“Did I shock you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“One of these days I’m going to shock you, Father Mike. It’s my top goal in life.”

“Good luck with that, my dear. I used to minister to men on death row. I’d be more shocked if you’d never ‘dated’ someone.”

“I ‘dated’ a nineteen-year-old boy this morning.”

Father Mike sighed wistfully. “God, I miss nineteen.”

Nora laughed. Father Mike looked like an old-school priest, and talked like it with his faded Irish accent, but he didn’t scare her one bit. He had a mighty scowl but it turned to a smile too quickly to intimidate her.

“Do you need some help there, Father?”

“Please. Unless I’m interrupting your prayers.”

“Not praying,” she said as she took a stack of brand-new shiny blue hymnals from the box and helped Father Mike place them in the back of each pew. “Just thinking.”

“Thinking? Sounds dangerous.”

“It is.”

“Boy trouble?” he asked.

“Always.”

“Somebody break your heart?”

“No. I broke someone’s heart.”

“Feeling guilty?” Father Mike asked. “There’s hope for you yet if you haven’t lost your Catholic guilt.”

“Sorry. No guilt. Not where he’s concerned. It’s just...we were very happy together right up until the moment we weren’t.”

“What happened?”

“I changed,” she said. “There was something I needed to do with my life, and he wouldn’t let me do it. I had to choose between staying with him and not being the real me, and being the real me and leaving him. Does that make sense?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been there, lass. My own brother wouldn’t speak to me for five years after I left home to join the church.”

“Five years? But you’re Irish. Aren’t you all supposed to send one child in the family to a convent or a seminary?”

Father Mike stood up straight and stared at a wrought-iron cross hanging on the wall at the back of the choir loft.

“Our priest growing up...he mistreated my oldest brother.”

“Mike,” she said, reaching out to squeeze his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“We put that bastard in jail after my father beat him with a golf club. Ten years later when I told the family I was joining the church, Seamus said it was like the husband of a Jewish girl joining the Nazi party.”

“The path I took, it hurt my...ex–whatever he was. What I wanted to do with my life, the person I needed to be, he couldn’t be a part of it,” Nora said.

“It scared Seamus when I became a priest. First time he saw me in the collar he swore he didn’t even know me anymore. I looked the same but he couldn’t see me. Took a while before his eyes adjusted.”

“My gentleman has very good eyes. But he still can’t see me for me.”

“Any regrets about leaving him?”

“If I had to do it over again, I’d do the same thing. And,” she said, glancing down at her closed laptop in her bag, “we certainly enjoyed it while it lasted.”

“Then what’s the problem, lass?”

Nora shrugged as she sorted the hymnals in her hand.

“I miss him.”

Father Mike gave her a look of compassion and the kindness almost undid her.

“That is a problem, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Nora said, swallowing. “Yes, it is.”

“You think he’ll come around?” Father Mike asked as he gathered up the old, crumbling hymnals and started placing them in the box.

“I keep hoping he will. No luck yet.”

“Is he a good man?”

“He...” Nora paused, trying to figure out the best way to answer the question. “He sold a very precious possession of his once in order to buy me something I needed and couldn’t afford at the time.”

“What did he buy you?”

“A laptop so I could write my dirty books.”

“What did he sell?”

“His dignity.”

“Sounds like a very good man then.”

“He’s the best man alive,” Nora said and realized as she said the words, she meant them.

“Sounds like you’re still in love with him.”

“I am. He knows I am.”

“He’s still in love with you?”

“He was last time I checked. Seems like it should be easy, right? He loves me. I love him. But it never is that easy.”

“God said ‘Love is patient. Love is kind.’ He never said ‘Love is easy.’”

“Love is patient,” Nora repeated. “You think if I’m patient he’ll eventually come around and love me for me instead of waiting for me to be someone I’m not?”

“I’ve been screwing up mightily for sixty-eight years. God’s still patiently waiting for me to get it right, and He hasn’t given up on me yet.”

“Fine. I’ll give him sixty-five more years to come to his senses. Then I’m moving on with my life. But after that I’m finding a new priest to be in love with.”

Father Mike’s eyes went round as Communion wafers.

“Did I finally shock you?” she asked, handing over a stack of hymnals.

He shook his head again, and his eyes returned to their normal size. “You’ll have to do better than that. I know too many priests. Anyone I know?”

“I’m kidding,” she lied. “I wouldn’t sleep with a priest. That would be a sin.”

“For your sake, I hope you’re kidding.”

“Why is that?”

“You’re a sweet girl, even if you do correct my theology. Involved with a priest? I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

“That bad, is it?” Nora asked, keeping her voice neutral as she sorted hymnals into the box.

“Priest I went to seminary with had a lover for years. Fifteen, if you can believe it, before it was over.”

“Over? Did they get caught?”

“One dark night she washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a bottle of vodka. Never woke up.”

Father Mike said the words casually, but Nora felt them like a punch in the gut. She wanted to ask the woman’s name, what church she attended. Nora wanted to know if her priest called her by a pet name that made her melt, if he told her he needed her, if he told her she was his heart.

“And him?” she asked, keeping her tone neutral as she slipped a hymnal into the box. “What happened to him?”

“They transferred him to a church five hundred miles away. They sent him packing so fast he didn’t even get the chance to pay his last respects to her family.”

“That’s awful,” Nora said not meeting his eyes.

“It’s shameful, is what it is. She thought she was giving him the best years of her life. Turned out they were the only years. Suicide is a mortal sin, but I’d put it on his head, not hers.”

“Do you honestly think God wants a celibate clergy?”

“Doesn’t matter if God wants it or not. The church wants it and the church sets the dress code. God doesn’t want all men to shave their heads and march in formation either, but the army certainly does. You want to join the army, be prepared to march. Don’t want to march, don’t join the army. If you do join the army, for God’s sake, don’t marry a pacifist.”

“You can’t help who you fall in love with sometimes.”

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Father Mike said. “Which is why God gave us hearts and common sense, and He put them in different places.”

“We’re Catholics, Father Mike. We believe in the Sacred Heart, remember? No one ever talks about the Sacred Common Sense.”

“True. But still, my heart breaks for the girl.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Any regrets about being a priest? Anything to repent?”

“Being a priest has been my North Star on this journey. But I wonder sometimes about the children I didn’t have. You get called Father all you life, you can’t help but wonder...”

Nora looked at the iron cross on the wall.

“My old priest would have made a wonderful father.” She remembered a long-ago visit to Denmark, and seeing Søren holding his baby niece Gitte in his arms. For hours he walked with her, trying to comfort and quiet her colicky cries. He was so patient, so endlessly patient. Nora didn’t want to have children herself and she had no regrets about that at all. But Søren never holding his son or daughter? That hurt her. That she regretted. And she hated to think about it, but Søren was fourteen years her senior and women lived longer than men. Wouldn’t it be something to have part of Søren live on after he was gone?