Did you? Clare said not yet. He was quiet for a moment. I don't know if I'm going to sitting with it. What does sitting with it feel like?
He considered that. Like trying to figure out if I owe something to a man who left because he's in pain now or if I'm just afraid of being the kind of man who doesn't go. Clare was quiet for a while beside him. Those are two different questions. She said, "I know.
The first one is about him. The second one is about you. He looked at her. You've been answering the first question. She said, "The one you can't resolve because you don't have enough information.
You don't know what he needs. You don't know what he wants. You don't know if it would even matter to him if you went." She shifted to look at him. But the second question, "What kind of man, Marcus Reed, is you already know the answer to that."
He held her gaze. "What kind of man am I?" He said. The kind who shows up," she said. "Even when it costs something, even when it's complicated," she paused.
"You showed up for Dileia every day since she was a year old. You showed up for a woman you barely knew in the middle of a flood because it was the right thing. You showed up for my father at that diner, even though you had every reason not to." She looked at him steadily. "You don't have to decide yet, but when you do decide, you already know what it'll be."
He looked at her for a long moment. I'll probably go, he said. I know, she said. I might need you to come with me. She didn't hesitate.
Then I'll come. That was all. No condition, no calculation. Just the directness. That was her most Marcus thing.
He took her hand. She curled her fingers around his. The swing moved slowly in the dark. Two weeks later, Marcus drove to Nashville. Clare sat in the passenger seat.
Delia was at his sisters for the weekend. They barely talked on the drive, not out of tension, out of the particular companionship of two people who've learned that not every silence needs filling. The man Marcus found in the apartment in East Nashville was smaller than his memory of him. That was the first thing. Thinner, he moved with the deliberate care of someone who'd learned that careless movement cost something now.