Chapter 18
eighteen
Evie
The donor spreadsheet hasn't changed since Tuesday, which means either the foundation's development office is behind on data entry or someone decided these numbers were final.
Neither explanation tracks. The Blanchard Foundation runs quarterly reconciliation like clockwork, and July contributions should have posted by now.
I scroll past the familiar names, cross-referencing against the contact list Margaret sent over last week.
Board members, repeat donors, and the corporate sponsors who show up every year because their PR teams tell them to.
I know these people. I've shaken their hands at galas, remembered their wives' names, laughed at jokes that weren't funny because my father needed their checks to clear.
The coffee beside my laptop went cold an hour ago. I pick it up anyway, take a sip, and set it back down without tasting it.
Behind me, the bed is made with the kind of care that would pass a hotel inspection.
Pillows arranged, duvet smooth, corners tucked.
I did that at six this morning while Remy's shower was still running, my hair still damp from his bathroom, my legs still unsteady from how he'd had me at two AM, hands over mine on the headboard, telling me not to move.
Every morning, the same routine. Slip out of his room before Darcy's alarm goes off at seven, remake this bed like I slept in it, arrange the pillows like someone's head was actually here.
Domestic espionage. My most developed skill set.
I shift in the chair to reach for the cold coffee again, and the movement pulls the neckline of my sweater against my collarbone. Cedar. Clean and unmistakably him, layered underneath my own soap and lotion, settled into my skin like it belongs there.
My stomach tightens, low and immediate, and heat blooms up the back of my neck because my body doesn't care that it's eleven in the morning and I'm looking at a spreadsheet.
Three nights, each one more urgent than the last. His hands rougher, his mouth more demanding, the French coming faster and less controlled.
Two nights ago he had my back against the wall before we made it to the bed, my thighs around his waist, his teeth on my throat.
Last night his hands found me before I was fully awake.
I press my knees together under the desk and force my eyes back to the screen.
The spreadsheet. Focus.
Row forty-seven. Pacific Future Initiative, $175,000, Q3.
I've seen the name before in my father's correspondence, but when I try to place it against an actual website, a board of directors, a mission statement, there's nothing solid.
Just the name, the number, and a vague philanthropic blur in the original pledge letter.
Language that could mean anything because it was designed to mean anything.
I've filed things like this before. Not here, not about this specific entry, but the feeling is the same.
The kind of discrepancy I'd notice at a donor dinner and then let go of because my father's office handles vetting and my father's office is thorough and my father wouldn't let one through that didn't belong.
Remy's phone has been face-down on the nightstand for three days.
Tuesday he left the bed at four AM and came back smelling like coffee and cold air.
Wednesday a browser window closed the second I crossed the study threshold.
Yesterday his jaw was tight through dinner, and Darcy didn't notice because she was explaining the algorithmic reach of her latest campaign post, but I noticed because I've spent my whole life reading the distance between a man's smile and his eyes.
Three days of data points. No conclusion. Just the accumulation sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed without meaning to.
He's keeping something from you.
The thought arrives with certainty. I don't push it away. I don't follow it either.
"EVIE!" Darcy's voice rockets up the stairwell with enough force to rattle the window. "Get down here RIGHT NOW, I found the most unhinged vintage shop on Haight Street and I bought things, like plural things, and I need you to tell me I'm not insane before I go back for the jacket."
I close the spreadsheet. Minimize the window. The screen goes back to the default blue I've never bothered to change.
I stand up, leave the cold coffee and the laptop on the desk, and head for the stairs.
The kitchen noise hits before I reach the landing. Tissue paper crinkling, Darcy mid-sentence about a clasp, the coffee maker gurgling through a fresh cycle. I come down the last flight and round the corner into the wreckage.
Darcy has commandeered the entire island.
Three shopping bags are disemboweled across the marble, tissue paper blooming out of them like flowers nobody asked for.
A pair of wide-leg trousers is draped over the coffee maker.
There's a scrap of fabric that might be a scarf or might be a tablecloth pooled next to her laptop.
And Darcy, orbiting the wreckage with a ceramic mug in one hand and a beaded clutch in the other, talking a mile a minute in the way that means caffeine was involved well before I came downstairs.
