Chapter 39
YOU. THIS IS THE TEN PERCENT.
BILLIE
I wake up on Saturday morning to the sound of Peter in my kitchen. For a disorienting moment, I forget I spent the last several days feeling like my body was trying to digest itself from the inside out.
Before he got here, Neve had come to bring me food, check on me, and sit with me while we watched reality TV. She doesn’t track my cycle, but she always knows when something is off. Instead of trying to change my mood, she just shows up.
The PMDD wave broke yesterday—I could feel it receding, the way you can feel a fever lifting even before the thermometer confirms it. The heaviness in my chest loosened. The fog behind my eyes thinned.
Finally, it was my chance to recover, and I went from barely being able to stand upright to crying into this man’s chest and eating scrambled eggs on my counter, and now I’m lying in bed, listening to him open and close my cabinets like he’s solving a puzzle, and I feel—okay.
Not great. Not a hundred percent. But human again.
I slip into the bathroom for a quick shower that turns into me standing under the hot water for ten straight minutes and then morphs into an everything shower because I need the reset. When I step out, he’s still in the kitchen.
“You don’t have a single clean pan,” he calls.
“There’s a system,” I call back.
“The system is chaos.”
“And yet it works.” When I shuffle down the hall, he’s standing at the stove in his boxers and my oldest, most disgusting T-shirt—the one with the faded Cameron Construction logo I’ve had since the year I took over the company.
He looks so absurdly at home in my kitchen that my heart does cartwheels.
“Coffee’s ready,” he says without turning around. “Also, you need groceries. I’m making eggs again because eggs are all you have.”
“I have hot sauce.”
“You have hot sauce.” He turns now, spatula in hand, and gives me a look that’s somewhere between exasperated and fond. “Good morning.”
“Morning.” I take the coffee he’s already poured—in my favorite mug, the chipped blue one that says bad bitch juice, because of course he knows which one is my favorite—and lean against the counter. “I feel better. In case you’re wondering, but too polite to ask.”
“I was definitely going to ask.”
“I know. That’s why I beat you to it.” I take a sip and close my eyes.
He makes coffee stronger than I do, which I didn’t think was possible.
“The worst of it passes once I get my period. Yesterday was the tail end. Today, I’ll probably start to feel like myself again.
My period will be gone by tomorrow or Monday.
And then I get about two weeks before the whole thing starts over. ”
He’s quiet for a moment, plating the eggs. “Every month?”
“Every month.” I say it matter-of-factly, because it is a fact. It’s the most boring, predictable fact of my life.
“How have I not noticed this before? I’ve been here for two months, I—”
I cut him off before he can feel any worse about himself.
“You have. The meeting I showed up to late and nearly cried. You saw it. You saw me.” And he did.
He saw me, and he wasn’t fazed, even then.
“Some months are worse than others. This one was…” I trail off, thinking about Tim at the job site, the phone calls with Peter where I held everything in while missing him terribly, the afternoon I spent on the bathroom floor, not because I was depressed, exactly, but I didn’t want to be inside my own body anymore.
“This one was a bad one, even with the meds.”
He sets a plate in front of me and leans against the opposite counter, arms crossed. “What can I do? During the bad ones.”
It’s such a simple question, and it nearly undoes me. Not, how can I fix it, or have you tried this supplement, or maybe if you exercised more. Just…what can I do?
“What you did yesterday,” I say. “Show up. Make me food. Don’t ask me to be okay when I’m not.”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can.” And I do know. That’s the wonderful, horrible part.
After breakfast, he reaches for his phone, checks something on it, and then pulls open the small pocket of his bag on my hallway bench.
“Did you take yours?” he asks, casual, like he’s asking about the weather. He holds up an orange prescription bottle and shakes it once.
I blink. “Did I—oh. No. Shit.” I left my pill case in the bathroom this morning and completely forgot, which is peak ADHD irony—forgetting to take the medication that helps you not forget things. “Thank you. Hold on.”
I pad to the bathroom and come back with my pill case—the one Neve bought me with the days of the week on it because I kept losing track of whether I’d already taken my doses. I pop today’s two pills and wash them down with coffee. When I look up, Darcy is swallowing his own with a glass of water.
