The full powered version. I've been watching her watch you for 6 months. Yes, I think so. He was quiet for a moment. I'm really in love with her, too, he said.
Because Amara was the person he was most honest with in the world, and she deserved the honest thing. His daughter nodded slowly with ceremony. "Okay," she said. "Then I have something to say." "Okay." She put her hands flat on the table, a gesture he recognized as inherited. Renee used to do the same thing when she was about to say something she needed to be taken seriously.
I've been thinking about this for a while, Amarus said about whether it was okay to have someone new, someone who wasn't mom. She paused. And I decided it's okay. Marcus held very still. Because mom isn't gone, Amara said.
She's just somewhere else and she wanted you to be happy. She told me that I was little, but I remember. She said, "I want your daddy to be happy always, no matter what." Her voice was steady, the way only the very honest are steady when they say the hardest things. So, I'm telling you, it's okay. Emily can be here.
Mom said so. Marcus pressed his lips at together. He breathed very carefully through his nose for a moment. Then, he reached across the table and covered Amara's hands with his. "When did you get so wise?" he said, and his voice was not entirely even.
"I've always been wise," she said. "You've just been too busy running your system to notice." He laughed the full unguarded kind. She smiled, the smile that was both hers and Renee's, and something of his own reflected back. "I love you," he said. "I love you, too, Daddy." She pulled her hands back and picked up her book with the efficiency of someone closing a completed meeting.
"Now call Emily." She forgot her camera and she's probably worried about it. He called Emily. She came back for the camera and stayed for dinner. And afterward, the three of them sat in the living room and Emily showed Amara how to frame a shot, how to think about what you were keeping in and what you were leaving out, how the choice of what to focus on was itself a statement about what mattered. Amara absorbed this with the intensity she brought to everything she found worth understanding.
At one point, Amara pointed the camera at Marcus and took a photograph. Then she turned the screen toward him. He looked at himself, sitting on his own couch in his own apartment, completely unguarded, caught midlaw at something Emily had said. His shoulders were down, his eyes were bright. He looked like a man who was in this specific moment nowhere else.
Not running the system, not managing anything, not maintaining the face of someone who was fine when he wasn't. just there, present, alive, inside his own life. That's what you look like now, Amara said. In case you didn't know, he handed the camera back. He didn't say anything. He looked at Emily, who had been watching him, look at the photograph, who was doing the thing she did, where she said everything without words, and he held her gaze for a moment that required no translation.