Chapter 9
nine
Evie
Iwake up hot.
It's not the room, not the light filtering between curtains I forgot to close. My skin is flushed and my pulse is sitting somewhere it shouldn't be at six forty-seven in the morning, and the sheets are tangled around my legs in a way that tells me I was moving in my sleep.
The ache is low and persistent now, four weeks of waking up in this guest room with my body betraying me on schedule. I stopped pretending it was the house three weeks ago.
It's the hallway. One hallway, three doors, and the particular cruelty of knowing exactly how his hands feel because he wrapped my ankle and I noted every finger like a guest list I'd need later.
I shower cold and get dressed in a cotton sundress and the flats I've been wearing since the sprain. Pull my hair back wet and loose, and don't straighten it because nobody's watching and I am so tired of the flat iron being the first ritual of every day.
The kitchen smells like coffee and the lemon verbena on the windowsill that I put there two weeks ago and he hasn't moved.
Remy leans against the counter with a mug in his hand, the some article open on his phone, and he looks up when I come in with the particular expression of a man who's been awake for hours and is pretending he hasn't been.
"There's coffee."
"I can smell it." I reach past him for a mug from the cabinet behind his head, and his shoulder is right there, solid through his t-shirt. He doesn't shift to make room. "You're up early."
"I'm always up early." His thumb traces the rim of his mug, slow. "You're up late."
"Six forty-seven is not late." I twist the mug right-side up on the counter beside his.
"It is when you're usually down here by six fifteen stealing my coffee before I've finished the first cup." He tilts the carafe toward me while looking back down at his phone.
I pour and take the first sip standing close enough that the lemon verbena is competing with whatever soap he uses—cedar and cotton that I have memorized against my will. "Maybe I'm evolving."
He sets the carafe back on the warmer and turns to face me without saying a word, leaning his hip into the counter while he watches me drink.
My phone buzzes on the counter. It's Darcy.
OKAY SO i have meetings literally all day but PLEASE tell me you have the outfit for this afternoon figured out because if you're wearing that black thing again i will stage an intervention
I type back one-handed. The black thing is classic.
THE BLACK THING IS A FUNERAL DRESS EVANGELINE
It's a cocktail dress.
IT HAS SLEEVES
I'm smiling when Remy nods toward my phone. "Darcy?"
"She has opinions about my wardrobe."
"She has opinions about everything." He sets his mug down. "Let me look at your ankle before you leave."
"It's fine. I've been walking on it all week."
"Without a follow-up. That's why I want to look at it."
He pulls out a kitchen chair and waits. I sit, because arguing with a medic about a follow-up exam is a war I don't think I can win.
He kneels, takes my foot in both hands, presses along the outside of my ankle firm and systematic, rotating gently while he watches my face for a pain response I don't give him because there isn't one.
"Swelling's gone." His thumb traces the tendon. "You've been good about staying off it."
The flinch happens before I can stop it. A full-body contraction, involuntary, my foot pulling back in his grip and my spine going rigid against the chair. Not pain. The word good landing in the center of my chest like a key turning a lock I didn't know was there.
His hands stay exactly as they were while he waits, neither pressing nor pulling away. His eyes come up to mine and hold there. Whatever he sees, he doesn't ask about.
"I can drive you." He lowers my foot carefully to the floor. "If you want to save the ankle for tonight."
"It's a ten-minute walk."
"It's a five-minute drive." He stands, both of us pretending this is about an ankle.
"Fine."
I take my coffee to the couch and open my laptop, drafting talking points for Dad's office that no one asked for.
Remy stays in the kitchen long enough to make a second pot, then settles at the dining table with his own work.
Case files or reports or whatever he spreads out when he thinks I'm not paying attention.
We orbit each other for hours without speaking, the house quiet except for the occasional sound of him turning a page or me typing too hard when a sentence won't cooperate.
Around eleven, I close the laptop and check my phone. Six more texts from Darcy, a photo of her shoes, and a voice memo that's just her screaming into a pillow.
Remy stands up from the table. His keys are already in his hand.
