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I watch her go. She’s easy to track for a while, blonde hair, the Bible held against her chest that she never opened, that straight-backed way she carries herself like she’s balancing something. Then the crowd folds around her and she’s gone.

I put my hand on the top of Bo’s head. The same spot she patted, careful and unsure.

And I try not to think too hard about the look on her face when she found out about the two people who mean the most to me.

Lunch is leftovers, which Bo approves of because leftover pot roast is, in his professional opinion, better the second day.

Dottie sets a plate in front of him and one in front of me, then sits down with her own and folds her hands like she’s about to say grace.

“Lord, thank You for another Sunday together. Thank You for getting Luke home safe this week.” Her voice is easy, familiar, the same prayer with the edges worn smooth from years of practice. “And thank You for the lovely young woman we met this morning. Olivia. What a gift, to put such a beautiful girl right there in that hallway⁠—”

“Dottie.”

“—at exactly the right time. Amen.”

“Amen,” Bo says.

I don’t say amen. I say, “You cannot pray a woman into my life.”

“I can pray about whatever I like.” She unfolds her napkin, serene as a nun. “God and I have an understanding.”

“Can Olivia be my mom?” Bo says.

I choke on my coffee.

It goes down the wrong pipe entirely, and I spend a solid five seconds coughing into my napkin while my son watches me with mild scientific interest and my grandmother does absolutely nothing to help.

He asked it the way he asks whether we’re out of cereal. No buildup, no idea he just set off a small bomb over the pot roast. That’s Bo. The biggest questions come out of him flat and reasonable, because to him that’s what they are.

“Buddy.” I finally manage, setting the coffee down where it can’t hurt me. “You met her this morning.”

“I know.” He says it like that settles the matter rather than complicating it, and goes back to pushing his green beans into a neat pile. “But she’s nice. And you like her. You made the face.”

I feel my eyebrows climb. “I didn’t make a face.”

“You made the face.” He doesn’t even look up now. He’s found something more pressing on his plate.

“I don’t have a face.”

He just hums, a small, certain sound, a kid who’s already won and has moved on.

And underneath the coughing and the eyebrows and the whole ridiculous thing, it stops being funny, because my son just asked, out loud, plain as weather, for the one thing I’ve spent ten years being afraid to want for him.

Dottie is beaming now, not even pretending to hide it. She sets her fork down, folds her hands, and looks at me like the answer is obvious and she has got all afternoon to wait for me to catch up to it.

“It’s about time your father started dating again,” she tells Bo, like I’m not sitting right here. “I was beginning to think I’d have to do it for him.”

She’s looking at me the way she looks at a hand of cards she already knows she’s going to win.

“She seems lovely,” she says.

“She is.”

“And single.”

“Dottie.”

“I’m making conversation.”