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Luke!! They called…I have an interview for the job next week.

I applied last night like you said and they already called and I have an INTERVIEW!!

I’m going to throw up. In a good way. Is that a thing?

Luke

I never had a single doubt. Proud of you.

I love you.

Olivia

I love you too.

I set the phone down.

Saturday I get to stop keeping the biggest secret of my life.

I can’t wait.

Chapter 37

Olivia

Six months ago today, I sat in the third row at church and heard a man in dark jeans dare a room full of strangers to show up for six months and see what God did.

I did the math in the car afterward, the way I do everything. Six months from that Sunday landed on the last Saturday in March. I remember thinking it sounded like a sentence. Something to serve.

It’s now the last Saturday in March.

I served it. Every Sunday, tired or terrified, I showed up, until somewhere around month two it stopped being a thing I made myself do and became a part of my routine.

Six months. I did the whole six months.

And here’s the thing Pastor Jack didn’t put on the flyer. He said show up for six months and see what God does. He did not mention that I’d look up at the end of the sentence and not recognize the life I was standing in, because it was so much better than the one I’d built to keep myself safe.

I’m thinking about all of this because I’m standing in Luke’s kitchen on the last Saturday in March, chopping onions for a dinner nobody asked me to make, and I am so content it’s almost suspicious.

And something is off tonight.

It started this afternoon, actually, with Harper. She called me for no reason, which is not unusual, Harper calls me for no reason the way other people breathe, but she was strange on it. Too casual. She asked me three times what I was doing tonight, and when I said dinner at Luke’s she made a sound like a kettle and covered it with a cough and changed the subject to a candle she bought from Lawson Light Candle Co. in downtown Ashen Mills.

I moved on, because Harper runs at a frequency I can’t always decode and it’s usually nothing.

And now Bo is vibrating. Not his usual chaos. A specific, contained vibrating, like a kid sitting on a secret too big for him, which he is physically incapable of doing, and yet he’s doing it, badly. He keeps looking at me and then looking away fast. Twice he’s started to say something and Dottie has said his name in a low warning voice I’ve never heard her use.

Dottie herself has been strange. She keeps finding reasons to touch my shoulder when she passes.

And Luke. Luke has been to the bathroom four times in an hour and keeps patting his pocket like he’s checking for his keys, and he’s laughed too hard at two things that weren’t funny, and the man who reads every room he walks into can’t seem to hold my eyes for longer than a second tonight.

I decide the strangeness is nothing, and I go back to my onions, and I let myself just be happy in a warm kitchen with my people.

This used to be too much for me, the chaotic table. That’s the thing I keep marveling at. And now I’m in the middle of the noise, holding my own, next to a handsome firefighter with a mustache, wearing my favorite hat backward, and it feels like home.

Bo makes it through approximately half the meal before he breaks.

“So after dinner,” he announces, to his plate, at a volume clearly rehearsed to sound casual and landing nowhere near it, “we should all go outside. To the backyard. For a reason.”