Semua Bab FALLING FOR MY BEST FRIEND'S FATHER : Bab 71 - Bab 80

The grocery run was supposed to be a Lily-and-Emma errand.Lily bailed at the last second — Jake had found paddleboards in the garage, and the morning light was perfect, and please, Em, you're so much better at groceries than I am, which was how Emma ended up in the passenger seat of Marcus's truck with a handwritten list between them and twenty minutes of coastal highway ahead.He drove the way he did everything. Steady. No wasted movement.Emma watched the ocean flash between houses and told herself to act normal."You don't have to come," he said, not looking at her. "I know the store.""I want to." She looked at the list. "Besides, Lily wrote this. You'll end up with three things of granola and no actual food."The sound he made was so close to a laugh that Emma's heart did something stupid in her chest.The store was mercifully ordinary, cold aisles, too-bright lighting, a playlist nobody had chosen on purpose. They moved through it efficiently, dividing the list without discuss

Marcus was doing laps — proper ones, clean freestyle, arms cutting the glassy water with the efficiency of someone who'd done this ten thousand times. He hadn't heard the door. His head turned with each stroke, pulling air, face down, turning again. Back and forth. The pool lights were still on from the night before, casting the water pale blue-green in the grey morning light, and the steam rising off the heated surface drifted up and disappeared.Emma stood on the step for five full seconds.She could go back inside. Make coffee. Read or find literally any other occupation for the next hour that didn't involve —She walked to the pool and slipped in at the far end.The water closed over her shoulders, cold enough to clear every thought she'd arrived with. She pushed off the wall and started her own laps, steady and measured, staying in the lane furthest from his. The pool wasn't large enough for that to mean very much. Four feet between them at most.She didn't look at him. He didn't

Lily stared at them and stopped in the dining room doorway. Looked at her father, and Emma bent over the blueprints, red pen marks multiplying across the note pages, two empty coffee cups pushed to the side to make room for a spread of reference photos Marcus had pulled up on his laptop.A beat of silence.Then Lily laughed — bright and genuine and completely unbothered. "Oh God, Emma. He's going to try to recruit you."Marcus didn't look up. "Some of us are working.""Some of us are going to the beach." Lily pointed at Emma. "Don't let him keep you in here all day. He's done it to contractors. It's not pretty." She grabbed Jake's hand. "We're going to the south cove. Text me if you resurface."The door banged cheerfully behind them.Neither Emma nor Marcus moved. Emma just stared at them as they were leaving.The house was quiet again. Outside, Lily's laughter faded down the beach stairs.Emma looked at the blueprint again.Marcus looked at the blueprint too."Where were we?" He said

The staircase swallowed them. Their footsteps crossed the ceiling overhead, the muffled sound of the upstairs den door closing, and then the house was just rain and wind and the low groan of the structure doing what it was built to do.Emma stood in the living room.Marcus came back from the kitchen with a bottle of red wine and two glasses.He looked at her. Looked at the glasses. Something in his expression acknowledged the situation with the dry resignation of a man who had stopped pretending coincidence wasn't following him around."Might as well," he said.Emma sat on the far end of the couch.He poured. Sat in the armchair across from her. The storm pressed against every window simultaneously, rain sheeting in waves, the palm at the corner of the deck throwing its shadow in wild arcs across the ceiling.The lights went out at seven forty-three.The candles were thick white ones from the kitchen drawer, the kind bought for exactly this reason and never used until now. Marcus lit

Marcus was not aware of it. No tells. No glances. No fractional pauses. Nothing in the set of his jaw or the movement of his eyes across the screen could be held up as evidence of anything. He looked like a man doing exactly what he appeared to be doing, working, drinking water, and being present in an unremarkable morning.She'd spent a week learning to read the small things. The tight jaw, the half-second too long, the wall that no longer sat flush. She'd built a working vocabulary of his tells.This morning, he was giving her absolutely nothing.Which was its own kind of answer.Because Marcus Blake had a tell she'd identified in the very first days, when something caught him off guard, when he was recalibrating, he went more still, not less. More controlled, not less composed.Marcus was completely still right now.He hadn't looked at Emma once since coming in.Emma turned another unread page.Lily came downstairs at some few hours in yesterday's shorts, declared the coffee too s