Chapter 9 Actually Staying
ACTUALLY STAYING
WHERE I LEARN THAT CHOOSING IS THE EASY PART.
Two weeks.
Two weeks of actually dating Marcus Chen, and I still hadn’t screwed it up.
This was, by my calculations, approximately thirteen days longer than any relationship attempt since my divorce. Possibly a personal record. Definitely suspicious.
“You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Cassie said, watching me stare at my phone like it might explode.
We were at her kitchen table, Sunday morning, coffee and pastries from the bakery downtown.
Liam was somewhere in the house doing something handy—I could hear the occasional drill whir—and Luna was draped across the back of the couch, pretending not to listen. “I can see it on your face.”
“I’m not waiting for anything.”
“You’ve checked your phone six times in the last ten minutes.”
“I’m checking the time.”
“You’re checking to see if he’s texted. And then you’re checking to see if the dating app has started buzzing again. And then you’re checking the time so you have an excuse for why you were checking.”
I set the phone face-down on the table. “I hate that you know me.”
“I’ve known you for fifteen years. I know everything.” She pushed a croissant toward me. “So. How is it? Really?”
I thought about how to answer. How to describe the last two weeks—the strange, terrifying, wonderful experience of actually being in a relationship instead of just keeping one as an option.
Marcus and I had fallen into a routine. Morning coffee at the shop, where I’d taken over a corner of the back room and he pretended to be annoyed about it.
Dinner at my place or his, though “his” so far had only meant the tiny kitchenette behind the shop, not his actual apartment.
Texting like normal people—not the tentative late-night messages from before, but real conversation.
Mundane things. Daily things. The kind of texts that meant someone was woven into your life instead of just passing through.
The texts were very Marcus. The tea shipment arrived. It’s substandard. I’m writing a strongly worded email. And then, twenty minutes later: I miss you. That’s annoying. And then: Ignore that. The tea situation has escalated.
“It’s good,” I said finally. “Terrifying. But good.”
“Why terrifying?”
“Because I keep waiting for the panic. The urge to run. The moment where I notice something wrong and use it as an excuse to bail.” I picked at my croissant. “It hasn’t come.”
“And that scares you.”
“It scares me that it doesn’t scare me.” I set down the pastry. “When I’m with him, I’m not cataloging his flaws or planning my escape route. I’m just… there. Present. It’s disorienting.”
Luna lifted her head. “The only red flag I’ve observed is that he drinks tea at a temperature that would scald a normal human. But that’s more concerning than disqualifying.”
“Thank you, Luna. Very helpful.”
“I try.”
Cassie reached across the table, squeezed my hand. “Di. Not everything is a disaster waiting to happen. Sometimes good things are just… good.”
“Since when?”
“Since you stopped running long enough to find out.” She smiled. “The magic’s been quiet, right?”
I nodded. It had been. No new matches since the grand gesture—the counter had frozen at zero and stayed there. My phone barely buzzed anymore. The constant, frantic energy that had been humming under my skin since this whole mess started had faded to something quieter. Almost peaceful.
“That’s not nothing,” Cassie said. “That’s the magic settling. Believing you.”
My phone buzzed. I jumped about a foot.
Marcus: Are you free tonight? I want to show you something.
I stared at the message. Something about the phrasing felt different. Significant.
Me: Always. What is it?
A pause. Three dots appearing and disappearing. Then:
Marcus: My apartment. If you’re ready.
His apartment. Not the shop. Not the back room where we’d been carefully, safely getting to know each other. His actual home, where he’d lived with Sarah, where her things still were, where he hadn’t invited anyone in two years.
“What is it?” Cassie asked, reading my expression.
“He wants me to see his apartment.”
Her eyebrows rose. “That’s big.”
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
I thought about it. Really thought. About what it meant to enter the space he’d shared with his wife. To see her books on the shelves and her photos on the walls and navigate the geography of a grief I could never fully understand.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
Marcus’s apartment was above the shop.
I’d known that, technically. I’d seen the narrow staircase in the back, the door at the top that he disappeared through at the end of each day. But I’d never been up there. It had felt like a boundary—his space, his sanctuary, the place where he went to be alone with his memories.
Now I was standing at the bottom of those stairs, a bottle of wine in my hand, trying to remember how to breathe.
“You can still leave,” Marcus said from the top. He was leaning against the doorframe, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “I won’t be offended.”
“I’m not leaving. I’m just… gathering courage.”
“It’s twelve stairs.”
“It’s not about the stairs.”
His expression softened. “I know.”
I climbed the stairs. Twelve of them, creaky and narrow, each one feeling like a choice. When I reached the top, Marcus stepped aside to let me in.
The apartment was smaller than I’d expected. A living room that flowed into a kitchen, a hallway that probably led to a bedroom and bathroom. Warm light from lamps he’d clearly chosen with care. Books everywhere—on shelves, on tables, stacked on the floor in precarious towers.
And Sarah.
She was everywhere too. Not in a shrine-like way, not obsessive—just present.
A photo on the bookshelf of them young, probably just married, laughing at something off-camera.
