“The sexton started walking toward the confessional booth when he heard the commotion,” O’Reilly said. “I could hear his footsteps coming across the sanctuary, and I was trying to keep the guy calm until he got there. But the more we talked, the more agitated he seemed to get. He finally admitted that he was sick and he didn’t know what to do. I told him that confessing was the right thing to do, and that’s when he stood up and said he was the angel of death. The sexton opened the door and…”

He didn’t have to say what happened next. They knew it. The shotgun blasts, the killer’s flight, O’Reilly’s attempt to exact retribution. It all played out in their minds, in fits and starts, in flashes of red, in pieces of dreams.

“I thought you were in shock when you kept whispering about the angel of death,” Coletti told the priest. “I thought it was your mind’s way of dealing with what you’d done.”

“So that’s why you came here?” the priest asked. “To tell me what you thought?”

“No. I came to ask why you never mentioned the angel of death again.”

“Because it was so traumatic, I wasn’t sure that what I’d heard was real,” O’Reilly said. “I knew I saw a man kill those people, but I couldn’t be certain he’d called himself the angel of death, so I just stopped saying it.”

“And because you weren’t sure, you let it come to this?” Coletti asked in disbelief.

For the first time, the priest became agitated. “I got up on the stand and said I saw another man do it. What more could I have done? You think I wanted this? You think I haven’t prayed every day for the last ten years that God would deliver me from this? Do you honestly think for one minute that I haven’t hated you and everyone else for allowing this to happen to me?”

Coletti looked away, ashamed. “I can’t blame you if you hate me,” he said.

“But that’s just the point,” the priest said earnestly. “I don’t hate you, and I don’t blame you, either. Not anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I still wish you would’ve looked past the circumstances and tried harder to see the truth. But about five years ago, in the midst of hating you for what you’d done, I realized that it wasn’t about you. It was about me. As much as I used to love taking confession and seeing people set free from the things they’d done, I’d never truly grasped the one thing that confession is all about. I’d never truly learned to forgive.”