"It was everything. And then the very next thing I felt before I even hung up the phone was—" She stopped, made herself say it. "Was your face, Ava's face, my dad out here in this garden. This whole thing we've built out here since October." "And I felt sick because I realized the job wasn't the only thing I wanted anymore."
Her voice shook. "And that terrified me more than Daniel ever did. Because I taught myself so well not to need anybody that the second I did, my first instinct was to run to Chicago and never look back." "Not because I wanted the job more. Because wanting you scared me more."
Marcus reached across the table and took her other hand. "You're not running," he said. "No," Emily said. "I'm not running." She looked at their joined hands.
"But I'm not turning down Chicago tomorrow either, because that's just fear in the other direction. Throwing away my whole career the second a man shows up so I can prove I've changed. That's not it either." She took a breath. "I'm going to ask them for time."
"A real answer takes a real minute. And I'm going to spend that time figuring out if what's happening in this kitchen is the real thing or just two lonely people clinging to each other in a dead woman's garden. And I need you to be okay with the fact that I don't know yet. Can you do that?" And Marcus, who wanted so badly to say yes, it's real, I know it's real, don't go, understood with sudden clarity that this was the test.
This was the exact moment Harold had warned him about. This was where he found out whether he was a man who loved Emily or a man who loved having her. "I can do that," Marcus said. And he meant it. Emily let out a breath like she'd been holding it for four years.
"Okay," she said. "Okay," Marcus said. Harold looked between them and threw up his hands. "That's it? That's the big romantic scene?"
"Okay. Okay. I introduce you. I pour out my whole dying-wife speech, and I get okay?" "Okay, Dad." "In my day, a man would have—"
"Dad, I swear." "I'm just saying there was more kissing in my generation." "Harold," Emily and Marcus said at the same time, and all three of them broke, laughing. The tension of the last hour cracking apart into something lighter, something that felt for the first time all afternoon like it might actually be okay.
From the back door, a small voice. "Can I come in yet? Mr. Harold said to give the grown-ups a minute, but it's been a lot of minutes, and I got the paint out of the brushes and my hair." Ava stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, stre with paint. The picture of a 9-year-old who had reached the absolute limit of her patience.
Marcus laughed and wiped his eyes and held out his arm. "Come here, baby." She ran over and climbed into the chair beside him, looking around at all the adults with their red eyes and their strange smiles. "Were you guys crying?" she asked suspiciously. "A little," Marcus admitted.
"Because of the leaving thing?" Marcus and Emily looked at each other. "We're still figuring out the leaving thing," Emily said gently, turning to Ava. "But I promise you something, okay? Whatever happens with the leaving thing, I'm not going to disappear on you."
"That's—that's not—that's not a thing I would do to you. Even if I did have to go somewhere, you and me are friends now. Friends don't just vanish." "Okay." Ava studied her with those clear, serious eyes, her mother's eyes, the ones that saw straight through people.
"Okay," Ava decided. "But you should stay. Just so you know, my vote is stay." "Duly noted," Emily said, and her voice wobbled. "Mine too," Harold said.
"Two votes for stay." "You don't get a vote. You're compromised," Emily said. "I'm the host. The host always gets a vote." Marcus sat there in the warm kitchen, his daughter tucked under his arm, a woman he was falling for across the table wiping paint off her hands, and an old man he'd met on the side of the road grinning at all of them like he'd known this was coming since the second Marcus hit the brakes.
And for a moment, just a moment, the whole thing felt settled. Felt safe. Felt like maybe the hard part was behind them, and the leaving thing would sort itself out. And they'd all just laugh about it someday from inside that finished garden house. Marcus should have known better.
Because 2 days later, on a gray Monday morning, his phone rang while he was up on the eaves of a new job site, and it was a number he didn't recognize. And the voice on the other end said the words no man who'd already lost one person he loved ever wanted to hear again. "Mr. Johnson, this is Piedmont, General. We have you listed as an emergency contact for a Harold Bennett." Marcus's blood turned to ice.
"He collapsed this morning," the voice said. "You need to come now." Marcus was already moving before the woman on the phone finished her sentence. "I'm on my way," he said. And he was down off the eaves and across the site and shouting for Terrell to take over.
And then he was in his truck with the engine roaring and his hands shaking on the wheel in a way they hadn't shaken since a hospital hallway 5 years ago. Not again. The thought hammered at him the whole drive. "Not again. Not another one."
He knew that phone call. He knew that flat, careful voice hospitals used. He'd gotten that exact call about his wife, and he'd learned that afternoon that the calm in a stranger's voice was the calm of a person delivering news too big for the person receiving it. He called Emily from the road. She didn't pick up.
He called again. Voicemail. His stomach dropped further, and he left a message that came out cracked and rushed. "Emily, it's your dad. He collapsed. They called me."
"I'm going to Pedmont General right now. Call me, please. Please call me." And then he threw the phone on the passenger seat and drove faster. Then it hit him.