Okay, not so easy peasy. As I get into my car, my brain starts peeling everything apart, and I have to stop thinking about Keegan and PR for a moment so I can just…process.

Little Zenny-bug is a nun?

Little Zenny-bug is a nun who reported my financial firm to the press?

My mind is in a tumult as I navigate my Audi to the Keegan property to meet with Zenny. Zenny the postulant. Zenny the soon-to-be nun. I call Elijah, and it goes to his voicemail, so I toss the phone into my passenger seat with a huff, trying to remember if he’d said anything about his sister joining a religious order.

With some chagrin, I realize we don’t talk about our families much; an unspoken mutual thing, so as not to bring up anything that evokes the Great Iverson-Bell Schism of 2003. I didn’t even tell him Mom was sick until after he found out about it from his dad.

And it’s never bothered me that we don’t talk about family, but Zenny becoming a nun seems like something I should have known, at least for Elijah’s sake. His parents had been decently kind and understanding when he came out, although I knew he’d faced an unvoiced wall of Catholic discomfort about him being gay. The one thing his parents did voice was a desire for grandchildren of their bodies. Elijah hadn’t let it bother him—or maybe he simply hadn’t shown that it bothered him, I don’t know, we weren’t always great at talking about that kind of shit—but part of what had appeased his parents was knowing that Zenny might still give them grandchildren.

And now she’s becoming a nun.

I hope that hasn’t made anything harder for Elijah. I resolve to ask him about it whenever he calls me back.

I park on the street outside the property, leaving my pretty German car-baby behind with some reluctance, and then I have to poke around the block of old five and six-story buildings before I find a metal door marked simply with a cross and a local phone number. It’s unlocked, and I step into a narrow linoleum-floored landing with a badly lit set of stairs leading upward. I creak my way to the second floor, and there a door marked Servants of the Good Shepherd of Kansas City takes me into a makeshift waiting room. It’s also lined in linoleum, ringed by red plastic chairs that were definitely salvaged from a 1980s bowling alley or some shit, and dotted with baskets of well-worn toys. A dusty fake plant sits in a corner, and somewhere, incongruously, Bruno Mars is singing about Versace on the floor.

Sex and wealth—definitely the first things I think of when I think of nuns, right?

I ring the orange bell at the vacant receptionist’s window and wait.

I wonder what Zenny will look like after all these years. I can’t remember seeing any pictures of her floating around, but I guess it’s not that surprising. Elijah always claimed he was too burned out on social media from running the museum’s feeds to update his own personal accounts, and honestly, I’m too busy myself to open up anything on my phone that isn’t The Wall Street Journal or my stock apps, so I’m pretty much clueless about anything that isn’t directly related to my job—even my best friend’s family.

Well, given the schism, especially my best friend’s family.

I picture Zenny as I remember her best—as Zenny-bug, young and dimpled with hair in pigtails that ended in little dandelion-shaped puffs. I’d had to babysit her once or twice before the schism; in fact, I remember trying to slouch back to Elijah’s room in junior high so we could do some Playstation and my mom making me come to the Iversons’ kitchen to hold the new baby so she could get a picture.

When had I last seen her? The day of Lizzy’s funeral? Yes, yes, that had been it; I can remember the tap of her Sunday school shoes on our kitchen floor as she chased our family dog around the house after the service. The happy noise of her playing with Ryan while my dad wordlessly poured glasses of whiskey for the adults.

And me, I’d locked myself into the upstairs bathroom and gripped the edge of the sink until my knuckles went white, stared at the row of smudgy mascara tubes and half-empty lip glosses that Lizzy would never use again. I don’t know how long I’d been there, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing, before I’d heard a tentative knock at the door. The soft, rain-like noise of the beads on a little girl’s brand new braids clicking.

“Sean?” she’d asked. She’d been seven then, her voice just edging into a big kid voice and losing the little warbles and lisps of childhood.

If it had been anybody else, I would have roared at them to leave me alone, I would have hurled things at my side of the door until they left, but I couldn’t with Zenny. She was Elijah’s little sister, so I simply said, “Yes, I’m in here.”

“Mom says that we’re only supposed to say things like ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but Ryan and me thought you’d want to know that Jurassic Park is on the TV in the basement.”

And miraculously—it was the only time it happened that day—I smiled. “Thanks, Zenny-bug.”

“And I found a book for you to read.” There was a thunk and papery hiss of a book being wedged under the bathroom door. “It was in Mrs. Carolyn’s room, but I figured you might need it more than her. My dad always reads in the bathroom for a long time too.”

I did have to laugh a little at that as I reached for the cheap paperback now being birthed from the crack under the door. It was one of my mom’s historical romances, with a gold curlicue font and a guy in old-timey clothes clutching a woman’s shoulders.

In the Bed of the Pirate: Book One in the Wakefield Saga

“Thanks, kid,” I said. “Appreciate it.”

“I’m going to go watch Jurassic Park now,” she declared, and there was the crush of the carpet under her shoes, the plastic rain-sound of her beads, and then she was gone. The one person in the house who’d managed to stay sane through the whole mess of Lizzy’s death.

I’d stayed in that bathroom for another hour, still too fucked up emotionally to face anyone downstairs and too wound up to simply go to my room and sleep. In fact, the only thing that finally calmed me down enough to leave my bathroom cocoon of pain was reading the first fifty pages of In the Bed of the Pirate, which was weirdly compelling. After reading the chapter where Lady Wakefield was kidnapped by the mysterious pirate king, I finally felt normal enough to go downstairs. Which was of course when I walked into the middle of the schism—raised voices, Mrs. Iverson tugging on Dr. Iverson’s elbow, my mother crying, Elijah looking shocked.

And before I fully processed what was happening, I remember being grateful that Zenny was in the basement and far away from whatever ugliness was currently crackling between our families. And I’d held on to that Wakefield paperback like it contained the answers to life itself as I finished coming down the stairs and faced what would be the final, terrible gash left by Lizzy’s suicide.

Fuck.

I hate thinking about that day.

I shake off the memories and ring the bell at the window again, the first tendrils of impatience snaking through me. I glance at my watch. Yes, it’s definitely ten o’clock, and judging from the picture of the Virgin Mary hanging above the cheap plastic chairs, I’m definitely in the right place.

“Hello?” I call through the window. “Anyone there?”

I hear a laugh—muffled as if through a door—and a couple voices in ringing conversation, and the voices sound like they’re coming closer, thank God.

“Hello?” I call again, hopefully. “I’m here to see Zenny?”

I hear a door open somewhere I can’t see, I hear footsteps on the linoleum, and suddenly, I’m suffused with huge amounts of confidence. Optimism.

Because this is baby Zenny, baby Zenny who likes Jurassic Park and brought me a book once just so I wouldn’t be bored. This is the same baby Zenny I had to push in the swings at the park and guard my popcorn from during family movie nights. This is my best friend’s little sister, and this is going to be so easy. She’ll see her old friend Sean and realize that this was all a misunderstanding, a simple mix-up, and then she’ll step aside and let me clean this up.

Like I said before, easy peasy.

The footsteps get closer and I take a step back from the window, already pinning my best big-brotherly smile on my face as Zenny comes into view.

Except.

Except.

Shit.

It’s not Zenny at all.

It’s Mary.