Marcus said, "You'll know when you've figured it out. How are you so calm about this?" She said, "She hurt you, too." She did, he said. But I stopped being angry at Vanessa a long time ago.
Not because I forgave it, because I got far enough away from it that it couldn't reach me anymore. And where I am now, he paused. It'd be a waste of a good place to stand to keep being angry about how I got here. Silence on the line. Marcus," she said.
"Yeah, I think I love you." She said it quietly, not like a revelation, like something she'd known for a while and was just now saying out loud. The night was very quiet around him. "I think I love you, too," he said. "I've been working up to saying it."
"I know," she said. "I've been watching you work up to it. Was it obvious?" "Only to me," she said. "I've had years of practice reading you."
He felt the laugh come up before he could stop it and he let it go. The lunch with Vanessa happened on a Thursday. Clare came to his house that evening and sat at the kitchen table, the same kitchen table, the same chairs, the same place where all of it had started 7 months ago in a storm. And Marcus made coffee and Dileia who had a radar for important moments appeared briefly. "Assessed the room," said, "Hi, Clare and Dad.
I'm doing homework." And disappeared again with the tactfulness of an 8-year-old who'd been paying attention. Clare wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. She apologized, she said. A real one, not managed.
She talked for about 20 minutes without looking at her phone or redirecting the conversation or framing it in terms of herself, which is that's not something Vanessa does normally. And then she stopped and she looked at me and she said, "I don't expect this to fix anything. I just needed you to hear it from me without an audience." Marcus said nothing. He let her finish.
I told her I heard her, Clare said. I told her I wasn't ready to call it fixed, but I wasn't ready to call it finished either. She looked down at her cup. She cried, which I've never seen her do in a situation where she wasn't using it for something. This was just she was just sad.
What did you do? I sat there. Clare said I didn't fix it for her. I didn't tell her it was okay. But I didn't leave either.
She looked up at Marcus. I think that was the right thing. I think it was. He said, I'm going to see her again next month. Dinner.
Both of us and whoever she's with. She paused. I don't know if we get back to sisters the way we should have been. But I think we might get to something. Something is better than nothing, Marcus said.