6
He made her run on Wednesday.
Run was generous. He'd knocked on her door at seven-fifteen and said he was going out and did she want to come, in the same tone he used to ask if she wanted coffee, and she'd said yes before she'd fully woken up.
By block three she was at a brisk walk and he'd lapped back to match her pace without comment.
They went around the park, Leah maintaining what she felt was a respectable pace and Whit clearly operating at about thirty percent of his capacity, and he didn't say anything about the gap,
just moved alongside her and pointed out the coffee place on the corner he liked and mentioned that the farmer's market happened on Saturdays if she was interested.
At the building door he stopped and looked at her.
"I'm going to do another two miles," he said.
"Obviously," she said.
He almost smiled. Turned and went, his stride opening up immediately into something she was not going to stand on the sidewalk and watch, so she went inside.
* * *
Darcy called on Wednesday evening.
Leah was at the kitchen table with her laptop, working.
She was doing freelance graphic work that she could technically do from anywhere, which was the only reason the summer arrangement was viable.
Whit was also in the kitchen, standing at the counter eating a bowl of something with the focused efficiency of a man who viewed meals primarily as logistics.
They'd been in the same room for twenty minutes with the comfortable low-grade silence of people who had run out of things to find irritating about each other and hadn't yet found anything new.
His phone buzzed on the counter and his whole face changed.
It was small, the change. Not dramatic. He just became slightly more present in the room than he'd been a second before, and he picked up the phone and said "hey" and his voice had a softer quality in it, the ease of someone talking to a person they didn't have to arrange themselves for.
"Put her on speaker," Leah said.
He did, and set the phone on the counter between them, and Darcy's voice came through slightly thin with distance.
"Hi, hi… I have maybe fifteen minutes before I have to go back in. Leah, are you there? How are you, how is everything, how is he behaving?"
"She's fine," Whit said. "I'm behaving."
"I wasn't asking you. Leah."
"He's behaving," Leah said. "He made me run."
"Oh good. She needs…" A brief pause, diplomatic. "Fresh air. In the mornings."
"I'm sitting right here," Leah said.
"You love running."
"I do not love running."
"You love having run."
Whit pointed at Darcy's voice with his spoon in a gesture of agreement that was so automatic, so specifically the gesture of someone pointing at a person they knew extremely well, that Leah felt it land somewhere in her chest before she could deflect it.
They talked around her, mostly. Not excluding her, pulling her in regularly, Darcy asking about her work and whether she'd eaten and whether the neighborhood was treating her well.
But there was a register underneath the conversation that belonged only to the two of them, a frequency she couldn't quite tune into, and she watched Whit's face while Darcy talked and understood something she hadn't quite put together before.
He wasn't just a hot guy who was good at cooking and forgot his shirt. He was Darcy's, specifically and completely, in the way that some people were other people's fundamentally. The ease between them wasn't performance. It was just what they were.
Darcy said she had to go. She said I love you to Leah and then said it differently to Whit, and Leah found something on her laptop screen to read while he said it back.
The call ended. The kitchen was quiet.
Leah looked at her screen. Whit finished his bowl and rinsed it in the sink and went to the living room without saying anything, and Leah sat with her laptop and the low feeling that had no clean name and thought about going to bed early, which she did,
and lay awake for a while looking at the ceiling of a room that still smelled, faintly, of someone else.
Leah had learned something in her first week: planning helped.
Not planning in the ambitious sense. She wasn't rebuilding her life or making five-year projections.
Just small logistical planning, the kind that gave a day a shape.
So when Darcy texted Thursday to say she'd be home Friday by six, Leah spent twenty minutes on her phone and emerged with a plan so tidy it almost made her feel like herself.
Dinner with Jess and Cassie, two friends from her last in-office job who'd been texting her since the Chad situation with increasing urgency.
A place in the neighborhood, seven o'clock.
She'd leave the apartment at six-forty-five, which gave her twenty minutes after Darcy arrived; enough for a hug, a check-in, the important visual of Leah doing fine and going out and wearing actual clothes.
Then she'd hand the apartment over without ceremony and let whatever happened happen behind whatever walls and not be present for the start of it.
She'd text on her way home. Movie night if Darcy was up for it. A quiet sleep.
Simple. Clean. Civilized.