37. Darcy
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
darcy
My mother turned my childhood bedroom into a home office eight months after I moved in with Brett.
At the time I took it personally before deciding it was romantic, like she was so confident I wasn’t coming back that she’d already repurposed the room.
Looking back, she probably just looked at the empty space and thought finally, somewhere for the printer, which is honestly the most Mom explanation possible.
The powder blue walls have been repainted a shade that isn’t quite beige or white. The full-sized bed I used to sit cross-legged on doing homework is gone, and somewhere along the way the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck to the ceiling when I was eight disappeared too.
Now it’s just a wooden desk shoved into the corner beside a pink chair that should feel aggressively feminine and somehow just looks charming, a crafting cabinet I reorganized on day two because apparently emotional avoidance comes with a sudden interest in ribbon storage, and a daybed pushed against the wall over a Persian-style rug in terra cotta and navy.
I’ve spent the last few days staring at that rug like it’s eventually going to reveal the meaning of life.
So far all it’s revealed is that one corner curls up slightly if you catch it from the right angle.
I’ve been sleeping here for three nights.
Sleep feels ambitious.
Mostly I’ve been lying under the floral throw blanket my mom pulled out of the linen closet, staring at the ceiling where the stars used to be while my brain picks apart the same five conversations, rearranges them into entirely new ones, and starts over somewhere around one in the morning in case I missed a clue the first thirty-seven times.
At least Roxy’s been keeping me company.
She’s seventeen now and almost completely gray except for the white patch under her chin that makes her look permanently disappointed in everyone around her.
The first night I got here she wandered into the room, stopped in the doorway long enough to survey the sweatpants, the mound of ice cream pints and bags of junk food, and what I can only assume she correctly identified as an emotional hostage situation before hopping onto the bed and curling against my hip like she’d reluctantly accepted responsibility for supervising whatever this was.
She’s barely left since.
Every morning, I wake up with her stretched across my legs purring hard enough to vibrate the mattress while she stares at me like she disagrees with every decision I’ve made since Sunday morning.
I’ve eaten enough mint-chip ice cream over the last four days that the inside of my mouth feels like frozen toothpaste.
At some point yesterday I realized I was three true crime documentaries deep, still in the same sweatshirt, balancing the container against my stomach while the TV asked if I was still watching like it had concerns.
By documentary number five I wasn’t even following the killings anymore. I just needed somebody else’s life to be worse than mine for forty-five minutes at a time.
My phone spends most of the day face down beside me on the blanket because apparently I keep convincing myself I can outsmart my own anxiety through strategic placement.
Every few minutes I cave anyway, flipping it over before the screen even finishes lighting up, but it’s always the same thing—Bex checking in, my mom asking if we need milk, my dad sending me a picture of Roxy asleep somewhere else in the house even though she’s currently asleep on my legs.
Which shouldn’t matter this much considering I’m the one who left.
My parents, meanwhile, have been suspiciously normal about the whole thing.
Mom cried when I showed up, hugged me until I finally stopped insisting I was fine, then immediately asked if I wanted lasagna.
Dad just started talking about whatever crisis was currently being broadcast on the news, because that’s what he does when something’s wrong and he doesn’t know how to fix it.
The questioning started on day two during breakfast.
Mom had looked at me across the kitchen table over the rim of her coffee cup with the same expression she used to wear when I was a teenager pretending a report card didn’t exist.
“Is this about work?”
“Work’s fine.”
“The city?”
“I love the city.”
“Is it a boy?” she had asked carefully.
“I’m going back to Boston,” I’d said. “This is just a visit.”
Even lying here spiraling hard enough to qualify as cardio, I know that much is true.
I just needed a few days to remember I’m still the same person who packed up a car in January with nothing but a hostage plant and a few boxes and drove to another state anyway.
The problem is I keep acting like she vanished under cartons of ice cream, trash TV, and catastrophic overthinking, when she’s just waiting for me to get off the damn daybed.
Bex shows up a little before work carrying a chai tea latte and a blueberry scone.
That alone tells me how my current condition is being perceived. She drove forty-five minutes from Philly to get here, and Bex treats unnecessary traffic the way most people treat food poisoning.
I answer the door in the same sweatpants I wore Sunday, my hair twisted into a claw clip that’s been losing the battle against gravity since sometime yesterday afternoon.
She takes one look at me.
“You’ve been self-medicating with sugar and empty carbs.”
“I’ve been coping.”
“You’ve been hiding.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive…”
She walks inside and shoves the bag and the cup into my hand before I can further defend myself.
Mom pokes her head out from the kitchen just long enough to spot Bex in the foyer.
Her shoulders loosen almost immediately, like she’s relieved reinforcements have finally arrived, before she disappears again without saying a word.
Bex drops onto the daybed, and Roxy immediately hops to the floor like the occupancy limit’s been exceeded. She disappears into the hallway for a solid ten minutes before wandering back once she’s apparently decided Bex can stay.
“Tell me,” Bex says.
So I do.
I tell her about Brett on the stoop with the flowers and the way he managed to reach directly into every fear I’ve been carrying around and hand it back to me dressed up like logic.
I tell her about Mack’s words and the way they twisted inside of me before I even made it through the front door.
I tell her about the drive back to West Chester and the chips and the ice cream and Roxy’s unpaid therapy sessions.
