Teagan slept on the ride to the airport. He fell asleep again when their plane lifted off. Darcy let him have the window seat, but his eyes were closed before the shrinking peaks of the Gallatin range filled the little porthole.
Even asleep, with his mouth hanging slightly open and his hair falling over his forehead, his expression was tense. Every half hour or so he’d jolt awake and look around in confusion, then settle back down when he reoriented himself. Darcy would have teased him about it if his expression hadn’t been so wide-eyed and incredulous when it landed on her. Like he expected her to bail out of the arrangement while they were cruising over Ohio. Like she’d call the flight attendant back and say that actually, Teagan was allowed to drink whatever he wanted, she didn’t care. Instead, she proficiently ordered him an apple juice and some mini-pretzels, draped him with her hoodie, and told him she had hours of topical podcasts saved for her own education and entertainment if he wanted to sleep the rest of the way. He did.
Darcy, by contrast, was brimming with energy. She had fifty-seven new bookmarks saved on her phone to review. She had plans to make. She was riding an exhilarating wave of agency and competency as much as the jet stream as they flew east. She might be good at this job, she thought. Years later, Teagan might reflect that he was lucky to have had her.
She did not really think about where, exactly, she and Teagan were going beyond to New York, and she was so unfamiliar with the area that she did not even realize their Newark airport taxi was taking them away from the city until they were on the highway headed north and the Manhattan skyline was illuminating the rear window.
Darcy couldn’t figure out where they were relative to the city until they crossed the Hudson just as the sun finished setting. The woody hills flanking the river valley were still verdant and misty in the light rain at this time in the early autumn, and Darcy pressed her nose against the window as they slowed for suburban traffic. Teagan was a tense, curled-in shape on the other side of the backseat, gaze fixed on the blur of headlights from the oncoming traffic.
“It’s going to be okay,” Darcy said, turning away from the window and patting his knee. Her importance to this venture straightened her spine, and she strove to sound authoritative as she reassured him. “I won’t let you fuck up your recovery.” Teagan startled, looking first at the hand, then at the rest of her, like he’d momentarily forgotten that she was with him.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said in a rusty voice. He put his hand down next to hers, little finger just brushing her own as she anchored him from wherever his mind had gone. “I know that.”
“You just looked worried about it, is all,” Darcy said. He barely looked better rested for having slept all day.
“I’m worried about Sloane, actually. I shouldn’t have let her go back to California to pack up on her own. I should have asked her to come with us, bought her new stuff,” he said.
“She’s twenty-two,” Darcy pointed out. At twenty-two, Darcy had been on her second enlistment contract and second deployment. “And her issue was just a little coke? She can probably keep her nose clean for a couple days, at least.”
“No, I mean—I wish I’d asked her to come with me,” he said.
Darcy looked at him in confusion. Sloane had muttered a few things about third-wheeling it, and Darcy understood that concern. Teagan turned his face to the window.
“Okay, this will sound dumb,” he muttered. “But when Sloane was about four, she was going through a rough stage. It was hard to drop her off at preschool. She’d cry and cling to me and yell so loud that sometimes the teachers would just send her home.”
“She didn’t seem worried about going alone for a few days,” Darcy pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s the principle of the thing. About asking her. Because I didn’t know what to do back then. The tantrums went on for weeks, and it was just turning into more and more of a production every day.”
“You did the drop-off every day?”
“I did, on my way to school. Anyway, I tried bribing her, I tried sneaking away, I tried putting my foot down. Eventually I started reading parenting books. One of the books said that I couldn’t teach her that I’d come back for her at the end of the day by leaving. I couldn’t just leave. If she was holding on, I had to hold on harder. So if she wouldn’t go to preschool, I brought her with me to my high school. It only took two days of precalculus before she decided she’d rather do arts and crafts with the other kids than come with me. But, you know, it made it her decision.”
Darcy felt her chest squeeze at the image of baby Teagan with even more baby Sloane, then cursed herself as a repeat sucker for the single dad schtick. That was just her hormones talking, and they rarely wanted what was best for her.
“You didn’t catch hell from the other kids?” she said, trying to push the feeling away.
“No? Why would I?” Teagan asked, face honestly confused.
