Semua Bab FALLING FOR MY BEST FRIEND'S FATHER : Bab 81 - Bab 90

By noon he hadn't moved. Cold coffee at his elbow. A pencil turning end over end between his fingers without him seeming to notice. Lily padded past the study door in her socks, caught Emma's eye in the hallway, and shook her head slightly. “Dad!” She said,"What happened to him?" Emma murmured, barely a sound.Lily glanced at the study door. Back at Emma. "Mom stuff, probably. It always hits him after." She paused. "Give him space. He just needs to go through it."Emma nodded and made a slight move to give him space.She sat on the back porch pressing her phone and her coffee in one hand. She did not go to check on him. She helped Lily make lunch, and she set a plate outside the study. She did not knock. She heard the scratch of his pencil, the occasional low sound of him shifting in his chair, and she treated all of it like it was none of her business.It nearly broke her. Dinner was the worst of it.He came to the table, which she respected. He ate, which she was grateful for. He a

Lily laughed softly, that quick, bright laugh that meant she thought she was being a little silly and didn't mind — and let go.Emma heard her say goodnight to Marcus again from the doorway, heard his low response, heard her footsteps on the stairs, heard them reach the top and move down the hall.Heard Lily's door close.Marcus reached over and turned the television volume down slightly. Not off. Just down.The room was very quiet.Emma looked at the page of her book. The same page she'd been on for some minutes. The words were arranged in the correct order and meant absolutely nothing."She worries about me," Marcus said. Not to start a conversation. Just a fact, settled into the quiet."I noticed," Emma said.He made a low sound. Not quite a laugh."She's not wrong," he said.Emma looked up. He was looking at the television. Profile to her, jaw slightly tightened, the way it was when he was saying something that cost him a small, specific amount to say.He didn't elaborate. And she

They worked like that for nearly two hours. Chairs pulled close, heads bent toward the same paper, the morning burning slowly past ten and toward eleven. Once he reached across her to correct a measurement and his arm stayed there a beat longer than necessary, braced on the table beside her, close enough that if she had turned her head, the geometry would have been very different.She didn't turn her head.She pressed her hand flat on the table instead, fingers spread, two inches from the blueprint. She felt her palm itch with the specific awareness of how easy it would be, how completely and devastatingly easy, to simply move it six inches to the left and press it against his chest.She didn't.But she thought about it with all of her body.He made more coffee at eleven.They drifted to the living room — not by plan, just by the natural migration of people who have been sitting in the same place long enough. Emma tucked herself into the corner of the couch. Marcus sat in the armchai

Emma was almost inside when she heard him behind her."Emma." She quickly turned.He was standing in the driveway, keys in his hand, the porch light throwing shadows across his face. He looked like a man who had said nothing all night because he was saving it, hoarding it, waiting for the right moment to use it like a blade."That house," he said. "The cliffside one."She waited.His eyes held hers across the dark."I designed it three years ago." A pause. "Before I had the client. Before I had any reason to build it." Another pause, longer this time, heavier. "I designed it for someone I hadn't met yet."The night air sat between them, perfectly still."Go to sleep, Marcus," she said softly.She started moving, going inside. She looked back, and he was still standing.She leaned her back against the closed door in the dark hallway, pressed both hands flat against the wood, and listened to the silence on the other side.He didn't leave for a very long time.As she stays there looking

Outside, Emma could hear Marcus’s footsteps on the gravel, the distant creak of the gate to the back garden, the particular silence that meant he was walking the perimeter of the property the way he did when he needed somewhere to put something too large to keep inside.Emma did not watch from the window.She continued reading her book.Or she held her book and sat very still and told herself that she had done nothing wrong. That she had been honest, which was the only thing she knew how to be. That if he needed to walk the garden and hold his walls up with both hands, that was his choice to make.That she was fine. Twenty minutes.Forty. An hour.The gravel had long gone silent. The house was quiet in that dense, particular way that made her think of held breath and loaded questions and the moment before a storm commits to itself.Emma turned a page, she was about to read. And then she felt it — the change in the air.The way a room shifts when someone is standing in it who wasn't th