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She loves him. I know she loves him. I’ve watched her love him all night.

But when my son asked her to be his mother, she went white.

And I let a boy hand his whole heart across a game board to somebody who couldn’t say yes.

I don’t say any of it. Not tonight. Tonight was too good, and the crack is hairline, and maybe I’m reading it wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

I hope I’m wrong.

Chapter 26

Olivia

It’s the morning after our two-days-late Christmas. I’m getting ready for work, and I’ve just brushed my teeth for a full minute past where I usually stop, because my mind is elsewhere.

Bo asked me to be his mother, and I have thought about almost nothing else since.

Not the way Luke thinks I’ve thought about it. I can tell what Luke thinks. He got quiet on the porch when I left, and quiet is not his native language, and I’ve read enough faces to know that whatever he saw on mine at that game board, he filed under the wrong heading.

Here is what actually happened, in the second and a half before I could make my mouth work.

Bo asked if I’d marry his dad and be his mom, and every part of me said yes at once, so fast and so loud that it scared me, and I couldn’t get a single word past it.

That’s the truth. Not hesitation. The opposite. A yes so total it locked my throat.

I decided years ago that children weren’t for me. I said it plainly, to Ivy, to Harper, to myself, in the tone I use for things that are settled. The best part of someone else’s kid is handing them back. I built a life around it, clean and quiet and childless, and I was fine.

And then a ten-year-old with flour in his hair asked me to be his mom over a board game, and the wall I built didn’t crack or crumble or do any of the things walls are supposed to do. It was just gone. Like it was never load-bearing. Like I’d been guarding a door that opened onto a room I wanted to live in the whole time.

I didn’t answer Bo, because you don’t answer a question that size to a ten-year-old before you’ve answered it to his father. That conversation belongs to me and Luke, in words, on purpose, not blurted across a game I was losing.

But I have my answer. I’ve had it for a while. I was just the last to know.

The thing that scares me now isn’t the yes. It’s that I almost let Luke keep believing it was a no.

I’ll fix that. I make a mental note. Tell Luke. Soon. In words.

I go back to work the Monday after Christmas, and I am, by any measure, insufferable.

Not distracted.

Present. I sit with a client who’s been circling the same grief for three months and something I say actually lands, and I watch her shoulders drop, and I feel the specific clean joy of this work when it works. Luke texts me a picture of the fire-station lunch, which appears to be a brisket some random food vendor smoked in the parking lot, and I tell him his life expectancy concerns me and he tells me that’s why he keeps me around.

I am happy. That’s the whole diagnosis. I keep waiting to find the catch and there isn’t one, and I’ve decided to stop looking for it, which is possibly the most growth I’ve done all year.

I’m back at my apartment, doing paperwork on my computer, when an email comes in. From the church.

Baptism weekend. First Sunday in March. Sign up here.

I click the link. There’s a form. Name. First-time believer or reaffirming your faith. A little box for your testimony.

I fill it out before the next client, before the part of me that runs the war can talk me out of it. I don’t draft it three times. I just do it, the way Pastor Jack said. You don’t wait until you feel ready. You move, and trust God’s already there.

I hit submit.

Then I sit at my desk with my hand over my mouth, because I just signed up to be baptized, out loud, in front of everyone, in March. And I’m not scared. I’m the opposite of scared, and I still don’t have the word for that one either.

I call Luke first. It goes to voicemail. He’s on shift, and this isn’t a voicemail thing.