Chapter 168 Everyone

Chapter 168 Everyone


POV: Marcus

I had cleaned the apartment properly for the first time in weeks. Not the surface clean of someone who was expecting people over but the real version, the kind that required moving things and finding things and making decisions about things that had been sitting in corners long enough to start feeling permanent. Jess had laughed when she saw me doing it that afternoon and said she had not known I owned a mop. I had told her the mop had always been there. She said that was somehow worse.

They arrived in pairs. Kai and Riley first, Riley still carrying something luminous from the morning that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the particular quality of someone who had done a thing they had been working toward for a long time. Agatha and Ethan together, which had become the natural configuration, both of them with the ease of people who had stopped negotiating what they were to each other and had simply arrived at it. Zane last, slightly breathless as always, with a bag over one shoulder and the expression of someone carrying a secret that was not going to stay secret for long.

I made room for everyone. The table was not quite big enough for all of us, which meant we existed in the particular pleasant chaos of too many people in the right space, chairs pulled from different rooms, elbows occasionally touching, conversations crossing each other without losing their threads.

“Before we eat,” Riley said, looking at Agatha across the table. “I want to say something.”

“Riley,” Agatha said. Her voice had the warning quality of someone who was not going to handle being the subject of a speech gracefully.

“I know,” Riley said. “One sentence. I promise.”

Agatha looked at her.

“You stood up in that room for me when you had every reason not to,” Riley said. “And I have not properly said thank you for that.” She held Agatha’s gaze. “Thank you.”

The table was quiet for a moment.

“You would have done the same,” Agatha said.

“I did do the same,” Riley said. “That’s how we know.”

Something moved across Agatha’s face that she did not manage or contain. Then she picked up her glass and said: “Can we eat now please,” and the table came back to life.

The food was good, better than I had expected from myself, and the conversation moved the way it moved when a group of people had been through something serious together and had come out the other side and were discovering that the other side contained the ordinary pleasures of a dinner table and were allowing themselves to feel that.

Halfway through dessert, Zane put his fork down.

“I have an announcement,” he said.

“You’re finally getting a proper office,” Kai said.

“I have a book deal,” Zane said.

The table erupted. Everyone speaking at once, questions overlapping congratulations overlapping laughter, and Zane sat in the middle of it with the expression of someone who had been waiting to say this for weeks and was now discovering that the saying of it was better than the waiting.

“When did this happen?” Agatha demanded.

“The offer came through yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t want to say anything until it was confirmed.”

“How long have you been sitting on that?” Riley said.

“Since yesterday,” he said. “I told you.”

“You have the face of someone who has been sitting on something for longer than yesterday,” she said.

Zane’s expression shifted fractionally. “The conversation started three weeks ago,” he admitted.

The noise level went up again.

When it settled Ethan looked at Zane across the table and said: “You deserve it. The work you did this year was exceptional.”

“We all did the work,” Zane said.

“You built the story,” Ethan said simply. “That matters.”

Then Jess put her glass down and looked at Marcus.

The table felt it before she spoke. A shift in the quality of her attention toward him that those of us who knew them could read without difficulty.

“Marcus,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I made my decision,” she said. “About the graduate programme.”

“Okay,” he said.

She held his eyes. “I’m going.”

The table was quiet.

“I know,” he said.

“I know you know,” she said. “But I wanted to say it properly. In front of people. Because I’ve been making decisions quietly all year and I don’t want to do that anymore.” She paused. “I’m going because it’s the right thing for me. And I need you to know that deciding that was the hardest thing I did this year. Not because I doubted the decision. Because I love you and distance is real and I needed you to know I know that.”

Marcus looked at her for a long moment.

“Jess,” he said. “I am proud of you in a way I don’t have a sufficient word for.” He paused. “I will be where you need me to be. That is not a performance. That is just true.”

The table went warm and quiet in the specific way it went warm and quiet when something real happened in front of people who cared about each other, the collective recognition of a moment that mattered and deserved to be witnessed without interruption.

Kai’s hand found Riley’s on the table beside me and stayed there.

I looked around at all of them. I did not do this often. I was usually the person in the room who watched from a slight remove, cataloguing rather than inhabiting, the observer’s habit so long established that it had started to feel like personality rather than defence. But tonight I looked around the table and let myself stop observing and simply feel what was there.

All of it. The fullness of it. The year of it.

It was a great deal.

When the evening finally wound down and coats were found and goodbyes were said, Riley hugged me at the door and said quietly: “Thank you for the mop work.” Kai gripped my shoulder without saying anything, which was the Kai version of everything. Agatha looked at me on her way out with the expression she used when words were less accurate than the look itself. Ethan nodded. Zane waved from the corridor already heading toward the stairs.

The apartment was quiet. Jess was washing up. I was putting things away. The sounds of a normal end to an evening that had been anything but normal.

“We did something this year,” I said.

She kept washing. “We did a lot of things this year.”

“I mean all of us,” I said. “Together. We did something that mattered.”

She stopped washing.

She looked at me over her shoulder.

“Yes,” she said simply. “We did.”

I went to her and put my arms around her from behind and she leaned back into me and we stood in the kitchen while the water ran.

Neither of us said anything else, Nothing else was needed..