Chapter 25
twenty-five
Remy
The garlic hits the oil and I push the wooden spoon through the pan with my left hand while my right scrolls the donor spreadsheet two rows down, and Darcy's voice fills the kitchen from the phone propped against the fruit bowl, bright and breathless and mid-sentence the way she always is, like the conversation started three minutes before she called and I'm just catching up.
"And Corbin, I swear to God, Corbin looks at her and goes, 'Mama, that's not how Grams makes it,' and Mama just, her whole face, Evie, you would've died. She put the spoon down and walked out of the kitchen and didn't come back for forty-five minutes."
I laugh, and it's real, and the sound of it surprises me because I can't remember the last time I made it. "Corbin said that to her face?"
"TO HER FACE. In Grams' kitchen. While Grams was sitting right there pretending to read her prayer book, and you know she heard every word because that woman hears everything including things that haven't been said yet."
I push the hair off my forehead with my wrist because both hands are occupied, one with the spoon and one hovering over the trackpad, and the strand falls right back where it was.
But underneath the layers I've been cooking into these walls for weeks, there's something else.
Cedar and soap and skin that isn't mine, baked into the countertops and the dish towels and the air itself, and my body knows exactly how many days it's been since I stood close enough to smell it on the source.
Eight. My skin has been counting, a low constant hum like a frequency just below hearing that I can't turn off and can't satisfy, living in my sternum, my palms, the backs of my knees.
"How's Sylvie actually doing, though?" I stir the garlic, adjust the heat down.
"Better, I think? She's eating, which, thank God. Corbin's been over by the house every day. He brought her flowers yesterday and she cried, but like, good crying? I think? There's a difference and I'm choosing to believe this was the good kind."
"It was the good kind." I scroll past a row of donor names without reading them, then my eye catches and my hand stops.
James R. Blanchard, $175,000, Pacific Future Initiative.
Same number. Same line item. The wire transfer I flagged in March, hardened into a row on a spreadsheet I built.
My stomach contracts below my ribs, a tight pull I've trained myself to breathe through, and I breathe through it and scroll past and keep stirring.
"Okay so how's Tripp? Is he being weird? He's being weird, isn't he. He doesn't know how to be a person without me managing him."
My hand stills on the spoon for half a second. "He's fine. Working a lot. You know how he gets."
"Evie."
"Darce."
"You're doing the thing where you answer with no information and hope I don't notice. I always notice."
"He's eating. He's sleeping. He leaves for work and comes home." Every sentence is true. None of them touch what's real. I push the hair back with my wrist again and it falls again, and I leave it. "I made him gumbo Tuesday and he ate two bowls, so your brother is alive and fed, I promise."
"Okay but are y'all, like, okay? Because your voice just got smooth." A pause that carries through the phone. "That smooth thing you do. Where you talk like you're hosting instead of living. I called my friend, not the press release."
Camera Evie. She caught it from two thousand miles away.
"I'm literally stirring garlic in my pajamas, Darce. Nothing about me is hosting."
"Mmhmm. Stir prettier next time, then."
The front door opens.
The sound moves through the first floor with the latch and then the weight of the door settling into the frame and then footsteps, even, crossing the hardwood toward the kitchen.
My body knows those footsteps. Eight days of hearing them pass the guest room door without stopping, and the recognition is immediate, physical, a flush that starts at the base of my throat and spreads downward before I can stop it.
"Hey, Darce, I have to go, the bread timer's about to go off."
"That is the fakest excuse you have ever, and you once told your mama you couldn't come to brunch because your car had feelings."
"Love you, call you tomorrow."
"Love you, TELL TRIPP I SAID—"
I end the call.
I set the phone face down on the counter and pick up the spoon. The garlic is just past golden, needs the tomatoes now, so I reach for the can I opened earlier and pour it in. The oil spits. I don't flinch because I'm watching the doorway.
Remy stops at the edge of the kitchen.
My whole body flushes hot, instant and total, a wave that starts between my legs and rolls upward through my belly, my chest, my throat, like someone poured warm water through my center.
My fingers tighten on the spoon handle and my thighs press together, a response I didn't choose and can't stop, my body running a tab I didn't authorize.
