Clare looked at him for a long moment. And then what? She said. And then we figure out the rest when the water drops and you can make your own decisions from your own ground. She was very still.
That's the key part. He said your own ground, not your father's, not Vanessa's. Not here either. Whatever you decide about your life. It needs to be from your own ground.
She folded her arms across her chest. Not defensively, more like she was holding herself together against something she wasn't expecting to feel. You sound like you've thought about this a lot. She said, I've thought about what it took to walk away from your family's orbit, he said. And it cost me something.
But I've never once thought about going back. She looked at him like she was memorizing his face. Her phone buzzed in his sweatpants pocket. She'd transferred it outside and she pulled it out. Looked at the screen.
Her father. She looked at the screen for a long time. Then she put the phone back in her pocket without answering, and she turned around and looked at the river. Below them, the water was moving fast and brown and relentless, carrying everything it had taken headed somewhere neither of them could see. But Marcus Reed stood on his dock in the pale morning light, and he understood something he hadn't known yesterday, something about the woman standing two feet to his left and what she was really doing here and why she'd walked through a flood to get to him and the understanding settled into him slowly.
The way understanding always settles when it's the kind that changes things. Not everything was resolved. Not everything was named. But whatever it was that had started in his kitchen the night before, it was still rising slow and sure the way the river rose. And this time he wasn't going to let it pass without noticing.
The road opened at 2 in the afternoon. Marcus heard it before he saw it. The sound of a county truck grinding through the lower stretch, pushing debris to the shoulder, the particular rumble of heavy equipment, doing slow work. He and Clare were in the garage at that point. Him finishing the wiring job on the pontoon motor that the weekend fishermen still needed by Saturday.
Her sitting on the workbench with a cups of coffee and asking question that were specific enough that he had to actually think before answering. She'd asked about the solenoid. He'd explained it. She'd asked a follow-up that told him she'd actually understood the first answer. He'd started explaining things in more detail.
After that, when the sound of the county truck reached them, they both went quiet. Marcus set down his pliers and wiped his hands on the shop rag. Clare set her cup on the workbench. They stood there for a moment in the garage with the noise of the truck getting closer and the whole shape of the day rearranging itself around that sound. Roads opening, he said.
Yeah, you'll be able to get your car pulled from the ditch once it's clear. I can call Earl. He's got a chain. Okay. Neither of them moved.
You don't have to leave immediately, Marcus said. He said it carefully, the way he said everything he meant. The road being open doesn't mean you have to walk out the door in the next 10 minutes. Clare looked at him from the workbench. Something in her expression was doing several things at once, and he couldn't read all of them.