Midnight Mass (Camren)

CHAPTER 10

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I scrambled out of the tub, grabbing a towel and running into the hotel room. My phone was lit up and buzzing its way across the end table.

Please let this be the answer to my prayer.

Please let this be Camila.

Please, Lord. Please please please.

But the moment I saw the 816 area code, I knew it wasn't Camila. My heart—which had been pounding like mad, full of hope and energy and nervousness—flopped down to somewhere in my stomach.

Even though it was an unfamiliar number, I still made myself answer.

"Hello?"

A pause. "Is this Lauren Jauregui?"

I scrubbed my face with the towel while I answered. "Yes. How can I help?"

"I'm Sarah Russell, Mildred Gustaferson's daughter."

I let the towel fall away from my face. "Millie? Is everything okay?"

Sarah didn't answer right away, but when she did, she was obviously fighting back tears. "I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. My mother died this morning."

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I flew to Kansas City alone.

I'd broken my self-enforced phone fast and called Camila. She hadn't answered. I'd left a voicemail and sent a text, and then I'd driven to our house before I went to the airport, hoping to catch her there, knowing that she would want to know about Millie.

She hadn't been home.

And so I was alone on the plane, my eyes pressed tightly shut, as if I could keep the tears from falling that way. But they still managed to leak out, slowly and ceaselessly, hot tracks of grief and isolation against my cheeks. I felt so hollow and yet so full, so blank and yet so scrawled upon by events outside my control. My good friend dying, my wife's absence, this ridiculous distance between me and all the people I cared about. Nothing felt real, nothing felt intimate or close or true—it all seemed like a terrible movie of my life that I was being forced to watch from hundreds of feet away.

When I stared out the airplane window, my reflection superimposed against the velvet night outside, I barely recognized the unshaven man there. Who was he? Where was he going? And why was he going there alone?

The questions were too painful. I shut the shade for the window and leaned back, closing my eyes again, hoping to keep back a fresh wave of tears.

The priest in me wanted to meditate right now. He wanted to pray. He wanted to think of the right things to say to Millie's children when he went to the funeral, and he wanted to have the right verses ready in his mind in case they were needed.

But the other me—the girl who was Just Lauren—wanted to do nothing at all, except maybe flag the stewardess for a drink. He wanted to think about nothing, feel nothing, say nothing, and do you know what?

That's exactly what he did.

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"Your tie is crooked."

I turned back to my brother's bedroom mirror. "It is not!"