Darius considered this. Then that's not a no. He went to his room. Marcus stood in the kitchen for a moment longer. Then he went to the back door just to check the lock, he told himself, and through the glass pane at the top of the door.
He could see across the yard to the fence and beyond it. To the amber glow of that lamp on the shepherd's hook. It was still on. He locked the door and went to bed. Over the following two weeks, Marcus and Clare fell into something that wasn't quite a routine, but wasn't entirely accidental, either.
He would come home from work. She would be on the porch. Sometimes he had fence repairs or yard work to do that brought him to that side of the house. Sometimes he just found reasons to be outside. He wouldn't have admitted that last part to anyone.
He barely admitted it to himself. Their conversations were short at first. Careful. The way conversations are between two people who have both learned through experience that caring about things can be dangerous. Rough day, she asked one evening when he came out and sat on his porch steps with a look on his face that apparently said everything without him meaning it too.
Dishwasher in a commercial kitchen, he said. Been fighting it for 2 days. Motor kept throwing codes that didn't match the actual problem. Did you figure it out? Eventually, he paused.
Somebody replaced the wrong part 3 years ago. Wrong brand. Close enough to look right. When it wore out, it wore out wrong. She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, "That's a lot of life in that sentence." Marcus looked at her. She was looking at her book, not at him, but there was a slight curve at the corner of her mouth that told him she knew exactly what she'd said and meant it. He found himself smiling just barely, just for a second. But it was the first time in a long time that his face had done that without being asked.
He learned things about her slowly. The way you learn things about people when nobody is in a hurry and there's no performance happening. She'd been in Greensboro before this. A company restructure had let her go from the marketing position she'd held for 6 years. And rather than regroup in a city where everything reminded her of a life she was trying to move on from.
She had taken a leap, rented this quiet house in a quiet neighborhood and decided to figure out what came next. She was careful about the why of it, careful about the edges of certain parts of the story. Marcus recognized that carefulness because he practiced it himself. He understood there was a husband somewhere in the past of her. He understood the husband was not living.
He did not ask for details and she did not offer them and she did not offer them and they both acknowledged that they were operating under an agreement to let things come in their own time. He told her about the repair business, how he'd started doing it on the side while he worked at a parts supplier, how it grew into something real, how now he had the van and the accounts and the steady work of keeping other people's households functioning. You like it, she said. Not a question. Most days, he said there's something about taking something broken and making it work again.
She was quiet for a moment. Yeah, she said softly. And he had a feeling they weren't talking about appliances anymore. The night Marcus found out about the letter was not the night she told him. It started like a lot of things with Darius.