Chapter 4 #2
A tightness loosens behind my ribs, not much, but enough that my next exhale carries more warmth than I'd admit if anyone were watching.
"I'll text you the door code. That gets you in.
The alarm panel's on the left wall inside, you've got forty-five seconds to punch in the second code or it calls the monitoring company, and I promise you don't want to explain yourself to them. "
"Forty-five seconds is SO much time, I don't know why you're worried."
"Because I know you're gonna walk in talking and forget the alarm panel exists."
"Rude." But she's grinning, I can hear it, how her vowels stretch when her mouth is already shaped around a smile. "Okay so I'll just let myself in and make myself comfortable and you can come home whenever, I won't snoop."
"You will absolutely snoop."
"Of course I will, but I'll feel bad about it, which counts."
I lean back in my chair and the leather creaks under the shift, and for a moment her voice in my ear is Louisiana in this sterile room, loose and bright despite the speed of her words, carrying the cadence of a kitchen I can still smell if I stop fighting it.
The drawl surfaces before I can catch it.
"There's nothin' in the fridge." I hear the dropped g, the softened vowel. Don't correct it. "I'll pick something up on the way home."
"You're the best, I love you, I'll see you tonight, bye." All one word. The line goes dead.
The phone stays warm against my palm. The late afternoon light has shifted while I wasn't paying attention, gone gold and heavy, almost the color of four o'clock in a kitchen where the windows face west. But not quite.
The light here doesn't pool warm on hardwood the way it does in a house that's been settling into the same foundation for a hundred and forty years.
I gave her access to the one space in this city that's mine, the townhouse I built to be left like I built this office to be left, and I did it without a single beat of hesitation because it's Darcy, and Darcy needs to be safe, and safe is the thing that undoes me faster than any threat ever could.
I text her the details. Address, door code, alarm code. Add: Don't touch the rooftop garden because she will, and I want it on record that I tried.
Her reply is immediate: TOO LATE ALREADY PLANNING CHANGES
I set the phone face down on the desk and stare at the fog pressing against the window. I have a client briefing at five that I can't move, and then I'm done.
But my mind is already at the townhouse, already walking through the door, already hearing her voice fill the rooms that have never heard anyone's voice but mine.
Darcy means home. And home means Louisiana, and Louisiana means the kitchen, and the kitchen means the bar, and the bar means the hotel room, and the hotel room means a throat that tasted like bourbon and a voice that said Tripp while I was inside her and the sound of my real name in the dark turning me into someone I buried eight years ago.
I take a deep breath.
I put the phone in my pocket and pull my calendar back onto the screen and read the next meeting's agenda until the words stop blurring.
The door keypad takes four digits and I punch them without thinking, muscle memory moving my thumb while the rest of me is still catching up to the fact that the house sounds different from the other side of the door.
Not wrong, but different, the kind of different that means someone has been breathing inside a space that's only ever held my air, and the house absorbed it and changed its mind about what it wanted to be.
I step inside and the alarm panel on the wall blinks green because Darcy already disarmed it. She remembered the forty-five second window. I owe her an apology for the doubt, but my brain has already abandoned the thought. Because the smell hits me.
Butter. Not the expensive cultured stuff I keep in the fridge for the toast I never make.
Real butter, heated past golden into the nutty warmth that only happens when someone is standing over a pan with patience and a wooden spoon.
Underneath it there's garlic, softened not burned, something with cayenne, the layered slow sweetness of onion that's been cooking long enough to give up its sharpness.
My lungs fill before my brain authorizes the breath and my chest expands.
The smell is not San Francisco. The smell is a kitchen with west-facing windows, a woman who fed you whether you were hungry or not, the sound of French folded into English like butter folded into flour.
My body responds to it like a language it learned before it learned words.
The tension at the base of my neck unlocks. My chest cracks open half an inch.
I set my keys on the console table by the door.
My shoes are loud on the hardwood, louder than they should be, because the house has never been this quiet and this full at the same time.
Darcy's bag is in the hallway, bright yellow duffel spilling a phone charger cord like a white flag of surrender, and her jacket is thrown over the back of the couch because Darcy has never met a hook she didn't ignore.
Music is playing somewhere upstairs, faint, something with a beat I don't recognize.
I loosen my tie as I walk toward the kitchen.
My mind is already running the predictive model.
Darcy found the grocery store, bought too much, and is making something from Odette's recipe stack.
She's going to talk the entire time. The kitchen will be destroyed.
I'll clean it after she falls asleep on the couch, and it'll be the closest thing to home this house has ever felt.
That's fine. That's manageable. That's Darcy. That's safe.
I round the corner.
The model crashes.
My feet stop, not a decision, not a choice, but the way a heart stops, and for a full second nothing in my body moves. My lungs are still. My hands are still.
Evie.
She's standing at my stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and her hair down, the natural waves, dark and heavy past her shoulders with the kitchen light catching the places where it isn't quite black.
She's barefoot on my hardwood floor in a sundress that stops above her knees.
She looks so small in this kitchen. The kitchen was designed for someone my height.
She's standing on her toes to reach the spice shelf, and my brain, my disciplined, compartmentalized, eight-years-of-training brain, disintegrates.
Twenty-eight days. Of nothing, of silence, of not calling and not texting and not driving back and standing outside a house in the Garden District at three in the morning.
Of telling myself it was containable, it was one night, it was a mistake I could file in the drawer I keep locked because the things inside it are the things that would end the performance if I let them breathe.
Twenty-eight days and I'm still measuring every dark-haired woman in every corridor against a baseline I had no right to build and finding every single one of them wrong. Wrong height, wrong walk, wrong laugh, wrong, wrong, wrong.
She turns.
Her brown eyes find mine across ten feet of kitchen tile. The stove is behind her and the heat doesn't reach me. And I can't read her. I can't read her. The man who has never once failed to decode what someone was showing me cannot read the expression on Evangeline Blanchard's face.
It's not anger. It's not softness. It's not the careful nothing she gave me in the LeBlanc hallway when I walked past her like she was wallpaper and the effort of that nothing nearly cracked my jaw from clenching.
It's something I don't have a word for, something that lives in the space between I see you and I see through you, and it pins me to the floor of my own kitchen with more force than any weapon I've ever faced.
The wooden spoon drips once onto the stovetop. Neither of us moves to retrieve it.
Something in my face shifts. I can feel it, the jaw loosening from the clench I've been holding since eight this morning, the mask slipping before I can catch it.
Not the smile I built for the lobby or the ease I wore for Jax or the steadiness I held for Kade.
Whatever she's seeing right now is underneath all of that.
The kitchen holds us. Butter and garlic and cayenne and twenty-eight days of silence, and somewhere in all of it, the last thing I said to her, still in the air like it never left.
My nails break the skin of my palm.
Neither of us speaks.