He nodded. One sharp definitive nod, the kind that means more than any extended response could carry. He stood up at the door. He paused the same place people always seemed to pause when a conversation had been real enough to need a moment before re-entering the ordinary world. Miss Bennett.
Clare. Clare. He looked at her. Thank you. She didn't say, "You don't have to thank me."
Because he did and it mattered. And she was learning to let things matter without deflecting them. "Welcome back, David," she said. He left. She sat in her office and looked at the city through her window and felt something she hadn't felt in a professional context in a very long time.
"Pride clean and uncomplicated and completely hers." She picked up her phone and texted Marcus. "Day 11. David Park gets his record back. His reply came in 40 seconds.
That's everything the ERP was supposed to do. She typed back, I know. Three dots. Then how do you feel? She thought about it.
Then she typed like I went back to the place that broke me and built something better in it. His response was immediate. That's the whole story. She set her phone down. She looked at the city.
She thought, "Yes, that's exactly the whole story. He came back to Atlanta on a Friday afternoon, 3 weeks to the day after he'd driven north out of Piney Grove Road. He texted her from the Meridian parking lot at 2:15. I'm here. She was in a meeting, she texted back under the table.
When are you done? Handoff wraps at 5, maybe 5:30. Come to mine after. A pause. You sure I made dinner?
She typed. Don't make me eat alone. Another pause. What did you make? I'm getting better at cooking. don't push it.
He sent back exactly one emoji, a single period, which was not an emoji, which was just Marcus Reed communicating that he was done with this particular line of text conversation and was getting back to work, and she had learned to read it as warmly as anyone else might read a heart. He arrived at her apartment at 5:47. She opened the door and they looked at each other for a moment. In the particular way, you look at someone you have been talking to constantly and not actually seeing. And there is a 3we gap between the last physical version of them and this one.