Chapter 37: SARAH'S CHOICE
The call came through the church office on a Tuesday afternoon.
Father Mancini found me in the basement, organizing donated canned goods for the food pantry. Three years since I'd started this volunteer work, and it still felt like the closest thing to normalcy in my life. Stack cans, check dates, sort by type. Simple. Mechanical. A reminder that not everything involved demons and death.
"Phone for you," Mancini said from the stairs. "A woman. Says she's a journalist."
My heart did something complicated.
"Did she give a name?"
"Chen. Sarah Chen."
I set down the can of green beans and wiped my hands on my jeans. Seven months since the artifact room incident. Seven months since she'd left her card and driven away, leaving me with questions I hadn't had time to answer.
"I'll take it in the office."
The phone was waiting on Mancini's desk, receiver off the hook. I picked it up, suddenly aware that my palms were sweating.
"Hello?"
"Paul." Her voice was different than I remembered—less sharp, more uncertain. "I wasn't sure you'd take the call."
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Because I've been avoiding you for half a year. Because the last time we talked, you showed me something that changed my whole understanding of reality, and then I ran away like a coward."
"You weren't a coward. You were processing."
A laugh, short and humorless. "That's a generous interpretation." A pause. "I quit the magazine."
"What?"
"Three months ago. I couldn't write the fluff pieces anymore—'Connecticut's Best Apple Orchards,' 'Interior Design Trends for the Modern Home.' Not after what I saw in that house. Not after..." She stopped. "I've been researching independently. Hauntings. Possessions. The patterns you talked about. And I keep finding things I can't explain, things that don't fit into any rational framework, and I don't have anyone to talk to about it."
"So you called me."
"I called you." Another pause, longer this time. "Can we meet? I need to talk to someone who understands. Someone who won't think I'm crazy."
I thought about the Perron case files spread across my apartment table. About the system notifications warning of approaching canonical events. About all the reasons this was terrible timing.
"There's a diner on Main Street in Hartford," I said. "Maria's. I can be there at seven."
"I know the place." Relief flooded her voice. "Thank you, Paul. I mean it."
"See you at seven."
I hung up the phone and stood in Mancini's office, staring at nothing, wondering what I was getting myself into.
Maria's Diner hadn't changed since my first weeks in this body.
Same cracked vinyl booths. Same fluorescent lights that buzzed just slightly off-key. Same smell of coffee and grease and something that might have been apple pie if you squinted hard enough. I'd eaten a lot of meals here during those early days—alone, confused, trying to figure out how to be a person in a world that wasn't mine.
Now I sat in the back booth, watching the door, waiting for a woman who might complicate everything.
Sarah arrived ten minutes late, cheeks flushed from the January cold, her hair windswept in a way that made her look younger than I remembered. She spotted me immediately and slid into the opposite seat, shrugging off her coat with quick, nervous movements.
"Sorry I'm late. Traffic on 91 was—"
"It's fine."
"—completely stopped for twenty minutes because of some accident, and I kept thinking you'd leave before I got here—"
"Sarah." I caught her eyes. "It's fine. I wasn't going anywhere."
She exhaled slowly, some of the tension leaving her shoulders.
"You look different," she said. "Older. More... settled, I guess."
"It's been a busy seven months."
"The Warrens kept you working?"
"Something like that."
The waitress appeared—Martha, who'd been here since before I arrived in this world and would probably be here after I was gone. I ordered coffee. Sarah ordered tea and then changed her mind to coffee. Martha gave us the look of someone who'd seen a thousand awkward first dates and shuffled off to get our drinks.
"So," Sarah said when we were alone again. "I've been researching."
"You mentioned that."
"Not the hit-piece kind. Real research." She pulled a notebook from her bag—dog-eared, filled with handwriting, bristling with sticky notes. "I've documented forty-seven cases in the past three months. Families who reported supernatural activity. I followed up on each one."
"And?"
"And twelve of them were definitively fraudulent. Fifteen were psychological—grief, trauma, mental illness manifesting as belief in external forces. But twenty..." She opened the notebook, flipped to a page dense with notes. "Twenty of them, Paul. Twenty cases where I couldn't explain what was happening. Objects moving on their own. Voices with no source. Children describing things they couldn't possibly know."
"What did you do with those cases?"
"Mostly? Referred them to people who could help. Churches. Support groups. The Warrens, when the families were willing." She looked up at me. "Three of them, I investigated myself."
