The author was inspired by these words in writing the title and this novel and gives thanks to THE ONE above.

Chapter 23: Shattered Spirits

The apartment felt like a mausoleum in the days following the appellate court decision. Delores moved through the rooms like a ghost, touching objects that had once held meaning—the cracked family photograph on the mantelpiece, the books she and Serina had read together, the coffee mugs that still bore the faint lipstick stains from their morning conversations. Everything seemed to mock her with memories of a happiness that now felt as distant as childhood.

Serina had been gone for four days. Four days of silence broken only by a single text message: Need more time. I'm sorry. The words had arrived at 2 AM, suggesting that Serina was lying awake wrestling with the same demons that kept Delores staring at the ceiling until dawn.

The legal documents from the appellate court sat unopened on the kitchen table, their official seals like wounds that refused to heal. Rebecca had called twice, leaving voicemails about appeal options and next steps, but Delores couldn't bring herself to listen to them. What was the point? They had thrown everything they had at this battle—truth, love, theological authority, legal precedent—and it hadn't been enough. The system had looked at all of it and decided that her parents' prejudices were more important than her humanity.

The knock on her door came at 3 PM on a Tuesday, soft but persistent. Delores ignored it at first, assuming it was another reporter or process server or someone else who wanted to document her defeat. But the knocking continued, accompanied by a familiar voice.

"Delores? It's Beau. I know you're in there."

She opened the door to find her brother standing in the hallway, still wearing his clerical collar but looking haggard, as if he had driven straight through the night to get there. His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion and something that might have been his own grief.

"I came as soon as I could get away from the parish," he said, stepping into the apartment without waiting for an invitation. "I've been calling, but—"

"I haven't been answering calls."

"I figured." Beau looked around the apartment, taking in the closed curtains, the unopened mail, the general air of abandonment that had settled over the space. "When's the last time you ate something?"

Delores tried to remember. "Yesterday? Maybe the day before. I'm not really hungry."

"That's not how this works." Beau moved to the kitchen and began opening cabinets, his movements efficient and purposeful. "You don't get to disappear just because the legal system failed you. You don't get to stop existing because some appellate judges couldn't see your worth."

"Don't I?" Delores sank onto the couch, feeling the weight of defeat pressing down on her like a physical force. "Because right now, existing feels like the hardest thing I've ever done. Right now, I'm not sure what the point is."

Beau made her a sandwich—peanut butter and jelly, the kind of simple comfort food their mother used to prepare when they were children and the world felt too big and complicated to navigate. He sat beside her on the couch and watched until she took a bite, his presence both comforting and painful.

"Tell me about Serina," he said gently. "Rebecca mentioned that she's been staying elsewhere."

"She needed space. Time to think about whether she can handle being with someone whose love is legally classified as evidence of moral failure." Delores's voice was flat, emotionless. "I don't blame her. I wouldn't want to be with me either right now."

"That's not true, and you know it."

"Is it? Because I feel like I've destroyed everything I touched. I dragged her into a legal nightmare, exposed her to harassment and public scrutiny, and for what? So we could lose spectacularly and provide a roadmap for other families who want to use inheritance law to punish their LGBTQ+ children?"

Beau was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice carried the weight of his own struggle with the defeat.

"I keep thinking about my testimony," he said. "About how certain I was that speaking the truth about THE ONE's love would make a difference, that theological authority could challenge legal prejudice."

"Your testimony was beautiful. It changed everything in the lower court."

"But it wasn't enough for the appellate court. They dismissed it as opinion, as irrelevant to the legal question." Beau's voice grew bitter. "They essentially ruled that religious authority only matters when it supports discrimination, not when it challenges it."

"So what do we do with that? How do we keep believing in justice when the system is rigged against us?"

"I don't know," Beau admitted. "I've been praying about it, wrestling with it, trying to understand how THE ONE's love can coexist with such institutional cruelty. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion—that our job isn't to make the system fair. Our job is to live authentically despite the system's failures."

They sat in silence for a while, two siblings who had found each other across the wreckage of their family's dysfunction, only to watch the legal system validate that dysfunction and call it justice. The afternoon light filtered through the closed curtains, casting everything in a gray pallor that matched Delores's emotional state.

"I keep thinking about Mom and Dad," Delores said eventually. "About whether they would be happy with this outcome, whether they would feel vindicated by the appellate court's decision."

"What do you think?"

"I think they would be relieved. I think they would see it as confirmation that their prejudices were justified, that their inability to accept me was actually moral clarity." Delores felt tears starting to form. "And that might be the worst part of all this—knowing that my defeat would make them happy."

"Or maybe," Beau said carefully, "maybe they would look at what their will has done to our family—how it's destroyed relationships, caused years of legal battles, turned their children against each other—and realize that love should never come with conditions."

"That's a beautiful thought, but I don't think it's true. I think they wrote those clauses because they genuinely believed that people like me were morally deficient, that families like the one I wanted to build with Serina were threats to everything they valued."

"Then they were wrong. And being dead doesn't make them less wrong."

