Why haven't you told anyone? He considered the question. Because the second people know you have money, they stop seeing you the same way. I didn't want to be the guy who had money. I wanted to be the guy who showed up.
There's a difference in who you attract. Olivia looked at him for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes. Yeah, she said slowly. There is.
She went back to painting, but she was quieter now. And Marcus could tell she was turning something over in her mind. "Your turn," he said. "My turn? What? " "Something true.
Nobody around here knows it." She exhaled through her nose, a small involuntary laugh. Then she said, "I have a box under my bed with every letter my mother ever wrote me." He waited. She died when I was 19. Olivia said, "Breast cancer." She knew she was sick for 2 years before I did. She didn't tell me because she didn't want me to quit school.
So, I was sitting in my dorm room in sophomore year writing a paper on developmental psychology. And my mother was in a hospital in Memphis dying and I didn't know. Marcus stopped working entirely. She left me the letters. Olivia continued her voice steady in the way that voices get when they've told a hard thing often enough to have tamed it but not forgotten it one for every year until I turned 40.
She thought she was giving me a piece of her for the future and she was but some years it feels less like a gift and more like she stopped like a reminder of everything she's missed. Marcus said Olivia looked at him. Yeah. Yeah. They stood there with that weight between them.
Not heavy exactly, but real. The kind of real that can't be filled with small talk or social niceties or the careful performance of being fine. I'm 35, Olivia said after a moment. This year, she would have sent me the 35th letter. I opened it in January.
What did it say? She smiled and it was the most complicated smile Marcus had ever seen on a person's face. She said, "You have spent your whole life saving other people. It is time to let somebody save you." The words landed in the air between them. Marcus felt them in his sternum.
Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. They just painted, but the silence had changed. It was the silence of two people who had accidentally told each other something real and were now sitting with the consequences. At 10:15, Ava appeared at the fence elbows, hooked over the top board chin, resting on her hands, watching them with the frank and completely shameless curiosity of a 7-year-old. "Miss Olivia," she announced.