augustine

PART ONE: "The one with the proposal"

PART TWO: "The one with the purring traitor"

PART THREE: "The one with the birthday party"

PART FOUR: "The one with bruises and blue excuses"

PART FIVE: "The one with the Red lights"

PART SIX: "The one with the late night talk"

PART SEVEN: "The one with the unexpected visit"

PART EIGHT: "The one with Dante and Beatrice"

PART NINE I: "The one with the wedding"

PART NINE II: "The one with the wedding"

PART TEN: "The one with the skydiving"

PART ELEVEN: "The one with the things we shouldn’t talk about"

PART TWELVE: "The one when nothing happens"

PART THIRTEEN: "The one with the day after"

PART FOURTEEN: "The one with the nightly calls"

PART FIFTEEN: "The one with the cabin and the river"

PART SIXTEEN: "The one with the unnamed surprise"

PART SEVENTEEN: "The one with the vampire girl"

PART EIGHTEEN: "The one with the Halloween party"

PART NINETEEN: "The one where Frankie Says Relax"

PART TWENTY: "The one where they don't know that we know and bla, bla, bla!"

PART TWENTY ONE: "The one with the guilt"

PART TWENTY TWO: "The one with Benny’s date"

PART TWENTY THREE: "The one when Frankie pays"

PART TWENTY FOUR: "The one with the Boston trip, part one"

PART TWENTY FIVE: "The one with the Boston trip, part two"

PART TWENTY SIX: "The one with the New Year's kiss"

PART TWENTY SEVEN: "The one with the Talk"

PART TWENTY EIGHT: "The one when the World Keeps Moving"

PART TWENTY EIGHT II: "The one when the World Keeps Moving, part two"

PART TWENTY NINE: "The one with the Movie Nights"

PART THIRTY I: "The one in Blue Waters, part one"

PART THIRTY II: "The one in Blue Waters, part two"

PART THIRTY ONE: "The one where everyone is in love"

PART THIRTY TWO I: "The one where time passes, part one"

More parts soon soon soon!

EXTRAS:

The Boyfriend Act timeline

The Boyfriend Act moodboards

Frankie's playlist

TBA playlist by Lev! @dontlookatme121

"A Divine Comedy", a TBA playlist by Saige! @dreamsunwind ‐> Apple Music - Spotify

Frankie life in Boston moodboard - snippet

Dieter's art studio; The Boyfriend Act: art by @pedges-world <3 and this too!

Dieter's art studio; The Boyfriend Act: art and blurb by @pedges-world

This story comes from a different time: centuries ago, a fable as old as time.

It says to not let a spark ignite, for it is dark, and the Empire loves to smother even the smallest flicker of light.

The sky cries, mourning with a princess who watches her home crumble like a castle―fade like a dying star.

The lesson is fear: Jedha, Aldeeran, Zitlala. Ghosts of planets, fragments drifting into the ether.

She promises herself not to believe: not even when the threat is gone and the galaxy breathes in hope. To not wish anymore―desire is caging, and she was born to be free.

But his love might be the only hoax she'll have faith in―the only religion she'll sink her knees in the dirt.

For Din Djarin? She might be able to let her heart beat again.

0 · 1 ...

🔗: main masterlist / aD mixtape / wattpad / ao3

She stops at the door, looking back at the child tucked in the bed.

"Yes?"

His eyes shine bright as he pleads:

"Can you tell me that story again?"

She walks back, sitting at the end. The kid jumps out of the sheets, drawing closer to her.

"Which?"

"The one of the princess in the sky"

She smiles softly, patting his hair.

"But I just told it to you yesterday"

"I don't mind," the boy replies, "I want to hear it again"

And she can tell it's genuine, her niece's eyes glimmering with that larger than life curiosity that runs in the family.

"You must've been quite impressed by it"

"It's all I have been thinking about" is his sincere reply.

"I shouldn't have told you the story. I don't want you to have nightmares," she pretends to ponder. "What if you show up again at our bedroom because you can't sleep? You know uncle Owen won't be very pleased"

He jumps on the bed. "I won't! I promise!"

She laughs. "Alright, then. Let me tell you the story"

«Long ago, in a planet far, far away, lived a princess in the sky. Among the stars and the night, she was born out of the cosmos centuries ago, long before you and me.

They were the first to master the art of traveling through space. Zitlalans used to say stars could be read and spent a lifetime studying them. By the time the princess was born, everyone knew that if you wanted to know space, Zitlala was the place.

She lived in Zitlala, the Place of Stars. The Zitlalans were ancient beings with stardust in their blood. They're not like us, you see, even if we might look the same. Up in the sky, they lived and were made of things no one understood, so it was up to them to.

It happened on her birthday, the day the princess was meant to take over the throne.

Zitlala was covered in light, celebrating the future days ahead. It was the shiniest and biggest celebration in the galaxy. Folks used to say you could see the stars dance, no matter what place of the galaxy you were at.

But you know what they say: the Empire doesn't like it when they're not invited to a party.

I heard it was because they were allies of the Old Republic. Others say because their blue blood was a threat to the rising power. But, the bad tongues say it's because their power came from the Force, not from the stars.»

The child chimes in.

"Like... The Jedi"

She nods solemnly. "The Jedi were still a thing back at that time. But I don't think that's the truth, you know. There's always more than what meets the eye. Zitlalans were not warriors, just people with secrets to keep"

«The Princess lost her home the day she was supposed to heir it. The Empire arrived at dawn, and then, Zitlala was no more. All was gone.»

There's a brief pause, as if he's meditating the words, ever the contemplating kind.

"I hate the Empire," he says, a little too certain for such a small child.

She sighs, "Must of us do, even if we can't say it"

"What happened to her?" he asks. He hadn't before.

A heavy atmosphere falls on them. That doesn't stop her niece.

"Did she die?"

Yesterday, all he wanted to know was how light shined through her dress and other sparkly thing she shared from which she had heard back in the Old Days.

His aunt seems to ponder what's the best answer for a child.

"Not exactly. The princess' tears of grief for her people condensed her into a star. She's now up in the sky, traveling through space"

The kid seems content with that by the way he yawns, falling into bed.

"I want to do that too," he mumbles, drowsy.

"What?"

"Travel space," her niece lets himself be tucked in without a protest, "that's why I want to be a pilot when I grow up―to explore the galaxy"

She smiles, sadly so.

"I know." her hand runs through his locks, "You're very much like your father"

He's too sleepy to respond. Instead, he says:

"Goodnight, Aunt Beru"

The lights turn off as she replies back:

"Goodnight, Luke. Sweet dreams"

For a long moment after the door shut behind you, Joel stood exactly where he was, one hand still resting on the handle of the axe, his eyes fixed on the patch of empty space you had left behind as if something of you might still be standing there if he looked hard enough.

