Collared(71)

“Why are you doing this, Torrin? What are you even saying right now?” I squeeze my eyes shut because I can’t look away from him when he’s looking at me like that. “You are a goddamn priest. You made your choice.”

“You were gone, Jade. I made the only choice I had left.” His voice rolls over me. He’s upset.

I don’t want him to be upset because of me anymore. I don’t want to be that in his life.

“You’re not just a priest. You’re a good one. A really good one.” I think of the woman in that room and how he made her last moments on this planet better. “You’re doing this for a reason. Don’t throw it all away.”

“And what if I’m willing to? Give it all up? Throw it all away?”

My eyes flash open. “Then I’d tell you you’re a damn fool.”

He moves toward me, matching my every step as I back away. “And what if I don’t care what you say because when you look at me, you’re telling me something different every time?”

“I wouldn’t let you. I won’t let you do it.”

His phone vibrates in his pocket. He exhales when he pulls it out and checks the screen.

“They’re calling about us, aren’t they?”

He pockets the phone. “‘They’ being my governing bishop and the church elders? Probably.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“The truth.”

“And what is that?” I say, glad we’re in the privacy of the waiting room because my voice is getting louder. “The truth?”

Torrin’s eyes narrow. “You know it. You’re just not ready to admit it.”

I hear the phone vibrate in his pocket again. He can only ignore them for so long. I feel desperate, trying to think of anything I can say to him to get him to change his mind.

Though I’m not sure I want him to change his mind, because he’s right—I do know the truth. But he’s also right about me not being ready to admit it.

“Why did you become a priest?”

He tips his head. “I already told you why.”

“Yeah, because I was gone and maybe never coming back and you wanted to help people. You could have done a hundred different things if you wanted to help people. Why else?”

His jawbone pops through his skin. He glares out the window for a minute, then he falls into the chair behind him. He leans forward and glares at the floor. “After you went missing, I changed. A lot. I was consumed with trying to find you, and that led me down a lot of roads I never should have wandered down. One of those roads took me to a serious beating that almost killed me.” His shoulder lifts. “I wanted to die. That night under the Ship Canal Bridge, when I confronted some bad people who I’d heard might know something about your disappearance, I wanted to just leave this world for good. I thought that if nothing else, maybe you’d be waiting for me on the other side.”

I hadn’t been expecting this story. I hadn’t been expecting to hear about the time he almost died because he hadn’t been able to let me go. I drop into the chair across from him.

“Someone found me though. Someone who’d been out delivering sandwiches to the homeless. He helped me up, drove me home, and listened to my story. The whole drive, he didn’t say anything. He just listened. He was the first person to do that, you know? Listen. Everyone else had been throwing so much ‘you’ll be okay with a little time’ or ‘she’s in a better place’ at me I was ready to break the nose of the next person who said it.” Torrin clasps his hands in front of him, popping his knuckles as he rolls them together. “After he dropped me off back at home, he told me that if I wanted to ever talk again, I could find him at St. Mark’s. He was the priest there.”

That’s when he glances at me. The look on his face makes me want to crawl into the chair beside him and hold him.

“I went back. A bunch of times. I talked. He listened. Until finally one day, I was done talking. It was the same day he finally offered me some kind of advice or reassurance.” His phone buzzes in his pocket again, but I don’t think he hears it. “He told me that I wouldn’t be any help to you if I got myself killed. He told me that as long as there was still hope, not to give up on it. He told me that when I felt like an absolute failure and that I was getting nowhere, to repeat a certain quote to myself.”

I tip my head and wait.

Torrin exhales, his face bound by emotions I’m not sure I know the names of. “‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’”

I repeat the words to myself. I imagine a young, desperate Torrin repeating them to himself. I wonder if those words could help get me through my dark period, if they could pull me up when the weight of a thousand failures was holding me down. “Who said that?”

“I don’t know. Someone brilliant.” Torrin stares at his hands, his brows drawn together. “Because it worked. It’s what got me through a decade of dead-ends and cold trails. I just kept failing better until I ultimately remembered something that would lead the police to the man who took you.”

I have this priest and those words to thank for my freedom. It kind of knocks the wind out of me, and I sink deeper into the chair. “If you never gave up hope, why did you go to seminary? If you still felt like I’d be found, why did you become this?” I gently motion at him, my eyes lingering on his collar.