Chapter 23 #2
"Darce." I hold up a bikini top, two mismatched earrings, and a tube of mascara that have somehow gotten tangled together into a single artifact. "You're going to Louisiana. Why am I holding a bikini?"
"Because I'm an optimist and also because you never know."She snatches the tangle from my hand and has it apart in two seconds flat, tossing the bikini into the duffel and the earrings onto the dresser. "Also I run hot. I'm a warm person. Thermally and emotionally."
"You're packing for three different climates and a beach vacation."
"I'm packing for CONTINGENCIES." She holds up a sequined top. "What if there's a party?"
"At your mother's house. While she's not eating."
Darcy stares at the sequined top. Puts it back on the bed. "Fine. That one can stay."
The room gets emptier with each item that goes into the bag instead of back onto a surface. The bathroom counter, visible through the open door, has already been wiped clean, her products vanished into a toiletry bag that sits fat and overstuffed on the edge of the tub.
I fold a cardigan, stack her books, wind her charger into a neat loop, and the room is a little less Darcy with each step, until what's left is Remy's guest room again, the one that smelled like nothing before she got here.
My hands slow on the charger cord.
Darcy doesn't know.
She's folding her life back into luggage ten feet from where her brother touched me in the dark while I pretended to sleep, and she doesn't know. She's leaving me in this house with a man who conditioned my body to respond to a word, who is investigating my father, who is, who has been—
Who has been what, Evangeline?
I can't finish it. The sentence sits in my chest with its mouth open and nothing comes out, because finishing it means choosing a word, and every word I have is either too small or too large.
None of them fit what Remy is to me. That's the entire problem.
That's why I slept in the guest room last night instead of his bed.
That's why I'm standing here folding Darcy's clothes while the only buffer between me and whatever comes next packs herself into two bags and a carry-on.
"Hey." Darcy's hand lands on my wrist, her fingers heavy and grounding. "You okay?"
I look up. Her blue eyes hold mine, and for a moment the hurricane is completely still. My best friend in a half-empty room holding my arm and asking the question she always asks when I go blank.
"I'm good." The words come out even and honest enough that Darcy's fingers loosen on my wrist, because I am good, if good means holding the shape of something while everything underneath gives.
"You don't have to stay, you know." Darcy says it casually, reaching for another pair of shoes, but the offer underneath is real. "You could come with me. Grams would lose her mind. In a good way."
Louisiana. Odette's kitchen. The house that smells like coffee, old wood, the bone-deep belonging of a family that breaks and repairs itself in equal measure. The pull of it is real. I let myself feel it for a second, then set it down.
"I have the benefit next week. Margaret's counting on me for the logistics." True. Also a wall I'm building between myself and the exit, because if I leave now I will never come back to this house, and there are things in this house I haven't finished understanding yet.
Darcy nods. Doesn't push. Zips the coral duffel with a sound that is more final than it has any right to be, and straightens up, and looks around the room that no longer belongs to her.
"Beignet stays." She points at the ceramic cat. "He's yours now. I named him after the only food worth flying home for. He's beige. He's useless. I love him. He needs someone who appreciates him."
"I'll water him."
"He's ceramic, Evie."
"Low maintenance. I could use one of those."
Darcy's laugh fills the room like it always does, too big for the space, and for three seconds the guest room is hers again.
Then the laugh fades. The room is only a room.
She slings the duffel strap over her shoulder, picks up her carry-on, and I follow her into the hallway where the afternoon sun cuts across the hardwood.
Remy meets us at the top of the stairs and reaches for the other duffel. Darcy lets him. She doesn't always. She fights him on every chivalry instinct he has, calls them outdated, calls him grandpa. Today she hands over the strap without a word. It's its own kind of goodbye.
He carries both bags down the stairs while we follow.
The foyer is narrow. Remy sets the bags by the front door and straightens. Darcy stands between them with her jacket back on her shoulders, the denim one she draped over me on the rooftop last night, returned to its owner.
"Okay." Darcy faces Remy. Puts both hands on his arms, right above the elbows, and holds on. "You're coming for Thanksgiving."
Remy's mouth opens, and Darcy shakes her head once, sharp, already decided on the outcome while the other person is still arriving at the question.
"Nope. You're coming. Grams is already planning the menu and if you bail she'll fake another heart episode and we'll all end up right back here, so just save everyone the drama and show up.
" Her grip tightens on his arms. "Mom misses you, Tripp.
She won't say it because she's Mom and not saying things out loud is apparently a side effect of marrying into this family, but she asks Corbin about you every week. Every single week."
Sylvie. I know her name even though Darcy only ever says Mom.
I watch it land on Remy like weather changing, a shift behind his eyes he doesn't mask fast enough, his jaw tightening by a fraction before the rest of him catches up.
