10. Kate
Later that night, the Summer House didn’t look like the Summer House anymore.
Showered and done for the day, Kate came down the stairs in sleep pants and a tank top, standing at the landing to take it all in.
Every window and the great wall of glass sliders had been boarded to blackness.
All the outdoor plants had been hauled in from the deck and crowded into corners and the hall to the laundry.
Deck furniture was stacked like a warehouse and the whole main living area, normally flooded in sunshine by day or softened by Vivien’s “layered lighting,” looked dark and ominous and uninviting.
Everything was quiet, too. The remaining residents had retreated to their rooms to clean, rest, pack, and prepare. Or sleep, in the case of poor Atlas, who never did get a nap that day.
But Eli’s door had been open when Kate walked by, his bedroom dim and quiet. He certainly wasn’t down here, so she walked to the front door, mysteriously aching to see him.
Well, no, there was no real mystery, was there? Watching him work all day, she’d practically fallen in love with him all over again. Calm, strong, tireless, with a quick smile and a helping hand…yeah. She still loved him the way she did all those summers ago.
Outside, the remaining light surprised her, since the house had been so dark. But it wasn’t yet eight-thirty, so twilight painted the Destin sky in lavender, and a strong breeze blew all the palm fronds in one direction.
Norman was knocking at the door.
She heard some movement at the side of the house—had they left furniture or lawn equipment? Something blowing in the wind?
She rounded the long garage to the grassy area, stopping short at the sight of Eli working in the shadows, no doubt on a task on his seemingly endless checklist.
She looked down the narrow yard, remembering how she’d arrived here only six months ago and found Eli planting those very shrubs and palm trees, almost as dirty and sweaty as he was right now.
She’d thought he was the landscaper, only to have him take off his hat and sunglasses, give her that indescribably adorable smile, and drag her back three decades to her debilitating teenage crush on Eli Lawson.
Right now, every one of those feelings bubbled to the surface as she drank in the sight of him on his knees, methodically coiling a hose around his elbow. His T-shirt and face were dirty enough that the grime was visible from ten feet away, even in waning light.
His hair, the part that wasn’t under a ballcap he’d worn to fight the sun, was probably stuck to his head with sweat. The cap was pulled down low enough that she couldn’t see his expression in the shadow, but she could imagine it was determined, exhausted, and…still gorgeous to her.
She took a few steps, barefoot on the grass, but the movement was enough to get him to look up.
“Don’t,” he said, holding up the whole hose to stop her.
“Don’t walk on the grass?” she joked.
“Don’t come too close. Trust me, I smell. I am not fit for human contact.”
She laughed and didn’t slow her step. “I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. “since I’m the human about to make contact.”
Chuckling, he shook his head and stood. Watching her with a smile, he slid the hose into a black bag he’d take into the garage, not leaving it out for Norman to uncoil.
“You’ll regret it.”
“I’ll regret it if I don’t.” She stopped as he dropped the bag at his feet, now close enough to see all the grime and sweat and get a soft whiff of something strong on the breeze.
“Warning, I’m toxic,” he tried again. “And you…are…” He let his gaze slide over her tank top and pajama pants, slowly, right down to her bare feet, then back up again. His eyes softened. “Tempting.”
She reached her arms out and walked right into him. “Give in.”
He made a sound that was half protest and half collapse, and put both his filthy arms around her, and held her so close she could hear both their heartbeats.
Kate pressed her face into his T-shirt and inhaled the earthiness of him with helpless clarity—nothing, no one, not even God, could stop her from loving this man.
“I didn’t hate today,” she whispered. “Did you?”
He inched back. “The lemonade and pizza were good. The last nail went in nicely. The arrival of the ‘gang of five’ was nothing short of remarkable. So, no, I didn’t hate the day. Did you…enjoy yourself?”
She laughed at the way he asked the question, with raw doubt and real humor.
“I enjoyed watching you. Is that wrong?”
He gave another throaty chuckle. “Nah. It’s sweet.” Leaning back, he searched her face. “I haven’t watched you enough these last few days. I’m sorry.”
“No, do not apologize. You’ve been a patriarch protector. You’ve been a construction worker. A meteorologist. A big brother, a loving son, a kind father, and…it’s all very attractive to me.”
He lifted a dubious brow. “Thanks for the help, Norman. Nothing like a hurricane to win over my woman.”
She gave an involuntary shiver at being “his woman.”
