Chapter 19
nineteen
Remy
"But the stems were already brown, so I just cut them back to the node and hoped for the best."
Evie leans against the island with her coffee held in both hands, her hair still damp from the shower and curling along her back like she hasn't touched it with the flat iron.
No makeup. One of my t-shirts hanging off her shoulder where the neck is stretched out, and cotton shorts that barely clear her thighs.
She looks like she belongs in this kitchen, and the thought arrives without any of the usual resistance behind it.
"You can't kill basil by cuttin' it back." I crack the third egg into the bowl one-handed, tossing the shell toward the compost bin. "Odette used to take hers down to nothin' every August and it'd come back twice as thick. The rosemary's the one you gotta worry about."
"The rosemary looks fine."
"The rosemary looks like it's thinkin' about dying and hasn't committed yet.
" I whisk the eggs with a fork, fast, wrist loose, how Odette taught me, and reach past Evie for the salt.
My hand brushes across her lower back, and she leans into the pressure without turning her head.
Just a slight shift of weight, her hip cocking toward me, her coffee coming back to her mouth.
"You're hovering," she says, mouth at the rim of her mug.
"I'm cookin'."
"You're mixing. At the counter. Two feet away from me." She gestures at the open space around them. "The kitchen's enormous."
"That's the only way I know how to do it." I tap the side of the bowl with the fork. "Odette taught me. Stand close enough to the person you're feedin' that they have to defend their space."
"Odette has a galley kitchen."
I don't answer that.
I glance over. Her expression is composed, but the corner of her mouth has gone soft, and I know exactly which version of her is asking. I let the look land for one beat too long. Look back at the pan before I give my sister an opening she can hear from upstairs.
"Eat your eggs when they're done, ma'am."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't yes sir me at eight in the morning."
"You started it."
The fridge is full. I don't remember stocking it.
But there's cream and butter and the thick-cut bacon from the butcher on Chestnut that Darcy found three weeks ago, and eggs from the farmers market, and the hot sauce Evie likes that isn't the hot sauce I like, and a container of the rice she made last night sitting on the middle shelf with a piece of tape on the lid that says REMY — DON'T THROW AWAY in her handwriting.
I move to the stove and pour the eggs into the pan. They hit the butter and hiss, and I tilt the handle to spread them across the surface, keeping the heat low.
Evie moves to the coffee maker without being asked, refilling my mug and setting it on the counter beside the stove where I can reach it, and the choreography of it hits me somewhere behind the ribs. We don't adjust for each other anymore. We just move.
It happened sometime when I wasn't watching.
Upstairs, the guest room door is closed. Bed made, pillows set, the whole careful performance still standing. The pretense has gotten thinner by the week and I'm not doing anything about it.
But Evie is reaching past me for a plate, her chest brushing my arm, and she smells like my soap because she ran out of hers four days ago and hasn't replaced it. I noticed the day it happened. That's probably relevant information about where I am with this.
The eggs are curling at the edges exactly right. The morning light through the kitchen window is doing something to her skin that makes the hollow of her throat glow gold. She reaches up to push her damp hair off her neck and the hem of my shirt rides above her hip.
There it is. Three small marks, two days old, fading from red to violet. The medic clocks the healing timeline automatically. The rest of me just stands there with a coffee mug, observing a bruise I put there at two AM like that's a normal thing to be doing on a Tuesday morning.
My mouth twitches. I bring the coffee mug up and take a slow sip, hiding it behind the rim.
She doesn't know it's visible. She thinks the shirt covers it, and it does, until she reaches for things on high shelves in a kitchen built for someone a foot taller than her.
The medic clocks the capillary damage, the depth, the healing timeline.
The rest of me just stands there drinking coffee with a bruise I made on a woman wearing my shirt in my kitchen, and the coffee tastes better than it has any right to.
My body responds with a directness that has nothing to do with eggs or morning light or the domestic tableau we're standing in.
I shift my weight against the counter. Adjust my stance behind the island.
Your sister is ten feet above you and alert. Get it together.
"What are you smilin' about over there." Evie doesn't look up from her coffee.
"Nothin'."