"Okay so THIS," she holds the clutch up like evidence in a trial, "was buried under moth-eaten fur coats and the woman at the register had it priced at twelve dollars. Twelve. It's nineteen-fifties, look at the clasp, that's hand-set brass."
I take the clutch from her and turn it over. Tiny seed pearls in a chevron pattern, decades of patina on the catch. "It's beautiful."
"RIGHT? And there's a jacket I had to leave behind because I'd already maxed out my arms."
I laugh, and the sound comes easy because Darcy makes everything easy. She always has. Since we were six and she decided I was hers, pulling me into the LeBlanc kitchen like friendship was a fact she already knew and I just hadn't been informed yet.
"You're going back for the jacket."
"YES! Of course I am, do you even know me?" She shoves the bags to one side and pulls her laptop closer, angling the screen toward me. "But FIRST. Remember Yuki, the ceramics woman on Valencia?"
"The glazed planters."
"Her Instagram is doing her zero favors and I'm fixing it. I need your brain for the strategy because you actually understand brand narrative and I understand how to make things pretty. What's her story?"
I lean against the counter, already thinking. "Build the maker story first. People don't buy ceramics from an Instagram grid, they buy them from a person they feel connected to. Show her hands, the process, the studio. Let the product sell itself through the craft."
Darcy points at me with her mug. "SEE. This is why I need you."
"You knew something was missing, I just gave you the structure."
"Exactly." She grins, dimples deep, and pulls her laptop back to start typing. "Oh, and Tripp said he'd be late tonight, a work thing, so dinner's on us."
My fingers tighten on the edge of the counter.
A brief contraction that moves through my hand and up my forearm before I release it.
The marble is cold and smooth and his palm pressed against the small of my back right here three mornings ago, guiding me toward the coffee maker while Darcy was still asleep upstairs.
"Works for me." My voice doesn't change. "What are we thinking, takeout or should I cook?"
Darcy launches into a passionate defense of a Thai place she found on Clement Street, and I'm nodding, following, and genuinely engaged, when the spreadsheet surfaces uninvited in my mind.
Pacific Future Initiative. Row forty-seven.
The name floats up small and unremarkable, the way the wrong notes always do, and I push it back down before Darcy gets to green curry.
Then the front door opens.
Darcy doesn't look up from her laptop. Her fingers keep moving, her mouth keeps going. An opinion about coconut rice and whether it's rude to request extra basil twice in one week.
My attention shifts toward the foyer.
The front door opens, and Remy's voice carries down the hall before his footsteps do. Low, and easy, the register I've come to know as his professional default. Not cold, not warm. Calibrated.
But there's a second voice with his, and it isn't Jax's booming laugh or Kade's measured bass. It's rapid and female and punctuated by what sounds like a Star Wars reference I can't quite catch.
Vanessa.
I know Vanessa. I like Vanessa. I've been around her a handful of times, once at the office in a hoodie that said Han Shot First, and spending twenty minutes explaining her monitor naming system to Darcy while Asher watched her from across the room with the kind of stillness that made the air feel five degrees cooler.
She's brilliant and completely, irrevocably in love with a man who is learning Tagalog for her.
I know all of this.
My fingers curl into my palms anyway.
Their footsteps pass the kitchen doorway without stopping.
I catch a half-second glimpse. Remy's hand on the back of his own neck the way he does when he's thinking.
Vanessa a full step behind him with her laptop bag slung crossbody, her phone already in her hand.
Her posture is forward, chin down. Not socializing. Working.
They turn toward the stairs, and Remy's hand drops from his neck to the banister. He doesn't look toward the kitchen.
"Oh wait, is that Vanessa?" Darcy's head pops up from her laptop, neck craning toward the stairs. "VANESSA! Hey! Come say hi, I want to show you Yuki's stuff, you would LOVE her aesthetic."
Vanessa calls back, already halfway up the stairs. "Rain check? Asher's picking me up in twenty and if I'm late he'll time it to the second and then I'll never hear the end of it."
"He WOULD do that." Darcy grins, settling back into her chair. "Tell him I said he needs to smile more. Actually, don't tell him that, he'll just stare at me and I'll feel judged. Tell him I said hi."