Only autumn, which did come to New Orleans, but slowly and late, late in the season. No winter either, unless she counted Søren who carried winter with him, wherever he went. Winter in the scent of his skin, like frost on sleeping tree branches and the hard freeze of new snow under star-wild skies. Winter in his eyes when he glared, a look that could bring the temperature of any room down if you happened to be on the wrong side of that icy gray stare. Winter in his touch…when she burned for him, only his touch would cool the fires. But only after fanning the flames.

God, she missed him.

Nora sat in the third pew from the front. Gmork curled up on the floor at her feet. The arched windows cast long shadows in the chapel dark. From her purse, she took out a velvet bag that contained a set of tarnished silver rosary beads that had belonged to her late mother.

She didn’t pray the rosary. Nora couldn’t even remember the last time she prayed the rosary. But Søren prayed it often, his fingers flicking through the beads like gears turning on a bicycle.

Once Nora had asked Søren, “Does it mean anything to you? The rosary? Or are you just doing it because you’re a priest and they expect you to do it?”

His answer surprised her.

“All over the world, thousands of Catholics are praying the rosary right this very moment. I like thinking about them, about all of us reaching out to God together. If enough people all over the world were singing the same song at the same time, the whole world could hear it. I like singing in God’s choir.”

“You’re a good priest,” she said to that and kissed him. But he wasn’t a priest anymore.

No. Not true. Søren was still a priest. It was a sacrament, after all, the priesthood. Once a priest, always a priest, they said. Even if a priest were to leave the priesthood, even leave the Church altogether, he would still bear on his soul a brand that said PRIEST in ornate all-capital letters.

What he wasn’t anymore—technically—was a Jesuit. Six weeks ago, after the very last day of the summer course he’d been teaching at Loyola, he’d gone to his Jesuit superiors with a photograph. He showed it to them, a picture of a blond three-year-old boy in a suit jacket and short pants. “This is Fionn,” he said. “This is my son.”

The silence that followed, Søren told her, had sucked the sound from the entire city.

But thanks to a severe shortage of priests in the Church, he’d been spared the worst-case scenarios—he hadn’t been laicized or excommunicated. The punishment handed down was still severe: he was to be suspended from the Jesuits for the period of no less than one year for the crime of fathering a child with a married woman.

Alone in the dark, stuffy chapel, she cried. She cried because Søren had disappeared without a word to her or Kingsley, which meant he was in such deep pain he wanted to protect them from the sight of it.