"I got a message that said you collapsed, and I thought—I know. I know." Harold squeezed her hand. "I'm sorry, M. I scared you. I scared myself, if I'm being honest, which I usually try not to be."
He looked past her at Marcus. "You got here fast." "I ran three red lights," Marcus said. "Atta boy." Harold grinned, then winced, then settled.
"See, this is why I put you down as the contact. Knew you'd move. Emily's a worrier. She'd have called nine people first. You just come." Marcus stepped up to the other side of the bed.
He didn't quite know what to do with his hands or his face or the enormous thing sitting in his chest. "You listed me as your emergency contact," he said. "Harold, you've known me 2 months." Harold looked at him. "I've known you 2 months," he agreed.
"And in 2 months, you stopped for me on a road when nobody else would. You fixed my joints so my wife's garden house wouldn't fall on my head. You brought your little girl out to keep an old man company, and you sat in my kitchen and told my daughter to take a job in Chicago because you loved her too much to cage her." He said it plainly, but his voice was thick. "Son, I've had friends for 40 years I wouldn't trust to feed my dog."
"Two months is plenty. I know exactly who you are. I knew the day you hit the brakes." Marcus had to look away for a second. He looked at the monitor, at the numbers, at anything, because his eyes were burning and he was a grown man in a hospital and he'd promised himself he'd be the steady one.
"Well," he managed, "you could have picked a less dramatic way to tell me you like me." Harold barked a laugh, then grabbed his own chest. "Don't—don't make me laugh. It hurts. Oh, that hurts."
"Serves you right," Emily said, wiping her eyes. "Two months you've been out there playing lumberjack when the doctor told you last year to take it easy. I ought to—" She stopped, pressed his hand to her forehead. "I can't lose you too, Dad. Do you understand me?"
"I already lost Mom. I can't. I won't survive it." And there it was. The thing under all of it.
The thing Emily had been holding down under the strength and the walls and the pushing everybody away. The pure, terrified love of a woman who'd already buried one parent and could not, would not, face burying the other. Harold reached up with a shaking hand and cupped his daughter's face. "Emily," he said softly. "Look at me."
"You're not going to lose me today. Doctor says it's fixable. Little procedure, and I'm back to being a nuisance in no time." He wiped a tear off her cheek with his thumb. "But baby, someday you are going to lose me."
"That's just the deal. That's the deal for everybody. And I need you to hear what I'm about to say because a man gets clear about things when his heart decides to act up in a garden." Emily went still. "I have spent 3 years terrified of leaving you alone," Harold said.
"Ever since your mother passed, it's the thing that keeps me up at night. Not dying. I made my peace with dying a while ago. Being alone doesn't scare me either. I had 41 years with the love of my life."
"That's more than most men get. What scares me, M, is the thought of leaving you the way you've been. Strong and alone and proving to the world you don't need anybody. Because a father can't die easy leaving a daughter like that behind." His voice cracked.
"But these last two months, watching you out in that garden, laughing again, arguing with this big fella about levels, watching you actually let somebody in for the first time in 3 years, I've been able to breathe. Because I looked at you and I thought, she's going to be okay. If it's my time, whenever it comes, she's going to be okay. She's got people now."
Emily was sobbing now, her forehead pressed to their joined hands. "So don't you dare," Harold said, his own tears falling now. "Don't you dare use my heart as one more reason to run to Chicago and lock the door behind you. And don't you dare use it as a reason to hide down here and never live either." "You hear me?"
"My collapsing does not get a vote in your life anymore than Daniel does. You make your choices out of what you want, out of love, not out of fear of losing people. Because everybody loses people, baby. The only question is whether you let anybody in before you do." The hospital room was silent except for the steady beep of the monitor and the sound of Emily crying.
Marcus stood on the other side of the bed with his heart in his throat, understanding that he was witnessing something sacred. A father faced with his own mortality, using the moment to try one last time to set his daughter free. After a long moment, Emily lifted her head. Her face was a wreck, but her eyes were clear. "I already decided," she said.
Harold blinked. "Decided what? About Chicago?" Emily wiped her face with both hands. "I decided this morning before any of this. That's actually why I didn't answer my phone when Marcus called."
"I was on the other line with the firm." Marcus felt his heart stop. Harold's grip tightened on her hand. And Emily looked at Marcus, held his eyes, and Marcus braced himself because he'd meant every word he said in that kitchen. He'd told her to take it.
He'd told her to go. He'd made himself into the kind of man who could survive her leaving. And now the moment was here, and he found that all his noble words didn't make his chest hurt any less. "I told them no," Emily said. The room went absolutely still.
"Emily," Marcus started. "Let me finish." She turned to him, and there was steel in her now and certainty. "I told them no, and before you do the noble thing and lecture me about not shrinking my life for a man, that's not what this is. I need you to hear that."