Ethan looked up at him with those clear blue eyes. “What got complicated?”
“Life,” Marcus said simply. “It does that sometimes.”
Lily was tugging on his vest. “My turn! My turn!”
Marcus lifted Ethan off and then carefully positioned Lily on the seat, making sure she was secure and her cast wouldn’t hit anything. She squealed with delight, bouncing slightly until Marcus steadied her.
“Careful, Lily pad,” Thomas warned, using what was clearly a long-standing nickname. “Remember your arm.”
“I’m being careful,” Lily insisted, though her wiggling suggested otherwise.
After the children had both taken their turns sitting on the bike, taken approximately fifty photos with Thomas’s phone, and extracted a promise from Marcus that he’d come back, Thomas invited him inside for coffee. Marcus almost declined. He could feel the weight of neighborhood attention, could imagine the stories already forming about the dangerous biker hanging around the Cole family. But something in Thomas’s expression—a loneliness that mirrored Marcus’s own—made him accept.
The inside of the house was as modest as the exterior suggested. The furniture was old but clean, the carpet worn but vacuumed. Photos covered nearly every flat surface—pictures of the kids at various ages, school photos with awkward smiles and carefully combed hair, a few older images that Marcus assumed included the absent mother, though her face had been carefully cut out of most of them.
“Sorry about the mess,” Thomas said, moving some of Lily’s toys off the couch. “I try to keep up, but it’s—”
“You don’t have to explain,” Marcus said. “Place looks fine to me.”
They sat at the small kitchen table while Thomas made coffee in a pot that looked like it predated both children. Ethan and Lily had disappeared into their shared bedroom, their excited voices carrying down the hallway as they no doubt replayed every moment of the motorcycle visit.
“The social worker came by yesterday,” Thomas said, setting two mugs on the table. The coffee was weak but hot. “Jennifer Wallace. She said you spoke with her.”