Don’t hulk out. How funny. If anything, I was hulking in, shrinking and folding into a smaller man, a weaker man. Without Poppy, it was as if I had forgotten all the things that made me into Tyler Bell. I pined for her like a person would pine for air, incessantly, gaspingly, and it left so little room to think about anything else. I couldn’t even watch The Walking Dead because it reminded me too much of her.

“I’m lost,” I admitted to Jordan one day after Thanksgiving. “I know I did the right thing by leaving the clergy, but now there’s so many choices—so many places I could go, so many things I could do. How am I supposed to know which one is the right one?”

“Is it because they all feel wrong without her?”

I hadn’t mentioned Poppy to him at all, so his acuity unnerved me, even though I should know better by now. “Yes,” I said honestly. “I miss her so much it hurts.”

“Has she tried to contact you?”

I looked down at the table. “No.”

No messages. No emails. No phone calls. Nothing. She was done with me. I supposed this meant she’d seen me that day in her house, that she knew I knew about Sterling, and that almost made it worse. No explanation? No apology? Not even the charade of feeble excuses and well wishes for the future?

I knew she’d moved away from Weston—Millie called to give me weekly updates on the church and my former parishioners—but I had no idea where she’d gone, although I assumed it was to New York City with Sterling.

“I think you should try to find her,” Jordan said. “Get some closure.”

Which was how I ended up at the strip club with Sean that December. He’d practically imploded with excitement when I had asked him to bring me, talking about getting me laid, getting him laid, and also about how we should bring Aiden, but not tonight because he wanted to focus on my game.

“I don’t want to hook up with a stripper,” I protested for the ten thousandth time as we rode the elevator up.

“What, they’re too good for you now? You were fucking one just a couple months ago.”

God, had it been two months already? It felt so much shorter than that, except the times when it felt longer, the times when I was sure it had been years since I’d last tasted the sweetness of Poppy’s body, since I’d felt her cunt so warm and wet around my dick, and those were the times I’d found myself so painfully erect I could barely breathe. Luckily, Sean was desperate to climb the ladder at his job and worked lots of late nights, and so I had the penthouse to myself most of the time. Not that jacking off ever helped—no matter how often I came into my hand thinking of her, it never dulled the ache of losing her, it never softened the blow of her betrayal. But betrayal or not, my body still wanted her.

I still wanted her.

“That was different,” I told Sean now in the elevator, and he shrugged. I knew I’d never be able to explain it to him, because he’d never been in love. Pussy is pussy, he would say whenever I tried to make him understand why I didn’t want to be set up with some random girl he knew, why I didn’t want to date at all. What was so special about hers?

The club was busy—it was a Saturday night—and it only took a couple vodka and tonics to convince Sean to go do his own thing. I stayed near the bar, sipping a Bombay Sapphire martini and watching the dancers out on the floor, remembering what it was like to have Poppy dance for me and me alone.

What I wouldn’t give just to have a few of those moments back—her and me and that goddamn silk thing around her neck. With a sigh, I set my drink down. I hadn’t come here to reminisce. I came here to find out where Poppy went.

The bartender came down my way, wiping down the bar. “Another?” she asked, gesturing to my martini.

“No, thanks. Actually, I’m looking for someone.”

She raised an eyebrow. “A dancer? We usually don’t give out schedule information.” For safety reasons, I could see she wanted to say, but she didn’t.

I couldn’t even be offended, because I knew how it looked to her. “Actually, I’m not looking for schedule information per se. I’m looking for Poppy Danforth…I think she used to work here?”

The bartender’s eyes widened in recognition. “Oh my God, you’re that priest, aren’t you?”

I cleared my throat. “Um, yeah. I mean, I’m not technically a priest anymore, but I was.”

The bartender grinned. “That picture of you playing Frisbee in college—it’s the background on my sister’s work computer. And have you seen the Hot Priest memes?”

I had indeed—for better or for worse—seen the Hot Priest memes. They were made using the picture that used to be on St. Margaret’s website, the one that Poppy admitted to looking up all those months ago.

I thought maybe it would be easier if I knew what you looked like.

And is it easier?

Not really.

Now that we had established I wasn’t just some random guy harassing dancers, I tried again. “Do you know where Poppy went?”

The bartender turned pitying. “No. She gave her notice so fast, and she didn’t tell anybody why she was quitting or where she was going, although we all knew about the pictures, so we guessed it had something to do with those. She didn’t tell you?”

“No,” I said, and I picked up my martini again. Some truths went better with gin.

She hung her towel off a nearby rack and then spun toward me again. “You know, now that I think about it, I think she left something here when she came to pack up her things. Let me go grab it.”

I tapped my fingers against the stainless steel bar, not letting myself believe that it was something as important as a letter left specifically for me, but still craving it all the same. How could she just have left? Without a word?

Had it all meant that little to her?

Not for the first time, my chest went concave, crumpling inward with the pain of it. The pain of one-sided love, of knowing that I had loved her more than she had loved me.

Is this how God feels all the time?

What a sobering thought.

The bartender came back with a thick white envelope. It had my name on it, Sharpied in hasty, thick strokes. When I took it, I knew immediately what it was, but I opened it anyway, more pain slashing through my gut as I pulled out Lizzy’s rosary and felt its weight in my hand.

I held it up for just a minute, watching the cross spin wildly in the low light of the dance floor, and then I thanked the bartender, slung back the rest of my martini, and left, leaving Sean to have his strip-adventures on his own.

It was over. Really, it had been over the moment I’d seen Sterling and Poppy kiss, but somehow I knew that this was her definitive signal that there was nothing left between us. Even though I’d given the rosary freely, as a gift, had never thought once about wanting it back, she had seen it as some sort of bond, some sort of debt, and she was rejecting that bond, just as she’d rejected me.

Yes. It was time I accepted it.

It was over.

I’d love to say that I walked out the club and used this newfound closure to get my life together. I’d love to tell you that a white dove came fluttering down and the heavens opened and God told me exactly where to go and what to do.

Most of all, I’d love to tell you that the rosary—and the implicit message it sent—healed my broken heart, and I spent no more nights thinking of Poppy, no more days scouring the internet for mentions of her name.

But it took longer than that. I spent the next two weeks much like I’d spent the two weeks before I got the rosary back: listening to the Garden State soundtrack and apathetically filling out applications for different degree programs, imagining in vivid detail what Poppy was doing right then (and whom she was doing it with.) I went to Jordan’s church and mumbled my way through Masses, I exercised constantly, and I immediately undid all that exercise once I finished by eating shitty food and drinking even more than my Irish bachelor brothers.