Page 29 of Original Sins

“Same reason, honestly.”I shrugged.“I met the love of my life.”

“Oh, they MATCH,” Rox said to Bett.“They gave the same answer.I'm going to be sick, it's beautiful.”

“It's a little more boring than that,” I said.“The network wanted the story, and the story they wanted was the takedown—the hypocrite, the scandal, the head on a pike.And by the time I could've written it, the man wasn't a hypocrite anymore.He'd told the truth himself, in public, which is the one thing the machine can't survive and can't spin.There was no takedown left to write.So I wrote the other story.How the cage gets built.Who profits.What it costs the kid in the church pew who thinks he's the only one.And I didn't want to do that with a network lawyer reading over my shoulder, so—”

“So he built his own thing,” Harrison said, with a pride he didn't bother to hide.

“Substack and a YouTube channel,” I said.“I point a camera at right-wing grifts and I turn the lights on.No editor, no owner, nobody I owe a favor.Turns out a couple hundred thousand people will pay for somebody to just… tell them the truth, plainly, with the receipts.Who knew.”

“I knew,” Bett said.“It's the whole reason we have jobs.”

“And Harrison.”Rox turned, and her voice did the thing the good ones do, dropped the bit for a second and got real.“You're not preaching anymore.You gave away the empire.So what does a man like you even do with his Sundays now?Genuinely.I want to know.”

“I open shelters,” Harrison said.

“You—”

“For homeless queer kids.The ones who get put out on the streets by their families.There are more of them than you would believe, and a frightening number of them come out of exactly the kind of church I used to headline.”He said it without heat, just fact.“We've got one open in Houston and one in Richmond—where this one's from, I relocated.”Harrison pointed at me.“I follow him around now like a stray—and there's a foundation behind it so we can put them in more cities.Beds.Counseling.Somebody at the front desk at three a.m.who's glad to see you walk in instead of sorry.”He paused.“I spent my whole life raising money to tell people who God couldn't possibly love.I figured I'd spend the rest of it on the other side of that ledger.”

The studio was quiet.Even Rox, for a second.

“Can I ask you something,” Bett said, “and you can tell me to go to hell.”

“I've been told worse by worse.”

“Do you still believe in God?”

And there it was, the only question that had ever really mattered, asked over a coffee table with a neon sign buzzing behind it, and I felt Harrison consider it the way he considered everything now—honestly, without the armor, reaching for the truth.

“I don't know,” he said.“That's the real answer, and I used to think it was the most frightening sentence a man could say.I truly don't know.I spent thirty-five years absolutely certain.But the certainty was a cage, and I'm not in a hurry to build another one out of the opposite.Maybe there's something.Maybe there's nothing.What I know—” he reached over and took my hand “—is that everything they told me was a sin turned out to be the only thing in my life that ever felt holy.So whatever's up there, if anything is, I figure it can find me at the shelter.I'll be the one making up the beds.”

“Well,” Rox’s voice was thick, and she didn't bother to hide it.“I was going to make a joke there and I've decided against it, which has never once happened on this show, ask Bett.”

“Never,” Bett confirmed.

“Harrison Cole.Alec Friedman.”Rox lifted her BLESS YOUR HEART mug in a toast.“Congratulations on the wedding, congratulations on the shelters, on the—honestly, the whole beautiful mess of it.You came on Sinners and Saints and you made me feel something, and now I have to go lie down.”

“Thank you,” Harrison said, laughing.

“Go get married, you ridiculous boys.”

They went to break.Harrison kept my hand the whole way through it, his thumb moving slow over my knuckles, and I looked at him in the buzz of that pink neon light—this man who six months ago had been the most famous liar in America and was now just a guy who made up beds at a shelter and was marrying me on a beach next week—and I thought about the version of me who'd sat in a Richmond apartment a year ago and told my editor that love was silly shit you only see in the movies.

That guy had been so sure.So armored.So safe.

He had no idea what he was missing, and I will be grateful every single day of my real, actual, gloriously un-fairy-tale life that I got to find out.

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