Chapter 38
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE EGGS.
DARCY
On Thursday, Martin offers me everything.
We’re in his corner office—the one I used to picture myself in, back when having my name on a door meant something—and he lays it out like a hand of cards he’s been saving.
Partner track.
My old client list, plus three new accounts.
A compensation package that would make my financial investor brain weep with joy.
“Take September,” he says, leaning back in his chair with the easy confidence of a man who’s never doubted a decision in his life. “Extend your little sabbatical. October first, you’re back. We’ll announce the promotion at the fall retreat in Muskoka.”
Your little sabbatical.
Like the last few months have been a vacation.
Like I’ve been sitting on a beach somewhere, instead of rebuilding myself from the inside out in a small Nova Scotia town, where the cashier at the grocery store knows my name and a woman with calloused hands and a crooked smile taught me how to breathe through a panic attack in my kitchen.
“That’s incredibly generous, Martin. I appreciate it.”
“You don’t have to appreciate it. You’ve earned it. Before you left, you were billing more than anyone on the floor. The clients miss you. I miss you.” He says it like a joke, but I can hear the offer underneath: Come back. Be who you were. It’s easier.
And he’s right. It would be easier. The apartment is still here. The routine is still here. The version of Peter Darcy who wore ties every day and ate nice lunches at his desk and measured his worth in billable hours—that guy is waiting right where I left him, like a Tom Ford suit on a hanger.
But I don’t want to put him back on.
“Can I have some time to think about it?”
Something flickers across Martin’s face—surprise, maybe. In his world, people don’t ask for time to consider a promotion to partner. They shake your hand and call their parents. “Of course. Middle of September. But, Darcy—don’t overthink this. You’re not the type.”
He’s wrong about that. I’m absolutely the type. I’ve been overthinking everything since I was twelve, I’ve just gotten good at doing it behind a smile.
I’ve called her every night. Tonight is no different.
It has become the scaffolding of my day in Toronto—meetings, dinners, a drink with a university friend, who spends the entire time talking about his stock portfolio, and then, when I’m back at the condo with my tie loosened and the city buzzing twenty floors below, I call her.
She always picks up. That alone tells me something, because Billie doesn’t answer calls from anyone outside of work hours.
I’ve watched her stare at a ringing phone with the disdain of someone being asked to kick a puppy and then text back, what do you want?
forty minutes later. But she picks up for me.
Every time. Usually on the second ring, which I suspect is a deliberate choice not to seem too eager, and which I find unbearably endearing.
But something’s off.
I can’t name it exactly. She’s still funny—still tells me stories about her crew and Neve’s increasingly unhinged color-swatch obsession and how Tammy has officially declared war on Balsam Bay residents—because she showed up on Main Street the other day and stalled traffic for three hours.
She still calls me ridiculous when I tell her I miss her cooking, which we both know is a lie because she burns water.
She still laughs in all the right places.
But there’s a gap. A small one, like a door that’s been left open a crack—enough to let the draft in, not enough to see what’s on the other side. She’s holding something back. And every night when we hang up, I lie in the dark and turn it over in my head, trying to figure out what it is.
Tonight, I almost ask.
“How was your day?” I ask, the same way I always do. There’s a pause that lasts half a second too long.
“Good. Normal. Steph almost dropped a circular saw on her foot, so that was exciting.” Her voice is light, but it’s the kind of light that takes effort. I know because I do the same thing—sugarcoat everything in ease so no one thinks to dig deeper. “She’s fine. Steel toes for the win.”
“Beth.” I use the name that feels intimately only ours. The one I hold close, saving it for when I want her to remember who we are to each other.
“Hmm?”
“You’d tell me if something was wrong, right?”
Another pause. Longer this time. “Yeah. Of course.”
She’s lying. And I’m letting her, because pushing her is like pushing a door that only opens inward—the harder you press, the more resistance you get. She’ll tell me when she’s ready. That’s how she works. That’s how we work.
But lying in the dark yet again after we hang up, staring at the ceiling of a place I once called home, the distance between us feels less geographical and more like something I need to fix before it becomes permanent.
I rebook my flight at 5 a.m. on Friday.
The original plan was to fly back Saturday evening, get home late, and see her Sunday. The new plan is a 12 p.m. flight that’ll get me into Halifax by the afternoon, because sometime between midnight and dawn, I stopped being able to talk myself into another day of this. My parents will understand.
I don’t tell her I’m coming back early. Partly because I want to surprise her, and partly because I’m afraid if I call, she’ll use her everything-is-fine voice, and I’ll spend the entire flight wondering what’s underneath it.
The drive from the airport takes ninety minutes, and I use every one of them not to think about Martin’s offer.
I don’t think about the partner track or the corner office or the compensation package.
I think about Beth eating cereal for dinner and when she said I’ll be here like it was nothing, like she didn’t hand me a rare, precious gift.
It’s late afternoon when I pull up to her place.
I’ve been here before, but only to drop her off or for a quick stop.
It dawns on me I haven’t made much of an effort to come to her.
She always comes to mine. I wonder if that’s been another intentional way of her keeping emotional distance between us.
Her truck is in the driveway, which means she’s home, which means… I don’t know what it means. I grab my bag from the back seat and stand in her driveway for a moment, feeling stupid and certain in equal measure.