We stand there for a second, both mid-swallow, and the mundanity of it—two people in a kitchen, reminding each other to take their meds on a Saturday morning—is so quietly intimate I don’t know where to put it.
“We’re a pharmaceutical commercial,” I joke.
“Side effects may include domestic bliss and improved egg consumption.”
“That was terrible.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m grimacing. It’s different.”
It’s not different. I’m absolutely smiling, and he knows it. The look on his face is so stupidly pleased with himself, I have to turn away before I say something I can’t take back.
He tells me about Martin’s offer that afternoon.
We’re at the beach—the quiet one past the point, where the rocks jut out far enough so the tourists never bother walking to it.
We’re perched on a flat rock ledge overlooking the cove, sharing a bag of plain no-name chips and Helluva Good!
Dip because neither of us felt like cooking or eating out.
The tide is coming in, lazy and unhurried, and the gulls are arguing about something overhead.
It’s the kind of peace that only exists in places where the nearest traffic light is twenty minutes away.
“Partner track,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.
“Yeah.”
“That’s a big deal.”
“It is.”
I stare at the water and wait for the feeling to hit me—the bracing, the walls going up, that familiar recalibration of expectations.
He’s leaving. You knew he was leaving. This was always the deal.
But it doesn’t come.
Or it does, but it’s duller than I expected, buried under something heavier.
“When does he need an answer?”
“Mid-September.”
Three weeks. I take a chip and eat it slowly, buying myself time. “What are you thinking?”
He’s quiet for long enough that I look over. He’s not staring at the water or the rocks. He’s staring at me, with an expression I can’t read, which is rare, because Peter’s face usually operates like a billboard—every thought displayed in high definition.
“I’m thinking: six months ago, I would have said yes before he finished the sentence.” He pauses. “I’m thinking I sat in that office and looked at the view and the desk and the nameplate, and all I could think about was whether you’d eaten lunch.”
My chest tightens. “Peter—”
“I’m not asking you to factor into my decision.
I know that’s not fair. I know this is supposed to be—” He stops himself, and I watch him edit the sentence in real time.
“I want you to know it’s not a simple yes for me.
It’s not what I thought it would be. And not only because of you.
I want—I need to find my ikagi.” The confusion must be clear on my face, because that’s not a word I know the meaning of.
This must be how people feel whenever I do this.
“I want to know what my purpose is, to find what makes my life worthwhile.”
I nod because I don’t trust my voice. We sit in silence for a while, eating chips and watching the tide.
I think about how, a few months ago, I would have made this easy for him.
I would have said go, obviously, don’t be stupid, this was just a summer thing.
I would have smiled and meant it, mostly, and then I would have spent the next three PMDD cycles crying about it in the shower or on the bathroom floor.
I don’t say any of that. I don’t make it easy. I don’t make it hard, either. I just sit next to him and let the silence hold all the things we’re both too scared to say out loud.
“These chips are too salty,” I say eventually.
“They’re terrible,” he agrees, scowling.
“At least the dip is good. Want some more?”
“Obviously.” He covers a small chip with so much dip, I doubt he’ll even be able to taste anything other than French onion. “We should have sprung for the Ruffles,” he mumbles before popping the loaded chip in his mouth.
“Next time,” I respond, unthinking.
Will there be a next time?
We finish the bag, because we’re committed to bad decisions, and then Peter slides off the rock and holds his hand out. “Come on. Let’s go down to the water.”
I shoot him a skeptical glare.
“We’re not swimming. Just our feet.”
I take his hand and let him pull me down.
We leave our shoes by the rock and pick our way across the beach toward the shoreline.
The water is cold when it touches our toes—that sharp Atlantic cold that never fully warms, even in August—and I hiss through my teeth, but I don’t step back.
I roll my jeans up as far as I can, while Peter wades in to his knees like it’s nothing, because he’s a person who adjusts to discomfort instead of avoiding it.
I guess all that time spent surfing has gotten him used to the chill.
When he moves back to me, I stand beside him, the water swirling around my feet. The late-afternoon light is turning the whole cove gold, making the rocks look like they’re glowing from the inside.
