They stood in the driveway in the thin morning light and ate pastries, the three of them, while Bruno made his way from the backyard and immediately positioned himself next to Claire with the confidence of a dog who has completely stopped pretending. For 20 minutes, nobody talked about anything important. Malik explained his current theory that certain rocks held memory, which Claire engaged with seriously, and Marcus found himself listening to with more interest than he had any right to. It was the most ordinary Saturday morning scene imaginable, and it felt to Marcus like standing at the edge of something he could not see the bottom of. Then Claire's phone rang.
She looked at the screen and something crossed her face there and gone in half a second, but Marcus caught it. Not fear, exactly. More like the expression of someone who has been expecting an interruption and is not happy it arrived. "I have to take this," she said. "Excuse me."
She walked around the side of her house. Marcus looked at Malik. Malik looked at Marcus. "Who was that?" Malik asked.
"I I know, son." "She looked weird. People get calls they don't like. It happens. Malik thought about this.
You get that face when Grandma calls about Aunt Diane's drama. Eat your cinnamon roll. Claire came back 6 minutes later. Whatever the call had been, she'd locked it somewhere behind her face. She was composed, completely.
The kind of composed that takes practice. Sorry about that, she said. Everything okay? Marcus asked. Fine.
A pause. An old situation checking in. Me is. He didn't push, but the phrase stayed with him. An old situation.
He recognized the architecture of those words, the way they were built to give information and withhold it simultaneously. He'd used similar constructions himself in the months after the divorce, when people asked how he was doing, and he needed to say something that wasn't a lie without being the whole truth. She left 20 minutes after that, said she had things to do, thanked Malik for the company, gave Bruno exactly two pats on the head. Bruno looked personally devastated when she walked away and went back to the blue house. Marcus watched her go.
He picked up the bakery bags, went inside. He spent the rest of the morning on the truck and the afternoon on paperwork for the shop and the evening helping Malik build a display board for his rock collection. And the whole time underneath all of it quiet and persistent as a leak you can't locate was the question he hadn't asked. What old situation? He didn't ask it.
He should have. Later he would think about how different things might have been if he'd just asked. But he didn't. And 2 days after that was when everything shifted. It was a Monday.
Marcus came home at 6:15 to find a white sedan parked in front of the blue house that he'd never seen before. He noticed it the way he noticed anything that appeared where it hadn't been, automatically the trained eye of a man who paid attention to his surroundings as a matter of habit rather than intention. "Cain." He went inside, made dinner, helped Malik with a reading assignment, watched some of the game he'd rescheduled three times. At 9:40, he took Bruno out for the last walk of the night.
The white sedan was still there. He could hear voices from inside the blue house. Couldn't make out words. One voice was Claire's. The other was a man's.
He told himself it was none of his business. He told himself that three more times on the walk back to his own front door. It was none of his business. He went to bed. He did not sleep.
At 11:23, he heard the front door of the blue house open and close, heard a car engine, heard the white sedan pull away. He lay in the dark for another 40 minutes before his body finally decided to let him sleep. He didn't see Claire on Tuesday or Wednesday. The coffee appeared on the window sill, so she was there, but he didn't see her. He didn't look for her.
He told himself this was fine. This was normal. This was what neighbors did. They lived their lives in parallel, occasionally intersecting, fundamentally separate. Thursday morning, he was loading equipment into his truck at 6:50 when she came out of her front door and stopped when she saw him, and for a moment they just looked at each other across the yard with the cold morning air between them, and Marcus felt something that he recognized uncomfortably as relief.
"Morning." He said. "Morning." She said. "I've been busy."
"I noticed." A beat. Did you need something? No. He loaded the last case.
Just noticed. Why do you buy so much spray? She looked at him for a moment with that steady, clear-eyed way she had, and then she said, I'll explain sometime, if you want. You don't owe me an explanation. I know I don't.
She held his eyes. I said if you want. He closed the truck tailgate. Yeah, he said. I think I do.
She nodded. Saturday, she said. Come by Saturday morning. I'll make real coffee, the good kind. You've been making me instant this whole time.
Something lifted in her face, not quite a smile, but close. I said I'd make real coffee Saturday. I didn't say anything about what I've been making up until now. He shook his head. Got in the truck.
He drove to the shop almost smiling. He was not ready for Saturday. Saturday came the way things come when you're simultaneously dreading and wanting them too fast and somehow also not fast enough. He dropped Malik at his buddy Darnell's house at 9:00, came home, changed his shirt twice, told himself changing his shirt twice was completely normal behavior for a man going next door for coffee, and crossed the yard at 9:40. She answered the door before he knocked.
Heard you coming, she said. You heard me on the grass. I've been up since 6:00. I hear everything. He came inside.