"That was dangerous."
"I know. I know that now." Her hands wrapped around her coffee cup, the ceramic warming her fingers. "The third one... there was a moment in the basement when something pushed me. Actually pushed me. I felt hands on my chest, except there was no one there. I ran out of that house and sat in my car for an hour, shaking."
"Did you go back?"
"No. I called the Warrens. They handled it." She met my eyes directly. "That's when I realized I needed to stop pretending I could do this alone. I needed someone who actually knows what they're doing."
"So you called me."
"So I called you." A small smile touched her lips. "You're easier to talk to than Ed. Less intimidating. And Lorraine..." She shook her head. "Lorraine looks at you like she's reading your diary. It's unsettling."
"She can be intense."
"That's one word for it."
Martha returned with our coffees. I added sugar—one spoon, the way Ed had taught me. Sarah drank hers black, grimacing slightly at the bitterness.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"You can ask. I might not answer."
"Why do you do this? The investigations, the exorcisms, all of it. You could have a normal life. You're smart, you're capable, you could be doing literally anything else. Why choose to fight monsters?"
I thought about the answer for a long moment. Thought about all the things I couldn't tell her—the transmigration, the system, the foreknowledge that made me uniquely suited for this work. Thought about the simpler truth underneath all of that.
"Because someone has to," I said finally. "Because the monsters are real, and they hurt people, and most people don't even know they exist. Someone has to stand between the darkness and the families it wants to destroy."
"And that someone has to be you?"
"It doesn't have to be me. But it is me. I made that choice, and I don't regret it."
Sarah studied me across the table, her expression unreadable.
"That's either the bravest thing I've ever heard," she said, "or the saddest."
"Probably both."
She reached across the table, touched my hand. Her fingers were warm from the coffee cup, soft against my calloused knuckles.
"I want to know more," she said. "About the work. About you. About everything you're allowed to tell me."
"If you get close to me, you get close to what I fight. The things I face—they notice people who matter to me. They use them. Hurt them."
"I know." She didn't pull her hand away. "I watched a ghost throw a book across a room. I felt something with no body push me down a flight of stairs. I know what I'm getting into."
"Do you?"
"Maybe not completely. But I know I don't want to walk away from this. From you." She squeezed my hand. "Is that crazy?"
I thought about the Perron case, three months away at most. About Bathsheba Sherman, about possessions and terror and a family that would need every ally it could get. About all the reasons this was the worst possible timing.
And then I thought about Sarah's eyes, watching me with something that looked like trust and hope and the beginning of something more.
"Yeah," I said. "It's probably a little crazy."
"Good. I've always been a little crazy."
We walked after dinner.
The January night was cold enough to see our breath, the streets mostly empty of pedestrians. Hartford in winter had a particular bleakness—bare trees and gray buildings and the promise of months more cold before spring arrived.
But Sarah's hand found mine as we walked, and somehow the cold didn't matter as much.
We didn't talk. Didn't need to. Just walked through the empty streets, two people who'd found something unexpected in the middle of chaos.
I thought about all the things I couldn't tell her. The transmigration. The system. The canonical events approaching like storms on the horizon. There were walls between us that might never come down, secrets I might carry to my grave.
But underneath all of that, something simpler existed. Something human.
I liked her. Genuinely, uncomplicated, liked her. And she liked me. In a life full of monsters and mysteries, that simple truth felt like a miracle.
"I should get going," Sarah said eventually. "Long drive back to my apartment."
"Where are you staying now?"
"Bridgeport. Smaller, cheaper. Better for independent research." She squeezed my hand. "When can I see you again?"
"Soon. I've got some cases coming up, but... soon."
She kissed my cheek—quick, soft, a promise of more to come.
"Be careful out there, Paul Franco."
"Always."
I watched her car disappear down Main Street, taillights fading into the winter dark.
My rosary was warm in my pocket. Ed's father's crucifix hung against my chest. The system pulsed quietly in the back of my mind:
[PERRON CASE — TIME SENSITIVITY INCREASING]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: ACCELERATE PREPARATION]
The dream of a normal life folded back into focus. There was work to do, darkness to fight, a family in Rhode Island who needed help they didn't know how to ask for.
But for just a moment, standing on a cold Hartford street corner, I let myself imagine something more. A future after this. Someone to share it with.
Then I walked back to my car and drove home to continue planning.
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