She nodded. He gathered his legal pad and stood up. She walked him to the door, which she hadn't done before. He had always left through the yard back over to his own side. This felt different, more formal, and somehow more intimate at the same time.
The way going through the front door of a house carries a different weight than the back. At the door. She said, "Ava has a school thing on Friday." She told me. She asked if I would come. Marcus turned back.
She asked you directly at the fence yesterday morning. She was very casual about it. Olivia's expression was amused and careful at once. She said, "It's just a science fair, Ms. Olivia. No big deal, but it would be nice to have more people there." Marcus pressed his eyes closed for one full second.
Olivia was trying to keep the amusement off her face. She was not entirely succeeding. "You don't have to," he said. "I want to," she said simply. "If that's okay with you," he looked at her.
"Yeah," he said. "That's okay with me." He walked back to his house and he did not immediately go inside. He stood in the yard for a moment with his legal pad and his empty coffee cup and he did something he hadn't done in a long time. He tilted his head back and looked up at the sky and let himself feel without trying to organize or contain or quantify it what was happening. It felt like something being rebuilt, not replaced, not covered over, rebuilt on the same ground where something had stood before with knowledge of what that something was and why it mattered and what it would mean to build again in its memory.
He thought about Denise. He thought about her the way he wanted to think about her clearly without the jagged edges of early grief with the steady love of a man who had been married to a woman he genuinely liked and admired and still sometimes reached for in the dark. He thought she would have liked Olivia. He thought she would have said something like, "Marcus, quit overcomplicating it and just show up for people. That's literally all you have to do." He smiled, went inside.
Two days later, Olivia Bennett walked through the front door of Ava's school science fair at 5:30 in the evening, and Ava saw her from across the gymnasium and lit up with an expression of pure uncomplicated joy that reached Marcus in the chest like a physical thing. Ms. Olivia! Ava abandoned her position next to her project, a model of the water cycle that she had been tending with the seriousness of a secret service agent, and ran across the room. Olivia crouched down to Ava's level, which Marcus noted she did without thinking, without the self-conscious crouch adults sometimes perform when they're performing Being Good with children. She just did it naturally.
"Show me your project," Olivia said. "I want to see everything." Ava took her by the hand and pulled her across the gymnasium. Marcus stood by the door for a moment and watched his daughter lead this woman through a crowd of kids and parents and teachers chattering at full speed, pointing things out, laughing at something Olivia said, turning back to check that she was keeping up. And he felt something he did not have an immediate word for. It wasn't just the romance of it.