“You actually came back. After the scene in the hospital I thought for sure you’d never come back.”

“You did say some pretty bizarre things.”

“Ah, but they’re not bizarre to me. Only to you. If you believed, they wouldn’t be so weird.”

“Believed what?”

And then I’d woken up.

I hadn’t given the scene at the hospital a whole lot of thought recently, although every time I ran across one of those televangelists on TV, I wondered vaguely if she thought the same way they did. And yet whenever I did think of that day, I could remember exactly what she had said. I had a hard time believing that someone who seemed as normal as she did would really think that God worked like that, if there even was a God. It seemed a bit fanatical to me. But then again, it had been a long, long time since I had darkened the door of a church, and I didn’t remember much of what I’d learned at the church my parents had dragged us to a few times a year when I was growing up. Maybe it wasn’t that fanatical. Maybe it was pretty normal, and I just didn’t know it. Either way, it didn’t seem like something I was willing to buy into. Heck, I’d tried all those other religions to no avail. Why would this one be any different?

I finished eating, then showered and dressed before trying to make the apartment presentable. Kate was stopping by sometime after noon, and it was 12:30 by the time I finally got the place looking decent. I’d been pretty sloppy lately, which wasn’t typical of me, but I’d been preoccupied and distracted, and when I got like that, I tended to get messy. Too much brainpower was being diverted to the Grace issue for me to think about being tidy.

Kate arrived a little after 1:00, a cardboard box in her arms. “All right, let’s see what you’ve got here,” she said after settling into an armchair. She handed me a bundle of fan mail, a stack of scripts, and an envelope of business mail. After that she whipped out a calendar and ran down a list of interview requests, charity invitations, and a few other issues that needed my attention, and after an hour we had everything squared away.

When we were done, she fidgeted a bit in her seat and then stared me down. “So tell me about this girl.”

I shrugged. “What’s to tell?”

“Well, you gave her a car.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“So that’s it? You gave her a car, said, ‘Have a nice life,’ and that’s the end of that? Not gonna call, not gonna write, just … let it lie?”

I raked a hand through my hair. Why did this conversation make me uncomfortable? “Well, yeah, I guess. What’s the big deal?”