Chapter 9 #2
“Can I say something?” Kate said during a pause, while Tessa was cleaning avocado off Olive’s fingers.
“You can say anything,” Tessa said.
“I’m really happy for you, Tess. Not just the wedding—all of it. You’ve got Dusty and Olive and Roman and this house that’s currently being destroyed but will be beautiful. You found it. The whole thing.”
Tessa looked at her with soft eyes. “It only took me fifty years.”
“It took all of us a while,” Vivien said.
“Look at us. Three women who spent their summers in Destin as teenagers, dreaming about boys and weddings and what our lives would be. And now—Peter, Eli, Dusty. They were all there, too. The three of them, right on the beach with us, all those summers ago.”
“The universe has a sense of humor,” Tessa said.
Kate almost corrected her but stopped herself. Eli would say it was God who’d orchestrated all that, and she knew it was chance and geography and a series of family connections that happened to converge.
Did it really matter what or who it was or wasn’t? Something had drawn all of them back to this place, to each other, to love that had been waiting decades to find them.
“Speaking of Eli,” Tessa said, eyeing her with the ruthless scrutiny of a twin sister. “How are things?”
“Good. Really good.” Kate smiled. “I just keep thinking—the more time I spend with him, the more I love him. Distance is not our friend.”
“Then move here,” Vivien said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
“Emma would come in a heartbeat,” Kate admitted. “But there’s Matt, and Jeffrey has his custody rights, and my job—though the lab is closed, so that’s less of an anchor than it used to be.”
“And the faith thing?” Tessa asked gently.
Kate looked out at the water. “I don’t know. But surely that can’t get in the way of a good love. Right?”
Neither of them answered immediately, which Kate appreciated.
“Right,” Vivien finally said, with the quiet confidence of a woman who’d watched her own love story unfold recently enough that she still glowed at all times.
“Right,” Tessa echoed, lifting Olive from the highchair for a more thorough cleaning and some lap time. “And for the record, Lady Katie, you deserve the whole thing, too. Not just the good love—the whole, settled, happy, figured-it-out thing. All of it.”
Kate put her glasses back on—of course she hadn’t realized she’d taken them off—and looked at her sister and her best friend across the table, their love palpable.
“Okay,” she said. “But first, we plan your wedding.”
“Deal,” Tessa said, and raised her iced tea. “I have only one request.” She leaned in. “You know what the three of us are going to dance to at the wedding.”
Vivien gave a little hoot. Kate threw her head back and laughed. And Tessa squeezed the sweet girl on her lap and started singing their signature song.
And all the way home, little Olive sang a toddler version of, “Walka on Sun-sine—oh, oh!” to the sheer delight of her mother and aunts-to-be.
Kate floated into the guest room on a cloud of wedding plans and sisterly love, still smiling from the afternoon at Pompano Joe’s.
“You should have seen Olive with the guacamole,” she said to Emma, who was sprawled on the bed, reading.
“That child turned a highchair into a Jackson Pollock painting, but she’s adorable.
And now we have to stay until September because Tessa’s going to have a real wedding, Em.
On the beach at the Summer House, sunset, the whole thing. ”
“That’s so cool,” Emma said, lowering her book, which was leather-bound and…wait. What was she reading?
She stared at the cover, embossed with a fish and some words. Kate’s smile didn’t disappear, but it froze in place.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.
“If you think it’s a Bible, yeah.” Emma looked up with an expression that held no guilt and no defiance—just youthful honesty.
“Eli gave you a Bible?” She didn’t have to ask, though. Who else would do such a thing?
“Actually, it was that old guy at the marina, Seamus. And he bought them for his ministry, which teaches poor kids how to fish.”
“And read the Bible.”
“Yeah, but did you know Grandpa’s name is on the scholarship that paid for these?” She patted the leather cover. “I kind of love that. It makes me feel close to him.”
How could Kate argue with feeling close to her dear late father? She couldn’t. She shouldn’t. She wouldn’t.
But still. A Bible?
