“Please don't disappear.” He looked at her for a long moment. “You disappeared from our marriage without going anywhere.”
Then he walked out. Marcus was standing in his own driveway next door when Nathan emerged. Noah was no longer with him. Presumably someone inside the Reed house had taken the child.
Marcus's home looked much as Nathan remembered: brick front, trimmed hedges, basketball hoop near the garage. The familiarity made everything worse. Marcus started across the lawn. “Nate.”
Nathan kept walking toward the rental sedan parked at the curb. “Nathan, please.” He stopped but did not turn. “You have ten seconds to decide whether following me is worth it.”
Marcus stayed where he was. “I never meant for it to happen like this,” he said. Nathan turned then. “That sentence is for accidents.
You had an affair with my wife long enough to make a child and then raise him next door while you texted me about football scores.” Marcus swallowed. “You're right.” Nathan had expected excuses.
Agreement disarmed him in a way defense would not have. Marcus continued, “There is no version where I come out of this clean. I knew you. I knew what she was to you.
I was lonely, she was lonely, and we kept crossing lines we pretended weren't lines until we crossed the one we couldn't uncross. Then Noah happened. I love him. I won't apologize for loving my son.
But what I did to you was wrong.” Nathan looked at him steadily. “You did not lose the right to love your son. You lost the right to call yourself my friend.”
Marcus nodded. “I know.” Nathan got into the car. The first place he went was not a hotel.
It was a twenty-four-hour diner off the interstate where he sat in a booth wearing his uniform while a waitress old enough to be his mother brought coffee without asking questions. Nathan did not drink it. He stared through the glass at headlights moving in the rain and tried to understand how a life could still exist materially after its meaning collapsed. His bank accounts worked.
His phone unlocked. His wedding ring remained on his hand. Yet he felt as though the world had shifted several feet sideways and left him standing in the old coordinates. He finally called the only person he trusted enough to hear his voice break.