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Ewron had memorized the liturgy for his ordination the way he'd once memorized the shape of Katie's laugh, without meaning to, without trying, simply because it had been said near him enough times that it had worked its way in and stayed.
I will have no other before You.
He said the line to himself in the dark of his room, the way he'd been taught, the way Brother Ansel had drilled into him for six years. repetition as devotion, the words worn smooth as river stone from use. A month from now he would kneel in front of the whole village and say it out loud, and it would be true, and he would mean it because meaning it was the entire point of the six years that had led him here.
He believed that. He needed to believe that.
He thought of Katie instead.
It happened without permission, the way it always did. Not some grand betrayal, just her face arriving uninvited in the space where his prayers were supposed to live; the specific tilt of her head when she laughed at something stupid he'd said; the weight of her hand in his on the walk back from the river last week, easy as breathing; the way it had always been between them since they were ten years old and she'd sat down next to the boy nobody else would sit next to and simply never left.
The first time Ewron wondered if he loved Katie more than he loved God, he was nineteen years old and halfway through a prayer. It was an ugly thought. But that's the thing about thought. You don't get to control them. It was just a quiet, ugly little thing that arrived while he was kneeling in the chapel with his forehead against his clasped hands.
I would choose her. He stopped breathing. He waited for shame to strike him hard enough to knock the thought out of his head. He waited for the familiar certainty he'd spent six years cultivating to return. He waited for God to remind him that this was precisely why he had given himself over to priesthood in the first place.
Nothing came. Only Katie's face.
Katie at ten, missing one of her front teeth and furious because the village boys had told Ewron he couldn't play with them because his father had never married his mother. Bastar, Fatehrless, Unclaimed. Words said with spite the children hadn't truly understood. They learned the words and who to throw them at. And yet Katie never did. Or perhaps she just never saw the point. She'd stood between them with her fists balled at her sides and announced, with the absolute certainty only a child could possess, "He's mine."
And that had been that. Eleven years later, he still belonged to her in every way that mattered. And in one month, he was supposed to belong to God. Ewron looked to the cross on his wall, only barely visible in the dark. He had wanted this; he still wanted this. He had wanted to become a priest since he was sixteen; he knew what that entailed. He just hadn't thought that Katie would haunt him like this. It used to be so simple.
Then he changed. Something took root in his heart, something neither he nor Katie asked for. That was another thing he couldn't forgive himself for. He wasn't only hurting himself, but he was betraying her. Because sometimes, late at night, when she was close enough that he could feel her breathing, Ewron thought about what it would be like if he simply stopped resisting the thoughts. If he gave in to his deepest, darkest thoughts.
He hated those thoughts, hated how easily they came, the terrible tenderness of them. He hated the way his mind supplied details he had never asked for. Katie was waking beside him, wearing his clothes, reaching for his hand because she wanted it, not because she was cold. Katie saying his name in a room where no one else could hear.
Katie looking at him and knowing. That, the knowing, was the worst one. Because he didn't know what would happen if she ever looked at him and understood.
The heart is a garden. What you allow to take root there will eventually demand to be fed.
Ewron had once thought that meant temptation. He'd imagined money, power, pride, and vanity. Things a person could identify and reject. He had never considered that temptation might have Katie's face.
Kurwa. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until color bloomed behind them. Even now, thinking her name felt closer to prayer than most of the actual prayers did.
He'd asked Brother Ansel about it once, carefully, wrapped in enough hypothetical language that it could have been about anyone. "What does a man do," he'd asked, "when his heart keeps reaching for something other than God?" Ansel had told him that love of God and love of one's fellow man were not opposed, that charity and devotion could live in the same chest without conflict.
Ansel had not seen the way Ewron's whole body went quiet when Katie fell asleep against his shoulder. Ansel did not know what it cost him to sit still through that, to let it happen and not turn it into something else, something he had no right to turn it into. Not now, not a month out, not with vows sitting on the horizon like a door already half-closed.
Genesis, he thought, lying back on his cot, staring at the ceiling like it might have an answer written on it. It is not good for man to be alone. He'd read that verse a hundred times in the last six years and never once let himself sit with the fact that it felt more true of Katie than it had ever felt true of God.
That was the sickness of it. Not that he wanted her. wanting was a small, containable thing, something confession could file away and absolve. The sickness was that when he tried to picture the rest of his life, the whole shape of it, robes and rosary and a congregation and a God who required the entirety of him, Katie was still in the picture. Not beside it. Inside it. Wound so far into the architecture of what he understood his own life to be that he couldn't find the version of himself that didn't include her, and he was supposed to, in thirty days, stand in front of an altar and give the entirety of himself to something that didn't have room for that.
He thought of her hands. That was its own particular torment. How ordinary it should have been after eleven years of them holding on to each other the way children do, the way friends who'd never known a world without one another simply continued doing without noticing it was strange. Katie had never once made it strange. She took his hand crossing a street the same way she'd done at ten, threaded her fingers loosely with his while they sat by the fire, fell asleep curled into his side on cold nights like there was nothing to think twice about, because to her, there wasn't.
