And you were standing there. She said, looking at the wall with that expression like a man who had broken something and was already measuring the cost of fixing it before he'd even processed what happened. And I thought, she stopped, smiled at the memory of it. I thought, "This man is going to stand there and take responsibility for this, even though the hose broke and it wasn't technically his fault, and he's going to do it without making it dramatic. And that's the most Marcus Carter thing I've never seen in my life, even though I didn't know your name yet." He stared at her.
You thought all that in the first 30 seconds. I'm a counselor, she said. Reading people fast is a professional skill. And the thing you said, was destroying my house your way of getting my attention. That was, she laughed, shook her head.
That was me deciding in real time that I was too tired to pretend to be the kind of person who gets upset about paint. A pause. And maybe a little bit of me thinking you had kind eyes. He was very still. You thought that the first day?
She said, "Yes, and you didn't say anything. You were a stranger who had just soaked my wall." Fair. And I had a mortgage problem and a proposal nobody was reading. And my mother's letter on the kitchen table telling me it was time to let someone in, which I found profoundly irritating at the time. She held his gaze.
And then you showed up every Saturday and you never pushed. You never made it about what you were doing for me. You just showed up and kept showing up. It wasn't a strategy, he said. I know.
That's why it worked. He looked at her for a long moment around them. The room was quiet. Ava reading in the corner. Darius tactfully pretending to examine the ceiling tiles.
Mrs. Patterson having produced a thermos of coffee from somewhere and distributing it to herself first. Olivia," he said. "Yeah, I need to say something." "Okay, I have not said this out loud to anyone except Darius, and Darius already knew, so it barely counts." Her eyes were steady, waiting. "I love you," Marcus said. "Not as something I've been working toward, not as a next step, just as the truth of what I've been feeling since approximately the second Saturday when you told me about your mother's letters and didn't ask me to make it mean less than it did." He paused.
I love you and I am in absolutely no rush and I'm not saying it because I think it needs to become something immediately. I'm saying it because you told me you'd been alone with no one knowing the whole thing and I think you should know. Olivia did not look away. She did not perform composure. She did not manage the moment.