Relief like I’d never felt before cascaded over me like rain. The words that had needed to be spoken for so long were finally out there, irrevocable, clear as crystal, and unable to be ignored. There were tears on my face, but I didn’t actually cry until he stood and walked out the door.

“You broke up with him?”

Grace nods. “I had to,” she whispers. Jack fell asleep in the middle of her narrative, and she’s been trying not to awaken him. “And I don’t know where the strength came from to do it—well, I mean, I know where it came from, but it wasn’t from me.”

“Did you have any kind of feeling you’d eventually get back together?”

“Nope.”

“So you were really okay with the fact that he might never come back, that you’d just cut loose the most eligible bachelor on the planet?”

She nods and shrugs, then leans forward to make sure I clearly hear her. “You have to understand, Jada, that I trusted God knew what He was doing. We’d brought us together for something. As long as I did what I knew I was supposed to do, I couldn’t go wrong, even though it looked on the surface like I was making a huge mistake. The things the world sees as logical aren’t necessarily logical when seen from God’s perspective, and since I can’t see what He sees, I just have to trust Him when He tells me what to do.”

I can’t help shaking my head. “That’s an awful lot of trust.”

She flashes a small smile. “Maybe so, but He led me right.” Jack rouses from his nap and, after sipping his water, picks up where Grace left off.

JACK

I DON’T REMEMBER the first ten minutes of the drive home. The look on her face—so serene and confident as she shoved a knife into my chest—was before me like a ghost until I got to the freeway. Then the other drivers got a taste of my wrath as I wove in and out of lanes doing eighty.

I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I’d been absolutely convinced she felt the same way I did; had I known she didn’t, I would never have said anything. And all that crap about God—it hadn’t stopped her lately, so why was it stopping her now?

All the things I wished I’d said filled my mind as I sped back to LA; the words are never there when you need them. I almost went back to demand an explanation, but frankly I didn’t want to talk to her. And I wasn’t sure an explanation would help anyway; it wouldn’t change the fact that I loved her and she didn’t love me. Or at least didn’t love me enough to look past her God.