Chapter 8
DARCY
By eight o'clock that same evening I have been interrogated twice, my wineglass refilled three times, and now accused of harboring feelings for the enemy by a licensed veterinarian.
Cathy's back porch is built for nights like this, with string lights, mismatched Adirondack chairs, a wine selection she describes as "whatever was on the end cap," and a view of her darkened clinic across the yard.
Annie claimed the porch swing the moment we arrived.
Jules is sitting on the steps doing calf stretches, because Jules is incapable of sitting anywhere without improving herself.
I have the deep chair and a Malbec and, apparently, the witness stand.
"For the record," Jules says, "Ernie's wife posted video. Forty seconds of your billionaire doing ochos. It has two hundred likes and a comment from my aunt in Tampa."
"He's not my billionaire."
"The caption says 'Darcy Gable's billionaire.' Take it up with Carol."
I take a long, dignified sip instead. The group chat has been handling the day's coverage since noon.
The Ferrari sighting, the Yorkie checkpoint, the tango footage.
Mattichogue's surveillance network needs no help from me, which is convenient, because I have no interest in narrating any of it. Especially not the unsettling moments we spent holding each other on Jules’s dance floor, which I have placed in a sealed box, in a locked drawer, in a room of my mind I am not currently visiting.
"Annie already gave us the drama club report," Cathy says, topping off my glass like she's loosening a witness. "I want the part she couldn't see. What's he like when he's not on a stage?"
"He was on a stage all day. The man treats eye contact like a spotlight."
"Joshua Cline asked him to come back," Annie says, to the table, not to me. The swing creaks. "Voluntarily. Out loud. I've had that kid in two productions and I've never heard him ask a stranger for anything."
Jules stops stretching. "The little one who whispers?"
Annie nods. "He talked, Jules. Full sentences. Stood there while Finn taught him the drill and then asked if he could come back tomorrow to paint." Annie lifts her glass in my direction, gently, like an apology for what she's about to do. "Tell them what you told me in the hallway."
"I said he's exactly who I thought he was." The Malbec doesn't help the sentence go down. "He's just better at hiding it now."
"And do we believe that?" Cathy asks the porch at large. "Show of hands."
No hands go up. Including, I notice with some betrayal, mine.
"Here's my problem." I set down the glass so I can use both hands, because apparently this requires gesturing.
"If he was awful, this would be simple. I built the entire weekend on awful.
I had contingencies for awful. Instead he follows Ernie's lead for two hours without one complaint, learns three step patterns, buys a hundred dollars of pizza for kids he's never met, and spends twenty minutes teaching my shyest student to use a power drill without once making the boy feel small.
" I pick the wineglass back up. "Do you know how much pent-up animosity I put into this weekend? And he's ruining it by being decent."
"The monster," Jules says.
"Tragic," Cathy agrees. "A handsome man behaving well. Someone should call the authorities."
I gesture with my glass. "You're all fired as friends."
"You can't fire us, we have the wine."
The conversation mercifully wanders off me for a while.
Jules is six days from her spring recital and has developed a twitch when anyone says the word "tulle.
" Cathy tells the saga of yesterday's emergency patient, a corgi named Biscuit who ate a sock and is recovering with, quote, "no remorse whatsoever.
" The sock did not make it. Annie's phone keeps lighting up on the swing cushion beside her, and she keeps almost not smiling at it.
"Who keeps texting you?" Jules asks.
"The drama booster account." Annie says it a half-second too fast. "The set photos are getting comments."
"Comments, plural?"
"One commenter," she admits, "who may or may not be recovering from a broken leg." As soon as the words are out of her mouth she buries her entire face in her hands while I feign outrage and Jules and Cathy giggle like we’re all in sixth grade.
Eventually Cathy tucks her feet under her, eyes going shrewd in the way that means the teasing is about to get a point on it.
"So what happened, Darce? Because you didn't drive over here glowing about power drills.
You drove over here like a woman composing a strongly worded letter to the school board. "
And there it is. I've been deciding all evening how much of this to say out loud, because saying it out loud makes it real, and making it real makes it matter, and I have a policy about letting Finn Bardot matter.
"At the end of the day, when it was just us, when I was actually starting to think he’d grown up into some semblance of a decent human being, he said it."
"Said what?" Cathy asks.
I wince inwardly, not only because I have to say it now and admit how bad it still hurts, but because Finn actually said it. Again. After all these years.
"Dictionary Darcy."
Annie reaches over to squeeze my hand. Silence from Jules and Cathy, who didn’t attend school in Mattichogue.
"Okay," Jules says slowly. "Walk me through the crime, because I'm a dance teacher, not a cryptographer."
"It's the same joke." My voice comes out flatter than I intend.
"After all these years and a few billion dollars later, when Finn Bardot reaches for something to say to me, what's there?
The same old joke I always was to him. Dictionary Darcy, the nerdy girl.
