She said, "I'm terrified." "I know." He said, "That's how you know it's right." She stood in his doorway for a moment. Nashville.
I told corporate yes this morning. She nodded a beat. When do you leave? End of the month. That soon.
Yeah. They looked at each other. There was something sitting in the air between them that had been sitting there for weeks. Something neither of them had named. Not because they didn't know what it was, but because naming it meant dealing with it, and both of them had been dealing with enough, but the end of the month was soon, and some things Clare had learned the hard way.
Didn't wait for you to be ready. I need to tell you something, she said. He waited. She came in and sat down in the chair across from his desk, the same chair she'd been sitting in for weeks. the chair that had started to feel familiar in the way that things feel familiar when they are becoming part of your life without you fully deciding to let them. When I was on that highway, she said I was not doing well.
I think you know that I was not just having a bad night. I was having the end of a bad year and I had been holding it together with a kind of effort that doesn't leave anything left over for anything else. She looked at her hands and then you pulled over and you put a water bottle on the ground between us so I could take it without feeling like I owed you anything for handing it to me. She looked up. Nobody had done anything like that for me in a very long time.
Maybe ever. Marcus was still. I'm not saying that to make you feel responsible for anything, she said. I'm saying it because you need to know that what you did mattered. Not just the ride and the charger and the apartment list and the dinners.
All of it. Yes. But specifically the way you did it without making me feel like I had to earn it or pay it back or become something for you in order to deserve it. She took a breath. You just helped me and then you kept doing it.
And somewhere in the middle of that I stopped being someone who was surviving and started being someone who was living again. The office was very quiet. Clare he said. I'm not done. she said. He waited.
I'm going back to Harrove Keller. I'm going to build something there that matters. And that's my life, my actual life that belongs to me, and I built it. She paused. But I also want to say clearly, so there's no ambiguity, I didn't choose you because I needed you.
I want you in my life because of who you are. And if Nashville and Atlanta end up being a problem that has to be figured out, then I'd like to figure it out with you. The silence that followed was the kind that isn't empty. Marcus looked at her for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was lower and quieter than usual.