Chapter 33
Harper
“Where are we going?” I ask as Micah opens the passenger door of his truck.
“You’ll see.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Correct.”
I narrow my eyes at him, but I get in anyway.
Honestly, I don’t have a lot of room to argue.
My stomach growled three times during cleanup—loud enough that Anna heard it from across the room and gave me a look—and when Micah asked if I’d eaten lunch, the answer was technically no but I had half a granola bar around two o’clock which I feel should count for something.
He disagreed.
So now I’m in his truck at eight o’clock on a Friday night, still in my yellow dress, hair probably doing something unhinged, being driven to an undisclosed location by a man who remembered my coffee order and brought me a devotional and spent his entire Friday evening looking at kindergarten art.
I stare out the window.
Don’t make it weird, I tell myself. It’s not weird. This is just what Micah does. He’s a helper. It’s his whole thing. You are a friend in need of a meal and he is a friend with a truck. This is completely normal.
My stomach growls again.
Okay. Moving on.
He drives us through downtown, past all the chain restaurants, past the trendy spots I’ve eaten at approximately a thousand times, and then pulls into a parking lot in front of a tiny, unassuming building with a hand-painted sign that reads Angelo’s.
“What is this?”
“My favorite restaurant in Dallas.” He cuts the engine and looks at me. “Best Italian food you’ll ever have. I promise.”
We walk inside, and it’s small and warm and smells like garlic and fresh bread and something that makes my stomach do an immediate, embarrassing sound of approval.
Red-and-white checkered tablecloths. Vintage photos on the walls.
And behind the counter, an older man who spots Micah and looks genuinely overjoyed about it.
“Micah! My boy!”
“Angelo.” Micah grins. “I know, I know. It’s been too long.”
“You work too much.” Angelo comes around the counter and pulls him into a hug like he’s a returning soldier. Then he spots me, and his entire face rearranges itself into something delighted. “And who is this beautiful girl?”
“This is Harper,” Micah says. “She’s—” A half-second pause. “A friend. She’s had a long day and she needs feeding.”
“Then you are in the right place.” Angelo waves us toward a corner table like he’s been expecting us. Micah pulls out my chair before I can grab it, and Angelo nods approvingly. “Such a gentleman.”
“Don’t encourage him,” I say.
Angelo laughs and disappears into the kitchen.
I look around the table. Then at Micah. “He didn’t give us menus.”
“Nope.”
“Are we supposed to...ask for them?”
“We’re not getting menus, Harper.”
I stare at him. “So how do we order?”
“We don’t.”
“Micah.”
“Angelo knows what to make.” He says it with the complete calm of a man who has fully surrendered control of this situation and made peace with it. “You just trust him.”
“That’s not how restaurants work.”
“This one does.”
“What if I’m allergic to something?”
“Are you allergic to something?”
“Not currently. But I’d like the option to be.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Harper.”
“Micah.”
“Have you smelled this place?”
I pause. Garlic. Fresh bread. Something with herbs that I cannot identify but would like to be closer to. “Yes.”
“Then trust the process.”
I lean back in my chair and cross my arms. “I just want it on record that I had concerns.”
“Noted.” He adjusts his glasses. “For what it’s worth, in four years Angelo has never once made me something I didn’t love.”
“Fine.” I unfold my napkin with what I feel is appropriate skepticism. “But if he brings out something weird, I’m blaming you.”
“Completely fair.”
Angelo returns with bread and water and launches into a breathless explanation of what he’s making us. I catch maybe sixty percent of it—fresh pasta, his grandmother’s sauce, something about a specific imported cheese—before he’s gone again.
Micah leans back in his chair, completely at ease, and I’m struck again by how he does that. How he just settles into a room. No fidgeting, no scanning, no wondering if he’s in the right seat. Just present.
I have never once in my life felt present. My brain is usually about four topics ahead of wherever I actually am.
Right now it’s cycling through: the showcase, whether I remembered to tell Anna where the extra tablecloths go, the devotional Micah gave me that’s currently sitting in my bag, the way Ethan announced to the entire kindergarten wing that Micah was my boyfriend with the confidence of a tiny CEO, and also what is happening to my hair right now because I can feel it doing something and I don’t have a mirror.
“So,” Micah looks at me. “How are you feeling? Now that it’s over?”
I tear off a piece of bread. “Exhausted. Relieved. Really proud of my kids.” I pause. “Also, I think I’m getting a second wind, which is genuinely inconvenient because I should be tired.”
“That tracks.”
“Classic ADHD. My body doesn’t get the memo until about an hour after everyone else’s.”
He smiles. “Your kids were incredible tonight.”
“They really were.” I feel the warmth of it settle in my chest—that particular feeling that makes every chaotic, glitter-covered, superglue-adjacent moment worth it. “Seeing their faces when their parents walked in. That’s the whole job, right there.”
“You’re great at what you do.”
“You said that already.”
“Because it’s still true.” He says it simply, with no performance behind it. “Watching you tonight—with your kids, with their parents—you’re in your element, Harper. It’s something.”
My throat does a traitorous tightening thing. “Stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Being so nice to me. I don’t know what to do with it.”
He leans forward slightly, and his expression shifts into something that is unfairly sincere. “You deserve people being nice to you. You know that, right?”
