Marcus turned to look at her. How did I say it? Like you were answering a question he hadn't asked. He held her gaze. Maybe I was.
The silence between them was different from all the previous silences. Charged in a way that had been building for weeks and had now arrived at a point where it either became something or it didn't. Where one of them either stepped toward it or stepped away from it. "Marcus," she said. "Yeah." She turned to face him fully.
"I need to tell you something, and I need you to just let me say it without making it into a practical matter or a next step item or something we're going to build a budget around." Despite everything, he almost smiled. "Okay," she took a breath. "I have been alone for a long time. Not just since the divorce before it, years before it. I have been alone in the way.
That means there's nobody in the world who actually knows what's happening inside me. Nobody who sees the whole thing. She paused. And then a hose broke and soaked my wall. And you showed up with your tools and your daughter and your legal pads and your 4:30 a.m. phone calls about grant cycles.
And she stopped. "And I see you, Marcus. The whole thing. And I think you see me." He looked at her. The afternoon light was doing something generous to her face.
Or maybe it wasn't the light. Maybe it was just her. The realness of her. The courage of her standing here after a day that had required her to be cracked open in front of 37 people and still being entirely stubbornly beautifully herself. "I see you," he said.
It was simple. He meant every syllable. She let out a breath she had been holding since at least this morning, possibly longer. "Okay," she said. Okay, he said.
They stood at the fence while Mrs. Patterson's goodbye continued on the other side of the yard, and Ava could be heard negotiating a second piece of peach cobbler with the particular legal precision of a child who knows exactly which arguments have the best chance of working. And the October Sun began its slow drop toward the Atlanta skyline. Then Olivia said quietly, "He was never wrong, you know, Derek, about the practical reality." No, Marcus agreed. But being right about the obstacle doesn't mean you get to tell someone to stop running the race. She looked at him.