His hand left her elbow, and for one eternal second she felt so incredibly bereft that she thought she might splinter, fracture, fall to pieces. But then, then his warm hand was cupping her cheek, and those fissures closed. “My sweet Libby. You’re not alone. You’re never alone. Even if your family were gone, even if we here who would be proud to be counted as your true friends were never to see you again—even then, you wouldn’t be alone.”

She knew well that he meant God. It was the vicar in him; he couldn’t help but say such things. And she admired him for saying them, for being able to believe them. Still, she had to shake her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know how to have that sort of faith, Oliver. I wish I did.” Even if she granted that He was necessary, He was still so very distant. She could see Him in the order of things, as Oliver had pointed out weeks ago. God not of the so-called mysteries that weren’t mysterious, but of order. But that was just a creator. Not a friend.

He tilted her face up, and she let her gaze follow, expecting to see disappointment in his face. Or even rebuke. After all, what kind of man of the cloth would let someone speak so of the Lord? But for some reason, the moonlight touched on a smile on his lips. “I’ve heard many people say they wish they had more faith. People who have been broken by life, by disappointments, who can’t fathom a God who is good in the face of a world filled with evil. But trying to answer that question isn’t the way to make Him known to you, is it?”

“I don’t know how He could be made known to me. That’s the problem.” She wanted to believe. But no one’s explanations had ever made sense. And maybe . . . maybe she wanted it more so she wouldn’t disappoint her mother than because she thought she needed that belief for her own sake.

“Is it enough, perhaps, to believe that He knows you?”

She blinked, refocused on his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He gave her that beautiful smile of his, full of caring and knowing and something a bit more she was afraid to name. “You are a student of nature. You study it and catalogue it. You take the utmost care to put the proper name with each specimen. Why?”

She smiled a bit, simply because it echoed the conversation she’d first had with his grandmother, before she knew she was his grandmother. “Because it’s by naming a thing, knowing a thing, that you come to understand it. Only when you see its unique traits can you truly appreciate what it is, and what it isn’t.”