The girl who hid in the library and lived in books, not reality.
He doesn't even know he's doing it, that's the part that...
" I stop, recalibrate. "The whole day I'd been thinking, maybe the teasing and bullying was just a kid being an idiot.
Kids are idiots—I know they are, I teach a hundred and forty of them.
But then he opens his mouth and the first thing out is the same shorthand, like I'm a category to him. Like I've always been a category."
Annie's swing has gone still. "Darce. I’m sorry. But did it ever occur to you he might have meant it as a compliment?"
"A compliment? Back then? No. Today? Annie, he said he thought I’d have him organizing library cards all weekend."
She lifts her shoulder. "Not a bad idea, actually. Why didn’t we think of that?"
I shake my head at her. "He hasn’t changed a bit. Not that I expected he had."
So, why am I disappointed to be proven right? I’m not sure I want to know.
"Well," Annie says. "I watched him with those kids for four hours.
People can fake charm. I've directed enough teenagers to know charm when it's blocking and choreography.
But nobody fakes patience. Maybe it's not a performance, Darce.
Maybe this is who he became when you weren't looking. Maybe you just don’t want to see that. "
The porch is quiet except for crickets and the distant judgment of Mrs. Fielding's Yorkies, three streets over, barking at something that probably deserves it.
"Or," I say, "he became a man who's wonderful to everyone whose opinion doesn't threaten him, and I'm the one room in town where the old furniture's still arranged the way he left it."
"That's good," Jules says. "Bitter, but good. You should write that down."
Cathy looks at me over the rim of her glass. "Can I offer a professional observation?"
I tilt my head. "Professional? You're a vet."
"Animals don't lie." She shrugs. "A dog that's been kicked flinches at every raised hand.
Smart dog. Right to do it. But sometimes the hand's just reaching for the leash, and the only way to find out is the thing the dog can't do, which is wait one extra second before deciding.
" She swirls her wine. "You waited about half a second today, by Annie's account.
Tomorrow, maybe try a full one before you condemn the guy. "
"Tomorrow," I say, grateful for the exit ramp, "is your day, actually. If you're still willing to put him to work, given that you’re sitting here telling me I’m already being too harsh on him."
The change that comes over Cathy Morse is genuinely unsettling. She sets down her glass like she's handling ordnance, folds her hands, and smiles the way I imagine people smile in the last scene of heist movies.
"Oh, I'm willing."
"What does that mean?" Annie looks between us. "What's going on at the clinic?"
"It’s Sunday," Cathy says, as if that’s explanation enough.
"Cathy." Jules sits up. "What are you going to make him do?"
"I am not going to make him do anything. He is a volunteer, performing community service, and I am a small business owner with a list." She picks her glass back up, serene as a lake. "Wear washable shoes, Darcy. Tell him the same. Actually, don't tell him anything."
"Should I be worried?" I ask.
"You? No." She clinks her glass against mine. "You're going to have a wonderful time."
God, I love these women. It's possible I chose my friends too well.
The party breaks up around ten. Annie hugs me at the door a beat longer than usual, which is her way of saying she knows Finn’s comment cut deeper than I let on.
Jules makes me promise to report tomorrow "in real time, with photos," and Cathy walks me to my car humming something that sounds suspiciously like a battle march.
"Whatever you're planning," I tell her, "remember he's technically a donation to the library."
"Hey, I treat every animal that comes through my door with complete professionalism. Even the human ones." She pats my car roof twice. "Seven sharp. Pray he hasn’t eaten breakfast before he gets here."
"Why would... Cathy. Why would you say that?"
"Goodnight, Darcy!"
I drive home through streets I know by heart, past the dark library and the darker school, and let myself into my apartment over the bookshop, where everything is quiet and smells like old paper and the fancy scented candle I shouldn't have bought the same week I spent three thousand dollars on revenge.
I get ready for bed with great efficiency and absolutely no thinking.
I check my banking app exactly once, quickly, the way a person checks a bruise.
Three thousand dollars from my savings account, which had been set aside for a dream project I’ve been thinking about for the past several years.
Now, it’s on hold indefinitely, all because of some decade-plus payback fantasy.
Worth it, I tell the dark, with most of my conviction. Today didn’t go the way I thought it would—for many reasons—but I still have tomorrow to exact another dose of revenge.
Whatever Cathy has in store for him, he deserves.
I promise myself I won’t feel anything when I see him again.
Not the hurt from the past. Not the soft curiosity that started forming when I saw him with those kids at the drama club.
With Joshua, who hadn’t come out of his shell for anyone yet ended the day working alongside Finn like they’d known each other for years.
I tell myself I won’t think about any of that.
Then I lie there in the dark and relive the feeling of Finn’s hand resting in mine at the studio, warm and strong and patient, every signal answered a half-beat after I sent it. Nothing anticipated. Nothing resisted.
A man whose whole life is velocity, holding still because I asked him to.