Chapter 16 #2
The front door opens and closes, and my body knows before my brain catches up.
The air shifts, or maybe I do, a low pull behind my navel that I've stopped trying to name and started just navigating around.
Remy comes into the kitchen with his phone in his hand, thumb moving across the screen, and he doesn't look up immediately.
Gray t-shirt, dark jeans, hair pushed back like he's been running his hands through it.
He finishes whatever he's reading and slides the phone into his back pocket when he sees me watching.
"Darce." He surveys the island. "Did you buy the entire market?"
"I bought SELECTIVELY. There was a mushroom vendor I showed incredible restraint with."
"She bought four jars of honey," I offer, and Remy's mouth twitches.
"The honey man got to you."
"The Honey Man is a VISIONARY, Tripp, and I won't hear otherwise."
Remy reaches past me for a strawberry from the flat, and his arm crosses my sightline, close enough to touch.
His fingers brush the back of my hand on the way, not accidental, not lingering, just the barest graze of knuckle against knuckle that Darcy wouldn't notice if she were looking, and she's not looking because she's arranging cheese on a cutting board like the arrangement is going to be graded.
I don't move my hand. My pulse picks up, which is ridiculous given that all he did was reach for a strawberry.
"How was the meeting?" Remy asks.
"Good. Margaret wants me at the Foundation benefit next month. Not as a guest, working with them."
"That's great, Evie." He bites the strawberry, and the small, genuine thing he means by it is real. Darcy hears it. She doesn't hear what sits underneath.
Darcy launches into a detailed account of every vendor she visited, complete with character descriptions and dramatic reenactments of tasting samples, and I laugh in the right places and ask the right questions while Remy leans against the counter across from me and eats strawberries.
Three feet of kitchen island between us. His sister between us.
Remy stretches to grab another berry, and his shirt rides up on the left side.
The skin above his waistband is wrong.
A cut along his side, two inches, held together with the kind of small white strips I've only ever seen in TV ERs. The skin around them is pink and angry. Whoever closed it knew what they were doing, and and he didn't go to a hospital for it.
My stomach drops and my face doesn't change.
"What happened to your side?"
Remy glances down and tugs the hem back into place. "Caught it on the edge of a filing cabinet at the office. The metal lip on those things is brutal."
"Ow," Darcy says without looking up from her cheese arrangement. "Put some Neosporin on it, Tripp, don't be a hero."
"Yes ma'am."
His eyes meet mine across the island for half a second longer than the answer requires. Steady, easy, nothing to see. The same smooth deflection I've watched my father execute across a thousand dinner tables. I've seen Remy do it too. At Darcy's question about the packed bag by his door.
I don't push.
I file it in the drawer behind my ribs where things go when finishing them costs more than keeping them. The drawer was full long before Remy.
Filing cabinets don't make you patch yourself up at home.
Darcy finishes her cheese board, declares it a masterpiece, and insists we all try the lavender honey on the burrata. She's right, it's transcendent.
The three of us stand in the kitchen eating cheese and fruit and bread while the evening light goes gold through the windows. Remy's shoulder is four inches from mine.
Darcy is telling us about a woman at the market who had a dog in a stroller wearing a beret, and she's pulling up the photo on her phone to prove it,.
I'm laughing because the dog does look absurdly French and because this is my favorite version of my life, the one where I'm standing in a warm kitchen with the two people I love most and nobody is performing anything.
Except I am. And so is he. And the person we're performing for is the one who trusts us most.
Darcy yawns around nine-thirty, big and unashamed, the way she does everything. "Okay, I'm calling it. The Honey Man took everything I had and I need to recover." She kisses my cheek and squeezes Remy's arm on her way past. "Don't eat all the peaches. I counted them."
Her footsteps go up the stairs, and the kitchen gets very quiet.
Remy doesn't move. I don't move.
"You okay?" I ask, and watch what his face does with it.
His thumb traces one slow line across my knuckles, just that, slow enough to mean what he won't say out loud. "Long day."
"Did it really happen at the office?"
His eyes lift to mine, and something passes behind them that he files away before I can name it.
"Filing cabinet," he says, and his voice is steady like my father's gets when he's deciding what version of a story I'm allowed to have. He pulls his hand back, picks up the cutting board, and carries it to the sink.
I press my knuckles against the cool marble where his thumb just was and listen to the water run and don't move until the warmth fades from my skin.
The laptop screen is the only light in my bedroom at ten past three in the morning.
My phone buzzes against the cushion beside my thigh, and the screen shows an incoming call. Foundation main line, just past six in the morning Eastern, which means somebody in DC needs an answer before my father's nine a.m. starts.
I sit up. I clear my throat. I touch my fingers to my collarbone like I have since I was thirteen and the register slides into place, warm and even, polished before the word.
"This is Evangeline." A pause for them to set the agenda.
"Yes, of course. Thursday at four. I know Senator Blanchard is eager to discuss the foundation's coastal initiative.
I'll have the Hargrove summary in front of him before the meeting.
" Another pause. A laugh calibrated to land exactly right.
"Wonderful. Tell him I'll see him then."
I end the call. Thirty seconds. Clean.
The Senator Blanchard I just promised to brief is my father. The coastal initiative is the project that pays his largest donors back in policy. The voice I just used is the one Margaret Winchester didn't hear once today.
If you stopped being useful to him, would he still—
I don't let that thought finish. I press my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger, hard, and breathe.
This morning I sat across from Margaret Winchester and she asked me what I thought, not what my father thought, not what the Blanchard office's position was, and the difference between that question and the call I just took is so wide I could fall into it and never hit bottom.
It's the same observation I've been making since I was old enough to notice that my father's pride and my usefulness have never existed independently of each other, and noticing has never once changed what I do next.
I set the phone screen-down on the cushion and stand.
The hallway is dark except for the thin blade of light spilling under Remy's study door, gold against the hardwood.
He's awake. Working on something he won't tell me about with the door closed and the light on.
Later tonight that door will open for me, his hands will find my waist, and I'll stop thinking about coastal initiatives and the difference between being needed and being wanted.
Two men who need what I can do.
The light holds under the door, patient and gold, and I stand in the hallway between the room where my things live and the room where my body will end up, and I don't knock.
Not yet.