Chapter 3
three
Evie
Iwake up sore.
That's what registers first. The deep unfamiliar ache between my thighs and the tenderness in muscles I didn't know I had, and for five full seconds I just feel it with my eyes closed, the morning heat pressing in and jasmine threading through air that smells like old wood and him.
My body is heavy and loose in a way that makes me want to stretch into the sheets and stay here for the rest of June.
I reach across the mattress.
His side is warm, but the warmth is fading, the impression in the pillow already cooling, and my hand finds cotton instead of skin. My eyes open.
Remy is sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me.
He's dressed in jeans, the same gray t-shirt from last night, his shoes already on.
His forearms are braced on his knees, his head is down, the line of his spine rigid, and it is unlike the body I fell asleep against. That body was loose and easy, his thumb moving over my collarbone, his breath slow against my hair. This body belongs to someone else.
Below the window a metal shop gate rattles open, the sound scraping up through the morning quiet. He's been sitting like that for a while. Long enough to go somewhere I can't follow.
"Hey." My voice comes out rough, sleep-soft, the vowels rounder than I'd let them be in any room that wasn't this one.
I pull the sheet up over my chest and push hair off my face, and my whole body wants to lean forward and press my mouth to the knot of tension between his shoulder blades.
"You're up early for someone who kept me awake past two. "
Nothing moves, not his hands, not his shoulders, not his head.
"You were a mistake."
The words land flat and clean, every consonant precise, every vowel clipped, the accent from last night stripped out so thoroughly that he sounds like a different man.
The same mouth that was between my thighs six hours ago forming words in Louisiana French I understood more of than he realized, and now it's producing boardroom English like last night was a draft he's decided not to send.
The cold comes off him before my brain catches up, goosebumps rising on my arms despite the heat, and I pull the sheet higher without thinking about it.
I look at his back. At how his fingers are laced together between his knees, the knuckles white, the tendons standing out, and the tension in his jaw visible even from this angle. He's holding himself still, locked in place, like someone afraid of what happens if they move.
I think he meant this. The sentence came out shaped wrong. He meant to say this was a mistake, or last night, and what came out was you, and he hasn't corrected himself, and he's not going to.
But that doesn't matter. He still said it.
The rejection doesn't match the data. None of last night builds to a man calling me a mistake without looking at my face.
I learned the protocol from watching my mother navigate fundraiser after fundraiser where men talked past her like she was furniture. Smile, stand, smooth your skirt, and walk out as if the door was always your destination.
I shouldn't need that protocol in this room.
I get out of bed. The sheet falls and I let it fall, and I don't look at him while I find my clothes on the floor.
My underwear first, then my bra, my fingers fumbling with it for one stupid second, the metal slipping twice before it holds, then my dress.
My face heats and I'm grateful his back is still turned.
My keys and purse are on the floor by the door where they landed when he pressed me against it.
I pick them up. I step into my shoes. I don't say goodbye because I don't want to see his face when I do.
The hotel door clicks shut behind me, and the sound is very small and very final.
The drive to the LeBlanc house takes eleven minutes, and I don't remember a single one of them.
I sit in the driveway for two minutes with the engine running, checking my face in the rearview mirror, smoothing my hair, pressing my lips together until the color evens out.
Then I walk into the kitchen with my shoulders back and my chin level and my smile already in place.
The kitchen smells like chicory coffee and butter.
The cypress countertops are warm under the morning light that pours through the tall windows.
Darcy is standing at the counter with her phone in one hand and a mug in the other and she turns the second my sandals hit the hardwood.
"Oh my GOD Evie I texted you like four times, you didn't text back, I literally almost called the police and I know that sounds dramatic but you went to the Quarter at NIGHT and then just vanished so honestly the police thing was totally reasonable."
The words come out in one continuous stream, no punctuation, no breath, and she sets her mug down hard enough that coffee sloshes over the rim onto the counter.
Her eyes are wide and blue and completely focused on my face, scanning for damage, for distress, for anything that doesn't match the version of me she's expecting.
