Yeah. Are you okay? He looked at his daughter, 11 years old, one arm on the table, pencil in her hand. Homework in front of her, looking at him with those eyes that noticed things. Yeah, he said.
I'm good. She looked at him for one more second, the way she always did when she was deciding whether to believe him. Then she looked back at her homework. Marcus turned back to the stove. He was not okay.
He was in the most complicated possible way. Something that was going to require a lot more thought than he had time for right now. But he would get to it. He always got to it eventually. He told himself it was fine.
That was the first lie. Marcus drove away from that house on Peach Tree Lane, telling himself that what had just happened was nothing. A door opened. A woman was standing there in a towel. It was awkward for 4 seconds.
She went and got dressed. They had coffee, they talked, he left. That was the complete and total story of it. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen.
He was a grown man with a daughter to raise and two jobs to work and exactly zero business feeling anything about Daniel Coleman's sister. He told himself that all the way home. He told himself that while he checked on Maya, while he showered, while he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling at midnight, with the specific wide awake energy of a man whose brain had decided sleep was no longer on the agenda, he was still telling himself that at 12:45, when he finally sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and said out loud to the dark room, "Okay, stop." Because here was the truth Marcus Williams was not ready to say out loud to another human being, but could at least admit to himself at 12:45 in the morning in his own bedroom with nobody watching. That conversation had been the most alive he'd felt in years. Not the awkward first moment at the door.
Not that, but after the kitchen table, the coffee, the way Olivia had said 7 years, like she was finally putting a number to something she'd been carrying without a label. The way she had looked at him when he said because the answer is always the same like he'd said something language she thought only she spoke Marcus Williams had been running on empty for a long time he knew what it felt like to be seen by someone he also knew how long it had been since it happened he put his face in his hands u sister he said to his palms then he lay back down and eventually somewhere around 2:00 in the morning fell asleep he did not sleep well but he slept The next three days were a study in discipline. Marcus was good at discipline. He had built his entire life on it. When Renee got sick, discipline was what kept him functional.
When she passed, discipline was what got him out of bed every morning to face a 4-year-old who needed her father to be present even when he was shattered. When he decided to buy the shop, discipline was what made him work both jobs for 14 months straight to save enough for the down payment without dipping into Maya's college account. Marcus Williams understood that you didn't get to have what you wanted just because you wanted it. You made choices. You held lines.
You were the kind of man who could be trusted because you had proven over and over again that you did not take the easy road when the easy road cost someone else something. So for 3 days he was disciplined. He worked. He parented. He did not text Olivia.
He did not think about Olivia. Except that was the second lie because he thought about her constantly. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that interrupted his ability to function. But in the background, the way a song gets stuck in your head and you find yourself humming it without realizing until suddenly you realize and then you can't stop realizing.
On the fourth day, his phone rang. He was in the back of the shop doing inventory and he almost didn't answer because the number wasn't in his contacts. And Marcus had a policy about unknown numbers after 9:00 p. M. That was based on 2 years of delivery shift spam calls.