The Bluebird Motel was nothing special, but despite the crappy mattress and the sound of semis rolling by on the highway outside my door, I slept like I was dead. I woke up disoriented and strange, reaching like I did every morning for my anxiety. Searching through my subconscious for all the things I worried over.

Abby.

The baby.

Her future.

And I realized they were all here, within reach. I’d found her, and she was healthy, and the baby was healthy, and the future was not a cold blank place.

I showered and then, standing in a threadbare Bluebird Motel towel, wiped the steam off the mirror and carefully shaved, putting more into my appearance than I had in years. I got dressed. Having left all my suits behind in the city, I planned to never wear a suit again. Not ever. And instead I wore the clothes of who I’d been. The son, brother and student.

Old faded Levi’s and a fisherman’s sweater my mother had knit for me before she died. All of it still fit, thanks to the weight I’d lost in the last three months. I was like a razor-sharp version of myself.

And I liked it. I liked the sweater against my skin and I liked the age in my eyes.

I wondered if Abby would like it. If she would see this version of me and miss the gangster in the suits with the scowl.

I liked the version of her I’d seen yesterday. She looked somehow younger, with that braid down her back and no makeup, but also older. More solid. More grounded. And I knew that I had done that to her.

I had taken away some of the brilliance that had attracted me to her. I had wiped away some of the shine.

And I had no business admiring what I’d left behind. No business thinking her more beautiful for the pain I’d caused her.

But I did.

I grabbed my keys from the uneven table beside the door and headed out, planning to go back to the café. I would give her the money she left behind, and I’d try to convince her to let me take care of her in whatever capacity she felt comfortable with.

I expected her to resist. I expected to have to wear her down.

Halfway into town I saw the church spire, and my soul recognized the beacon as something I needed. I hadn’t confessed once since the murder. Since Abby. The baby. I’d been clinging to my sins like a rosary.

I turned into town earlier than I would to get to the café. Over the tree line I followed that spire until I was stopped in front of a Catholic church that was sandwiched between a train overpass and the public library.

Without thinking, I put the car in park and went inside. Embraced immediately by the smell of incense and mildew. Wood cleaner.

I loved that a Catholic church in small-town Idaho was in so many ways no different than a Catholic church in San Francisco. The gory stations of the cross plaques. The blood-red stained glass. The crucifix.

The violence of it all made me feel at home.

“Can I help you?” a man asked, poking his head up from behind the lectern at the front of the building.

“I’m, ah, just passing through,” I said, walking slowly up the center aisle.

“Well, we’re always happy to see those passing through. I’m Father John.” The man came down the stairs, wearing the collar of his faith. The black clothing of his calling. “I’m trying to fix a microphone problem at the lectern, but I think I’ve only made it worse. Betty told me I would make it worse, and now I’ve only proven her right.”

“I’m Jack,” I said, feeling tongue tied. I only talked to priests when they were behind screens in confessional. “When are your hours of confession?”

“Sundays,” Father John said. “After Mass.”

Sunday was four days away. I must have looked crestfallen because he said, “But I have time to talk now, if you’d like.”

“Talk?” I asked, like the idea was horrible.

“Not so different from confession, really.”

Except that it was completely different than confession. There was a script in confession. There was a screen between me and the priest. This… was not that at all.

He sat down in the pew closest to him. “Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the pew in front of him and I found myself sitting down.

“What brings you to Bloomfield?” he asked, his blue eyes piercing beneath bushy white eyebrows.

I killed a man.

That’s what I wanted to say, but I wasn’t there yet. I might never be there. I might never be able to say those words to a priest in my life.

“A woman.”

“Uh oh.” He said it with a smile, a tired old joke that had the effect of making me smile.

“She’s having my baby.” Even saying the words was ridiculous. They sounded outrageous coming out of my mouth. Abby was having my baby.

“Are you married?” He sounded stern and disapproving and I very nearly got up, but I’d come here for this. I’d come to be judged and then forgiven.

“No.”

“Are you going to be?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Married? It was the twenty-first century, marriage was hardly a requirement for being a family. But… married? The idea of it, the quiet nature of the word and all the strange comfort it would provide. Me and Abby and the baby. Forever.

“If… if that’s what she wants.”

“What do you want?” he asked, and I turned sharply to look at him.

He held his hands out in front of him. “It seems like a reasonable question. Do you want to marry her?”

Yes, I thought, so small and so quiet. Of course. She is all I want.

“I don’t think what I want matters,” I said.

“Who told you that?” he asked, sounding angry on my behalf.

“It’s… well, it’s complicated.”

He sighed and sat back against his pew. “I think that’s bullshit.”

I gaped at him in surprise and he smiled at me. “The important things,” he said. “Love. Forgiveness. Commitment. Faith. Hope. They are simple things with yes or no answers. You love or you don’t. You believe or you don’t. You forgive or you don’t.”

I sat there for a long time, and he sat with me silently.

“Son,” he finally said, “you are welcome here for as long as you like, but I need to fix that microphone before Betty finds out I broke it worse.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Remember,” he said as he passed, a friendly hand on my shoulder. “There are worse things than love.”

Perhaps that was true.

But I couldn’t think of them.

* * *

I showed up at the café an hour later, not sure if she would be working but hoping she would be. Because I had real doubts anyone in that place would tell me where she lived.

