The crowd outside that conference hall was screaming for blood.
The night a Saudi prince announces he had become a Christian.
What happened in the next 60 seconds made every single person in that mob go completely silent.
My name is Ferris and I am 28 years old from Houston, Texas.
I came to this country from Riyad when I was 9 years old, tucked between my parents on a plane that smelled like recycled air and cardamom, carrying nothing except two suitcases and a faith my father described as the spine of our family.
Without it, he told me once, we have no shape.
We are just soft and formless like water without a cup.
I believed him completely.
I believed him for 28 years, right up until the night everything broke open in a hotel parking garage in downtown Houston, and nothing was ever the same again.
My father, [clears throat] Nasser, was an engineer.
He worked for a Saudi oil company that sent him to Houston to oversee a pipeline partnership with an American energy firm.
We lived in a house in the Galleria area, the kind of neighborhood where the lawns were always green and the cars in the driveways were always new.
We were the only Arab Muslim family on our street for the first 3 years.
The neighbors were polite but careful.
The way Americans are polite with people they are not sure about yet.
The mosque was 20 minutes from our house.
Every Friday, my father dressed in white and drove us there without exception.
Rain, traffic, illness, it did not matter.
Friday prayer was not something you rearranged your life around.
It was what your life was arranged around.
I learned that before I learned long division.
I was a serious student.
Not just in the school where I graduated near the top of my class, but in the mosque where I attended weekend Islamic classes from the time I was six.
By 13, I had memorized the last quarter of the Quran.
My father kept a small notebook where he tracked my memorization progress.
He had neat handwriting and he would put a small check mark next to each chapter I finished.
When I completed the last one, he took me to dinner at a restaurant where the cloth napkins were folded into swans and he ordered meat lamb that I did not have to pay for and told me he was proud in a way that made his voice go low and careful because he was not a man who said that easily.
I kept that notebook for years.
At Rice University, I studied petroleum engineering following my father’s path.
But my real passion was something else.
I had started following the work of a Saudi academic named Dr.
Wed Mansour who ran a think tank in London focused on what he called the Islamic defense of identity.
He argued that the biggest threat to Muslim communities in the West was not violence or poverty.
It was slow cultural erosion.
Christians who were kind to your face while quietly pulling your children away from their faith.
Universities that made Islam seem old and irrelevant.
Media that made Western values look like universal values instead of one culture’s values being imposed on everyone else.
His arguments were sharp and well doumented and they matched exactly what I had been feeling without knowing how to name it.
I started sharing his content online during my sophomore year.
By junior year, I had 30,000 followers across three platforms.
By the time I graduated, I had almost 90,000 Muslim communities in Houston and Dallas and Chicago and London were sharing my posts.
I was getting invited to speak at Islamic conferences.
I was 23 and I felt like I had found my purpose.
After graduation, I started a full-time media organization I called Fortress Media.
The name came from a Quran verse about Allah being a fortress for believers.
We produced video content, written analysis, and a weekly podcast all focused on defending Islamic identity against what I called Western missionary aggression.
I had four people working with me.
By the end of the first year, our podcast reached 60 countries.
I was particularly focused on what I called celebrity apostasy.
When prominent Muslims left Islam publicly, it sent shock waves through communities and gave Christian missionaries enormous amounts of material to work with.
High-profile conversions were a weapon and I believed fighting them was critical.
Then I heard about Prince Dawood.
His real name was not Dwood.
That was the Christian name he took at his baptism.
He was a minor member of the Saudi royal family, a cousin three times removed from the main line, but royal blood was royal blood.
And when the story broke, it was everywhere.
He had been living in London for 6 years.
He had quietly converted to Christianity 2 years earlier.
He had been baptized in a small Anglican church in West London.
And now he had agreed to speak at a Christian conference in Houston called Faith Without Borders.
A conference that brought together ex-Muslim converts to talk about their journeys to Christianity.
The conference was scheduled for a Friday and Saturday in October at the Marriott Marquet in downtown Houston.
8,000 people had registered to attend.
Three of the main speakers were former Muslims.
Princess Da Wood was the headline.
When I read the announcement, I felt something igniting my chest that I can only describe as a fire with a very clean burn.
Not chaotic, not unfocused, sharp and hot, and absolutely certain of its direction.
I called my core team immediately.
I called Islamic community leaders across Houston.
