Like the shop." She paused. Like me. Marcus opened his mouth, closed it. I told you that night, Maya said. She looks at you like you're the first solid thing she's grabbed onto.
She picked her book back up. I'm glad it's real. She's good. Marcus sat next to his daughter and looked at the ceiling. Where did you come from?
He said quietly. Mom, Mia said without looking up. And you? She turned a page, but mostly mom. He laughed.
A real one, low and full. And Maya looked sidesways at him with a small smile that she tried to hide by looking back at her book and didn't fully succeed. He sat with her for a while. He didn't go to bed right away. He just sat there with his daughter in the quiet of their apartment.
The city doing what it always did outside and thought about how the life he had right now. This specific configuration, this daughter, this possibility, this building and rebuilding was not the life he had planned and was not the life he would have chosen if choosing had been available. But it was real. It was his. And for the first time in years, it felt like it was expanding instead of holding still.
His phone buzzed. Olivia, tell me how it went with Maya. He typed back. She figured it out weeks ago. Three dots.
Then, why am I not surprised? She said, "You look at me like you're not going to let go." A pause longer than the usual ones. Then she's not wrong. He read that twice. Then he set the phone down on the cushion beside him, leaned his head back, and stayed there in the quiet with his daughter and everything that was coming and everything that had already come.
And he did not try to make it smaller than it was or larger than it was. He let it be exactly what it was. Real his enough. But 3 days later, Marcus found out that not everyone in his life was ready to extend the same peace he had found. It came from a direction he hadn't guarded, which was the only direction anything truly difficult ever came from.
It was a Tuesday morning and he was at the shop when Gloria called. Gloria Tate, Rene's mother's younger sister. Not Maya's grandmother, that was Sandra, but the woman who had been the second emergency contact since Maya was born. The woman who came over with food in the first year after Renee passed, the woman who had been at every birthday, every holiday, every school play. She was family.
She had always been family. She opened with, "I need to speak to you about what's happening." Marcus sat down his coffee cup. "Okay," he said. Sandra called me, Gloria said. And then I called Patricia Greer, who was at the school fair.