Chapter 23
twenty-three
Evie
The guest room bed is narrower than Remy's mattress but it feels wider.
Three weeks of sleeping next to him recalibrated something, and now the empty space on both sides reads as too much instead of too little. Cool cotton where I've gotten used to linen and the warmth of his skin. My body logs every difference whether I ask it to or not.
My left hip aches from a mattress that doesn't dip where his does. Darcy's jacket is zipped to my chin, the denim collar rough against my jaw, and my dress creased from every position I tried before I stopped trying.
The light comes from the wrong side. East-facing window, flat morning, no gold stripe across the floor where Remy's blackout curtains never quite meet.
You chose this room.
I did. Walked past his door, knew he wouldn't sleep either, and kept walking.
Put my hand on this doorknob, turned it, lay down on this bed in last night's fundraiser dress, didn't cry.
The not-crying felt less like strength and more like a faucet that's been turned so hard in one direction the handle stripped.
I'm not leaving the house. The thought arrives without debate.
Leaving means Darcy alone in the kitchen tomorrow asking where I went.
It means returning to my father's office and the cardboard cutout of a daughter I've been operating from behind.
It means I chose comfort over the mess, which is my mother's sin, and I've committed enough of her sins for one lifetime.
Underneath the soreness, deeper, the thing he built into me. A low hum lodged in my nervous system, a frequency I didn't choose and can't return, still answering even with him on the other side of two doors.
I didn't discover anything from that card. I confirmed it. The wire transfer I processed without asking, the rooms I was told to leave, the donors whose names surfaced once and never again.
I'd been filing all of it for years in a drawer labeled this is fine, and one conversation on a rooftop ripped it open.
I sit up. Fold Darcy's jacket into a neat square on the pillow. Unzip the dress and let it fall, then pull on my own jeans, my bra that hooks where my fingers expect it to, my cotton shirt. The clothes fit the same, and nothing about wearing them answers the question of who's inside them.
Downstairs, a cabinet closes. I hear the muted percussion of a French press being assembled. He's up.
I don't go down yet. I sit on the edge of the bed long enough to feel my pulse return to something I'd call a baseline if I trusted the term. Long enough for the smell of coffee to climb the stairs and find me. Then I go down.
The kitchen smells like coffee and cedar soap.
Remy stands at the counter with a mug in his hand, dressed for the day and his hair damp from the shower. His eyes find me the second I cross the threshold, and for once there's nothing calculating behind them. He's run out of angles.
"Coffee's ready."
"Thank you."
I cross to the cabinet for a mug, pour from the French press he's already prepared, add the splash of cream that's sitting out because he set it there for me. Then I take my coffee to the far end of the island where the third stool sits tucked near the wall.
I never sit here. This is Darcy's stool when she's scrolling her phone, farthest from the stove, closest to the window. I pull it out, sit down, and wrap both hands around the mug.
Remy doesn't turn to look. He registers the new distance without moving his head. He doesn't comment and drinks his coffee and looks at the window above the sink where the morning fog hasn't burned off yet, and the twelve feet of countertop between us is colder than the marble.
Darcy's feet hit the stairs at full speed.
"Okay so I had the WILDEST dream, like genuinely unhinged, there was a pelican but it was wearing a blazer and it was running for office?
And I think Grams was its campaign manager?
" She rounds the corner into the kitchen already at full volume, hair piled on top of her head in a knot, sleep still soft in her face but her mouth already three sentences ahead of her brain.
"Also the hot water cut out halfway through my shower, which, Tripp, we need to discuss, because I was mid-conditioner and that is a HOSTILE act. "
She pours coffee. Adds enough cream to turn it beige. Leans against the counter between us and looks at me.
"Evie, you would have died. The blazer was pinstriped."
"That's a strong look for a pelican." I say the right words in the right order with the right warmth, and I hear them land flat before they finish leaving my lips, the charm arriving without the engine behind it.
Darcy's mug pauses halfway to her mouth. She looks from me to Remy and back, alert and quick, reading the space between us and filing it somewhere behind that chaotic exterior.
