We sat one night on their balcony, she wrapped in a quilt on the porch swing, and I on a deck chair across from her—I couldn’t bear to take the seat beside her, knowing it was Jack that should be there—and I asked how she could be so calm when her husband was dying. “How can you not spend all your time together,” I asked, “when every time with him might be your last?”

She smiled and shrugged wearily. “It won’t be the last time. There will be a day when we’ll be together again, and Bree, too, without the shroud of sickness to ruin things. He needs his time alone with God, with himself, with “Bree. I don’t want him to worry about us. I don’t want to make him feel guilty. I know he still does, and I’m afraid if I hover he’ll feel like a burden, and then he’ll feel more guilty. Why cloud his last days and hours with that?”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re so sure of yourself.”

Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not sure of myself at all. I’m only sure of God.” And again, for perhaps the thousandth time since I’d met her and her husband, she told me about the God she believed in, and why. It was a liturgy I had come to love, if only because the look of serenity on their faces as they explained it eased the pain of losing a new friend. But tonight it was not enough for me to hear it, and I told her as much.

“Then perhaps,” she said with a quiet thoughtfulness, “it’s time for you to believe it.”

When I pull into their driveway, I park alongside Todd and Zoe’s SUV. Through window I can see Bree in Zoe’s arms, her head on Zoe’s shoulder. She is crying. I literally run to the door, slowing myself just enough to enter the house without bursting In. Todd, Zoe, and Grace are there, tears on their cheeks, and I know I’m too late. Grace comes to me and puts her arms around my neck. We hold each other and cry. “Jack wanted me to tell you something,” she says as she wipes tears from her eyes and pulls a tissue from a nearby box. “He said to tell you he had to finish the book for you. You were the reason he had to stay. God wanted you to hear our story.”

I nod. I know. God told me as much on my way here. How I know it was Him, I can’t explain.