My home. I'd like a week before we try to have this conversation properly. I need a week. Walter nodded. Eleanor nodded, wiping her face.
Vanessa said nothing. She just looked at Clare with something in her face that Marcus recognized. Not for what it was in Vanessa, but for what it was in general. Guilt is a specific face. He knew it.
Clare turned to Marcus. She looked at him for a moment, quiet, steady, all the noise of the last hour sitting around them. And she said, "Thank you for today." He said, "You were going to get here on your own." Maybe, she said, but it helped to have somewhere real to stand while I was finding my way.
She picked up her keys from where she'd left them on the workbench, collected the sealed Ziploc bag with her dress and her red-soled heels, and walked to her rental car. Earl had arranged it while they were at the shop. Another quiet, useful thing Earl did without being asked. She got in. She didn't look back at her family as she drove out of the lot.
She did look at Marcus just once through the windshield. As the car moved past him, a look that meant something she hadn't said yet. He watched the car go behind him. The Bennett sorted themselves back into their vehicles with a quiet efficiency of a family that was very good at maintaining order when the disorder had gotten too large to absorb all at once. Vanessa was the last to leave.
She stopped beside Marcus on the way to her car. Didn't look at him. Just stood there for a second. She's been in love with you since the day she met you. Vanessa said, "I want you to know I knew that and I made it harder for her anyway.
That's mine to carry." She paused. Don't make her wait any longer than she already has. She walked to her car and left. Marcus stood alone in the parking lot of his marina shop with the river behind him and the sound sound of the last cars leaving the gravel and the words settling into him one by one.
She's been in love with you since the day she met you. He stood there a long time. Earl came back from wherever he'd made himself scarce and leaned in the garage doorway with his thermos and said without looking up that was something. Yeah, Marcus said. Woman drove away without looking back at her own family.
Yeah, Earl sipped his coffee. But she looked at you. Marcus didn't answer that. She's a good one, Earl said. I can tell that much.
You talked to her for 11 minutes total. 11 minutes is enough if you know what you're looking for. Earl finally looked up. You going to call her? Marcus looked at the empty lot, at the place where the rental car had been, at the flat gray sky over the river going dark at the edges.
Not today, he said. When he thought about what she'd said, about solid ground, about not wanting to make decisions from anyone else's territory. When she's had time to stand in her own place and still feel the same way, he said. Earl considered that or it's scared. Maybe both," Marcus said.