Chapter 37
Micah
At church, I’m the children’s ministry director. Responsible. Organized. The guy who color-codes his volunteer schedule and brings backup markers to craft night. The guy parents’ trust with their kids and their chaos and their questions about whether Jesus liked dinosaurs.
Here, at this dive bar on a Monday night, I’m just the guy with the guitar who hasn’t figured out a better way to spend a Monday.
“You’re tuning it too tight,” Gray says, not looking up from his own guitar.
“I’m tuning it correctly.” I adjust the G string. “These are two very different things.”
“Sounds like you’re strangling it.”
“Sounds like you should mind your own instrument.”
Chris, behind the kit running a lazy warmup beat, snorts loud enough to be heard over both of us. “Every time. Every single time.”
Gray grins. I grin. This is fine. This is what Monday nights look like when the three of us drag ourselves out of our respective corners of responsible adulthood and remember we used to do this for fun.
The venue is small—more pizza counter than stage, honestly.
A handful of mismatched tables, string lights strung along exposed brick, a stage that’s really just a corner of the room with better acoustics and a modest PA system someone’s cousin clearly installed with good intentions and limited expertise.
It smells like garlic and old wood and something faintly sweet from whatever they were baking earlier.
I love it unreasonably. There’s something about a room that doesn’t try too hard that I’ve always found more honest than places that do.
“Song order?” Gray asks, finally looking up.
I pull the set list from my back pocket.
We spent exactly fourteen minutes putting it together via text yesterday, which is roughly twelve more than usual.
It starts with a Relient K deep cut, wanders into some early Switchfoot, a couple of original worship songs we’re telling ourselves we’re playing for fun and not because Gray literally cannot stop writing music even when he tries, and ends with a chaotic detour into some mid-2000s emo that Chris lobbied for aggressively and we caved on immediately.
“Looks good,” Gray says, handing it back.
I’m mid-chord checking when the door opens.
I look up.
Ivy first, hair down, laughing at something on her phone. Olivia beside her, already scanning the room with that calm, assessing quality she carries everywhere, the kind of attentiveness that makes you feel like she’s cataloguing you whether she means to or not.
And then Harper.
Harper, in jeans and a jean jacket over a burgundy top with her red hair loose, who steps through the door last and looks up at exactly the wrong moment.
Or the right one, depending on how you’re keeping score, which I’m not. Obviously.
Our eyes meet across the room.
I smile. Because that’s what normal people do when they see a friend. A normal friend. Someone they’re friends with in a completely standard, uncomplicated way. I raise my hand in a small wave.
She looks—breathless. For about half a second. And then she nods, that sharp little dip of her chin, and looks away and lets Ivy steer her toward a table two rows back from the stage.
I turn back to my guitar.
“You good?” Gray asks, casually, not looking at me.
“Great,” I say. “Let’s play.”
Between songs, the bar fills in a little more. A few people pull chairs around. Someone orders the garlic knots and the smell hits with such force that three different tables seem to perk up in unison.
I’m enjoying myself. I genuinely am.
Except.
I’m also hyperaware of exactly where Harper is sitting in this room.
Two tables back, slightly left of center.
She’s laughing at something Olivia said, her head tipped back slightly.
Her jean jacket is off now, draped over the back of her chair.
She’s got her elbows on the table, and she’s leaning in toward Olivia’s voice.
She hasn’t looked at the stage in approximately four minutes.
Not that I’m tracking this.
Gray leans into the mic for the next song, that easy performance smile sliding into place. “This one’s about a guy,” he says, “who took way too long to figure out something pretty obvious.”
Then he starts playing, and I recognize the chord progression immediately, and I nearly close my eyes because the lyrics are about a guy watching a girl across a room and understanding, with sudden, inconvenient clarity, that he has completely miscalculated his feelings.
I keep my expression neutral through main strength of character.
I also, at no point, look at Harper.
This is a significant personal achievement and I feel it deserves recognition.
We cycle through the set. The Switchfoot songs land well.
The worship ones always have this moment, halfway through, where the energy in the room shifts—not everyone, not even most people, but a few.
A couple near the back who close their eyes for a verse.
A guy at the bar who sets down his drink and just listens.
It’s quiet and strange and good, the way those moments always are.
Like dropping something true into a noisy room and watching it ripple outward without asking permission.
The emo detour in the final slot causes exactly the amount of chaos Chris hoped for, which is significant.
Through all of it, song by song, I am aware of her. Aware that the last time I saw her, she bolted. That things were getting real, and she left.
I play the last chord of the set, and Gray says something charming into the mic about garlic knots, and the table up front cheers.
Dinner is loud and comfortable in the way that only happens when everyone at the table has known each other long enough that silence isn’t weird and interrupting each other mid-sentence is a love language.
Two long rectangular tables shoved together, paper plates, pizza, a pitcher of Mountain Dew that Chris requested unironically.
Gray and Ivy are in the middle of the table, which means they’re at the center of everything, which is where they always end up without trying.
Ivy’s eating carefully around the peppers on her slice and Gray keeps moving them to his plate without her asking, without even interrupting the conversation.
I notice this and try not to let it make me feel anything.
