Chapter 36
Harper
I’ve been home for forty minutes, and I’ve rearranged the throw pillows on my couch three times.
This is a known symptom. I know what it means. I do it when my brain is moving faster than my ability to process what it’s moving about, and right now it is moving very, very fast about something I am not ready to name out loud in my own apartment with no one watching.
I wanted you to come.
I said that. To Micah. With full eye contact and absolutely no strategic reason attached to it. Then, I bolted. Left him there in the parking lot after lunch.
I move the pillow on the left two inches to the right.
It doesn’t help.
I go to the kitchen. Fill a glass of water I don’t drink. Stand at the counter staring at the fruit bowl—still empty, still waiting on fruit I keep meaning to buy—and try to do something useful with the feeling currently occupying my entire chest.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
I look at the screen the way you look at something you’re not sure is safe.
Collin.
I pick it up slowly.
Collin
I broke up with Jessica. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I miss you, Harper. Can we get coffee this week? I think I made a mistake.
I read it once.
I set the phone face-down on the counter.
I pick it back up and read it again, waiting for the feeling.
The flutter, the spike, the complicated rush of vindication that I would have expected—two months ago, even two weeks ago—to hit me somewhere around the word mistake.
I built an entire architecture around this moment.
A dress, a gala, a fake boyfriend, a performance sustained across weeks of dinners and events and carefully managed impressions.
All of it pointed here, toward exactly this message, this confirmation that he saw what he let go.
I feel nothing.
That’s not quite right. I feel something. But it isn’t about Collin.
I set the phone down again, and this time I leave it.
I make it to the living room. The throw pillows are in slightly wrong configurations from my earlier intervention.
I look at them for a moment and then I look at my Bible on the coffee table and my journal beside it—the brown leather one with the cracked spine, the one Micah gave me—and then I do the only thing that makes any sense.
I sit down on the floor.
Not a composed, folded, presentable sit. Cross-legged on the rug with my back against the couch, in my going-out top and jeans from today, and I close my eyes.
“Okay,” I say. Out loud, because apparently that’s where we are. “I don’t know how to start this.”
Silence. The apartment hum. A car passing outside.
“I’ve been pretending for so long I don’t know what’s real anymore.” The words come out rough, slower than I expect. “I started all of this to get Collin back. I didn’t ask You. I didn’t think to ask You. I just…grabbed the wheel, made a plan, and told myself it would work out.”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
“And now he texted me and it’s exactly what I thought I wanted and I feel absolutely nothing.
Except—” My voice breaks slightly on the word, which is embarrassing and also apparently unavoidable.
“Except I can’t stop thinking about a man who went to three space camps and has a ferret named Biscuit and remembered my coffee order and sat across a vinyl booth with me tonight while I told him things I’ve never told anyone. And I don’t know what to do with that.”
I drop my hands. The ceiling is neutral about all of this.
“I don’t know how to want something I didn’t plan for,” I admit.
“I don’t know how to trust something I can’t see the end of.
I’ve been performing faith the same way I’ve been performing everything else—doing all the right things so nobody looks too closely at what’s underneath.
And I’m tired.” I exhale slowly. “I am so tired of it.”
The quiet settles differently after that. Not empty. Just still.
“I don’t know how to let You in,” I say.
“But I think…I think I want to try. Actually try. Not the streak version.” I pick up the journal from the coffee table and hold it without opening it, just the weight of it in my hands.
The inscription inside the cover, which I have read enough times I could recite it.
May this be a space where you can be honest with God, yourself, and the journey ahead.
“I’m trying,” I say. “That’s all I’ve got right now. I’m trying.”
It isn’t dramatic. No lightning, no sudden warmth, no audible answer.
Just the particular peace of having put something down that’s been too heavy to carry alone, and the apartment around me, and the journal in my hands, and somewhere across the city a man who asked me why I invited him tonight and actually waited for the real answer.
I pick up my phone.
I don’t text Collin back.
I open my contacts instead, scroll to the group chat.
Harper
Are y’all free tomorrow? I need to talk. And possibly shop.
Three dots appear almost immediately.
Ivy
Don’t you have work?
Harper
It’s a bad weather makeup day we didn’t use. So no school.
Ivy
Gotcha. I’m open!
Olivia
I only have one client in the morning. Brunch first then we’ll drag you to every store in the Galleria until you feel better.
Ivy
Also Gray and Micah are playing at The Parish tomorrow night. Y’all wanna come?
I stare at that last line for a long moment.
Olivia
Sure, why not.
Harper
I guess.
I set the phone down, pick up the journal, and open it to the first blank page.
I start writing.
Brunch is Ivy’s idea of emotional triage, which means we’re at a table by the window at her favorite spot in Uptown with overpriced lattes and a bread basket that appears before we’ve even ordered, and she’s watching me with the particular expression she reserves for situations she has already diagnosed.
“Talk,” she says.
So I do.
