I've carried that around every day since. He leaned forward. And last night, a person screamed across the street. And I ran. And for the first time in 3 years, I got to a person in time.
I got there. I could do something. Do you understand what that is to me? You didn't take on my problem last night. You handed me back something I thought I'd lost.
His voice was rough now. So don't you sit in my kitchen and tell me nobody's this kind for no reason. I've got a reason. It's just not the kind of reason a man like Ryan would ever understand. Emily stared at him.
Her eyes filled and spilled over, and she didn't bother wiping it away this time. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay, I'll stay." "Okay," Marcus said. They sat with it a moment. Then Marcus stood because there was a whole day to get through and the world doesn't stop for two people learning to trust each other.
"I've got to get to the site. I'll be back by 6. Keep the doors locked. Keep your phone on you. If he shows up here, you don't open the door and you don't engage.
You call me first, then you call the police in that order because I'm closer. He wrote his cell number on the back of an envelope. You need anything? Anything at all? You call Marcus?
She caught his hand as he turned to go. It was the first time she touched him deliberately, and they both felt it. Thank you. You keep thanking me. I'm going to keep doing it until you believe I mean it.
He squeezed her hand once and let go and went to work. The days that followed fell into a rhythm neither of them had planned and neither of them named. Marcus went to the construction site in the mornings and his second job in the evenings a few days a week. And Emily went to the hospital where she ran her department with the same competence she'd always had. Though now she took a different route to work every day and parked in a different spot and kept her phone in her hand.
And at night they came home to the same small house and slowly, without ever deciding to, they became something that looked from the outside almost like a family. It was small things. It was always small things. With Marcus, that was the whole truth of the man. The third morning, Emily got up before him and made the coffee and packed Ava's lunch so it was ready when the alarm went off.
And when Marcus came into the kitchen and saw it, he stopped in the doorway and didn't say anything for a second. And Emily saw his throat move. "You didn't have to do that," he said. "I know I didn't have to," she said. "That's kind of the point, isn't it?
You taught me that." The fifth night, Marcus came home from his second job at 10:00 and found Emily at the kitchen table with Ava a math worksheet between them. The two of them bent over it in concentration. "She was stuck," Emily explained. "We're doing word problems, Ava. Tell your dad what a word problem is." "A trick," Ava said with total conviction.
"It's regular math, but they hide it in a story so you can't find it." Marcus laughed a real laugh. The kind that comes up from a place that's been closed a long time. That's exactly what it is, baby. That's the best definition of a word problem I ever heard. And Emily watched him laugh and something moved across her face.
And later that night when Ava was in bed, she said to him quietly. "She's a wonderful kid, Marcus. You did that by yourself. You did that." Her mother started it. Marcus said, "I've just been trying not to mess it up.
You're not messing it up. Emily was quiet a moment. Can I ask you something and tell me if it's too much? Go ahead. Does it get easier losing somebody?
Does it ever get easier? Marcus considered the question the way he considered everything slowly and honestly. It doesn't get easier, he said finally. It gets different. The hole doesn't get smaller.
You just get bigger around it. You build a life that's got room for the hole in it. He looked at her. Why do you ask? You didn't lose Ryan the way I lost Denise.
Ryan's still out there. That's the thing, though. Emily's voice was small. I did lose somebody. I lost the person I thought he was.
I loved a man who never existed. He was a costume the whole time. And I loved the costume. And now the costume's gone. And I feel stupid for grieving something that was never real.
But I am grieving at Marcus. I'm grieving a man who was never even there. She laughed, but it was a broken sound. How do you grieve someone who was fake? Marcus reached across the table and for the first time took her hand and held it.
Not a squeeze and release this time. He held it. You grieve it the same as anybody, he said. Because it was real to you. Your love was real, even if he wasn't.
That counts. That's yours. Don't let him take that from you, too. Emily looked down at their hands, his rough and calloused from the work hers manicured and shaking. And she didn't pull away.
You're going to make me cry again, she said. You've earned a few cries, Marcus said. Cry all you want. I've got a whole roll of paper towels and nowhere to be. She laughed through the tears.