Waiting for my rental, I watched the half-hearted rain from the station cafe, pictured you gazing from the kitchen of your mother’s house with a similar cup of similar tea balanced in your very individual hands while listening for tires on the drive snaking between the trees. That house was haunted, not by your late parents so much as by you, the insistent memories of growing there under the cannon fire of their lives, and in retrospect I understand your choice to meet there, selecting a white-collared black envelope to send the single invitation. Through the evening and night, hushed words and thin scream-cries as you spoke for the first time of her bruises by his hands, of his breath at your neck on too many nights across too many years, the later claiming of your empty bed to align his adulteries, described torn promises, twisted commandments almost scripturally fragile. At last I saw why we were never lovers, though in love with the idea of each other, and why you took me for confessor, entrusted fully with your exorcism, to be haunted while your dreams run sweet around me as I try to learn who frees the priest of demons heard through screens in darkened rooms.