I called contacts in Dallas who could bring people.
Within 4 days, I had organized a coalition of over 300 Muslims who were willing to come to the Marriott that Friday evening for a public demonstration against the conference and against what we saw as a coordinated attack on Islamic identity using a Saudi prince as the centerpiece.
I built the whole plan in my apartment at my standing desk with four monitors and a whiteboard covered in notes.
I made a schedule.
I assigned roles.
I drafted a public statement that we would deliver outside the hotel entrance.
I prepared a speech I would give through a portable speaker system we would bring on a small cart.
I was focused and organized and I had never been more sure of anything.
We were going to show up in force and make clear that this kind of event using a royal Muslim apostate as inspiration uh was not going to happen quietly in our city while we looked away.
My father called me the night before.
He asked what I was planning.
I told him.
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, “Be careful.
Just be careful, Ferris.
Not because the cause was wrong,” he said, “but because crowds are not always as controlled as the people who organized them.
” I told him I had everything planned.
I told him not to worry.
I did not sleep well that Thursday night.
I lay on my back in my apartment and stared at the ceiling and listened to the city and felt the energy in my chest that had been there all week building towards something that I thought I understood completely.
I had no idea what I was actually walking toward.
Friday evening came cold and clear.
October in Houston can go either way, but this night the sky was dark blue and the air had a real bite to it and the lights of downtown blazed against it like something deliberate.
I arrived at the Marriott Marquee at 6:15 p.
m.
The conference opening session was scheduled for 7:00.
I wanted to be set up and visible before the attendees started arriving in numbers.
My team had the speaker system ready on its cart near the main entrance plaza.
We had printed signs in English and Arabic.
40 people were already there when I arrived.
By 6:45, we had over 250.
More were still coming from the parking structures.
I stood at the front with the portable microphone in my hand and looked at the crowd behind me.
Men and women, young and old, people who drove 2 hours from other cities because they believed what we were doing muttered.
I felt the weight of their presence.
The way you feel the weight of something real.
I started speaking at 6:50.
I told the crowd that what was happening inside that hotel was not a religious conference.
It was a strategic operation using a Saudi prince to give legitimacy to apostasy.
Using his royal name to tell young Muslims around the world that leaving Islam was acceptable, that it was even admirable.
I said this was not about Prince Dawood’s personal choices.
This was about the machinery behind his story.
The Christian organizations funding this event, the media amplification waiting to turn his testimony into viral content that would reach millions of Muslim homes.
The crowd was with me completely.
The energy was focused and strong.
Hotel security stood near the entrance in a line, but kept their distance.
Guests arriving for other hotel events gave us a wide birth.
Conference attendees began arriving around 6:55.
Some entered through a side entrance that security had opened specifically to avoid the main plaza, but a few came through the front.
When they did, parts of our crowd pressed forward and shouted at them, not threatening at first, just loud, angry.
Then around 7:20, something shifted.
A group of about 30 young men who had positioned themselves near the front of our crowd started moving toward the entrance with more intention than demonstration.
They were not holding signs.
They were pushing.
Hotel security stepped forward immediately and there was a hard physical confrontation.
Elbows and shoulders and raised voices that sent something like electricity through the entire crowd.
I tried to bring the microphone up and redirect.
I called out for everyone to hold their positions, but the speaker system was not loud enough over the noise, and the crowd had its own momentum now, separate from me, separate from my plan.
Then I heard something I was not ready for.
A door on the far side of the plaza opened and a man walked out alone.
He was wearing a simple dark jacket.
He was Saudi.
I could tell immediately by his features and bearing.
He had security with him.
two men who flanked him and scanned the crowd.
But he had clearly made a decision to come outside anyway because he walked past them and stood at the edge of the plaza and he raised both his hands palo toward the crowd.
This was Prince Dawood.
He was maybe 45.
He was not a large man.
He was not loud or dramatic.
He just stood there with his hands raised and looked at the crowd with an expression that I could not immediately categorize.
Not fear, not defiance, something quieter than both.
The crowd noise dropped by half almost immediately.
Not because anyone decided to be quiet, just because a Saudi prince standing alone in a hotel plaza holding his hands up toward an angry crowd was something that none of us had already response for.
I stood 10 m away from him with the microphone hanging at my side.
He spoke in Arabic, clear, clean Arabic with Ariad accent that I recognized from my own family.
