You've known me for four years, Walter. My name is Marcus. Walter's composure held. But something shifted behind his eyes, not respect. Not quite embarrassment, but the recognition that he'd made a move that someone had noticed.
Marcus, he said with the adjustment of someone who'd recalculated. I have no quarrel with you specifically. I am asking for my daughter to come home. Then ask her," Marcus said. "She's standing right there."
Walter turned to Clare. "Come home?" "No," Clare said. Eleanor made a small sound. Walter stared at his daughter.
"Cla, I'll go to my apartment, which is my home, not yours," she said it without cruelty. "And then I'd like us to have a real conversation. Maybe next week, maybe the week after when nobody's managing a crisis and everybody can sit at a table and actually talk. "We are talking," Vanessa said. "We are having a confrontation in a marina parking lot," Clare said, turning to her sister.
"That's not the same thing." Vanessa looked at her for a long moment. "And then she did something." Marcus did not expect. She looked at him, really looked at him the way she hadn't since she'd gotten out of the car.
Did something happen between you two? She said. Marcus held her gaze. No, but something is happening. Silence, Vanessa, Clare said.
I want to hear him say it, Vanessa said without looking away from Marcus. Marcus looked at her. This woman he'd spent 11 months engaged to. This woman who' told her sister 2 months before their wedding that he didn't understand what her life required of him. This woman who' announced her engagement while watching her sister's face for a flinch.
He looked at her and he said evenly, "What is it you actually want to know?" "Vanessa," she held his gaze. Something cracked in it, "Just slightly behind the composure. I want to know if you have feelings for my sister." The marina lot was quiet except for the river behind it.
Marcus said, "I think that's a question for another day. It's a question for right now, Vanessa. Clare's voice had gone very controlled. Stop. He was engaged to me, Vanessa said.
And now there was something underneath the precision, not grief. Not loss, but something older and stranger. Something like the fear of being replaced at something she'd already left. He was engaged to me, and now he's You were engaged to him, Clare said. And her voice broke open for the first time, not with tears, but with something that had been compressed for a very long time.
You were engaged to him, and you told me 2 months before the wedding that you weren't sure you were going to go through with it, and you told nobody else, and you let him keep planning that wedding, and you let him keep believing he had a future with you, while you decided privately whether he was worth the inconvenience. She was breathing hard now. And then you let him be the one to walk away so you wouldn't have to carry it. And I watched that happen. I stood in that family and I watched you do that to a man who deserved better.