"Borneo?" his mother read aloud. "Is that near India?"

"South America, dear," his aunt whispered. A crow plucked at the string of coke cans lying listless on the pavement behind his father's Volvo. One of his cousins chased it off as another used his sport coat to scrub the rear windshield of its liquid chalk declaration.

"I'm sorry," blurted Jacinda, one of the church coordinators, poking her head out the side door. Shep glanced over her shoulder at the rows of evacuated pews, the wilting flower garlands, the abandoned bowls of rice that would never be tossed in benediction.

"It's the caterer on the line—she needs to know whether she should put everything back in the refrigerator, she says it'll spoil—"

"Homeless shelter," Shep grunted. Jacinda withdrew, chatting somberly into the phone.

Shep clasped the second page of the letter in his fist and blinked the sweat from his eyes. He suspected tears would come later, and the anticipation filled him with self-loathing. Part of him hung outside of his body, watching himself and his family slumped on the service ramp in their suits and summer dresses, so blank, so utterly lame. The mess ahead of him seemed nuclear.

Two pages, both sides, neatly written save for the end—had her hand cramped? Was she overcome with emotion? Had she been busy packing her zip-offs and hiking boots, throwing back her last dose of anti-malarial pills? He remembered how she had complained of strange dreams in the preceding weeks, of being stuck in a house with a thousand doors, of talking animals, of growing scales and stalking through patches of dappled sunlight...

What had changed? He would still leave for Chicago in a month's time, still enter the seminary, as absurd as it now seemed for him to seek authoritative knowledge on anything, let alone God. He would need to lease a smaller apartment, perhaps take on a roommate who ate ramen in his boxers at 2AM and left beard clippings in the sink. He wouldn't wear a ring on his finger; people would treat him like the twenty-two-year-old he was, not the future thirty-year-old he purported to be. He would sleep alone—but even as he thought it, another voice at the back of his mind added, For now.

I know the evidence is against me, but I do love you Shep, the letter read. He did not need to uncrumple it to rehash the words again and again in his head, eyes glazed over, fixed upon the inch of hot air wavering above the Volvo's trunk.

If I could stay with you and leave at the same time I would, but this was a choice I had to make. You have a faith that I know won't be broken even by this, a faith I once mistook for my own, just by calling you mine. How I wish it worked that way. Please find it in your heart to forgive me. If you can.

All my love, C.S.