He thought about it. She talks in her sleep. Full sentences. Last week, I walked past her door and she was asleep and having what sounded like a complete negotiation with someone about which movie to watch. She woke up in the morning with no memory of it.
Clare looked at him across the table and smiled. A real one all the way up to her eyes. No managing of it. She sounds exactly like you. How do you figure?
Because I've watched you have complete negotiations inside your head without saying a word out loud. She's just doing it more audibly. He looked at her for a moment. You've been studying me for years? She said without a trace of embarrassment.
It was the only access I had. The check came. He paid it. They walked out to the parking lot and the night was cold and clear. The way Tennessee gets in October when the weather fi finally makes up its mind.
I'd like to meet her, Clare said eventually. When it makes sense, when it wouldn't be strange for her or for you. It won't be strange, Marcus said. She's going to have opinions. Good.
I like people with opinions. Okay. But her opinions are going to be specific. How specific. Last week, she told me she didn't trust a man at the gas station because his shoes were too new.
She said nobody with feet that knew could be trustworthy. Clare stared at him. She's eight, eight, and very confident in her assessments. I'm going to love her, Clare said. And she said it simply without strategy.
Just a thing she knew the same way. She knew other things she'd been deciding to know lately. Marcus stood next to her car while she found her keys and felt something in his chest warm and then immediately get complicated the way it does when you've been careful about something for a long time and you suddenly aren't being careful anymore. Clare, he said. Yeah, I'm slow.
He said, I want you to know that about me. I'm slow with things that matter. I don't move fast and I don't make announcements and I don't do anything for the story of it. I do things because they're true. She looked at him in the parking lot dark.
Marcus, I've been waiting six years. Slow is fine. He nodded once. She got in her car. He stood there until her tail lights turned onto the highway.
Then he drove home and checked on Dileia, who was sound asleep midnegotiation about something. And he sat on the edge of his bed in the dark for a while and thought about what it felt like to want something that didn't scare him. It felt it turned out like the dock after a long day, like something solid that he'd built himself. The months that followed didn't move in a straight line. Nothing real ever does.