by Ella James
Before I start down the stairs, I look over my shoulder. No one’s here—I don’t have staff in the house on nights and weekends—but I’m plagued by the sensation that I’m being watched.
Given what I’m doing, maybe that makes sense.
The feeling follows me as I stride toward the curb. I open my own door and lunge smoothly into the back seat. It’s a skill I’ve been coached on—like nearly everything at this point. Every hat I wear puts people’s eyes on me. Every move I make reflects on Evermore, its mission.
Like it or not—and I don’t, sometimes—I’m the focus of intense media scrutiny and even more intense fandom. Two years ago, I found a woman in my bedroom when I got home from a trip to France. The year before, I gave a speech, and as I stepped off the stage, someone bumped into me—with the butt of a rifle. The media treats me more like a celebrity than a pastor most days. I do a lot of advocacy work with Hollywood and fund-raisers with people of wealth, and all of that draws interest. Every Sunday, I stand before a crowd of 30,000 while 14 million watch on devices and TVs.
Being Luke McDowell means I need to look elegant climbing into my custom SUV. The clothes I’m wearing, like the car, cost too much—but that’s how this goes. I’m not a monkey in a cage. I’m the ringmaster—maybe at times a puppeteer. I spend some time behind the curtain, but a lot more in the spotlight.
For tonight’s dinner, my PR team chose a low-key Moroccan restaurant that offers private, curtained booths. And even then, someone will know me. Probably almost everyone I come across.
I snap my seatbelt buckle, and Bernard’s brown eyes meet mine in the rear-view. “Evening, sir.”
I give him the best smile I can muster in the mirror.
“Looking sharp,” he says.
“Likewise, sir.”
There’s a divider window in the Escalade, but I don’t use it. Neither did my dad, when Bernard was driving him around. I’m not sure what the point of privacy would be, in this context. For the first few years after I stepped into my new role, Bernie knew more about Evermore than I did.
“Our destination still the Mason house?”
I nod once, then drop my gaze to my lap. The trek will take about twenty minutes in San Francisco traffic. No reason not to get a few things done while I ride.
I look at the calendar in my phone, then make my next call.
“Ms. Walker. How are you?”
I spend ten minutes going over an upcoming financial transfer from the Evermore Foundation to a charity that’s providing bottled water to Syrian families. Linda Walker, the foundation’s chief operating officer, confirms our dollars are going to be spent on what’s intended, and we talk briefly about the strategy for South Sudan next month. She relays some information from her contact at the State Department, which makes me feel even more sure that steering funds from Sierra Leon to South Sudan will maximize our aid potential.
“I’ve been doing some pre-work for The Empathy Endeavor,” Linda says. “You remember, the organization that produces those commercials?”
“I do.”
“Are you still thinking of them for our domestic agenda in March?”
“I’m down for it if you are.” I have to pull the trigger on big financial transfers, but she’s the one who’s really in charge of the foundation’s giving.
“I like them,” she says.
“Sounds good to me.”
After our call, I lean my head against the seat’s headrest and shut my eyes. I’m tired. Can’t sleep. To keep my eyes open, I call Pearl, letting her know there are two more kittens in the bushes in front of my house.
“I called the Paw Patrol again, but I’d like it if someone could make sure that they arrive.”
“I’ll send David.” He’s a high school boy—Pearl’s gopher. “Then I’ll call the Silk Curtain to double-check your private seating.”
“Thanks.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“I don’t think so.” I bite my check. “Mm…there might be one thing. If you could find a way to talk to Michael, mother’s chef. He said she’s been refusing food again. I should have followed up this morning, but…”
“Of course. I’ll talk to Michael. You focus on having fun, chief.”
I can picture the worried notch between her brows—the one she’s always got lately when we talk. “Will do.”
“I’ll leave a voice mail letting you know what he tells me. If you’ll have the phone on silent?”
“I will.”
“Did you wear what I thought you should?” She sounds sly.
I shut my eyes. “I did.”
“Smart guy.”
I roll my eyes. “Goodnight, PNW.”
“Goodnight, PL.”
I hang up the phone and hold it in my lap. I breathe slowly and let my body move with the car. I’m just cargo, being transported to a strategically selected destination. Like the food they’ll drop over Raqa and the other Syrian cities next week. Like that, but so much less essential. Ansley Stevens, Evermore’s associate pastor, could run the church without me. I rub my eyes until I see spots…then look at my phone again, at my reflection. Two years ago, I got my eyebrows shaped up with a laser. Makeup people were always complaining about them, and one of my assistants thought it was a good idea. I enjoy every creature comfort known to man—almost.
The other….doesn’t matter. If life underlines for us anything at all, it’s that. You work within the confines of the boundaries set for you. Round hole, and you’re a square peg? Whittle off the edges, baby.
I smooth one of my jeans-legs, rubbing a fingertip over the dark denim. Bernard turns right at a light. I go into my email inbox, read an update from the head trustee at Evermore Academy, followed by a one-line message from Rufus, the church’s lobbyist.
