She stopped hoping. Clare said. Yeah. She stopped so it would hurt less. He looked at her.
Kids do that. Clare said. She said it. The way someone says something they know from the inside. Not from observation.
They figure out really fast which hopes are safe and which ones cost too much to carry. Marcus held her gaze. You did that. She didn't answer for a beat. I stopped expecting certain things from my family a long time ago.
It hurts less. It also means I stop being surprised when they disappoint me, which is its own kind of loneliness. Loneliness, he said. Is that surprising, Clare? You're 30 years old.
You're smart. You're capable. You've got a career and you look the way you look. Loneliness isn't the first thing I would have predicted. She didn't react to the look comment the way most women would have.
She just said, "Loneliness doesn't care about any of those things. Loneliness is just what you feel when the people around you don't actually see you. She turned and looked out at the river. I've been in rooms full of people my whole life and mostly invisible in all of them. That was the most honest sentence anyone had said to him in years.
He stood next to her at the edge of the dock, and the river rushed below them, brown and wide and indifferent, and they both just looked at it for a while. I see you, he said. He hadn't planned that either. It came out the same way the other thing had, just falling out of the space between deciding to say something and not saying it. Clare didn't look at him right away.
She stood there with the early morning light on her face and the wind off the water moving through her hair and her hands in the pocket of his sweatpants. And then she turned slowly and looked at him. I know, she said. Simple as that. Not grateful, not overwhelmed, just knowing like it was something she'd already figured out and was only now getting to confirm.
His phone buzzed in his back pocket. He pulled it out. Vanessa. He looked at the screen for a moment. Then he looked at Clare.
She looked at the phone, then at him. Her expression went somewhere complicated and careful. "You should answer it," she said. "I don't have to. You should answer it," she said again.
Because if you don't, she'll call back 20 more times and then she'll decide you two planned this and it'll be 10 times worse when the road opens. She was right. He knew she was right. He answered, "Marcus." Vanessa's voice was the same as it had always been smooth, controlled, the particular kind of composed that took years to perfect.