Page 150

“Then it is Luke’s and my honor to baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Luke turns to me. He puts one hand between my shoulder blades and takes my wrists in the other, and he leans his head close to mine.

And the man lowers the woman he loves back into the water with both hands like she’s the most precious thing he’s ever held.

I go under.

And it’s quiet down there. That’s the thing nobody tells you. For one second the whole loud world I finally learned to love just cuts out, and it’s dark and warm and silent, and everything I carried into this water is under it with me.

I leave her down there. I don’t decide to. It just happens, the way the best things this year have happened, before I could talk myself out of them.

And then Luke’s hands bring me back up.

I come out of the water into a wall of sound, the whole room on its feet, Bo shrieking, Harper and Ivy flat-out sobbing, Dottie’s hands in the air, the water running off me and the lights too bright and I’m gasping and laughing and crying all at once, and I have never in my life felt so clean or so loud or so held.

Luke pulls me into him, both of us soaked, and into my wet hair he says, “There she is.”

They give you a few minutes to dry off and change, which is a mercy, because I need a full minute alone in a church bathroom just to look at myself in the mirror, hair dripping, mascara a lost cause, grinning at my own reflection like I’ve lost it. A year ago I’d have been mortified by the mascara. Today I decide it’s the best I’ve ever looked.

The lobby afterward is chaos, the good kind, fifteen freshly baptized people getting passed around their families. I come out in dry clothes with a towel around my wet hair and don’t make it three steps before I’m swallowed.

Harper gets to me first, because of course she does, and grabs me so hard my feet nearly leave the floor.

“I have prayed for this,” she says into my ear. “For years, Olivia. Do you understand what I just got to watch?”

“I think I do.” I laugh.

“You do not. You were underwater.” She pulls back, holds my face in both hands, mascara down her own cheeks now. “That was the best thing I have ever seen.”

And that’s when Bo hits us at knee height.

He’s come tearing across the lobby, dodging adults, and he wraps around my waist, and then he looks up, sees who I’m standing with, and his whole face does something complicated.

“Mrs. Mitchell?”

Harper looks down. Blinks. “…Bo?”

“You two know each other?” I say.

Bo lets go of me and throws his arms around Harper instead, which, given that Bo does not hand the full-body hug to just anyone, stops me cold.

“That’s Bo,” Harper says slowly, over his head, her whole face reorganizing. “That’s little Bo. I had him in kindergarten, back when I taught in Dallas.” She holds him back by the shoulders. “You got so big.”

Micah wanders up with two cups of coffee, takes in the scene, and says, cheerfully, “Hey, isn’t that the kid you kidnapped from church that one time?”

Harper turns and glares at him with the heat of a thousand suns.

“I did not kidnap him. He ran out of your children’s wing straight into my arms. That is the opposite of kidnapping.” She turns back to me, still holding Bo.

And Luke, who’s come up behind me with his hair still wet, snaps his fingers.

“That’s it. That’s why I told Olivia that night after dinner you looked familiar and I couldn’t place it. You were his teacher.”

Harper looks at Bo. Then at Luke. Then at me, welling all over again.

“Wait.” She points between me and Luke. “So the sweetest little boy I ever taught is his kid. And you’re dating his dad.”

“I guess so,” I say.