Chapter 10
ten
Remy
The roux is the color of peanut butter and I'm standing over it with a wooden spoon because Odette's voice lives in the back of my skull and she's never once let me walk away from a roux before it was ready.
You leave that pot, Remington, and I will haunt you from this side of the living. Stir. Slow. You rush a roux, you ruin a gumbo, and you ruin a gumbo in my kitchen, I don't know you.
Twenty minutes in and it's just flour and oil and patience.
The cast iron Dutch oven is older than I am, seasoned black and heavy enough to kill a man.
Odette pressed it into my hands the last time I came home, wrapped in a dish towel like a baby she didn't trust me not to drop.
The lemon verbena Evie put on the windowsill is bright in the morning light and I don't know when this kitchen started smelling like a place someone lives, but it did, and the roux needs another twenty minutes so I can't leave.
I hear her before I see her. Bare feet on hardwood, the soft drag of cotton over skin, and then she's in the doorway.
I stop stirring.
She's wearing my blue button-down, the one I left on the hook in my room two days ago.
It hangs past her thighs, and the left shoulder has slipped down far enough that I can see her collarbone and the hollow beneath it.
Little thief. Her hair is loose, waves instead of the flat-ironed version, and she's blinking against the light like she followed the smell of the roux down the stairs without deciding to.
My teeth ache. Physically ache, like the impulse to bite the skin that shirt is exposing traveled from my brain to my jaw before I could intercept it. I turn back to the stove and stir.
"What are you making?" She's already moving toward the coffee maker, which means she's moving toward me, because this kitchen wasn't built for two people who aren't willing to touch.
"Gumbo."
"At seven in the morning."
"Roux takes time." I adjust the heat down a fraction. "Start it now, eat tonight. Odette's recipe. She'd tell you good things don't come from rushin', but she'd say it in French and make you feel guilty about every meal you've ever microwaved."
Evie reaches past me for her blue mug and her hip brushes mine and neither of us moves away. The coffee maker is behind me. She has to come back through.
"Nice shirt."
"Your sister's doing." She fills the mug without looking at me. "I mentioned needing something to sleep in and she raided your closet before I finished the sentence. Said you wouldn't notice."
Darcy started raiding my closet the semester I left for college and never saw a reason to stop. I came home for Thanksgiving and she answered the door in my LSU hoodie like she'd won it in a custody battle.
"She's not wrong."
"Your grandmother's recipe." Steam curls from the mug between us. "Does she know you're making it two thousand miles from her kitchen?"
"She'd have opinions about my knife work." I learned every recipe she had the summer I turned fifteen. Every Sunday, same kitchen, same wooden spoon. Landry thought I was insane. Darcy was too young to reach the counter comfortably.
I shift the spoon to my left hand and reach behind her for the cayenne, and my forearm crosses the small of her back and stays there a beat longer than the reach requires.
"She'd have opinions about the cayenne. She'd have opinions about the weather affectin' the roux, which isn't a real thing, but try tellin' her that. "
"Affectin'." Evie takes a sip of coffee and watches me over the rim. "There it is."
"There what is."
"Nothing." But she's smiling into the mug.
Her phone buzzes on the counter. She glances at it, picks it up.
"Margaret Winchester." She says warmly. "Foundation follow-up from the garden party."
"Mm." I don't turn from the stove.
"She wants to talk about the literacy initiative structure.
" Evie leans her hip against the counter beside me and wraps both hands around the mug.
"The whole west coast program is built on enrollment numbers, but enrollment doesn't tell you if kids are actually reading at grade level two years out.
You'd need longitudinal tracking tied to school district data, and nobody's funding that because the numbers look worse before they look better. "
I stop stirring for one second because she delivered it between sips of coffee in my stolen shirt like it was obvious.
"You mapped that from one garden party."
A micro-contraction around her eyes, like the compliment landed on a bruise instead of solid ground. She takes a sip of coffee and the expression is gone. I catch it anyway.
"From the donor briefs, actually. The data's in the quarterly reports if you read past the executive summary. Most people don't."
"Most people aren't you."
I file the flinch. Not enough data to read it yet.
She turns toward the fridge and I put my hand on her waist to guide her past the stove. Just my hand on the shirt, the cotton warm from her skin underneath, and I don't let go until she's past.
She pulls out the butter and doesn't mention it. I go back to the roux and don't mention it. Somewhere in the back of my skull Odette has plenty to say about this, all of it in French.
"Remy."
"Yeah."
"I wanted to say..." The shirt is slipping further off her shoulder and whatever she was going to say dissolves before it reaches her mouth. She shakes her head once, small, private. "Never mind."
"The roux needs another fifteen minutes." It comes out softer than I planned, more Louisiana than San Francisco.
"I'll stay."
She stays.
The gumbo has been on low for six hours and the smell has permeated every room in the house.
Andouille, okra, filé, the holy trinity sweating down to silk in Odette's cast iron.
It's in the curtains, the couch cushions.
Up here in the study, where Evie has been working all afternoon wearing my blue button-down with the sleeves cuffed to her elbows, it's settled in too.
Victoria's spreadsheet is still open on my laptop. I close it when I hear the front door, because Darcy's keys hit the hall table and then nothing. She stopped moving. The gumbo caught her.
"Oh my GOD. Oh my GOD, Tripp, is that GUMBO? Is that Grams's gumbo? I could smell it from the STREET, I'm not even kidding, I stopped and I literally just stood there on the sidewalk breathing like a weirdo and some guy walking his dog looked at me like I was having a medical event."
