That night, after Ava was asleep, Marcus sat at the kitchen table the way he did most nights. The bills were there, the calculator was there, but for once he wasn't looking at them. He was thinking about Harold, not the setup, not the daughter. He'd already decided that was off the table. That was crazy.
That was moving too fast. That was exactly the kind of thing a lonely man could get pulled into if he wasn't careful. And Marcus had spent 5 years being nothing if not careful. No, I was thinking about the other thing Harold had said. The thing that wouldn't leave him alone.
You both spent your lives building something for someone who isn't here to see it. Because here was the truth Marcus had never said out loud, not to anyone. Not once in 5 years. He was tired. Not the good kind of tired, the kind you earn from an honest day.
The other kind, the kind that lives underneath everything and never fully goes away. He was tired of standing up alone. He was tired of being the only one who knew where the good spatula was. The only one who lined up the vitamins, the only one who got up at 2:00 a.m., the only pair of hands, the only voice, the only everything. He loved his daughter more than his own life.
That was never the question. The question was the one he never let himself ask because asking it felt like a betrayal. Is this all it's going to be, just him and Ava and the standing up forever until she grew up and left and it was just him? Was that the whole story? Was a man allowed to want more than that?
Or was wanting more the same as saying his daughter wasn't enough? His wife's voice came to him then the way it did sometimes, unbidden, from wherever she was. She needs a father who never gives up. But she'd said something else, too, hadn't she? Near the very end, when they both knew when there was nothing left to be brave about, she'd taken his hand and looked at him with those eyes, the eyes Ava had now.
And she'd said, "Marcus, promise me you won't spend the rest of your life alone. I don't want that for you. Do you hear me? I want you to live. Really live, not just survive."
"Promise me." And he'd promised. He'd promised. And then he'd spent 5 years quietly breaking that promise, one careful, dutiful, exhausted day at a time. Marcus sat in the dark kitchen for a long time.
Then he pulled out his phone. Harold had written his address on a scrap of paper before Marcus left. "In case you change your mind," pressing it into his hand with a look that said he already knew Marcus would. Marcus had taken it just to be polite. He'd figured he'd throw it away.
He hadn't thrown it away. He turned the paper over in his fingers now in the light of his phone, and he thought about a garden house being built 3 years too late for a woman who couldn't see it, and a man building it anyway, because better late than one more thing I never did for her. Down the hall, his daughter was asleep, and above her bed hung a crayon drawing of three people and an angel. Promise me you'll really live. Marcus set the paper down on the table.