"I’m not going to say anything to you, baby." She reached up and put her hand on his cheek, the way she had when he was small. "Your mama’s my sister, and I love her, and Daddy beat both of us till we couldn’t sit down, and I’ve got two grown sons who don’t call me but on Mother’s Day. So I’m not going to say a thing." She patted his face once, twice. "You go home to your family now."
It was after one when he pulled back into the driveway. The Highlander was still there with its liftgate down now, the suitcases still inside. The garage lights were off. The house was dark except for a single lamp in the living room.
Danielle was on the couch with Caleb asleep across her lap, his head on a cushion against her thigh, Rex tucked under his chin, his legs in the rocket-ship pajamas drawn up so that the backs of them did not touch anything. She had a throw blanket over both of them. She was awake. She watched Marcus come in and set his keys down on the table by the door, very quietly, and she did not move.
He sat down in the armchair across from her. On the coffee table between them lay the blue leather passport wallet. Someone had brought it in from the kitchen.
After a while he picked it up and opened it.
Four passports. Danielle’s American one and her British one, both dark blue, almost the same color, one with the eagle and one with the lion and the unicorn. Caleb’s, issued when he was five, the photo of a much smaller boy with a missing front tooth, trying very hard not to smile because the man at the post office had told him not to. And his own. He opened it to the photo page. He had taken it in 2019, the spring before the pandemic, and he looked younger in it, and very serious, in a blue shirt against a white background. MARCUS HAROLD REED. Place of birth: ALABAMA, U.S.A.
He sat with it open in his hands.
"Would you have come?" Danielle said softly.