She hadn't asked about it. She asked about it now. "What's in the bag?" Lunch, he said. She turned and looked at him fully. You made lunch.
I assembled lunch. He said, "There's a difference. What's the difference? One involves heat and the other involves decisions at a deckly counter." She pressed her lips together. "Marcus Williams, did you make me a picnic?" "I got sandwiches and some other stuff and I found a park." He said, "That's what happened." She was quiet for a second.
Then she said softly, like she was saying it more to herself than to him. Nobody has done something like this for me in a very long time. He didn't respond to that directly because responding to it directly would have made it a bigger moment than it needed to be. And Marcus understood instinctively that Olivia Coleman did not need her feelings turned into events. She needed them to be received quietly and held steadily.
So he just nodded once and said, "There's also chips." And she laughed again and they got out of the truck. They found a bench off the path. They ate. They talked. And that was where things shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with a single sentence, but incrementally the way a dial turns. Because for the first time, they weren't talking in the context of something else. Not in her mother's kitchen with the subtext of the folder. Not in a diner booth with workc clothes and a time limit.
Not on the phone in the dark with the safety of distance. They were just two people on a bench in the afternoon and there was nowhere else to be and the conversation then found its own level. She told him things she hadn't told him before. She told him that she had almost left Atlanta 3 years ago. Had a job offer in Charlotte, better pay, better title, a chance to start completely over somewhere that didn't have the weight of everything she knew in it.
She'd turned it down because her mother had needed a hip surgery that year and there was nobody else who would manage the recovery, the appointments, the calls to the insurance company, the arguments with the billing department that required a specific sign of polite relentlessness. She had spent 38 years developing. Do you regret it? Marcus asked. No, she said.
Then sometimes then both at the same time. That's allowed, he said. She looked at him. Is it? You can love someone and also wish things had gone differently.
Those aren't the same feeling. She was quiet for a moment. My ex used to say I didn't know how to put myself first. Was he wrong? No, she said.
But the way he said it, it wasn't concern, it was accusation. Like my problem wasn't that I didn't put myself first. My problem was that he wasn't who I put first. She turned the paper bag from her sandwich over in her hands. I spent a year after he left trying to figure out which one was the real reason whether he was being honest with me or whether he was just covering his exit.
What did you decide that it doesn't matter? She said that asking that question was just another way of letting him take up space in my head. So I stopped asking. She paused. I'm still working on the stopping.