He said he was not there to argue.
He said he was not there to insult anyone’s faith.
He said he understood why people were angry and he said he respected the love for Islam behind that anger because he had felt that same love himself for 42 years of his life.
The crowd noise dropped again.
He said he was not there to tell anyone that Islam was wrong or that Muslims should follow his path.
He said his story was his own and he held it carefully.
But he said he could not deny what happened to him in a small room in West London on a Tuesday morning 2 years ago when everything he thought he knew about God cracked open and something real and alive came through.
He said he knew what it cost.
He said he knew what he gave up.
He said the word cost did not feel adequate for what he actually paid.
Then he said something that put a hook in me that I have not been able to remove to this day.
He said, “I did not choose Jesus because I stopped loving God.
I chose Jesus because I finally understood that Jesus is God and that difference is everything.
” For a moment, the plaza was very quiet.
Then one of the young men near the front threw something.
I do not know what it was.
It hit the ground near Prince Dawood’s feet and shattered.
His security moved immediately and had him back through the door in seconds.
The crowd surged toward the entrance and hotel security met them hard and the noise came back all at once, shouting and shoving and the kind of chaos that I had specifically organized this demonstration to avoid.
I stood in the middle of it with the microphone in my hand and prince the wood’s words in my head.
I did not choose Jesus because I stopped loving God.
I chose Jesus because I finally understood that Jesus is God.
I had heard versions of that claim hundreds of times.
I had a prepared counter for it.
I had memorized the arguments.
But since standing there in that cold plaza with chaos breaking out around me, the claim landed differently.
Not as a theological position to refute, as a testimony from a man who sounded like he was telling the simple truth about something he had seen with his own eyes.
The police arrived 12 minutes later.
Crowd control.
They moved people back from the entrance and established a perimeter.
Most of our group dispersed within 30 minutes.
No arrests were made.
Three people had minor injuries from the pushing near the entrance.
Two of them conference attendees.
I stood near the parking garage entrance and watched the crowd thin out.
My team packed up the speaker cart.
The cold air was sharp now and I was not wearing enough for it.
My phone was full of messages.
People calling the night a victory.
People sharing videos of the confrontation online.
The hashtag we created was trending in three cities.
I did not feel like it was a victory.
I felt like I had been standing in front of something important and organized a crowd specifically to look away from it.
I drove home alone that Friday night.
My team had wanted to go out and mark what they were calling a successful demonstration.
I told them I had to get up early.
That was not true.
I just needed to be alone with the drive and the city lights and Prince Dawood’s words which had been repeating in my head since the moment he said them.
I did not choose Jesus because I stopped loving God.
I chose Jesus because I finally understood that Jesus is God.
I had spent 5 years building arguments against exactly that claim.
I could dismantle it six different ways from six different angles.
The Trinity was a fourth century invention.
The Council of Nika Paul corrupting Jesus’s original message.
the Bible being revised and translated and changed over centuries until the original was unreoverable.
I had podcast episodes on each of those arguments.
I had thousands of followers who shared them.
But standing 10 m from a man who said those words with that kind of quiet certainty.
A man who had given up a royal family and a country and a whole world of privilege to say them.
The arguments did not feel the same as they did inside my apartment in front of a whiteboard.
Arguments made sense when the person on the other side was an abstraction.
Prince Dawwood was not an obstruction.
He was a real man who stood alone in a cold plaza facing a crowd that wished him harm and spoke in a steady voice about what he had seen.
I stayed up until 200 a.
m.
that night, not doing anything, just sitting at my kitchen table with a glass of water I did not drink, and the city quiet outside my windows.
At 2:15, I did something I had not done since my freshman year of college when I was writing a rebuttal paper for an Islamic apologetics class.
I opened the Bible, not an app.
I had an actual Bible in my apartment, a hardcover King James that a Christian classmate had given me at Rice years ago.
I had kept it on a shelf, not because I valued it, but because throwing it away felt like an overreaction.
It had a layer of dust on the top edge.
I opened it to the Gospel of John because I vaguely remember that was the one that Christians most often quoted when they wanted to argue for Jesus’s divinity.
I was going to read it the way I read things I intended to counter.
Looking for the weakness, looking for the seams.
By chapter 3, I had stopped looking for weakness.
