Grace grins sheepishly. Oops, sorry; shame on me for reverting to lingo.” She sets her lips for a second, seeming to think. “A ‘God thing’ is when something happens just the way you needed it to, and there was no way you could have orchestrated it yourself. You could call it a miracle, although I tend to think of miracles as being … I don’t know … more like the defying of natural law, you know? Like cancer disappearing, fatal injuries not being fatal, that kind of thing, but a God thing is … well, just like what happened to me: jobs materializing and a roof being placed over my head with practically no effort on my part whatsoever. You look at the odds and think, How did that happen?” She shrugs and smiles. “And I reply, ‘It was a God thing.’”

“Like a coincidence!’

“You could call it that, yeah. But we believe that there are very few things in life that are just coincidences. There’s a master plan, and we only see glimpses of it, and when we don’t see the whole thing, we say, Oh, what a coincidence.’ But in reality it is God setting us up for exactly what we needed. More like a divine coincidence.”

Apparently my doubt is written like text all over my face. Jack laughs. “Mull it over,” he says. “We can talk more about it later.”

I’m hoping we won’t talk about it at all—their God talk makes me uncomfortable. Not because of them; they aren’t pushy the way so many other religious people are. They’re just so matter-of-fact about it. This is what bothers me, I think—that they see it as fact. I work hard to shelve my personal feelings about this and urge Grace to continue her story.

Even though things had gone incredibly well up until now, the anxiety I had warded off for so long began to break down my resolve. What had I been thinking? Why, of all places, California? Sure, the winters were a lot more tolerable than the often-arctic conditions I’d weathered my whole life, but I’d never minded the snow and subzero windchill that much, had I? And I knew no one in this state, except for Gary. But he wasn’t really my friend; he was my godfather, my parents’ age, and not exactly someone I’d want to spend my time hanging out with.