My plan, such as it was, was to sit there and eat and drink coffee until she came in.

Walking into the coffee-scented air with the bell ringing overhead was such a familiar thing, and so soon after the piercing familiarity of church, I felt overcome in a way. By all the parts of my life. My mother and my past. My brother. And now Abby and perhaps my kid.

Abby was there. Behind the counter. An apron tied around her waist, revealing the small swell of her stomach.

She looked so different than she did in the city. Plainer. Simpler. Fiercer.

I wondered if other people looked at her and just thought she carried some weight there. Or did everyone know she was pregnant?

I wanted—like a caveman—for everyone to know she was pregnant. With my baby.

She glanced my way as I stepped in, and her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the café, and today her hair was braided again but this time it was wrapped at the top of her head in a bun.

Placing my memory of her from the club next to this creature watching me—I would be unable to say they were the same person. That girl had been lovely. Captivating.

This woman was irresistible. I wanted to crawl to her on my knees.

She didn’t look surprised to see me. But she didn’t look happy either. I didn’t know what to make of this resolute creature in front of me.

“Hungry?” she asked, cutting through the thousands of things we could say.

“Yes.”

I felt my hunger like a black hole inside of me. My hunger for her. For that smile in her eye and the glow that suffused her. For a baby, a family. For a place to belong.

“Have a seat at the counter. The eggs and bacon are local—everything else is gross.”

“I heard that!” yelled the crusty old woman from yesterday as she walked by.

“Well, it is,” said Abby with a shrug.

“Eggs and bacon sound good.”

“Have a seat, I’ll bring you some coffee.”

I sat down and spent the next hour watching her light up the room like she did in the Moonlight Lounge. She had magic, and I didn’t know if she even realized how magical she was. Even here in the middle of nowhere, she brought something to the people in this café that had nothing to do with the food. She smiled and touched people’s shoulders as she poured their coffee. She looked right into their eyes and said thank you and you’re welcome and I hope you enjoyed it with complete sincerity.

It was her dream, the café where everyone came to get what they need, and she was the one pouring it with her coffee.

Finally, I had to turn my back on her before I fell apart. Before I fell to my knees.

At long last she came up to my shoulder, wearing the sweater she wore yesterday, and she had a plate in her hand. An omelette with a side of tomatoes.

“My shift is over,” she said. “Can I join you?”

I smiled, though maybe I shouldn’t have. This politeness between us was excruciating. I wanted to lean over and whisper in her ear: remember when you told me to make you come with my mouth?

“Please,” I said, moving my coffee cup and the paper I had been reading. We were pretending something. I just didn’t know what it was.

She sat down with a sigh and a slouch and I was immediately concerned for her.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Tired,” she said. “My back.”

She twisted sideways like there was a kink in her lower back. “Can I—” I asked. My hand hovering over her sweater at the base of her spine.

“Give me a massage? Here in front of God and the Hardt twins?” she asked with a tired laugh.

“I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“Better not,” she said, breaking my heart. I put my hand back on the counter, feeling useless.

She dug into her omelette.

“How long have you been looking for me?”

“Since the moment you left.”

Her fork paused on her way to her mouth.

“And if I hadn’t walked in here yesterday I would be looking for you until I found you. No matter how long it took.”

“To tell me I was safe.”

“Yes. And to give you this,” I said and pulled from my coat pocket the manila envelope I’d left for her on the bar.

A hundred thousand dollars.

“You told me you loved me,” she whispered, her voice in her throat. Her eyes on that envelope. “Remember? The phone call?”

This was one of the things we’d been pretending. Or I had anyway, that the phone call never happened.

“Yes,” I said, stiff because I didn’t know how to talk about this. “I remember.”

“Did you say that because you were scared?” she asked. “Because you thought you were going to die?”

No, I thought. I said it because I want you. I want that baby. I want us. I want us so badly and I don’t know what to do.

But I couldn’t say any of that. Not here.

“Abby,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else.

She sighed, low and quiet, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, being there and not touching her. I put my hand against her back and she flinched away.

“Don’t,” she breathed. “I’m not… I can’t.”

It was like being sliced to pieces. Ribbons. I looked at my body, sure I would see blood, but I was whole.

I stood up. Put my coat on and shoved my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t put them on her body.

“You’re leaving?” she asked, looking up at me with tears in her eyes. As I watched, one trembled past her eyelashes and slipped down her cheek. I touched it before I could stop myself. I popped the bubble of the tear, felt bathed in the salt water of her grief.

The grief I caused just by being near her.

“The money is yours. For you and the baby. No matter what happens. I’m staying out at the Bluebird Motel until you tell me to leave. Do you want me to leave?”

“You’re leaving now!” she cried.

I leaned down until we were eye to eye. “I can’t do this in here. I can’t talk about my feelings while the guy next to us orders the lunch special. Everyone is watching and… I can’t, Abby.”

She glanced around, seeing what I knew to be true. All eyes were trained on us.

“Do you want me to leave town?” I asked her, because I had to get out of there or lose my mind.

Barely, just barely, she shook her head no.

I turned and left before I made a scene.

Once I was out on the street I put my finger in my mouth, tasting her tear and closing my eyes in pain.