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She hugs me hard, then turns the full wattage on Luke. “I’m Harper. I’ve heard everything about you.”

“That is deeply concerning and we’ll circle back to it.”

She studies him a beat longer than a greeting requires, head tilting, something working behind her eyes. Then she leans into me, not bothering to lower her voice much.

“Why does he look familiar?”

“He goes to New Chapter,” I say, which is the obvious answer and apparently not the one she’s after, because she keeps squinting at him like there’s something on the tip of her tongue.

“No, that’s not it.” She shakes it off. “Never mind. It’ll come to me.”

Ivy hugs me next, softer, one hand on my cheek. “You look happy,” she says, low, just to me, and there’s something careful in it, an old-friend appraisal, and her eyes are already wet because Ivy’s eyes are always already wet. “You look really happy, Liv.”

“I...” My breath catches. The feeling comes up before I can get ahead of it, and I close my eyes, swallow, take a breath. “I am.”

She lets me go and turns to Luke. “Hi. I’m Ivy. I cry a lot, postpartum hormones, it’s not you.”

“Noted,” Luke says, and I watch her decide to like him.

Gray shakes his hand across the table, doing the serious thing, sizing him up, and Luke doesn’t flinch, and after a second Gray says, “You a Cowboys fan?”

“Unfortunately,” Luke says.

“We can work with unfortunately,” and just like that they’re fine.

Micah is last. He shakes Luke’s hand and says nothing, and Luke says, “You’re the one who gave her the wrong number?”

Micah nods.

“Thank you,” Luke says.

We order, and the table does what the table has always done, talk over itself in three directions at once, and I’d forgotten how much I missed the specific noise of these people. Harper interrogates Luke about the fire department and whether he’s ever gotten a cat out of a tree (once, and it bit him). Ivy passes her phone around with two hundred photos of Charlie, who is three months old and, I’ll admit, getting cuter. Gray steals bites off Ivy’s plate and denies it with food still in his mouth.

And then, between the queso and the entrees, Ivy sets down her fork. “Gray, tell them. Tell them or I will.”

“It’s not a sure thing.” He waives it off.

“It’s very much a sure thing!” Ivy turns to us, glowing. “A film company wants a whole album, not one song, an entire soundtrack. Original, all Gray, for a movie that’s actually getting made, in actual theaters.”

The table erupts. Harper screams. I put both hands flat on the table because it’s the closest thing to holding onto something.

“Gray. This is what you’ve always wanted!” Harper says.

“It’s a good break,” Gray says.

“It’s not a break,” Micah says, the first full sentence he’s offered in twenty minutes. “It’s the thing you were always going to do. It just took the world a while to catch up.”

The table goes soft for a second, the way it does when Micah spends one of his sentences. Then Harper ruins it by asking Luke whether firefighters really pose for calendars, and we’re loud again.

It happens the way these things happen. Sideways, in the middle of something else.

Harper’s asking Luke about his week, and he’s telling a story about his day off, and he says, “I had Bo at the park and he decided the ducks owed him money,” and Harper laughs and then stops, mid-laugh. “Wait. Who’s Bo?”

And Luke, easy, no idea what he’s walking into, says, “My son.”

The table goes still.

Not long. A beat. But I’ve read this table for quite some time, and I watch it move across all four of them at once. Harper’s eyebrows. Ivy’s hand pausing on her water glass. Gray’s glance at Ivy. And under it, the thing none of them say.