Semua Bab FALLING FOR MY BEST FRIEND'S FATHER : Bab 41 - Bab 50

Emma looked at the woman standing in the hallway, who was somewhere in her early forties, with Marcus's same dark eyes and the same quality of stillness underneath an otherwise animated exterior, like deep water running under a bright surface.She was beautiful in an undecorated way, dressed simply, hair pulled back, no performance about her at all. She held Lily on one hip like it cost her nothing, and she looked at Emma with eyes that were warm and sharp in equal measure."I'm Emma," Emma said. "I'm Lily's friend.""Patricia," the woman said. "Marcus's sister." She studied Emma for precisely three seconds, not rudely, not aggressively, just with the frank, efficient attention of someone who took accurate readings of people as a matter of habit.Then she smiled."Well," Patricia said. "It's very nice to meet you, Emma.”She said it pleasantly. Completely pleasantly. And yet Emma had the distinct and immediate sensation of having just been filed away somewhere, catalogued and noted, i

Patricia looked at her glass again. "You and your daughter's friend being —” she breathed."Gravitational," Patricia said.“Stopped," Marcus said as he looked at her."That's the word," Patricia continued pleasantly. "You move around each other the way things move when there's a pull neither of them is acknowledging. I watched it all day. At breakfast. In the kitchen. At the bottom of the stairs." She set her mug down. "That thing at the stairs, Marcus. When you touched her arm.""I stopped her from — ""It was one second of one hand on one arm," Patricia said. "And you both went so carefully in opposite directions afterward that it told me more than if you'd stood there for five minutes." She looked at him steadily. "I'm not here to lecture you. I want to be clear about that.""Then what are you here to do?""Name it," she said. "Since you clearly can't."The kitchen was quiet. Outside, the garden was grey with early morning, the roses bowing slightly in a wind that hadn't decided

Later, Marcus found Patricia in the sitting room after lunch."What did you say to her?" he asked calmly.Patricia looked up from her book. "I've said things to a great many people, Marcus. You'll need to be more specific.""Emma." He stood in the middle of the room. "This morning. Before I came down. Did you speak to her?"Marcus looked at Patricia in a split second. “And why should I speak to her? Do I have any agreement with her, or why are you insisting I should speak to her?”“Marcus, remember you deserve love that can make you happy again.”“Anyway, Patricia considered this,” Marcus said. "We said goodnight last night. That's the last time I spoke directly to her."Marcus walked through the hallway to clear his head. But something shifted behind his eyes. He turned and looked at the kitchen door. In the hallway. At the geometry of the morning, the positions of things, the gap the kitchen door had been sitting open at when he came downstairs and walked inside, as he found Patric

"I don't have anything to do with her." “Why does she keep coming here?”A flash of something painful in his eyes. “I know exactly who she is. Don't think for one second that I've forgotten."“What are you talking about?” Marcus said as his expression changed immediately.Emma observed him for a brief moment. "Then why are you out here?""Because—" He broke off. His jaw tightened. He looked like a man fighting a war with himself and losing one side of it. "Because staying in the house tonight pretending everything was fine felt like lying. And I'm so tired of—" He caught himself again and shook his head. "I can't..." He couldn't finish his sentence."Because?""I don't know what Lily would do if she—" He went very still. The word Lily changed something in the air between them. Like a key turning in a lock. His voice dropped to nearly nothing. "She watches, Emma. You know that. She watches everything. And if she thought for one second that I—" He exhaled. "I'm afraid of what she's

Down the hall, Emma's light was still on. A thin gold line under her door, the only light left in the corridor. He stood there in the dark, looking at it like a man looking at something he couldn't have and couldn't stop wanting.From behind him, he heard Lily's small voice drift down the hallway."Jake? Dad is not looking happy."There was a pause. Then Jake's voice, quieter now, the performance stripped out of it."He's not sad, baby. He's just... figuring something out.""What's he figuring out?" Another pause. Longer."Grown-up stuff."Marcus pressed his palm flat against his bedroom door and stood very still.Down the hall, Emma's light still stayed on. He didn't know how long she lay awake in there, or whether she was thinking about dinner, or about the way he'd spoken to her, or about the man on the couch who had made her laugh the real laugh without even trying.He told himself it didn't matter.He was still telling himself that when he walked into his room and sat on the edge