“Walk to the beach with me,” he said, wrapping his arm around her. “Wind’s getting fierce and the waves are something. Anyway, you’ll need another shower after getting this close to me.”
Smiling, she nodded and stayed close as he dropped off the hose in the garage, and they headed toward the boardwalk and over the dunes.
“Oh,” she exclaimed as she saw the waves, high and white and angry. Her hair whipped straight back, the wind strong enough to feel it press her whole body. “Yikes. I didn’t realize it had picked up this much.”
“This isn’t even the first real band. It’s gonna be serious, Kate.”
She nodded. “I can see that.”
Three-, four-, even five-foot waves stacked and broke in lines of phosphorescent white. The horizon to the south had gone the color of a bruise as night fell for the last time before the furious storm hit somewhere along the crystal beaches of the Panhandle.
They made their way down the boardwalk and sat on the top step where it met the sand, braving the wind.
“No night for a walk,” she said.
“You’d have to carry me.” Eli fell straight back, laying on the wood with his feet hanging down to the sand. “Actually, I may sleep here and dream about how you like Construction Eli.” He opened one eye and looked up at her. “Maybe I’ll hang up the drafting table and grab a toolbox.”
“Mmm. Hot.”
He laughed and sat up, bracing himself on his arms. “I could go into landscaping. Carry a shovel around. Look rugged. Have you swooning at parties.”
She laughed into the wind, and he caught a strand of hair that whipped across her face, guiding it back and tucking it—unsuccessfully—behind her ear with one filthy fingertip.
She closed her eyes.
“So, have you been deep into research while I did my level best to save Lakeside and the Summer House?”
She held his gaze, then looked out at the churning waves. “I have.”
“And?” He tried not to sound interested or anxious, she could tell. But he failed.
She had known this would come. She had been hoping she would have another day or two, just to put together her findings against hypothesis.
She had wanted to keep the research to herself a little longer because the moment she said any of it out loud, the conversation would set up another one that she didn’t really know how to have.
But here they were, on the outskirts of a hurricane, windblown, exhausted, and finally alone.
“It’s…okay.”
“Okay?” She heard the disappointment in the two syllables.
“More than okay,” she assured him. “As scholarship. As history. The documentation is better than I expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you said just the gospels, and I have studied them, but I also…looked up some other stuff and have a few…theories.”
“Oh?”
“Well, I had to compare the manuscript evidence before I just accepted them as…” She smiled. “Gospel truth.”
He didn’t smile back, but looked hard at her, clearly bracing for whatever answer she would give.
“I expected to find a few dozen copies, specifically of those gospels, as primary source material. It’s the usual way historical documents are given weight and validity.”
“And?”
“There are twenty-four thousand copies, in multiple languages, with the earliest fragments dated within a hundred years of the originals.”
Eli straightened slightly. “And that means?”
“A lot. Compared to other ancient texts, like Homer, Plato, the histories that are never questioned as ‘real,’ well, it’s not even close.
No one doubts the life of Alexander the Great, and his story is based on two manuscripts written four hundred years after he died.
Most classical sources have under twenty copies and gaps of seven hundred to fourteen hundred years between the original and the earliest surviving manuscript. ”
He stared at her. “And that means…”
“It means the gospels are in a category by themselves.”
“Oh.” He breathed the word. “I’ve heard something like that, but it’s good you know it.”
Good? She wasn’t sure if that’s what she’d call it.
“It was interesting,” she corrected, not loving the word but she didn’t have a better one. “As a scientist. I expected to find a religion, and instead I found a very well-documented set of ancient texts.”
“Kate.”
“Hold on. There’s more.” She felt herself warming to the topic, probably because the next part was the most fascinating, at least to her. She wanted him to know and appreciate that.
“There’s a line in the Psalms,” she said.
“You read the Old Testament?”
“Some of it,” she said. “The Old Testament is woven into the New, I discovered, with key players quoting many passages. It’s incumbent upon a scientist to read the footnotes, you know.”
He smiled. “References,” he corrected. “But what line in Psalms?”
“The one that says the earth and the heavens will wear out like a garment.”
“Um…” He squinted. “I think that’s 102? Not positive. Why?”
“Why?” she scoffed softly. “That is the second law of thermodynamics, Eli. And it was written about three thousand years before Clausius.” At his look, she added, “A German physicist considered the founding father of thermodynamics. Honestly, I can’t imagine how a musical shepherd in the Bronze Age figured out that the universe is winding down, but he did. ”
Eli closed his eyes. “David,” he whispered. “Oh, Kate.”
