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She’s just the first to name it Jesus.

Over the last couple of months there have been others. My money couple, the two who’ve spent three years unable to talk about a bank account without it becoming a referendum on respect, told me last month that something I said finally landed, and I looked at my notes afterward and I hadn’t said anything I hadn’t said a dozen times before. I said it different, is all.

The teenager who answers every question with “I don’t know” told me on his way out that I’m less scary than I used to be. A woman I see for anxiety said she’d been recommending me to a friend, and that she’d described me as “hopeful, but not in an annoying way.”

Hopeful. Me. There’s a word I never earned before this year.

I used to think being good at this job meant being the calm, distant expert, the one who had it handled, the one nothing touched. I was good at it that way. But I was good at it the way a very clean, very empty room is good at being a room.

I’m messier now. There’s a faith I can’t fully explain and would not give back for anything. And somehow, being less of a sealed room has made me better at the one thing I was already good at.

I lock up my office.

On the community board by the door, under the flyers for the grief group and the parenting workshop, there’s a posting that wasn’t there last week. New Chapter Church, it says, is opening a counseling center.

Licensed therapists. A faith-integrated practice. Now accepting applications.

I read it twice.

I don’t take it down. I don’t fill anything out. But I stand in the hallway longer than I need to, looking at a piece of paper that has somehow proposed the exact thing I didn’t know I wanted, which is to do this work, the work I love, inside the community that gave me back my life.

Then I turn off the lights and drive to the loud house across town, where a ten-year-old is going to tell me about his day whether I ask or not, and I think about the fact that in five days a firefighter is going to lower me under the water in front of everyone I love, and I am not afraid of a single part of it.

Chapter 33

Olivia

I keep waiting to be nervous, and it keeps not coming, and it’s starting to concern me.

I am not typically a nervous person, but this seems like an event that emotion would show up to.

It isn’t coming.

I’m in a line of about twenty people along the wall of the baptistry room. It’s its own space, tucked behind the main sanctuary, small and warm, the air thick and humid from the heated tank in the middle of it. We’re all in matching gray New Chapter T-shirts, white block letters across the front: Dead. Buried. Raised.

Every one of them looks how I feel like I should look.

A teenager two ahead of me is bouncing on his toes. A woman behind me keeps blowing out slow four-count exhales. A man near the front is openly crying already, and it isn’t even his turn.

And I’m just standing here. Calm and ready. Clinging to a firefighter like an accessory.

Luke’s beside me, his hand at the small of my back, warm through the thin cotton.

“You nervous?” he says, low.

“I’m not nervous. I’m actually a little worried about how not-nervous I am.”

“That’s not a bad thing, Liv.”

There’s a camera mounted in the center of the room, aiming at the water, and the feed runs to the big screens out front, so hundreds of people in a sanctuary I can’t see or hear are watching on screens the size of a garage door. In a few minutes they’ll be watching me.

A pastor stands waist-deep in the tank and doesn’t climb out between any of us. Some he’ll baptize on his own, others bring someone with them. A father. A sister. A best friend who got them here.

I’m bringing Luke.

Here’s the thing I haven’t said to anyone, not even him, standing here in the gray shirt with the water waiting.

I don’t have it all figured out.