Chapter 41
BELIEVING IT AND WATCHING IT HAPPEN ARE DIFFERENT THINGS.
DARCY
Mom is out of the car before Dad has it in park, which is standard protocol. She takes in the cottage with her hands on her hips and the expression of a woman who is already mentally planning new garden beds.
“Oh, Peter. It’s gorgeous.” She turns to me, and her eyes are doing the thing—the quick, full-body scan she thinks is subtle and absolutely is not: checking if I look healthy.
If I look rested. If I look like the version of her son who called her from a Toronto sidewalk five months ago, unable to breathe. “You look good, sweetheart.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You look tanned. And less…” She waves a hand vaguely at her own face. “Clenched.”
“Clenched?”
“You used to look clenched. Around your jaw. Like you were always bracing for something.” She pats my cheek and walks past me into the house. “Not anymore.”
Dad follows, pulling two suitcases from the trunk. He’s a quieter presence than Mom, but no less significant. Always has been. Rob Darcy communicates primarily through firm handshakes, well-timed nods, and a dry humor so subtle people occasionally miss the joke entirely.
We walk in, Mom oohing and ahhing as we go. Dad sets the bags down in the hallway and looks around the living room with an appraising eye.
“Good bones,” he says. Which, from my father, is practically a standing ovation.
“Leo did most of the cabinetry. Neve designed it all. And Billie’s crew handled the structural work.”
“Ah.” A single syllable, loaded with more meaning than it has any right to carry.
Dad has heard the name Billie approximately forty-seven times in the last month.
I know because my mother has been keeping count and reporting it back to me with undisguised glee, while commenting on how I go back and forth between calling her Beth and Billie.
And the ah tells me he has thoughts. He’ll share them on his own schedule.
Probably at the worst possible moment. That’s his well-meaning way.
I give my parents the grand tour, which takes longer than expected. Mom has an opinion about every room, and Dad keeps asking structural questions I can’t answer and have to text Billie about. By the time they’re settled in the guest room, I’ve received six texts in rapid succession:
Tell your dad the joists are 2x10 on 16-inch centers
Also I’m freaking out
What do I wear to meet your parents?
Neve says a dress. I don’t own a cute enough dress for this.
I used to. But it has paint on it now.
I’m wearing jeans. Can I wear jeans? If your mother judges me for jeans I’m leaving.
I type back:
My mother is currently wearing cargo pants she bought in a Lisbon flea market. You’re fine.
Beth:
Oh I love her already
Then, a beat later:
I’m still freaking out.
ME:
I know. See you at six.
Leo and Neve arrive first, which I planned deliberately because I know what they are for Billie—a bridge.
If she walks into a room full of Darcys with no buffer, every wall she has will go up, and we’ll spend the first hour trying to coax her out.
But if our friends are already there, already comfortable, already making my parents laugh, she’ll see that and her nervous system will relax.
It works exactly the way I hoped.
Leo brings a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread he baked this morning. Mom pulls him into a hug that lifts him slightly off the ground, which is impressive given she’s a foot shorter than him.
“Leopold. I know we saw each other not long ago, but I miss you. How are you doing? Are you eating?” She holds him at arm’s length, examining him in the same way she does me.
“I eat constantly, Dana. I promise.”
“He does,” I confirm. “He ate an entire pizza in front of me last week.”
“That’s not nutrition. That’s survival.” She takes the loaf from him and sniffs it. “Oh, this is beautiful. Rob, smell this bread.”
“I can smell it from here, love.”
Leo catches my eye and grins, and the ease on his face—the complete absence of the anxiety that used to follow him into every social situation—brings me the same sense of peace as listening to the waves lapping on the rocky shore.
This is what my parents have always given him.
A place where his shoulders come down. This town has been that for him, too.
Neve walks in, apologizing for having to finish a work call in the car, and Mom immediately gushes over her, hugging her tightly and commandeering her for a conversation about Portuguese tile work that will almost certainly last the entire evening if left unchecked.
Dad opens the wine. Leo starts slicing the bread.
And I’m standing in my cottage, watching the people I love fill this house, and the only thing missing is—
The front door opens.