He thought about it every night now. Christ washing feet. An act of service, humility, love without wanting anything returned: that was supposed to be the model, the shape devotion was meant to take. He tried to hold Katie inside that shape. He tried to make what he felt for her into something clean, something he could stand in front of God and call brotherly, call charity, call anything other than what it actually was, lying awake at two in the morning with his own pulse loud in his ears and her laugh still sitting somewhere behind his sternum from six hours ago.
It never held. The shape kept slipping.
He had spent six years preparing for this.
Six years of waking before dawn. Six years of scripture, fasting, prayer, memorization, and discipline. Six years of learning the rites he would perform for the rest of his life. In a month, he would stand before the altar in white and take his vows. He would give himself to God. He had known the words since he was sixteen. He could recite them without looking. He could recite them half-asleep, which, considering the hour, was becoming increasingly relevant.
I give what was given to me.
I keep what has been entrusted.
I will not divide my heart between the altar and the world.
He thought about the wedding at Cana, water into wine, the first miracle, done at his mother's asking, done out of love for another person before love of self. He wondered, guiltily, viciously, whether there was a version of himself that could ask God for that kind of miracle now. Turn this into something ordinary. Turn it into nothing at all.
Peirdolić. He said it out loud this time, quiet, to the empty room, like the ugliness of the word might scour something out of him. It didn't. Nothing did lately. He'd tried prayer, tried fasting, tried the old discipline of simply not seeing her for three days, and on the third day she'd shown up at the chapel steps with two apples and no explanation, handed him one like no time had passed at all, and every ounce of ground he'd gained came apart in his hands faster than he could hold onto it.
He remembered the first time he thought of her this way. They were seventeen. Katie had been asleep with her head in his lap while he read scripture aloud because she'd claimed the sound of his voice helped her sleep. He remembered looking at her then and thinking she was so beautiful. Katie had asked him her whole life if he thought she was pretty. Ewron had always scrunched his nose and confidently said no because he hadn't. She wasn't a girl; she was his friend. But lying on his lap like this, the colored light of the sunset coming through the stained glass window to dance on her face. It's was like a switch had flipped. Since that day, every second he looked at her was torture.
He was going to kneel in a month and promise the whole of himself, undivided, to a God he did love. He needed that to still be true, clung to it the way a drowning man clings to driftwood. But somewhere in the same chest, occupying the same space, unmovable, uncontested, was a girl who had never once asked him to choose and had never needed to, because some nights he lay awake fairly certain that if she ever did ask, he already knew which way he'd go, and the knowing of that was its own quiet, unconfessable sin, the one he could never quite bring himself to bring to the altar, because saying it out loud would make it real, and as long as it stayed folded up in the dark of his own chest, unspoken, he could still tell himself he hadn't chosen anything at all.
He turned onto his side, facing the wall, and made himself say the liturgy again, from the beginning, the way Ansel had taught him. Repetition as devotion, the words worn smooth as river stone.
I will have no other before You.
He didn't believe it as much as he had that morning. He said it anyway. That, he thought, was probably supposed to count for something.
He didn't sleep. That wasn't new, exactly, sleep had become an unreliable guest these last few weeks, showing up for an hour or two and then abandoning him somewhere around three in the morning to lie there with the ceiling and his own thoughts for company. But tonight felt different in a way he couldn't fully name, some low, persistent dread sitting under his ribs that hadn't been there before, or maybe had always been there, and he was only now letting himself feel the weight of it.
He rose before dawn, the way he'd trained himself to for six years, and went to the chapel because that was what a man in his position was supposed to do with a restless conscience. Empty pews. Candles gone to stubs from the night before. The particular cold quiet of a room built for a presence he was supposed to feel and, this morning, simply didn't.
He knelt anyway. Discipline outlasted feeling. Ansel had taught him that too: that faith wasn't a feeling you waited to arrive at; it was a practice you kept whether the feeling came or not. He'd believed that once without having to think about it. This morning it felt like something he was reciting rather than something he knew.
*Lord, take this from me.*
He'd prayed some version of that prayer every day for two weeks now, and every day it came back to him unanswered or answered in the wrong direction because every day Katie was still there when he opened his eyes, waiting just behind them, the first thing his mind reached for before it reached for anything else. Even here. Even now, forehead against his knuckles in the house of the God he was about to give his whole self to, it was Katie's voice he heard first in the quiet, not God's.
He heard the chapel door before he heard her, the old hinge complaining the way it always did, and didn't need to turn around to know who it was. Some animal part of him always knew when she'd entered a room, some old instinct built over eleven years that had never once failed him and, he suspected, never would.
"You weren't at breakfast," Katie said, letting the door fall shut behind her. Her footsteps on the stone were unhurried, unbothered, the footsteps of someone walking into a place she'd walked into a thousand times and had no reason to think twice about. "Don's convinced you've died. He's already planning what to do with your room."
