Chapter 17 #2
“I don’t know if they know it yet, but from my scientific observations—basically, the way she gets just a tad flustered when he’s around or someone talks about him—there’s something happening.”
Was she right? Eli shook his head, shocked at how oblivious he was. They did laugh a lot at work, and had plenty of inside jokes, and…well, yes. They might like each other.
“Connor is a dental student. He’s temporary. He’s going back to Gainesville.” He glanced at Kate. “That couldn’t work.”
She rolled her eyes playfully. “Right, because we’re so opposed to long-distance relationships.”
He considered this news for a long moment, mulling over what he knew about Connor, his work ethic, his intelligence, his basic kindness.
Finally, he nodded. “He’s a good guy.”
“Excellent,” Kate agreed.
“I’ll have to be more observant,” he mused, looking up at the sky through the cypress branches. Then he turned to her. “But not today. Today is just about us. Thank you for planning this, for seeing how much we needed it, and for being you—my beautiful scientist.”
She smiled up at him. “I’m really looking forward to tonight,” she said. “A proper date with a dress.”
“You own a dress, Dr. Wylie?” he teased.
She jabbed him with her elbow. “Don’t push your luck or I’ll wear a lab coat.”
“That would work, too.”
The Edward Ball Dining Room appealed to every bone in Eli’s architect body.
The graceful arched windows framed in thick, glistening mahogany gave weight and grandeur to the space.
The coffered ceiling added dimension and drew the eye up.
Even the checked floor against the round backs of the chairs was a complementary detail that might be design, not structure, but it worked perfectly.
All around, candles flickered on white tablecloths, and a piano player in the lobby was working through a set of standards that were soft enough not to interrupt conversations but jazzy enough to lift the mood.
And his date most certainly didn’t wear a lab coat.
Kate sat across from him in a simple black dress that was all things elegant, attractive, and perfectly fitting for the atmosphere. Her hair was down, and she’d paid him the highest possible compliment by wearing her contacts and a light shimmer of makeup that made her look vibrant and so feminine.
“You’re doing it again,” she said with a lilt in her voice.
“Staring?”
“Yeah, kind of.” She touched her face self-consciously. “I can’t hide behind my glasses.”
“Never hide with me.” He leaned in to whisper, “You’re beautiful and I love being here with you.”
She blushed, which she almost never did, and picked up her after-dinner coffee to hide behind it.
They’d eaten well—filet mignon for him, the signature shrimp and grits for Kate because Southern food was mandatory—and the meal had been exactly what the evening required. Unhurried, warm, with conversation that never stalled because there was always more to say.
He took her hand across the table. Her fingers were warm from the coffee cup.
“Can I ask a serious question?” he asked.
Her eyes flickered as if bracing for something difficult. “That could be dangerous.”
“It’s not,” he assured her. “But I want to talk about something.”
Kate set her cup down, giving all her attention to what came next.
“What if we stopped thinking about this as temporary and started to explore options for…permanent?”
She looked almost relieved—and as though the question didn’t surprise her at all. Did that mean she’d been thinking the same thing? He hoped so.
“The house,” he continued. “Vivien, Crista, and I have been talking. We’re not selling. The trust transfers to us in November and we could make a fortune, but—”
“No one expects you to sell,” she said. “I mean, not from my side of the family, although we admittedly don’t have a say.
But you and Vivien have built the Summer House into a…
being. Does that make sense? It’s alive, that beautiful beach house.
Far more than a compound, I feel like the place is its own little world. ”
The compliment warmed him more than the coffee or the company.
“Thank you,” he said simply. “But a lot of that atmosphere is due to you and Tessa, and Peter. And Crista. The original summer kids.”
She smiled. “I think that’s true.”
“And our mothers seem pretty content up in the apartment.”
“You’re not going to get Jo Ellen back to Ithaca,” Kate said. “She’s already told me to put her house on the market and we will.”
He nodded. “Well, Tessa and Dusty are in Miramar. Peter’s in Crystal Beach.
Crista and Anthony bought the bungalow. Jonah’s settled in with Atlas, Meredith’s here to run Lakeside for the foreseeable future, and Vivien’s already looking for office space for her business.
The whole family is gravitating back to Destin. ”
“All but me,” Kate said.
He took a breath…and a baby step. “Could you see yourself here? Ever? After the kids finish school or…”
She fingered the polished spoon on the table, looking down, her great mind no doubt turning over all the pros and cons and data points.
He loved watching Kate think—the way her brow furrowed slightly, the way she pressed her lips together, the way she looked at a question from every angle before allowing herself to come to the most logical answer.
“My lab is closed, obviously,” she said slowly. “My grad students work remotely. Cornell doesn’t need me in person.”
“And Emma?”
“Emma would move here tomorrow if I said the word. After the school situation—the group chat, the team, all of it—I’m not sure I could send her back even if she wanted to go. A fresh start might be exactly what she needs.”
His heart lifted. “And Matt?”
She sighed. “Matt’s happy with Jeffrey and doesn’t have strong opinions. He’s an easy kid. I don’t mean that he’s weak—he’s not. But he’s so independent and grounded. He doesn’t need me the way Emma does at the moment. But I’d miss him. I’d miss him terribly.”
“You could divide your time,” he suggested. “Summers and holidays here, stretches in Ithaca with Matt. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
She looked at him across the candlelight with an expression he hadn’t seen before—open, unguarded, almost brave.
“Yes,” she said.
His heart stopped. “Yes?”
