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She didn’t tell us.

Because I didn’t.

“You have a son?” Harper says. Carefully. To Luke. But it’s a question for me.

“He’s ten,” Luke says, still not fully clocking it, because why would he, he doesn’t know he’s holding the thing I buried. “Bo. Best kid you’ll ever meet.”

“I didn’t know you had a son,” Harper says, and now she’s looking at me.

“It just didn’t come up,” I say, a sentence so transparently false even Bo would call it a lie.

“It didn’t come up?” Harper repeats.

“You’d have had forty questions and Ivy would have overthought it and I just wanted to...” I hear myself and stop. “It wasn’t a secret.”

It was a little bit of a secret.

Ivy’s smiling the gentle, wounded smile of a woman recalculating two months of conversations. Harper’s smiling the one that means we are absolutely discussing this later. And Luke is smiling too, but it’s gone a half-degree off, and I feel him feel it, the shape of what I didn’t say, sitting there next to a whole child I apparently didn’t mention.

“Well,” Harper says, pivoting, generous, letting me off the hook in front of everyone, which is its own kind of mercy. “For the record, I’m shocked. Olivia, with a kid. You’re not exactly...” She waves a hand. “You hand Charlie back after ninety seconds.”

“I do hand Charlie back,” I say, because it’s true and it’s easier than the rest.

“She’s not good with kids,” Harper says to Luke, warm, like she’s giving him a helpful heads-up about a woman she loves. “I say it with love. She’s just never been a kid person.”

Luke doesn’t say anything.

He just reaches under the table and puts his hand on my knee, steady, and I don’t know if it’s for me or for him, and I decide not to look at his face to find out.

The rest of dinner is good. It really is.

Harper tells a story about Micah getting lost in his own new town. Gray does an impression of the film producer that is genuinely funny, proving my earlier point to Luke, who catches my eye. We split three desserts.

It’s a good night with my favorite people and the man I love.

We say goodbye in the parking lot. Harper hugs me too long and says into my ear, “He’s wonderful and I love him and you are calling me tomorrow.” Ivy hugs me and says nothing, which from Ivy says more.

Then it’s just me and Luke and the drive home.

He waits until we’re on the highway, one hand on the wheel, the other resting open on the console between us, which I’ve learned is an invitation I can take or not.

“So. You didn’t tell them about Bo.”

There it is. I put my hand in his, because I’d rather be holding on for this. “No.”

“We’ve been dating three months.”

“I know.”

“Can I ask why?”

I could give him the version I gave the table. Harper’s never ending questions. Ivy’s overthinking. The way I ration information like it’s wartime. All true, none of it the truth.

“I don’t fully know,” I say, which is the truest thing I’ve got. “Everything else about you, I could hand them. The wrong number’s a good story. The firefighter’s a good story. Those are things that happened to me. But Bo isn’t a thing that happened to me. Bo is a person I...” I stop. The word is right there and I’ve never said it out loud about a child. “A person I love. And I’ve never done that. Loved a kid. So I kept him. Not because I was ashamed. Because he was the one part I couldn’t stand to have questioned.”

The truck is silent. I stare at the taillights ahead and wait for him to be hurt, because that’s what I’ve earned, and because being ready for the hurt is how I’ve always kept it from landing anywhere soft.

He lifts my hand off the console and presses his mouth to my knuckles, once, the way Micah does to Harper, the way I’ve watched from the outside for years and never had.