Holy Sins

A Saint's Farewell

AERIS

Larkhaven doesn't do funerals halfway.

By eight in the morning the whole town was already dressed in black and drifting toward Saint Michael's like the church had its own gravity, pulling everybody in at once.

My mom was up before me, ironing a dress she hadn't touched since my dad's funeral, and neither of us said much over breakfast because there wasn't much worth saying.

You don't small-talk your way through a morning like that.

"You ready?" she asked. Second time in two days she'd asked me that.

"No," I said. "But let's go anyway."

The walk to church wasn't a parade this time.

Nobody joined in laughing, nobody waving from porches. People just fell into step, heads down, quiet as hell, like the whole street had turned itself into a procession without anybody voting on it.

The bell was already going when we got there. Slower than usual. Heavier. It didn't sound like Sunday morning. It sounded like something being carried out the door for the last time.

---

The church was packed past what it was built to hold people standing shoulder to shoulder along the back wall, kids sitting cross-legged in the aisles because there wasn't a pew left open anywhere.

Cordelia had a black lace shawl draped over her shoulders like she'd been saving it in a drawer just for this.

Ambrose stood gripping his cane with both hands, jaw locked, not saying a word to anybody.

Florence had her arm hooked through Tobias's, both of them staring dead ahead like blinking too hard was going to take them out completely.

Aveline found me by the doors, Stellan next to her holding Thomas's hand while Lily clung to her mom's coat, dead quiet for once in her whole eight years of life, feeling something in the air even a kid could pick up on.

"You good?" Aveline murmured.

"No," I said again. I had only honest answers today.

She didn't push. Just squeezed my arm and steered us toward the middle where we could actually see something.

Up front, the casket sat closed under the altar, white cloth draped over it, flowers stacked around the base, half of them from Tobias's garden, I'd bet money on it.

Father Matthias stood beside it in full robes, eyes already blown out red, hands shaking around the edges of his prayer book like he was barely holding the thing together.

And next to him, Ronan.

Black on black, collar stark against it, standing so still he could've been carved out of the same stone as the walls around him.

I watched him from three rows back and couldn't find one single crack. Not one. His face was a locked door, and it hurt worse than if he'd been sobbing right there in the aisle for everybody to see.

Beside him stood a woman I didn't know younger, dark-haired, dressed simple, gripping his arm like she needed it more than he did.

She kept glancing up at him, checking the way you check on somebody you love who won't let you see what's underneath.

"That's his sister," Aveline whispered, catching where my eyes had gone. "Lillian. Came in from Elderglen last night."

I nodded and kept my mouth shut, because there wasn't a version of I wonder if he's okay that didn't sound completely unhinged coming from me about a priest I'd spoken to maybe three times in my whole life.

---

The service went the way these things go.

Hymns nobody could get through without their voice snapping somewhere in the middle.

Readings about eternal rest, about a life spent in service, about a man who'd apparently married, buried, baptized, and confessed damn near everybody sitting in that church at some point across forty-four years.

Father Matthias tried to get through the eulogy and made it about halfway before he had to stop, hand pressed over his mouth, shoulders shaking.

Then Ronan stepped up.

The whole church went dead silent. The kind of silent where you can hear fabric shifting three pews back.

He stood at the pulpit for a second before he said anything, hands flat against the wood on either side like he needed the thing to keep him upright.

"Father Dominic used to say confession wasn't about the sin," he said, voice low, even, carrying to every corner of that packed room without him raising it once.

"It was about being known. Fully known, by somebody who wasn't going to walk away because of what they heard."

I watched his jaw tighten, just barely the only crack I saw in him the whole morning.

"He knew every person in this parish that way. Better than most of you know each other. Better, some days, than you knew yourselves." Longer pause this time. "I don't know how you replace forty-four years of that. I don't think you do. I think you just carry it forward the best you can and hope to God it's enough."

He stepped back from the pulpit like the words had physically cost him something, and Lillian reached up and grabbed his hand the second he was close enough, and he let her, which was, somehow, the single most human thing I'd seen this man do since I met him.

My own throat went tight and I hated myself a little for it.

Hated how much of that tightness was actually for Dominic, and how much of it was for the man standing beside the casket holding himself together through pure stubborn will and nothing else.

---

The burial happened out back, in the old cemetery behind the church where the headstones went back further than anybody living could account for.

The whole congregation followed the casket out, black clothes moving slowly across green grass under a sky that couldn't make up its mind whether it wanted to rain on us or not.

I stood near the back with my mom and Aveline, close enough to see, far enough that it didn't feel like I was crashing something that wasn't mine.

They lowered him slowly. Matthias said the final words, steadier now, like he'd already burned through all his breaking room earlier and had nothing left but function.

Ronan stood at the head of the grave with Lillian's hand still in his, and when that first bit of earth hit the casket, I watched something move behind his eyes quickly, gone almost before it started, but it was there.

Grief. Real grief, showing itself for half a second before he slammed the door on it again.

Nobody else probably caught it. I don't know why I did. Maybe because I'd spent the last month learning exactly what it looks like to bury something you're not allowed to fall apart over in public.

The crowd broke up slowly after that, people drifting toward him in small clusters to offer their hands and their condolences and their own grief dressed up in words that never quite fit the size of what they were trying to hand off.

Ronan took every single one of them. Didn't flinch. Didn't rush a single person off. Just stood there and let this whole town lean on him while the one person he probably needed to lean on was already six feet under the dirt behind him.

I didn't go up. Didn't know what I'd even say sorry for your loss felt like an insult for a man who'd just lost the closest thing he had left to a father, and anything closer to the truth wasn't mine to say. Not today. Not with half of Larkhaven watching his every move.

So I stood back and watched him hold that whole town together with his bare hands, and thought about how badly I wanted to be the one thing in that churchyard he didn't have to perform for.

I didn't know what the hell that made me.

I was starting to think I didn't care anymore.