He drove for a minute before he answered. "I think I want to show you." She looked out the window. "Okay, not today," he said. "Not today," she agreed.
"But someday." "Yeah," Marcus said. "Someday." The word sat between them with more weight than it looked like it should carry. Someday, not a deflection, a date.
When they got back, Marcus' phone showed a text from Darius. Can I stay for dinner? Jordan's mom is making tacos. Marcus texted back, "Yeah, be home by 7:00." He showed Clare the text.
She smiled. The first real smile since before Ryan rang the doorbell. He's strategically absent, she said. "He planned it this morning," Marcus said. Clare laughed.
Short and genuine. And in it, Marcus heard something he hadn't heard before. A laugh with no edges on it. No management, no performance, just her. He felt it like a hand on his chest.
They went into her house because that was where the afternoon had left them. And she made tea because that was what she did. And he sat at her kitchen table because that was where this all happened. And they talked. They talked the way they had been building toward talking for 2 months without walls.
Without the careful selection of what was safe to say, she told him about the year David kept from her, the specific moments she could now reinterpret, the things that made sense in retrospect that had felt like madness in real time. Marcus talked about the week after Aaliyah's funeral when the practical necessities of being a single father had not left him any space to fall apart and how he had held himself together with such completeness that one morning he looked in the bathroom mirror and genuinely could not identify what he was feeling. "What did you do?" Clare asked. "I got in the shower," Marcus said.
"And I sat down on the floor of it and I stayed there until the water went cold." She looked at him and then I got up. He said because Darius needed breakfast. She reached across the kitchen table and put her hand on his forearm. Not his hand, his forearm.
A different kind of touch. More familiar. The kind that doesn't ask for anything back. You've been carrying so much, she said. So have you, he said.
We've been very heavy people, she said. He looked at her. Lighter now, he said. She nodded. Outside, the afternoon had gone to evening, and the porch light had come on automatically, casting its amber glow the way it always did, steady and uncomplicated.