1. COMING HOME.

MICAH

The bus smelled like diesel and the scent of fish lingered in the air.

I pressed my forehead against the window and watched Haloshul reveal itself slowly in pieces. First the coastline, catching the last of the afternoon light. Then the billboards, loud and bright, advertising things I didn't recognize. A new nightclub where the old pharmacy used to be. A casino with a name written in aggressive neon. A boxing gym promising to make men out of boys, which struck me as both hopeful and vaguely threatening.

Not like I cared.

Then the church.

Even from the highway, the steeple rose above everything else like it wanted to announce itself.

The Cathedral of Saint Anselm had always looked like it was daring the rest of Haloshul to be better than it was. Standing against a skyline that had clearly changed in every other direction, it was the one thing that looked exactly as I remembered it.

My chest did a flip. I hadn't been back. Not properly at least. Not in the way that required me to unpack a bag and sleep in a bed and let a place hold me. In the three years since my father's funeral, the brief, terrible visit where I sat in the third pew and cried so quietly that the woman beside me didn't notice. I had passed through Haloshul exactly twice. Both times I kept moving. Both times I told myself it wasn't avoidance. It was timing. It was the seminary's schedule. It was God's plan.

Both times, I lied.

"First time in Haloshul?" the man beside me asked.

I turned. He was older, maybe sixty, with a tan and kind eyes. He was looking at my collar and I suddenly shifted in my seat.

"No," I said. "I grew up here."

"Coming back for someone?"

I thought about that longer than the question deserved. "Coming back to serve," I said finally, because it was the truest version of the answer I could give without unraveling the rest of it.

He nodded like that made perfect sense, and maybe it did. People understood priests in simple terms most of the time. We were comfort. We were certainty. We stood at the crossroads between the terrifying and the bearable and we said, “God is here, God is present, you are not alone.” That was the job. That was the calling.

I had answered it at twenty-two, younger than most, younger than the seminary expected of someone so newly ordained. But Father Donovan had looked at me across his desk three weeks ago and said, "Haloshul needs someone who knows it," and I felt like someone had dug a knife into my chest.

Someone who knows it?

I knew Haloshul the way you know a scar. Everything about it. Even though it was bitter and painful.

The bus rolled into the station and I gathered my two bags— everything I owned fitted into two bags, which was either disciplined or sad, depending on how you looked at it, and stepped out into the dense air of my hometown.

Haloshul hit me all at once.

The noise first honestly because that was hard to miss. It was louder than I remembered. Motorbikes weaving through traffic with a recklessness that bordered on stupid. People moving fast and talking fast.

Then the smell. God, I missed it.

I had forgotten how alive Haloshul felt. I stood on the pavement outside the station with my bags at my feet and let it wash over me.

I'm home.

The church housing was a modest two-bedroom unit three blocks from the cathedral, on a street that had apparently been renovated sometime in the last five years judging by the new paving stones and the row of young trees planted along the curb. My predecessor, Father Cletus, had left it neat.

There were dishes stacked, a note on the kitchen table with the Wi-Fi password and the name of a good laundry service around the corner and a single line at the bottom: Haloshul will surprise you. Let it.

How comforting.

But in reality, the last thing I needed were more surprises. I wanted to be lucky here. To forget the past. To bury myself in work. To play it safe. Because the latter option never really ended well for anyone.

I put my bags down in the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the ceiling for a while.

The afternoon light came through the curtains quietly, but I didn't move.

I thought about my father.

Emmanuel Sawyer had been a man of routine. He had pastored a smaller congregation for years before the cathedral absorbed them, and even then he'd never quite lost the sensibility of a neighborhood minister. He remembered names. He brought soup when people were sick.

He had been sick for two years before he died, and I'd visited when I could— which wasn't often enough, and I knew that.

When he finally went quietly, in his sleep, in the house I grew up in, I'd flown back and sat through three days of condolences and then gotten back on a plane because the seminary had exams and Father Donovan had said my father would want me to finish. But truly, I left because I didn’t want to face reality.

That was part of why I was here.

I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and breathed slowly.

My phone buzzed. A message from Father Donovan: Safe arrival? Start at the cathedral Sunday morning. Deacon Farris will orient you. You're in good hands, Micah.

I typed back: Arrived safely. Thank you, Father.

Then I sat there a moment longer, looking at the screen, before setting it face-down on the mattress.

Sunday was three days away. I had three days to relearn the feel of Haloshul before I had to stand in front of its people.

And I planned on finishing my whole stay here without meeting anyone from my past.

Especially… not him.

But family always had a way of finding you. And I hoped it wouldn't be so this time.