Holy Sins

When Saints Die

AERIS

I was sitting at Aveline's kitchen table, half-listening to her b***h about Thomas trying to smuggle a stray cat past her like she wasn't going to notice, when her phone started buzzing on the counter like it was possessed.

"Jesus Christ, hang on." She snatched it up mid-sentence, and I watched her whole face drop before she said one damn word.

"What?"

"My mom." Thumb flying across the screen, jaw locked tight. "Something's going on at the church. Everybody's blowing up my phone at once."

I felt it before I understood it. That sick drop in your gut right before somebody says a sentence you can't take back once it's out.

"Aveline. What."

"Father Dominic." She looked up at me and whatever was on her face killed the whole kitchen stone dead. "He's gone, Aeris. Died this morning."

I didn't say s**t.

Couldn't.

Father Dominic baptized me. Confirmed me too, years later, hand on my head in front of the whole damn congregation like it actually meant something back then. Married half this town. Buried the other half. And somehow, like an i***t, I'd let myself believe a man that old, that stubborn, that stitched into every brick of this place, was just going to outlast everybody forever.

He felt permanent. Church-pew permanent. The kind of thing you don't picture losing until it's already gone and you're sitting there like a fool trying to catch up to it.

"How?" I finally got out.

"In his sleep, I think. That's what my mom's saying." Aveline set the phone down like it weighed forty pounds. "He was eighty-one, Aeris. Not exactly a shock. Still feels like getting hit by a truck though."

"Still," I said back, because there wasn't anything smarter in me.

I sat there with my hands flat on the table and realized, kind of distant, that I hadn't thought about Philip in days. Not once.

My whole head had been so full of gray-blue eyes and that low, deliberate voice and the memory of his fingers curling around mine over a communion cup that there hadn't been one square inch left over for the man I buried a month before I even made it back to this town.

That made me feel a little sick, if I'm honest. How fast one wreck shoved the last one out the door.

"I keep thinking about Father Ronan," Aveline said, quietly, and my head snapped up so fast I knew she clocked it, though she didn't say s**t.

"God, can you imagine? Those two were basically father and son. The whole town knows it. Dominic's the one who brought him here in the first place mentored him for years before he even got sent out to Larkhaven."

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah. My mom says Dominic used to tell people Ronan was the closest thing he ever had to a real son. Wouldn't hear a bad word about him. Not once. Not from anybody." She shook her head. "I don't know what that man's going to do without him. They've been glued together since before I was even born."

I thought about Ronan's face that locked-door calm, the kind that always looked like work instead of nature and tried to picture it cracking open. Couldn't. That was almost worse, not being able to see it.

"When's the burial?"

"Tomorrow. They're not messing around."

Aveline rubbed her temple like the day had aged her a decade in ten minutes. "I have to call my mom back. Are you good?"

"Yeah." Lie.

Grief for a man I actually loved, tangled up with something I had zero business feeling about a priest who just lost the only father he had left.

"I think I'm going to head home."

"Sure. Go be with your mom." She squeezed my shoulder on the way out, already dialing before I hit the door.

"This whole town's about to lose its mind for a while."

She wasn't wrong.

My mom was sitting outside on the porch steps when I got home, and she wasn't alone Florence and Tobias, plus two church ladies, all of them clumped together in the dying light like grief had physically dragged their asses into a circle.

Florence had a tissue balled up so tight in one fist it was basically confetti. My mom's eyes were red as hell, hands wrapped around a mug she wasn't even drinking from.

"He confirmed my youngest," one of the women was saying as I came up the walk, voice cracking clean down the middle.

"Forty years ago. Forty years, and I still remember exactly what he said to me that day."

"He married Tobias and me," Florence added, and Tobias reached over and took her hand without a word, both of them looking like they'd aged a decade since breakfast.

"Aeris." My mom looked up, and I could see it had gotten to her too, same as it got everybody. "You heard?"

"Aveline told me."

She nodded, mouth pressed thin, and I crouched down and hugged her for a second because there wasn't a single word going to make any of this smaller.

"I'm going to head in," I said. "Let you all talk."

"Okay, sweetheart." She caught my hand quickly before letting go.

"Burial's tomorrow morning. We'll go together."

I nodded and left them to it, said something soft to Florence and Tobias on the way past, and let myself into the house.

Dead quiet inside.

That specific, hollowed-out quiet a house gets when everybody who usually fills it up is somewhere else.

I climbed the stairs slowly, sat down on the edge of my bed, and finally let myself sit with the thing I hadn't been able to say out loud back in Aveline's kitchen.

I kept thinking about him. Ronan.

Not Father Armand, not the composed priest handing out wafers like it cost him nothing the man underneath all that, the one who'd spent years being somebody's actual son, who was about to bury the closest thing he had to a father in front of the whole damn town tomorrow, standing there calm-faced and steady-voiced while everybody else got to fall apart and he didn't get that luxury.

I didn't know him. Not really. A few minutes in a courtyard. A couple seconds over a chalice. My own name said low enough to wreck something in my chest for no good reason at all.

And still, sitting there in the dark like some kind of lunatic, I found myself wishing stupid, useless, completely out of my lane

that there was some way I could be there for him tomorrow.

Sit close enough to matter while he buried the one person who actually knew him and loved him anyway.

I didn't know what the hell that said about me.

I was starting to think I didn't want to find out.