The conversation was interrupted by another knock on the door, this one more tentative. Delores looked through the peephole to see Maria standing in the hallway, holding what appeared to be a casserole dish and wearing the expression of someone who had come prepared for a difficult conversation.

"I brought food," Maria announced when Delores opened the door. "And I'm not leaving until you eat some of it and tell me what you need."

"I need to be left alone to process this defeat in peace."

"No, you need to be reminded that you have people who love you regardless of what any court decides." Maria pushed past her into the apartment, nodding at Beau with the familiarity of someone who had become part of Delores's chosen family. "You need to remember that your worth isn't determined by legal rulings or inheritance decisions or your parents' ability to see your truth."

"But it feels like it is. It feels like the entire legal system just ruled that I'm less than human, that my love is evidence of moral failure, that my authentic self is a threat to family values."

"The legal system is wrong. It's been wrong before, and it'll be wrong again. That doesn't make you less real, less worthy, less deserving of love and respect."

Maria's casserole turned into an impromptu gathering as word spread through Delores's chosen family that she was struggling. Dr. Martinez arrived with tea and professional concern. Janet from the support group came with flowers and the quiet wisdom of someone who had survived her own battles with institutional rejection. Even Paula, Elena and Marcus from the group stopped by, their presence a reminder that Delores was part of a community that saw her truth regardless of what courts decided.

"I feel like I've let everyone down," Delores said as they sat around her living room, the space transformed from a mausoleum into something that resembled a wake—but a wake for hope rather than a person. "All of you supported me through this battle, believed in the fight, and I couldn't deliver the victory we needed."

"You didn't let us down," Elena said fiercely. "You fought for all of us. You put yourself through hell to challenge a system that treats us as less than human. The fact that the system failed doesn't diminish what you did."

"But what was the point if we lost? What was the point of all that suffering if the outcome is that other families now have legal precedent to discriminate against their LGBTQ+ children?"

"The point," Janet said gently, "is that you refused to disappear. You refused to accept that your parents' prejudices defined your worth. You stood up and said 'I am real, I am worthy, I deserve equal treatment,' and that matters regardless of what judges decided."

"Does it? Because right now it feels like I just provided entertainment for people who wanted to watch me fail."

The gathering continued into the evening, with people coming and going, bringing food and comfort and the kind of presence that reminded Delores she was not alone in this defeat. But as the night wore on and the apartment gradually emptied, she found herself sitting with Beau in the same silence they had shared earlier, both of them processing the weight of institutional failure.

"I keep thinking about what comes next," Delores said as they prepared for bed—Beau had insisted on staying the night, unwilling to leave her alone in her current state. "About how to rebuild from this, how to find meaning after such a complete defeat."

"What do you want to come next?"

"I want Serina to come home. I want to believe that love is stronger than legal rulings. I want to find a way to use this experience to help other people, even though right now I can't imagine how."

"Those are good wants. Those are worth working toward."

"But what if Serina doesn't come home? What if this defeat has broken something between us that can't be repaired?"

Beau was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke, his voice carried the gentle authority of someone who had learned to find hope in the darkest places.

"Then you'll grieve that loss, and you'll heal from it, and you'll find other ways to build a meaningful life. Because your worth doesn't depend on any one relationship, any one legal victory, any one institution's recognition of your humanity."

"I don't know how to believe that right now."

"You don't have to believe it right now. You just have to survive right now. The believing can come later, when you're stronger, when the immediate pain has dulled enough for you to see beyond it."

That night, Delores lay in bed listening to Beau's quiet breathing from the couch, grateful for his presence but still feeling the vast emptiness where Serina should have been. The apartment felt wrong without her—too quiet, too cold, too much like the isolated space Delores had inhabited before love had transformed it into a home.

She thought about the appellate court decision, about the judges who had looked at all the evidence of her authentic life and decided it was evidence of moral failure. She thought about Craig, probably celebrating his victory, probably already making plans for how to spend the inheritance he had won through legal cruelty. She thought about her parents, whose prejudices had been validated by the highest court in the state.

But mostly, she thought about Serina—about the woman who had chosen to love her despite the complications, who had stood with her through months of legal battles, who had endured harassment and public scrutiny for the right to build a life together. The woman who was now staying with friends, processing whether their love was worth the cost it seemed to demand.

The defeat was complete. The legal battle was lost. The inheritance was gone. The family recognition she had fought for had been denied. And now, the relationship that had given her the courage to fight was hanging by a thread, strained to the breaking point by the very battle they had fought to protect it.

All was lost, and the spirits, hers, Serina's, everyone who had believed in their cause, were shattered.

But as she lay in the darkness, Delores realized something important: being shattered didn't mean being destroyed. Glass could be broken into a thousand pieces and still catch the light. Hearts could be broken and still beat. Spirits could be shattered and still find ways to heal.

Tomorrow would bring new challenges, new grief, new opportunities to either surrender to despair or find ways to rebuild. Tonight, she would rest in the knowledge that she was not alone, that her chosen family saw her worth regardless of what courts decided, that her truth was real even when institutions refused to recognize it.

The spirits were shattered, but they were not extinguished. And sometimes, Delores thought as sleep finally claimed her, that was enough to build on.

Sometimes, survival was its own form of victory.