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“Two of his songs are going on the radio.”

I sit up. “What?”

“Bigger artists recorded them. Real ones, you’d know the names.” She’s beaming, all her tears rerouted into pride. “They release over the next few months.”

“Gray. That’s incredible.”

He does the thing he does when a compliment lands, where he tries to shrink out from under it. He drops his head, drags a hand across the back of his neck, and finds something fascinating on the far wall. “It’s a good break.”

“That’s not even the big one,” Ivy says. “One of them might get picked up for a movie.” She says it slowly, like she still can’t believe the shape of the words. “A real one. A Christian film, in theaters. They’re talking about using his song.”

“Gray. That is enormous.”

“It’s not signed.” He says it to the carpet, thumb worrying the hem of his sleeve, the tips of his ears going a shade darker than they were a second ago. “Could fall through.”

“But it might not,” Ivy says, for him.

Gray has been writing songs for years. Now the whole world is about to hear them. He hunches a little further into the couch, like if he folds down small enough the praise will pass over him and land on someone else.

Ivy watches him the entire time. Like the radio and the movie are nice, but the actual miracle is that she gets to sit on this couch and be the one who’s proud of him. She reaches over and rests a hand on his knee, and without looking he covers it with his, and some of the bracing goes out of his shoulders.

And I have a thought I don’t invite.

I wonder what that’s like. To be that sure of a person that their good news feels like your own. To have someone look at you across a room the way Ivy is looking at Gray right now.

Ivy waits until the lasagna is on plates before she makes her move.

“Hold her while we eat?”

“I—”

“Please. I haven’t used two hands at the same time in nine days.”

There’s no good way to say no to that, so I don’t. Gray transfers Charlie into my arms with the same instructional care he used in the hospital, except this time I already know. One hand under the head. Keep her close. Do not twist.

Charlie settles against me and does not file a complaint, which I take as a personal victory.

She weighs almost nothing. Her whole hand closes around the tip of my finger without waking up. Up close she smells like laundry and something warmer underneath, and I sit very still, because it turns out I’m afraid to move a person who trusts me this much on no evidence.

And I think about Bo.

Not on purpose. It just arrives. I wonder if he was ever this small. If he closed his hand around Luke’s finger the same way. If Luke hovered over a bassinet while he slept the way Gray does, except Luke did it alone.

I don’t know what Bo was like at two weeks old, and I notice, with some alarm, that I’d like to.

And right behind that comes the question I somehow haven’t asked.

Alone. Luke did it alone. There’s a mother somewhere. There has to be. And in two hours of coffee and a morning of church and a whole week of texting, her name has not come up once, which is strange.

I didn’t ask Luke.

Maybe because I already suspect the answer isn’t simple. Nothing that ends with a man raising a boy by himself ever is.

“Oh my gosh!” Ivy’s fork clatters against her plate. “Oh my gosh, I am the worst!”

Gray is on his feet before I can react. “What? What’s wrong?”

“I never asked her about Paul!”