No drama in it. Just fact. Not recently. Not the way you'd think. I don't mean Dana.
He looked down at his hands. I mean the years after. The way people look at a widowed father with a little girl and decide what the story is before they ask. I've had women who wanted to rescue us. I've had women who wanted the idea of us and not the reality.
He looked up. The reality is early mornings and parent teacher nights and a child who staples things together and has opinions about geological eras. It's not glamorous, Marcus, she said. I'm serious. I know you are, she said.
And I need you to hear this the same way. He waited. I ran a company for 14 years. She said, I made hundreds of decisions that affected thousands of people. I built something from nothing in a field where most people said I'd fail.
I am not without resources, without patience, without the ability to commit to something difficult and see it through. She held his gaze. I am telling you that I want to try not to rescue anything. Not because this is an idea, because you are the first person in a very long time who made me feel like it was safe to be exactly who I am. Marcus was very still.
And Ava, she said. Ava, she stopped, found the words. Ava is not a complication. She's a reason. Something shifted in his face.
He didn't say anything for a long moment. He looked out at the yard. He looked at his hands. He looked at some middle distance that had a lot in it. Then he said, "Okay. " Not a declaration, not a promise, not a resolution to everything complicated and uncertain and logistically improbable about two people who lived 482 mi apart with entirely different lives.
Just okay, which in Marcus Carter's language she had learned was the first word of something rather than the last. She sat with it. She let it be what it was. At 3:45, she said she needed to start driving if she was going to make it back before midnight. He didn't argue.
He walked her to the car the way he'd walked her from the truck to the shop on a Friday morning that felt both 2 days ago and two decades ago. She opened the car door. She stopped. Marcus, she said. He looked at her.