“Don’t oh, Kate me yet, I’m not done.”
But his eyes glimmered with victory.
“There are also extra-biblical references to the darkness at the crucifixion,” she added. “I know you wanted me to look into that.”
“The resurrection,” he corrected. “No one doubts the crucifixion.”
“Well, there are findings that support statements in the gospels. Phlegon, a Greek historian, wrote about three hours of darkness, and a great earthquake, exactly in the year and month they believe Jesus was crucified.”
He leaned in, straighter, alert, visibly fighting the urge to throw a fist in the air and claim a win.
Her heart dropped, but she continued. “He thought it was an eclipse, but the timing rules an eclipse out—the moon was full, you can’t have a solar eclipse during a full moon, it’s astronomically impossible.
So, something happened that day. Something he had to explain.
He wasn’t a Christian. He had no reason to confirm anything. ”
Eli remained so still, she doubted he was breathing.
“And Francis Collins is a Christian,” she said, knowing she was all over the place, but didn’t have her notes.
“Who?” he asked.
“Francis Collins ran the Human Genome Project. He was the head of the National Institutes of Health for ten years. He converted from atheism in his thirties after reading C.S. Lewis. The man mapped DNA for a living and—”
“He’s a believer,” Eli finished, looking at her with the careful excitement she had been dreading.
There was enough awe in his voice to let her know he wasn’t going to love the end of this conversation.
But she’d get him there in a way that would ideally ease the pain.
“Kate, that’s amazing. Exactly what I’d hoped you’d learn and I just couldn’t tell you without…
well, you had to find this out on your own. ”
She picked up a small shell at the edge of the step and turned it over in her fingers. The wind pulled at the hem of her shirt. Out beyond the surf, the purple horizon was getting wider and darker and even more ominous.
“Here’s where I am,” she finally said. “I can do a Creator. I can. The chemistry of life is impossibly elegant. I look at a cell under a microscope, and I have to be honest—I don’t think that happened by accident.
Something is behind it. Some intelligence, some pattern, something I can’t explain with chance. I’ll go that far.”
“Kate.” Eli’s voice had gone very gentle. “Oh, oh. That’s so…” He was overwhelmed enough that all he could do was close his eyes.
But could she tell him the rest? Could she tell him the truth?
Could she tell him that a man walking around in dusty sandals two thousand years ago, in a small province of the Roman Empire, who got himself killed for political reasons, was not, in her reasoned and scientific and logical opinion, the maker of the universe?
Taking a breath, she put her hand on his dirty, stubbly cheek, and looked into his eyes. The words were there, she knew every one, because she’d practiced them over and over.
Eli, she’d say, I can’t do it. I’ve tried and I can’t get there.
And then she’d watch the hope in his face come apart slowly. He’d close his eyes for a long moment—enough time that she suspected he was silently saying a prayer. And then he’d go inside, broken and sad.
How could she do that to this man she loved? This man who’d given his all today—and every day—who was nothing but good and smart and kind and everything she wanted in the whole world?
How could she break the heart of this man?
“Yes?” he prodded when too much time passed and she didn’t speak. There was enough of a cloud in his eyes to know he was worried she was, indeed, going to say the words she was thinking.
But could she lie? Never.
“I think that’s incredible progress, don’t you?” she said instead.
He didn’t move, but searched her face. “You’re sure? You can get to a Creator. Because if you can do that—”
A stiff breeze hit them, hard enough to whip her hair back and make her lean in to avoid getting pushed away from him.
“We better go in,” she whispered. “We’re going to get sand in our eyes.”
“But, Kate.” He beamed at her, all the light back in his eyes, the joy and hope and depth that made her heart soar. “This is huge,” he said, wrapping both arms around her and giving a squeeze. “This is so…”
She closed her eyes and breathed him in, a mix of sweat and sand and coppery air heavy with impending disaster.
Leaning back, he looked down at her. “Thank you for having an open heart, Kate. I love you so much for that. For everything.”
As he kissed her, she just sank into the beauty of it. The love on his lips, the strength in his arms, the hope in his heart.
If she told him her true feelings, they’d be over. If she lied, she couldn’t live with herself.
For now, she’d take this kiss and pay the price later.