Yeah, he said. I'll be there. She nodded like she'd been hoping for that and was trying not to show how much. Not tonight, she said, but soon. Okay, he said.
Soon, she went inside. Marcus walked the short distance back to his own house and stood in his kitchen and looked around at the ordinary unchanged surfaces of his life. The coffee maker, the dish rack, the calendar on the wall with the service appointments marked in red. And he felt acutely the strangeness of how a person can be standing in the same room they've stood in a thousand times and feel somehow that something in the coordinates of their life has shifted. He called Darius to check in.
His son was fine. His son was having pizza and playing video games. And could he stay an extra hour? Yes, he could stay an extra hour. Marcus hung up and sat at the kitchen table in the quiet and thought about a woman who had carried an unopened letter for 3 and 1/2 years because she loved her husband too much to risk changing what she remembered.
He understood that. God help him. He understood that down to the bone because he had a box, too. Not a letter, a box. A shoe box in the back of his closet with the last birthday card his wife had given him.
Three ticket stubs from a concert they'd gone to the summer before she got sick. And a hair tie, a plain blue one that had been on her wrist the last morning she woke up and then wasn't anymore. And he had no memory of picking it up, only of finding it in his jacket pocket weeks later and understanding immediately that he could never throw it away. He had never shown that box to anyone. Not Darius, not his brother, not the grief counselor he'd seen for 4 months after the funeral.
He sat at the kitchen table and thought, "What if someone asked me to open it?" And he understood fully and completely what Clare was carrying. He also understood something else. Something that sat quietly in the corner of his thoughts like a patient waiting thing. He was not helping her because he was a good person who helped people in need.
He was helping her because being near her made him feel like himself, the full version of himself, the one he'd put in storage. That was a different thing. That was the different thing of something he didn't have a strategy for. And Marcus Reed was a man who always had a strategy. The following week they fell into a rhythm that neither of them named.
He would come home and sometimes she would be on the porch and sometimes not. And on the days she was there he would stop and they would talk 15 minutes, half an hour, sometimes longer. On Tuesday, she brought him a plate of something she'd made a pasta dish with vegetables. Covered in foil left on his porch step with a note that just said, "I made too much." On Wednesday, he replaced a hinge on her back door that she mentioned had been stiff.
Not because she asked him to, but because he noticed it was stiff when he walked past it, and he couldn't leave a broken thing broken. On Thursday. She knocked on his door at 8:00 in the evening with the letter in her hand. She didn't say anything when he opened the door. She didn't need to.
He could see it in the way she was holding it. Not tight. Not loose, but the way you hold something when you're not sure yet whether you're going to keep it or let it go. He opened the door wider. She came in.
He made tea. And she sat at the kitchen table. And the envelope sat on the table between them. Off-white, her name on the front in handwriting that Marcus could see, even from across the table was careful. Someone who had taken time with each letter.