I rack my brain, trying to remember if he ever told me that. No. He’d said he talked to his father. But he’d never said he felt guilty about his death. His father had died in a car accident, on the way home from work. How could he have felt responsible? “He did?”

“Oh yes. That was a major theme of our talks. He was big on guilt. Beat himself up over fear of doing the wrong thing.”

Looking back, Declan never seemed to do the wrong thing. I thought he’d always done right effortlessly.

Father Brady lets out a heavy sigh. “Other than that, he had the same troubles as any boy his age. School. Future. Girls.”

Girls. Me? He had trouble with me? Oh. The whole sex-before-marriage thing. I’m not going to touch that topic with a ten-foot pole with Father Brady. I stand. “All right. Well, thank you.”

“Of course,” he says as I put the scarf around my neck. “Declan didn’t come to see me at all in the time before he died.”

I stop winding my scarf on my neck and stare at him. “What do you mean?”

“He used to come and see me every Tuesday evening, like clockwork,” he says, making me think of my own Tuesday appointments with Juliet. “He knew I had a penchant for Big Macs, so he’d always bring me one, and we’d sit and have dinner together and talk about life, maybe play a little chess.”

Okay, so that was nothing like my appointments with Juliet. I didn’t even know Declan knew how to play chess. “And you say he stopped coming?”

He nods. “The last time I saw him was before Christmas. He didn’t show up after that. He even stopped showing up at Sunday masses, though his mother did. When I asked, his mother said that he was fine, that he’d bitten off more than he could chew and was busy with school. The year before college is a busy year, so I didn’t think anything of it.”

I stare at him, mouth agog. Declan had stopped going to church? I didn’t think anything short of a natural disaster or death would keep him from church. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Father Brady pushes his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, refocusing his eyes on the paper in front of him as I head for the door. Before I can escape, he says, “Your family doesn’t come to church anymore. But you used to go with Declan. Did you lose your faith when he died?”

Talk about guilt. I feel it seeping in. “No,” I say. I could say more, but I don’t.