The conversation ended, and we both zoned out for a bit. I started imagining Zoe and Todd together, thinking how good she’d be for him when he broke the silence with an unexpected statement.

“I was talking to Dave Croft the other day and he said he’d been here with a bunch of other people to, like, pray and stuff.”

I nodded. Dave had been one of the first on the set to join us for prayer, and one of the most reserved members of our impromptu Bible study. I was curious to know how he and Todd had hooked up, but I avoided the question for fear it would take us away from a more important discussion. “Yeah, there are about forty of us who get together once a week. Grace and I host it, and we just talk and read the Bible and pray.” I mentally threw God a look of panic and a plea for help.

Todd drained his glass and twirled the ice silently for another minute before stating, “My mom died three months ago.”

I blinked. “Oh wow, Todd … I’m so sorry.”

“She started going to some church about a year ago and telling me about it. She sounded a lot like you did when you first told me you’d started believing in God. She’d had Parkinson’s for a while; we pretty much saw it coming. She’d left my dad a list of stuff she wanted me to have, and one of the things she gave me was her Bible. It was all marked up, notes in the margins and stuff. She put a letter in the front, asking me to read it. So I started to.” He’d been studying his glass while he spoke, but now he looked right at me. “Do you really believe all that?”

Slowly, I nodded. “I do. It took a lot of convincing at first, but it makes sense to me now. Well … to be honest, it made sense almost from the beginning, but I was too stubborn to admit it. If you believe it, it pretty much demands that you change, and I didn’t want to change.” I shrugged. “But eventually I quit fighting it, because it took a lot more energy to be in denial than it did to relent.”

He frowned at his glass, thinking. I prayed like mad. “I don’t see why my mom got such a raw deal then, if she believed. Why would God have let her die if she was so faithful?”

I was out of my depth, and I knew it. I shot up a prayer for how to respond, then suddenly Zoe was bounding down the stairs, oblivious to what had been taking place. God’s timing was, as usual, impeccable. She stopped short when she realized the mood was more serious than it had been at her departure. “Am I interrupting?”