She lowered herself onto the edge of the king-sized bed, facing Emma. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her shirt, which she did not need to do but it bought her five seconds to arrange her face into something that wasn’t alarm.
“I didn’t know you were interested in that,” she said carefully.
“I wasn’t, really. But Eli said some stuff on the boat that stuck with me, and I wanted to look it up.” Emma rolled onto her side, propping her head on her hand. “Did you know there’s a verse that says your body is a temple? Like, an actual temple where God lives?”
“I’ve heard the expression.”
“It’s in…one of the Corinthians. I really don’t get it all, but I found the quote. It’s kind of cool when you think about it, like, that your body is…for goodness. For God.”
“If you believe that sort of thing,” Kate said softly.
“Well, I like thinking of myself as…” She searched for the word. “Sacred.”
Kate’s heart dipped with a bone-deep confusion she did not begin to understand.
Of course, she could hear Eli’s voice in every syllable, and the feeling that moved through her was complicated.
The message itself—your body has value, respect yourself, you are more than what happened to you—was everything Kate wanted her daughter to hear. It was the right message. The perfect message.
“That’s a beautiful way to think about it,” Kate said, and meant it. “What Eli told you about respecting your body and knowing your worth—that’s important, Emma. Really important.”
Emma’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I feel a but coming on.”
Kate put her glasses back on. “Nope. I just want to make sure you’re reading that with a critical eye. The Bible is an ancient text. Some of it is historical, some of it is poetry, some of it was made up thousands of years ago by people with an agenda. You should not—”
“Mom.” Emma sat up. “I’m not joining a cult. I’m reading a book.”
Not any book, Kate thought. Not a science textbook or a carefully crafted book about a girl’s value. The Bible.
“I know,” she said simply. “I’m just…surprised.”
“Why? I’m seventeen. I can read a book that a really nice old man gave me because it’s connected to Grandpa Artie’s scholarship.
And Eli said things that made me feel better than anything anyone has said to me since this whole nightmare started.
I wanted to understand where he was coming from, is all. ”
But was it all? Kate considered that from every angle, turning each word in her mind.
Her daughter, who had barely spoken for a week after “it” had happened, who had curled into herself on a bathroom floor in Ithaca, who had shown up at Kate’s door at eleven o’clock at night—that girl was sitting up in bed with light in her eyes because of something Eli Lawson said to her on a boat.
How could she argue with that?
She couldn’t. And yet…she had to.
“What else did he talk about?” Kate asked.
“Just, you know.”
“Actually, I don’t, Emma. He and I haven’t discussed what you talked about because it’s private.”
“It is private, except you don’t like his source material.”
Kate winced, the truth hitting her along with the keen intelligence of her daughter. Too intelligent for…her gaze shifted to the book between them. Much too intelligent for that.
Emma tucked her legs underneath her, sitting up fully now. “He told me about the plumb line—you know, the architecture thing? How God is like this standard that doesn’t move, even when everything else is shifting. I liked that.”
“The architecture metaphor is very Eli,” Kate said with a small smile she couldn’t help.
“He’s easy to talk to. He doesn’t lecture or yell or remind me that I’m a child. He doesn’t make me feel stupid.” The unspoken comparison to Jeffrey hung in the air, loud and clear. “He just…listens and then says something that actually helps. I don’t know how he does that.”
“It’s one of his gifts.” One of many, Kate reluctantly acknowledged in her heart.
“Yeah, and I think his beliefs are part of it. Like, his whole God thing isn’t separate from the way he is. It’s why he’s like that.” Emma looked at her mother steadily. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing, Mom.”
Kate felt something shift in her chest. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Eli has faith. I’ve never said that.”
“But you don’t want me to have it. And you don’t want it. Do you?”
No, she did not. Kate opened her mouth and closed it again, because the honest answer was complicated and the simple answer was unkind and the middle ground didn’t exist.
“What I want,” she said slowly, “is for you to think for yourself. To examine evidence and look at the world from a broader perspective. What makes that religion right?” She gestured to the book.