Nothing moved except the heat.

The yard had gone quiet again in the way it always did at that hour, with the late sun stretching long over the grass and the church wall holding the day’s warmth in its stone. Springsteen was still going on about desire in that low, dragging voice of his, and for some reason that irritated Joel more now than it had a minute ago he went and reached over to the radio and turned the volume up harder than necessary.

The song swelled into the yard but It did not help.

He went back to the chopping block, set another log upright, and brought the axe down with enough force to split it clean through. One half toppled into the grass. The other struck the side of the block and rolled. Joel bent, picked both pieces up, and stacked them without looking at what he was doing. Then he reached for another.

And another.

And another.

Before long, his movements stopped belonging to thought and settled into rhythm instead.

Grip. Lift. Swing. Split. Bend. Stack. Repeat.

The work took over the way it sometimes did when he needed it to, when his mind had gotten too crowded and he wanted to beat it back into something quieter, something dull enough to bear. Usually it worked. Usually his body gets tired before the thoughts even have a chance to sharpen.

Today, though, the thoughts stayed.

They kept returning to the same maddening place. The back door opening. A pale dress. That sharp mouth of yours. The look on your face when he’d thrown that first line at you and expected, with complete certainty, that you’d bristle and leave.

But you hadn’t.

Joel drove the axe down again.

A neat split. He set another log in place.

You’d stood there in the heat looking entirely unsuited to Jackson and somehow completely unwilling to be run off by him. Worse, you had looked at him like you could see straight through the act. Not all the way through, maybe, but far enough to make him uneasy.

He split another log.

Neanderthal, primate.

The words came back with humiliating clarity, along with that sweet little smile you’d worn when you said it, like you’d enjoyed landing it more than was proper for a woman who had just met him less than five minutes ago.

Joel muttered a curse under his breath and reached for another piece of wood.

He shouldn’t still have been thinking about it. About you. About any of it. A stranger wandered into the yard, got smart with him, called him an asshole to his face, and left. That ought to have been the end of it. Would have been the end of it, if he had any sense left in him at all.

Instead, the whole thing kept replaying with a clarity that was beginning to feel vaguely punitive.

Your face. Your eyes. Your mouth.

The dress. The bag. The shoes.

The way you’d looked at the church first.

The way you’d looked at him after.

Joel adjusted his grip on the axe and split another log harder than necessary, the crack echoing off the stone wall. The woodpile beside him grew steadily. The rejected pieces collected near his boot. The radio kept changing songs over and over, without managing to capture his attention for very long.

Sweat began to gather at the back of his neck, then between his shoulder blades, then beneath the heavy flannel clinging to his skin. By the time he noticed it, he was already damp through the undershirt, heat crawling over him in a way that made his jaw tighten.

Your voice came back to him then, bright with disdain.

It hasn’t escaped me that you are wearing a flannel shirt in June.

Joel closed his eyes for half a second.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

He set the axe down long enough to yank the shirt open, fingers moving roughly over the buttons until patience ran out halfway through and he simply dragged the thing off over his shoulders. Hot air moved over the sweat slick of his skin at once, but not enough to make much difference. He let the flannel fall where it wanted, a dark heap in the grass beside the chopping block, then picked the axe back up and went straight back to work.

The radio kept playing.

The pile of wood kept shrinking.

And Joel kept seeing your face.

Not in the dangerous way a younger man might have allowed himself to. Nothing so indulgent as that. It came at him in fragments instead, each one more annoying than the last. The arch of your brow when he’d insulted your dress. The little lift of your chin when you’d decided not to back down. The laugh you’d failed to suppress when he’d said something ruder than he should have. The way the last of the sunlight had caught in your hair while you stood there looking at him like he was a problem you intended to solve by sheer force of personality.

That was the part that had got under his skin.

Not that you were pretty, though you were. Christ, you were. That much he had registered instantly and resented on sight. No, the worse part was that you had seemed entirely aware of yourself in his presence without once becoming shy of it. You hadn’t fluttered. Hadn’t softened. Hadn’t mistaken his silence for permission to become uncertain. You had simply stayed where you were and met every rough edge he offered with one of your own.

That ought to have irritated him.

It did irritate him.

It was also, Joel was sorry to report, precisely the reason he was now shirtless in the back yard of a church, splitting wood like a man trying to exorcise something.

He drove the axe down again and this time the log exploded into three jagged pieces, one of them spinning off the block and striking the side of the wheelbarrow with a hollow knock.

Joel stood still for a moment, breathing harder than the work called for.

The sun had shifted lower. The shade had crept a little farther across the yard. Somewhere along the way the music on the radio had changed six, maybe seven times. He had no memory of any of it.

He lowered the axe slowly and looked around.

No wood left.

The stack he had started with was gone down to splinters and bark, the whole thing reduced to neat, cut piles and scattered debris at his feet. For a second he simply stared, as if the absence might explain itself if he gave it time.

Then he swore.

Not because the work was done. Because he had no earthly idea how long he’d been standing there.

Joel dragged a forearm across his face, smearing sweat over his brow, then bent to start gathering the split logs into the wheelbarrow. His body ached in the ordinary, satisfying way hard labor sometimes gave him, but beneath that sat another kind of tension entirely, one that had not gone anywhere no matter how many times he’d brought the axe down. He stacked the wood carefully anyway, more from habit than attention, fitting the larger pieces first and balancing the smaller ones on top until the barrow sat heavy and full.

When he finally straightened, his back pulled in complaint.

“Perfect,” he muttered. “Just perfect.”

He took the handles and pushed the load toward the little storage shed beyond the church, wheels bumping over uneven ground and patches of dry grass. The shed sat half in shadow now, its door already open from earlier, the interior cool and close smelling of cut timber, dust, and old tools. Joel wheeled the load inside, set the barrow down, and started unloading by hand.

This part, at least, asked less of his mind.

Lift. Turn. Stack. Adjust.

He built the row carefully against the wall, lining the pieces in tight, practical order the way he always did. There was comfort in that too, in making something neat when the inside of his head refused to cooperate. He reached for another split length, turned it in his hand, and drove a splinter straight into the pad of his palm.

Joel hissed through his teeth and jerked back on instinct.

“Son of a bitch.”

The log dropped to the floor with a dull thud. He looked down at his hand and immediately saw it, a pale shard buried just under the skin near the base of his thumb. Not deep, but deep enough. Irritatingly deep. Blood welled around it in a fine red bead.

He set the rest of the wood down and used the nail of his opposite thumb to try and catch the end of it. For one hopeful second, he thought he had it. Then the splinter snapped clean off beneath his fingers.

