Chapter 1
Nina
“Surprise!”
I freeze like a deer caught in the headlights. Actually, a deer probably has slightly better instincts. Sometimes they keep running, don’t they? Or they stop in their tracks and stare the car down, hoping they can intimidate the driver in to swerving away.
I don’t do either of those things. When I open a door to a darkened apartment, hear someone shouting at me, and my instincts tell me that I’m about to be murdered, I don’t run away or bravely stand my ground.
I close my eyes and wait to die.
“Nina?”
Recognizing Helen’s voice, I open my eyes again. She approaches me from the darkened inner room, smiling apologetically, her eyes filled with concern. “You poor thing!” Over her shoulder, she calls out, “I told you this was a bad idea!” To me again, “Matilda really wanted this to be a surprise party. Blame her for everything.”
“Matilda’s here?” I ask, confused but happy at this development. Nowthatis a nice surprise—finding out that a friend who’s recently moved away is back for a visit. Getting yelled at as you walk into a darkened room? Not so much.
Matilda bounds toward me from out of the shadows, beaming, arms outstretched. “Nina!” She envelops me in one of her too-tight, but completely heartfelt, hugs. “Surprise parties are fun! It was fun, wasn’t it?”
When she pulls back, waiting expectantly for my response, her smile is so big it transforms her entire face. She hardly looks like the dour, cynical woman she was almost a year ago before she met her now husband. Back then, she wasn’t one for physical affection, even with her closest friends. Now she’s offering out hugs like candy at a parade, even if she hasn’t totally gotten the hang of them yet.
I don’t want to make her feel bad about her obvious excitement over the idea of a surprise party, so I just nod as enthusiastically as I can. “So fun,” I agree.
Appeased, Matilda grins. Then her expression narrows with irritation as she pivots to look back over her shoulder. “Turn the lights on already! She obviously knows we’re here now. The surprise is over!”
Ah, there’s the friend I know. I love all the changes I’ve seen in my friend since she met Kimo, but sometimes I do miss her old brusque, curt self. Seeing glimpses like this let me know the old Matilda is still buried somewhere underneath all those happy smiles. I want her to be happy, of course, but it’s good to know she can still be counted on to lead the survivors if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse.
Various lights around the room turn on, revealing the other attendees of what, I suppose, is my going-away party: Thad, Helen’s fiancé, who looks glum about the fact that he has somehow been talked into wearing a party hat. (Honestly, I have some questions about how that was accomplished.) Kimo, Matilda’s husband, who is his usual big happy ball of energy, punctuated by his own paper hat and party horn that he blows enthusiastically. And Grady, who gives me an apologetic shrug, likeWhat are you gonna do?since he totally could have warned me about this whole surprise-party thing but obviously didn’t.
I give him my best death glare, even though I’ve been told it’s morecutethanfear inspiring. I guess when you’re five foot nothing, pretty much everything you do is considered cute. Reaching for something on a high shelf? Cute! Riding a bike? Cute! Shouting in irritation at a broken parking meter? Cute! It’s a bit frustrating sometimes to be treated like a doll when you’re a full-grown woman, but I’ve gotten used to it. Mostly.
This eclectic group of people make up my very best friends in the entire world. Most of us have very little in common, except for the big thing we have incommon—Matilda, Helen, and I are all former nuns, and Grady is an ex-priest. We each served for different amounts of time and at different levels of intensity. Matilda belonged to the most austere order, the Poor Clares; Helen was technically a sister, never a full-fledged nun; and I was only ever a postulant. Grady was a priest for the longest amount of time and is the one who most recently left his order.
So despite being different ages and coming from different backgrounds, there’s a common language we speak, a common experience that no one else can really understand unless they’ve lived through it. It’s bonded the four of us forever, no matter how our lives change.
And there have been some big changes over the past couple years: Helen falling in love with her bounty hunter, Thad, and getting engaged; Matilda marrying Kimo and moving to Hawai‘i with him and his family; and Grady finally teaching me how to ride a bicycle. Okay, that last one might not sound quite as life-changing, but it’s really helped me get around downtown Chicago much faster.
“Peke!” Kimo greets me, coming forward for a hug. He’s so tall that it’s always somewhat comical to attempt to find a non-awkward way to fit our bodies together. We manage by me going up on my tiptoes and him hunching over.
“Peke?” Helen repeats.
“Kinda like shorty,” I tell her. It’s the nickname Kimo started calling me around Thanksgiving. I was supposed to go out and visit him and Matilda and the kids for a week in Hawai‘i—they’d bought the plane tickets for me and everything—but at the last minute, I couldn’t find my passport or driver’s license. I was absolutely crushed to be missing the visit, and I was so embarrassed to have wasted their money; but they surprised me by buying last-minute tickets to come see me instead. Flying five people (including Matilda, his mother, his niece and nephew, and himself) the week of Thanksgiving and buying the tickets with less than twenty-four hours’ notice must have been enormously expensive, but they’d insisted they wanted to be with me for the holiday. And they had been, whenever I wasn’t helping my aunt and uncle with whatever they needed.
So while normally I wouldn’tlovesomeone calling me a name based off my height, or lack thereof, I know it comes from a place of affection. Plus the size difference between Kimo and me really is hard to ignore. And Kimo’s so good-hearted that he could probably find a way to call you “poop face” that would soundendearing.
I smile at the man in question as he wraps an arm around Matilda. “You two didn’t have to come all the way out here for this!” I say, although I’m so thankful they did. Aside from some video chats, I haven’t seen the two of them since Thanksgiving, so about six months ago now. We all make the best of things, using our group chats (one with the guys and one without) to regularly keep in touch, but there’s a noticeable hole in our friend group without them around. I like it best when we’re all together.
“Nonsense. Of course we did!” Matilda ushers us forward so we can join Thad and Grady in the living room. The couples arrange themselves around their respective partners, and I take a seat next to Grady on the “singles” couch. I don’t think anyone pairs us this way intentionally; it’s just the natural pattern we fall into whenever we all manage to be in the same place at the same time.
“We had to see you off for your big adventure!” Helen agrees.
“How long are you going to be gone, anyway?” Kimo wants to know.
“I think it’s supposed to take about eight weeks.” I hope my smile doesn’t slip too much at the prospect. I’ll be traveling with my aunt, uncle, and cousins to a town called Green Valley in the mountains of Tennessee so my cousin Harmony can participate on a reality dating show calledMountain Man. It’s a pretty big departure for my serious, church-going aunt and uncle, but Harmony has managed to persuade them that she can use the show to launch her career as an Instagram pastor and “help spread the glory of Christ.”
In my humble opinion, I have a hard time imagining God using reality television or Instagram to spread the good news. But no one asked my opinion on it. They never do.
“Eight whole weeks?” Matilda protests, sounding put out, even though (again) she doesn’t live here anymore and thus likely wouldn’t see me in all that time, anyway. “Why? You’re not going to be on the show, are you?”
