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We set the table together. It’s become a thing we do without talking about it, him following me around my own kitchen learning where I keep things, and I notice, setting down the water glasses, that the candle in the center of my table isn’t in the center anymore.

It’s four inches off. Toward the window.

He’s been doing that for weeks. Nudging it, a little, every time he’s here. The first time, I moved it back and it turned into a whole thing. Somewhere in the last month I stopped moving it back.

I look at the off-center candle on my perfectly ordered table, and it doesn’t make my skin itch the way it used to. It just looks like someone lives here with me now. Like the room has a second set of fingerprints.

I leave it where it is.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Luke says, setting the bread down.

“I have big news. Can I go first?”

He studies me, then lets it go and nods. “Go.”

“I signed up to get baptized. First Sunday in March.” I watch it land the slow way good things land on Luke, starting in his eyes. “And I want to ask you something, and you can say no.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Will you baptize me?”

He goes very still. Sets down the bread, like he needs both hands free for this. “Me?”

“You’re the reason I could do it. You didn’t fix me or preach at me or hand me a verse. You just kept showing up, being exactly who you are, until I believed a person could. Until I believed God could. If I’m going under that water, I want it to be your hands.”

For a second he doesn’t say anything at all. Then he crosses the kitchen and takes my face in both hands, and he kisses me, slow, and when he pulls back his eyes are wet and he doesn’t bother hiding it.

“Yes,” he says, rough. “Olivia. It would be the honor of my life.”

I have to look down.

After, when we’re eating, I remember. “Wait. You said you had something to talk about?”

He looks at me across the off-center candle, and something moves behind his eyes, there and gone, and then he smiles the one that’s only mine and shakes his head. “I can’t even remember.”

Chapter 27

Olivia

The new year came and went.

I spent it at Luke’s. Bo swore he’d make it to midnight and I bet Dottie a dollar he’d be out by ten. He made it to midnight. He was feral about it, running on sparkling grape juice and spite, and when the countdown hit zero he threw both arms in the air, then proceeded to insist it was time to be tucked into bed.

Then Luke drove me home, and he kissed me on my own doorstep. A new year, and the first thing in it was him.

That was two days ago.

Tonight, I have changed my outfit twice, which is not like me, because I lay my clothes out the night before like an adult with a functioning prefrontal cortex.

Tonight the adult lost. I’m standing in my third outfit when Luke’s truck pulls up, and I’m nervous in a way I can’t fully account for, which bothers me more than the nervousness itself. I like to know why I feel things.

Luke gets out and opens my door before I’ve made it down the walk, because he’s decided this is a thing he does now, and I’ve decided to let him.

“You look nice,” he says. “You look nervous.”

“I look nice and nervous? They’re not mutually exclusive.”

He shuts my door once I’m in, comes around, climbs behind the wheel. “You’re not wearing what you laid out last night.”