Joel went very still.

Then, with perfect clarity, “Oh, you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me.”

He shoved two fingers through his hair and tried again, pressing at the skin around the break, but all that did was drive the remaining piece into a sharper angle that made him suck in a breath through his teeth. A second, smaller splinter had lodged itself nearer the heel of his hand in the meantime, as if the first one hadn’t been enough insult for one afternoon.

“Unbelievable.”

He braced his wrist against his knee and squinted at the damage like glare alone might solve it. It did not. All it did was make him aware of the sweat still drying on his skin, of the sawdust clinging to his forearms, of the deep and ridiculous irritation humming through him at a pitch entirely too close to embarrassment.

Because this was what came of losing his concentration.

This was what came of letting some smart mouthed woman in a sundress get into his head so badly he chopped through an entire damned woodpile without noticing the sun move.

Joel let his hand fall and stared at the floor of the shed for a long beat, his mouth flattening.

Then, because there was nothing for it, he grabbed the discarded flannel off the yard on his way back past and headed inside the church.

The cool of the sanctuary hit him as soon as he stepped through the side door, sliding over his overheated skin with enough force to make him feel his own exhaustion all at once. It smelled faintly of old stone, candle wax, and the clean ghost of flowers left too long in water. The colored light from the stained glass had shifted now, spilling farther across the floor in long bruised ribbons of blue and gold and red.

Joel barely looked at any of it.

He crossed behind the altar with the shirt hanging loose from one hand and went into the small room off the sacristy where he kept the practical things people always forgot churches required: twine, extra candles, batteries, scissors, a sewing kit, a half empty tin of nails, and, somewhere in the second drawer if memory served, a pair of tweezers.

He found them after a moment of irritated rummaging and leaned one hip against the edge of the table beneath the little sink. The room was narrow, plain, and dim, just enough light coming in from the high window to catch on the metal in his hand. He lifted his palm closer, jaw set, and prodded the skin until the broken edge of the splinter made itself visible again.

“C’mon,” he muttered.

The tweezers slipped once.

He hissed, reset his grip, and tried again. This time he caught it properly and drew it out in one sharp pull, the sting bright enough to make his shoulders tense before easing almost at once. A thin line of blood rose in its place. Joel dropped the splinter into the sink and reached for the second one.

That one took longer.

By the time he finally got it free, the room had gone quiet enough around him that he could hear the faint creak of the church settling with the evening. Somewhere outside, a bird called from the trees. The radio had finally gone silent, either because the batteries had died or because the signal had given up as the day turned.

Joel rinsed his hand under cold water and stood there a moment longer than necessary, palm open beneath the stream.

The relief should have been simple, something physical and immediate.

Instead, all he could think about was the way you had laughed on the other side of that sanctuary door. Not loudly and definitely not cruelly. Just once, surprised out of yourself by something he’d said. He could still hear it if he let himself.

He shut the tap off hard.

The room went still again.

On the table beside him lay the flannel, darkened in places where sweat had soaked through. He looked at it, then at his reflection in the narrow pane of the cabinet glass above the sink. His hair was damp at the temples, skin flushed from the heat, expression drawn tight with something he had no interest in naming.

“You’re too old for this,” he told the man in the glass.

But the man did not look convinced.

The man.

That was how he spoke of himself now.

Bitterly.

With a sense of self hatred and even revulsion.

Joel dried his hand on a dish towel, set the tweezers back in the drawer, and reached for the shirt without putting it on. For a brief second he considered walking straight upstairs to his rooms and letting the day end there. He was tired enough. Irritated enough. And there was still a sermon half finished on his desk that would not write itself.

But he did not move.

He stood in the small half light of the sacristy with his hand stinging faintly and the shirt hanging from his fingers, listening to the quiet spread through the church, and knew with sudden, unhelpful certainty that the day was not done with him yet.

Because something had shifted.

Not in the church. Not in the town. But in him.

Small enough that another man might have ignored it. Easy enough to bury if he had not spent the better part of ten years becoming an expert at burial. But Joel knew the feeling of disturbance when it came. Knew the dangerous, almost imperceptible moment when still water stopped being still.

He had felt it this afternoon the instant he turned around and found you standing there.

He felt it now in the silence you had left behind.

And the worst part, the part that made him close his eyes for one brief moment in weary resignation, was that he had the sinking suspicion this was only the beginning.

── .⋆♱ ⋅🦋⋅ ♱⋆. ──

After a while, Joel stepped back out into the sanctuary and stopped dead in the middle of the aisle.

The cross above the altar was still crooked.

He stared at it.

For one stubborn second, he tried to convince himself it only looked that way because the light had shifted, because the sun was lower now and the colored glass was throwing strange angles across the stone, because he was tired and annoyed and not in any state to be trusting his own perception where anything connected to you was concerned.

Then he squinted.

Closed one eye.

Lifted his thumb out in front of him, first vertical, then horizontal, gauging the line of it against the beams and the arch of the apse with all the petty determination of a man who already knew the answer and intended to fight it anyway.

The damn thing was crooked.

Not really badly and not enough to be obvious at a glance unless someone was the sort of person who noticed details immediately and refused to let them go once spotted. But crooked enough that now he had seen it, he could not unsee it.

Joel lowered his hand slowly.

“Aw, come on,” he muttered.

The church, as ever, offered him nothing.

He looked back up at the cross, jaw tightening. It hung there with infuriating serenity above the altar, slightly off center, impervious to the human indignity of imperfection. You had seen it in less than five minutes. Him, who had lived with the thing overhead for God knew how long, had apparently never once looked at it with sufficient suspicion.

“Well,” he said into the silence, his voice rough from the heat and the cursing and the fact that he had spent too much of the afternoon not saying what he was actually thinking, “you can stay like that.”

Nothing.

He took a step farther into the aisle, shirt still dangling from his hand, eyes fixed on the cross like it had personally betrayed him.

“You hear me?” he said. “You’re stayin’ exactly how you are.”

Still nothing.

Joel gave a humorless little laugh through his nose, the kind that held no amusement in it at all. “Yeah. Figured.”

The light in the church had deepened while he’d been in the sacristy. Red and blue and gold lay in long fractured bands over the pews and the floor, the stone holding the day’s last heat in some places while the shadows had already gone cool in others. The whole room should have felt peaceful. It usually did, even on the bad days. Even when he had no peace of his own to bring into it. But this evening the place seemed to hold itself differently around him, as though it had noticed something before he had and was waiting to see whether he would catch up.

Joel stood there another second, looking at the cross.

Then, because a decade of bitterness had a way of turning silence into invitation, he spoke again.

“Lemme make somethin’ clear to you.”

