I want you to understand what I just said. My first thought was about my reputation, not about Ava. Naomi's jaw was working. Marcus watched her hold it together. "That lawyer call was the worst thing I've done in a while," Damen said.
"And I've done some things using the legal system to pressure you, pressure both of you because I was embarrassed." Because looking at the two of you that afternoon at that table with her knowing what people in this town were saying, I felt replaced and I turned that into aggression and I aimed it at people who were doing what I never did. He looked at Marcus directly. You didn't steal my daughter. I abandoned her. Those are very different things.
And I knew that before I walked through that gymnasium door. Marcus looked at him. Then why did you come? Because I'm selfish, Damian said plainly. And being selfish is easy when you're not there.
You can tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself from a distance. But I walked into that gym and I saw that little girl look right through me like I was nobody. And I saw her look at you like he stopped. His jaw tightened like you were the whole world. And I had to make that someone else's fault because making it my own fault in that moment would have destroyed me.
The diner moved around them. Coffee cups, voices from other tables. Someone laughed at the counter. Naomi said very quietly. Damian, what do you want?
Not from us. What do you actually want? A long pause. I don't know if I want to be her father, he said. And the honesty of that, the brutal, uncommon honesty of a man admitting the thing he was most supposed to want and knowing he might not want it, landed in the booth with the weight of something real.
I know that sounds. I know how that sounds. But I've spent a month trying to figure out if I want to be her father or if I just don't want someone else to be. And I don't have a clean answer, and I'm not going to pretend I do. Naomi looked at him for a long time.
Then she said, "At least that's the truth." "Yeah," Damen said. Marcus looked at him. "So what are you asking for? I'm asking you to tell me she's okay," Damian said. And something in his voice shifted went underneath the calculation, underneath the politics into something more unguarded than anything he'd shown in the gymnasium.
I'm asking someone who actually knows her to tell me she's okay because I can't ask her and I don't have the right to ask Naomi like I'm owed an answer, but I'm asking. He looked at Marcus. Is she okay? Marcus held his gaze. He thought about Ava at the bench with her homework.
Ava explaining the intake manifold. Ava saying no thank you in the gymnasium with three words that contained six years. Ava writing six pages about engines and broken things and patience. She's more than okay. He said she's remarkable.
Damian nodded once. He looked at the table. Something moved across his face. Not quite relief. Not quite grief.
Something in between that didn't have a clean name. I'm going to withdraw the filing, he said. Permanently. Gerald Watkins will get a letter by Wednesday. Already done, Naomi said.
3 weeks ago, right? He looked at his coffee. I know. He pushed the cup aside. I just needed to say it in person to make it real.
He looked at both of them. You're good for her, both of you. I can see that. And I'm not going to be the person who damages that because of my ego. He stood up, left a 20 on the table, looked at Naomi.
I'm sorry for all of it, the absence and the return and everything in between. Then he looked at Marcus. Take care of her. I will, Marcus said. Damian nodded.
He walked out of the diner and through the window. They watched him get into a car and sit there for a moment before he drove away. Naomi sat in the booth with her hands flat on the table looking at the door he'd gone through. Marcus watched her process it, watched the years of it move across her face, the anger and the exhaustion and the complicated relief of a chapter that had finally actually closed. "Are you all right?" he said.
She looked at him. Her eyes were bright. "Ask me tomorrow," she said. "Fair enough," he said. He ordered them both a piece of pie.
They sat in the diner for another 40 minutes and talked about nothing important. And it was the best 40 minutes of either of their weeks. March arrived. Marcus asked Naomi to marry him on a Tuesday evening, which was completely ordinary and exactly right. He hadn't planned Tuesday specifically.
He'd carried the ring for 11 days, his wife's ring, which he'd taken to a jeweler on Route 9, who'd reset the stone in a new setting, something that honored what came before without pretending this was the same story. It was a different story. It was its own thing. He'd had conversations in his head about timing, about the right moment, about whether there there should be something ceremonial, a restaurant, a view the lake. He thought about all of it.
And then on a Tuesday evening at Naomi's kitchen table while Ava was in the back of the house running a bath and the kitchen smelled like the soup Naomi had made and they were halfway through their coffee and she was telling him something about a patient who had made her laugh that afternoon right in the middle of a sentence in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. He reached into his jacket pocket and put the ring on the table between them. Naomi stopped mid-sentence. She looked at the ring, looked at him, looked at the ring. Marcus, she said, I'm not good at speeches.