As Bernard steers us down a street lined with Edwardian homes, my phone buzzes. Email. It’s from the interior design team overseeing our expansion of the church’s west wing. I skim Aiden’s comments and questions; they’re not directed at me, but at the team that’s overseeing the project. I’m just cc’d. My eyes zero in on one of them as Bernard parks along the curb.
How would you feel about a mural on that south wall? That big one in the atrium between the two big halls. It’s the wall with no windows, the wall behind the one behind the theater’s stage. Pam thinks it could use something.
I swallow hard. Then I slip the phone into my pocket.
When I glance back up, she’s floating down the front walk like an angel swathed in pale blue silk. One Ms. Megan Mason—my dinner date.
Three
Luke
“So there I am. I have absolutely no clue how to speak the language, and I’m on the porch with this woman. She’s smiling hugely, holding out a plate bearing a slipper, looking at me like, ‘Well, are you going to eat it?’”
She laughs, and I find myself grinning with her.
“I had no idea what to do, so I mimed like I wanted salt and pepper. Buy myself some time, you know?”
“Good move.”
“So she disappears and comes back out with some seasonings. I watched her shake them onto the shoe.” Megan mimes that. “And all I’m thinking is how will I chew it? Leather shoe, sort of like a ballet slipper. I raised it to my mouth, and she starts laughing…like, hysterically. That’s when I found out that before she left, my Aunt Louise had told her in incorrect Tamasheght that I should be served a pretty shoe for dinner!”
She throws her head back laughing, her long, wavy brown hair flowing down her shoulders. Her sea green eyes are vibrant, creased at the corners with amusement as they meet mine again.
“So anyway, that was my first time in the field with Wellspring. When I was nineteen.”
Now she’s the chief operating officer of the charitable foundation her grandfather founded. Wellspring digs wells in areas where water is scarce, and while they’re there, they feed and clothe the people, set up aid for other needs, and proselytize.
“That sounds pretty crazy.”
She grins, shaking her head. “It’s always a little like that. Or it was. I haven’t been out in the field the last two years at all.”
I nod. “Too busy?”
She nods around a bite of her hors d’oeuvres, then dabs one corner of her mouth with her cloth napkin. “I’m sure it’s nothing compared to your schedule.”
I give her my pastor smile—the warm, empathetic one. “Pretty sure it’s not nothing.”
“How many hours do you work, like weekly?”
I lift my brows.
She giggles. “C’mon…”
“And expose my workaholism?”
“I’m fifty-five or sixty,” she says, at the same time I lie, “Seventy or eighty.” Which means ninety.
She gives a low whistle, grinning even as she shakes her head. “You must sleep there.”
“At the church?” I laugh.
“Do you?”
“Rarely.”
“Do you work at home, then?”
“There or on a plane.” I waggle my brows.
“That’s incredible.”
“Nah.”
“It really is, though. Do you like it?” Her face pinches comically, and I laugh before serving up my own exaggerated skeptical look. “Are you trying to get me on the record saying I don’t like my job, Ms. Mason?”
Her cheeks color. “Of course not. No. I-I just—you’re so busy, and it seems like—”
I grin, and she covers her mouth with her napkin. I can see her cheeks are a bit flushed. “Don’t be nervous, Megan.”
She lowers the napkin, revealing pursed lips that slowly tip up in a small smile. “I am nervous.”
“Why? Because you’ve seen me on TV?”
“A little bit that.” Her voice is low. Soft.
“Why else?”
A pink hue spreads across her cheeks, and she fans her face. “I’m not usually this awkward.”
“Let me guess: my dazzling smile disarms you. Is that it?”
She holds my gaze, and I’m surprised by the vulnerability in her eyes. The kindness and, strangely, empathy. “Of course,” she whispers.
“You wouldn’t be here if not, is that it?” I’m teasing as she gathers her composure.
“There’s no such thing as a blind date with you, is there?”
For a long second, my pulse loses its rhythm. “It’s very rare.”
“That must be strange.”
“A little. And to answer you from earlier—” I offer her a smile— “I do like the job.”
“If you didn’t, would you still do it?”
I prop my cheek in my hand and decide to answer truthfully. “Yes.”
“Because of obligation?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it that. In fact, I wouldn’t.”
“What would you call it?”
I chew my cheek, thinking carefully about my words. “It’s a calling.”
“Do you really feel that way?”
“Don’t you?” I ask.
She smiles. “Most of the time.”
“I’d say that’s about the same for me.”
She nods. “There must be perks, though.”
“How do you mean?”
Her eyes widen, and she looks like she regrets asking. And I get what she means. Although I’ve never behaved any way except sincerely, and I’ll never take a salary, skepticism of my life abounds.
“You mean this.” I gesture to the space around us. This restaurant is one of the hottest in town right now. “We got in because of the pulpit,” I say. “But the McDowell Family Trust is paying for the meal, I promise.”
She smiles, looking off-guard and embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I promise.”
I open my mouth, then close it. Maybe I’m coming on too strong. “It’s fine.” I wave the whole thing away. “People assume my ‘ascension’ was driven by business interests as much as spiritual. It makes sense, since our ministry is so large. But for myself—I was content in the outreach post.”