Another on the wall of her alone, standing on a beach, hair wild in the wind.
Her books mixed with his on the shelves.
A sweater draped over the back of a chair, like she’d just taken it off.
“I haven’t changed much,” Marcus said quietly. “I kept meaning to. Pack some things away. Make it less…”
“Less her?”
“Less frozen.” He moved past me into the kitchen, started opening the wine. “For a long time, keeping everything the same felt like keeping her. Like if I moved her sweater, I’d be letting go of something I wasn’t ready to release.”
“And now?”
He was quiet for a moment, focused on the corkscrew. “Now I think I was just scared. Changing things meant admitting she was really gone. That this was my life now, not ours.”
I walked to the bookshelf. Looked at the photo of them young and laughing. She was beautiful—dark hair, bright smile, the kind of face that made you want to know what she was thinking.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
Marcus looked up, surprised. “You want to hear about Sarah?”
“She was your wife for twenty-eight years. She’s part of you.” I turned to face him. “Unless that’s too hard.”
“No. It’s not too hard.” He brought me a glass of wine, then settled onto the couch, patting the spot beside him. “It’s just… no one’s asked. Since she died, people either avoid the topic entirely or treat her like a tragedy. No one wants to hear the actual stories.”
“I want to hear them.”
So he told me.
He told me about their first date—dinner at a tiny Italian place in North Beach that didn’t take reservations. “We waited two hours for a table,” he said. “I was terrified. Two hours of conversation with a woman I barely knew, trying not to say something stupid.”
“Did you? Say something stupid?”
“I told her the history of mourning jewelry for forty-five minutes. Including the part about hair harvesting.” He winced at the memory. “She should have run.”
“But she didn’t.”
“She asked follow-up questions. Actual, interested follow-up questions. And then she told me about a mummy unwrapping party she’d read about—Victorians used to host them, apparently, as entertainment—and somewhere in the middle of discussing nineteenth-century death rituals over mediocre breadsticks, I realized I was going to marry her. ”
“On the first date?”
“I didn’t say it was rational.” His smile was soft, private. “We were married six months later. Everyone said it was too fast. We said they were probably right. We did it anyway.”
He told me about their wedding—small, just family, she’d worn her grandmother’s dress and he’d forgotten his vows halfway through and had to improvise.
He told me how she’d insisted on the reading chair by the window because the light was perfect in the mornings.
About her laugh—loud, unexpected, the kind that made strangers in restaurants turn and smile.
About her obsession with terrible reality TV and her inability to cook anything more complex than pasta.
He told me about the Thanksgiving turkey that was somehow burned on the outside and frozen in the middle. “We ended up ordering Chinese food and eating it out of the containers while the fire department aired out the apartment. She laughed so hard she cried. Best Thanksgiving I ever had.”
He told me about the diagnosis. The six months. The way she’d handled it with more grace than he had—making lists, writing letters for anniversaries she wouldn’t be there for.
“She made me promise to keep living,” he said quietly. “Made me swear I wouldn’t just shut down.”
“Have you? Kept the promise?”
“I’m trying now.” He looked at me, and there was something raw in his expression. “Because of you.”
“I’m not trying to replace her.”
“I know. And you couldn’t, even if you wanted to. But that’s not what this is.” He took my hand. “Sarah would have hated seeing me closed off like I was. She probably would have liked you, actually. She had a weakness for chaos.”
“I’m not chaos.”
“You attracted a magical plague of ex-boyfriends, including a man in a leisure suit who wanted to put a disco ball on my chandelier.”
“Okay, I’m a little chaos.”
“You’re a lot chaos.” He squeezed my hand. “That’s why it works.”
I looked around the apartment. At Sarah’s photos and books and the sweater still draped over the chair.
“I’m going to knock something over eventually,” I said. “In my head, I’ve already broken three picture frames.”
“I’d forgive you.”
“Even if it was the wedding photo?”
“Even then.” He pulled me closer. “They’re just things, Diane. She’s not in them. She’s here.” He touched his chest. “And she’s not going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be here too.”
I leaned into him. Let myself settle against his side.
“This is a lot,” I said.
“I know.”
“Not the apartment. Not Sarah. Just… letting myself have this.”
“I know.” He kissed the top of my head. “Me too.”
Walking home later—he’d offered to let me stay, but we’d both agreed we weren’t quite there yet—I kept thinking about the Thanksgiving story. The way he’d laughed telling it. Not grief-laughed. Actually laughed, like the memory was still more joy than pain.
Twenty-eight years. They’d had twenty-eight years of inside jokes and burnt turkeys and falling asleep reading next to each other. And he’d shared that with me—not because I’d asked the right questions, but because he wanted to. Because he was ready.
I thought about Sarah’s sweater still draped over the chair. The way he’d said she’s not going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be here too.
There was room. He was making room.
And I’d walked through the door. Actually walked through it, instead of hovering on the threshold looking for exits.
I texted him: Made it home. Thank you for tonight.
His response came quickly: Thank you for wanting to know her.
I smiled at my phone. At the strange, wonderful feeling of being exactly where I wanted to be.
For once, I didn’t need to rush. We had time.