There is a scene where Jesus speaks to a man named Nicodemus at night.
Nicodemus comes quietly away from people because he has questions he cannot ask publicly.
He is a religious leader and respected man.
and he comes to Jesus in the dark because something is drawing him that he cannot explain to his colleagues.
I sat at my kitchen table in Houston at 2:00 a.
m.
reading that scene and I felt like Nicodemus.
That specific feeling of being pulled towards something you cannot publicly admit you are interested in.
That specific feeling of questions you carry alone because the community you belong to has already decided the answers.
I kept reading.
Jesus said to Nicodemus, “You must be born again.
” Nicodemus asked it how a man could go back into his mother’s womb.
Jesus said he was not talking about physical birth.
He was talking about a second birth from above from spirit.
He was describing a transformation so complete it was like becoming a new person.
I closed the Bible at 3:30 a.
m.
and went to bed.
I did not sleep until almost 5.
Over the following two weeks, I carried on my normal work.
I published content.
I recorded podcast episodes.
I responded to the footage from the Friday demonstration and framed it as a community standing up for its identity.
My metrics were the best they had ever been.
The demonstration had given us enormous visibility.
But privately, something was cracking.
I started researching the historical reliability of the New Testament.
the way I researched everything systematically and with multiple sources.
I did not use Christian apologetics websites.
I used academic databases and peer-reviewed historical scholarship sources with no stake in the theological outcome.
What I found did not match what I had been teaching.
The New Testament had more ancient manuscript evidence than any other document from the ancient world.
Not slightly more, vastly more.
over 5,000 Greek manuscripts alone.
The variations between them were real but minor and affected no major theological claim.
Historians who were not Christians acknowledged this.
A scholar named Bartman, who explicitly was not a Christian and had written extensively about what he saw as problems in the Bible, still acknowledged that the core historical facts were solid.
Jesus existed.
He was crucified.
His tomb was found empty.
His disciples believed they saw him alive afterward.
These were not disputed facts among serious historians.
The dispute was only about what caused them.
I had told audiences for 5 years that the Bible could not be trusted because it had it been corrupted over centuries.
I had said it with complete confidence.
I had never checked.
I had simply repeated what my teachers told me and then repeated it to other people who trusted me.
The same people I had spent five years telling to distrust Christian sources without reading them, I had become.
That recognition sat in my chest like a stone.
I found Prince Dawwood’s testimony video, the full version, not the clips from Friday night.
He had given a 40inute interview to a Christian media organization 6 months earlier.
I watched it alone at my desk with my door closed.
He talked about his 42 years as a devout Muslim.
He talked about his genuine love for Allah and for the Quran.
He talked about the questions that started when he was in his late 30s.
Questions about the character of God that he could not resolve within Islam.
He talked about reading the Gospel of John in an Arabic translation and feeling as he described it like every door he had been pushing against his whole life suddenly opened from the other side.
He talked about what it cost.
He talked about it for 11 minutes without stopping.
His voice was not dramatic.
He just went through the list of what he had lost with the careful thoroughess of someone who needed to make sure the weight was accurately recorded.
When he finished that part of the interview, he looked into the camera and said, “I would do it again tomorrow, not because it was easy, because Jesus is worth every single thing it cost.
” I stopped the video and sat in my chair for a long time.
Then I found a contact email on the Faith Without Borders Conference website.
The conference was over.
I did not know if anyone would respond.
I sent a message to the general address.
I said I was someone who had been at the demonstration outside the hotel on Friday.
I said I had questions that I could not ask in my normal circles.
I asked if there was anyone affiliated with the conference I could speak with privately.
I did not mention my name.
I did not mention Fortress Media.
I just sent the message from a secondary email account I used for research.
I got a response the next morning from a man named Pastor Ray Coleman who was one of the conference organizers.
He said he would be honored to talk.
He said he could meet anywhere I felt comfortable.
He said there was no agenda except honest conversation.
I read his message three times.
Then I wrote back and suggested a coffee shop in the Montrose neighborhood far enough from my regular area that I was unlikely to run into anyone I knew.
I sent the message and immediately felt the specific fear of having done something that could not be undone.
Good.
I thought that was probably the point.
Pastor Ray Coleman was shorter than I expected.
I do not know why I had an expectation, but he was maybe 5’8 with close cut gray hair and the kind of unhurried way of moving that belongs to people who stopped trying to prove things.