Darcy snorted, because his high school must have been much more accommodating of personal differences among its students than the three she’d attended.
Teagan looked away again. “Everyone was always very impressed with me for taking care of Sloane.” He paused. “And then later my mother too, I guess.”
“It’s not your worst quality,” Darcy said drily. Of course everyone had cooed over the teenage boy with his parenting books. It was all she could do not to go misty about it herself. Steady, girl.
She shoved him with her shoulder. “Sloane’s not going to feel abandoned because you let her spend a couple days packing up on her own. She knows you care.”
Teagan put on that familiar half smile, the one she now knew to be directed mostly at himself. “Knowing that something is real or isn’t doesn’t always help.”
That was a good and sound observation, something Darcy needed to keep in mind herself, but he looked so worried that Darcy had a sudden pang of misgiving.
“It’s not too late to change your mind on going home,” she said, nodding out the window at the suburbs. “We could tell the driver to take us right back to the airport. Or anywhere else. It’s honey harvesting season upstate. I watched a YouTube video on beekeeping a while ago, so I’m basically an expert in it already. How does your sister feel about agricultural work? She could come too.”
“Sloane’s afraid of bugs,” Teagan reported, the second corner of his mouth now engaged.
“I’ll keep thinking, then,” Darcy promised. She needed to work out a backup plan in case Teagan bailed on sobriety before the ninety days were up.
From the bridge, they traveled another ten minutes north until the taxi disgorged them, minus a truly astronomical sum of money, at a low-slung yet sprawling house constructed of poured concrete forms on a large lot high over the valley. It was dark by then, but bits of the landscape were illuminated by lights in the bushes and tall, mature trees. The place was huge.
Darcy had expected anything up to and including a castle with turrets and a moat around it, but Teagan’s house was beautiful in a tasteful way, like something out of an architecture magazine. The grass was mowed and the landscaping immaculate, but Teagan had to fiddle with a lockbox on the front door to get the key.
“This is theoretically for sale,” he said by way of explanation as he opened the big square front door and admitted them to a terrazzo-tiled foyer. “It was my mother’s house. But since I wanted Sloane to have somewhere she could come home to during school breaks, I haven’t tried very hard to sell it.”
He flipped on the lights, illuminating the vast interior.
“You don’t live here?” Darcy asked, eyebrows shooting up as she took in the space, full of raw stone, warm wood, and complicated midcentury furniture. Why wouldn’t he live here if he was allowed to? It was gorgeous. She was nearly bouncing on her toes with excitement that she got to live here for the next three months.
“Not since I was in college. Now only when Sloane is here. I have a condo in Midtown, but it’s just a studio, and . . .” He didn’t finish that thought, but his cheeks turned a little pink.
Darcy felt her mouth curl up in a wide smirk. “You didn’t want to get me there and announce, ‘Oh no, only one bed, what to do?’ ”
Teagan pressed his lips together, not quite returning the expression. “I didn’t think I could pull that off, no.”
He might have done better than he thought, but there was no sense in inflating his ego just yet. Darcy looked around the open floor plan. There was a kitchen at one end, a bar at the other, and a big living area in between. A hallway between the kitchen and living room led off to the back of the house.
Rachel had decorated the wellness retreat’s big residence complex, and it had all been nice and matching and all that, but this house was flawlessly arranged, every fixture and item of furniture fitting the space as though designed with this room in mind. For all Darcy knew, it had been.
And there was art on every wall—real art, where you could see the artist’s brushstrokes and their signature in the bottom corner.
Darcy dropped her bags and started pacing the exterior, searching in vain for some photographs of Teagan or other members of his family. The only photographs were black and white, weird angular shots of people writing on their hands or smoking unfiltered cigarettes through bad haircuts. Probably not captured during Van Zijl family vacations.
Teagan went straight to the fridge to fetch bottled water out of a drawer apparently maintained for that purpose, so Darcy continued her snooping. She marked the location of the wet bar, spotted two cabinets full of wine on built-in racks, and critically noted a stack of mirrored drink coasters on a glass coffee table that must have been staged specifically for doing lines. She added them to her to-do list.
