She pressed her hand to her mouth for a second, getting herself under control. "Marcus, what if I don't want to go?" "Then don't go," Marcus said. "But not for me. Don't you dare do it for me."
"Do it because you looked at the whole thing. Chicago, your dad, this town, whatever the hell this is between us, and you decided what you actually wanted. Not what you're scared of, not what somebody's making you do. What you want." "And if what I want," Emily said slowly, "is to figure out whether the thing between us is real before I move a thousand miles away from it?"
Marcus felt his heart start to pound. "Then that's allowed, too," he said carefully. "That's allowed." They stood there in the kitchen, 3 ft apart. Both of them wrecked.
Both of them scared. Both of them standing at the edge of something neither had let themselves stand near in years. And that was when Harold, who had absolutely been listening at the door the entire time, leaned his head in. "You two done being noble at each other?" he said. "Because the girl's got paint drying in her hair, and I'm too old to get it out."
Emily let out a startled laugh and wiped her eyes. "Dad, were you listening?" "Every word," Harold said, unrepentant, walking in. "It's my kitchen and my daughter and, frankly, my matchmaking, so I've got a stake." He set a hand on the counter and looked between the two of them.
And the mischief drains slowly out of his face, replaced by something older and more serious. "Sit down, both of you. There's a thing I need to say, and I've been putting it off, and I'm too old to keep putting things off. You of all people should know that, M. Look what putting things off did to that garden."
Emily and Marcus sat. Harold lowered himself into a chair across from them, slow, his knees protesting, and folded his weathered hands on the table. "You want to know why I did it?" he said. "Why I pulled a total stranger off the side of the road and started throwing my daughter at him 20 minutes later?" Everybody thinks I'm just a meddling old man.
"Emily thinks I'm trying to marry her off to the cable guy." He almost smiled. "But that's not it. It was never it." "Then what?" Emily asked softly.
Harold was quiet for a moment. "When your mother was dying," he said, "she made me promise her something. Same as I imagine your wife made you promise something, Marcus." He glanced at him, and Marcus felt it land because his wife had made him promise the exact words coming back. "Promise me you won't spend the rest of your life alone."
"Your mother took my hand near the end," Harold went on, "and she said, 'Harold, you are the most stubborn, self-sacrificing man I have ever met, and I'm not worried about you being sad when I'm gone. I'm worried about you being alone, and I'm worried about our Emily.'" Emily's breath caught. "Me?" "You."
Harold looked at his daughter with an ache that had clearly been living in him for 3 years. "She said, 'Emily is so busy being strong that she's forgotten she's allowed to need anybody. She takes care of everybody and lets nobody take care of her. Promise me you'll watch out for that. Promise me you won't let her turn into a woman who spends her whole life proving she doesn't need a soul.'"
His voice broke on the last word. "And I promised her. And then I watched you do exactly the thing she was afraid of for 3 years. Ever since Daniel, you built a wall so high nobody could get over it. And you called it strength, and it broke my heart every single day."
Emily was crying again, but quietly, differently now. "Dad—" "Let me finish. I'm on a roll and my knees hurt." Harold turned to Marcus. "And you?"
"When I saw you, you stop that day. I wasn't lying about what that meant. Two cars went around me. I was on the ground. And this man skids to a stop and runs across the road like it's his own father down in the dirt."
He shook his head. "I've spent 75 years reading people. Forty of them designing buildings, which is really just the science of figuring out what'll hold weight and what won't. And I looked at you, Marcus, and I saw a man who'd hold weight. A man who'd been holding it alone for a long, long time and never once put it down or asked anybody to help carry it."
His eyes went between the two of them. "And I thought, Lord, there they are. Two people who spend every waking hour taking care of everybody but themselves. Two people who forgot they're allowed to want something for their own sake. And I thought maybe, just maybe, if I got them in the same room, they'd recognize each other."
The kitchen was silent. "That's why I did it," Harold said. "Not to marry Emily off. Not because I'm bored. Because I made a promise to a dying woman that I'd make sure our daughter didn't spend her life alone, proving she didn't need anybody."
"And because I met a man on the side of the road who was doing the exact same thing, and I couldn't stand to watch two good people waste their one shot at not being lonely just because they were both too proud and too scared to admit they wanted it." Emily reached across the table and took her father's hand. "You never told me that," she whispered. "Bird about what she said." "I'm telling you now," Harold said.
"Because you've got a phone call to make about Chicago, and I'll be damned if you make it out of fear." Either way, he squeezed her hand. "You go because you want the job. That's a good reason. You stay because you found something here worth staying for. That's a good reason."
"But you make that call as a woman who knows she's allowed to need people, Emily. Not as a woman still trying to prove to a man named Daniel that she never did. He doesn't get a vote anymore. You hear me? That man does not get a vote in the rest of your life."
Emily pressed her father's hand to her cheek and cried. And this time, it wasn't the scared kind of crying. It was the kind that let something out that's been locked up too long. Marcus sat very still, giving them the moment, his own throat tight because Harold's words had cut just as deep into him. A man who'd been holding weight for a long time and never asked anybody to help carry it.
That was him. That was exactly him. He'd been so focused on Emily's wall that he'd nearly missed the fact that Harold had just described his own brick for brick. After a while, Emily wiped her face and sat up straight and looked at Marcus. "I need to tell you something," she said.
"And I need you to not do the noble thing this time. I need you to just be a person about it." "Okay." "Okay," Marcus said. "When I got that call," Emily said, "when they offered me the job, for about 10 seconds I was thrilled."