"I'm not dead."
"That's what I told him. He wasn't convinced." She dropped onto the pew behind him instead of leaving him kneeling alone, close enough that he could hear the small sounds of her getting comfortable. with a knee drawn up, her chin resting on the pew's edge, the way she'd settled behind him in this exact chapel more times than he could count since they were children. "You've been weird lately."
His whole spine went taut. "I haven't."
"You have. You get all far away, even when you're right in front of me." A pause, and when she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its usual ease, gone careful in a way that wasn't like her. "Is it the ordination? Are you nervous?"
*Yes,* he could have said, and it would even have been true, just not true in the way she meant it. He kept his forehead against his hands and said nothing at all, because the silence felt safer than any sentence he could currently construct.
"Ewron."
"I'm fine, Katie."
"You're praying at dawn in an empty chapel with your shoulders up around your ears. That's not fine, that's a man having a crisis." She said it lightly, the way she said most things, but he could hear something underneath it, some thread of real worry she wasn't quite willing to name outright. "You can tell me. You always tell me."
*I always tell you everything except this.* The thought arrived with such force it was almost physical, a genuine ache behind his sternum, because it was true, had always been true. Eleven years of no secrets between them, of her knowing the shape of his grief over his mother before he'd fully understood it himself, of him knowing exactly which of her jokes were armor and which were real. and this, this one thing, the only thing that had ever truly mattered to hide, was the one he would take to the altar unconfessed and bury there.
"I'm just tired," he said. "The vows are a lot to hold in your head all at once."
"You've known the vows since you were sixteen."
"Knowing them and being about to actually mean them forever are different things."
That, at least, wasn't a lie, even if it wasn't the whole truth either. A small mercy, he thought, that he could still find a sentence honest enough to hide inside.
She was quiet for a moment. He heard her shift on the pew and then felt her hand land against his shoulder, light, familiar, the same easy weight it had landed there a thousand times before, and he had to consciously stop himself from flinching at something that should have felt like nothing at all.
"You're going to be a good priest," she said, quiet and certain, the way she said things she genuinely believed. "You've wanted this since we were kids. I remember. You used to make me sit through entire made-up sermons behind the mill, do you remember that? You'd stand on the fence, and I had to sit on the ground and actually listen, or you'd start over."
Despite everything, something in his chest loosened slightly at the memory. Katie at twelve, arms crossed, scowling through his terrible twelve-year-old theology because he'd insisted, and staying anyway, every single time, because he'd asked her to.
"You never once actually listened," he said.
"I listened plenty. I just also complained about it constantly. Those aren't mutually exclusive." Her hand was still on his shoulder. He could feel every point of contact like it had been marked out separately on a map. "I'm proud of you, you know. Whatever's got you all twisted up right now. I don't know what it is, but I know you. You'll be exactly the priest you've always wanted to be."
*You have no idea what's got me twisted up,* he thought, *and if you did, you would never say that to me again.*
"Thank you," he said instead, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.
She must have heard something in it, because her hand tightened slightly before she let go, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone careful once more, testing. "Ewron. You'd tell me. If something was actually wrong. You wouldn't just—carry it alone."
He thought of the liturgy. “I will not divide my heart between the altar and the world.” He thought of the version of himself that could turn around right now, in the quiet of an empty chapel with dawn barely breaking through the windows, and tell her the truth plainly. Tell her that he loved God, that he did, entirely, and that somehow, impossibly, unforgivably, he loved her more, had loved her more for four years now without letting himself call it by its name, and that in thirty days he was going to swear an oath he already suspected he couldn't fully keep.
He thought of what her face would do. He thought of what it would cost her to carry that, on top of everything he'd already have taken from her by saying it.
"I wouldn't carry it alone," he said. Another true sentence built to hide a larger lie. "I have you."
"You do," she said, satisfied, missing entirely the second meaning folded inside the first, the way she always missed it, the way he'd built an entire six years of discipline around making sure she always would.
She stood, stretching, the moment passing the way moments with Katie always eventually did. "Come eat something before Don actually starts redistributing your belongings. He's already called dibs on your good boots."
"Those are consecrated boots. He can't have those."
"Tell him that. I give it fifty-fifty odds he cares." She was already at the door, glancing back at him with the same easy, unguarded warmth she'd worn her whole life, utterly unaware of the small violence her presence did to him every single time she looked at him like that. "You coming?"
"In a minute."
She left. The hinge complained again, and then the chapel was quiet, and he was alone with the candles and the cold stone and the God he was supposed to be speaking to, who had, once again, said nothing back.
He stayed kneeling a while longer.
"Kurwa," he said finally, to no one, to the empty room, to whatever version of God was still listening despite everything. "I don't know how to give you all of it. She's already got half."
The chapel didn't answer that either. He hadn't really expected it to.