Chapter 4
Jamie lasted three days before he cracked.
Three days of immaculate performance. Three days of sitting at the kitchen island with his laptop, designing invitation mockups while Marcus's half-finished oak project loomed at the end of the counter like a monument to a life Jamie wasn't part of.
Three days of pleasant dinners with Tom—how was your day, pass the salad, these designs are looking great, Jamie—while Marcus sat across from him and ate with the controlled precision of a man defusing a bomb with a fork and knife.
They'd developed a system. An architecture of avoidance that would have impressed anyone who understood the engineering involved.
Marcus left for work before Jamie came downstairs.
Jamie worked in the guest room when Marcus was home.
When they were forced into the same space—meals, the hallway, the single excruciating instance when they'd both reached for the bathroom door at the same time and Jamie had felt Marcus's knuckles against his own and nearly vomited—they performed.
Polite. Cordial. Two strangers getting along fine.
Tom was thrilled. "See?" he told Jamie over lunch on day two. "I knew you'd like him."
Jamie smiled and ate his sandwich and thought about driving his car into the Sound.
The problem was that avoidance wasn't a solution.
It was a pressure cooker. Every interaction they didn't have, every word they didn't say, every question that sat rotting between them like fruit left on the counter—it all went somewhere.
Into Jamie's jaw, which he was clenching so hard his dentist would have wept.
Into his hands, which had developed a tremor he couldn't attribute to caffeine.
Into his sleep, which had become a nightly exercise in lying rigid in the guest bed, staring at the ceiling, listening for sounds through the wall that he both dreaded and strained to hear.
He needed answers. He needed to stand in front of Marcus without his father in the room and ask the questions that had been eating him alive for three years, and then for three more days on top of that, and he needed to do it before the pressure cracked him open in a way that would be visible to Tom.
On the evening of day three, Tom left for a hospital board dinner.
"Back by ten," Tom said, kissing Marcus on the cheek at the front door. "Don't wait up. Jamie, there's leftover pasta in the fridge."
"Thanks, Dad."
"You two have a good night."
The door closed. Tom's car pulled out of the driveway. The sound of the engine faded down the street, and the house went quiet with the specific, charged silence of two people who have just been left alone with three years of undetonated history between them.
Jamie stood in the kitchen and listened. From somewhere at the back of the house—the garage, probably—the sound of a power tool. A sander, maybe. Marcus, working on the island.
Jamie poured a glass of wine. Drank half of it. Poured more.
Then he walked through the kitchen, through the mudroom, and opened the door to the garage.
Marcus was at the workbench.
The garage had been converted into a workshop—well-organized, immaculate, because of course it was.
Pegboard with tools hung in precise arrangements.
A table saw. A lathe. Drop cloths on the concrete floor.
The air smelled like sawdust and linseed oil and the ghost of Marcus's cedar cologne, and the combination hit Jamie's limbic system like a sucker punch.
Marcus was sanding a piece of oak by hand.
He'd changed out of his work clothes into a gray t-shirt and jeans, and his sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and his forearms were dusted with fine wood shavings, and he was working with the focused, meditative rhythm of a man who used his hands to quiet his mind.
The overhead light caught the silver at his temples.
His jaw was set. His shoulders moved in smooth, repetitive arcs.
He looked up when the door opened.
Their eyes met across twelve feet of concrete and sawdust, and Jamie felt the same thing he'd felt in the kitchen four days ago—the lurch, the recognition, the full-body inventory of a nervous system encountering its primary stimulus after a long withdrawal.
His pulse spiked. His palms went damp. The back of his neck prickled with the specific awareness of being seen by someone who knew where to look.
Marcus set down the sandpaper. Straightened. Wiped his hands on a rag, slowly, watching Jamie the way you watch a weather system approaching—calculating trajectory, estimating impact.
"Tom's gone," Jamie said.
"I know."
"We need to talk."
"No. We don't."
"Bullshit." Jamie stepped into the garage and let the door close behind him.
The sound it made was very final. "You've been dodging me for three days.
