Closed it. "I hadn't thought about it like that," he admitted. "No," Emily said. "You wouldn't have, because you weren't calculating. You just said the true thing."
She pressed her hand to her mouth for a second, getting herself under control. "Marcus, what if I don't want to go?" "Then don't go," Marcus said. "But not for me. Don't you dare do it for me."
"Do it because you looked at the whole thing. Chicago, your dad, this town, whatever the hell this is between us, and you decided what you actually wanted. Not what you're scared of, not what somebody's making you do. What you want." "And if what I want," Emily said slowly, "is to figure out whether the thing between us is real before I move a thousand miles away from it?"
Marcus felt his heart start to pound. "Then that's allowed, too," he said carefully. "That's allowed." They stood there in the kitchen, 3 ft apart. Both of them wrecked.
Both of them scared. Both of them standing at the edge of something neither had let themselves stand near in years. And that was when Harold, who had absolutely been listening at the door the entire time, leaned his head in. "You two done being noble at each other?" he said. "Because the girl's got paint drying in her hair, and I'm too old to get it out."
Emily let out a startled laugh and wiped her eyes. "Dad, were you listening?" "Every word," Harold said, unrepentant, walking in. "It's my kitchen and my daughter and, frankly, my matchmaking, so I've got a stake." He set a hand on the counter and looked between the two of them.
And the mischief drains slowly out of his face, replaced by something older and more serious. "Sit down, both of you. There's a thing I need to say, and I've been putting it off, and I'm too old to keep putting things off. You of all people should know that, M. Look what putting things off did to that garden."
Emily and Marcus sat. Harold lowered himself into a chair across from them, slow, his knees protesting, and folded his weathered hands on the table. "You want to know why I did it?" he said. "Why I pulled a total stranger off the side of the road and started throwing my daughter at him 20 minutes later?" Everybody thinks I'm just a meddling old man.
"Emily thinks I'm trying to marry her off to the cable guy." He almost smiled. "But that's not it. It was never it." "Then what?" Emily asked softly.
Harold was quiet for a moment. "When your mother was dying," he said, "she made me promise her something. Same as I imagine your wife made you promise something, Marcus." He glanced at him, and Marcus felt it land because his wife had made him promise the exact words coming back. "Promise me you won't spend the rest of your life alone."