Her gaze was eventually drawn to a huge portrait hanging next to the bar. It was so exaggerated as to be almost cartoonish, but it depicted a young woman with her dress falling off her breasts, bright pink nipples lovingly detailed.
“Um,” Darcy said, stifling a laugh, because she hadn’t really anticipated Teagan having tits-out art in his living room, even if she’d braced for all the drinking and drug paraphernalia.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a John Currin,” Teagan said, following her expression and wrinkling his nose. “Mom was a big collector. I think it’s kind of ugly, but I haven’t taken anything down. It technically belongs to the foundation.”
Darcy walked up to take a closer look at the painting. It had the expensive layered quality of museum art, but the subject matter overwhelmed the technique. “Is this a painting of your mom?”
“What?” Teagan asked, mouth falling open in shock. The idea had obviously never occurred to him. “No, John Currin is famous. He does lots of these.”
“Your mom never met him? Because the lady kinda looks like Sloane . . .” Darcy trailed off.
“I—she probably did. But she never said—Jesus.”
Teagan’s face went through several shades of horror. Darcy guessed that she would also have been horrified if she found out she’d been eating breakfast under the watchful gaze of her mother’s tits for over a decade.
She looked at the painting longer. Definitely looked like Sloane.
“God. Now I’m never going to be able to unsee it,” Teagan said, staring at the artwork in dismay, hands on his hips.
Darcy laughed at how stuck he seemed. There was a simple fix. “Let’s just take her down, then.”
When he didn’t object, Darcy lifted the painting off its nail and turned it so that it faced the wall. “See? Easy enough. Show some modesty, Ma.”
Teagan blinked in agreement. “Maybe I’ll let Nora sell just this one,” he muttered, putting one hand over his mouth.
Darcy nodded to encourage him. Maybe he could put some vacation photos up instead. Make it a little homier. This place could be perfect with just a few updates.
“So, where should I put my stuff?” she asked, hooking a thumb at the hallway, trying to project the nonchalance of someone accustomed to standing in houses like this. Probably never again. This was probably her only opportunity to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. She wondered whether there was such a thing as vegan marabou heels. If so, she wanted to order some and walk around in them, liven up Teagan’s life a little. Let her own tits hang out.
Teagan grabbed her sea bag and set it over his shoulder despite her abortive grab for the strap. “Sloane’s room is pretty nice; she redecorated a couple of years ago. Queen bed. The guest room smells a little bit like cedar because that’s where my mother kept her furs—they’re gone, don’t worry. And the primary’s been cleared out too, but . . .”
He obviously didn’t want to vocalize any objections to Darcy taking his mother’s bedroom, but the mere thought sounded like a buzzkill.
“What about your room?” she asked lightly, waggling her eyebrows to dislodge his unhappy thoughts.
She had an idea of what Teagan was like in bed, and it was already playing through her mind in high production values. She imagined their hands clasped together, the muscles of Teagan’s shoulders rippling as he moved, curtains rustling. None of the windows in this house had curtains, but somehow, curtains were rustling.
Teagan ducked his chin and smiled between closed lips. “Twin beds,” he said. “And all my water polo trophies.”
“You hiding some stuffed animals, champ?”
Darcy was going to be disappointed if he didn’t make even a tiny pass at her while they talked about sleeping arrangements.
“That’s what the second bed is for,” he said, dimple not quite popping out.
She edged close enough to wrap her hand around the inside of his arm and slide her bag onto her own shoulder. She could feel the tension vibrating through his body. His mind was still somewhere else.
“I’m not picky,” Darcy said. “My first deployment, I had to hot rack on a stack of Tomahawk missiles.”
“You’re welcome to whichever one you like best,” Teagan said, still not picking up what she was laying down. “I think all the sheets are clean.”
Coming home from rehab was supposed to be very hard. One of the most fraught events in recovery, according to the podcasts she’d been listening to all day. The temptation to fall back into bad habits would be overwhelming. Darcy set her shoulders back, shaking off her amusement at how oblivious he was. She was here to work, after all.
Well, time to start earning her keep.
“I’ll take the guest bedroom, then,” she said, releasing his arm. “Then I’ll get started on the bar.”