Page 117

Olivia’s pulling into the driveway, and I get to her door before she’s got the car in park, which earns me a look through the windshield that’s equal parts exasperation and something she’s not fast enough to hide.

She rolls the window down instead of opening the door. “You did not have to come out here.”

“I know.”

“It’s cold.”

“It’s seventy degrees.”

“That’s cold for Texas.” But she’s fighting a smile and I decide the three words can’t wait after all.

“Hey. About what I said on the phone.”

Everything in her goes still. She’s good at still. It’s the thing she does instead of running.

“I meant it. I wasn’t going to say it like that, I had a whole better version. But I meant it, and I’m not sorry, and you don’t have to say anything back.”

She looks at me through the open window for a second that goes on too long.

Then she says it. Plain, the way she says the truest things.

“Love you too.”

I take the pie out of her hands and set it on the roof of her own car, and I kiss her right there in the driveway with seventy degrees of Thanksgiving around us, and she kisses me back with both hands fisted in the front of my shirt like she’s been waiting on it as long as I have.

Which, I think, she has.

I don’t stop. Neither does she. We keep going right through the part where we probably should.

“The pie.” She says it against my mouth, not pulling back far enough to really say it. “The pie’s on the roof of my car.”

“It’ll keep.” I kiss her again before she can argue.

“Luke.” She says my name into the kiss, which does not come out as the warning she means it to.

“It’s an ugly pie.” I catch her mouth between words. “A little character won’t hurt it.”

That’s the one that gets her. She pulls back an inch, breathless, and points at me, and I get the pie down off the roof before she can make it a whole thing, mostly because I’m grinning too hard to kiss her right anyway.

Inside, the house is running at about twice its normal volume. Four burners going. Something in the oven. The kitchen radio playing the station that starts Christmas music too early, which Dottie has decided is allowed the second the turkey’s done.

“There she is,” Dottie says, crossing the kitchen and taking Olivia’s face in both hands like she’s been doing it for years. “You brought a pie!”

“Bo and I made it. I take about ten percent of the credit.”

“That’s more than he’ll give you,” I say.

Bo comes around the corner at a dead run and hits Olivia at the waist, arms all the way around, the full-body kind he doesn’t hand out to just anybody. Back at church, the first time, she went stiff and patted his head and didn’t know what to do with her hands.

She knows what to do with her hands now. One goes to his back, the other to his hair, and she holds on.

“I made the pie,” Bo tells her stomach.

“You did make the pie.”

“I did the leaves.”

“The leaves are the best part.”