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And everything in me goes still.

Here’s the thing. A month ago there’s no version of this where I say yes. The list is the list. I built it out of ten years of being careful, and I do not add names to it. It’s held at the same four for years, and every one of them earned it slow.

But I’m not thinking about the list right now. I’m thinking about Saturday night. How she folded herself down onto the floor of his room so she’d be eye to eye with him instead of towering over him. How Bo threw both arms around her neck without warning, the all-in hug he does not hand out to people, and how she went still for half a second like nobody had ever done that to her, and then held on like she wasn’t going to be the one to let go first.

I watched the whole thing from the doorway.

I look at her now. Olivia, who’s met my son twice.

The list has four names on it.

I’m pretty sure it’s about to have five.

“Bo would love that,” I say. My voice isn’t quite level, and I don’t try to fix it.

And under the table, where nobody can see, Olivia’s hand finds mine and holds on.

Chapter 16

Olivia

I’m supposed to be getting ready.

Instead I’m on my couch at nine in the morning with a cold cup of coffee and my thumb moving on its own, doing the exact thing I tell my clients not to do, which is scroll.

Natalie posts a lot.

She warned me she does. It’s a problem, she said, and she wasn’t wrong. In the week since I followed her, my feed has become roughly forty percent Natalie, and I’ve learned more about her life than I know about people I’ve worked beside for years.

She’s at brunch. She’s at a lake. She’s at a concert with Lily, both of them mid-laugh, the caption just a string of exclamation points. There’s a whole highlight reel devoted to her mom, the two of them cheek to cheek, matching smiles, a dozen versions of the same easy closeness. My mom is my best friend, one says.

I talk to my mother about four times a year. Birthdays, holidays, the occasional logistical text. She’s a good person. So is my father. They live in a lovely house in Houston and they love me in the correct and appropriate amounts, and I could not tell you the last time either of us called the other just to talk.

Natalie talks to her mom all the time. Natalie has a best friend she takes to concerts. Natalie moved to a new city alone and built a whole warm, loud, photographed life out of nothing in under a year.

And the thing is, I had that once. Not the mom part. But the rest of it.

I have two best friends. Ivy and Harper. The two women laughing beside me in the photo on my wall, the ones who dared me into every good thing that’s happened to me lately, including the man at the fire station right now. For years they were my whole social world. A group chat that never went silent. Two people who always knew exactly where I was.

Then Harper married Micah and moved to Ashen Mills and fell in love with an entire small town. And Ivy had Charlie, and her whole life reorganized itself around six pounds of newborn, the way it was supposed to.

They’re not gone. They still love me. But the chat that used to light up multiple times a day now goes off maybe once a week, and it’s mostly Ivy sending a photo of Charlie in some new outfit. Which I save. Every single one.

I’m happy for them. I genuinely am. I just didn’t understand, until the silence moved in, how much of my belonging I’d outsourced to two people who were always, eventually, going to have lives of their own.

Which leaves me here. And here is very specifically the corner of my couch, where I’ve been for forty minutes, still in the T-shirt I slept in, a mug of coffee gone cold on the armrest, my thumb scrolling a screen I’ve stopped actually seeing. My whole adult life in this city, and these days my social calendar is a bingo hall, a life group full of strangers, and a family I met just a few weeks ago.

I set the phone facedown on my knee. The apartment does the thing it always does when I finally stop moving, which is go very, very still. No TV. No roommate. No one on the other side of a wall. Just me and the hum of the refrigerator and a Saturday I’m supposed to be getting ready for.

Today I’m watching Bo.

I still can’t quite believe I offered.

I offered before I thought about it, the way I’ve been doing a lot of things lately, and by the time I understood the size of what I’d said, the whole bingo table had gone still and Luke was looking at me like I’d handed him something, and it was too late to take it back.

Not that I wanted to.

Dottie’s will be headed to the outlet mall. Luke’s on shift until tomorrow morning. And for the next several hours, a ten-year-old is going to be my responsibility. Mine, specifically. The woman who decided years ago that children were a thing that happened to other people.