Page 105 of Sinner (Priest 2)
But she’s not here.
I’m utterly alone, except for—ironically enough—God.
Chapter Thirty-Two
voice message 11:34 a.m.
Sean—
After I left the hospital yesterday, it was time to begin the short retreat that postulants take before receiving their veil. Which means no outside contact, no technology, nothing but three days of contemplation and prayer. But I couldn’t have you noticing my absence at your mother’s funeral and thinking it was because I didn’t want to be there.
I wish I could be there. I wish I could hold your hand during it. You deserve that, and I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you didn’t. You deserve a girl who will give you everything.
Before your mom died, she told me…well, it doesn’t matter now, I guess. But I wanted you to know that those words are lodged in my heart like shrapnel, just like you are.
Just like you are, Sean.
There’s no sanctuary free of you and the memories you gave me, there’s no part of me that isn’t splintered with you. I still don’t know how to feel about that—angry? Melancholy? Lucky?
Happy?
Blessed?
There was a reason I didn’t answer you when you asked me if I loved you back. And there’s a reason I’m sneaking a phone call and not sneaking out to tell you these things face to face. Because if I told you face to face, you’d see, and you’d know and then—
God, you’d be right and I hate it when you’re right. It’s so funny that I ended it because you can’t give up having control…and now I’m finding I have the same problem. It’s not that I can’t give up God or my sisters or even my vocation, because I know I could still have these things in another life. I’m not so categorical and stubborn that I can’t see that. But I can’t give up control over my life, because if I don’t have that, then what do I have left? If I don’t get what I’ve been working so hard for, hurting for, and sweating for—then what will all those sacrifices have been worth? It would feel cowardly, and I’m no coward.
I started this with you to find out what I’d be missing, and I did find out. It’s you. I’ll be missing you.
I hope my saying that counts for something. Somehow. In the end.
Chapter Thirty-Three
r /> Zenny’s monastery is an old stone house, sprawled lion-lazy over the block and surrounded by trees. I’m surprised at how intimidating it looks to me right now—big and venerable and almost castle-like—and even the trees seem to guard the women inside, fretting at me with leaves like hands flapping in warning.
I ignore them. If God Himself couldn’t stop me right now, then I’m certainly not going to let the trees do it.
I’m only here to say goodbye to her, I tell the trees. Calm down.
I glance down at my watch and then at the invitation I’ve got clutched in my hand. Elijah had wordlessly handed it to me during my mom’s funeral, and I don’t know what he wanted me to do with it—or if he simply wanted me to know that Zenny was still going to be a nun, despite le detour de Sean Bell. But I’d known what I needed to do the moment I saw it.
The monastery door is open, and I step inside the wide foyer, following the muffled, hymning sonance down the hall to the small chapel, slowing my steps the closer I get. And the slower I walk, the faster my heart hammers.
I tell my stupid heart to stop. That we’re only here to say goodbye. If Zenny can be brave enough to reveal how she feels in the face of this, then I can be too. I can set her free. And I’ll never recover, sure, because she’s it for me, she’s all a sinner like me gets—my one and only chance flashing like a firefly in the dark, too high up to catch. I’ll spend the rest of my life hurting with wanting her, missing her with swift and fierce aches. I’ll spend the rest of my life jealous of God, no matter what fledgling truces He and I have struck.
But I don’t want that for her; I don’t want her to waste any of her precious heart on an old sinner like me. I want her to live free and happy and full.
Without me.
It’s been two days since Mom’s funeral, and it’s weird to be approaching the chapel now, since it’s my second time in a religious space in almost as many days. Or maybe it’s weird how not-weird it feels.
Maybe I’m reformed.
The chapel doors are closed, and I have an uncomfortable foreboding that I might be too late, a foreboding that turns into a metallic panic I can taste in my mouth.
You can say goodbye just as easily after her vows as before, I remind myself, but it’s about more than that. I wanted her to feel free as she walked down the aisle to meet God, I wanted her to walk to God without any other claim on her heart. She deserved that at least, that final unmooring, that final atonement. She deserved that from me. And I’m too late to give it to her.
But then I hear a small hiccup coming from somewhere in the hallway, followed by a nose being blown. Curious, I follow the sound to its source: a small room off the side of the hallway and around the corner from the chapel’s entrance.