I tell them about the parking lot. The question Micah asked.
What I said back and the way I just—bolted, because apparently my response to any genuine emotion is to locate the nearest exit and take it at speed.
I tell them about the Collin text. I tell them about sitting on my floor and praying, which I say quickly and sideways because I’m still figuring out how to talk about that part without it feeling fragile, like something that might break if I handle it wrong.
When I finish, the bread basket is significantly emptier.
Ivy is crying. Quietly, controlled, dabbing under her eye with a napkin. “Sorry, I’m just so proud of you, Harp.”
“You’re crying because I prayed on my floor?”
“I’m crying because you prayed on your floor. Do you understand how long I’ve been—” She fans her face. “Never mind. Keep going.”
“That’s it,” I say. “That’s the whole thing.”
“The whole thing,” Olivia repeats, in the specific tone she uses when she wants me to hear how wrong I am. She has her coffee cup in both hands, legs crossed, the picture of calm. Olivia always looks like she’s taking notes, even when she isn’t.
“So you’ve realized you have genuine feelings for Micah, you’ve had your first honest conversation with God in what sounds like years, and your response is to call it ‘the whole thing’ like it’s a parking ticket.”
“Olivia.”
“I’m just naming what I’m observing.”
“That’s literally what you always say.”
“Because it’s literally always what I’m doing.” She sets her cup down. “So, tell him.”
I pick at the edge of my napkin. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s not, actually. You feel something, he probably feels something, you tell each other, that’s communication, it’s a straightforward process that humans have been doing for ages.”
“It started as a fake arrangement,” I say. “I recruited him to pretend to be my boyfriend so my ex would be jealous. That’s the foundation we’re working with.”
Olivia considers this. “Okay, that complicates communication slightly.”
“Thank you.”
“But it doesn’t make it impossible. It just means the conversation starts one step earlier.”
Ivy, who has successfully stopped crying and is now dismantling a piece of sourdough with the calm focus of someone who has been waiting to say something for a while, looks up. “He’s going to be at the show tonight.”
“I know.”
“You should come.”
“I was already going to come, Ivy.”
“Good.” She puts her sourdough down. “And when you see him, you don’t have to say anything enormous. You just say you want to try dating for real.”
The words land the way they always do when they are true.
“Working on it,” I say.
“I know you are.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand once. “That’s the whole point.”
Olivia picks up her latte. “For what it’s worth, the fact that you prayed last night is not a small thing, Harper. That’s not nothing. That’s you actually showing up instead of just going through the motions.”
I look out the window at the street. “It felt like nothing. I don’t even know if I did it right.”
“You did it,” Olivia says simply. “That’s what right looks like at the beginning.”
We shop for three hours, which is exactly the amount of time it takes for Ivy to develop opinions about every piece of clothing I hold up and Olivia to evaluate each one with the measured neutrality of someone on a panel.
I find a top I like on the second floor of a store we almost didn’t go into, deep burgundy, soft fabric that looks effortless and takes six minutes to find the right earrings for.
“That one,” Ivy says, the second I hold it up.
“You said that about the last three.”
“I meant it every time. I mean it more now.” She tilts her head. “Wear it tonight.”
Olivia, who has been holding a jacket she has looked at from four angles without committing to, finally hangs it back on the rack. “I’m not buying anything today. I’m in a very specific relationship with my budget right now, and retail therapy is not covered.”
“Chris mentioned there might be a few more people coming. From Gray’s old college group.” A pause that has too much space in it. “Apparently James will be there.”
Olivia’s expression doesn’t change. This is a skill she has developed professionally and personally, the ability to keep her face exactly where she wants it. “That’s fine.”
“He asked about you.”
“People ask about things all the time. I ask about things. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Olivia—”
“I have seventeen active clients, a waiting list, and a lease renewal coming up.” She adjusts the strap on her bag with complete composure. “I am not in a position to be asked about.”
Ivy looks at me. I look at Ivy. We do the silent conversation.
“Noted,” Ivy says pleasantly, and drops it.
For now.
I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror at six-fifteen with the burgundy top on and my hair doing something that required three attempts and is still only cooperating at about sixty percent.
The thing I’m trying not to think about is that tonight I get to see Micah. I’m about to walk into a room where he’ll be on a stage with a guitar, and I will have to exist somewhere in his line of sight and act like a functional person.
I can do that.
I put my mascara on.
I can absolutely do that.
I don’t actually want to act anymore. That’s what Sunday night on the floor was about, in the end. Not just Micah. Not just Collin. The whole pattern, the whole exhausting architecture of performing the right version of myself for whoever’s watching. I’m tired of it.
But knowing a thing and doing a thing are different, and right now I’m standing in my bathroom trying to make my hair cooperate while every nerve in my body is running a quiet rehearsal of what it might look like to just be honest.
My phone lights up on the counter.
Ivy
We’re outside. Ready?
I look at my reflection one more time, grab my jacket off the chair and head for the door.