Chapter 29 #2
I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, and the air tastes like cooling eggs and coffee and the cedar soap that lives in the warmth of Remy's skin.
"I heard it differently than you saw it." My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. "I heard numbers through a speaker. You walked through a room."
"Yes."
"And you came home and made me an omelet."
His jaw works once, a small tight motion beneath the close-trimmed beard. "Yes."
I pick up both plates and carry them to the sink, and when the water runs warm over my hands I stand there longer than the dishes need, letting the heat soak into fingers that feel cold from the inside out.
The water runs over the last plate and I shut off the faucet, drying my hands on the towel that hangs from the oven handle because I put it there three weeks ago and Remy never moved it.
My phone buzzes against the counter.
I pick it up and the screen fills with Darcy's name and a wall of text that has no punctuation, no paragraph breaks, and at least four words in all caps.
"Darcy says, and I'm quoting, 'Corbin just ate an ENTIRE pecan pie that Grams made for the church ladies and now he's lying on the kitchen floor making sounds like a dying animal and Grams is standing over him saying she hopes he learned something and I am LOSING it please tell Tripp.
'" I look up from the screen. "There's a video attached. "
Remy's face changes. Not the calculating shift or the performance management, but a window with the curtain pulled back, light that was already there just waiting.
His mouth curves, and the exhaustion around his eyes rearranges itself into missing, the kind so constant it's become a room he lives in.
"He's twenty years old and he still can't pace himself around her pecan pie.
" Remy shakes his head, but the warmth in his voice has Louisiana in it, soft and round at the vowels.
"When he was eight, he ate half a sweet potato casserole at Thanksgiving and fell asleep under the dining table.
Odette put a blanket over him and told everyone to eat quieter. "
"Darcy would've documented the whole thing."
"Darcy was twelve and she narrated it like a nature documentary. 'And here we see the baby LeBlanc in his natural habitat.'" He takes a sip of coffee, and the smile stays. "She hasn't changed."
"She really hasn't." I tap the video and Corbin's groan fills the kitchen, theatrical and miserable, while Odette's voice cuts over it in French that sounds like a benediction and a scolding wrapped in the same sentence.
Remy leans closer to hear, and his shoulder presses against mine, and I hold the phone between us while Darcy's laugh rings through the tiny speaker like a bell someone struck in a church neither of us attends anymore.
The video ends.
The kitchen stills again.
And Darcy doesn't know. She sent this text from a kitchen where she's laughing at her brother's stomachache, and she doesn't know that I sat in a room today and identified seven donors whose money bought sedatives for a fifteen-year-old boy on a concrete floor, and she doesn't know that the man whose shoulder is warm against mine built a trigger word into my body while I slept, and she trusts us both with the uncomplicated love of someone who believes the people she chose deserve the choosing.
You can hold all of it. You can laugh at Corbin on the floor and carry what your father built and feel the heat of Remy's arm against yours and none of those things cancel the others out. That's not compartmentalizing.
I type back a string of laughing emojis and a single heart, and I hit send, and I set the phone facedown on the counter.
Neither of us moves toward the hallway. The overhead light catches the edge of his coffee mug where it sits beside mine on the counter, two ceramic half-moons of cooling liquid, and the refrigerator hums its low constant note and the faucet drips once from the handle I never tighten enough, and the room holds us in the particular stillness of two people who've stopped talking but haven't stopped being in the same place.
"Cole wants the donor timeline cross-referenced by nine." Remy says it low, the Louisiana still warm in it from Darcy's video. "I told him you'd have the secondary flagging done before the briefing."
He said tomorrow. He said it like I'm part of tomorrow, like the day ahead has my name penciled into every hour of it, like of course I'll be at that table with my laptop open and my highlights bleeding through the pages because where else would I be.
He said nine AM and it sounded like breakfast. Or breathing.
My chest tightens, a shifting of load I wasn't ready for, and I press my palm flat against the counter to steady what doesn't need steadying.
"I'll have it done by eight." I pick up my mug and then his. "And tell Cole his color-coding system is criminal. I'm fixing it."
I carry both mugs to the sink, but Remy is already there.
He takes his mug from my hand before I can set it down, and his fingers close around the ceramic in the space where mine just were, and he turns the faucet on and the water runs over his hands and then over the mug and I'm standing close enough that his shoulder shifts against mine as he rinses it.
My hand reaches for the faucet at the same moment his moves to shut it off.
Our knuckles brush over the handle. The contact lasts less than a second but the warmth of it travels up my wrist and pools low in my belly, heavy and liquid and aching.
A man washing his own dish. His hip almost against mine and the water still running between our hands and the ordinary devastating simplicity of standing next to someone at a sink after a meal you made together on a night that should have broken you both but didn't.
I'm wet. The slow deep kind that lives underneath want, the kind that a body makes when it recognizes something it wants to keep.
He shuts off the water. I dry my hands on the towel.
At the hallway I stop. Turn back.
He's leaning against the counter where I left him, arms crossed loosely, watching me with eyes that aren't asking for anything.
"Good night, Remy."
Two words. The first time I've said them since before the rooftop, since before the guest room door became a wall between us and the silence became a language I didn't want to learn.
They cost me something lodged in my throat, a small bright ache that tastes like the beginning of a sentence I'm not ready to finish.
His chin dips. "Good night, Evangeline."
I climb the stairs to my room. I go in. I close the door, and the latch clicks into the frame with the same sound it made the night Darcy left, the same mechanical snap of metal finding metal, but my hand stays on the knob for two full breaths after it catches.
That night the click was a period. A sentence ended, a door sealed.
Tonight it's a comma.
I let go of the knob and press my back against the closed door and stand there in the dark.
His light will stay on. I know it like I know my own name, like I know the cream will be on the counter in the morning, like I know that tomorrow at nine he'll look across a briefing table and find me already there.
His light will stay on and mine is off and the hallway between us is twelve feet of dark hardwood floor, and tonight that distance feels like something I could cross if I chose to and the choosing is what matters.
Not the crossing. The knowing that I could.
I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up, and I press my forehead against them, and I breathe.