We need to talk before this becomes something you can't manage alone. That man is not trying to be a father. That man is trying to win something. And I will not let Noah be the prize in someone's game. James was quiet.
You're right. He said about which part? Both parts. He looked out at the back yard. You're going to be a good mother, Sophia.
You already are. She made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. You didn't think that when I showed up on your porch. I thought a lot of things when you showed up on my porch, he said. I was wrong about some of them.
She looked over at him. Which ones? He looked back. I thought this was going to destroy the life I'd built. He said, "I thought letting you in was going to cost me something I couldn't afford to lose.
That the risk was bigger than what I'd get back. And now he held her gaze. Now I think I had been living in a house that was finished but not complete. And I didn't know that until it started being complete. And by then I already knew the answer.
Sophia looked at him for a long steady moment. That's the most you've said in one direction at one time since I got here. I'm practicing, he said. She smiled. A real one.
The kind she didn't always let out. James Carter, she said, practicing feelings. Don't make it weird, he said. She laughed. He let himself do the same.
They sat on the back porch for another hour, talking, really talking. The kind that moved between the serious and the ordinary without effort. The kind that used to come easy to them and was finding its way back gradually, like a skill that had been unused long enough to feel slightly new again. She told him about a woman at her new job named Paula who had already decided to be her friend and was doing so with remarkable efficiency. He told her about a fleet client who had called that week asking for a discount.
And Marcus's response to this, which was not exactly professional, but was deeply satisfying. She told him about something Noah had done that morning with a spoon that defied easy description, but had made her laugh harder than she had in months. He told her that Ava had written a poem for school about her family and had submitted it without showing him first, which was new. And he was still figuring out how to feel about his daughter growing her own interior life with increasing independence. Does that scare you?