“You did the apps and the TV channel, the publishing, right? Before your father…”
“And radio, and publishing, yes.” Before my father died in 2014, and I got bumped up in the Evermore hierarchy. “That’s what I like to do. But as Dad got older, he got tired.”
“And that’s when you started stepping in?”
“I wrote the sermons starting about a year before he passed. It was just going to be a break for him. I did it once when he was sick with diverticulitis. There were always other writers, for when Dad got tired. That’s not unusual when someone does this for as long as he had. The creative well runs dry.”
“Of course.” Her pretty face is empathetic.
“When he passed away, the board of elders did a search of sorts.”
She nods. “But they chose you, unanimously. My dad told me.” Her grandfather was one of the elders at that time. “He said there was no one like you.”
I lift my brows, and she shrugs. “Clearly, it’s in your blood.”
I press my lips flat. “If you think it’s clear.”
“My best friend is a doctor,” she says. “Fifth generation. And her family is from Pakistan, so women doctors aren’t without obstacles, at least not in their country of origin.”
I have one last bite of my kefta briouat before the waiter steps over to take our first-course plates.
He serves the second course, and Megan looks at me thoughtfully over her chickpea soup. “I just wondered how you saw yourself in the grand scheme of things. I didn’t mean to question your sincerity.”
I give her a forgiving smile. “It’s okay.”
“You must get that a lot.”
“Sometimes.”
“Because people think your family made their money that way. Via the church. Is that it?”
I nod.
“No one from this area, though,” she muses.
“Most people from the Bay area know that’s not true,” I agree.
“Your family helped repair after the earthquake.” When I only nod—what they really did was invest after the earthquake—she says, “You must have a lot of love for what you do. Do you have time for hobbies?”
I feel the weight of my phone in my pocket and tense my leg beneath it. “I like sailing,” I manage. “Snowboarding. I read a lot.”
“What do you like reading?”
“Mostly dry theology. Nonfiction. Mysteries, sometimes.”
“What’s your top read of the last year?”
I swallow hard. Confessions of The Fox. I won’t say that. I settle on, “Asymmetry, probably. By Lisa Halliday?”
Her face is blank.
“The Great Believers was really good, too. American Prison—that one I wouldn’t call enjoyable, though.”
Still blank.
“Educated?”
She perks up. “I liked that. And I have the sense you’re better-read than I am. Did you read The Apostles’ Creed?”
I grin. “I gave a quote for the jacket.”
“Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism?”
“You read that?”
She nods, looking half amused and half abashed.
“What did you think?”
Her face lights up. “I liked it. And I thought it was important. Painfully relevant. I don’t think I know anyone else who’s read it.”
I lift my glass. “To obscure theological treatises.”
“To extreme nerdiness.”
We reach across the table to clink glasses. After that, she has some of her soup, and I, mine.
“Tell me something else about yourself,” she says as she looks up. She makes an expression that’s très dramatique. “Tell me something no one knows.”
I keep my face on lockdown, twisting my lips slightly upward at the corners as I inhale slowly through my nose—and firm up my mask. “Are we talking secretly afraid of butterflies or more like not a fan of Martin Luther?”
Her eyes wid
en as my lips twitch. “Are you…”
I smirk. “Am I what?”
“Are you scared of butterflies?”
I lift one brow.
“You’re scared of butterflies!”
I lean forward, waving my hand in feigned embarrassment, as if I’m signaling her to keep her voice down.
“Why butterflies?”
I look around before whispering conspiratorially. “Grasshopper bodies.”
“Grasshopper bodies? What! They have soft, velvety—”
“Grasshopper bodies.” I give her the look I give to kids at Evermore Academy to keep them in line. Then I smile and push my chair back. “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”
I can hear her laughing as I head toward the men’s room. With every step, I feel my iPhone in my right back pocket.
In the stall, I take a long, slow breath and admit that I like her. The mutual friends who set us up were right—she’s kind. And beautiful. And thoughtful. She’s a good conversationalist, and I bet she’d be a great wife.
I put my hand over my chest, thinking of what I’d need to do to be with her. It doesn’t matter.
I take the phone out of my pocket, shut my eyes. Later tonight, I should delete the app. I can’t do this—keeping one foot partway in a fantasy. It’s undisciplined…a self-deception. And it’s pointless. It’s been years since I spoke to him. Truth be told, I barely know him. I’ve said prayers of thanksgiving that he is who he is, because I don’t think he’ll ever tell. I got off easy for my indiscretion.
I delete the app on impulse, drop the phone back into my pocket, wash my hands, and return to the table.
She’s an ideal dinner date. We talk about her dog and how I’d like a dog but don’t feel like I’m home enough. During the desert course, Hanna comes up. I tell her it was mostly me who ended things back in November. We only dated for five months, but I knew Hanna was eager to marry. She was thirty-eight, and she wanted a whole brood of children.
Megan’s face bends sympathetically. “That must have been hard.”