Michelle McGill-Vargas

“Baby, I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Your heart shatters at his words, piercing every inch of your body. They defy gravity, clawing their way up your throat on a river of sour bile. He’s not supposed to be saying this. You of all people should never hear those words—spoken in that order. Four years at seminary should have eradicated the sentence from his vocabulary.

The words are in your head now, deafening you, stabbing your eardrums for a release. He’s just a foot away, yet you see past his image to the clock on your kitchen wall. Twenty-two minutes before, life was fine. Twenty-two minutes before, you believed he knew better than to think that sweet thang sashaying down the aisle in her Pepto-Bismal Sunday best with the hat no one could ever see over had come to hear the Word.

“It’s just that…”

His lips are moving. But you…