He got to the coffee shop before me and was reading something on his phone.
When I came in, he looked up, smiled, and put his phone face down on the table.
That small gesture meant something to me.
putting the phone down, being present.
We sat for a moment before either of us said anything significant.
He asked if I wanted anything to eat.
I said no.
He said he was going to get a pastry and asked if I was sure.
I said I was sure.
He came back with a pastry and a refill on his coffee and settled into his chair like a man who had nowhere else to be.
Then he said, “What is on your heart?” I had rehearsed this.
I had planned what I would say.
I was going to ask specific theological questions, the reliability of the New Testament, the historical evidence for the resurrection, the nature of the Trinity and how it was different from polytheism.
Instead, I said, “I organized the protest on Friday night.
” He was quiet.
He looked at me steadily.
Then he said, “I know who you are, Ferris.
” I stared at him.
He said Fortress Media was one of the largest Islamic apologetics platforms in the country and that anyone running a Christian conference in Houston in 2024 knew your name.
He said he recognized me Friday night from across the plaza.
He said he had been praying for me since then.
I did not know what to do with that.
A man whose conference I had organized at a crowd against had spent the following week praying for me.
I said why? He said because you are clearly someone who loves God intensely.
He said that kind of love does not disappear.
It gets redirected.
He said he prayed that God would redirect mine.
Something moved in my throat.
I pressed it down.
I told him everything.
The 5 years of fortress media, the arguments I had memorized and taught.
The way I had repeated things about biblical corruption without actually checking them.
the two weeks of research that had slowly dismantled what I thought I knew.
Prince Dawood standing in the plaza saying the words that would not leave my head.
Pastor Ray listened to all of it without once trying to jump in and make a point.
When I finished, he sat quietly for a moment.
Then he said, “Can I ask you something?” I said, “Yes.
” He said, “In all your years of studying Islam and Christianity as opposing positions, did you ever spend any time with Jesus himself? Not Christianity as a religion or an institution, not the history of the church or the arguments for or against the Trinity.
” Jesus, did you ever just sit with who he actually was in the text? I told him I had read John two weeks ago for the first time.
He nodded slowly.
He said, “What did you find?” I said, “I found someone who did not fit any of the categories I had prepared for him.
” I said, “I found someone who spoke like he owned the truth rather than received it.
I found someone who wept at a tomb even though he was about to raise the man inside it.
I found someone who at the moment of his own arrest told his friends to put away their weapons and healed the ear of the man who came to capture him.
” I said, “Who does that?” Pastor Ray said, “Only someone who came for a completely different reason than any of us expected.
We took it for three hours.
He answered my historical questions with patience and honesty when something was genuinely debated among the scholars.
” He said so.
He did not oversell.
He did not dismiss.
He treated my questions like they deserved real answers, which they did, and which so few people on either side of this conversation had ever given me.
Near the end, I told him about reading the Nicodemus story at 2:00 in the morning at my kitchen table.
He smiled at that.
He said Nicodemus came at night because he was not ready to be seen asking.
He said Jesus did not turn him away for that.
He met him exactly where he was.
Then pastor Ray said, “Faris, I can talk with you about this as long as you want, but at some point the question stops being intellectual.
At some point it becomes personal.
” He said, “The only person who can answer the deepest version of your question is Jesus himself.
” He said to ask him directly, tell him the truth about where you are and ask him to show you who he actually is.
I drove home that afternoon and sat in my car in the parking garage of my building for 40 minutes.
My phone had 17 new notifications from the Fortress media team about upcoming content.
I turned the screen off.
I sat in the dark of that parking garage and I spoke out loud.
I said, “I have spent 5 years telling people who you are not.
” I was certain.
I was organized.
I built a whole platform out of my certainty.
But I am sitting here right now and I cannot tell you honestly that I know the truth about you.
I need to know.
Not for my platform, not for my father, not for anything except this.
I need to know if you are real.
If you are what that man in the plaza said you are, if you are what I found in John at 2:00 in the morning when I was not looking for you, show me, please.
The parking garage was concrete and fluorescent and it is smelled like exhaust and oil and it was the least sacred space I had ever prayed in.
But what came into that space after I finished speaking was not nothing.
The silences changed.
The way silences changes when someone enters a room.
The quality of the air shifting around the presence.