The walk to her front door takes approximately four seconds, but my brain fills them with enough doubt to last a lifetime.
What if she doesn’t want me here?
What if the space was good for her?
What if the distance clarified something that proximity had been blurring—namely, that this was always supposed to be temporary, and I’m the only one who forgot?
I knock.
Nothing. Then… movement. Slow. Unhurried in a way that tells me she wasn’t expecting anyone, and possibly wasn’t vertical.
When the door opens, the speech I’d been rehearsing on the plane dies in my throat.
She looks wrecked.
Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. In the real way—the way people look when their body has been at war with them and they’ve stopped fighting back.
Her hair is in something that might have been a bun twelve hours ago but has since surrendered to gravity.
She’s wearing a sweatshirt that swallows her whole—mine, I realize, the gray one I thought I’d lost. Her swollen eyes tell me today has involved crying.
The kind that isn’t about one thing but about everything; the cumulative weight of a body and brain that won’t give you a break.
She stares at me. Not with surprise, exactly. More like she’s trying to determine whether I’m real.
“You’re early,” she says, and her voice is raw.
“I’m early.”
She doesn’t do the thing. The mask, the deflection, the easy joke that reroutes the conversation away from whatever she’s feeling. She doesn’t do any of it. She stands in her doorway in my stolen sweatshirt, with swollen eyes and unwashed hair, and she lets me see her.
All of her.
The version her father thinks is a failure. The version her mother has chosen not to see. The version her exes couldn’t handle. The version she’s spent her whole life editing down, smoothing over, packaging into something palatable so the world doesn’t choke on the fullness of who she is.
She lets me see it. And I understand what that costs her, and it cracks something open in my chest I don’t think will ever close.
“Bad day?” I ask because I don’t know what else to say, and because I know she doesn’t need me to say the perfect thing. She needs me to just be here.
Her face does something complicated. Her chin trembles—once, barely—and she presses her lips together hard, like she’s physically holding herself in. And then she exhales shakily and says, “Bad few days. Then I got my period.” She shrugs, but it’s weak.
I drop my bag on her porch and step forward. At the same time, she steps into me like she’s been holding herself upright by sheer force of will and has decided to stop.
“Is it okay that I’m here?” She nods, arms still at her sides. “I’m sorry I haven’t made the effort to come to your house sooner. I should have.”
“I like your place. And I’m always on the move, anyway.
” Her arms go around my waist, and her face presses into my chest, but she doesn’t cry.
She just breathes. Deep, deliberate breaths I feel against my sternum.
I wrap my arms around her and hold on, thinking, This is it.
This is everything. I will burn that offer letter and never go back to Toronto if it means I get to be the person she leans into when the lights go out.
“I’m wearing your sweatshirt,” she mumbles.
“I noticed.”
“I’m not giving it back.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and her arms tighten around me. And then, so softly I almost miss it: “You came back early.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Because my apartment ceiling didn’t have any answers. Because Martin’s offer felt like a sentence, not a reward. Because I called you every night and heard the space between your words and couldn’t stand being on the wrong side of it for one more day.
“Because I wanted to be here,” I say, and it’s the truest and simplest thing I’ve ever said.
She pulls back enough to look at me. Her eyes are glassy and tired, and so disarmingly open I have to remind myself to breathe.
This is Beth without the armor. Without the jokes and the deflection and the I’m fine she layers over everything like plaster over a crack.
This is the woman underneath it all. She’s letting me see her, and I am absolutely, irreversibly, catastrophically in love with her.
“I look terrible,” she says.
“You look like you.”
“That’s either the sweetest or most offensive thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“It’s the sweet one.”
She almost smiles. It doesn’t quite make it to her mouth, but it reaches her eyes, and that’s enough. That’s more than enough.
“Come inside.” She steps back, pulling me with her by the front of my shirt. “I haven’t eaten since this morning, and there’s nothing in my fridge except hot sauce and regret. Maybe eggs.”
“I’ll make you something.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Beth.” I stop her in the hallway, my hand now in hers. “Let me make you something.”
She looks at me for a long beat, and I watch the war inside her—the part that wants to say I’m fine, I don’t need help, I’ve been handling this alone for years, and I don’t need you to rescue me versus the part of her that is so tired of handling it alone that the thought of someone simply making her something to eat is enough to make her eyes fill again.
“Okay,” she whispers.
I make her eggs. Nothing fancy—scrambled, with toast and butter and the hot sauce from her nearly empty fridge.
She sits on the counter, like she always does, except tonight her legs are still, and she’s quiet in a way that she never is.
She watches me move around her kitchen like I belong there, and I realize, I do.
I belong in this kitchen, making this woman eggs at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon because her body spent the week tearing her apart, and she forgot to feed herself.
When I hand her the plate, her fingers brush against mine, and she holds on for a second longer than necessary.
“Thank you,” she says, and it’s not about the eggs.
“Always,” I reply, and it’s not about the eggs, either.
She doesn’t ask me to stay, and I don’t ask if I can. I just do. We fall asleep wrapped up in one another, and it’s the first night in a long time I don’t spend any time staring at a ceiling, contemplating my life.