I shift my weight against the counter. The pressure makes it worse.
I want to say something that would make my mother faint.
"There's bread in the oven, should be done in about ten minutes." I stir the tomatoes into the garlic and keep my eyes on the pan because looking at him while my pulse is doing this would give away everything I'm trying to hold. "I made enough for two if you haven't eaten."
The sentence comes out measured, even, the cadence of a woman making polite conversation at a dinner she's hosting, and I hear it the second it leaves my mouth. Blanchard mode. I let the next breath come slower and drop whatever that was, just let it fall.
"I haven't eaten." His voice is quieter than usual, stripped of the easy warmth he wears like a jacket. "I should have. Didn't."
Too much honesty for the question I asked.
I look up.
He's leaning against the doorframe with his arms loose at his sides, and something happened today.
I can read it in the tension around his mouth, in the way his shoulders sit a half inch lower than normal, in the fact that his eyes are on me, level and steady, and haven't moved since he stopped walking.
Whatever meeting or call or mission or thing he won't name, it left marks. Not on his skin this time. Deeper.
"Long day?" I keep my tone even, just open enough that he could walk through it if he wanted to.
"Yeah." He stays where he is, ten feet of hardwood and kitchen island between us, and the distance is a choice he's making in real time while I watch him make it.
I turn back to the stove and stir the sauce and let the silence hold.
"Your father doesn't just donate to Pacific Future Initiative.
" Remy's voice is low and even, stripped of everything I've heard him use as armor.
"He chairs the board. He built the shell structure, Evangeline.
His signature is on the incorporation documents for three of the five entities that funnel money into the network. "
I set the spoon down and turn from the stove, brace my hands on the island's edge. The tomato sauce bubbles untended and I don't turn back. My fingers go white on the marble.
"The donations aren't contributions. They're profit disbursements routed back through his own PAC to look like donor activity. He takes a cut from every transaction the network processes, and the network processes people."
The words hit me under the ribs, a blunt force that empties my lungs in one short push, and the inhale that follows is sharp and uncontrolled, a sound that belongs to someone else.
Heat floods my chest, my face, the space behind my eyes, burning like shame before it hardens into something I can use.
The strategist. Be the strategist.
"Which entities specifically?" My accent vanishes. My vowels flatten and my cadence slows, every word placed with the precision I learned drafting press releases in my father's office. "The three with his signature. Name them."
"Coastal Heritage Partners. Meridian Health Partners. Coastal Horizon LLC."
"Disbursement pattern." I'm not looking at him. I'm looking at the marble between my hands. "Monthly? Quarterly?"
"Quarterly. Timed to align with campaign finance reporting deadlines so the amounts blend with legitimate donor activity."
"How long?"
"Seven years that we can document. Maybe longer."
"Who else signs?" My voice doesn't waver. My hands are shaking but the words hold, and I hold onto that distinction because it's the only thing I have right now.
"Evangeline."
"Who else signs on the incorporation documents, Remy?"
He doesn't dress it up.
"David Ardoin. Registered agent on all five. Co-counsel on every filing." Another beat, and this one has a different weight than the ones before it. "And on two of the documents, the second signer is you."
The kitchen tilts. The sound dampens. The light flattens. My hands are still on the marble but I can't feel them.
"Ardoin has been my father's personal counsel since I was eleven." The words come out quiet and flat, and they cost me something I won't be able to name until later. "I've sat across from him at Christmas dinner."
I don't ask which two. That's not a question I can hold right now.
The one I can hold is the one I asked at fifteen and twenty and twenty-three, every time my father slid paperwork across his desk with his hand warm on my shoulder.
What's this for, Daddy? And every time the answer was the same.
Just paperwork, baby girl. Foundation things. Trust your daddy.
I trusted him.
The muscles in my face go slack. I can feel it happen, the analytical mask dropping away, and what's underneath is worse than crying. It's stillness.
I reach behind me and turn the burner off. The flame clicks once and goes silent.
"Your team." I press my fingertips into the marble until the bones ache. "Centurion. You told me private security consulting."
"I told you what the public knows."
"So what does the truth say?"