His own voice echoed back softly from the stone. Low and tired. Angry in that worn down way that had less to do with temper than with endurance pushed too far.

“That woman,” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the side door as if you might somehow still be hovering beyond it out of pure spite, “is a damn tourist. That’s what she is. Somebody passin’ through. Somebody seein’ a cousin for the weekend. Somebody droppin’ in on a friend, takin’ a few pictures of the mountains, sayin’ all the usual nonsense about how charming the place is, then gettin’ right back in the car and goin’ wherever it is people like that go.”

He paused, looked at the cross, and waited as if the wood might have the decency to object.

But once more, it did not.

Joel nodded once. “Good. Glad we understand each other.”

He started pacing then, not quickly, but with the restless, irritated movement of a man who already knew he ought to stop and could not seem to make himself. The shirt brushed against his thigh every time he turned. His bare forearms still carried the faint sting of sawdust and splinters, and the cuts in his palm tugged unpleasantly every time his fingers tightened around the fabric.

“I do not want to see her again,” he said, angling a look toward the altar as though continuing a conversation no one else in the room had agreed to have. “I don’t want her wanderin’ back in here tomorrow. I don’t want her askin’ me any more questions. I don’t want that mouth of hers turned on me again like she’s got nothin’ better to do than stand in my yard and call me names till I lose what little patience I had left this mornin’. I don’t want to hear her voice. I don’t want to hear her… laugh.”

That last word landed wrong somewhere inside him. Somewhere tender and bruised, somewhere he believed rotten.

Joel stopped walking.

For one brief second he stood completely still in the middle of the colored light, his expression hardening as though he could punish himself for the slip by force of will alone.

Then he looked up again and pointed at the cross with the shirt clutched in his fist.

“Not a damn sound of it,” he said. “You understand me? Not one more word. Not one more laugh. Not one more—”

He broke off and scrubbed a hand over his beard.

The church remained maddeningly, saintly silent.

Joel let out a breath and laughed again, sharper this time. “Christ, just listen to me.”

He turned away, paced two more steps, then turned back just as quickly. The agitation in him had nowhere useful to go. Not upward, where a better man might have called it prayer. Not inward, where it would have become recognition too fast to bear. So it spilled out exactly as it was. Ragged, resentful, and far too honest for comfort.

“You know what this feels like?” he said. “One of your little jokes. That’s what it feels like. One more of those damn twists you seem so fond of.” His voice grew lower, rougher. “And before you start—I know. I know how that sounds. I know I’m standin’ in a church talkin’ to empty air like a lunatic. That part’s not lost on me. But I’ve been here long enough, and you’ve put me through enough, that I think maybe I’ve earned the right to speak plainly.”

He stared up at the cross for a beat, his chest still rising a little too hard from work that had long since stopped being about wood.

“For over ten years,” he said, “your sense of humor has been absolute dogshit.”

The words echoed faintly.

This time, in spite of himself, the corner of his mouth almost twitched, not with amusement, but with the old reflex of a man who had once survived by turning fury into something drier and meaner before it could split him open. The expression vanished as quickly as it came.

“You want me to be grateful?” he went on. “For what? For Jackson? For this place? Fine. I am. More than I ever expected to be for anything after…” He cut himself off and shook his head once. “But don’t think I’ve forgotten the path it took to get me here. Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you let happen before you decided I could have four walls and a collar and somethin’ useful to do with my hands.”

He stopped near the first pew and looked toward the stained glass windows without really seeing them, his gaze caught somewhere inside himself instead.

“You took everythin’ from me,” he said more quietly. “Then sat back while I took the rest.”

The words fell into the church and stayed there.

Joel stood very still after that, eyes lowered now, one hand braced against the end of the pew as if he had not meant to touch anything and discovered too late that he needed the steadiness of it. The rough wood pressed into his palm. The little room behind his ribs, the one he spent most of his life keeping boarded shut, had gone suddenly dangerous with memory.

Sarah in the back seat.

Rain on the windshield.

Blood. Broken glass. 

Sirens that came too late.

A woman with a face gone white from grief and cruelty and the need to place the blame somewhere that wasn’t herself, telling him he had killed the child he would have died to keep breathing.

Then the years after, each uglier than the last in their own inventive way. Whiskey. White powder. Bloody fists. Men cheering while he broke other men open because pain had to go somewhere and by then he had lost all interest in pretending he was above becoming a monster when the alternative was to feel too much.

Joel swallowed once.

When he looked back up at the cross, the rawest edge of that memory had hardened again into anger, but not the clean, hot kind. This was older. Colder. More exhausted. Anger worn down by repetition until it had become a shape his body carried as naturally as a limp or a scar.

“So no,” he said. “I don’t find any of it funny. Never did. Not the years I spent crawlin’ through all of it just to wash up here and call that mercy because it was quieter than what came before.” His jaw tightened. “And I sure as hell don’t find this funny.”

His hand came up again, pointing now not just at the cross but through it, beyond it, at whatever silence might be hiding behind the rafters.

“That woman is not funny.”

He let the sentence hang there.

And then, because honesty had already outrun dignity, he added in a lower voice, “She’s trouble.”

The word settled over the church with a weight he felt all the way down to his bones.

Joel drew in a breath and shook his head at himself immediately, as though the admission had embarrassed him more than all the rest of it put together.

“No,” he said, correcting it at once. “She ain’t trouble. She’s just…” He groped for something dismissive and came up instead with the memory of your face lifted toward him in exasperated disbelief. “She’s insufferable. That’s what she is.”

His mouth flattened.

“Smart ass. Mouth on her like a switchblade. Looks at people for too long. Notices things she’s got no business noticin’. Walks into a church like she belongs there and starts pointin’ out what’s crooked before she’s even figured out who she’s talkin’ to.” He stared upward with open accusation now. “That is not the sort of person you put back in my path by accident. That’s the sort of person you put there because you’re bored.”

Still God gave him nothing.

The quiet after that was immense. It spread through the sanctuary in patient waves, making room for every word he had thrown at it and offering not a single one back. The only sound was the old building settling around him and, farther off, the faint complaint of wind touching the outer walls.

Joel looked at the cross for another long beat.

Then he laughed once more, low and entirely without joy. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

He began pacing again, slower now, his anger turning inward and outward at once, searching for a target and finding too many. The floor caught the last of the red glass under his feet, so that every turn took him through color that looked too much like old bruises.

“What do you want from me?” he asked at last.

The question sounded weary, almost like a reflection of himself.

“I’ve done everythin’ you asked. More than you asked. I came here. I stayed. I put in the work. I put in the years. I held my tongue when I wanted to break somethin’. I listened to people confess the same damn sins every season like I was somehow qualified to help ‘em carry what I can barely carry myself. I buried folks. Married folks. Sat with folks in hospital rooms and kitchens and porches while they asked me why bad things happen and all I had for ‘em was whatever half decent lie sounded kindest at the time.”