"What's..." She stops. Recalibrates and tries again with a different angle, her default pivot when a room isn't responding to the first approach. "What are y'all doing today? Because I was thinking maybe the Ferry Building, or that bookstore on Clement that has the cat."
"I have a meeting." I set my mug down carefully, both hands releasing at the same time. "Margaret's foundation. She wants to go over the benefit logistics for next month."
"Oh fun! Can I come? I've been dying to meet her, you talk about her like she's Oprah but with better blazers."
"It's a working meeting, Darce. But I'll tell her you said that."
Darcy grins, but the grin fades at the edges when I don't match it. She glances at Remy. Her eyes drop to his hands wrapped around the mug, then come back to me.
"Evie." Darcy's voice shifts down half a register, enough that I hear the question underneath my name.
"I'll be back by lunch." I slide off the stool, carry my mug to the sink, and set it in the basin without rinsing. One piece of training I'm letting drop today.
Heading back to my bag, I pass Remy at the counter, close enough to catch the cedar soap on his skin and see his forearm tensing on the counter edge when I pass. My pulse kicks once, hard, a response my body delivers before my brain can override it.
I don't look at him.
The front door closes behind me with a soft click that lands harder than it should.
The house is too quiet when I let myself back in. Darcy-quiet, the kind that means she's somewhere being still, which she never is.
I'm halfway up the stairs when I see her door standing open. Inside, Darcy's in front of the bed, surrounded by the detritus of a life that filled this space so thoroughly even the walls look startled to see it leaving.
Clothes cover every surface. A curling iron sits on the dresser next to three half-empty bottles of dry shampoo, a stack of vintage postcards she bought on Haight Street, and a ceramic planter shaped like a cat that she found at the farmers market and named Beignet.
"Okay so before you say anything." Darcy holds up one hand without turning around, the other clutching a romper she's trying to fold into something that will fit in a duffel designed for a person who packs like a rational human being. "Corbin called."
I set my bag down in the doorway and lean against the frame. "When?"
"This morning. While you were out." She abandons the romper, tosses it onto the bed, and turns toward me.
Her expression isn't panicked. It's stiller and harder than that, the look of a woman who has spent her whole life being the loudest person in every room and is now choosing her words with the kind of care that makes my chest tight. "It's Mom."
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened. That's the thing." Darcy pulls a sweater off the back of the desk chair and folds it with surprising neatness, her hands doing the work while her mouth finds the words.
"Corbin says she's just... not. Not eating much.
Not leaving the house. Not answering when Landry calls, which, okay, she never answers when Landry calls because Landry calls like he's conducting a board meeting, but she's not answering Corbin either, and Corbin's the one she actually talks to. "
I cross the room and pick up the romper she abandoned. Fold it the way she likes, with the straps tucked in so they don't tangle. Set it in the open duffel.
"He didn't say come home." Darcy watches me fold, and her whole expression eases a fraction when someone takes a small task off her hands without being asked.
"He said 'I think someone should be here.
' Which is Corbin-speak for 'I'm twenty years old and I don't know how to do this by myself,' which is also, if we're being honest, the exact same thing Tripp would say if Tripp ever admitted he needed help with anything.
Apparently that gene skipped me entirely because I just say HELP in all caps. "
"You do."
"I really do." She picks up the cat planter, considers him, and sets him on the dresser with a gentleness that tells me he's staying.
"She was doing better. After Senior died, she was, I don't know.
Lighter? Like someone opened a window. Then Tripp came home and left again.
Odette's whole thing happened. I think maybe the window closed. "
I fold a tank top. Then another. The rhythm of it is easy, worn in. Darcy and I have always worked in parallel, her talking, me making the physical world cooperate around her words. "Have you talked to Landry?"
"Landry thinks she needs a therapist, which, yes, obviously, but you can't therapist someone into eating dinner, Evie, you have to actually sit at the table.
" She shoves a pair of sandals into the side pocket of the duffel with more force than the sandals deserve.
"I'm not going because something's wrong.
I'm going because Corbin shouldn't be the only one paying attention. "
The distinction matters to her. It lands when she hits "shouldn't," the word carrying weight she won't distribute anywhere else.