“Emma would move here tomorrow if I said the word. After the school situation—the group chat, the team, all of it—I’m notsure I could send her back even if she wanted to go. A fresh start might be exactly what she needs.”
His heart lifted. “And Matt?”
She sighed. “Matt’s happy with Jeffrey and doesn’t have strong opinions. He’s an easy kid. I don’t mean that he’s weak—he’s not. But he’s so independent and grounded. He doesn’t need me the way Emma does at the moment. But I’d miss him. I’d miss him terribly.”
“You could divide your time,” he suggested. “Summers and holidays here, stretches in Ithaca with Matt. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
She looked at him across the candlelight with an expression he hadn’t seen before—open, unguarded, almost brave.
“Yes,” she said.
His heart stopped. “Yes?”
“Maybe. Probably. Yes, I could see it.” She held up a hand. “Not tomorrow. Not without a plan. But the idea of being here—near you, part of the house, near my mom and Tessa—it doesn’t scare me the way it would have a month ago. It actually sounds like…what I want. What Imightwant.”
He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss against her knuckles, not trusting his voice for a moment.
“If we solve distance,” he said carefully, “that just leaves?—”
“Faith.” She finished it for him, the word floating to the table like an autumn leaf.
He sighed. “Yeah, that.”
She leaned forward, gripping his hand tighter. “You have to know this, Eli. I don’t hate your faith. I recognize that it is a part of you.”
It was all of him, but he swallowed that thought and let her continue.
“But I worry that it will mean I’m always a source of disappointment to you.”
“You couldn’t disappoint me,” he insisted.
She lifted a dubious brow. “Sometimes, I see something in you. Like you think you wish I would say or see or be something different than I am. That I would approach the world through your lens, and not mine.”
Was that the “something” he’d been trying to ignore?
“I don’t know about that, Kate.”
“Well, I’m afraid that you’ll always be waiting for me to come around, and I’ll always be failing to, and we’ll both be let down by the other.” She traced the spoon again, thinking. “You deserve someone who can share that with you. Who can pray with you and go to church with you and read the Bible with you the way Emma?—”
She stopped herself, but the name hung in the air.
“Kate.” He held her hand tighter. “I’m not looking for someone to pray with. I’m looking for someone to live with. To build something with. You.”
“Even if I never believe?”
The question was so honest it deserved an honest answer. And the honest answer was complicated, because deep in his heart, Eli knew that a shared faith would make everything fuller. It would remove the last barrier, the final crack in the foundation. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t matter.
But she mattered, too. A lot.
“I looked it up, you know,” she said softly. “What the Bible says about…a couple who don’t share faith.”
His eyes widened. “You read the Bible?”
“No, I asked ChatGPT.” She gave a soft laugh. “And then I looked at some articles by experts. I researched, as I do. I kept seeing this phrase, ‘unequally yoked,’ which kind of made me feel like…an ox.”
He chuckled at that, deeply familiar with the concept. “God wants believers to marry each other because the burden—likethe yoke of that ox—is lighter. Carried equally. The Bible also says if one spouse in a non-believer, they are not to divorce. The non-believer is sanctified through the believing spouse.”
She nodded, wetting her lips as she searched for the right way to say whatever came next. “But what if I don’t want to be…sanctified or ‘saved,’ as you Christians say.”