He looked up at the cross again, eyes narrowing.

“And I did it. I did all of it. So for once—just once—I’m askin’ somethin’ plain.”

His voice sank lower. More dangerous for how even it became.

“Keep her away from me.”

The words landed sharply.

“Please.”

Joel stood there breathing through the silence that followed with his shoulders taut. It was absurd, he knew that. Absurd to feel this much over a stranger. Absurd to be standing half dressed in the middle of a church negotiating with heaven like a man trying to bargain his way out of purgatory. But there was something in him—a survival instinct, maybe, or the last shabby remains of self preservation—that recognized danger before he could put a respectable name to it.

And whatever this was, it had the shape of danger.

Not because you had done anything. Not really. You had argued with him, yes. Smiled at the wrong moments. Looked too amused by his bad behavior. Called him things he probably deserved and then laughed on your way out and none of that things should have mattered.

But it did.

Because he had felt something shift.

Because he had looked at the space you’d left behind as though it might still be occupied.

Because he had cut through an entire pile of wood with your voice in his head and not once noticed the passage of time.

That was enough, that was more than enough.

Joel stopped pacing at the foot of the altar steps and pointed once, sharply, at the crooked cross.

“So now you know,” he said. “That’s me askin’ nice.”

His eyes moved over the line of it one final time, taking in the slight tilt, the maddening imperfection.

“More than nice, really,” he muttered. “Considerin’ our history.”

Then he lifted his chin, expression gone hard again.

“So you fix whatever this is before it starts. You hear me? I don’t care if she’s pretty. I don’t care if she’s got that…” He stopped, disgusted with himself. “Whatever. I don’t care who she belongs to or where she came from or why she was in my yard. I want no part of it. None. My road stays mine. Hers stays hers.” His finger rose toward the cross one last time. “So you’d better make damn sure they do not cross.”

The words rang out clear in the sanctuary and then were swallowed by it whole.

Nothing answered.

Not the rafters. Not the altar. Not the darkening glass. The church held the silence with almost unbearable composure, as if the absence of response were itself a kind of verdict.

Joel stood very still in the aftermath of his own voice.

Then, with the abrupt weariness of a man who had once again said too much to a God who had never shown much talent for replying, Joel dropped his hand, turned on his heel, and started toward the narrow staircase at the back that led to his rooms above.

He did not look at the windows as he passed them. Did not see the moose standing forever over its dead calf, or the wolves forever circling, or the pale little girl in the final pane who had spent all this time looking down at the bones.

He walked with his shoulders tight and his jaw set, still carrying the heat of his own anger, too deep inside it to notice anything outside the ordinary world of wood, stone, and silence.

But the church was not entirely as he had left it.

In the last stained glass panel, the little girl was no longer looking at the remains at her feet.

Her eyes had lifted and they had found him at once.

It was not the vague illusion painted figures sometimes gave from a distance and definitely not the trick of changing light at dusk. Her gaze really moved with him, full of the same sorrow she had once turned on the bones below her, only now it belonged to Joel.

He reached the first step and her eyes followed closely.

Joel’s hand closed around the railing. The flannel shirt still hung loose from his fingers. He climbed without looking back, his body heavy with irritation, with exhaustion, with something else he still refused to name.

Below, the girl —the angel— kept watching.

Step by step, her gaze moved with him. Quietly and patiently. As if she were memorizing him. As if she were trying to hold on for as long as she could before he disappeared from her view.

He climbed higher.

The boards creaked beneath his weight. The evening light thinned across the church floor. Blue deepened in the stone. The bones in the window grew paler as the day withdrew.

Still she watched him.

There was no fear in her face. No warning. Only sadness. Deep and unmistakable. The kind that came from seeing someone carry too much for too long and being unable to do anything except witness it. Just like the remains of the moose beneath her.

Joel took another step.

And another.

Her eyes never left him.

By the time he reached the final stretch of stairs, there was something unbearable in the look on her face. Not only grief but something closer to helplessness, to frustration. As though there was something she needed to tell him and no way to make him hear it. As though she could see the weight on him clearly enough to mourn it, but not touch it. Not lighten it. Not take even a fraction of it from his shoulders.

Then Joel reached the last step and he disappeared from her view.

The moment he was gone, the girl closed her eyes.

It was a small thing. Barely a movement at all. But it changed her completely.

For one terrible second, she looked less like part of the glass and more like a child who had held herself together for as long as she could and failed the instant no one was left to see it.

A silver tear slipped down her face.

Then another.

Silent and helpless, full of the kind of sorrow that had nowhere to go.

She did not look down at the bones again.

She only remained there with her eyes closed, as if whatever strength had kept her watching him had given out the moment he was gone. As if losing sight of him had become its own fresh grief. As if she had wanted—desperately and uselessly—to reach him before he vanished upstairs, and had failed.

Below her, the bones stayed where they had always been.

Around her, the church fell slowly into shadow.

And in the quiet that followed, her sorrow no longer seemed meant for the dead alone.

── .⋆♱ ⋅🦋⋅ ♱⋆. ──

By the time you make it back to the house, the light has started to turn.

The sun is lower now, softer than it was when you left, and the whole street looks washed in the kind of late afternoon gold that makes even unfamiliar places seem briefly forgiving. The front of the house is still half taken over by the move. The van is parked at the curb with its back doors open, and two of the men are carrying flattened cardboard out in neat stacks while another ties off a bundle of packing paper by the front walk. Through the wide front windows, you can see the outline of boxes still crowding the entryway and the living room beyond them, some open, some untouched, all of it still waiting to become a life.

You step inside and close the door behind you, and at once the smell of the place meets you again; wood, fresh paint, unpacked fabric, the faint chemical sharpness of newness that has not yet been lived in long enough to fade. Somewhere upstairs, something heavy is dragged across the floor. One of the movers crosses the hallway with a lamp in both hands and nods politely when he sees you.

“Evening, ma’am.”

You smile automatically. “Evening.”

You slip around a stack of marked boxes near the staircase, your fingers brushing the strap of your bag higher onto your shoulder, and you are only halfway through the hall when Peter appears at the far end of it.

He looks as he always does when he has spent the afternoon making decisions on other people’s behalf; composed, pressed, perfectly put together even now, his sleeves folded neatly to the forearm, one hand still holding a page torn from his notebook. He takes one look at you and something passes over his face, quick but noticeable.

“There you are.”

The words are simple. The tone beneath them is not.

You stop. “Hi.”

Peter glances toward the front door behind you, then back at your face. “That was quite a walk.”

