Chapter 3: Sunday Morning Persecution
The sawdust in the half-built rectory smelled like pine and forgiveness. Each swing of the hammer, each board fitted true, was a silent word in a prayer Riley had never learned. It was the one reprieve they had all day long, this work. Here, with the salt wind threading through the unfinished walls, the world narrowed to the simple geometry of a nail head and the solid heft of a crowbar in his palm. Paul, sleeves rolled up over forearms that had never known a day’s manual labor in his first life, was an eager, clumsy student.
“You’re holding it like it’s a sacramental wafer,” Riley grunted, adjusting Paul’s grip on the hammer. “Let the tool do the work. It’s not theology.”
Paul shot him a wry look, a flicker of the old humor. “Everything is theology, Riley. Especially rebuilding.”
“Yeah, well, my theology says don’t hit your thumb.”
That hour, that space, was a sanctuary. Outside of it, the air had curdled.
Bev Keane, withered and sharp as a rusted nail, had been campaigning. Her poison was efficient, delivered in whispers at the grocery, in solemn pronouncements on doorsteps. She spoke of God’s judgment, of blasphemy, of sin festering in their midst. Her most potent slander was a single, hissed word: sodomite. She called Paul a gay hypocrite, a godless sinner defiling the church with his very presence. The words were horrifying to Paul, not because they attacked an identity he’d never claimed, but for their venom, their calculated cruelty. He feared speaking out, fearing it would only sanctify her lies.
But her fire-and-brimstone followers listened. The Sunday congregation had split, a slow, painful fissure. Those who remained in Paul’s thinning flock did so with doubt pinching their faces, their faith a brittle thing. It didn’t stop him. Every Sunday, he climbed the pulpit, his hands steady only once they gripped the lectern. He preached love. Community. Acceptance. A God whose arms were wider than the sea.
Riley sat in the back, a silent sentinel. Erin was there, often with a notebook, her presence a solid anchor. And Sarah, Paul’s biological daughter—a woman now miraculously, tragically his peer—sat in the front, her agnosticism set aside in a fierce, protective show of support. She watched the man she knew as a kindly, fading priest with an intensity that made Riley’s heart ache.
This Sunday, the light through the stained-glass fragments—replaced with plain glass since the massacre—was a brittle, wintery gold. Paul spoke about the parable of the prodigal son, focusing on the father’s unconditional embrace. His voice was fervent, beautiful even.
Then, midway through, Bev Keane stood. The creak of the pew was a gunshot. Four others followed, their boots loud on the old floorboards.
Paul’s words faltered. He watched them, his knuckles white on the wood.
As she passed Riley’s pew, Bev didn’t look at him. She looked straight ahead, her voice a dry, clear rasp meant to carry. “We will not sup with a pervert who twists scripture to justify his filth.”
A man behind her, younger, with a face like clenched stone, spat the word. “Faggot.”
The word hung in the sacred space, more violent than any vampiric leap. It wasn’t just an insult; it was a stripping, an attempt to reduce a cosmos of complicated love and terrible history into a single, ugly syllable.
Paul flinched as if struck. He didn’t crumble, but he seemed to fold inward, his passionate light snuffing out into a dull, practiced calm. He finished the sermon, his voice a monotone ghost of itself.
Afterward, Sarah and Erin rushed to him, a wall of feminine comfort. “They’re ignorant, Paul,” Sarah said, squeezing his arm, her eyes blazing. “They don’t know anything.”
“Their loss,” Erin added, her tone practical, but her hand was gentle on his shoulder. “The sermon was beautiful. It was.”
Riley hung back, jaw muscle throbbing. He watched Paul’s forced smile, how it didn’t touch his eyes, how it fissured and fell the moment Sarah and Erin turned to speak to another congregant. He saw the priest vanish through the side door.
He found him twenty minutes later, not on the rectory steps, but inside the skeletal structure, sitting on a sawhorse amidst the piles of lumber. Paul’s head was bowed, his hands dangling between his knees. The evening chill was seeping in.
Riley leaned against a wall frame. The silence wasn’t empty; it was full of the echoing slur.
“Bev Keane doesn’t know the first fucking thing about you,” Riley said, the words rough, scraping his throat.
Paul didn’t look up. “She knows enough to wound. That’s all that matters here.”
“It shouldn’t.”
“It does.” Paul’s voice was quiet, hollowed out. “It’s not their hate that breaks me, Riley. It’s the silence of the ones who stay. The ones who hear that word thrown like a stone and don’t denounce it. Their quiet tolerance feels like… consent.”
Riley pushed off the frame and walked over. He crouched down in front of the sawhorse, forcing Paul to look at him. In the dimming light, Paul’s ethereal beauty seemed weary, human. “Then let them be silent. We’re not.”
Paul searched his face. The anguish there was ancient, a sum total of eighty years of secrecy and a few months of raw exposure. He took a shuddering breath. “That word… She uses it like a weapon. To make me small. To make this,” he gestured vaguely between them, at the rectory, at everything, “into something dirty.”
“It’s not.”
“I know.” Paul said it with surprising force. Then the force dissolved into a whispered confession. “But it’s also… not entirely wrong.”
Riley went very still. The world narrowed to the space between them, two feet of dusty floorboards.
Paul closed his eyes, speaking to the darkness behind his own lids. “I’ve questioned… for a long time. A lifetime, really. Even before… all this. It was a whisper, then. A sin to be confessed and absolved, over and over. A part of myself I walled away in a chapel of shame.” He opened his eyes, and they were terrified, utterly lucid. “It’s not a whisper anymore. I hear it now. In me. It’s a… a fact. A truth. Bev Keane’s ugliness doesn’t make it less true. It just makes it harder to hold without bleeding.”
He looked directly at Riley, his gaze unflinching and full of tears. “I’m gay, Riley. I am. And I believe—I have to believe—that God should love me all the same. But she makes it so hard to believe.”
The confession settled in the dusty air. Riley felt it land in his chest with a dual impact. A sharp, protective heartbreak for this man, this ancient, childlike soul, finally naming this core of himself in a moment of such profound attack. And beneath that, a treacherous, selfish river of relief, so powerful it felt like shame. It changed nothing, and it changed everything.
He didn’t move from his crouch. He just held Paul’s terrified gaze, letting him see that the world hadn’t ended, that the sawhorse hadn’t collapsed beneath him.
“Okay,” Riley said, his voice low and steady. “Okay, Paul.”
It was all he could trust himself to say. Okay. An acknowledgement. A acceptance. A door swinging open on a hallway he wasn't ready to walk down, but whose very existence now made the air itself electric.
He slowly rose, his knees protesting. He offered a hand, not to pull Paul up, but just to hold. After a beat, Paul took it. His hand was cold. Riley warmed it between both of his, a silent, wordless communion in the gathering dark of the un-walled room.