“She talked to me,” he said, turning to face me, instantly pulling my mind back to that stoop. His cheeks were strangely white, drained of any color in the hazy light. “She talked to me after you left. I would have told you sooner . . . I wanted to, actually, but you haven’t exactly seemed interested in talking to me, so I guess I sort of forgot about it somehow. Until now.”

“What did she say?” I could feel my heartbeat soar, could hear the rapid thudding in my ears. He knew something. He held another piece of the puzzle.

“She said that when the time came, I shouldn’t be afraid to believe in you. That I should support you and trust in whatever you’d have to tell me.” He stared at me as if he was seeing me for the first time, his eyes scanning over every curve and every shadow of my face. I wanted to hide, cover myself with my hands, but I stayed still. I let him look.

He laughed then, but it wasn’t the sort of hostile laugh that I’d come to expect. He sounded amazed, like a little kid almost, excited to have made some awesome new discovery.

“Well, now,” he said, one of his trademark grins slowly spreading across his face, lighting up the dark stoop. “I guess I have to believe you, right? No choice in the matter, it would seem. That solves that for us.”

I heard myself giggle in response. The sound was completely foreign to me after the last few weeks.

“It’s that easy to convince you?” I asked, savoring the unexpectedly easy, happy moment. “For all you know, that was my grandma and I begged her to go along with this whole incredible, elaborate story, just to keep myself entertained. You never know.”

“I may hardly know you, Mina, but something tells me that you’re not the kind of girl to take the risk of ruining your image quite so lightly, not for the sake of some ridiculously premeditated practical joke.” He paused to beam at me again, dimples on full display, and had we been anywhere else, talking about anything else, I would have thought we were flirting. But we weren’t. We couldn’t be, not here and now. “It all sounds pretty outrageous, I know it does. But it feels good to believe in something this crazy, you know? To believe that there’s something in the world that we can’t explain. I like it. I want a little crazy in my life.”

“Ha. Be careful what you wish for,” I said, though crazy didn’t sound so bad to me, not when he put it like that. Maybe I needed more crazy, too. Maybe I always had, and this was life’s over-the-top way of giving it to me.

“I warn you, once the entire school knows—and they will know very soon, I’m sure, because Green Hill plays a pretty vicious game of whisper down the lane—all bets are off. You’ll be putting your whole reputation on the line to be seen anywhere near me. I don’t want to suck you into my mess.”

“Reputation? Please. I don’t have a good reputation now. I don’t have any reputation at all, in fact. So you definitely don’t have to worry about that, trust me. But this will all add some nice color to my first and last year in public high school, that’s for sure. I’ve been homeschooled my whole life, up until my parents very recently decided that sending me off into the real world for senior year would be a good way to prepare me for college life. Just in time to be your bodyguard and knight in shining armor, it seems. Everybody wins.”

“How are you winning?” I asked.

“Well, now you have to be my friend, of course.” His lips were still curled up in a smile, but his eyes looked dimmer, as if part of him had crawled off into that other world he so often seemed to live in. “You probably haven’t noticed, Mina, but I’ve yet to make any of those at our school. And if I’m being totally honest with you, despite my pretty tremendously charming personality, I’ve never had many friends to begin with. I blame the homeschooling, but I think it’s probably my wicked intelligence and dashing good looks, too. Deadly combo. Scares people away.” He laughed then, softening the blow of such a sad, intimate detail about his life. It surprised me to think that the boy with the beautiful smile could be so lonely.

But I could see, I suppose, why people would be put off by his spacy, zoned-out way, his offbeat sense of style that made it clear he didn’t follow anyone else’s rules. As soon as someone reached out to him, he snapped out of his shell, and he was warm and friendly and interesting—but that was just it. Someone else had to make the effort first. And in a new high school filled with strangers, that could be a lot to ask for. After all, even I had taken this long to come around.

“I’m glad we have it all sorted out then,” I said, nudging him with my elbow as I looked down at my wrist to check the time. I’d gotten into the habit of wearing the gold watch I’d bought Nate for our anniversary—silly, I knew, but somehow having it there, on me, tracking my days, made me feel as if Nate wasn’t lost for good. At the very least, it had been too expensive to just waste away in a drawer, and I couldn’t bring myself to return it to the store. Just in case. Just in case Nate ever found a way to forgive me. But now, sitting so close to Jesse, the watch made me feel almost guilty. As if I was betraying Nate somehow, feeling this connected to a boy who wasn’t him.

I spun the watch, hiding the face along the inside of my wrist. “We should probably go back in now. Save your uncle from the mountain of things I’m sure he still has to do. I believe there’s a big box that needs carrying, too. But I promise to only watch from the sidelines while I direct you.” My hands automatically flew to my stomach as I said that, cupping the tiny bump that was hiding under my apron.

His eyes followed my movement, and we both sat there staring at my hands, thinking about what was actually under them, just inches beneath the surface of my skin. No matter how many times every minute of every day I’d thought about that baby, that little miniature person growing inside of me, it never felt any less mystifying or any less spectacular.

“I’m not far enough along for the baby to kick,” I said, filling the space with the first thought that came to my head. “But soon, I hope.”

“Can I . . . Can I touch it?” He looked away as he asked. “I’m sorry, that was probably a weird thing to say. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“No. No, it’s fine,” I said, though the idea of his hand on my stomach actually terrified me. “You can touch it.” My mom and Gracie and Hannah were the only people I’d let get that close. But I couldn’t say no to Jesse. And I didn’t want to, I realized.

He reached out and I moved my hands off to my lap to give him room. His fingers were light and cautious, landing on my stomach one tip at a time. Neither of us said anything for a minute or so, letting the full weight of everything settle on the stoop around us.

“Why do you think . . .” He paused, his hand still resting over the baby. “Why do you think Iris needed the child to be born from a virgin? Or from a person at all? Why not just have him or her delivered down to earth by, I don’t know, an angel or something? Some kind of divine messenger?”

I sighed, so heavily that I felt his hand carried by the rise and fall of my belly. I closed my eyes, trying to be less aware of his touch, his warmth spreading through the thin layer of my cotton T-shirt. “Trust me. I’ve asked myself that question. It doesn’t really make sense, does it? Why does there have to be a carrier at all? What am I? Why me? Why any of this? But I’ll never understand. I don’t think I’ll ever get an answer.”

“I wonder then, if you hadn’t been a virgin . . .” My eyes snapped open as he trailed off again, blushing profusely. “Sorry.” He shook his head, looking down as his teeth clenched in an awkward grimace. “Too personal maybe.”

“It’s fine. Really. None of this feels personal anymore anyway. But if I wasn’t a virgin, would they not have picked me? I don’t know that, either. I didn’t not have sex because I thought it was dirty or sinful or anything like that. I just wanted to be perfectly sure, I guess. I wanted to be completely in love.”