Lily Marcus said she should know you practiced. Clare looked at him. He looked very briefly like a man who would like to have a word with his daughter about information management. The pancakes got better the second time, he said. That's all she means.
He also called Mrs. Patterson to ask about the syrup brand. Lily added helpfully. Lily, I'm going inside. Lily said satisfied and disappeared.
Clare looked at Marcus. She has no filter, he said. She has perfect filter, Clare said. She filters out everything except the truth. She picked up her bag.
Show me the house. The house was Marcus. That was the only way to describe it. It wasn't big, and it wasn't decorated in any way that anyone had planned, and there were still boxes in the corner of what was clearly going to be the study. But it had the same quality as the house on Piney Grove Road, the sense of a place that was being genuinely lived in, where the mess was the kind that means presence and not neglect.
Lily had already colonized the second bedroom entirely, which was evident from the art supplies on every horizontal surface, and the fact that three separate drawings were taped to the wall above her desk. Clare stood in the doorway of Lily's room and looked at the drawings. She did those in the first week, Marcus said from behind her. They're good, Clare said, and she meant it not good for eight, just good. The horse from the refrigerator drawing was still there.
The original from Piney Grove, but it had company now. A Nashville skyline that was impressionistic and slightly lopsided and completely alive. A portrait of Mrs. Patterson that captured something true in the set of the woman's eyes. And a third one smaller in the corner of the grouping that made Clare go very still.
It was her, a woman with dark hair sitting at a kitchen table looking at something off frame. It was loose and gestural the way Lily drew everything, but the likeness was there. The posture was there. "When did she do this?" Clare asked quietly.
"I don't know," Marcus said. "I noticed it about 2 weeks ago. She stood there looking at herself, drawn on the wall of a child's room in Nashville and felt something move through her that was too large and too complicated to have a single name." "She didn't say anything about it," Clare asked. she said, and I quote, "I drew the people who matter," Marcus said. Then she went back to whatever book she was reading.
Clare turned away from the wall before she did something embarrassing in a doorway. She walked back to the kitchen. Pancakes happened. They were in fact excellent. Two months became three.
Three became five. And somewhere in the fifth month, a thing happened that neither of them had engineered or even consciously planned for, which was that Clare started knowing Nashville, not as Marcus' city, not as the place she drove to on weekends, but as a place with its own geography in her mind. She knew the construction on I65 southbound. She knew the farmers market that Lily liked, and the specific booth with the honey. She knew the coffee place two blocks from Marcus's office where the line was always too long, but the coffee was worth it.