But for that half-second, he's a son who hasn't spoken to his mother in eight years, and the distance is on his face like a bruise.
He doesn't smooth it over. He breathes out. Once. Looks at the foyer wall behind Darcy, then back at his sister. When his eyes find her again the Louisiana drawl has come thick into his voice.
"The jet's hers." He says it low. "For her. For Landry. For Corbin. Anyone." He swallows the next word and forces it through. "Mom. The jet's hers, Darce. Whenever she wants out of that house."
"Tripp—"
"And tell her I'll come before Thanksgiving." He stops. Looks past Darcy at nothing. "If she needs me before then. Don't make her ask Corbin to ask. Just tell her I'll come."
For a second Darcy doesn't have an exit line. Her mouth that runs three sentences ahead of her brain is just sitting in the silence, considering the brother who has not, in eight years, offered anyone in their family a thing without making them ask twice.
Her eyes go bright. She blinks it back hard.
"I'll fly commercial," she says finally, soft. "They give you those little cookies."
"They give you cookies on the jet."
"It's not the SAME, Tripp, the commercial cookies taste like victory because you survived the middle seat."
She pulls him into a hug, hard, both arms around his neck, her cheek pressed into his shoulder. Remy's arms close around his sister, his eyes shut, his hand spreads wide across her back.
I stand three feet away watching someone love him with no conditions, no walls, no distance between the feeling and the expression of it.
My ribs ache with this feeling. It's not grief.
Nor envy. I don't have a name for it yet.
Only a location, right in the center of my chest where the breath keeps stopping short.
Darcy lets go. Turns to me.
"Come here." She opens her arms. I step into them. She holds me like she's held me since we were fourteen, tight and sure and completely ignorant of every reason this hug should feel like a knife. "Take care of my brother. He's hopeless without supervision."
She pulls back and looks between us, her gaze bouncing from me to Remy and back. Then she winks at me, slow and pleased, like two people standing six feet apart in a silent foyer is exactly the love story she ordered.
"Y'all are so cute it makes me sick." She grabs her bags. "I'll text when I land."
The front door opens. Closes. Her footsteps on the front steps, then the car door, then the engine turning over, then the sound pulling away down the street until there's nothing left of it.
The house settles into the silence Darcy left behind.
The foyer holds us. Two people who have run out of buffer, the walls close and the light flat and the silence filling every inch that Darcy's voice used to occupy.
I move first. Past Remy without touching him. Up the stairs.
The upstairs hallway is twenty feet long. I've measured it in footsteps, in held breaths, in the number of times I've walked it barefoot at two in the morning with my heart in my throat and my door left open like an answer to a question nobody asked out loud.
Darcy's room is dark. The door stands open where she left it, and the bare mattress glows faintly in the streetlight coming through the window, stripped of sheets, stripped of the chaos that made it hers.
Beignet the ceramic cat sits on the dresser watching nothing with painted eyes. The nail holes in the wall are small and neat, the only evidence that postcards lived there once, and the room smells like cleaning product and absence, a scent so aggressively neutral it registers as loss.
I keep walking.
Remy's door is closed. He's downstairs, in the foyer or the kitchen, gone as still as I am, and the length of the whole house is between us and it isn't far enough.
My pulse picks up anyway. My skin warms, back of my neck first, then lower, the lazy inevitability of a response trained into my body that one night in a different room hasn't uninstalled.
He isn't even up here. It doesn't matter.
His bed is twelve feet away through a closed door and my body remembers his bed.
He built this. Or he built around what was already there. I can't tell where my own wanting ends and his conditioning begins.
I could go down to him. Find whatever room he's gone quiet in, say the true thing, watch him do what he does when I strip the performance away.
Shoulders dropping. Eyes going soft. Louisiana climbing back into his throat until he's the man underneath every man he's ever pretended to be.
My body wants to with a clarity I can feel in my hands.
I could also leave. Pack a bag, call a car, text Darcy from the airport. Be in Louisiana by morning, in Odette's kitchen by noon, in a life that doesn't require me to choose between the man who conditioned my body and the father whose crimes I processed without asking questions.
I don't do either.
My hand finds the guest room doorknob. The brass is cool under my palm.
I step inside. My room. My bed. The one I slept in when I first arrived, before his room, before the open doors and the silent invitations and the slow erosion of every boundary I thought I was maintaining while my body was already answering questions my mind hadn't agreed to ask.
The door closes behind me.
All the way. The latch catches with a click that sounds like a period at the end of a sentence I've been writing for weeks, small and definite.
I sit on the bed. Pull my knees up. Press my back against the wall and feel the cool plaster through my shirt and breathe, and the breath goes all the way down this time, past my ribs, past the place where it's been catching for two days, all the way to the bottom of my lungs where the air finally has somewhere to go.
He won't sleep tonight. I don't need to check.