The months after that were not a clean upward progression. He was suspicious of the consulting work, then grateful, then uncomfortable with the gratitude, cycling through those feelings with the regularity of someone who had not had much recent practice at receiving good things without immediately looking for the cost. Physical therapy made him difficult for a stretch. He had to learn how to exist in rooms full of credentialed professionals without assuming his perspective was the least valuable one present.
It was not. Not even approaching it.
He began helping to train coaches at the adaptive recreation center once it opened. Then he started working directly with teenagers who had lost athletic identities to accidents or illness and did not know who they were on the other side of the loss. He was better at this than almost anyone Emily had seen do it, because he did not talk down to anyone, and young people can detect condescension before anyone has said a word.
One kid told him that if he could not play anymore he did not know who he was.
Marcus said without hesitating, “Then start with who you are when nobody is clapping.”
The kid came back the following week. And the week after that.
Emily found the prom photograph in an old keepsake box while looking for something her mother had asked for. She had not opened the box in years, and she opened it on a Tuesday evening at the kitchen table and the photograph was near the bottom, printed on the kind of glossy stock that school photographers used in the nineties. Grainy with age. His hands on hers. His grin, visible even in the faded image, that specific grin of someone getting away with something genuinely good. Her face turned slightly toward the camera, caught in the surprise of the moment, wearing the real smile.
She brought it to the office the next morning without making a conscious decision to do so. She put it on her desk and turned back to her work.
He saw it when he came in.
He went still.
“You kept that?”
“Of course I did.”
He picked it up with the careful deliberation of someone handling something they cannot quite believe is real and looked at it for a long time. Then he set it down and looked at her.
“I tried to find you,” he said. “After that summer.”
She stared at him.
“You were gone. Someone said your family had relocated for treatment. I asked around.” He paused. “Then my mom got sick and everything got very small very fast. But I tried.”
“I thought you had forgotten me,” she said.
He looked at her with an expression that was almost exasperated in its sincerity, the expression of a man who finds it slightly absurd that this needs to be said but is saying it anyway. “Emily. You were the only girl I actually wanted to find.”
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