Why didn't you tell me? She said. Because I wasn't sure Gerald would call back, Robert said simply. He did. Yesterday morning.
Marcus sat back in his chair. He put both hands flat on the table the way Robert always did when he was processing something. He hadn't realized he'd picked up that habit until just now. When does he want to meet? Marcus said Thursday, Robert said.
He said to come to the office at 10:00. Dress like you mean it. Marcus looked at his daughters. Nadia had stopped drawing and was watching him with those careful eyes. She knew something important was happening.
She didn't know what. Okay, Marcus said. Thursday at 10:00. Robert picked up his coffee cup. Good.
And that was it. No ceremony. No further discussion. Just Robert Hayes, 80 years old, who had carried his own guilt for three decades, calling in a debt from a war that most people had stopped talking about for a man he'd known for 2 months because he'd decided that was the right thing to do. Marcus had to look away from the table for a moment.
He looked at the kitchen window at the gray October sky and breathed through something that was trying to become more what want to show in front of his daughters. Olivia's hand appeared on the table near his. She didn't touch him. She just placed her hand there close. And when he looked back, she was looking at him steadily with those dark eyes.
She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. The rest of that afternoon moved at its own. Robert fell asleep in the armchair in the living room, which neither Marcus nor Olivia commented on or acknowledged. Just let happen the way you let a person rest when they've earned it.
The girls watched a movie. Marcus and Olivia sat at the kitchen table with coffee that had gone tepid and talked in the kind of low voices you use when the rest of the house has gone quiet. She told him about her marriage. She didn't tell it like a victim. She told it the way a person tells something they've already processed enough times that the story no longer controls them carefully and carefully with full honesty without needing Marcus to react any particular way.
He wasn't a bad person, she said. He just wanted a version of me I couldn't sustain. The version that didn't have opinions about everything. The version that wasn't still working through her father issues in therapy every Tuesday, she smiled thinly. Eventually, I realized I was spending more energy managing his comfort than I was spending on anything that mattered to me.
When did you leave? Marcus said he left, she said. But I'd already been gone for about a year before that emotionally. So, she shrugged. I'm not interested in being angry about it anymore.
I just She stopped, looked at her coffee. I got careful afterward about people about what I let in. That makes sense, Marcus said. It also gets lonely, she said. She said it plainly without drama the way she said most things.