The car is quiet and enclosed. His hands are on the wheel, steady. I press my own hands flat against my thighs and watch the fog blur past the window.
The costume goes on somewhere around Van Ness.
I watch it happen in the passenger window reflection.
My shoulders settle back, chin lifts, hands release their flat press against my thighs to fold themselves into my lap, fingers laced, relaxed.
The wet waves I left partially loose this morning are drying into something that looks intentional rather than careless.
My smile calibrates to the version that reaches my eyes two beats after my mouth.
Remy doesn't say anything. He drives with one hand on the wheel and his eyes on the road and the silence between us sits heavy, full of everything neither of us is willing to say.
The ankle wrap is sitting on the console between us, a rolled elastic bandage he brought from the house without mentioning it.
I didn't ask. He didn't offer. It just appeared, just like his jacket had appeared on my shoulders on the rooftop, just like the ice pack had appeared on my bed.
The car stops in front of a Pacific Heights estate with stone pavers and hedgerows trimmed into precise geometric shapes.
I reach for the door handle as his hand closes over the wrap and holds it out, not toward me but into the space between us, his eyes still forward.
I take it. Our fingers don't touch. The elastic is warm from sitting in the sun through the windshield, and I tuck it into my clutch and step out of the car.
I don't look back. Looking back would crack the costume before I've finished putting it on.
The garden courtyard smells like jasmine. The jasmine reads wrong to me, somehow thinner than in Louisiana, like the cool dry San Francisco air carries scent without the humidity to hold it, and for half a second I'm in Odette's side garden before I pull the property back into focus.
White hydrangeas line the stone pathways in clusters so perfect they look staged, and a string trio is playing something restrained near the conservatory entrance. Thirty, maybe forty people.
I read the courtyard in the time it takes to accept a glass of sauvignon blanc from a passing tray.
Three foundation board members near the fountain, two legislative staffers I recognize from the Capitol circuit, a tech couple who donate to everything and remember nothing, and a blonde woman holding court near the conservatory doors with the kind of effortless authority that makes other powerful people lean in instead of puff up.
I work the crowd like I always do. Wine I won't finish in one hand, the other free to shake hands, the political smile calibrated for each conversation, compliments delivered like currency.
My shoe catches on a stone paver ten minutes in.
A half-step, barely visible, and pain shoots up through the outside of my foot in a bright line that makes my vision narrow for one second.
I shift my weight to the other leg, keep my glass steady, smile at the woman talking to me about school vouchers. Nobody sees it.
But his hands flash through my body like a phantom, the pressure of his fingers rotating my joint this morning, clinical and careful and devastating in their competence.
The elastic bandage presses against my clutch through the thin leather and the ache in my ankle rhymes with the ache I woke up carrying.
"Evangeline Blanchard?"
I turn. The woman approaching has short blonde hair and blue-gray eyes that hold steady on mine. Slim, sharp-shouldered, wearing a silk blazer over white that makes her look powerful without trying. She extends her hand and her grip is firm and doesn't hold too long.
"Margaret Winchester. Linda Forsythe mentioned you'd be here today, and I've been hoping to meet you."
"Ms. Winchester." I shake her hand and my shoulders loosen by a degree, involuntary, because the woman in front of me isn't checking my dress or my last name or the ring on the hand I'm extending.
She's looking at my face. "The Foundation's survivor housing initiative in Oakland was featured in the Chronicle last month. I read the piece twice."
Her expression shifts, not surprised but pleased in a way that has depth behind it. "You read it twice."
"The reintegration pipeline. Job training paired with transitional housing with a two-year support window instead of the standard six months. That's not charity, that's infrastructure."
Margaret's smile reaches her eyes without the two-beat delay I use. "That's exactly the word I used in the grant proposal, and it took the board three meetings to agree with me."
She tilts her head slightly. "Most people your age lead with the gala numbers. You led with the program design."
"Gala numbers measure how much people want to be seen giving.
Program design measures whether anyone's life actually changes.
" The words come out before I edit them, sharper than I usually let myself sound at events like this, and the register slips and I pull it back.
"At least, that's what I've noticed working donor relations for my father's office. "