By the time I finish talking, I’m emotional again and Bex is watching me with that expression she gets when she’s trying very hard not to interrupt a witness who’s still testifying.
“Okay,” she says slowly.
I already don’t like that tone.
“Did you maybe say any of this to them?”
I blink at her.
“They were there.”
“They were there for what happened,” she says. “Not for everything that’s happened in your head since.”
I look away.
“They told me what this was from the beginning.”
“Did they?”
“Yes.”
“They also told you they’d never done this before.”
I don’t answer.
“They told you they didn’t sleep with the women they shared more than once.”
Silence.
“They took you on dates.”
I stare at the rug.
“One date…”
Bex waits another beat before she asks, almost casually,
“Did they tell you they didn’t want you?”
“No.”
“Did they ask you to leave?”
“No.”
“Did they stop reaching out?”
“No.”
She folds her arms.
“Then what happened?”
I open my mouth to defend myself.
“Brett…” I stop, shaking my head. “He spent twenty minutes making me question everything, and then Mack said the one thing that made it all feel true.”
I swallow.
“So I ran.”
I’d spent four days dressing it up as anything but that.
Bex just nods.
“Yeah.”
I stare down at the blanket twisted in my lap. Roxy sighs in her sleep beside us without bothering to open her eyes.
“One shitty night, and I was halfway back to West Chester convincing myself I’d imagined the last few months.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I know how insane that sounds.”
“Little bit.”
I let out a laugh that doesn’t survive very long.
“Do you know what I think?”
“Probably.”
“I think you’ve been hiding in the one place you couldn’t wait to leave.”
That one stings because it’s true.
“The girl who packed up her entire life and moved to Boston didn’t ask permission from anybody,” she says. “She definitely wouldn’t spend four days hiding from one bad night.”
“She’s currently horizontal.”
“Get her up.”
I huff out a laugh and scrub both hands over my face.
“I don’t know if what I want is what they want.”
Bex shrugs.
“Then go find out.”
She says it like it’s simple.
“It’s not that easy.”
“No,” she agrees. “It’s six hours, probably awkward as hell, and there’s a decent chance somebody cries.”
“Not helping.”
“But at least then you’ll know.”
I stare down at my latte.
“What if they meant it? What if it really was temporary?”
Bex doesn’t answer right away.
Instead she tears off a piece of my blueberry scone like she has every intention of stealing my breakfast after driving forty-five minutes to deliver it.
“Then you survive that too. But don’t you dare spend the next six months wondering if you walked away from something that wasn’t actually over.”
I pick at the corner of the napkin wrapped around the scone until it starts to tear.
I hate how quickly I know she’s right.
“And,” she adds, “think how good the makeup sex’s gonna be when two ridiculously hot men spend the next week apologizing.”
I laugh despite myself, then immediately feel my eyes sting a little afterward.
“Go get your men, Darcy.”
Roxy opens one eye like she’s been following the conversation this entire time and would appreciate us reaching the conclusion already.
“Okay,” I breathe.
I hug Bex for a long moment and she just holds me without making it weird. Then I stand up and start throwing clothes back into my weekender bag before momentum catches up and fear talks me out of it again.
When I make my way downstairs, Dad’s standing in the kitchen pretending not to notice I’m obviously leaving.
“You heading out?” he asks casually.
“Yeah. I think it’s time to go home.”
He smiles like he expected that answer.
Mom appears from the hallway a second later, and her eyes go straight to the bag. She walks over and straightens the collar of my coat even though it doesn’t need straightening.
“You look better.”
I let out a breath that almost turns into a laugh.
“I think I am.”
She gives me a small nod.
“Are you going back for the city?”
I look at her.
“Among other things.”
Her mouth curves.
“Good.”
I grab my keys from the counter and head for the door.
The screen door swings shut behind me as I cross the driveway. Sprinklers hiss somewhere down the block, and somebody’s mower drones three houses over, the whole neighborhood settling into the suburban rhythm I spent years trying to escape.
The house still feels like home.
It just doesn’t feel like mine anymore.
Standing there with my keys digging into my palm and Boston waiting six hours north of me, I realize it doesn’t hurt the way I thought it would. It just feels true.
The drive gives me six uninterrupted hours to convince myself this is a terrible idea. Apparently, personal growth is just arguing with yourself until one version wins.
By the time I park, most of the brownstones have their porch lights on. Somebody laughs half a block over, and for one dizzy second it feels like every other night I’ve come home to this neighborhood, except this time my stomach’s somewhere around my ankles.
I haul my bag up the stoop and let myself into the building, already listening for the sounds I usually hear before I even see them. Tyler laughing, Mack moving around the living room, the surround-sound playing the Bruins game through the floor below.
Tonight there’s nothing, and my anxiety immediately starts filling in the blanks because apparently six hours of driving did nothing for my ability to remain a rational adult.
They’re working.
They’re asleep.
They’re out.
They moved.
Excellent. Love that journey for me.
I drag my bag upstairs anyway and let myself into the apartment, which looks exactly the way I left it. Everything is where it should be, except now I’m standing in the middle of it wondering why every ounce of confidence I had somewhere around Connecticut apparently stayed there.
I pick up one of the throw pillows from the couch and hug it against my chest.
This was significantly easier when I was still in the car giving myself motivational speeches.