She looked relieved. “Okay. There’s a restaurant just across the road. I’ll go sit there and have lunch while I wait for you. Join me when you’re ready. Go claim that boy of yours.”

•   •   •

Though I’d never set foot in Daniel’s church before, being there felt like a homecoming. It had been a lifetime since I’d stood within the walls of a Catholic church and yet it was as familiar as breathing. My being there required no thinking, no effort at all.

Christ was nailed on the cross before me, dying for my sins. His hands and feet were bleeding, and his head, with its crown of thorns, was dipped low. The stained-glass windows depicting various biblical scenes cast yellow, blue, and red shadows onto me, making me think back to the day I first saw Father Thomas.

I knelt then in Daniel’s church, the place where he’d given hundreds of sermons and blessings, where he’d married hopeful young couples and eulogized those whose days of hope had passed; where he’d blessed and forgiven and worshipped and prayed.

I looked up at the pulpit and tried to imagine my son there. I wondered what the timbre of his voice had sounded like. If it was gruff and pitched low like his grandfather’s or if it was more melodious like his father’s. Did he gesture when he spoke, drawing the congregation in, or did he stand still as a statue, trusting that his words would find their mark?

I hoped that he had been kind and quick to forgive. I hoped he had empathized rather than condemned. I thought he would have but I was also aware of how easy it would be to canonize him. I bent my head then and prayed for the first time in four decades. The last prayer I’d ever uttered was on that day forty years before, after Daniel was born and I handed him across to the Reverend Mother. Then, I’d prayed for God to watch over my son and protect him from harm. Now, I prayed to my son for forgiveness for ever entrusting that job to anyone but myself.

I have no idea how much time passed, but the shadows cast by the stained glass had lengthened across the room by the time I rose. When I turned to leave, I saw a nun sitting a few rows behind me. She wasn’t praying. She was staring at me intently.

I smiled a greeting and she smiled back before rising and walking toward me.

“It is you,” she said. “I knew you’d come, but I thought it would be sooner.”

“Pardon?”

“You don’t remember me?”