Conor is three years into his priesthood in the Society of Jesus, living in the bland comfort of a low-risk, low-reward profession. By his fourth year he feels submerged in depression; lost in a lonely and directionless life. He announces his intent to leave the priesthood to his major superior, who laughs at his impassioned description of a ‘crisis of hope’. Mollified, he spends another year pursuing love affairs and serving dully before committing again to laicization.

An interrogator is assigned to take down Conor’s motives for leaving the priesthood. The interview is designed to portray Conor’s commitment to the church as forced, inauthentic, or stilted from the beginning, and he protests that his decisions both to join and to leave were purely his own. He wants to be free to make his own mistakes. Upon leaving the room, Conor turns back and says he remembers first thinking he’d be a priest, it was after a terrible quarrel with his mother.

At age eight, Conor was his mother’s closest companion, spending weekend mornings reading in her company as she did housework. He’d been entreating her for a few weeks to buy him a new pair of shoes, as his one pair had a sizeable hole in the seam which made other children laugh. Each weekend his mother deferred the task because she was busy. This morning his pleas led to a full-blown argument between the two, and he leveraged as savage an insult he could at his mother, shaking with his intent to hurt and punish her. The strength of own words made Conor feel dizzy with an awful, all-consuming power, and in a frenzied desire to hide he buried himself in clothes in his closet.

Soon after leaving the priesthood Conor’s wife Alix became ill with metastatic cancer. The two hoped desperately until hope was out of the question, and even as he attempted to cheer her up Conor found himself wishing she would pass, tortured by the notion that he’d never known her anyway. He began casting around for some memory or image of her that would prove he had indeed known and loved her and landed upon a photo from her childhood in which hope was etched firmly all over her face. But Alix, as if sensing his conclusion, bolted up in sudden strength and pulled her hospital gown off. ‘Help me’, she said to him, ‘I never loved.’ Even as Conor protested, Alix sank down for the last time.