"Than you used to. He said he could tell." She was quiet for a second. "Is that true, Dad?" Marcus kept his eyes on the road.
"I don't know, baby," he said. "Maybe." But he did know. Of course he knew. Ava had stopped tracking the wrinkle because the wrinkle wasn't showing up as much anymore.
He'd noticed it himself. Noticed that he'd started looking forward to the drive out there. Noticed the way an ordinary Tuesday now had a Saturday at the end of it worth waiting for. Noticed the specific way his chest felt when Emily laughed at something he said, which was a feeling he'd filed away 5 years ago and never expected to take back out. He and Emily hadn't said anything.
Neither of them had. It was all still buried under hammers and joints and Harold's terrible sandwiches, but it was there. Both of them knew it was there, and both of them were scared to death of it for reasons the other one didn't know yet. For Marcus, the fear was old and familiar. He'd lived it for 5 years.
He didn't want his daughter to get attached to someone who might leave. He didn't want to get attached to someone who might leave. He'd buried one woman he loved, and some part of him, the careful, wounded, self-protecting part, had decided a long time ago that it would be safer to just never risk that again. To keep the wall up, to stand up alone at 4:45 forever, because at least alone was a thing you couldn't lose twice. For Emily, the fear was different, and Marcus didn't understand it until the day it nearly ended everything.
It was a Saturday in late October. The garden house was almost done. Real walls now, a real roof, a door that closed clean because Emily had been right about the level. They were painting the trim, the three of them, plus Ava. When Emily's phone rang, she looked at the screen.
Something changed in her face. "I have to take this," she said, and walked to the far end of the yard. Marcus kept painting, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye, watched her free hand come up to her mouth, watched her start to pace, watched her whole posture change into something taut and electric. She was on the phone for 10 minutes. When she came back, she was pale and she was smiling in a way that didn't reach anywhere near her eyes.
"Everything okay?" Marcus asked. That was—Emily stopped, looked at her father, looked at Marcus. "That was a firm in Chicago. A big one. One of the biggest design firms in the country."
She said it carefully, like the words might break if she dropped them. "They want me to run their new division. Director. It's—Marcus, it's the job. It's the actual job."
"The one I've been working toward my whole career." For a second, nobody said anything. Harold set down his paintbrush very slowly. "Chicago," Harold said. "Chicago," Emily said.