He paused. And I want Lily to see her father be something more than someone who stayed small to keep her safe. She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "Have you called the school yet about transfer options in Nashville?" He stared at her.
"Have you?" She said again. "No," he said slowly. "Then that's the first step," she said. because the answer might be easier than you think or it might be harder, but you can't decide anything on an assumption. He looked at her for a long moment.
Why are you? He stopped. You don't have to help me think through this. I know I don't have to, she said. He recognized it.
The same thing she had said to him at the diner about thanking him. Something moved through his expression. Not quite vulnerability, not quite relief, something older and quieter than both. Okay. He said, "Call the school," she said.
"Okay." And Marcus, "Yeah, you stayed for her. Now think about what she'd want for you." She held his gaze because I've met Lily. And I don't think she wants a father who disappeared inside himself.
He didn't speak for a beat that stretched into three or four. No, he said finally, very quietly. She doesn't. He left her office. She watched the empty doorway for a moment after he was gone and felt something that had no clean name.
Something that was complicated and warm and a little bit frightening. The way things feel when you realize they have become important to you without your permission. Outside the afternoon had gone in golden the way Atlanta afternoons do in early fall. And somewhere four offices down, Marcus Reed was sitting at his desk for the first time in 3 years thinking about what he actually wanted. that Clare thought was not nothing. That was in fact the beginning of everything.
He called the school. Not that day. That day he sat at his desk until 6:40 and stared at the Nashville offer paperwork without touching it and then drove home and made Lily grilled cheese and helped her with a book report about the American Revolution and did not say one word about any of it. But the next morning at 5:22 before the coffee finished brewing, he picked up his phone and called the admissions office of West Westbrook Elementary in Nashville and left a message asking about enrollment procedures for the spring semester. He hung up and stood in his kitchen and felt like he had just jumped off something tall without looking down first.
Lily came out 20 minutes later, one sock on, planet pajamas, library book already in hand. You look weird, she told him. Good morning to you, too. Did something happen? I'm thinking about something.
Good thinking or bad thinking, he looked at his daughter, this small, direct, utterly unfiltered human being who had been his entire world for 3 years and somehow somewhere along the way had started quoting him back at himself with more accuracy than he was comfortable with. "I don't know yet," he said. Honestly, she studied him with those serious eyes. Is it about the lady from the highway? No, he said then partially.