Page 67
Gray sits back down. “You scared me.”
“We made her do a dare and then I brought a baby home and I never asked how it went.” She’s crying again, fully, into her napkin. “I’m a terrible friend. You could be married by now and I wouldn’t know.”
“You had a baby nine days ago,” I say.
“That’s not an excuse.”
“It’s a medically documented excuse.”
Gray puts a hand on her back and says, in the low even voice I imagine he uses on Charlie at three a.m., “Baby. You are not a terrible friend. You’re a great friend running on ninety-minute sleep increments. Eat your lasagna.”
“It’s really good lasagna.” Ivy wipes her eyes, takes another bite, then turns the full force of her attention on me.
“Tell me everything.”
So I tell her.
The wrong number. “Bad news, I’m not Paul.” Four days of texting a stranger who got less like a stranger every hour, and the coffee shop where we both ordered both drinks.
I watch Gray’s smile widen and more tears gather in Ivy’s eyes, and by the end she has both hands pressed to her chest like she’s holding something in.
“That is the cutest meet-cute I have ever heard,” she says. “A wrong number. Olivia. That’s right out of a movie.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that.”
“We’re just friends.”
Ivy stops. Fork halfway to her mouth. “What? Why?”
“I told him dating terrifies me. He said he could use a good friend.” I shrug, careful of the baby. “So that’s what we are.”
Ivy sets the fork down. Then she laughs, a wet, delighted, entirely unconvinced laugh.
“We are just friends.”
Gray takes a bite of lasagna. “Friends,” he says, thoughtful. “You know, Ivy and I started as just friends too.”
“That was different.”
He points his fork at me, mild as anything. “I’m just saying. You never know.”
I roll my eyes so hard I nearly wake the baby.
What I don’t tell them is that I went back to church. That I’m going again next Sunday, and the one after that. That somewhere between a sermon and a hallway I signed up for six months of showing up.
I don’t know exactly why I keep it. Ivy would cry about it, in the good way. Harper would drive an hour and a half to sit next to me.
Maybe that’s why. Maybe I want one thing right now that’s only mine. That I chose while no one was watching.
Or maybe it’s just that they’re both so full, Ivy with Charlie and Gray with a whole future arriving by radio, and there isn’t a clean place to set it down.
So I hold the baby, and I hold that too.
The drive home is twenty minutes, and I spend all of it thinking about people I’ve technically met once.
Luke. Bo. Dottie. A firefighter, a ten-year-old, and a grandmother.