“Can I ask you something?” He’s looking down at my foot, where my tattoo peeks out above the sand. The “90%,” inked in small, clean script.
“You want to know about the tattoo.”
“I’ve wanted to know since Halifax. But you had a strict no-personal-information policy.”
I smile at that, because he’s right—Halifax Billie wouldn’t have told him her last name, let alone the story behind her tattoo. But Halifax Billie isn’t standing in this cove. I am. And whether I like it or not, those two people are no longer one and the same. Not entirely.
“Ninety percent of what I think about never happens.” I wiggle my toes in the sand under the water.
“It’s an ADHD thing. My brain is constantly generating scenarios—worst-case, best-case, completely implausible middle-case.
I overthink everything. Plan for disasters that never come.
Catastrophize conversations I haven’t had yet.
” I shrug. “I got it as a self-deprecating joke. A reminder that ninety percent of the stuff my brain tortures me with is fiction. And also as a visual reminder of how much ninety percent really is, and how little, but important, those other ten percent are.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Is it still a joke?”
“Less than it used to be.” I look at it—the thin black lines, slightly faded now, the skin around it tan from a summer spent outside.
“Somewhere along the way, it became more of a… I don’t know.
A grounding thing. When I’m spiraling, I look at it and think, ninety percent of this isn’t real. Focus on the ten that is.”
“What’s the ten percent right now?”
I look at him. Standing in the Atlantic Ocean in shorts and a T-shirt, chip salt still on his fingers, asking me about my brain like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever encountered.
“This,” I reply. “You. This is the ten percent.”
His expression makes me need to look away, so I do. We stand in the water for another minute, letting the cold numb our toes and the silence say everything we can’t.
“Okay, I need to get out,” I say finally, shifting my weight and immediately grimacing. “I hate sand. Between my toes, on my feet—it’s a sensory nightmare. The walk back to our shoes is going to be miserable.”
“How do you live on the coast and hate sand?”
“Talent and avoidance. That beach day only happened because Neve bribed me with food.” I take a step and wince. The wet sand clings and grinds, and it’s exactly as awful as I knew it would be.
Peter turns around, squatting slightly in the water, and looks at me over his shoulder. “Hop on.”
“What?”
“Get on my back. I’ll carry you.”
“Peter, I’m not—You’re standing in the ocean. You’ll fall. We’ll both fall. This is a terrible idea.”
“Ninety percent of what you think about never happens. Hop on.”
I stare at him, crouched in ankle-deep water, peeking at me over his shoulder, like this is the most reasonable suggestion in the world, and I think, this man used my own tattoo against me, and I have never been more in love with anyone in my entire life.
“If you drop me, I’m breaking up with you.” The words land like an anvil in my stomach.
Breaking up with you? You can’t break up with someone you’re not in a relationship with.
He doesn’t seem to care one bit, grinning widely at me. “Noted.”
I jump onto his back, wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. He stands with the same easy strength that undoes me every single time.
He lowers again until my feet dip into the water, effectively washing off all the sand once clinging to them.
The water splashes as he walks us toward the shore, his hands hooked under my thighs, and I’m laughing—really laughing, the kind that shakes my whole body and makes it hard to hold on.
“You’re heavier than you look,” he says on a laugh, because he has a death wish.
“I will end you, Peter Darcy.”
“Worth it.”
He carries me across the sand, steady and sure-footed. I press my face into the back of his neck and hold on: the sun is warm and the wind is cool and my feet are clean, and the ten percent is so, so good.
He sets me down on the rock next to our shoes, and I keep my arms around his neck for a second longer than necessary. He turns his head and kisses me—salty and windblown and tasting like bad chips and good dip and the kind of afternoon you remember forever.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For the piggyback or the chip consumption?”
“For asking about my tattoo.”
He brushes the sand off his shorts and looks at me with those caramel eyes that are the best thing I’ve ever seen. “Anytime, Beth.”
We put our shoes on and walk back to the car, and I don’t think about Toronto or partner tracks or the fact that three weeks isn’t very long.
I think about the ten percent. I think about the water and the rock and the man who carried me across the sand because I told him it bothered me, and he just—did something about it.
No questions. No judgment. No, have you tried getting used to it?
He picked me up.