“Yes,” she said, “but no. There are debates about logical absurdities, of course, but this concept is more of a riddle. The classic question—reduced to very human terms—is this: could God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift? Either way, the argument goes, there is something He could not accomplish, and therefore there is no such thing as omnipotence.”

“Were you, by any chance,” Harry said, “a philosophy major in college?”

Hannah smiled, nodding her thanks to the chef as he deposited a steaming mound of rice onto her plate. “I was a theology major.”

“Well. I am way out of my depth in this conversation. I majored in political science. Which, let me be the first to tell you, is a useless major if your goal is gainful employment.”

Hannah wanted to hear more about Harry’s past—she knew he’d been in the military—but even more than that, she wanted to return to the subject at hand. She couldn’t see herself dating any man who wasn’t a committed Christian. “So what paradox did you mean?”

“Ah,” he said. He took a long swig of his beer and set it on the counter. “I suppose it’s the same question that bothers every person, religious or not, at one time or another. Some variation of the age-old lament: Why does an all-powerful God allow suffering? And I’ve heard”—he held up his beer glass, trying to ward off any protestation—“I’ve heard all the arguments about suffering as a counterpoint to joy and the limit of human knowledge and the gift of free will and just about every other theory there is, but I cannot square any of those with the scale of the agony that exists in our world. On our earth there is devastation and pain and suffering. I’ve seen it, Hannah. And yet, we are supposed to pray to God for the things we need—not simply the things we want, but the things ensuring our survival and our humanity and our decency? And if we obtain what we need—the cancer is cured, the kidnapped child is found unharmed, the famine ends—then it is evidence of God’s benevolence, but if children are murdered and tortured and starved while liars and brutes are rewarded, it’s an example of us not understanding what we needed?” His eyes did not leave hers once. “I want to believe in God, Hannah; I do.”

After that conversation, the first of many, they’d never come around to each other’s way of thinking, and ultimately they’d stopped discussing it, but by then she loved him. Hannah knew Harry had lost both his mother and his brother as a child, and he’d witnessed atrocities in the Middle East during his deployments. She didn’t know—he wouldn’t say—which of these things had affected him the most, because he wouldn’t talk about any of them. Or perhaps something else had happened that he’d never told her. Still, he never said anything disparaging about her faith. She’d long ago made her peace with their differences, but she’d always harbored hope that one day Harry would come to share her belief. She’d pictured this event occurring in a blast of cinematic glory; a dramatic declaration, a literal come-to-Jesus moment in which faith would explode like a bomb into Harry’s soul and instead of devastation he would experience the peace and grace and thankfulness she felt at the touch of God.