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“You’re dating his dad,” Harper says again, as if it hasn’t quite clicked.

Bo tugs at Harper’s sleeve. “Do you still have the crayons shaped like rocket ships?”

“Buddy, that was five years ago.”

I stand in the middle of it, watching my oldest friend and my whole strange beautiful found family collide in a way none of us planned and all of us needed, and I think about a God who apparently had all of these people threaded together years before I ever let a single one of them in.

I don’t understand all of it.

But I’m starting to think I don’t have to.

Chapter 34

Luke

It’s Wednesday, and I’m pushing a broom across the kitchen floor, and I catch myself doing the thing I’ve done all week, which is stop in the middle of whatever I’m doing to catch myself smiling.

Three days ago I stood waist-deep in water and lowered her under, and when I brought her back up she came out of that water gasping and laughing at the same time, water running off her, looking at me like she couldn’t believe I was the one who got to do it. I couldn’t believe it either. I keep not being able to. I’ve replayed it about four hundred times this week.

Here’s what my life looks like now, and I still catch myself not quite believing I get to have it.

Dottie goes out often.

Now she’s got a standing Wednesday. A women’s Bible study at the church, then dinner with the same crowd, Ruth and Carol and Fran and the rest of the widows who’ve adopted her right back. She comes home late and a little loud and smelling like perfume, happier than I’ve seen her in years, and every Wednesday when she walks out that door I have to look away so she doesn’t catch what it does to me.

She can go out because Olivia has stepped in.

She shows up at his school events, especially on the days I’m on shift, like she’s been doing it his whole life. Olivia gets him. She knows he needs ten minutes of quiet in the car before he can talk about his day. She knows to cut the tags out of his shirts. She keeps a specific brand of granola bar in her glovebox because it’s the one texture he’ll eat without a negotiation.

I’ll be at the station on a Tuesday, halfway up a ladder, and my phone buzzes in my locker, and when I get to it there’s a photo of the two of them doing homework at my kitchen table, or at the park, or playing Legos, and I have to go stand in the bay by myself for a minute.

Tonight I’m off, and Dottie’s at her Wednesday thing, and it’s just the three of us. Family dinner and a movie. It has become, without anybody announcing it, the best night of my week.

Olivia makes something out of the recipe box, because she always does now, working through Dottie’s cards one at a time like she’s studying for a test she intends to ace. Tonight it’s a chicken and rice thing Dottie’s mother used to make, and my kitchen smells like a house I grew up in, and Bo sets the table without being asked because Olivia asked him once, weeks ago, and he decided it was his job now.

She’s at my stove in bare feet. That’s the part that gets me, if I’m honest. Not anything dramatic. A woman standing at my stove with her shoes off, tasting a sauce off a wooden spoon, arguing with my kid about whether tonight’s movie can have talking animals in it.

“Talking animals are for babies,” Bo says.

“I’m choosing to ignore that, because tonight’s pick is mine and it absolutely has talking animals in it.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I sat through your shark documentary, Bo. Both hours. I learned things about sharks I did not consent to learn. Tonight we watch the animals who talk.”

Bo weighs the debt and grants it. “Fine. But if they sing I’m leaving.”

I lean in the doorway and watch the two of them, and I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. My son and the woman I’m dating, arguing about talking animals in my kitchen while dinner cooks. I’ve fought fires that felt less impossible than the fact that I get to stand here and have this.

Dinner is loud and good. Bo tells a story about a kid at school that has no ending and we react anyway. Olivia flicks a piece of rice at me when I tease her about her movie pick, which is not a thing the woman I met in October would have done, the one who lined her spice jars up like soldiers. She’s got her feet tucked under her and she’s laughing at something Bo said, and I keep catching her eye across the table, and there’s a whole conversation happening in it we’re not having out loud in front of the ten-year-old.

Bo’s eyes are glued to the screen from the pallet he made on the floor in front of the couch.

Olivia and I don’t watch much of the movie.

I mean, it’s on. There are, in fact, talking animals. But she’s tucked under my arm with her legs across my lap and her head on my chest, and I’ve got one hand playing with the ends of her hair, and about ten minutes in she tips her face up to me in the blue light and whispers, “You’re not watching the movie.”

“Neither are you.”