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“It’s okay, Olivia. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?”

“No.” He puts our hands back down, keeps hold. “You want the truth? I’m glad.”

I turn to look at him.

“I don’t let people near Bo. I’ve told you that. And this whole time, some part of me’s been braced for you to treat him like a fun fact. The interesting thing about the guy you’re dating. My son, the party trick.” He shakes his head. “You did the opposite. You loved him so quiet you wouldn’t even say his name to the people who’d have made him a topic. You protected him from being a story. You have no idea what that does to me.”

I don’t say anything. I’m not sure I could.

“He’s not a pawn to you,” Luke says. “He’s not leverage, he’s not a headline, he’s not the thing that makes me more interesting at dinner. He’s just yours to keep careful. That’s the thing I’ve been waiting ten years to see somebody do, and you did it before I even asked.”

I look at the side of his face lit up by the dash, at the man who just took the thing I was most ashamed of and turned it over and found something to be grateful for, and I think, that I have spent my whole life braced for people to be the worst version of themselves and I don’t know what to do with a man who keeps being the best one.

“You’re too good at this,” I say, which is as close as I can get right now to the real thing.

“At what?”

“Understanding me. That’s supposed to be my job.”

“You can have the job back tomorrow,” he says. “Tonight I’ve got you.”

He pulls up outside my building and doesn’t idle at the curb. He puts it in park, comes around, opens my door, walks me up like the twenty feet matters, and maybe it does. At the door he tips my chin up with two fingers and kisses me goodnight.

“Text me when you’re inside.”

“You’re standing right here. You’ll hear the lock.”

“Text me anyway.”

I go in. I lock the door. I text him a single heart emoji, and I stand in my apartment with Bo’s ugly blue rock still in my coat pocket where it’s lived since Christmas, and I think about the fact that I kept a ten-year-old a secret from my best friends for four months because loving him scared me more than anything has in years.

And then I think about the thing I’ve been not-thinking about since Christmas. Since he asked me a question over a board game and I couldn’t make my mouth work.

I love that kid.

So why can’t I say the other word. The mom word.

I don’t have an answer.

I just hold the rock, and I go to bed.

Chapter 28

Luke

A slow shift is a dangerous thing for a man with something on his mind.

Give me a busy one, calls stacked back to back, no time to think, and I’m the best version of myself. It’s the quiet shifts that get you. The trucks are clean, the reports are done, there’s nothing to do but sit in the dayroom with your own head, and my head has decided to spend the whole afternoon on one sentence somebody said four days ago.

She’s not good with kids.

Harper said it at dinner Saturday like a weather report. Warm, teasing, no idea she was handing me anything. If anything she was defending Olivia, heading off the shock of Olivia-with-a-kid before it could land wrong. I say it with love, she said. She’s just never been a kid person.

I laughed it off at the table, because that’s what you do at tables. I put my hand on Olivia’s knee and told myself it was nothing.

It’s not nothing.