Chapter 5 #2
I turn my head. He's watching me, eyes green and unreadable, and for one suspended moment neither of us is performing anything at all. He sees me seeing his house. I see him watching me see it. I just read his current life in twenty minutes, and we both know it.
Darcy cuts between us on her way to the herb pots, brushing my arm as she passes. "Okay, dinner plan. Evie, the roux is probably ready, we need to get back down there before it burns and I have to start a GoFundMe for Tripp's kitchen."
I blink. The moment closes.
"It won't burn." I follow her toward the stairs. "I turned it down and covered it before you dragged me away."
The guest room is at the end of the second-floor hallway, small, clean, clearly unused until today. Darcy claimed the room across from Remy's, which means I'm here, three doors down, close enough to hear someone walk between rooms if the house gets quiet enough, but not too close.
I unzip my suitcase on the bed and start with the things that matter.
Toiletries in the bathroom, lined up on the shelf above the sink in the order I use them.
Laptop on the desk by the window, charger plugged into the outlet underneath.
The journal goes in the top drawer of the nightstand where it always goes, every hotel, every guest room, every place I've ever slept that wasn't mine.
My jacket goes in the closet.
I stand there for a moment with the closet door open, looking at the empty rod and the single shelf above it, and hanging my jacket in Remy's house feels less like unpacking and more like planting a flag.
My denim jacket looks small and out of place on the rod, and I leave it there and close the door.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. The screen lights up with the Blanchard office email chain, and I recognize the subject line before I even sit down.
NOLA Arts Council donor reception, August ninth, venue confirmation pending, need approval on the catering shortlist. I open it, scan the attachment, type "Approved, forward final to Christine for signoff" and send it.
The whole thing takes forty-five seconds and when I set the phone on the nightstand the screen goes dark and I'm still standing in Remy's guest room with my suitcase half-emptied on the bed.
A shadow shifts in the doorway.
I don't look up immediately, but my skin registers it before my eyes do.
When I do glance toward the hall, Remy is already past the door, moving toward his own room, and the only reason I know he paused at all is because his stride picked up again a half-beat too late.
He saw the laptop. The email still faintly visible on the lock screen.
The event binder I stacked next to it, navy leather with my father's senate seal embossed on the cover.
He doesn't comment. His door closes with a soft click down the hall.
I fold a sweater and place it in the second drawer and think about what his face would have looked like if I'd been fast enough to catch it.
The étouffée turns out better than it has any right to, given the circumstances.
Darcy eats two bowls, talking through both of them.
Remy eats one and says it's good in a voice that gives the compliment exactly enough warmth to sound genuine without sounding like he's tasting anything beyond rice and roux.
I eat slowly and watch them both, and the kitchen fills with Darcy's voice and the clink of spoons against ceramic and the ordinary sounds of people sharing a meal in a house that has never heard them before.
Afterward, the evening settles into something almost normal.
Darcy is cross-legged on the couch with her laptop balanced on one knee, scrolling through something that makes her mutter under her breath every few seconds.
Remy is cleaning up the last of dinner, and the sounds of running water and cabinets closing carry through the open floor plan with a normalcy that doesn't match anything else about this house.
I sit in the armchair near the window with my journal open in my lap, pen moving in small absent loops that aren't words or pictures, just motion. The fog has thickened outside, pressing against the glass, and the room has shrunk around us.
Remy comes into the living room drying his hands on a kitchen towel and drops into the opposite end of the couch from Darcy.
"How's the boutique rebrand going? Last time you mentioned it, the owner was fighting you on the color palette." He sounds relaxed when he talks.
"Oh my GOD, don't even get me started." Darcy doesn't look up from her screen. "She wants millennial pink. I told her millennial pink died in 2019 and she looked at me like I'd insulted her firstborn child."
"You probably did." That version of him, the one I watched him build in the kitchen earlier. Asking the right questions, keeping Darcy talking, filling the room without revealing anything about the interior.
Darcy launches into the full story, the boutique owner in the Garden District who wants to go viral on TikTok but refuses to be on camera, and Remy laughs at the right moments. I pull my feet up under me in the armchair and watch them both over the edge of my journal.
"You're quiet over there." He eyes me across the room, and the attention is light, conversational, a glance that invites a joke and nothing more.
"I'm always quiet." I match his register on instinct. Light, polished, the pleasant guest. "You're just used to Darcy's volume."
"Excuse me, my volume is a GIFT." Darcy doesn't look up from her screen.
Remy's mouth curves. He holds the look for one beat longer than the joke requires before turning back to Darcy. I look down at my journal, and the pen has stopped moving.
The world outside the windows has gone gray. Darcy is on the couch with her phone held above her face, thumb scrolling through something that's been absorbing her for the last ten minutes.
"I've been looking at everything. There is SO much. We're going to need the whole summer." She says it casual. Like she's reading a menu.
The whole summer.
I don't move. My pen is still touching the page of my journal where I stopped mid-loop, and I keep it there to hide a reaction I'm not ready to have yet.
I allow myself one second to look at him.
Remy is in the armchair across the room, and what moves through his face happens so fast that anyone who wasn't trained by two decades of reading politicians would miss it.
First the calculation, quick and cold, the cost of the whole summer tallied and weighed against every reason to say no.
And then, underneath that, something quieter and less defended that I almost miss because the mask arrives a half-beat later and seals it shut.
But I catch it. The fraction of a second where his eyes move to me and he is not entirely sorry.
"Okay so first things first, we need to explore. I want to find a good seafood place, like ACTUAL seafood, not tourist seafood, because if I'm here all summer I need a place to be a regular at. Evie, do you know any places out here?"
"I've never been out here." My voice works fine. "But I can find one."
His house. His city. His sister asking me to stay for the summer three doors down from his bedroom, and the man who called me a mistake didn't say no.