You leave before I wake up. You won't look at me when Tom's in the room.
You're building a fucking kitchen island for my father twenty feet from where I sleep, and you won't even—"
"Jamie."
"Don't. Don't say my name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you just learned it. You didn't just learn it. You learned it four days ago, but you knew me for a year before that, and you don't get to stand there sanding wood like none of it happened."
Marcus folded the rag. Set it on the workbench. His movements were deliberate, precise—the same maddening control he brought to everything—but Jamie was close enough now to see the tension in his shoulders, the vein in his neck, the way his hands weren't quite as steady as he wanted them to be.
"What do you want me to say?" Marcus asked.
"I want you to tell me the truth. Did you know?"
"I told you. No."
"When you started dating him. When he told you about me—his son, the designer, lives in Brooklyn—none of that rang a bell? Nothing clicked?"
Marcus's jaw worked. "You never gave me a name. You never told me what you did. You never told me anything. That was the arrangement. That was what you wanted."
"So it's my fault."
"That's not what I'm saying."
"It sounds a lot like what you're saying.
" Jamie was closer now. He hadn't decided to move; his body had made the decision independently, pulled by the same gravity that had pulled him across every room Marcus had ever been in.
Six feet. Five. The workbench was between them, and Jamie put his hands on it and leaned forward.
"You left first. You stopped showing up.
No note, no message, no nothing—you just vanished.
I went back three weeks in a row and sat in that room and waited, and you never came. "
Something moved behind Marcus's eyes. A fracture in the foundation. "I didn't know you waited."
"Well, I did. Like an idiot. Three Thursdays, in a room that smelled like you, waiting for someone who'd already decided I wasn't worth the trouble."
"That is not what happened."
"Then tell me what happened. Because from where I was standing—kneeling, usually—you got bored and moved on, and three months later you were picking out champagne with my father."
Marcus moved. Around the workbench, closing the distance Jamie had been shrinking without realizing it, and suddenly they were three feet apart with no barrier between them, and Marcus's body was radiating heat and sawdust and barely contained something that Jamie recognized because he'd felt it directed at him a hundred times in the dark.
"I left," Marcus said, his voice dropped to a register that made Jamie's vision narrow, "because you wouldn't let me stay."
"What?"
"I asked you. More than once. I asked for your name.
I asked to take you to dinner. I asked to see you outside the club, outside the room, outside the goddamn scene.
And every time—every single time—you shut it down.
No names. No real world. No strings. That was your line, and I respected it until I couldn't anymore. "
Jamie's mouth opened. Closed.
"I was falling in love with someone who wouldn't tell me his name," Marcus said.
"I was forty-one years old, on my knees in a different way than you were, begging a twenty-three-year-old to let me know him.
And you said no. So I stopped coming. Because I couldn't keep walking into that room and pretending it was enough when it wasn't."
The garage was very quiet. The overhead light buzzed. Outside, a neighbor's dog barked once and went silent.
"You never said any of that," Jamie whispered.
"I said all of it. You weren't listening. You were too busy making sure the walls stayed up."
Jamie felt it then—the ground shifting under the story he'd been telling himself for three years.
The version where Marcus got bored. The version where Jamie was disposable, interchangeable, one anonymous body in a rotating cast. That version had been a load-bearing wall in the architecture of his self-pity, and Marcus had just kicked it out.
"I was scared," Jamie said. The words tasted like blood.
"I was twenty-three and I didn't know how to be—I couldn't let you see me.
Not really. The club was the only place I could—" He stopped.
His eyes were burning. He would not cry in this garage.
He would absolutely not cry in this garage.
"You were the first person who ever made me feel like I wasn't performing, and that terrified me, and I handled it by making sure you couldn't follow me home. "
Marcus exhaled. It was a long, slow breath, and Jamie watched his chest move with it—the expansion, the controlled release—and remembered lying with his ear against that chest, post-scene, listening to Marcus's heartbeat slow from exertion to rest while Marcus's hand moved through his hair and the world outside the room ceased to exist.