I pour myself coffee from the pot. My hands are steady. I've been managing my face since I was twelve.
"I found him." I take a sip, let the chicory bitterness settle on my tongue, and lean my hip against the counter at an angle that feels casual because I practiced it.
"He was at Bijou's, second bourbon in, doing that thing you said, where he stares at the glass like it offended him.
I sat with him for about an hour, he talked a little, I told him you were worried.
He said he'd come home when he was ready.
" I shrug, one shoulder, the movement small and unconcerned.
"I figured he needed the space, so I left and went home and fell asleep with my phone on silent. I'm sorry, Darce."
The apology is the anchor. Give them something small to forgive and they stop looking for something big to find.
Darcy narrows her eyes for half a second, and my pulse ticks up in my chest where she can't see it. Then her face softens and she waves her hand.
"Okay, fine, but you're not allowed to put your phone on silent when I'm in crisis mode. New rule. Non-negotiable." She picks up her mug again and drinks, and the tension leaves her shoulders, and the worst part isn't that the lie worked.
The worst part is that it didn't have to be good. She just trusts me.
Through the wide doorway I can see Odette in the breakfast nook, settled into her usual spot at the small round table by the window with her tea and her crossword and the reading glasses pushed halfway down her nose.
She's wearing a pale blue cotton blouse, sharp-eyed and unhurried, watching the kitchen like the whole house is a garden she's tending.
"Evangeline, chère." Her voice carries without effort, low and easy. "Come sit. You look thin."
I don't look thin. I look like a woman who slept five hours in a hotel room with her best friend's brother and then drove home with the windows down because the air conditioning felt like suffocation.
But Odette says everyone looks thin. The invitation is the same one she extends every morning, and I take my coffee to the nook and sit across from her because this is the one room in the world where sitting down used to feel like exhaling for the first time all day.
Darcy follows, dropping into the chair beside me and pulling one leg up under her.
"He never came home last night, by the way.
Tripp. His bed's still made." She scrolls through her phone, frowning.
"I mean, he's a grown man, I know that, but he hasn't spent the night here in eight years and then he disappears his second night back and I just..
." She trails off, which is so unlike her that I look up. "I just got him back, you know?"
Something behind my ribs folds inward, a quiet compression that I feel in my throat and my stomach and the space between my hips where I am still sore from him, and I take a sip of coffee and nod.
"He'll come home, Darce. He came back for Odette. He's not going to disappear."
My voice sounds exactly right. Warm, steady, and certain. The version of me that Darcy trusts, that Odette watches without comment. That my father built and my mother polished and I have maintained every single day since I was old enough to understand that the real one wasn't enough.
Darcy's phone buzzes and she glances at it, makes a face, and pushes back from the table.
"Ugh, the landscaper's here early, I have to go deal with the crepe myrtle situation before he just does whatever he wants again.
Be right back." She squeezes my shoulder as she passes and the touch burns through my dress like a brand.
The kitchen goes quiet.
Darcy's footsteps fade down the hallway and I hear the screen door creak open and slap shut, and my face drops.
I feel it drop, the smile falling off like something unhooked.
My eyes close, my fingers tighten around the mug until the ceramic bites into my palms, and I breathe once through my nose, hard, holding everything exactly where it is, because if I let one piece move the rest will follow.
I can still feel him. The ache between my thighs, the rawness on my chin from his jaw, the phantom weight of his hand on the back of my neck.
My body doesn't know about the man on the edge of the bed.
My body is still in the dark with his mouth against my ear and his voice gone loose, the vowels stretching into something that wasn't English.
You were a mistake.
"Evangeline."
My eyes open. Odette is watching me over her reading glasses with an expression I can't decode, and I pull the smile back on so fast my cheeks ache.
"Ma'am?"
She holds my gaze for one beat longer than comfortable, then looks back down at her crossword. "Seven across is 'magnolia.' I can never remember if it's one L or two."
"One," I manage.