Whatever this is, whatever it turns into, you've got a whole grown man across the street who runs in his socks. That's a start. Emily looked at his open hand on the table. She didn't take it, but she didn't need to. She understood what it was.
"Why are you being so kind to me?" she asked. "You have your own life. You have a daughter. You work two jobs. I've seen you leave before dawn.
You don't need a stranger's problems on top of all that. So why?" Marcus thought about the question honestly. He didn't give her the easy answer. He gave her the true one. Because I spent 3 years telling myself I didn't need anybody," he said slowly.
After Denise died, I closed up. I said I could do it all myself, raise Ava myself, work myself to the bone, carry everything myself, feel nothing, need nothing. And I called that being strong. He shook his head. And then a woman screamed across the street tonight and I ran.
And for the first time in three years, I felt useful to another grown person. Not to my kid, to another adult. And it woke something up in me I thought was dead. He looked at her and his eyes were wet now, too. Though he'd never admit it.
So maybe I'm not just being kind to you, Emily. Maybe you did me a favor tonight screaming like that. Maybe I needed somebody to need me. God's honest truth. The kitchen was very quiet.
We're a couple of messes, aren't we? Emily said softly. Yeah. Marcus let out a low laugh. Yeah, we are.
But you know what my grandmother used to say? She said, "A mess and a mess sometimes make a home. I never knew what she meant. I think I'm starting to." Emily smiled, "A real one now. Tired and cracked, but real." She picked up her tea, and this time she drank it.
Outside, the rain had stopped completely. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked once and went quiet. The whole neighborhood was asleep, and in a small kitchen with crayon drawings on the fridge and a dead woman's photograph on the mantle. Two lonely people who'd both been carrying too much for too long, sat across a table from each other, and for the first time in a long time didn't feel quite so alone. "You should try to sleep," Marcus said finally.
"You've had a night." "I know." Emily stood still holding the mug. Marcus, one more thing. Yeah, if he comes back, Ryan, if he comes to your door instead of mine, then I'll answer it, Marcus said calmly. And he and I will have a conversation. And I promise you, Emily, he's not getting past me.
Not to you, and not to my daughter. Not while I'm standing. He said it without anger, without drama. The way a man says a thing he simply knows to be true. Go to sleep.
You're safe here. Emily looked at him one more time, then turned and walked back down the hall to the guest room. Marcus heard the door click shut, and then a moment later, he heard the lock turn. Good. Let her feel safe.
Let her sleep. He sat alone at the table a while longer. He looked at the photograph of Denise on the mantle across the room. I know what you'd say. He murmured to the picture.
"You'd say, "Of course you helped her, you big idiot. What else would you do?" He almost smiled. "You'd like her, I think. She's tough. She's just forgotten it for a minute." He finally got up, turned off the kitchen light, and went to bed.
But he didn't sleep. He lay in the dark, and listened to his house, his daughter breathing down the hall, a woman he barely knew, safe in the guest room. The settling creeks of a small home that had been silent for three years. And suddenly tonight was full again. And Marcus Williams, who had told himself he needed nothing and nobody, lay awake in the dark, and felt something he hadn't let himself feel since the day he buried his wife.
He felt his door coming open just an inch, just enough. Because what neither of them knew yet, what neither of them could have known sitting at that kitchen table drinking tea in the middle of the night was that Ryan hadn't come to that house by accident. Ryan hadn't just followed Emily across town in a fit of jealousy. There was a reason he'd chosen this neighborhood, this street, this exact house across from Marcus Williams. There was a connection between these two families that went back further than either of them realized.
A name from Marcus's past that Emily was about to speak out loud. A truth buried in a stack of financial documents in Emily's overnight bag that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the man who fixed fences and jumped car batteries and ran across the street in his socks. Marcus rolled over and closed his eyes and finally drifted towards sleep, thinking the hard part of the night was over. He had no idea it had only just begun. Morning came before either of them was ready for it.
Marcus was up at 5 the way he always was moving through the dark house on instinct. He'd slept maybe 2 hours. His body achd with it, but there was coffee to make and a lunch to pack and a daughter to wake in an hour. And a man who works two jobs doesn't get to be tired the way other people get to be tired. He stood at the counter in the gray halflight and measured out the coffee grounds and tried not to think too hard about the woman asleep in his guest room.
He failed at that. He thought about her the whole time. He was on his second cup when he heard the guest room door open. A minute later, Emily came into the kitchen wearing his oversized t-shirt and the sweatpants he'd given her, her hair pulled back, her face scrubbed clean. She looked younger in the morning, younger and more scared now that the adrenaline of the night before had drained out of her and left just the plain hard facts of her situation.
You didn't have to get up, Marcus said. It's barely 5. I heard you moving. I didn't want to lie there anymore. She hovered in the doorway like she wasn't sure she was allowed to come all the way in.
Is that coffee? Sit down. I'll pour you a cup. He got a mug from the cabinet. How'd you sleep?
I didn't really. She sat down at the table. I kept hearing cars. Every time one went by, I thought it was him. Marcus set the coffee in front of her.