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Here’s what she doesn’t know.

Seven weeks ago she cried in a folding chair over her mother, and I sat three feet away and judged her for it. Not out loud. I did the kind, correct thing on the outside, the hand on the arm, the right words. But inside I took her honest, breaking-open moment and I used it as evidence in a case I’ve been building against every warm person I’ve met since I was seventeen. I looked at the gap between the mom on her feed and the mom in that story and I decided the whole thing was fake, that community was a performance, that I’d been a fool to walk back into any of it.

I got baptized carrying that. I went under the water still holding a grudge against a girl who never did a single thing but love me at full volume.

So I asked her to lunch. To make it right somehow, without fully knowing how you apologize for a sin the other person never knew about.

“Can I ask you something?” I say, when she finally pauses, because this is the door and I’ve been standing outside it for seven weeks. “And you can absolutely tell me it’s none of my business.”

“You know that’s my line.”

“I know.” I take a breath. “Your mom. On Instagram she’s your best friend. And then a few Sundays ago you admitted she was the woman who lectures you and leaves you crying in a parking garage.” I say it as gently as I know how. “Those are two really different women. I guess I’ve been wondering which one’s the real one?”

Natalie sets down her fry.

And for once, my loud, spring-loaded friend goes still, and thinks, and when she answers she’s not performing a single word of it.

“They’re both real. That’s the hard thing. My mom is the woman who lectures me and makes me feel like I’ve never once gotten it right. And she’s also the woman who sat up with me every night for a month when I had pneumonia in fourth grade, and drove nine hours to help me move here when nobody else would, and taught me every single thing I know about Jesus.” She turns her water glass. “Both of those are true. She is genuinely both.”

“So the posts⁠—”

“The posts are what I’m choosing.” She says it simple, like she’s explaining water. “When I write my whole heart under a picture of us, I’m not lying, Olivia. I’m hoping. I’m choosing to honor her instead of drag her, and I’m speaking the relationship I want over the one I’ve got, because I actually believe God can still get us there. My pastor back home called it calling the thing that isn’t as though it were.” She shrugs, a little embarrassed by how much she means it. “The feed isn’t a highlight reel of a perfect mom. It’s a prayer for one. It’s me deciding, in public, to keep loving a woman who’s hard to love, and to believe it isn’t finished yet.”

And the world tilts about four degrees on its axis, and I have to put my sandwich down, because I know that move.

I did it seven weeks ago.

The same night I sat in judgment of Natalie, I drove to Ivy’s, and Ivy told me she was leaving, and I stood up and put a front on so thick and so warm she never saw me crack. I told her I was thrilled, that I wasn’t alone, that I was happy. None of it was what I felt in that moment, and I called it a front, and I hated myself for it.

But it wasn’t a lie.

I did the exact thing I condemned Natalie for. And when I did it, it wasn’t fraud.

Which means, it was probably never fraud when she did it either.

“Olivia?” Natalie’s looking at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” My voice isn’t quite level. “I just realized something.”

“Good something or bad something?”

I think about it. “Both. Mostly good.”

“That’s the best kind,” she says, and steals the last of my fries, and moves us on to something lighter, because she doesn’t know she just handed me the thing I’ve been trying to find my whole adult life, and she lets me not be ready to say so, because that’s what she does. That’s what she’s always done. That’s what I couldn’t see.

I hug her longer than usual in the parking lot.

“What was that for?”

“For being exactly who you are,” I say. “Out loud. All the time. Even when it’s hard.”

“That’s just me being incapable of shutting up.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

I’m supposed to be getting ready for bingo. Luke and Dottie are picking me up at six-thirty, and I have exactly one job, which is to put on real clothes and be waiting outside, and instead I’m sitting on the edge of my bed half-dressed, holding one earring, because I can’t stop turning it over.

Both of them are real.