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We would fail each other in small ways. Perhaps, once or twice, in large ones. But I imagined us choosing to remain. That was what made the future beautiful. Not that it would be easy. But that neither of us would face it alone.

A sound came from the back of the church. Adriana walked down the aisle and stopped beside the pew. She looked toward the altar. “I wasn’t sure whether I should come in.”

She took a seat beside me. For a while, she said nothing. That was another thing I had learned about her. Adriana did not fear silence. She only feared the things people hid within it.

Her gaze moved over the church.

“Does it feel different?”

“Yes.”

“Bad different?”

I considered the question.

The building looked exactly as it always had. The same stone. The same pews. The same saints staring down from painted glass. But the emptiness no longer felt like peace. It felt like a room after the person living inside it had moved away.

“No, it just feels empty.”

Her eyes came to mine.

“Is that what you expected?”

“I think I expected it to feel like losing my home.”

“And does it?”

I looked around once more.

At the pulpit where I had preached mercy and the altar where I had asked others to believe in resurrection. The confessional still stood, that place where strangers had handed me their worst truths and trusted me not to turn away.

This place had saved me once. But salvation was not meant to become another prison.

“No. It feels like understanding that it stopped being my home some time ago.”

Adriana’s expression softened. She didn’t ask where my home was now. Perhaps she already knew.

Her hand rested on the pew between us, palm turned upward. An offering. I looked at it.

For years, I had hidden inside these walls because stone could not leave me. It could not die. It could not look at everything I had done and decide I was beyond loving. But stone could not love me either. My family could. Adriana could.

I placed my hand in hers. Her fingers closed around mine. We sat there together as the last light faded through the stained glass, and the church surrendered itself to shadow.

I felt the past loosen its grip. Enough for me to walk beside her toward the doors. At the threshold, I looked back one final time. The church remained as it had always been. A vessel waiting for people to fill it with hope, grief and meaning.

It had carried my ruins when I couldn’t carry them myself. I would always be grateful for that. But I no longer needed to live among them.

Adriana stepped outside, her hand still holding mine.

A new life waited beyond the church. My brothers, my sister, Marigold and a future I had once believed I didn’t deserve.

42

ADRIANA

“Aman can do evil and still die trying to do one good thing. It does not absolve him. But it matters.”

I thought of my father.