I head for the stairs. She's already in the kitchen by the time I reach the bottom, lid off the Dutch oven, wooden spoon in hand, face in the steam.
"You couldn't wait thirty seconds."
"I would NEVER." She's already tasting, lids shut, making a sound that's somewhere between a moan and a prayer. "Tripp. This is it. This is the one. You did the thing with the filé, I can taste it, Grams is gonna lose her mind when I tell her."
"Darcy."
"This is happening every week. I'm calling it. Sunday gumbo. Evie!" She's yelling toward the stairs now, spoon in her hand, gesturing with it like a conductor. "EVIE. Get down here. He made the gumbo. The REAL gumbo."
She turns back to me, eyes bright and wet in a way she'll deny if I mention it. The smell has pulled Louisiana out of her like a thread, and she's standing in my San Francisco kitchen looking exactly like she looks in Odette's.
"Everything okay?" Darcy glances at me between tastes. "You've got your work face on."
"Work stuff."
"On a Sunday?"
"Security consulting doesn't take weekends off."
She's already moved on, pulling bowls from the cabinet she memorized her first week here, counting out three, stacking them on the counter with the efficient chaos that is Darcy doing anything in a kitchen.
"I'm calling Grams. She needs to know. She needs to know her recipe survived the trip and her grandson isn't a complete disaster. "
She grabs my arm and pulls me toward the stove. "Come on. You're serving. I'm supervising. Evie's judging. This is how it works now."
Darcy reaches around me, grabs a bowl, and serves herself before I finish ladling Evie's. Which is exactly how dinner works in any kitchen Darcy occupies. She's seated, blowing on the first bite like she's defusing a bomb.
"Okay, wait. Wait wait wait." She holds the spoon an inch from her mouth. "I need a moment of silence for this. Evie, I need you to witness this."
"I'm witnessing." Evie slides into the chair across from me, bare feet tucking under her on the seat. She hasn't touched her bowl, and watches Darcy with the patient amusement of someone fluent in Darcy.
Darcy catches the look. "Don't you start with me, Evangeline. I waited ALL DAY."
Darcy eats the bite and her eyelids drop. The sound she makes is reverent and shameless, entirely too loud for a dining table.
I'm reaching for the pepper when Evie takes her first bite and makes a sound that is none of those things.
It's quiet. A small exhale through her nose, lids falling shut for half a second, her lips pressing together like she's holding something in.
The spoon comes away from her mouth slowly. Her throat moves when she swallows.
That sound belongs behind a locked door. My hand tightens on the pepper mill.
"Tripp." Darcy points her spoon at me, gaze bright.
"Grams used to make this the first Sunday of every month and I would literally count the days.
Like a calendar. I had a physical calendar on my wall and I would cross off the days until gumbo Sunday, and Landry told me I was being dramatic, and I told Landry he had no soul. "
"Landry has a soul. It's just filed alphabetically." I sit down and the chair scrapes the floor and Evie's eyes open and find mine across the table.
"Odette used to put a little bowl on the counter for me." Evie says it to her gumbo, not to us. "A little blue bowl. Before anyone else sat down. She'd say viens manger, chère, and put the bowl right at the edge where I could reach it because I was too short for the table."
Darcy's spoon freezes midair. "The blue bowl. Oh my God, the blue bowl with the chip on the rim."
"She never let anyone else use it."
"Because it was YOUR bowl." Darcy sets her spoon down and grabs Evie's wrist across the table. "Evie. That bowl is still in the cabinet. I saw it last month. She kept it."
Evie doesn't answer right away. Takes another bite, and I watch her swallow, and the absence of performance on her face is the most naked thing I've seen from her since Louisiana.
Not working the courtyard. Not reading the table.
Just eating gumbo that tastes like a kitchen from another lifetime, curled tight into the chair with her free hand gripping the edge of the seat.
"Okay but can we talk about the fact that this man had a kitchen with a six-burner Viking range and literally nothing in his fridge for apparently YEARS?
" Darcy gestures at me with it, flinging a drop of broth onto the table.
"I opened that fridge our first night here and it was like looking into the void, Evie.
Condiments and rage. That's what was in there. "
"There was beer."
"Expired beer, Tripp."
"Beer doesn't expire."
"It had DUST on it."
Evie looks up from her bowl. "To be fair, it's hard to cook for one person." She pauses, and her mouth twitches at one corner. "Although most people at least keep milk. Even serial killers keep milk. I've seen the documentaries."
Darcy's laugh hits the ceiling and bounces off every wall in the room and lands in my chest like bass from a speaker.
Even Evie is smiling now, a real one, dimples and all, and she's looking at me like she knows exactly what she just did and is pleased with herself in a way that has nothing polished about it, nothing practiced or camera-ready, just a woman who made a joke about serial killers at my dinner table while wearing my shirt and eating my food.
My food. My table. My shirt.
Every time I touched her today, I had a reason. Guiding her past a hot stove. Reaching for the cayenne. Good reasons. Practical reasons.
The math has changed. She's laughing with my sister in my kitchen and I'm memorizing what this looks like in case I have to survive without it.
Darcy calls Odette after dinner. Her voice carries through the house while I wash the Dutch oven, Odette's responses tinny through the speakerphone but warm enough to fill the room anyway. Evie dries the bowls beside me and our elbows bump twice. She doesn't move away. I don't either.
They go upstairs eventually. I rinse the last pot and their laughter comes through the ceiling, muffled, and the house is quiet enough for me to hear the burner to tick as it cools.
Victoria's spreadsheet is still open on my laptop.