“A bird survived,” Kate said. “That’s a good sign.”
“Like Noah’s Ark,” Emma muttered, pushing up to go to the window.
She didn’t really think that happened, did she? Another look at that already worn Bible told Kate she very well might.
“Yikes, it’s a mess out there,” Emma said, pressing into the glass. “Oh, there’s a tree halfway out of the ground and branches everywhere.”
Kate shuddered. “I hope the Summer House is okay,” she whispered. “It means everything to Eli.”
“And Eli means everything to you,” Emma countered.
Kate gave her a shaky smile. “Not everything, Em. You and Matt are first and always will be.”
Emma turned from the window and walked to Kate’s small bed, perching on the end. She looked young and fresh, more like ten—at least to Kate’s maternal eyes—than seventeen.
“He does, though, Mom. You love him. He loves you. I could see it, especially when he said every word you used for Scattergories was acceptable. I mean, ‘stranger’s feet’ for things at a beach that start with S?”
“I knew everyone else would say sand and I needed that point.” Laughing, Kate pulled the comforter higher and eyed her daughter. “You’re okay with that, I take it? Not the answer, the man.”
“Very much so. I think he’s awesome and really good for you.”
She nodded because there was no way to argue that. “But, you know, we have…the issue.”
“The God thing.”
Kate stared up at the white ceiling of a stranger’s house and tried to think of how to answer that. “You know I made a deal with him to look into it, to research it.”
“My idea, if we’re being real.”
“He told me that,” she said. “And I did, Em. I’ve been studying since Tessa’s wedding. I read the gospels. I read the history. I read the people who argue about it for a living, the serious ones, famous ones, and some I’d never heard of.”
“And?”
“And I started off expecting to find nothing and instead I found a great deal. Enough that I can look at the world now, at a cell, at the sheer impossible elegance of how a living thing is put together, and say there is something behind it. Some intelligence. I can go that far. I didn’t think I’d be able to and I can.”
“That’s great, Mom.” She leaned closer. “I got there fast, but I think it’s an important first step.”
“But it’s going to be my only step,” she said, looking at Emma to see if she followed.
“That makes you agnostic, I think,” Emma said. “It’s…vague but not atheist. He has to see that as a good thing.”
“But not good enough,” Kate argued. “He needs me to believe a specific thing. That a particular man, two thousand years ago, was God. And I’m not…” She closed her eyes and dug forthe most straightforward words she could find. “I’m not getting there.”
“Yet.”
“Ever,” Kate corrected. “I’ve gone as far as the road goes, for me, and it stops short of where he was hoping I’d arrive. And I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know if it’s enough for us to be…an us.”
Emma leaned into the early morning light and considered her mother with an expression Kate could not entirely read, but it was thoughtful, a little tender, and somehow older than it had any business being.
“Okay,” Emma said. “But you don’t have to have it all figured out today.”
“Em—”
“No, listen. I’ve heard people say that. The exact thing you just said. There are people—a lot of them—who say,I believe in God, I just can’t wrap my head around the Jesus part.That’s a normal place to be, Mom. It’s practically a whole category of person.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I’ve seen it. People talk about it.” Emma made the vague gesture that Kate had learned most likely meant TikTok or some other social media that was about as dependable as dirt. “This girl I follow did a whole thing about it. She said she sat in the believing-in-God part for like a year before the rest of it caught up to her.”
