Urgency, the unperformed kind, Marcus. I know you don't trust me. I know what she thinks of me. But this is about David. What I found, she needs to know.
Marcus held the phone and looked at Clare and didn't say anything because Ryan sounded different and Marcus was a man who had learned through years of working on machines that lied about what was wrong with them. To hear the difference between performed malfunction and something that was genuinely actually broken. Ryan Whitmore right now sounded genuinely broken. I'll tell her, Marcus said. She'll be in touch.
He hung up. The living room was silent. Clare said, "What did he say? " Marcus looked at her. He said he found something in David's papers. Marcus said something he thinks you need to know.
Clare stared at him. Her hand still in his went cold. What kind of something? She whispered. He didn't say.
She looked at the wall at nothing. At something Marcus couldn't see. Clare, he said. She looked at him. Her eyes were different now.
The warmth of 5 minutes ago was still there. But underneath it was something older and more complicated. Something that had been sitting in her since before Marcus knew her name. Whatever it is, she said slowly. Been sitting in his papers since David died.
For 4 years. Yeah. She looked at their hands. Then up at him. I opened the letter.
She said, I can handle whatever this is. I know you can. But not tonight, she said. Not tonight. No, Marcus agreed.
Not tonight. She tightened her grip on his hand. He tightened his grip back and they sat there in the quiet of his living room while something waited just outside the boundary of this evening. Something that had Ryan Whitmore's voice and four years of David's papers behind. And an urgency that Marcus couldn't explain away.
It was coming. Whatever it was, it was coming. But tonight for this hour in this room with their hands locked together and the porch light burning outside and a 12-year-old boy asleep upstairs who had eaten chili and talked about basketball and looked comfortable in a way he hadn't in years. Tonight Marcus Reed chose this. He chose to stay right here and so did she.