Daniel, she get the folder? Marcus stared at the message for a second. "Yeah," he typed back. She got it. You're the man I owe you.
Marcus looked up at the house. The front door was closed. He put the truck in reverse. His delivery shift that night was 6 hours of muscle memory picking up, dropping off, thanking people, watching the GPS, doing the thing his body had done hundreds of times. While his mind was entirely somewhere else, he kept coming back to something Olivia had said.
Not the big things. Not the moment she talked about being lonely. Not when she said seven years, but something small almost throwaway. She had said it's exhausting in a way that doesn't really translate when people ask how your day was. And he had said because the answer is always the same.
And she had looked at him like he'd said something that nobody had managed to say in a very long time. He thought about that look. He thought about it dropping off pad tie in Midtown. He thought about it while a guy in a bathrobe opened a door and handed him a $2 tip without making eye contact. He thought about it sitting in a parking lot waiting for his next pickup.
He wasn't supposed to be thinking about it at all. She was Daniel's sister. He had rules, not written down rules. He wasn't that kind of man, but internal ones, lines he'd drawn a long time ago around what kind of person he was and how he treated the people in his life. Daniel Coleman was the closest thing to a brother Marcus had.
They had history together that went back 20 years. The kind of friendship where you didn't have to explain yourself, where you could call at 2 in the morning, where the trust was built on so many small moments that tearing it would take something serious. Marcus wasn't going to be the man who complicated that. He decided that on the drive to his fifth delivery, he decided it again on the drive to his seventh. He dropped off that last order at 11:48, drove home, parked in his space, sat in his truck for a few minutes in the dark parking lot of his apartment complex, and thought, "You went over there to drop off a folder.
That's all." Then he went inside, checked on Maya asleep, sprawled sideways across her bed, the way she'd slept since she was three. One arm hanging off the edge covered her properly, and went to bed. He stared at the ceiling for 45 minutes before he fell asleep. Sunday was normal. Maya wanted pancakes.
Marcus made pancakes from a box, but he cut up a banana and fried it in butter first because his mother had done that and it made the whole thing feel intentional. Maya ate four of them and announced that she wanted a dog. We talked about a dog, Marcus said. We talked about it and you said maybe. Maybe isn't yes.
Maybe isn't no either. He looked at his daughter, this small, composed, relentlessly logical person who had his eyes and her mother's cheekbones and an internal lawyer that had apparently been activated at birth and thought about what he'd told Olivia the day before. She'll just come sit next to you, won't say anything, just sits there." Maya was looking at him with the patient expression of someone who had learned that her father could sometimes be talked into things if given enough time. A small dog, he said. Maya did not smile.
She looked down at her pancakes and cut off a precise piece with her fork. We'll revisit, she said, which was something Marcus said all the time and had never expected to hear back. He turned back to the stove so she wouldn't see him fighting a grin. Monday came, Tuesday came. Marcus worked.
He fixed a brake job on a Jeep Cherokee. He ordered new parts for a Honda with an exhaust issue. He managed his two guys at the shop. Deshawn, who was 24 and could diagnose an engine by sound, and Reggie, who was 51 and had been working on cars longer than Marcus had been alive, and wasn't shy about reminding him. He picked Maya up from school.