You shift the bag off your shoulder. “I didn’t realize it had been that long.”

“That’s sort of the point.”

The answer lands lightly enough that another person might have mistaken it for teasing. You don’t. There is something too measured in the way he says it, too careful in the pause that follows.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I lost track of time.”

Peter studies you for a second, then comes a few steps closer. “You did more than lose track of time. You vanished for over an hour in a town you don’t know, on the first day we’re here, while half our life is still in boxes.”

He isn’t angry. That would be simpler somehow. Anger can be pointed at. This is quieter than that. Sharper.

“I was just walking.”

“I know you were just walking.” His voice stays calm, but his mouth has gone a little flat around the edges. “That’s what worries me.”

You look at him. “Worries you?”

He exhales softly through his nose, then shakes his head as if he’s correcting his own tone before it can become something less pleasant. “Forget it. I’m not trying to start something. I just mean… I turn my back for a minute and what was supposed to be a short walk becomes you being out of my sight for over an hour.”

The sentence settles over you with more weight than it should have.

You tell yourself that. More weight than it should have.

“I said I’m sorry,” you answer gently. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Peter’s expression changes again, easing all at once as though a switch has been thrown somewhere behind his eyes. He steps in close enough to touch you, one hand sliding to your waist, the other brushing a loose strand of hair back from your shoulder.

“I know.” His voice has softened now. “I know you didn’t.”

You let out a slow breath.

“There was just…” You hesitate. “A bit of a weird encounter.”

His fingers pause at your waist. “What kind of weird encounter?”

You shrug lightly. “Nothing serious. Just some man behind the church who apparently never learned how to speak to people.”

Peter’s brows lift. “A man.”

The tiny pause before the word makes you glance up at him. “Yes. A man.”

“What happened?”

You almost laugh. “He was rude, I was rude back, and that was pretty much the end of it.”

Peter looks at you for another second, then the corner of his mouth moves in something that isn’t quite amusement. “So that’s why you were gone so long.”

“Not entirely.”

“No?”

“No. Then I kept walking.”

He nods slowly, as though filing the answer away somewhere private. Then he leans in and presses a brief kiss to your forehead.

“Well,” he says, as though concluding the matter himself, “I suppose Jackson has already started introducing itself.”

You smile despite yourself. “Apparently.”

His hand slides from your waist to your wrist. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“I have something to show you.”

The shift is so smooth you barely feel it happen.

Peter turns and leads you toward the staircase before you can ask anything else, and because the whole day has left you a little unmoored, a little more willing than usual to be guided, you follow without protest. You climb past half unpacked rooms and walls that still look too blank to belong to anyone, up to the top floor where the noise from the movers fades behind you into something distant and harmless.

The bedroom door at the end of the corridor stands open.

The room itself is still unfinished in the way the whole house is unfinished. There are lamps with no shades yet. Boxes along one wall waiting to be emptied. A chair by the window with one of Peter’s jackets thrown across the back. But someone has made the bed, and the doors to the balcony beyond it stand open to the evening air.

Peter doesn’t stop in the room. He keeps walking until you step out after him and the surprise catches up with you all at once.

There is a small table waiting on the balcony.

Two chairs. A bottle of wine in a silver cooler. A cheeseboard already laid out between plates and folded napkins, the fruit cut, the crackers neatly stacked, the cheeses arranged in careful little wedges you would recognize anywhere. Your favorites. All of them.

You stop in the doorway.

“Peter…”

He turns to look at you, and this time the smile that appears is genuine enough to warm his whole face. “I thought we should have one nice thing today that doesn’t involve cardboard.”

You laugh softly. “You did this?”

“Well, I didn’t personally cut the brie, if that’s what you mean.”

Your gaze moves from the bottle to the chairs to the view beyond them, where the rooftops of Jackson stretch out beneath the fading sky and the mountains sit far beyond them, blue and patient and much larger than anything in New York ever allowed itself to be.

“It’s beautiful,” you say.

Peter watches you, pleased. “That was the hope.”

He crosses to the table, pulls out a chair, and waits until you take it. Then he uncorks the wine and pours, the sound of it soft in the cooling air. When he sets your glass in front of you, his fingers brush the back of your hand.

“There,” he says quietly. “That’s better.”

You pick up the glass, let the stem turn once between your fingers, and look out over the balcony rail again.

For a moment, neither of you speaks.

Then Peter settles into the chair across from you and asks, “So. Now that you’ve actually seen it. What do you think?”

You take a sip before answering. The wine is good. Cold enough to be crisp, rich enough to slow you down.

“I think,” you say, glancing at him over the rim of the glass, “that you were annoyingly right.”

His smile deepens immediately. “About?”

“Jackson.” You look back out at the town. “It’s beautiful. More than I expected.”

“Told you.”

“Yes,” you say dryly. “You did.”

Peter leans back in his chair, one ankle crossing over the other. “I usually know what’s good for you.”

The answer comes quickly, almost playful. “That sounds arrogant.”

“It’s only arrogance if I’m wrong.”

You laugh under your breath and set the glass down. “Dangerous distinction.”

“But still a distinction.”

His tone is light, but not entirely. There’s always that little thread under things with him, subtle enough to miss if you aren’t listening for it. You are. You just haven’t decided yet whether you resent it.

Peter reaches for his own glass and lifts it toward you. “To new beginnings.”

You hesitate just long enough to notice that you’re hesitating, then lift yours too. “To new beginnings.”

The glasses touch softly.

You spend the next several minutes eating, the conversation flowing more easily now. Peter tells you which shipments are still delayed, which rooms he wants finished first, which pieces of furniture his father insists should be sent from the club house in the morning because apparently the dining room still doesn’t look quite right. You listen, smiling where it feels appropriate, adding small comments when you can. 

At one point he asks, “Did you get a chance to see much of the town?”

You nod. “A little.”

“And?”

“It’s quiet.”

“That’s one of the selling points.”

“It feels…” You search for the word. “Slower.”

Peter cuts a piece of cheese with neat precision. “That’s because it is slower.”

“I think I like that.”

“I know you do.”

You look up at him. “You know I do?”

He smiles faintly. “You like pretending you don’t want peace, but you do. You always have.”

The sentence settles somewhere inside you and stays there a second longer than you expect.

Before you can decide what to do with it, Peter adds, “That’s why this place is going to be good for us.”

Us.

He says it with such certainty you almost kiss him.

You glance back out over the balcony. The evening is beginning to cool in earnest now. Somewhere a dog barks once and is answered from farther off. The whole town feels held inside itself.

Peter refills your glass.

You let him.

Then he asks, “What was he like?”

You blink and look back at him. “Who?”

“The man.”

