He knocked on Lena's door.
"It's me."
"I know."
"Can I come in?"
A pause. "The door's not locked."
She was on the bed, hoodie still on, hood down, knees up. She had wiped her face. The wipe had not fooled the skin around her eyes. A library book lay open beside her, unread, a prop she had grabbed because a girl with a book looks occupied. Marcus sat on the desk chair, not on the bed, giving her the distance of not being crowded by a father's regret.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For him, or for you?"
The question was so clean he almost smiled, and didn't, because smiling would have been a theft.
"Both. The sorry for him doesn't fix the paper. The sorry for me is the one I should have spent months ago. I let him come because he helped with the rent when the furnace died, and because every week I didn't fight felt easier than the week I did. That was my math. It was bad math. You paid for it this afternoon. Owen did too, differently. I know saying it doesn't un-rip anything."
Lena looked at the open book as if the paragraph might offer her a line. It didn't. She closed it.
"I wanted him to say it was good," she said. Her voice was small and furious at being small. "That's the humiliating part. Not the tear. I knew better and I wanted it anyway. Don't make that into a lesson about how I should stop wanting things."
"I won't."
"Mom already told me I didn't have to show him. I showed him. So don't make it Mom's fault either, or mine, when you tell the story later."
"The story is he tore it up and I stood in a garage rehearsing sentences while he did it. That's the story I'm stuck with. You don't have to carry a neater one for me."