Chapter 4: The Weight of a Second Lifetime
The looks started small. A flicker of a gaze held a second too long from across the street. A tightened mouth from Mrs. Keane as she shuffled past the rectory gate. A quick, almost superstitious crossing of the chest from one of the younger fishermen, his fingers darting to his forehead and shoulders before he turned away.
Riley saw them. He felt them, like a change in barometric pressure. Each one was a tiny needle pricking at the careful peace they’d built.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said one afternoon, his voice tight. The air in the half-built rectory felt suddenly thick with sawdust and judgment. “Lunch by the water. Away from this.”
Paul just nodded, relief washing over his features. He didn’t need to ask what Riley meant.
They took the path down to the jagged shoreline, away from the town’s main curve. Here, the black basalt was carved into secret pockets by the tide, the air sharp with salt and the raw, clean smell of decaying kelp. Riley carried a paper sack with sandwiches from the dwindling stocks of the island’s lone store. They found a weathered driftwood log, silvered by sun and storm, and sat.
For a while, there was only the hiss and pull of the waves, the shriek of gulls. Paul picked at his sandwich, his appetite gone. He was coiled in on himself, shoulders hunched, his unnaturally beautiful face tense.
“They’re staring again,” Riley said finally. He didn’t look at Paul. He stared out at the grim line of the horizon. “The whispers. The fucking… looks. Like you’re a contaminated thing.”
Paul’s flinch was barely perceptible. “I am.”
“Bullshit.” Riley’s voice was flat, final. “You rebuilt Bev Keane’s porch steps last week. You carried old man Henderson’s groceries when his arthritis was bad. You’re here, every day, putting this fucking place back together board by board. What more do they want? A miracle?”
“They want a priest who didn’t lead a blood Mass,” Paul said softly, his words barely louder than the surf. “They want an old man who died with dignity, not… this. A monster in a pretty shell.”
Riley picked up a flat, black stone, turned it over in his fingers. His knuckles were white. “You’re not a monster.”
“You know what I am.”
“I know what you were. I know what you did. I also know what you’re doing now.” He finally looked at Paul, his dark eyes fierce. “It’ll get better. They’ll get used to you. They have to.”
Paul offered a faint, tragic smile. “You can’t promise that.”
“I just did.”
A long minute stretched between them, taut and scared. The wind picked up, whipping Paul’s dark hair across his forehead. He looked out at the endless, churning water, and something in him seemed to dissolve.
“I’m not Father Paul Hill,” he said, the words leaving him in a quiet rush.
Riley went very still. The stone sat heavy in his palm.
“I never was. The man you knew, the old priest who was here your whole life… that was me. That is me.” Paul’s voice trembled, but he pushed on, needing the poison out. “My name is John Pruitt. Monsignor John Pruitt. I’m eighty years old.”
Riley’s brain stuttered. It rejected the information outright. The sharp-jawed man beside him, with the unblemished skin and the young, tired eyes… eighty. The math was impossible. His mind flashed to the blurry figure at the altar of his childhood, a kind, distant man with papery hands and a fading mind. That man had given him crackers and grape juice. That man had, on long afternoons when his own house was too loud with silent disappointment, let a restless boy stack hymnals in the quiet gloom of the sacristy. A second dad, in a disconnected, holy way.
“You…” Riley’s voice was gravel. “You raised me. In that place.”
“I tried,” Paul whispered. “When I could. Before the dementia took the pieces of me away.”
He told it all then, staring at his hands as if reading the story from his palms. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a desperate, aging man seeking a spark. The cave. The creature—not an angel, never an angel, he swore—and the agonizing, glorious rebirth into this. Returning to the island young, fueled by a mad, divine purpose. Sarah. His daughter. Sarah Gunning.
“Her mother was a woman I loved, before my ordination, a lifetime ago. A secret. A sin I cherished.” A real smile, torn and tender, broke through. “Sarah doesn’t know. She can’t ever know. I got to baptize her, you know? As an infant. I held her and I marked her with holy water and I knew. I watched her grow up from a distance. So brilliant. So fierce.” His voice shattered. “And now I’ll be this… this unchanged thing, while she grows old. While she dies. That is my real punishment. To be forever thirty, watching my child’s life burn down like a candle.”
Riley listened. He didn’t speak. The revelations piled up inside him—the age, the secret daughter, the cosmic horror of it all. He should be freaking out. He should be walking away. This was, theoretically, an eighty-year-old guy he was sharing lunch with. He knew about Paul’s immortality and how he was once an older man, but this was not a revelation he was anticipating. Who could have anticipated this? A guy who’d been a paternal figure, rematerialized into a younger frame. It was all so messed up his mind skated over the surface, unable to find a purchase.
But looking at Paul—John—who sat with his soul carved open, raw and trembling with the truth… Riley couldn't summon the revulsion. All he found was a staggering, awful honesty. A self-awareness so brutal it felt like a kind of courage. This wasn’t a monster lying. This was a man, impossibly ancient and yet as vulnerable as a kid, showing him the bloody blueprint of his own damnation.
Riley looked down at the stone in his hand. He drew back his arm and skipped it across the choppy water. Once, twice. It vanished into a swell.
“You know,” he said, his voice rough. “I spent four years in a cage for killing a woman with a car. I made a choice. I was selfish. I was drunk.” He swallowed. “You… you went to a desert to find God for your people. You got lost. You were trying to save everyone. Even if you were wrong. You were trying.”
He turned his head, meeting Paul’s terrified, brown eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
A sob hitched in Paul’s chest. He blinked rapidly, tears spilling over despite his effort, cutting tracks through the salt air on his cheeks. He laughed, a wet, broken sound. “You’re a terrible atheist, Riley Flynn.”
A ghost of Riley’s old smirk appeared. “And you’re a terrible priest, putting yourself down like that. We’re even.”
They sat in the spray. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they shuffled closer on the log until their arms were nearly touching. They ate the rest of their sandwiches in a silence that was no longer strained, but vast and shared. The ocean breathed in and out.
Finally, Riley stood, brushing crumbs from his jeans. He looked down at Paul, who seemed smaller somehow, huddled in his jacket. Without overthinking it, because overthinking would ruin it, Riley stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him.
It wasn't a pastor’s hug. It was firm, solid, grounding. A man holding another man together.
Paul stiffened for a single, instinctive second, a lifetime of celibacy and loneliness shrieking in protest. Then he melted. He crumpled into the embrace, his face pressing against Riley’s shoulder, his own arms coming up to cling to Riley’s back. He shook, silent, absorbing a human warmth he hadn’t realized he was freezing for. It was more profound than any sacrament.
When they finally broke apart, the world seemed both sharper and softer. Riley cleared his throat, eyes on the rocks. “So. John, then?”
Paul chuckled, wiping his face with his sleeve. The sound was clearer now. “No. Just… Paul. That’s who I am with you. That’s who I want to be.”
Paul. Not the saint, not the monster, not the ancient secret. Just Paul. The dork who made grass salads. The friend.
Riley nodded, a single, firm dip of his chin. “Alright.” He slung the empty paper sack over his shoulder. “Come on, Paul. We’ve got a wall to finish.”