You pause, fingers resting lightly against the stem of your glass. “Still on that?”

“You brought him up.”

You smile faintly. “Only because he was impossible not to mention.”

Peter watches you. “What was he like?”

You should say rude and leave it there.

Instead you hear yourself answer more honestly than you meant to. “Difficult.”

His brows lift. “Difficult.”

“Very.”

“In what way?”

You think about it. About the heat. The chopping block. The radio. The flannel in June. The way irritation had sat on him like another layer of skin. The way he had looked at you with something halfway between dismissal and reluctant engagement, as if the conversation itself had offended him and still he couldn’t quite stop having it.

“He was just…” You shake your head. “One of those men who thinks being unpleasant is a form of personality.”

Peter smiles. “So, an idiot.”

“More or less.”

“And of course you argued with him.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to thank him for it.”

Peter laughs softly. “No. I suppose you weren’t.”

You take another sip of wine. “He started it.”

“I have no doubt.”

You should let it go there.

Instead, some stubborn little part of you still annoyed on your own behalf adds, “He was unbelievably rude.”

“And yet,” Peter says, watching you now with a look you can’t immediately place, “you’re still talking about him.”

The sentence catches you off guard enough that you laugh.

“Only because you keep asking.”

“Mm.”

You shake your head and reach for a cracker. “Trust me. He wasn’t memorable for the right reasons.”

Peter leans back, apparently satisfied by that, and lets the subject drop.

The sky darkens by degrees while you sit there. The first edge of evening comes in blue instead of gold. The wine softens everything a little. The house behind you grows quieter as the movers finish for the day and leave. Eventually you hear the van start, then pull away from the curb, and after that it is only the two of you and the town spread out below.

Without thinking too much about it, you push your chair back and move closer to Peter’s. He opens an arm automatically and you go into it just as automatically, resting your head against his chest while he settles you in against his side.

“There,” he murmurs, kissing the top of your head. “That’s better.”

You close your eyes for a second and let the weight of the day loosen by a fraction. His shirt is cool beneath your cheek. His hand moves slowly over your arm. The view from the balcony stretches outward in quiet layers, the town dimming below the coming night.

For one brief moment, it almost feels enough.

Then, without warning, another image slips in.

Dark hair damp at the temples. A jaw gone tight with irritation. Sunlight caught in a pair of hazel eyes that had no business being as warm as they were in a face like that.

You go still.

It lasts no more than a second. Less, maybe. Just long enough to leave a trace. A small, strange friction in the middle of an otherwise ordinary thought.

Because that’s the thing you remember, in spite of yourself.

Not his rudeness first. Not the absurd conversation.

His eyes.

How wrong they had felt on him. How at odds with the rest of him. Not soft, exactly. Not kind in any easy way. But warm. Warm in a way that had unsettled you more than his temper did.

You shift lightly against Peter and force your gaze back out over the balcony.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” you say quickly. “Just tired.”

His hand smooths over your shoulder once. “Long day with the flight and all.”

You nod. “Very.”

He kisses your hair again and keeps talking, something about tomorrow, about the last of the boxes, about how much better the place will feel once everything is properly unpacked. You listen. Answer when you need to. Let his voice carry on around you.

And if, for one moment longer than it should, another man’s eyes remain lodged in the back of your mind while you tell yourself it means nothing at all.

── .⋆♱ ⋅🦋⋅ ♱⋆. ──

Joel didn’t turn the light on when he stepped into his room.

He didn’t need to. There was still enough of the evening left to see by, a dull wash of fading light coming through the window and flattening everything into shape without detail. The room held its usual stillness. The bed. The chair by the window. The desk with the papers left exactly where he had abandoned them. None of it registered properly. It was all background now. The only thing he seemed able to feel with any clarity was the restless, unwelcome awareness still running under his skin.

He shut the door behind him harder than he meant to and stood there for a second, breathing, his body still carrying the heat of the yard. Sweat had dried unpleasantly at the back of his neck and along his spine. His pulse hadn’t settled. It was still there, too high in his throat, too present. He dragged a hand over his face and muttered, “Jesus,” though the word had long since stopped meaning prayer in moments like this. It was only habit now, something rough and tired said into empty air because silence made him feel worse.

Then he moved.

He crossed the room in a few quick strides and dropped the flannel on the chair without looking, already reaching for the hem of his shirt. It came off in one sharp motion. His boots followed, kicked aside with less care than usual, then the belt, then the jeans. He stripped everything off with the same irritated efficiency, like if he did it fast enough he might shed the rest of the afternoon with it. By the time he stepped into the bathroom, he was already losing patience with himself.

He turned the shower on too hot. The pipes knocked once in the wall before the water steadied, and steam began to gather almost at once, thin at first, then thicker, filling the room and softening the edges of things. Joel stepped under the spray without waiting. The heat hit his shoulders, his back, his chest, and for one brief moment it almost felt like relief. The kind that belonged only to the body. Muscles loosening. Skin finally cooling under the heat in the strange backward way water managed. He braced one hand against the tile and leaned forward until his forehead touched the wall, then shut his eyes and stayed there, letting the water run over him.

He tried not to think. That was the rule. Don’t follow it. Don’t name it. Don’t give it room. Let it pass. That had always worked better when the thing pressing at him came from somewhere old, somewhere he already knew the shape of. But this was new, and that seemed to make it worse. Because when he closed his eyes, the afternoon didn’t fade. It just sharpened.

Your voice came back first.

You’re very rude.

His jaw tightened against the tile. “Yeah,” he muttered under his breath. “No shit.”

He shifted his weight and pressed his palm harder into the wall as if the extra force might anchor him better, but it didn’t. It only made him more aware of how wound up he still was. The tension hadn’t gone anywhere. It sat in his shoulders, his chest, his mouth. It sat in the simple humiliating fact that he was standing in a shower, trying and failing not to think about a woman who had been in his yard less than an hour.

He tried again.

Let it go, Joel.

It doesn’t mean anything, Joel.

She’s just a stranger, Joel.

The water kept falling, but his mind didn’t listen. It kept returning to the same fragments as if repetition alone might turn them into sense. 

Joel exhaled sharply through his nose. “Doesn’t mean a damn thing,” he said aloud this time, low and flat, like he could correct the problem by force if he named it hard enough.

He lifted his head, dragged a hand through his wet hair, then leaned forward again until the tile caught his forehead. The cold of it helped for a second. Water. Heat. Breath. That ought to have been enough. It had to be enough. Because the alternative was something he did not have the strength for tonight, and he knew that. He knew the edge of it. The point where irritation stopped belonging to the present and something older began moving underneath it.

“No,” he said under his breath.

Not tonight.

