The Man I Could Never Have

Chapter Seven: Ordinary Things

Marcus was quieter the next morning.

Not cold.

Not distant.

Just... careful.

As though last night's phone call had reminded him that some walls existed for a reason.

"There's a firm dinner Friday," he said, not looking up from his coffee. "Clients, mostly. A few people from the old crowd." A pause. "You don't have to come."

"Do you want me to?"

It was the wrong question to ask a man who'd spent his whole life avoiding wanting things out loud. He set his mug down and considered it longer than the question should have required.

"It'd be good for you to get out," he said finally, which wasn't an answer at all, but I recognized the deflection for what it was — the same trick I'd been using on him for years.

"I'll come," I said. "As long as you promise not to introduce me as your best friend's kid the whole night."

Something almost like a smile. "No promises."

The dinner was at a restaurant with no menu prices, the kind of place my father would've made a joke about the second we sat down. Marcus wore a charcoal suit that did something unfair to my ability to form sentences, and for the first hour I mostly stood at his elbow, shaking hands, absorbing introductions I wouldn't remember by morning.

Then a woman appeared at his side like she'd been waiting for an opening.

Silver dress, easy smile, the kind of familiarity in the way she touched his arm that made something in my chest go still.

"Marcus Whitfield," she said. "I heard you were still allergic to your own parties."

"Diane." His voice was even, but I felt him go rigid beside me. "Didn't know you'd be here."

Diane.

So this was her. Not a voice on the phone anymore — an actual person, elegant and unbothered, looking at Marcus like she had a history with him that predated every single thing I thought I knew.

Her eyes slid to me, assessing, quick. "And you are?"

"Elena," I said. "I'm—"

"She's family," Marcus said, before I could finish, and something in the way he said it — flat, final, a door shutting — made Diane's expression shift into something I couldn't quite name.

"Family," she repeated. "Of course." Her smile never reached her eyes.

She looked at me for one lingering second before turning back to Marcus.

"We'll finish our conversation another time."

It wasn't a question.

It sounded like a promise.

She didn't stay long after that. A few more words I didn't catch, a hand on Marcus's arm that lingered a beat too long, and then she was gone, swallowed back into the crowd.

Marcus didn't say anything for a long moment.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Fine." He wasn't. I could hear it in the single clipped syllable.

"She seemed—"

"Elena." My name, not a deflection this time. Just tired. "Not tonight. Please."

I let it go, the way I always did, filing it away with everything else I wasn't allowed to ask about.

But family sat strange in my chest the whole drive home — the word he'd chosen, quick and automatic, like it was the only safe container he had for whatever I actually was to him.

I wondered if he even believed it himself.

Because if I was truly family...

Why had the look in his eyes changed the moment Diane touched his arm?

And why...

When he'd introduced me...

Had it sounded less like the truth...

And more like something he was desperately trying to convince himself to believe?