“Don’t apologize. When I say no one is allowed to play it, I meant…no one but you.”
S?ren glanced up and met Kingsley’s eyes. It took all of Kingsley’s resolve, fortitude and the alcohol left in his bloodstream not to break eye contact. S?ren always had this way of looking at him that made Kingsley want to confess everything to him. Even back when they were teenage boys in school together, he’d had that power. But Kingsley kept silent, kept his secrets. They weren’t boys anymore.
“I’ll call someone,” Kingsley finally said. “I’ll have it tuned.”
“Call a music store. They’ll be able to recommend a good tuner.”
Kingsley and S?ren studied each other over the top of the piano.
“Do you want to keep talking about the piano, or should we have a real conversation?” S?ren asked.
Kingsley gave him a halfhearted smile and sat down on the piano bench. The adrenaline had subsided, but the disorientation remained. If he awoke to find himself in bed and all this was a dream, he wouldn’t be surprised.
“So…parish priest? Dominican? Franciscan?” he asked, the old words coming back to him like a language he used to be f luent in but hadn’t spoken in years.
“Jesuit,” S?ren said, taking a seat on the white-and-blackstriped sofa across from the piano bench.
Kingsley rubbed his forehead and laughed.
“A Jesuit. I was afraid of that. I knew they wanted you in their ranks.”
“I wasn’t recruited. It was my choice.”
“So it’s real? The collar? The vows? All of it?”
He clasped his hands in front of him between his knees. “It is the most real thing I’ve ever done.”
Kingsley raised his hands in surrender and confusion.
“When? Why?” He gave up on his English and fell back into his French. Quand? Pourquoi?
“I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I’ve wanted to be a priest since I was fourteen,” S?ren answered in his perfect French. It felt good to speak his first language again, to hear it again, even if every word S?ren said stabbed his heart like a sword. “I converted at fourteen, so I could become a Jesuit. It was all I ever wanted.”
“You never told me.”
“Of course not. When I met you…”
“What?”
S?ren didn’t answer at first. Weighing his words? Or simply torturing Kingsley with silence? Kingsley remembered those long pauses before S?ren would speak, as if he had to examine every word like a diamond under a jeweler’s lope before allowing it to be displayed. Kingsley could live and die and be born again waiting for S?ren to answer one little question.
“When I met you,” S?ren said again, “it was the first time I questioned my calling.”
Kingsley let those words hang in the air between them before tucking them inside his heart and locking them away.
“Did you think I would try to talk you out of it?” Kingsley asked once he could speak again.
“Would you have tried to talk me out of it?”
“Yes,” Kingsley said entirely without shame. “I’ll try to talk you out of it now.”
“You’re a little late. I’m ordained. You know religious orders are sacraments. They can’t be revoked. Once a priest…”
“Always a priest,” Kingsley finished the famous dictum. He wasn’t Catholic, but he’d gone to a Catholic school long enough to learn all he needed to know about the Jesuits. “But a Jesuit? Really? There are other sorts of priests. You had to join an order that takes a vow of poverty?”
“Poverty? That’s your problem with the Jesuits? Not the celibacy?”
“We’ll get to that. Let’s start with the poverty.”
S?ren leaned back on the sofa and rested his chin on his hand.
“It’s good to see you again,” S?ren said. “You look better than the last time I saw you.”
“The last time you saw me I was dying in a Paris hospital.”
“Glad you got over that.”
“You’re not the only one, mon ami. I should thank you—”