When the church had cleared out save for the verger, Henry, sweeping the aisle, Shep sat on the stoop and tugged at his surplice, the June heat making a nuisance of modesty. Across the lawn and slate walkway, at the bottom of the hill rambling with honeysuckle and beach rose, the green gave way to white sand, which bled into the greedy glut of blue.

Shep never dreamed he would live in such a place—he, who had grown up land-locked, who had not seen the ocean until he was thirteen, who didn't know a jib from a mizzen or a ketch from a yawl. Yet, to most who knew him as a boy, this was but a quirk of luck, hardly surprising compared to the other vagaries in his life's trajectory. Some things, he figured, you weren't made to understand; you just got used to them.

"'Scuse me, Father," Henry said, ushering a small pile of sand to the threshold. Shep scooted to the side so that the verger could sweep it out the door, where the wind caught it and dusted it over the brambly hillside, though a fair amount was blown back into the church (much to Henry's chagrin). Shep smiled to himself, gathering the Communion tray from the altar and carrying it back to the sacristy. He preferred the old stone church, with its sweet aroma of salt-aged wood and wax, a little sandy.

"Shepard? Where are you?" came a caw from the office. An elderly woman appeared in the sacristy doorway seconds later. She had crossed the chancel with startling speed, considering her orthotics and heavy cane, which was dented and scuffed, if Shep had to guess, from decades of rapping insolent youths about the shins. Her mouth angled downward from the center like a steepled roof.

"Oh, you're still here, Miss Riri," Shep said with as much cordiality as he could muster. That she did not address him as Father, even after five months at Saint Christopher's, did not bother him half as much as her use of his full name did.

"There's breath in me yet," she snapped. Without preamble she tossed his iPhone through the air; he caught it just before it landed in the sink.

"That infernal thing has been buzzing and buzzing since nine this morning," she growled, stumping out of the sacristy. "Father Thompson's never makes a peep!"

"Father Thompson is eighty-one years old," Shep dared to whisper at her ample, floral behind. It was probably just Robin, he thought, reporting he had landed in Austin, though he usually knew better than to call during service.

He glanced at the screen: 11 new texts and eight calls from Rachel Delaney. Shep groaned and called her back without bothering to read the texts.

What could it be this time? he speculated as her phone rang. Laid off? Caught a weird new strain of bird flu? Had the best tapas of her life last night at some trendy Bushwick hole in the wall?

His stomach dropped when she answered the phone with a sniffly, "H-hello? Shep, oh my God, finally!"

He slumped in a wicker chair and cradled his temples.

It's Kyle, he thought morosely, and the image of his sister's boyfriend of one year, hair moussed to improbable dimensions in imitation of his favorite YouTube prankster, floated to the forefront of his brain. That son-of-a-bitch dumped her.

On the bright side, for the price of a few weeks' comforting Rachel with psalms and platitudes and Double Stuf Oreos, he would never have to sit through one of Kyle's self-proclaimed "diamond-in-the-rough" stand-up routines ever again.

"It's Kyle!" she warbled, right on cue. "He's proposed! We're getting MARRIED!"