"I know. I heard. She's extraordinary, Marcus. I knew she was from everything you'd said." But she shook her head. She's more than that.
She's like she's a complete person. At 8, she just lives fully inside herself and she looks at the world and she decides what she thinks about it. She gets that from her mother, he said. She gets it from you, too, Emily said. She gets the steadiness from you, the staying power.
She paused. She said, I look at you the way Renee did. Marcus met her eyes. I know, Emily said. I know what that means, and I know what it cost you, and I'm not I'm not trying to be anything other than what I am.
She was choosing words carefully the way she always did when something mattered. I'm just telling you that what she saw, she saw it right. Whatever this is, whatever we are, it's real for me. Completely real. He crossed to her, stopped close, close enough that she had to tilt her head to keep his gaze.
He put both hands on her face gently. The way you hold something that you understand the value of Emily, he said. Yeah, I know it's real. He held her gaze. It's the realest thing that's happened to me in 3 years, and I am done being careful with it.
She searched his face. What does that mean? It means I'm in, he said. Not halfway. Not with conditions, not with some version of myself.
I've checked and approved and made safe. I'm in all of it. You, your grief, your dad's memory, whatever comes next, I'm not going anywhere. She looked at him for a long moment. Something in her expression shifted the last of the held back thing, the last of the distance she'd been maintaining without fully knowing she was maintaining it.
Marcus Hayes, she said, I fell asleep on you on a train in November. I know I was awake the whole time. He smiled. The slow one, the real one. I know that, too.
She put her hands over his where they rested on her face. She held them there and then she said very quietly, "Don't let me go either." "Not a chance," he said. And then he kissed her. Not a movie kiss. Not the kind that requires music and lighting.