The Mistress

“Is it weird having a priest for an uncle?”

“Yes and no.” Laila looked up at the darkening sky. “I’m so used to it now that it’s only strange when I stop to think about it. I’ll see something on television about the pope or Rome and I’ll think, ‘He’s one of them....’”

“He’s not one of them. Priests aren’t supposed to have girlfriends.”

“The girlfriend is the part that isn’t weird. If he didn’t have her, then that would be strange. What man would choose to be alone if he could have her?”

“No man in his right mind.”

Laila tried to smile at him but Wes didn’t meet her eyes. For some reason it seemed he was hiding something from her. But he glanced her way again.

“I don’t blame him for being in love with her. I just wish, for her sake, she wasn’t in love with him.”

Wes said the words tentatively, as if he worried about giving offense.

“Don’t tell him I said this,” Laila found herself almost whispering, “but I’ve thought the same thing.”

“You have?” Wes looked at her with new eyes and in shock. “I thought—”

“I love him. Completely. He was a father to me and Gitte after our father was gone. But I love my aunt, too, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for her.”

“Hard?”

“In our house in Copenhagen, she’s his wife. We treat her like family because she is family. Everywhere else she goes, she’s just...”

“The mistress,” Wes finished the sentence for her, and she was glad he had. The word felt like treason to her.

“Yes, the mistress. She told me she fell in love with him when she was fifteen years old and loved him every day since the day they met. That’s almost twenty years now. And not once has he been able to publicly say they’re together. She’s his dirty secret. She’s something he has to hide. When I found out that she’d left him, I wasn’t surprised and I wasn’t angry. I was sad, but I understood why.”

“I’m glad you get it,” Wes said. “I didn’t want her to go back to him. For a lot of reasons. I feel like she thinks I’m the bad guy because I don’t want her in a relationship like that. She deserves better.”

“She does,” Laila agreed. “And he tried to give her more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tante Elle and I went for a walk together last time she came to visit. I asked her why she and my uncle never got married. I said I felt bad for her because she couldn’t be his wife. I asked her if she was mad at him for not leaving his job and marrying her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said being a priest was like being a writer or a healer or a parent. It was a calling, not a job. It wasn’t something you did, it was who you are. And she would no more ask him to quit being a priest than he would ever ask her to quit being a writer, or ask my mother to quit being a mother. She said that for Catholics the priesthood was a sacrament. Being a priest was written into his very DNA. She loved him and he was a priest, and if he quit the priesthood, he wouldn’t be him anymore. He’d give up so much of himself there would be nothing left of him to love. And then she told me something I’d never known....”

“What did she say?” Wes asked, seemingly clinging to every word she spoke. She’d never had anyone like him paying so much attention to her before.

“She said I shouldn’t judge him for not leaving the church and marrying her. He’d offered once and she said no.”

Wes went completely still. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. Why her aunt and uncle’s love life mattered to him so much, she couldn’t guess and didn’t want to. But she wasn’t stupid. Obviously Wes had feelings for her aunt. But it seemed to go deeper than a crush.

“He asked her to marry him and she said no,” Wes repeated.

“Yes, and that’s when she left him. She said she was scared she’d change her mind and say yes and he would leave the church for her. She said it was like hearing someone offer to commit suicide to prove their love. She left so he wouldn’t destroy the man she fell in love with.”

For a few minutes they sat side by side in silence as the evening faded out and became night.

“It’s crazy,” Wes finally said. “All this time I thought she left him because he wouldn’t stop being what he was for her.”

“He offered. She refused. She said she’d rather be the mistress of a priest than the wife of the ghost of a priest.”

Wes started to say something but she heard a woman’s voice calling her name.

“We’re here, Grace,” Laila said as Wes jumped off the log. Laila started to jump down, too, but Wes stood in front of her and held out his hand. She took his hand in hers and let him help her down. She probably would have landed okay even in the dark but she couldn’t turn down a chance to hold Wes’s hand, could she?

“What’s up?” Wes asked as Grace jogged into the clearing.

“Your uncle was wondering where you’d gone,” Grace said as the three of them retook the road toward the house.

“I needed to walk,” Laila said. “I was going crazy in that house.”

“I don’t blame you.” Grace gave her hand a quick squeeze, a kind and affectionate gesture that Laila appreciated even as part of her wished to feel her hand in Wes’s again. “But it’s late and your uncle wants us all under the same roof tonight.”