I hold the thought for a moment, pressing on it like a bruise, just to make sure it still twinges.

Finn makes it easy to forget he’s hollow inside. Curly hair and a lopsided smile, quick to laugh. Yes, it’s easy to un-focus my eyes and see him as the boy I once thought I loved. It would be so easy to hold his hand.

But he isn’t that boy. That boy never existed.

My hands hang by my side, cold and trembling.

He’s taken us to a church that could be one of any dozens in this city. Hewn from ancient-looking stone, it’s made up of a rectangular main building and a tower topped with a sharp spire.

The small sign out front is barely visible, obscured by the parishioners streaming into the cathedral.

ÉGLISE DE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

“It’s the oldest church in Paris,” he says as if I asked.

Discomfort ripples through me. “Of all the Catholic churches in the city, why this one?”

He shrugs. “Because I wanted to see it.”

I don’t fight back, but he has the slippery “trust me” look in his eyes that I know means to do the opposite. Every nerve in my body is on high alert.

We join the stream of people and step into the halls. The temperature drops noticeably despite the crush of bodies. I crane my neck up to look at the ceiling, crisscrossed with flying buttresses and painted a navy blue almost the exact shade of the night sky.

“Beautiful,” Finn mutters. “Makes our parish back home look like a sheepherder’s cottage.”

We shuffle into a pew, finding a space between two white-haired ladies speaking rapid French and a couple in their fifties not speaking at all.

It isn’t long after we’re seated that the priest walks down the center aisle, swinging a golden ball on a chain, pouring sickly sweet incense smoke into the worship hall.

He’s wearing robes and saying something in a language that might be French or might be Latin, but Finn’s head is bowed reverently, regardless.

Catholic Mass is even longer than the quiet, homily-filled sermons I used to be dragged to at our small neighborhood church back in New York. I feel as if I am eight years old again, fidgeting, picking at my fingernails, counting the angels sketched in the tall stained-glass windows.

Their beady eyes stare back at me. I’m not sure if I believe in God, not in the literal sense anyway, but if there is a higher power to judge me, I do not think they would judge me favorably.

The priest drones on in French, but Finn watches with the reverence of a choirboy. His eyes are wide, the hard line of his jaw is relaxed, unclenched. A beam of light through the stained glass sends a slash of blue light across his face.