“Hello? It’s—Hi. I’m here. I’m late, I know. Tammy’s back on her shit. Sorry, the door was open, and I didn’t know whether I should knock or—I brought dessert. It’s store-bought. I didn’t have time to—anyway.”
My girl is standing in the hallway holding a bakery box like it’s a grenade, wearing jeans and a pink, cropped button-down I’ve never seen before, which means she bought it for tonight, which means she cares about this. Something she would rather die than admit to.
Her eyes sweep the room—Mom and Neve on the couch, Dad by the wine, Leo with the bread knife—and I watch the exact moment she clocks me. The tightness in her shoulders decreases by about forty percent.
“Beth!” Mom is off the couch and crossing the room before I can make a formal introduction, which is fine because formal introductions aren’t Dana Darcy’s style.
“Or do you prefer Billie? You and Peter with your multiple names. So cute. Anyway, I have been dying to meet you. Come sit down. Do you drink red? Rob, pour Beth a glass. Peter, why are you just standing there? Take this from her.”
Beth shoots me a look—half panic, half amusement—and I slide my hands under the bakery box and lean close enough to whisper, “Just let it happen. Resistance is futile.”
“Your mom is a force of nature,” she whispers back.
“You have no idea.” I chuckle knowingly.
Within ten minutes, Beth is on the couch with a glass of wine.
Mom is asking her about the cottage renovation with the intensity of a journalist conducting an investigation.
But it’s the right intensity—genuine, interested, impressed—and it makes Beth’s defenses come down.
One by one, like locks clicking open. She starts talking about load-bearing walls and foundation work with the confidence she has on a job site.
Mom nods along like she’s taking mental notes, and Dad has migrated closer because Rob Darcy has never met a structural detail he didn’t find fascinating.
“So you did the framing yourself?” Dad asks.
“My crew and I, yeah. The entire south wall had to come out and be rebuilt. The previous owner had done some… creative things with the supports.”
“Creative,” Dad repeats with a dry smile. “That’s generous, I’m sure.”
“I’m being polite for your son’s sake. What they did should be criminal.”
Dad laughs—a real, full laugh that surprises everyone in the room except me, because I know what Beth does to people. She disarms them. Not with charm or performance, but with the blunt, unpolished honesty of a woman who doesn’t know how to be anything other than herself.
Leo catches my eye from across the room and raises his wine glass slightly.
A silent told you so. He’s been telling me for weeks my parents would love her.
I believed him. But believing it and watching it happen are different things, and watching it happen is making my chest so tight I excuse myself to check on the chicken.
Dinner is loud. My small family has never been quiet—Mom talks with her hands, Dad interjects with deadpan observations that take people a beat too long to catch, and Leo has come alive in the way he only does around people who feel safe.
Add Neve’s dry wit and Beth’s tendency to start a sentence in one place and end it somewhere entirely different, and the table sounds like a dinner party for twenty rather than six.
Mom tells the story of how she and Dad met—at a bus stop in Mississauga in 1989. He offered her his umbrella, and she told him she didn’t need it and then stood in the rain for twenty minutes to prove her point.
“I married her a year later,” Dad says with hearts in his eyes. “She still won’t share an umbrella.”
“It’s a matter of principle, Robert.”
“It’s a matter of stubbornness, my love.”
Beth is laughing so hard, she has to set down her wine glass, and the sound—open, unguarded, her whole body in it—makes me forget there’s a bureau vote in twenty-eight days, a job offer from Martin in my inbox, and an entire life in Toronto waiting for an answer.
Leo starts the story of how he met my parents, and Beth’s face shifts as she listens.
She knows the broad strokes—Leo lost his mom young, his dad checked out, my family became his.
But hearing him tell it, hearing his voice softens when he talks about my mother teaching him to bake, my father taking him to hockey games, and the Christmas morning he woke up at our house to presents under the tree with his name on them—I can see it landing differently for her.
She’s doing the math. Comparing it to her own parents.
To Tim, who showed up at her job site to tell her she was embarrassing herself, and a mother whose name she rarely mentions and whose approval comes with conditions attached.
Under the table, her hand finds my knee. Just resting there. An anchor.
Hers or mine? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.