Chapter 5: A Word That Breaks the Dam
The days that followed Paul’s confession in the half-built rectory were a landscape of silent, shifting ground. Riley’s “okay” had been a door held open. Neither of them stepped through, but the draft it let in changed the temperature of everything. They worked. They hammered. They spoke of joint compound and weather stripping. And in the careful spaces between, something hummed, unspoken.
It was after a long afternoon of hanging drywall, their clothes and hair dusted with fine white powder, that Riley finally broke the new stillness. They were washing their hands at the outdoor spigot, the water icy.
“You know,” Riley said, shaking water from his hands, not looking at Paul. “What you said. In there. It doesn’t change how I see you. It just… explains the shape of things a little better.”
Paul froze, the water still running over his pristine, unchanging skin. “It doesn’t… repulse you?”
Riley barked a laugh, rough and surprised. “Christ, Paul. After everything? After scaly wings and blood-drinking and a sentient plague? You think that’s thebridge too far?” He finally looked at him, his dark eyes earnest in a way that was rare and brutal. “It’s just a fact. Like me being an ex-con. Or you being unnervingly pretty. It’s just part of the map.”
The simplicity of it, the utter lack of theological crisis, left Paul winded. He had braced for earthquakes, and Riley had offered a steady hand on flat, solid ground. That small word of confidence was a stone dropped into the stagnant well of Paul’s fear. It sent ripples outwards, touching every buried regret.
It gave him the courage, that evening, to walk the familiar, overgrown path to Mildred Gunning’s house.
The porch light was a feeble yellow halo in the deepening blue. He knocked, the sound too loud in his own ears. When the door opened, Mildred stood there, a woman in her late seventies wrapped in a quilted cardigan. Her face, a network of gentle lines framed by soft white hair, did a slow, painful ballet: shock, a fleeting, youthful warmth, and then a settling into a guarded, deep-seated sorrow.
“John,” she breathed. Not Paul. John. The name he hadn’t heard from her lips in decades.
“Millie,” he whispered.
She nodded, stepping back. “Porch swing’s still here.”
They sat. The swing groaned under their shared but separate weight. The air was thick with salt and the ghost of lavender from her fallen garden. For a long time, the only sound was the creak of the chains and the distant surf.
“I don’t even know where to start,” he began, his voice splintering. “The lies. The impossible lies. I’m so sorry, Millie. For the youth I stole from you. For the life. For… for the angel. For all of it.”
He stumbled through the apology, a forty-year tapestry of deceit and supernatural horror presented in broken, gasping threads. He told her of his desperate prayer in Jerusalem, the creature in the cave, the horrible, euphoric mistake of it all. He spoke of returning young, of loving her from a distance, of watching Sarah grow through a pane of priestly glass.
Mildred listened. Her hands, patterned with time, stayed folded in her lap. When he finally fell silent, emptied out, she let out a sound—a dry, sad exhale that was almost a laugh.
“John Pruitt,” she said, her voice raspy with age and affection. “I loved you when I was young and foolish. I’m old now. I’m wise enough to know that love doesn’t mean a future.” She looked out at the darkening sea. “We can’t have that life we sketched out on notebook paper. It’s gone. I’ve lived it without you. It sucks, but it’s true.”
The finality in her tone was a clean cut. It hurt, but it was a sterile pain, the lancing of an old abscess.
“There’s more,” he said, the words sticking. He forced them out. “About why… why it was maybe easier to hide. To choose the church. I’m… I’m gay, Millie.”
The silence stretched. Then Mildred began to laugh, a real, hearty sound that shook her small frame. “Oh, Johnny. You precious fool.” She reached over and patted his knee, her touch firm and familiar. “I always wondered. Spent about a decade of my life wondering what was wrong with me.” She shook her head, her eyes misty. “It’s okay. I love you anyway. I always have. Just differently now.”
Tears spilled down Paul’s cheeks then, silent and hot. “I love you, too. So much.”
She opened her arms, and he leaned into her hug, careful of her fragility. They held each other, two ghosts of different kinds, mourning a path that had washed into the sea long ago.
When they pulled apart, she wiped her eyes with a knuckle. “Sarah,” she said, the word heavy with implication.
“I want to tell her. Everything. I need your permission.”
Mildred studied his face, the youthful planes so achingly familiar and strange. “She’s your daughter. I could never deny you that. You tell her. Tonight, if you’ve got the spine for it.”
“She’s coming home?”
“Any minute. Stopping by after her shift.” A sly, knowing smile tugged at Mildred’s lips. “So, you’ll stay? We can all have that talk. But first, come inside. I’ll make coffee. You can tell me about that Riley boy you keep frolicking with.”
Paul sputtered, a blush heating his cheeks that had nothing to do with vampire biology. “Millie! We’re not—it’s not—“
She laughed, standing and offering him a hand. “Oh, hush. I’ve got eyes. Now help an old lady up. The kettle’s whistling.”
They were in the warm, cluttered kitchen, steam rising from their mugs, when the back door opened. Sarah stopped dead, her medical bag hanging from her hand. Her eyes went from her mother to the eternally young man at her table.
“Father Paul?” she said, confusion flattening her voice. Then her gaze flicked to her mother’s face, to the rare, settled peace she saw there. “What’s going on?”
Paul stood, his chair scraping loud on the linoleum. “Sarah.” His voice cracked. “Please, sit down. There’s something… there’s everything I need to tell you.”
The talk was long. It was halting. It was an official family reunion conducted over a scarred kitchen table. Paul laid it all out, from the beginning. The pilgrim, the cave, the transformation. The return. The watching. The love he could never voice.
Sarah cried. She yelled once, a sharp “How could you?” that was aimed at the universe, not at him. She asked relentless, practical questions only a doctor could ask about biology, about time, about the mechanics of a miracle that was also a curse.
And through it, Mildred sat, nodding, adding a soft detail here, a confirmation there.
Finally, Sarah slumped back in her chair, exhausted. She looked at the man she’d known as her family’s gentle priest, as her awkward, fervent friend. “My father,” she whispered, testing the words.
Paul nodded, tears streaming freely now. “I’m so sorry I stayed hidden. I loved you. I supported you as much as I could from that distance. I’ve been… I’ve been your number two supporter since the day you were born. Your mother, of course, beat me to the number one spot.”
Mildred sniffed. “Damn right I did.”
A wet laugh burst from Sarah. Then another. Soon they were all crying and laughing, the tangled mess of decades beginning, just beginning, to unwind.
Later, they moved to the living room. Mildred dug out an ancient, dog-eared Parcheesi box. They played. The rolls of the dice were a mundane, healing rhythm. As Sarah moved her token, she said, quietly, “Since we’re sharing truths… I’m seeing someone. A woman. Annie Clements. She runs the bait shop.”
Paul’s face lit up with a pure, uncomplicated joy that transformed him. “Sarah, that’s wonderful. Tell me everything.”
And she did. And Mildred shared the latest island gossip about whose arthritis was acting up and who was feuding over a property line. And Paul and Sarah talked, tentatively, about being queer on an island that was learning, painfully, what tolerance meant.
Mildred watched them, her favorite people—her daughter and the boy she’d loved, now a man forever young—under one roof, together at last. The weight of the unsaid was gone, replaced by a fragile, treasured light. It had been so long. It was a start.