That's for flushing. Okay. And if the water starts coming under the door, you come get me. My room's at the end of the hall. She was standing in the doorway of the guest room.
Arms folded across her chest, his shirt, her arms, and an expression that was mostly exhaustion with something else underneath that he couldn't read from this distance. Marcus, she said, "Yeah, thank you." Not the surface kind of thank you. The kind that means something other thing entirely. You're all right, he said.
He said it the way you say things when you don't have a better way to say them. She nodded once and closed the door. Marcus walked back to the living room and sat down on the couch in the dark with his whiskey and listened to the storm do what storms do and tried to remember the last time anyone had sat across his kitchen table from him and said anything that true. He came up empty. He stayed there for a while, not sleeping, listening to the rain the river, until the river noise changed, pitch lower, wider, and he knew the water had reached the bottom of the dock.
He went out with his flashlight and tied off an extra line and checked the tarp on the skiff and came back and soaked. He changed in the dark in his room and lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. In the room at the end of the hall, the lantern was still on. He could see the light under the door. She wasn't sleeping either.
He thought about what she'd said, about Vanessa, about watching him leave, about knowing something was wrong and never saying it. 3 years of not saying it, 3 years of being in a family that expected her to manage her own feelings quietly and without causing trouble. And she'd done it. She'd kept doing it right up until she walked out of a party into a flood and went looking for the one person she thought wouldn't make tonight about someone else. Marcus pressed his palms flat on the ceiling above his head.
He did that sometimes when he couldn't sleep. Just pushed against the ceiling until he felt his shoulders settle and thought about the fact that he had spent the last 3 years assuming Clare Bennett was the one member of that family who had exactly the life she wanted. The quiet one. The background one, the one who was fine. He hadn't been paying attention.
He'd missed it completely. The river pushed against his house all night, and somewhere around 4 in the morning, the wind dropped, and the rain slowed to a long, steady pour, and Marcus Reed lay in the dark and felt something in his chest that had been locked for a long time shift, very slightly in its frame. He didn't know what it was yet. He wasn't going to pretend that he did, but it was there. When the first gray light started coming through the window, he heard the guest room door open.
He heard her walk down the hall, a cabinet opening in the kitchen, the familiar whisper of the gas burner catching. He smelled coffee. He lay there for another minute. Then he got up. He walked into the kitchen and Clare was standing at the stove with her back to him still in his shirt and the rolled up sweatpants and she'd found a second blanket from somewhere and had it wrapped around her shoulders.
She didn't turn around. Road's still out, she said. I know. So, I'm here today. I know.
She poured him a cup without turning around and set it on the counter behind her. He picked it up. Dileia can't get back from Murfreesboro until the water drops. He said that's going to be a conversation. What are you going to tell her?
He thought about it. The truth that a friend needed somewhere to be during the storm. Clare turned around then. She was looking at him steadily the way she did everything direct. No performance.