“Why not Hinduism or Jainism or Taoism? Why not Judaism or…or nothing? You need to learn it all and not just accept things just because someone you admire tells you they’re true. ”
Emma sighed. “Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing right now? Reading and thinking about it?”
Kate had no rebuttal for that.
“I’m not saying I believe all of it or any of it,” Emma continued. “I’m just saying I don’t hate it. Some of it’s actually really interesting. There are stories in here that are kind of wild.”
“They’re fairy tales, Em.”
But her daughter didn’t look so sure. She fluttered a few tissue-thin pages. “I don’t know. I’ve been jumping around. I don’t even know where to start, honestly. I was going to ask Eli.”
The alarm that had been simmering in Kate’s chest flared. “You’re going to ask Eli to teach you about the Bible?”
“Not teach me. Just, like, where to read first. It’s a big book and it’s confusing. What’s the difference between the testament stuff? And, honestly, did it really flood? And some of these guys in the beginning lived to be nine hundred!”
Kate pressed her fingertips together—a habit from faculty meetings when she was trying not to say the first thing that came to mind. That book was no different from Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk!
She took a slow breath, corralling her cool. “Emma, I need to ask you something and I want you to hear it as a real question, not an accusation.”
“Okay…”
She perched on the edge of the bed, looking right at her daughter’s guileless, freckled beauty. “Do you feel like Eli is trying to…convert you? To bring you into his belief system?”
Emma looked genuinely bewildered. “Convert me? Mom, he took me on a boat ride and told me I was valuable. He didn’t dunk me in the water and preach at me.”
“I know, but—”
Emma shifted on the bed, leaning forward, searching Kate’s face. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes.”
“Why does this upset you so much?” Emma’s voice wasn’t angry—it was honestly confused. “It’s a book. It made me feel better. Why does it matter what anyone believes if it helps them be a better person?”
Kate stared at her daughter and dug for another answer that wasn’t, Because it isn’t true.
That was her reason—the scientist’s reason, the empiricist’s reason, the reason that had governed her entire adult life. But saying “it’s not true” to a seventeen-year-old girl who had just found something that made her feel less broken was not something Kate could do.
Not today. Maybe not ever.
“I just don’t want you…indoctrinated,” she said quietly.
Emma smiled gently, and for one disorienting moment, Kate felt like the child in the conversation. “Mom, I’m going to keep reading this. And I’m going to talk to Eli about it. I’m not being brainwashed. I’m just…exploring something. Isn’t that what scientists do?”
Kate let out a breath that was half laugh, half surrender. Her own methodology, turned against her by a seventeen-year-old.
“Fine,” she said. “Just promise me you’ll keep thinking critically.”
“I promise. And you promise me you won’t freak out about it.”
“I don’t freak out.”
“Mom. You kinda are right now.”
Kate studied her daughter—this girl who couldn’t look at herself in a mirror three weeks ago, now sitting cross-legged on a bed in Destin arguing with her mother about the Bible—and felt a tangle of emotions she couldn’t sort into any category her scientific mind recognized.
Pride. Fear. Love. Something that might have been awe.
“I’m not freaking out,” she insisted, standing. “I’m processing.”
“’Kay,” Emma said cheerfully, and opened the Bible again. “So am I.”
Kate left the room, closing the door behind her with exaggerated calm. She stood in the hallway for a moment, one hand on the doorframe, staring at nothing.
She needed to talk to Eli…but not yet. She’d give it a few days to see if she was overreacting or if Emma came to her senses. She didn’t want to break the beautiful rhythm she and Eli had found this week, and a conversation like this…could be serious.
But if nothing changed in the next few days, if Emma was still “curious” about it all, then the thing she’d been trying to ignore—the fundamental fault line between them—had just cracked open. If that happened, Kate could no longer pretend the problem wasn’t real.
The man she loved had reached her daughter in a way Kate couldn’t. And he’d done it with the one thing Kate couldn’t share.
She blew out a breath and let the weight of that settle.