But she didn’t answer my calls or my texts, and answering promptly was something she normally did, and I spent a long hour walking tight circles around my office. I should just go over to her house. This was really important, and we needed to talk about it right now, but with Millie’s confrontation still front and center in my brain—not to mention this fucking black-hole-burning-pyre-beating-guilty-heart of an envelope inches away from me—I was too frightened to walk over to her house lest we be caught…again.

And then I wanted to yell at myself for being such a pussy. We needed to figure this out and that was more important than anything else. And I would just go on another run, that was all. Everybody was used to seeing me running at all hours of the day and night, and if I happened to run past the old Anderson house, nobody would think it odd at all.

I quickly changed into my running clothes and strapped my phone to my arm, and I was at Poppy’s house in less than two minutes. Her Fiat was in the driveway, but when I slipped into the garden (grateful once more for the overgrown shrubs that provided such great cover) and knocked on her door, there was no answer. Where the fuck was she? This was pretty important shit and she was unavailable? Was she taking a nap? In the shower?

I knocked and waited. Texted, knocked and waited. Paced and waited and knocked some more and then growled fuck it and unlocked the door with the key under the bamboo plant pot.

But I could tell the moment I walked in that she wasn’t napping or in the shower. There was the kind of silence filling the corners that only came with emptiness, with absence, and sure enough, I saw that her phone and purse were gone from the place she usually kept them on her desk, although her keys were still there. So she’d gone somewhere without her keys. Had she walked into downtown? To the coffee shop or maybe the library?

I turned to leave, and then a thought formed and stabbed me in the chest like an icy blade.

What if she was with Sterling?

I actually sagged against the wall. It made sense. What, I had thought he’d come all the way up here just to warn me? That he’d declare battle and then wait a few more days to fire his opening salvo? No, he’d probably gone straight to Poppy after leaving the church, and while I had been pacing the worn carpet in my office like an idiot, he’d been here persuading Poppy to go somewhere with him. To dinner. To drinks. To some sleek hotel in Kansas City where he’d fuck her against a floor-to-ceiling window.

That icy blade stabbed me over and over again, in my throat, in my back, in my heart. I didn’t even bother to fight the twin dragons of jealousy and suspicion as they coiled around my feet, because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was right. There’s no other reason she would be ignoring my calls and texts.

She was with Sterling. She was with Sterling and not with me and I was utterly powerless to make it otherwise.

After realizing that Poppy wasn’t at home that afternoon, I’d run by the coffee shop and the library and the winegarden, just to double-check that she hadn’t stepped out to work someplace other than her desk. But no, she hadn’t been any of those places, and when I’d gotten home and unstrapped my iPhone, she still hadn’t texted or called.

Bishop Bove had.

I didn’t call him back.

That night at youth group, I was a mess. An angry, distracted mess, but luckily it was Xbox game night, and my frustration and tension blended in with those of the rowdy teenagers also playing with me. And at the end of the night, I made our prayer brief and to the point.

“God, the psalmist tells us that your word is like a lamp to our feet—that even though we don’t always know where you are leading us, you promise that you will show us the next step. Please keep your lamp burning for us, so that our next step, our next hour and our next day, is clear. Amen.”

“Amen,” the teens mumbled, and then went home to their concerns that (to them) were as troubling and stressful as mine. Homework and crushes and unsympathetic parents and a graduation date that seemed too far away. I remembered those problems acutely, even though they’d been so massively overshadowed by Lizzy’s death. Teenagers felt differently than adults—they felt keenly and powerfully, without the frame of experience to remind them that they wouldn’t be broken by a bad grade or an unrequited love.

But I had that frame of experience. So why did I still feel like I could be broken?

After youth group, I sat in my living room with my phone in my hands, wondering if I should call the bishop back, if he’d called because Millie or Jordan had told him about my shattered vows, wondering if I could even keep up my own pretense if he didn’t know. And that’s when I saw it—the picture message.

It came from an unknown number, but I knew who it was the second I opened the message and saw the picture, a shot of Poppy in a car, her face turned away toward the window. The light was low, as if the person taking the picture hadn’t used a flash, and it appeared to be taken in a back seat, which made me think that they had a driver. I could just barely make out the wisps of hair around her neck and ears, the glimmer of the small diamond studs she sometimes wore, the pearlescent sheen of her tie-neck blouse.

Sterling wanted me to know that he was with her. And I knew it could be something as innocent as dinner and conversation, but honestly, when was dinner with an ex ever completely innocent?

I tried to swallow down my feelings of betrayal. What claims did I have on her time, when I could only give her stolen slices of mine? I was not the kind of boyfriend—or whatever I was—to want her to account for every one of her minutes, every one of her thoughts, in the jealous hope that this would keep her faithful. Even if I had the right to demand her fidelity—which I didn’t, given that I was unfaithful in my own way, cheating on her with the Church—I still wouldn’t. Love is freely and unconditionally given, and even I knew that much.

Besides, this was exactly what Sterling wanted. He wanted me to stew and fume, he wanted me to brood over his victory, but I would not grant him that satisfaction and I would not do Poppy the disservice of lobbing accusations via text or voicemail.

We would wait to talk about it until she came back. That was the reasonable thing to do.

But strangely, having a plan of action (or a plan of inaction, as it were) didn’t help. I tried to watch TV and read, I tried to sleep, and in every pause of dialogue, in every paragraph break, was that picture of Poppy and all the unbidden, awful images of her and Sterling talking and touching and fucking. Finally I gave up on it all and went downstairs to the rectory basement where I lifted weights and did sit-ups until the moon started to sink, and then I drained four fingers of Macallan 12 and went to bed.

I woke up that morning with sore muscles and an even sorer conscience and a phone still devoid of missed calls or messages. I indulged in the quiet fantasy of dropping it into a boiling pot of water and walking away or maybe microwaving it—punishing it for everything that had gone so terribly wrong in the last twenty-four hours—but I settled instead for leaving it behind as I went to prepare for Mass and then for the pancake breakfast.

The morning went by in a robotic blur—especially after Millie told me that Poppy had called in sick to volunteer (this was followed by a look that was not exactly scathing but was certainly grumpy and I must have looked fairly pitiful, because she relented and gave me a dry kiss on the cheek before she left.)

And then I found myself with a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do but try to avoid feeling my feelings, and you know what? I decided that I was going to work out some more.