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“Okay.” I sit down, because I can hear something building in her voice I don’t want to miss. “Tell me about it.”

And she tells me about it, and it’s the most I’ve ever heard her talk without stopping. She tells me she could do the work she loves and blend it with her faith. That she wouldn’t have to keep the two halves separate anymore, the therapist and the woman who found God, that she could just be both, in one building, on purpose. She tells me she’s a little scared of it.

“But I keep thinking about this year,” she says. “About how every single thing that’s changed my life is a thing I was too scared to do and did anyway. Church. You. All of it. And here’s this door, and it’s the exact thing I didn’t even know I wanted, which is to do my work in the middle of the people instead of behind glass. And I think I’d be an idiot to walk past it a fourth time.”

I’m quiet for a second, because I’m grinning too hard to talk, and because I’m thinking about the woman who sat across a coffee shop table six months ago and told me she’d built a whole life that couldn’t disappoint her so no one could ever get close enough to try.

“Apply,” I say. “Tonight. Before you talk yourself out of it.”

“You think so?”

“I think you should apply tonight and let me take you to celebrate when you get it.”

“When I get it,” she corrects.

“I’m confident you’ll get it.”

We hang up, and I sit at my kitchen table with the phone in my hand. She’s building a future. So am I. We’re building the same one from two different houses, and she has no idea it won’t be much longer till it is one.

I let myself sit in that a minute. Then I stop stalling, because there’s a thing I’ve been putting off for three days, and it’s the scariest phone call of my life.

Here’s a thing about me. I will run into a building that is actively on fire. I’ve done it, more than once, on purpose, for strangers, and it doesn’t make my hands shake.

Calling Olivia’s father makes my hands shake.

I’ve never met the man. I know a handful of things about him, all of them from her, most delivered in that flat, careful voice she uses for her family, the one that says the topic is fine, everything’s fine, we’re all fine.

I know he lives in Houston. I know he has a job with a title and a dining room they use for holidays and important announcements.

I know he loves her.

I’ve decided it’s true even though Olivia would never say it in those words, because you don’t turn out to be Olivia, careful and kind and loyal to the bone, if nobody ever loved you. They just love her from a distance and behind cloth napkins, in a house with the heat set a few degrees too low, and I’ve spent enough time in the warm loud opposite of that to understand exactly what she grew up hungry for.

Which is the whole reason I have to make this call the old-fashioned way. I could skip it. Plenty of guys do. But I keep thinking about a woman who never once had somebody show up for her the right way, in the right order, on purpose. And I decided a long time ago that I’d be the man who does things right for Olivia, even the parts she’d tell me not to bother with. Especially those.

So I sit at my kitchen table with Bo at school and Dottie out, and I take a breath, and I hit call.

It rings twice.

“Hello, this is Jim.”

“Hi, Jim. This is Luke. Luke Baker, I’m⁠—“

“Dating my daughter Olivia.” His voice is level, unhurried, a man used to being the one who finishes sentences. “I know who you are, son.”

That throws me. “Yes, sir.” I clear my throat and go for the speech I practiced, the respectful one that opens with asking for a meeting. “I was hoping to plan a trip down to Houston. To meet you and your wife. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about, and I’d rather do it face to face.”

The line is silent a moment.

“Luke. If you’re calling to ask my blessing to propose to my daughter, you have it. You don’t need to drive to Houston for that.”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

“We’ve heard nothing but good things,” he goes on, in the same even, matter-of-fact tone, and it takes me a second to understand that this is Jim being warm, that this is the temperature the man runs at, and that under the flatness he means every word. “For months now. She doesn’t say a lot, our Olivia, never has. But she’s happy. Her mother and I noticed it at Christmas, before she told us a thing. We figured there was a reason, and then the reason turned out to have a name and a son and a whole church, and we’ve been waiting, if I’m honest, for this exact phone call.”

“I—” I have to stop and get my voice under control, which is not where I expected this call to go. “Thank you, sir. I love her. I want you to know that, and I don’t have a lot, but everything I do have, she’s already in the middle of it. And I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure she never has to wonder if somebody’s going to stay.”

“We’ll come up to celebrate. You have my word.” A rustle of papers, a man always near his work. “It’s a busy season, her mother and I are both buried through the spring, but we’ll be there. We’ll come meet you properly and do it right.” A beat. “You’ll take care of her.”