He said. "Yes, and you'll tell me straight." She looked at him. "Marcus, I walked through a flood. I'm done being diplomatic."
He almost smiled. The almost of it felt like something unlocking. "Why here?" He said. "You knew my address."
"Fine, but why here specifically? Your parents are 20 minutes from Miller's Bend in the other direction." Vanessa lives in Nashville. That's closer than this. You've got cousins on that side of the county.
He held her gaze. Why walk to me? Clare was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Marcus thought she might not answer. Because my parents' house would have been a conversation about Vanessa's party and whether I'd embarrassed the family by leaving early.
She said, "Vanessa's apartment would have been a conversation about why I was making everything about myself when this was her night." She paused. And my cousins would have called my mother the minute I showed up. And me? She held the coffee cup in both hands and looked at him.
You were the one person I could think of who wouldn't make tonight about someone else. Marcus sat with that net. That's the whole reason he said, I don't know, Clare said. She said it quietly like she was telling the truth about something she hadn't finished figuring out yet. I just knew I needed to get somewhere real.
And you were the only real thing I could get to. The river cracked again below the house. Louder now, ice or rock or something structural giving way in the current. Marcus got up and walked to the back window. In the beam of his flashlight, he could see the water moving through the trees at the base of the hill.
Still below the dock. Not for long. We're going to be here a while, he said. I figured, Clare said behind him. He turned around.
She was at the kitchen doorway watching him with a lantern in her hand, and the light from it caught the side of her face, tired and bare and more honest than he'd ever seen a Bennett look. And something moved through Marcus Reed's chest that he had no clean name for. I should move some things out of the guest room, he said. I can help. You don't have to.
She held up the lantern. I'm not sitting in the kitchen alone during a flood. Marcus, where do you need me? They spent the next hour moving storage boxes from the guest room to the hall, setting up the bed frame that he'd had disassembled against the wall since he'd meant to put it in there for Dileia's sleepovers and never gotten around to it, and locating a fitted sheet and a blanket in the linen closet. Clare worked without being directed, without making it into a conversation, pulling her weight the way someone does when they actually know how to be useful.
At one point, she handed him the end of the sheet across the mattress, and he took it, and their hands were close enough that he could have touched hers, and he didn't. She didn't look at him when that happened, but she didn't pull her hand back fast either. When the room was set, Marcus carried a second lantern in and set it on the window sill. The well pumps electric, so the water won't run, but there are two gallons in the bathroom under the sink. Don't drink it.