What future specifically? My daughters, Walter said. Then after a pause, yours. They met for lunch. Not at the Bennett's house neutral ground, a diner off the highway that Marcus knew.
And Walter had clearly looked up in advance. Walter arrived first and was sitting at a corner table and stood up when Marcus came in, which was not something Marcus had expected. "I owe you an apology," Walter said. Before they'd even sat down, Marcus looked at him. For which part?
Walter sat down for the parking lot. For calling you this man, for assuming your value was something I had the right to measure, he folded his hands on the table. I was wrong, Marcus sat. He gave that the weight it deserved. Thank you, he said.
They ordered. They talked. Not easily. There was too much history for easy, but genuinely. Walter asked about the business.
Real questions, not test questions. Marcus answered them straight. Walter talked about Clare the way a father talks about a daughter when he's finally stopped trying to manage her and started trying to understand her, which is a different conversation entirely. By the end of the meal, nothing was resolved in the tidy way of movies. But something had been established, a willingness to try, a beginning of respect.
When Walter shook Marcus's hand at the door and said, "I hope my daughter knows what she has in you." Marcus looked at him and said, "With respect, Walter, I hope I prove it over time." "That's more useful than her knowing it." Walter almost smiled. "Yes," he said.
"I suppose it is." Marcus drove back to the shop and sat in his truck for a minute before going in because the feeling in his chest was specific and complicated, and he wanted to sit with it long enough to know what it was. It was something like peace, not the absence of difficulty, not at the absence of history, not the pretending away of everything the Bennets had put him through, and everything Clare had carried and everything Dileia would need from him in the years ahead. Just the particular feeling that comes when you have walked through every hard thing and you are still standing on your own ground and the person beside you is still there. In April, Vanessa called Clare, not their mother mediating.
Not a group call, just Vanessa calling Clare's phone on a Tuesday afternoon when Clare was between meetings at the marina. And when Clare answered, she heard her sister's voice, not the smooth performed version. Just Vanessa say, "I'd like to have lunch. Just us." "If you're willing," Clare told Marcus that night.
"Are you going?" He said. "I think so." She said, "I think I have to if I want to know whether there's anything left to build." A pause.
She's still my sister. Even with everything. Yeah. Marcus said, "She is. She did something terrible."
Clare said, "And she knew it was terrible while she was doing it. And she told me the truth about it anyway, which is the one thing I didn't expect. She was quiet for a moment. I don't know what that means yet, but I'm not ready to close the door." Then don't.