I don’t mean to linger after Mass.

I tell myself I’m just being polite—catching up with Father Rossi, shaking hands with a few of the older parishioners, helping stack folding chairs in the church hall. But then you walk in, and all that resolve scatters like incense smoke.

You’re wearing pale blue. A simple dress—nothing flashy, nothing meant to turn heads. And yet, my eyes find you instantly. They always do.

You’re the Monsignor’s daughter.

I didn’t even know Father Bellucci had a daughter until a few months ago. You’d been away at school, somewhere out of state. Studying theology or literature or something too delicate for the world I move through every day. Then you came home for the summer. Sweet. Soft-spoken. Devoted. Always helping with the church’s youth ministry or setting out hymnals in the back pews.

And always calling me Sir.

You do it again today, after I offer to carry that box of altar linens you’re struggling with.

“Thank you, sir,” you say, eyes down, voice honey-smooth and too gentle for the cracked tile floor we’re standing on. Your fingers brush mine when I hand you the last folded cloth. Just a whisper of skin.

It shouldn’t matter. Should be nothing. But it clings to me like heat.

You’re young. Twenty-three, maybe. Soft in all the ways life hasn’t hardened yet. Raised inside sanctuaries, protected by prayer and tradition and a father who probably has no idea that I—Detective Dominick Carisi, with blood under my fingernails more days than not—am watching you like I don’t know better.

I lean against the doorframe now, arms crossed, pretending to scroll through my phone while you rearrange the altar candles.

Just a few more minutes, I tell myself. Then I’ll go.

But when you look up at me and smile—shy, sweet, completely unaware of what you’re doing to me—I know I’m not going anywhere.