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The old sermon, the one Pastor Jack told me to stop preaching over myself, the one I caught myself holding up to the light a few weeks ago and thought maybe, maybe I could finally set it down.

It isn’t a whisper anymore. It’s the only voice in the car.

You keep the exits clear for a reason. You keep people at arm’s length for a reason. You do not hand them the soft parts, because they will take the soft parts to Ashen Mills, and you will be exactly where you started, which is alone, which is the one thing you were always going to be.

I get home. I don’t do the routine. I don’t pack a lunch or set the coffee or wipe the counter. I leave my keys by the front door and lie down on top of my made bed in my church clothes, and I don’t call Luke, because Luke is the newest one, the one I let in fastest, and some cold, certain part of me has already started doing the math on him too.

I don’t answer when he texts goodnight.

I lie in the dark and I let the seventeen-year-old have the wheel, and she drives me right back to the place I swore I’d never let anyone take me again.

I should never have gone back to church.

That’s the last thought I have. I should never have gone back.

And I fall asleep believing it.

Chapter 30

Luke

She didn’t answer my goodnight text Sunday.

I know how that sounds. A grown man tracking a text like a teenager. But you learn a person’s rhythms when you love them, the way you learn a house, where it settles, where it creaks, and Olivia’s rhythms are the most reliable thing about her. She answers. She sets her coffee for six-fifteen. She sends the single heart emoji when she’s too tired for words, that one dumb heart I’ve started looking for like it’s a whole letter.

Sunday night, nothing.

Monday I texted good luck with her clients and got a thumbs up four hours later. Monday evening was our standing call, and twenty minutes before it she texted that she was wiped, going to bed early. Today she answered two of my three texts, both short, both a half-degree cooler than her, and when I asked if I could come by tonight she said sure, which from Olivia, who does not deal in sure, who deals in yes or in a reason, landed like a door easing shut.

Two days. That’s all it’s been. Two days of a woman going quiet on me.

And I’ve spent both of them building the exact thing I swore to Wade I wouldn’t build.

Here’s how my head works, for better and mostly worse. It takes the two silent days and goes hunting for the reason, and it already has a drawer full of reasons ready, labeled, waiting, because I packed that drawer myself over ten years.

Christmas. Her face when Bo asked her to be his mom. The white, the flicker, the nothing coming out.

Harper at dinner. She’s not good with kids.

Two months she didn’t tell her own best friends I have a son. Two months she kept Bo in her pocket, and I called it protecting him, and I meant it, but there’s a version where you don’t mention a thing because you haven’t decided to keep it.

And now, two days of her pulling back. Right on schedule. Right when it started getting real, right when the next question is coming and she can feel it coming.

I lay it all out on the workbench in my head and it builds one thing. It builds the thing I’ve braced for since I was twenty-two and stood in a kitchen reading a note that said she couldn’t do it.

She’s realizing she doesn’t want it. Not me. The whole thing. The kid, the package, the forever of it. She got close enough to see the actual size of what I’m asking and now she’s backing out.

Wade’s voice is in my ear the whole time. Not on the phone. Sit her down, ask the real question, listen to her answer it. I’ve carried that question in my pocket for three weeks waiting for the right moment, and the right moment never came, and now the ground’s moving and I can feel her sliding and I’m out of moments. You don’t get to pick the moment. The moment picks you.

I can’t sit on it another day. If she’s leaving, I need to know before Bo hands her one more piece of himself. Bo comes first. He always comes first. I let her through the gate too fast, and now I have to go stand in it.

The second I get home I’m through the door and moving, room to room, the way I clear a house on a call, until I find Dottie at the kitchen sink and ask her to keep Bo tonight.

Dottie looks at me a long second, the water still running, and shuts it off without looking. She knows my faces better than I do.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just need to talk to Olivia.”