Page 100 of Saint
That’s very emotionally healthy and wise, and obviously not the way I’ve ever lived. “I’ll take your word for it.”
He laughs, like I’m joking. I force a smile back, but as Jamie carefully replaces the lid of his muffin container and bends down to set it next to his feet, I think about what Brother Connor said a few weeks ago.Sometimes our deepest happinesses start with regret.
I’ve been in a holding pattern these last few weeks—not making plans to leave for a new abbeyorfor a secular life. Just staying here with my hill and my creek and letting my loneliness expand to fill the halls of the church every time we pray. And even though Jamie made an active—and arguably brave—decision in coming to visit me here, maybe I’ve been acting more like him lately than I think. Maybe I’ve been trying to avoid regret more than I’ve been trying to reach for the right future.
Jamie straightens back up and when he does, he has something in his hand. A thick, glossy magazine.Mode.
“I wasn’t sure if you got this here,” he says, “or if someone would have mailed it to you already. But I think you should have this issue.”
He hands the magazine to me. The cover story is a profile about an older actor, but on the side of the actor’s grizzled but handsome face, I see it.
The Eternal Cool of Monks: Beer and Prayer in Some of the World’s Loneliest Abbeys
I’m already flipping through the pages to find Elijah’s article when Jamie speaks. “I thought after reading it when it came out this week...well, given the circumstances of how we ended our engagement...”
I stop flipping and look up at the friendly librarian.
He looks back at me with a look that’s curious but a little guarded too. “I was surprised to learn that you’re not together, is all.”
I drop my eyes down to the magazine, feeling a sharp stabbing at the back of my eyelids.Not for lack of trying, Jamie, I want to say.
“The article...well, you’ll see when you read it, I suppose.” He clears his throat. “I wanted to—that is—ah, this is awkward to say. But I wanted to make sure it wasn’t because of me. That you weren’t holding back with him because of me.”
There’s no amount of monk training that can stop the incredulous noise I make at that. “I break up your engagement, and you’re coming here to check on my feelings? Jamie, I celebrate saints every day, but have you ever considered that maybe you’re too good of a person?”
He laughs. “I suppose I haven’t.” But then his look turns serious. “I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened between me and Elijah.”
“Should I not?”
Jamie shakes his head, his eyes moving over to the fountain in front of us. “If I’m honest, I think I always knew that Elijah wasn’t going to marry me in the end. I was the one who pushed to move in together, to get engaged, to set a date. And despite what you might think, he never made a secret of you and the number you did on him when you left.”
I flinch, but Jamie is still looking at the fountain.
“I knew he was still in love with you, but I thought it was in the way we always romanticize our pasts, you know? That it wasn’tyouhe was still in love with, but that version of himself and that time in his life. But then when I came to visit, and I saw the way he looked at you...” Jamie sighs. “I knew then that it was more than the usual nostalgia. So I wasn’t surprised when he came back and told me that you two had kissed. It still hurt like hell, but I wasn’t surprised.”
“Jamie, I’m so sorry,” I say, “and I know that isn’t enough, but I am still so sorry.”
He looks over at me. “Thank you for your apology,” he says evenly. “It doesn’t change that it was an awful thing to go through.”
“I know.”
He blows out a breath. “My point is that no matter how much I loved him—and no matter how much he loved me back, because I know that he did—his heart was always elsewhere. Inside someone else’s chest. Even after all that time.”
I swallow as I look down at my hands and the perfect muffin cradled between them. I ache for Jamie’s clear-eyed assessment of the truth, and of the pain it must have brought knowing it. I ache knowing that during all the years I’d been lamenting my traitorous heart, Elijah had been struggling with the same thing.
Both of us had found new devotions and new loves, but we’d been unable to surrender the old.
“So you see now,” Jamie says after a minute. “I thought when he ended things that meant the two of you would be together. But then I find out from some mutual friends that it’s not true, and then I call and learn that you’re still here, and I think to myself, what’s the point in all three of us being unhappy?”
That is some bleak stuff right there. “I don’t want you to be unhappy either,” I tell him. “Even though you’re aggressively pleasant and handsome, and it makes me feel like a gargoyle.”
He laughs again. “If you really were a gargoyle, it would’ve made the last two years of my life a lot easier.”
“Unless I was a sexy gargoyle. Like from the showGargoyles.”
He squints at me. “Wasn’t that a cartoon?”
“Are cartoons not sexy?” I ask. “The hottest Robin Hood is a cartoon,” I add.
