THE PRIEST AND THE SINNER

CHAPTER TWO: THE MAN BEHIND THE SCREEN Daniel — POV

He knew her name before she sat down

That was the thing he hadn't told her The thing he was still sitting with at five in the morning, in the dark of the church, with cold coffee beside him and a prayer he couldn't finish that when she'd pulled back the confessional curtain and settled onto the bench and said I'm not Catholic and I don't believe in God, he had already known exactly who she was.

Eleanor had shown him the photograph in August.

Creased at the corner. A little girl, gap-toothed and laughing, held up in both arms. And on the back, in Eleanor's handwriting She was everything good.

That's my Scarlett, Eleanor had said, and her voice had done the thing it always did when she spoke about her daughter pride and grief braided so tightly together that you couldn't pull one free without the other unravelling.

He had held the photograph and looked at the little girl's face and said She sounds remarkable.

She is, Eleanor had said. She got that from somewhere that wasn't me.

He had said I think it came from you. Whether you can see it or not.

Eleanor had taken the photograph back and tucked it carefully into the cover of her Bible and said nothing. The way she said nothing when something had gone too close to the centre of a thing.

He had prayed for Scarlett Voss by name for four months without ever expecting to meet her.

And then she had walked into his confessional and sat three feet away from him in the dark and begun to speak and he had sat on the other side of that screen and listened to her voice and felt the breath go out of him in a way it had no business going.

That was the problem.

Not that she had come. Not that she had talked for forty minutes with the kind of honesty that most people spent their whole lives avoiding. Not even that she had cried and held herself together and cried again, and that something in him had wanted with a clarity that still alarmed him in the cold grey light of five in the morning to reach through the screen.

The problem was that it had felt like recognition.

Not attraction. Not yet he was not going to use that word, not at five in the morning, not in a church, not about a woman he had spoken to once through a lattice screen while wearing a collar.

Recognition. The sense of encountering something that you did not know you had been waiting for, and understanding the waiting only at the moment it ends.

He was thirty-two years old. He had been a priest for eight years. He had sat with the dying and the faithless and the grieving and the lost. He had held hands at bedsides and listened to confessions that had cost people everything to say and prayed over graves in every season of weather that Vermont could produce.

He had never felt this before.

He picked up his cold coffee.

He put it down without drinking it.

He thought You are a priest, You have taken vows, This is nothing.

He thought Be precise, Be honest, What is it?

He sat in the front pew of St. Augustine's at five in the morning and was ruthlessly, uncomfortably honest with himself.

It was not nothing