Chapter 21
twenty-one
Evie
The front door opens into the foyer and the late afternoon light follows us in, cutting across the hardwood in long rectangles that have become familiar over the weeks I've walked through them.
Remy's keys hit the counter, and his jacket goes over the back of the kitchen chair.
He never hangs it up no matter how many times Darcy tells him to move it to the closet.
"Diane Lau cornered you for what, twenty minutes?" He opens the fridge, pulls out a water bottle, cracks the cap. "Thought I was going to have to extract you."
"Twenty-three." My purse goes on the island. My heels stay on. "She has opinions about quarterly reporting cycles."
"Riveting."
"You have no idea."
He leans against the counter and drinks, throat working, and my body tilts toward him when we're alone in this kitchen, the muscle memory of weeks of standing exactly this close while Darcy isn't looking.
Except now Darcy knows. We don't have to hide. The relief of it surges through me before my brain remembers what's in my pocket. My shoulder almost touches his arm.
I reach into my pocket.
The card comes out folded, warm from my skin, crease sharp. I hold it between two fingers and extend it toward him, the practiced handoff of a business card at a fundraiser. No explanation. No preamble. Just the card.
He takes it.
And I watch.
His eyes drop to the text. PFI-7734-JRB. The water bottle lowers to the counter slowly, and his expression stays perfectly, professionally neutral, the kind of blank that takes training to hold.
He already knows what this is.
"How long have you known?"
It comes out level. The programming, one last time. Posture perfect, hands steady at my sides.
His eyes come up from the card. Green and careful, running calculations I can see because I grew up watching a man who runs the same ones. The split-second assessment of what to reveal, what to hold back, what version of the truth fits the moment.
There it is.
"Evie." He sets the card on the counter between us. "The team flagged financial irregularities in a donor network weeks ago. I've been trying to run it down, trying to prove it was coincidental, that the connections didn't lead where they looked like they were leading."
"How many weeks?"
"I wanted to protect you from what might have been nothing."
"How many weeks, Remy."
His mouth opens and I see the next sentence forming, and I don't need to hear it because I can count backward on my own. The nights in his bed. The mornings in his kitchen. The way he turned his phone screen-down at breakfast.
Each night. He knew every night.
The front door opens behind me.
Darcy's voice comes through first, bright and scattered ahead of her, shopping bags rustling against the doorframe.
"Tripp, I found the most insane vintage jacket on Clement Street, you have to see it, it's got these little—"
She rounds the corner into the kitchen and stops.
Her eyes go to my face first. Not the card on the counter, not Remy. My face. And whatever she sees there pulls the brightness out of her like someone hit a switch.
"Evie?"
"I'm fine." I pull my purse off the island. "I'm fine."
Darcy's mouth opens but I'm already past her, already moving, and behind me I hear Remy push off the counter, his footsteps starting after me, and then Darcy's voice dropping an octave to a register I've only heard twice in the years I've know ner.
"Tripp. Don't."
The footsteps stop.
The hallway is twelve steps from the kitchen island to the staircase.
I know because I've walked it every morning for weeks, barefoot, wearing his shirt, counting without knowing I was counting.
My heels click against the hardwood now, measured and even.
The measured strike my mother taught me when I was eight.
I catch the banister, the wood smooth under my palm where it's been polished by years of hands that weren't mine.
I take the first step and the heel strikes harder than I mean it to, the sound bouncing off the walls of a house that's too quiet for its size, and I soften the next one on purpose because I will not give him the satisfaction of hearing me climb.
Second floor. The guest room door is still open from this morning, my sweater draped over the chair where I slept for the first month before his bed became the place I went instead.
I don't look in. Past the study and the master suite is twelve feet of air I've crossed in the dark so many times my body knows the exact number of steps, and his bedroom door is closed.
I slow.
Not because I want to. Because my body remembers what's behind that door before my brain can override it. The feel of his hand on my hip in the dark, the way his mouth found the hollow of my throat while I was still half-asleep, the gravel of his accent bleeding through.
He asked something of me, and my whole body answered before he'd finished the question. Cedar and clean linen and the warmth of his skin against mine in a room he keeps cold on purpose so that touching him becomes necessary instead of optional.
My hand tightens on the banister and I keep climbing.
Third floor. The door to the roof sticks, swollen in its frame from the marine air, and I push it open with my shoulder because my hands aren't steady enough to trust with the handle.
The air hits me immediately, salt and wind off the bay cutting through the thin fabric of my dress.
I dressed for a fundraiser, not for whatever this is.
His garden spreads across the rooftop in careful rows, terra cotta pots and raised beds and the busy rosemary he waters every morning before coffee.
The herbs are still green. Basil. Thyme.
A plant with small purple flowers I've never learned the name of because I never asked because I thought there would be time.
I stand in his garden, cold.
The fog is already claiming the bay, the bridge disappearing in pieces, the city shrinking to this rooftop and the plants and the dress that was wrong for this three hours ago. My arms are wrapped around myself. I gave up on not doing that about five minutes ago.
Below me, footsteps on the stairs. Lighter than his, faster, taking them two at a time.
The rooftop door sticks and then gives. Darcy steps through into the fog, finds me among his rosemary.
She stops.
I watch her shoulders drop, her chin lift, her mouth open and then close without the sentence that was loaded behind it. Something older than tonight surfaces in her expression, a recognition that sits deeper.
She doesn't ask what happened.
She walks over and stands beside me, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off her but not touching, and looks out at the fog where the city used to be.
"Nice night for it."
"Gorgeous. The fog's really something."
Darcy waits a beat. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where you sound like you're hosting a dinner party and your eyes are somewhere else entirely." She shifts her weight, and I feel her looking at the side of me with the particular attention of someone who's been watching me since we were six. "The Camera Evie thing."
The corner of my mouth pulls up. It's not a real smile but it's close enough to pass, and I'm performing for Darcy, who has never once required a performance from me.
"I'm fine, Darce."
The wind pushes the fog closer. The rosemary at my hip lifts its scent, green and clean in the cold air. My hand drifts toward the nearest pot without permission, fingers brushing the edge of a terra cotta rim still warm from the afternoon sun that's long gone.
His plant. His soil. His patient, daily attention poured into living things.
I pull my hand back.
"You went quiet like this at Georgetown.
" Darcy's voice is low and careful, stripped of every exclamation point she owns, and the absence of her normal volume hits harder than shouting would.
"Sophomore year. You'd been told what to do and who to be your whole life, and the first time you got dropped somewhere with nobody watching, you didn't know what to do with the silence.
You stopped answering texts for nine days.
I flew out and pulled you out of that dorm because if I hadn't, I don't know that you'd have walked out on your own. "
The fog is on my skin now, fine droplets collecting on my bare arms, and I'm shivering but the shiver feels distant, like it belongs to someone standing next to me instead of inside my own body.
"That was different."
"Was it?" Not accusatory. "Because it looks the same from where I'm standing. The quiet. The perfect answers. You going somewhere I can't reach."
My throat tightens. The card is in my pocket, the crease sharp against my thigh, and behind my eyes the kitchen replays on a loop.
His face when he looked at the card. The trained stillness.
The calculations running behind his eyes like a man choosing which truth to offer from a menu of options, and I know that menu because I grew up setting the table for it.
"I'm cold," I say, and it's the truest thing I've said in an hour.
Darcy shrugs out of her jacket without a word and drapes it over my shoulders, and her hands stay there for a second, warm through the fabric, steadying what she can't see. "Come inside. I'll make that terrible hot chocolate you like with the cayenne."
"In a minute."