It was the same thing I had been circling for 2 weeks without knowing I was circling it.
It was in Prince Dawood’s steady voice in the plaza.
It was in the Nicodemus story.
It was in the face of Pastor Ray putting his phone down on the table to be present.
It had been in all of those places.
And now it was here in a parking garage in Houston in the particular quiet that followed my most honest prayer.
I stayed in the car for a long time.
When I finally came up, I knew something had changed that I could not undo.
Not because the feeling was overwhelming, because it was completely steady, the most unshakable thing I had ever felt, quieter than certainty, and more solid than any argument I had ever won.
I called Pastor Ray the next morning.
I told him I wanted to know more.
I told him I thought something had happened in a parking garage the night before that I needed help understanding.
He said, “Come back whenever you want.
” He said, “Bring your questions.
” He said, “Jesus is not bothered by the size of your doubt.
” Over the next six weeks, I met with Pastor Ray four more times.
I read through the Gospels completely.
I read Paul’s letters.
I read Acts.
I read a book by a former Oxford professor and atheist who became a Christian after spending two years trying to disprove the resurrection and finding he could not.
On a Sunday morning in December, I sat in the back row of Covenant Church in Houston, the church where Pastor Ray served.
I had come alone.
I did not tell my team.
I did not tell my father.
I sat in the back with my coat still on like I might need to leave quickly.
The worship was simple.
A few songs I did not know.
A sermon about a prodigal son who came home and a father who ran toward him.
I sat in the back row and by the end of the sermon, my face was wet and I did not entirely know when that had started.
After the service, Pastor Ray found me near the back door.
He did not say anything dramatic.
He just put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Welcome.
” I told my father on a Thursday afternoon in January.
He sat very still at the kitchen table where I had done homework as a child and he listened without speaking until I finished.
Then he stood and walked to the window and looked out at the street for a long time.
When he turned back, his face was closed in a way I had never seen it.
He said he did not know who I was anymore.
He walked out of the kitchen.
I heard his bedroom door close.
I sat at that table for a long time.
The same table where he once showed me his notebook with the neat check marks next to Quran chapters I had memorized.
The same table where he ordered me to keep going when I wanted to quit.
the same table where he told me faith was the spine of our family.
I still pray for him every day.
But I will keep praying until something changes.
I shut down Fortress Media in February.
It was the right thing to do.
The platform I built was built to argue against what I now believed was true.
I could not keep running it and I could not sell it to someone else to keep running it.
I posted one final video explaining that I had become a Christian and that my content was no longer something I could stand behind.
I said I was sorry to the people who had trusted me.
I said I still believed they loved God and that their love was real.
I said I hoped they would ask Jesus directly who he was because he was the kind of person who answered that question in parking garages and kitchen tables at 2:00 in the morning.
The video got more views than anything I ever produced.
I was baptized at Covenant Church in March.
Pastor Ray stood with me.
When I came up out of the water, the congregation was on its feet and the sound in that room was the warmest thing I had ever been inside.
I stood there dripping and breathing and completely certain for the first time in my life in a way that did not come from an argument I had won.
I work now with a ministry that supports people from Muslim backgrounds who are navigating questions about Jesus.
I meet with people individually in coffee shops and living rooms and occasionally parking garages.
I never pressure anyone.
I tell my story and I tell them that Jesus can be asked directly and that he answers.
Several people from my old fortress media community have reached out privately over the past year.
Some have come to faith, others are still asking questions.
I pray for all of them.
A few months ago, I was speaking at a small event in Houston.
A young man waited until everyone else left and then came up to me.
He said he had followed my old content for 3 years.
He said he was angry when I posted the video announcing my conversion.
He said he came to the event tonight to tell me to my face that I was wrong.
Then he said, “But I have been asking Jesus the question you said to ask for 4 months and I need to tell someone that something is happening that I do not know what to do with.
” I told him to sit down.
I told him I had time.
That is what Jesus does.
He pursues.
He meets people in the specific geography of their actual lives.
Cold plazas and dark parking garages and the back rows of churches and the quiet of 2 a.
m.
kitchens.
He met a Saudi prince in a small room in West London.
He met me in a Honda Civic in a Houston parking garage.
He is not particular about the setting.
He’s only particular about the person.
If you are carrying a question you have not been allowed to ask out loud, ask him.
He can handle it.
