Page 70 of His Elder

No companion. No calling. No mission.

Just myself. Finally, honestly, completely myself.

I pulled out my phone—the personal one I'd locked away for eighteen months—and turned it on.

Hundreds of notifications flooded in. Messages from my father. My mother. My siblings. Ward members. Friends from high school.

I scrolled through them. Didn't read them.

Because none of them would say what I needed to hear.

None of them would tell me where Eli was. How to find him. Whether he was okay.

I opened a search browser. Typed "Elias Vance Las Vegas."

Nothing useful. A few social media profiles that weren't him. A LinkedIn for someone forty years older.

He'd said once that he didn't do social media. That he preferred to exist in the real world, not the performed one.

I closed the browser.

Somewhere out there, Eli was facing his own consequences. His own family's disappointment. His own future in the ruins of what the church had made of him.

And I had no way to tell him I'd finally chosen him.

No way to say I was sorry.

No way to prove his sacrifice hadn't been wasted.

But I would find him.

However long it took. Whatever it cost.

I would find him.

Because his love had saved me.

And I needed to show him that salvation hadn't been in vain.

19

2 YEARS LATER

SAMUEL

The gallery smelled like cheap wine and expensive pretension.

I shouldn't have come. I belonged in the library, or at my shift at the bookstore, or asleep. But my roommate Jordan had insisted. He’d dragged me out of our shared apartment with promises that I needed to do something other than study and work until my eyes bled.

"You're turning into a hermit," he'd said, throwing a blazer at my head. "And not even an interesting, mysterious one. Just a sad one."

So here I stood, plastic cup of red wine warming in my hand, surrounded by sophomores discussing composition and negative space like they'd invented both concepts.

I'd learned to exist in spaces like this. Learned to smile atstrangers, make small talk, pretend the last two years hadn't carved out everything I used to be and left something unrecognizable in its place.

Sam Price. Not Samuel. Not Elder. Just Sam.

Economics major at the University of Washington. Barista on weekends. Excommunicated Mormon. Estranged son. A man who had traded his eternal salvation for three weeks of honesty and had spent every day since trying to figure out how to live in the wreckage.