It wouldn’t matter how pure the warmth in her chest felt. It wouldn’t matter that Joan had loved and accepted so many others. There were people—many people—who would never return that kindness.

It was too early, in all of this, to know what the future held. But what Joan understood already was that what they had together was a lit candle, and the wind could be fierce.

“Are you Catholic?” Joan asked.

Vanessa turned over onto her back and pulled the sheets up over them both. “I no longer believe in God,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.”

Joan grabbed Vanessa’s hand and started playing with her fingers, grazing her own through the gaps in Vanessa’s. She saw that Vanessa had a hangnail on her right middle finger, the skin reddening.

Joan thought of all the people she believed she had known well in her life. Her family, her old friends back in college, Donna and Griff. She would have said she knew everything about them. But it was only now, vulnerable in the intimacy of the middle of the night, that things turned granular. It was only now, in the quiet of this moment, that Joan’s eyes could see the redness around Vanessa’s cuticle.

“You don’t believe in any god at all, or just the Catholic God?” Joan asked.

“The Catholic one is the only one I know. And I will fight against it until the day I die.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean…sometimes my mother and I go months without speaking to each other because I refuse to go to Mass, and she refuses to drop it.”

“Months?”

“One time it was a year.”

Joan’s eyes went wide.

“She says I’m stubborn,” Vanessa said. “But it’s…it’s hard to pick up the phone sometimes when I’m mad. And that doesn’t come from nowhere—I got it from her.”

“Don’t you miss her? When you aren’t talking?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why not just go to Mass when you visit her and ignore what they say?”

Vanessa turned onto her side, to face Joan. “Because I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”

Joan cracked a smile.

“What’s funny?”

“No, nothing’s funny. It’s just…you’re so…dauntless.”

“I’m dauntless?” Vanessa said.