The way these things happen when two people stop pretending they aren't in each other's lives. He knew the code to her building. Maya called her Olivia, which was her name. But she said it differently than she said other names with a particular ease. The ease of a word that has been said enough times to become comfortable in the mouth.
It was real. It was solid. It was by every honest measure working, which was precisely when the thing Marcus had not planned for walked back into his life. Her name was Dominique. He hadn't thought about Dominique in 2 years.
She had been briefly. The woman people around him had pointed toward in the first year after Renee died. Not because either of them had chosen it, but because grief makes other people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable people try to solve things. She was a friend of a friend. They had gone to dinner twice, had nothing that either of them would call a connection, and had parted with the mutual relief of two people released from an obligation.
She had moved to Houston. He had filed her away as a chapter that hadn't become a story and forgotten about her. She came back on a Wednesday afternoon in the form of a direct message on a platform. Marcus barely used account. He kept active only because the shop had a page on it and he needed the login.
The message was simple. She was back in Atlanta. She heard he was doing well with the shop. She'd love to catch up if he was open to it. Marcus read the message.
He read it again. Then he did something that was not complicated and that he did not make complicated. He showed Olivia the message that same evening. Not because he was required to, not because there was anything to confess, but because he was the kind of man who had decided that transparency was not a strategy, it was a value. And because he had watched what happened to relationships, that operated on selective information, and he was not interested in building another one of those.
Olivia read the message. She handed his phone back. "What do you want to do?" she said. "Nothing," he said. "I'm showing you because you should know, not because it's a decision." She looked at him for a moment with the specific look, the recalibrating one.
The one he knew now as her face adjusting to him being exactly who he said he was. "You didn't have to show me," she said. "I know," he said. "That's why I did." She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "You're almost annoying.
You know that I've been told. Nobody is this straightforward. I am, he said simply. She looked at him. Then she took her tea and leaned back and said, "Don't respond to her." And the way she said it was not jealous and not insecure.
It was just a woman who knew what she had and was not interested in making room for noise. Already decided that, Marcus said. She nodded once. That was the end of it. But the end of Dominique was not the end of the complications that month because complications Marcus had learned rarely came alone.