He pressed harder into the wall and listened to the water, trying to keep himself in the room, in the heat, in the small ordinary discomfort of his own body. For a few seconds it almost worked. The day might still have passed into nothing if his mind had been willing to leave it alone. But his body had already started deciding otherwise, and by the time he realized it, his breathing had changed.

He lifted his head.

At first it was only that one breath wouldn’t go all the way in. Then the next one did the same. He blinked water from his eyes and tried again, drawing air in slowly through his nose, but it caught halfway down and broke apart in his chest before it reached where it was supposed to go. He went still under the spray. His pulse was suddenly everywhere again. Throat. Wrists. Behind his eyes. His chest tightened in response, and his hand slipped on the tile.

“Come on,” he muttered.

His voice sounded wrong now.

He planted both hands against the wall and tried to force another proper breath in, but the room had already started changing around him. The steam felt too thick. The noise too loud. The air too close. He could feel the first tremor in his fingers where they pressed against the tile, then in his forearms, then lower. It spread with that awful familiar speed, making him feel weak and overexposed all at once.

Not now.

He shut his eyes.

Not now.

But his body had already gone the other way. His heart was pounding too hard. His ribs hurt with it. His hands had started shaking in earnest. He could feel the weakness in his knees, the fine violent buzzing just under his skin, the sense that something inside him was trying to force its way through every place he had spent years trying to hold closed.

He knew what it was but that didn’t make it easier.

The room kept shrinking around him. He reached blindly for the tap and turned it hard. The water shut off at once, and the silence that followed hit him almost as badly as the noise had. Joel stood there dripping, chest pulling too fast, every part of him suddenly too aware. He grabbed the towel from the rack, but his hands were shaking badly enough that it nearly slipped. He swore under his breath, wrapped it around his waist, and pushed the shower door open with more force than necessary.

The floor did not feel steady under him.

“No,” he said, quieter now. “No, no, no.”

But the words did nothing.

He crossed into the bedroom and went straight to the dresser, leaving wet footprints behind him on the floorboards, yanked the top drawer open too hard, fumbled through the clutter inside it, then found the orange bottle and nearly dropped that too. The cap slipped once in his hand before he got it open. Two pills fell into his palm instead of one. He stared at them for half a second, breathing hard, then reached for the glass of water on the nightstand. The first swallow barely went down. His throat felt too tight for it. He forced himself to take more, dry swallowed the pill, and sat down hard on the edge of the bed because his legs no longer felt trustworthy.

The mattress dipped beneath him. He bent forward immediately, elbows on his knees, one hand still gripping the glass too tightly, his whole body full of those fine involuntary shocks that moved faster than he could calm them. He set the water down before he dropped it and scrubbed both hands over his face, staying there, folded over himself, trying to ride the worst of it out without letting it drag him any farther.

His heart was still hammering. His breathing was still wrong. He told himself the medication would kick in. Told himself this had happened before. Told himself he was not dying, not going mad, not about to come apart there… alone. But fear did not care what he knew. Fear only cared that the body had already chosen danger and gone to war over it.

He lowered his hands and stared at the floor between his bare feet, seeing nothing. All he could hear was his own breathing and the old pulse of shame under it, because this was the part nobody ever saw. Not the women who brought food to the church. Not the men who shook his hand after service. Not the town that had decided Father Miller was steady, dependable, the kind of man other people could lean on. They saw the polished version. The contained one. The one with the level voice and still hands and enough Scripture ready for whatever hurt they brought him. They did not see him like this, half naked under a towel on the edge of a bed, shaking hard enough to feel it in his teeth because some woman with a sharp mouth and a pale dress had managed to reach under his skin in under an hour and leave him raw there.

“Get a hold of yourself,” he muttered.

The sentence came out low and harsh and completely useless.

He knew better than to say it. Knew contempt never helped. But the voice came anyway, old and mean and familiar. The same one that had kept him alive before he had better language for survival than violence and denial. The man beneath the collar was still there. That was the part that frightened him. Not the panic itself. The thing under it. The thing that lived closest to the cracks and waited.

Joel dragged in another breath and held it as long as he could, then let it out slowly through his mouth. Again. This time it went a little deeper. Not enough, but enough to matter. He stayed bent forward and kept counting without really meaning to, forcing his breathing into something steadier while the medication took its time. In for four. Hold. Out. Again. His hands still shook. His chest still hurt. But the worst edge of it had begun, slightly, to shift.

The next wave came smaller. Ugly still, but smaller. He reached for the water again and made himself drink. His hand trembled against the glass. Less than before.

“Okay,” he said, though there was no one there to hear it. "I'm gonna be okay.”

It wasn’t true but the body liked simple lies when it was frightened, and that one was as good as any.

He sat there another minute, then another, waiting for the medicine to dull the sharpest points of what remained. The trembling in his legs eased first. Then his hands. His pulse was still too high, but no longer trying to break clean through his ribs. His breathing dragged less. The room came back to him in pieces. The desk. The window. The chair with the flannel over the back. The dark beginning to settle outside.

The fear stayed along with the knowledge of how close the old self always remained beneath the surface. How little it took, some days, to feel him shifting there. Almost crawling.

Joel looked down at his hands.

Steadier now.

Then he rose slowly, tightened the towel once at his waist, and went back into the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror because avoiding it would have been ridiculous by then. He looked tired. Older than he had that morning. Eyes red rimmed. Hair still wet. Skin damp. But from the outside, contained enough to pass.

That was familiar too.

He wiped the last of the water from his face and stood there a second with both hands on the sink. Then he looked at the man in the glass and said quietly, “You don’t get out tonight.”

The room, like the church below it, offered him nothing.

Joel turned off the bathroom light, crossed back to the bed, and sat down in the dark. After a while he lay back, one arm over his eyes, the medication pulling him slowly toward something he could bear. He stayed like that, listening to his breathing settle, feeling the last of the trembling go out of his hands and chest and legs. Then, almost without thinking, his fingers found the thin gold chain at his throat and the small cross resting there against his skin.

He closed his hand around it.

The metal was warm. He held it tight in his fist and shut his eyes harder. He didn’t say anything out loud. He didn’t need to. The prayer came anyway, quiet and tired and worn thin by the hour.

Lead me not into temptation—

His hand tightened around the cross.

He forced his breathing slower and tried to think of the work waiting for him in the morning, of practical things, of anything that belonged to the ordinary shape of life and not to you. But your face came back anyway. The laugh he had no business hearing this clearly still.

Lead me not into temptation, Father, but deliver me from… her.

The second time the prayer came quieter. More ashamed than afraid.

He stayed like that until the room softened around him and the medicine finally pulled him back from the edge and to sleep. 

That night his hand never left the cross.

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