He didn't decide anything. Not yet. He told himself he wasn't deciding anything. He'd sleep on it. He'd see how he felt in the morning.
There was no reason to go. One hundred reasons not to. He barely knew the man. It was too fast. It was too much.
His daughter, his heart, his careful, careful life. But he didn't throw the paper away. He left it right there on the table where he'd see it first thing when he came down at 4:45 to crack the eggs and pack the sandwich and stand up one more time. And as he climbed the stairs to bed, tired down to his bones, Marcus Johnson had no idea. None.
That the old man he'd stopped for on a road he never took on a day he almost skipped, in a moment that lasted less than a blink, had just quietly reached into his life and started to change everything about it. He only knew that for the first time in 5 years, when he thought about tomorrow, something in his chest that had been shut for a very long time had cracked open just far enough to let a little light in. And downstairs on the kitchen table in the dark, a scrap of paper with an address on it waited for the morning. The morning came the way mornings always came for Marcus, early, dark, and asking more of him than he had. But this time, when he came down the stairs at 4:45 and flipped on the kitchen light, the first thing he saw was the scrap of paper on the table, right where he'd left it.
Harold Bennett's address, written in the shaky, careful hand of a man who'd spent 40 years drawing blueprints. Marcus stood there and looked at it for a long moment. Then he made the coffee. He cracked the eggs. He packed the sandwich triangles, not squares.
And he lined up the vitamins. And he did all of it the way he did every morning, on autopilot, while his mind ran 100 miles an hour on a single question he thought he'd already answered. Was he going? He'd said no. Last night, three separate times he'd said no.
It was crazy. It was too fast. A grown man didn't rearrange his Saturday because a stranger on the side of the road wanted to play matchmaker. And yet, the paper was still on his table. He hadn't thrown it away.
That had to mean something, didn't it? A man threw away things he didn't want. He kept the things he wasn't sure about. "Dad." Marcus turned.
Ava was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas, hair everywhere, squinting against the light. "Baby, it's Saturday. What are you doing up?" "I heard you moving around." She patted over and climbed onto a kitchen chair, folding her legs underneath her.
"You've got the wrinkle again." Marcus reached up and sure enough felt the crease. "You need to stop keeping track of my face," he said. "Somebody has to." She yawned and looked at the paper in his hand.