"See, this is why I put you down as the contact. Knew you'd move. Emily's a worrier. She'd have called nine people first. You just come." Marcus stepped up to the other side of the bed.
He didn't quite know what to do with his hands or his face or the enormous thing sitting in his chest. "You listed me as your emergency contact," he said. "Harold, you've known me 2 months." Harold looked at him. "I've known you 2 months," he agreed.
"And in 2 months, you stopped for me on a road when nobody else would. You fixed my joints so my wife's garden house wouldn't fall on my head. You brought your little girl out to keep an old man company, and you sat in my kitchen and told my daughter to take a job in Chicago because you loved her too much to cage her." He said it plainly, but his voice was thick. "Son, I've had friends for 40 years I wouldn't trust to feed my dog."
"Two months is plenty. I know exactly who you are. I knew the day you hit the brakes." Marcus had to look away for a second. He looked at the monitor, at the numbers, at anything, because his eyes were burning and he was a grown man in a hospital and he'd promised himself he'd be the steady one.
"Well," he managed, "you could have picked a less dramatic way to tell me you like me." Harold barked a laugh, then grabbed his own chest. "Don'tโdon't make me laugh. It hurts. Oh, that hurts."
"Serves you right," Emily said, wiping her eyes. "Two months you've been out there playing lumberjack when the doctor told you last year to take it easy. I ought toโ" She stopped, pressed his hand to her forehead. "I can't lose you too, Dad. Do you understand me?"
"I already lost Mom. I can't. I won't survive it." And there it was. The thing under all of it.
The thing Emily had been holding down under the strength and the walls and the pushing everybody away. The pure, terrified love of a woman who'd already buried one parent and could not, would not, face burying the other. Harold reached up with a shaking hand and cupped his daughter's face. "Emily," he said softly. "Look at me."
"You're not going to lose me today. Doctor says it's fixable. Little procedure, and I'm back to being a nuisance in no time." He wiped a tear off her cheek with his thumb. "But baby, someday you are going to lose me."
"That's just the deal. That's the deal for everybody. And I need you to hear what I'm about to say because a man gets clear about things when his heart decides to act up in a garden." Emily went still. "I have spent 3 years terrified of leaving you alone," Harold said.