Emily laugh laughed, and then her face softened. "And her mother?" Marcus looked out at the backyard for a second. "Five years ago," he said. "She was sick a long time."
"It was—" He stopped the way he always stopped because there weren't words that fit. "It was hard. Ava was four. She barely remembers her, which is its own kind of terrible. She draws her sometimes as an angel over the house."
Emily didn't say she was sorry. That was the thing Marcus noticed. She didn't do the thing everybody did. The reflexive, "Oh, I'm so sorry," that people said to fill the silence. She just looked at him and let it be as heavy as it was.
And after a moment, she said, "Five years, and you're raising her alone." And you still stopped for a stranger on the side of the road when you had every reason in the world to just go home. "Anybody would have—" "Don't," Emily said. "Don't do the anybody-would-have."
"You keep doing that. I heard you do it with my dad. It's not true, and you know it's not true." She held his eyes. "Two cars went around him. He told me you stopped.
"So stop pretending it's nothing." Marcus didn't have an answer for that. For the second time in two days, a Bennett had backed him into a corner he couldn't argue his way out of. Harold came back out with a plate of sandwiches that took him suspiciously long to make, and the three of them ate sitting on the half-built frame. And Harold told stories, outrageous ones, the tallest-building-in-Savannah kind.
And Emily corrected every one of them. And Marcus laughed harder than he'd laughed in longer than he could remember. It was midafter afternoon when he checked his phone and saw the time and realized with a jolt that he'd been there almost 5 hours. "I got to go," he said, standing up fast. "My daughter, I've got a neighbor watching her. I said I'd be back by—"
"Go, go," Harold said, waving him off. "Family first, always." Marcus grabbed his jacket. At the corner of the house, he stopped and turned back. "Thank you," he said, "for the sandwiches and the—"
He gestured vaguely at all of it. "The whole thing." "Come back," Harold said. "The frame's not done." "Dad," Emily warned.
"What? It's not. He said the joints were bad. He can't just leave a man's joints bad. That's not right." Harold looked at Marcus with total sincerity and total transparency and not one ounce of shame.
"You'll come back." Marcus looked at Emily. Emily rolled her eyes at her father. But when she looked back at Marcus, there was something in her expression that wasn't rolling its eyes at all. "The joints are bad," she admitted.
"He's not wrong about that part." "Yeah," Marcus said. "Okay. I'll—I'll come back. Finish the joints." He drove home lighter than he'd driven anywhere in 5 years.
He didn't tell himself it was nothing this time. He'd run out of that particular lie somewhere around the second sandwich. What he didn't know, what neither of them knew, sitting there laughing on a half-built frame in a dead woman's garden, was that the two of them had each spent years building a very specific kind of wall, and that those walls were about to matter a great deal. Because Emily Bennett had come home for exactly one reason, and it wasn't to stay. Marcus came back the next weekend and the one after that.
It started as the joints. Then it was the roof. Then it was little things, a hinge that needed adjusting, a window that didn't sit right. And then it wasn't even things. It was just that.
Saturday morning came, and Marcus found himself driving to the old part of town before he'd fully decided to. He started bringing Ava. That was the thing he hadn't planned. He'd been so careful for 5 years about who came into his daughter's life, so guarded, so slow. But one Saturday, Ava had a half day and no one to watch her.
And he brought her along, telling himself it was just this once. And by the end of the afternoon, Ava and Harold were thick as thieves. "He taught me how to whistle with a blade of grass," Ava reported in the truck on the way home, breathless. "And he says I can hammer next time. A real hammer."
"And Miss Emily showed me how to draw a house so it looks 3D. Dad, did you know you can make a house look 3D?" "I did not know that," Marcus said. "And Mr. Harold said—" Ava stopped suddenly.
"He said what?" "Nothing." Marcus glanced at her. "Ava." "He said you smile more now," Ava said, looking out the window.
"Than you used to. He said he could tell." She was quiet for a second. "Is that true, Dad?" Marcus kept his eyes on the road.
"I don't know, baby," he said. "Maybe." But he did know. Of course he knew. Ava had stopped tracking the wrinkle because the wrinkle wasn't showing up as much anymore.
He'd noticed it himself. Noticed that he'd started looking forward to the drive out there. Noticed the way an ordinary Tuesday now had a Saturday at the end of it worth waiting for. Noticed the specific way his chest felt when Emily laughed at something he said, which was a feeling he'd filed away 5 years ago and never expected to take back out. He and Emily hadn't said anything.
Neither of them had. It was all still buried under hammers and joints and Harold's terrible sandwiches, but it was there. Both of them knew it was there, and both of them were scared to death of it for reasons the other one didn't know yet. For Marcus, the fear was old and familiar. He'd lived it for 5 years.
He didn't want his daughter to get attached to someone who might leave. He didn't want to get attached to someone who might leave. He'd buried one woman he loved, and some part of him, the careful, wounded, self-protecting part, had decided a long time ago that it would be safer to just never risk that again. To keep the wall up, to stand up alone at 4:45 forever, because at least alone was a thing you couldn't lose twice. For Emily, the fear was different, and Marcus didn't understand it until the day it nearly ended everything.