“What? The res…” She bit back the rest of the word. “Of course it didn’t happen, Eli! Nothing supernatural is possible. I was just going to tell you if Jesus existed or not.”
“Then save yourself the trouble, because He did,” Eli replied. “It doesn’t matter if He did or didn’t, unless he rose from the dead. The entire belief system is contingent on that one thing.”
“I do not and will not and cannot ever believe in miracles.” She stood to punctuate the statement. “Never, ever. But I’m happy to research the validity of the Bible.”
“There’s no validity without the resurrection,” he said, undaunted by her determination. “Disprove that and you’ve disproved every word in the book. Don’t read sixty-six books, Kate. Read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Throw in Acts because you won’t be able to stop.”
Did he really think she’d find it…riveting? “That’s all?”
He nodded. “Test one claim—the resurrection. If you can disprove that one, the whole thing falls apart, and I will marry your atheism on the spot.”
That stopped her. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Eli.”
“Hear me out. The whole religion stands or falls on it. Paul says so himself—if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and faith is futile. He hands you the disproof himself. So disprove it. Show me the body. Show me a hallucination that survives historical scrutiny. Show me aconspiracythat holds for fifty years among a dozen people who got tortured to death and never recanted. You crack the resurrection and you crack Christianity. Everything else is downstream.”
She stared at him.
“That is,” she said slowly, “almost suspiciously elegant.”
“It’s an old argument, Kate. I didn’t make it up.”
“It’s clean.”
“It’s clean because it’s right.”
“Or it’s clean because somebody constructed it that way.”
“Maybe.” He picked his coffee up again. “Figure out which.”
The scientist in her wanted to push back on the framing. She couldn’t tie a question that big to a single event two thousand years ago. She couldn’t evaluate a religion the way you evaluated a hypothesis. There were a hundred good reasons people believed things that weren’t true. But she didn’t want to fight about this anymore.
“I’ll consider that approach,” she said stiffly. “But, Eli, where does that leave us when I…” She closed her eyes and corrected herself. “IfI prove you wrong?”
He just smiled. “You won’t.”
“What if I do?” Because she would.
He lifted a shoulder. “We’re no worse off than we were twenty-four hours ago when you were ready to leave for good.”
She stared at him, taking in every single thing she loved about the man. There were too many to name, enough to make her dizzy.
She longed to step into his arms and put her face against his shirt, hold him and kiss him and throw away this problem so they could just spend the rest of their lives together.
Was this the biggest mistake she’d ever made? Should she just shut up, let her daughter go to church, and appreciate that he was a good guy who…believed in miracles?
“I’ll be very busy the next week or so,” he said softly, apparently not suffering from the same longing she felt. “You do your research and I’ll…fight the storm.”
And then what?
She had no idea, but she hoped she wasn’t sorry she’d ever agreed to this challenge.
Tessa stepped over the gap where the floorboards used to be and briefly considered if delayed renovation, exposed wood, the occasional nail, and the lack of a stair rail were grounds for divorce from the man she’d married yesterday.
Nah. She’d keep Dusty Mathers. Heck, she’d already married him twice—once in a civil ceremony and yesterday, in a dream beach wedding.
Still smiling at the memory of the festivities, she made her way past the stairwell construction. The setbacks to the project to connect her upstairs unit and his downstairs unit and turn this beach house into a family home were not his fault.
He’d sworn on their shiny new wedding rings when they’d happily fallen into bed last night that the railing was in the garage and the boards would be delivered today. The project would be finished…just in time for a hurricane.