I look down at my bread and change the subject.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Random.”
“I’m a random person. Humor me.”
He thinks for a second. “I wanted to be an astronaut.”
I nearly inhale my water. “I’m sorry?”
“Astronaut. NASA. The whole thing. Had it completely mapped out—engineering degree, pilot training—”
“Please tell me there’s more.”
“Three summers at space camp.”
I put my hands flat on the table. “Micah Sanders went to space camp.”
“Three times.”
“What happened?”
“Turns out I’m terrified of heights.”
The laugh that comes out of me is not cute or dignified. It is full and loud, and I don’t even care. “You wanted to go to space and you’re afraid of heights?”
“I was twelve. The logic wasn’t fully developed.”
“So then what—you just pivoted to children’s pastor?”
“Close enough.” He grins. “Still trying to reach for the stars. Just differently.”
I shake my head. “You’re such a dork.”
“You like it.”
“I really do.”
The words are out before I can review them, and something flickers across his face—quick and soft and gone before I can name it.
“Yeah?” he says quietly.
“Yeah.”
We look at each other for a beat too long.
And that’s when it happens. I panic.
I clear my throat. “Is this a date?”
He blinks. “What?”
“This. Us. Dinner.” I gesture vaguely at the checkered tablecloth, the candle, Angelo’s general romantic-Italian-restaurant energy. “It feels like a date.”
Something moves across his face. Complicated and fast, like he’s doing math he didn’t expect to have to do tonight.
Then he’s quiet.
Not a normal quiet. A considered one. The kind where you can almost see someone choosing their words carefully, stacking them up and checking them before letting them out.
He leans back. And when he finally speaks, it comes out just a little too smooth. Just a little too easy.
“No, Harper. This is just a friend making sure a friend eats something other than showcase cupcake leftovers.” He motions to me
“Right.” I force a laugh. “Of course. Friends.”
“Friends,” he repeats.
And I smile, because that’s what you do, and I file away the fact that it took him three full seconds to say it — rehearsed and deliberate, like he’d already written that answer out somewhere and just had to find it.
I don’t read into it.
I’m not going to read into it.
Friends.
Fine. That’s fine. That is the correct and reasonable answer, and I am a reasonable person who is totally fine.
Because honestly—why would he want to date me?
Micah is steady and grounded, and has his whole life organized in a way that suggests he has never once made an impulsive decision based on a feeling he hadn’t fully thought through.
And I am a woman who forgot to eat lunch, whose kindergarteners had to be stopped from putting glitter in the classroom hamster’s cage this week, and who agreed to a fake dating scheme as a legitimate life strategy.
We are not the same.
He would never actually want this—want me, the real version, not the showcase version in the yellow dress. The version that loses her keys twice a week and hyper-focuses on weird random topics at eleven p.m. and cries at dog food commercials.
He deserves someone steady. Someone who matches him.
And I am many wonderful things, but steady has never been one of them.
“You bring her back, yes?” Angelo says, gripping Micah’s arm. “She is good for you.”
“I’ll try,” Micah says.
“Don’t try. Do.”
Angelo hugs us both with the intensity of a man sending people off to war, and then we’re back in the truck.
Micah was right. Angelo absolutely knows what he’s doing.
He’d brought out two bowls of pasta—wide, silky ribbons in a sauce that tasted like it had been simmering since sometime last Tuesday, topped with fresh parmesan and herbs I couldn’t name but fully intended to think about later.
Garlic bread that should not have been as good as it was.
A small side salad that I ate mostly out of obligation before returning to the pasta with my full attention.
The conversation had been easy but minimal, mostly because I was stuffing my face. At one point he’d just watched me eat with this expression that was somewhere between amused and satisfied, like a man who had made a correct decision and knew it.
I didn’t even have the energy to be embarrassed about it.
By the time Angelo cleared our plates, I was so full I briefly considered just living at this corner table forever.
When Micah pulls into the school parking lot—my car exactly where I left it, alone under a single light—he puts the truck in park but leaves the engine running.
I unbuckle my seatbelt. Then I stop. “Micah?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not just a good fake boyfriend.” I look at him. “You’re a genuinely good person. And I’m really glad you’re in my life.”
Something moves through his jaw—a tightening, quick and controlled. He nods. “Me too, Harper.”
I get out of the truck.
I walk to my car, and I can feel him watching until I’m safely inside and my engine turns over.
He waits until I pull out first.
Of course he does.
On the drive home, I can’t stop thinking about the hesitation.
Five seconds of thought. Three seconds of silence. Then — just friends.
And even that’s a stretch, honestly. Micah and I were never friends. We bickered constantly. He got on my nerves every time he simply took a breath in my general direction.
And now I’m sitting here wishing he’d said yes, it’s a date.
“Lord, I am so confused!” I smack the steering wheel. “Why am I catching feelings for a guy who doesn’t even like me like that? Why can I not just be content with Collin — who I actually wanted back in the first place?”
No answer. Just Dallas at night sliding past my windows.
I pull into my parking lot, shut the engine off, and sit there staring at my building.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say finally, quieter. “I don’t even know what to ask you. I just...”
I shake my head.
“I don’t know.”