“I’m not saying I believe all of it or any of it,” Emma continued. “I’m just saying I don’t hate it. Some of it’s actually really interesting. There are stories in here that are kind of wild.”
“They’re fairy tales, Em.”
But her daughter didn’t look so sure. She fluttered a few tissue-thin pages. “I don’t know. I’ve been jumping around. I don’t even know where to start, honestly. I was going to ask Eli.”
The alarm that had been simmering in Kate’s chest flared. “You’re going to ask Eli to teach you about the Bible?”
“Not teach me. Just, like, where to read first. It’s a big book and it’s confusing. What’s the difference between the testament stuff? And, honestly, did it really flood? And some of these guys in the beginning lived to be nine hundred!”
Kate pressed her fingertips together—a habit from faculty meetings when she was trying not to say the first thing that came to mind. That book was no different fromCinderellaandJack and the Beanstalk!
She took a slow breath, corralling her cool. “Emma, I need to ask you something and I want you to hear it as a real question, not an accusation.”
“Okay…”
She perched on the edge of the bed, looking right at her daughter’s guileless, freckled beauty. “Do you feel like Eli is trying to…convert you? To bring you into his belief system?”
Emma looked genuinely bewildered. “Convert me? Mom, he took me on a boat ride and told me I was valuable. He didn’t dunk me in the water and preach at me.”
“I know, but?—”
Emma shifted on the bed, leaning forward, searching Kate’s face. “Can I askyoua question?”
“Yes.”
“Why does this upset you so much?” Emma’s voice wasn’t angry—it was honestly confused. “It’s a book. It made me feel better. Why does it matter what anyone believes if it helps them be a better person?”
Kate stared at her daughter and dug for another answer that wasn’t,Because it isn’t true.
That was her reason—the scientist’s reason, the empiricist’s reason, the reason that had governed her entire adult life. But saying “it’s not true” to a seventeen-year-old girl who had just found something that made her feel less broken was not something Kate could do.
Not today. Maybe not ever.
“I just don’t want you…indoctrinated,” she said quietly.
Emma smiled gently, and for one disorienting moment, Kate felt like the child in the conversation. “Mom, I’m going to keep reading this. And I’m going to talk to Eli about it. I’m not being brainwashed. I’m just…exploring something. Isn’t that what scientists do?”
Kate let out a breath that was half laugh, half surrender. Her own methodology, turned against her by a seventeen-year-old.
“Fine,” she said. “Just promise me you’ll keep thinking critically.”
“I promise. And you promise me you won’t freak out about it.”
“I don’t freak out.”
“Mom. You kinda are right now.”
Kate studied her daughter—this girl who couldn’t look at herself in a mirror three weeks ago, now sitting cross-legged on a bed in Destin arguing with her mother about the Bible—andfelt a tangle of emotions she couldn’t sort into any category her scientific mind recognized.
Pride. Fear. Love. Something that might have been awe.
“I’m not freaking out,” she insisted, standing. “I’m processing.”
“’Kay,” Emma said cheerfully, and opened the Bible again. “So am I.”
Kate left the room, closing the door behind her with exaggerated calm. She stood in the hallway for a moment, one hand on the doorframe, staring at nothing.
She needed to talk to Eli…but not yet. She’d give it a few days to see if she was overreacting or if Emma came to her senses. She didn’t want to break the beautiful rhythm she and Eli had found this week, and a conversation like this…could be serious.