"The house is done," he said. "Silence for a moment." "I know," she said. "You finished the trim yesterday." "I mean, it's done," he said. "Ready." A longer pause. "How does it feel?" she asked.
Her voice was careful. Not the professional careful, the personal kind, like something that remembered itself, he said. She was quiet. Marcus, she said, "Yeah, I want to come see it. It's 9:00 at night," he said.
"I know what time it is." He looked at the kitchen, the reclaimed floors, the repaired plaster, the windows that opened cleanly now in their straightened frames. Everything in its right place, everything solid. I'll leave the porch light on," he said. She got there in 35 minutes. He heard her car on the gravel and went to the door and opened it before she knocked because the house had good acoustics now that it was restored and also because he'd been listening for her.
She stood at the threshold. She looked at him for a moment and then passed him at the house. Then she stepped inside. She walked it the way he'd walked it slowly, completely with her hands touching walls and doorframes and the places where old Met knew and the seam was invisible. She went room to room and didn't say anything and he followed quietly because that was the right thing to let someone have a space in the way they needed to have it.
In the kitchen, she stopped. She stood in the middle of the reclaimed floor and looked at everything around her and then at him. It's exactly what he wanted, she said. my father. It feels like it remembers itself. Yeah, Marcus said.
She looked at him. Her face was open in the way it had been becoming gradually more open over these months. In the way things opened that had been closed for a long time, not all at once, not dramatically, but steadily. The way a house warmed from the inside out. I have something to tell you, she said.
He waited. My father called me this morning. she said before the article ran. He had already read it. He has a contact at the paper. Of course he does.
A slight breath, not quite a laugh, he said. And I'm quoting exactly. Marcus Williams is the kind of man I spent 50 years in business trying to find and two decades trying to find for you. I'm done being patient about it. Marcus looked at her.
He said that. Marcus said verbatim. Emily confirmed. To you, to me, this morning. This morning?