Olivia is telling a story about a situation at work and it’s the kind of story that gets funnier the further in you get, building toward something that makes Marcus inhale his drink at the punchline.
Harper laughs so hard she has to set down her cup.
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
“Every word,” Olivia says, entirely composed.
“There is no way that’s how it ended.”
“It ended exactly like that.”
“That cannot be legal.”
“Legally ambiguous,” Olivia says. “Which is its own category.”
Ivy is already laughing again, one hand on her stomach. Gray watches her laugh, and there it is again—that thing in his expression I have long since stopped pretending I don’t see. Like she is genuinely, constantly, the most interesting thing in any room.
I take a long sip of my drink and look at the ceiling for a second.
I’m at one end of the table. Harper is at the other.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter and then proceed to find my eyes drifting to that end of the table with a frequency that is, objectively, embarrassing.
She’s talking to Olivia. Laughing at something that makes her tip her head back slightly.
Then, as if she feels it, she looks up.
Directly at me.
I don’t look away.
She doesn’t either.
There’s this strange, suspended moment where we’re just looking at each other across this long, chaotic, noisy table, and I genuinely don’t know what’s happening in her head.
Her expression is unreadable in a way it rarely is, Harper is usually broadcasting something, even when she thinks she’s not, but right now it’s just quiet, and direct, and I feel it somewhere in my sternum.
She blinks first and looks back down at her plate.
But then she looks up again almost immediately, like she can’t quite help it.
I take a very composed sip of my drink.
She looks back down.
This happens four more times over the next fifteen minutes. Look. Look back. Look away. Repeat. It is excruciating in a way that is also somehow sort of funny, or would be funny in maybe three to five years when I have sufficient emotional distance to find it amusing.
Gray catches the third or fourth round of it and I watch him bite down on a grin from across the table. He says absolutely nothing. It’s the most gracious thing he’s done for me in recent memory.
Olivia, however, is looking at me with an expression of quiet, forensic interest that I find significantly less comfortable.
I’m mid-sentence talking to Marcus when I see Harper lean toward Ivy.
Whisper something. Olivia glances over. The two of them do a brief, wordless exchange that has the particular quality of a conversation conducted entirely in expressions, the kind of shorthand that only develops after years of friendship.
Then Harper reaches for her jacket. And her purse.
I watch her stand up.
And then she’s weaving through the chairs toward the door, and the whole thing takes about thirty seconds, and then she’s gone.
I’m pushing back from the table before I’ve made any conscious decision to do so.
“Where are you going?” Gray grabs my arm, half-laughing, half-something else. His eyes go to the door and back to me, and I can see him working to keep his face completely neutral, which he is only partially succeeding at.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Completely honest. I genuinely don’t know. I just know that Harper Mitchell has walked out of a room and my body has apparently decided that’s information requiring a response.
Gray’s hand drops. He shakes his head slowly, but there’s something in his expression that isn’t quite exasperation.
I head for the door.
Outside, the air is cooler than inside—sharp with the particular edge of late April after dark, the kind of cool that feels less like temperature and more like a reminder that the night is still happening out here regardless of what goes on in that room.
She hasn’t made it to her car yet. She’s standing near the edge of the parking lot with her jacket half on, not quite at her car, and she turns when she hears the door.
The amber streetlights catch her hair, the red of it going warm and gold, and for a second we just look at each other, and I don’t have a single prepared sentence for this moment because I didn’t plan to be in this moment.
I’m not sure what I planned. Just that I couldn’t stay at that table.
I move toward her. She watches me.
And then I step in front of her, between her and her car, close enough that she has to stop.
She does.
Neither of us says anything.
She looks up at me. I look down at her. The string lights from the bar window throw just enough light out here to see by, warm and low, and the night is quiet in the particular way that means we are the only two people in it right now.
Her chin lifts slightly, the way it does when she’s trying to hold something together, and her lips part like she’s about to say something and then doesn’t.
I don’t say anything either.
There’s no version of what I want to say that comes out right. Everything true feels like too much. Everything safe feels like a lie. So I just stay where I am, and she stays where she is, and neither of us moves.
She breathes in. I watch her eyes go soft and then complicated, the way they do when she’s processing something she didn’t expect.
She looks down briefly. Then back up. And I think she might be about to say something real, something past the deflection, something I would actually be allowed to hold onto.
Her phone rings.
The sound is jarring and immediate and wrong, cutting through whatever the air between us was building toward. She flinches, just barely. Her hand moves to her jacket pocket automatically, a reflex, pulling the screen out into the amber light.
She looks at it.
I watch her face change.
She raises her eyes to mine.
And I see it. The apology. The conflict.
The impossibility of whatever she’s working through that she has not let me anywhere near, and I know, with the kind of certainty that settles in the chest rather than the head, that I am looking at the shape of something I am not going to be able to fix tonight.
“Harper.” My voice comes out lower than I intended. Rougher. “Please.”
She shakes her head.
It’s small. Barely anything. But it lands with the weight of something much larger, and she already knows it, I can see that she knows it, and she is doing it anyway.
She steps around me. Walks to her car. The door opens and closes and the engine turns over in the dark, and the headlights sweep a wide arc across the lot as she pulls out.
I stand there until the taillights disappear.