“Maybe. Probably. Yes, I could see it.” She held up a hand. “Not tomorrow. Not without a plan. But the idea of being here—near you, part of the house, near my mom and Tessa—it doesn’t scare me the way it would have a month ago. It actually sounds like…what I want. What I might want.”
He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss against her knuckles, not trusting his voice for a moment.
“If we solve distance,” he said carefully, “that just leaves—”
“Faith.” She finished it for him, the word floating to the table like an autumn leaf.
He sighed. “Yeah, that.”
She leaned forward, gripping his hand tighter. “You have to know this, Eli. I don’t hate your faith. I recognize that it is a part of you.”
It was all of him, but he swallowed that thought and let her continue.
“But I worry that it will mean I’m always a source of disappointment to you.”
“You couldn’t disappoint me,” he insisted.
She lifted a dubious brow. “Sometimes, I see something in you. Like you think you wish I would say or see or be something different than I am. That I would approach the world through your lens, and not mine.”
Was that the “something” he’d been trying to ignore?
“I don’t know about that, Kate.”
“Well, I’m afraid that you’ll always be waiting for me to come around, and I’ll always be failing to, and we’ll both be let down by the other.
” She traced the spoon again, thinking. “You deserve someone who can share that with you. Who can pray with you and go to church with you and read the Bible with you the way Emma—”
She stopped herself, but the name hung in the air.
“Kate.” He held her hand tighter. “I’m not looking for someone to pray with. I’m looking for someone to live with. To build something with. You.”
“Even if I never believe?”
The question was so honest it deserved an honest answer. And the honest answer was complicated, because deep in his heart, Eli knew that a shared faith would make everything fuller. It would remove the last barrier, the final crack in the foundation. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t matter.
But she mattered, too. A lot.
“I looked it up, you know,” she said softly. “What the Bible says about…a couple who don’t share faith.”
His eyes widened. “You read the Bible?”
“No, I asked ChatGPT.” She gave a soft laugh. “And then I looked at some articles by experts. I researched, as I do. I kept seeing this phrase, ‘unequally yoked,’ which kind of made me feel like…an ox.”
He chuckled at that, deeply familiar with the concept.
“God wants believers to marry each other because the burden—like the yoke of that ox—is lighter. Carried equally. The Bible also says if one spouse in a non-believer, they are not to divorce. The non-believer is sanctified through the believing spouse.”
She nodded, wetting her lips as she searched for the right way to say whatever came next. “But what if I don’t want to be…sanctified or ‘saved,’ as you Christians say.”
The “you Christians” hurt a little, but he totally understood how tender the topic could be.
“Here’s the bottom line, Kate. And trust me, I’ve given this a lot of thought.” He took a deep breath and let it out, leaning in even closer. “I’d rather figure it out with you and have some challenges than have it easy with someone else. For me, there is no one else.”
Her eyes filled—not quite tears, but the brightness that came right before them. She blinked and squeezed his hand so hard it almost hurt.
“That might be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.” She swallowed what he assumed was a painful lump in her throat. “I love you, Eli.”
“I love you, Kate. So, so much.”
The piano player shifted into something slow and familiar, and the dining room had emptied around them without either of them noticing. The waiter had quietly left the check. The candles were burning low.
“Walk me to my room?” she asked.
They crossed the lobby through a quiet lodge, down the dim hallways, their footsteps echoing softly on the old tile.
At her door, she turned to face him.
“Thank you for today,” he said. “All of it. The boat, the spring, the dinner. You planned something perfect, Kate.”
“I had good inspiration.” She put her hand on his chest, over his heart. “And good company.”
He cupped her face and kissed her as tenderly as he could. She kissed him back with everything she had, her hands sliding up his chest to his shoulders, and for a moment, the hallway and the lodge and the whole complicated world outside disappeared.
When they pulled apart, she rested her forehead against his chin.
“Goodnight,” she whispered.
“Goodnight, Kate.”
She slipped into her room, and the door closed with a soft click.
Eli stood in the hallway, his hand over the warm spot where she’d touched his chest. Then he went to his room, opened the window to the sound of the springs—that constant, ancient rush of water from deep in the earth—and sat on the edge of the bed.
In the dark, still night, he replayed the evening—her face in the candlelight, the yes that had come so unexpectedly, the way she’d said “I love you” like she meant it with every cell in her body. Because she did. He knew that. He felt it.
And he loved her back with a completeness that scared him, because the last time he’d loved someone like that, she’d been taken away.
He didn’t think that was the lesson here. He didn’t think God was in the business of reopening old wounds. But the fear was there, underneath everything, the fear that loving Kate was leading him somewhere God hadn’t mapped.
How could a love this good be anything but holy? How could God not want this for him—this woman, this second chance, this late-blooming, hard-won, imperfect, beautiful thing?
But what if Kate remained exactly who she was—brilliant, loving, stubbornly empirical—and the crack in the foundation never closed?
Was she his mission field? Had God placed her in his life so that Eli could lead her to faith? He wanted to believe that, but doubted the effort would be well-received.
And yet…unequally yoked. It wasn’t holy. And it was the source of that tendril of discomfort that occasionally wrapped around his heart.
Closing his eyes, he silently prayed.
Not for answers, but for the faith to keep trusting a God who’d brought him this far.
Peace didn’t come with words or clarity. It came the way it always did—slowly, like that spring rising from deep in the earth, constant and clear and older than anything he could understand.
He loved her. He trusted God. And for tonight, he’d have to believe those two things were leading him in the same direction.