I think I believe that, Clare said. Lily nodded, satisfied, and went to the door. Marcus followed. He paused in the doorway the same way he'd paused in his kitchen that first night, the same way he always did things with that particular deliberateness. That meant whatever came next was not accidental.
I want you to have what you actually want, he said. Not just what you can manage right now, she looked at him. What does that mean? It means, he seemed to choose his words carefully. You spent a year surviving.
That's over now. You don't have to survive in here. You're allowed to build something. She stood in the middle of her empty apartment with her three boxes and her thrift store lamp. And she looked at Marcus Reed in her doorway, and she thought that in 8 months of working 20 ft from this man, she had understood almost nothing about him.
"Thank you," she said, "for all of it. You did the hard parts, he said. I didn't do them alone. He held her gaze for a moment. No, he said, "You didn't."
He left. She stood in her apartment. She didn't move for a while. Then she went to the window and looked out at her street and took a breath that went all the way down. The kind of breath you take when something has ended and something else is about to begin.
And you can feel both things happening at the same time. And you're terrified and grateful in equal measure. outside. She heard the Silverado start up and pull away. She thought, "I need to tell him something." She didn't know yet what it was, but she knew she would figure it out.
3 weeks after the move, she figured out what it was. She had been doing her job well better than well, actually. Whatever had been pressing her down for the past year, had lifted enough that she could feel the difference in herself. a kind of clarity that showed in her work, in her communication, in the way she moved through a building that had once felt like a place she was just passing through. Denise noticed first. You look different, she said one morning, not unkindly.
Good different or bad different, human different, Denise said. You look like a person again. She was in the middle of turning that over in her mind when Marcus knocked on her office door at 4:15 on a Thursday and said carefully, "Can I talk to you for a second?" She looked up. Something about his face stopped her.
He came in and closed the door, which he had never done before, and sat down in the chair across from her desk and looked at his hands for a moment before he looked at her. "Something happened," he said. "Okay," she said slowly. "Talk. Corporate called me in this morning.
He was quiet for a beat. They offered me a promotion. She felt the instinct to smile rise before she caught the look on his face. That should be good news. Regional director of operations, he said.