"That's not a nothin' face."
"You can't see my face, you're lookin' at your mug."
"I have peripheral vision, Remington."
"Don't Remington me at eight in the mornin' either."
She laughs, low and unguarded, and the sound lands somewhere between my ribs and my spine. I lift my coffee. Take another sip to keep my mouth busy.
A thump from upstairs. The particular heavy shuffle of bare feet on hardwood that means Darcy is vertical, and we have approximately four minutes before hurricane landfall.
Evie's eyes meet mine over the rim of her mug. One eyebrow lifts, barely.
"Four minutes." I slide the eggs onto the plate. "Maybe three."
"I'll make more coffee."
She straightens and reaches for the coffee maker, still close enough that her arm brushes mine. Darcy reaches the doorway before either of us thinks to change that.
She's barefoot in my old Tulane sweatshirt, the one she stole out of my hamper the year before I left and has refused to return on the principle that I went away for eight years and the sweatshirt was the price. The hem hits her mid-thigh. Her hair is a situation.
"Okay so the farmers market honey is crystallizing already and I need to know if that's normal or if that man lied to my face because he seemed very trustworthy but also he had a ponytail and I feel like that's, I don't know, I just—"
She stops mid-word with one foot still in the doorway and the other on the kitchen tile. Her mouth keeps moving for half a beat after the sound stops.
Her eyes move. The counter, then me, then Evie, then back.
The two portions of eggs, already split.
The mugs side by side. My hand still resting on the counter behind Evie's back like it forgot to leave when the rest of me did.
The fact that neither of us stepped further apart when she came in, because it didn't occur to us to.
"Oh my GOD."
Evie goes still beside me. I can feel the tension lock through her shoulders without touching her.
"I KNEW IT." Darcy's hands come up to her face, fingers pressed against her cheeks, and her eyes are enormous and blue and filling with something that isn't anger.
Not even close to anger. "I knew it, I knew it, I KNEW it.
Grams was right. Grams called it. She literally sat me down before I left and said, Darcy, chère, those two are going to figure it out, and I said Grams that is insane, and she said just watch, and I said—"
"Darcy." I set the fork down on the counter and lean my hip against the island, arms crossing over my chest.
"—Tripp hasn't seen her in eight years, there's no way, and Grams just did that thing with her face, you know the face, the one where she looks at you like you're a sweet idiot and she loves you anyway—"
"Darcy." I push off the island and take a step toward her, but she's not even looking at me anymore.
"—and she was RIGHT, oh my God, she is never going to let me hear the end of this, I have to call her, I have to call her right now—"
"You're not callin' anyone right now."
The g dropped off the end of that without permission.
I heard it. Waited for the usual flinch, the internal correction, the snap back to the boarding school vowels I've worn for eight years.
It didn't come. The kitchen was too full of coffee and Darcy's voice and the woman leaning against my counter in my shirt.
Then it hits me. I've been doing it all morning.
Huh.
Darcy's hand freezes halfway to her pocket. She blinks at me with the wounded expression of someone whose Christmas morning just got a speed limit.
Evie hasn't moved. I glance down and her composure is holding, but barely.
The flush is climbing her neck, pink and spreading across her collarbones and up toward her jaw.
Her fingers are tight around her coffee mug.
Her breath has gone shallow. Pupils dilated despite the bright kitchen.
The medic files it before I can stop him, and I try to file the medic right back, and the medic doesn't go.
"Darce." Evie's voice comes out careful, measured, the tone she uses at Senate dinners when someone says something unpredictable and she needs to manage the room. "You're not... you're okay with this?"
Darcy's entire face rearranges into confusion.
"Okay with it? Evie. EVIE. I have been waiting for this since we were seventeen years old.
Grams used to say you two were going to end up together and I thought she was just being Grams but she was RIGHT and I am so happy I could actually cry, and also I'm a little mad you didn't tell me but mostly I'm happy, like ninety-eight percent happy and two percent mad, okay maybe ninety-five five but the point IS—"
Evie makes a sound. Small, almost nothing, a breath that cracks at the edge, and then she's across the kitchen with her arms around Darcy.