“When did your mom pass?”
“Three years ago.” A pause. “It was slow. And then it wasn’t.”
“And Marcus.”
“He’s good. He’s really good.” Her face changed when she said it — the genuine warmth of a person describing something they have chosen entirely rather than accepted under duress. “He works four mornings a week at a bakery three blocks from the apartment. He
knows every regular by name and they know him. He’s — he has a very full life.”
“You gave him that.”
She looked at her hands again. “We gave each other that.”
He watched her.
“Every job I could get,” she said. “Cleaning, cashier, stocking shelves at the grocery chain on Delancey. The delivery runs are actually decent because I can do them in the evenings when Marcus is settled. The hours are flexible.”
She looked up at him with a smile that had some wryness in it. “You look like one of those people in ads for expensive watches. I can’t believe I said ‘sir’ to you.”
He laughed. Then he told her the thing he had been deciding whether to tell her since he crouched in front of her on the couch.
“The only person I’ve ever consistently measured anyone else against was a girl named Charlotte.”
She went
still.
“Every relationship I tried,” he said. “Every time someone asked me why things didn’t stick. My uncle used to say I was still comparing everyone to a girl in a blue dress.”
“Tyler.”
“He wasn’t wrong.”
He reached up and wiped the last of the tears from her cheek.
“You saved me before you came back. You did that in one night. You did it by choosing me out loud when I had almost forgotten what it felt like to matter to anyone.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Her mouth was not entirely steady.
He leaned in and kissed her.
Soft. No urgency to it. The way you do something that has been building for a very long time and you are finally in the same room as the person it belongs to.
She went still for one full second.
Then she kissed him back.
That was a month ago.
Charlotte and Marcus moved into the house two weeks after the prom night photographs. Marcus had opinions about the kitchen layout that Tyler found completely reasonable. He had spent a morning explaining to Tyler which shelf the cereal should be on and why, with a thoroughness that Tyler admired.
