Page 122

I’m already giving them to her, the kitchen and the phone and the way he didn’t even notice he’d said it, when the realization stops me for half a second.

Natalie is the first person I’ve told.

Not Harper, who initiated the dare that started all of this. Not Ivy, who has known me since freshman year of college. I’ve been carrying this around for days, and I handed it to a woman I met just two months ago.

It should feel like a betrayal. Mostly it just feels right, which might be worse. But Natalie is here, Harper and Ivy aren’t.

I finish the story, and let Natalie be happy for me. Then, before she can ask the next question, I change the subject.

“I saw you and your mom went to that new sushi place in Uptown, the one with the whole wall of little plants. It looked amazing.”

Something crosses her face. Gone almost before it lands.

“Yeah,” she says. Her mouth does a small, tight thing. “It was good.” And then, lower, mostly to her coffee, “Would’ve been better without the lecture about my life choices. But the tuna was great.”

I blink.

Because that is not the mom I know. The mom I know is the one all over Natalie’s feed, cheek to cheek, my best friend, my whole heart, a dozen captions a month. I’ve watched that woman get celebrated in Natalie’s stories for two months straight. I didn’t know there was a version with a lecture folded inside her.

“That sounds hard,” I say, careful, because it’s the true thing, and because I’ve learned not to grab at a door somebody’s only cracked an inch.

Natalie waves it off, the smile snapping back into place like it’s spring-loaded. “It’s fine. She’s just like that. Anyway.” Full volume again. “Back to your love story.”

“Alright, y’all, grab a seat,” Brandon calls, and the room starts folding itself into rows. I promise Natalie I’ll call her tomorrow.

Luke finds me before I find him and drops into the chair on my left. Natalie takes my right.

Brandon takes prayer requests first, the way he always does. A job interview. Somebody’s grandmother, still. A girl a few rows up asks about a decision she doesn’t explain, and nobody makes her. It still gets me, this room. Nobody performs in it. That is the thing I keep waiting to stop being surprised by.

Then he puts on the week’s video, a teacher walking through a chapter I’ve half-read, and after, turns off the screen and opens the floor. A guy named Cole says he is confused about the thing we just watched, and instead of fixing him Brandon says, “Yeah, it’s a lot to take in. But as we move through the rest of the chapter, I promise it will start to click.”

Then Brandon circles back to the sermon, to the words thing, and asks the room what we say to ourselves when no one’s listening.

And I feel it. The pull to raise my hand and say the true thing out loud, here, where it is apparently allowed. I’ve watched a dozen clients fight that exact pull from the other chair. I know what it looks like from the outside. I did not know it would be this hard to keep my own hand in my lap.

I don’t raise it. I’m not there yet. But at least I noticed that I wanted to.

Luke doesn’t say much. He listens the way he does everything, all the way. Once he catches me watching him and gives me the smile that’s only mine, right there in a room full of people, like he doesn’t care who sees.

Natalie leans into me. “He’s a keeper,” she whispers, at a volume that is not a whisper.

“You’ve said that already.”

“And I’ll keep saying it.” She bumps my shoulder.

We go to Si Señor after, where the waitress knows Dottie by name and the chips hit the table before we do.

Apparently church makes a person hungry, because we’re all too busy to talk until the plates are clean. By then Bo has folded his napkin into every shape it has and started to vibrate faintly in his chair, which is the universal ten-year-old signal that a restaurant has run out of things to offer him.

“Park?” Luke says, reading him a half second before he goes off.

That’s all it takes.

Then, because it’s December in Texas and the weather has no respect for the calendar, we end up at the park.

It’s seventy-two degrees. I wore a jacket this morning, the way you do in December, and I take it off within ten minutes of getting out of the car because I am sweating.

The park has a tall slide which Bo goes straight for. Dottie claims a bench in the sun. Luke and I take the one across from the swings, close enough to watch, far enough to talk. His arm along the back of the bench. My jacket in my lap. The perfect afternoon.