“I know,” he said softly.
“Why would you lie about something like that? Why wouldn’t you tell me what was really going on?” Darcy cried, trying to make it make sense. “God, the number of times I made you listen to that terrible alcoholism podcast—I would have done everything different. I’ve just been spinning my fucking wheels—”
“No, no, Darcy, it’s fine, please, I couldn’t have done anything without you. I meant what I said, you’re everything good about my life,” he pleaded until Darcy waved her hand at him to get him to stop talking.
“You’re making it worse,” she said.
She couldn’t think. Everything was replaying in her mind, every time she’d told Teagan he was going to be okay because he wasn’t drinking, all those things he hated about his life that she let him endure because he wasn’t drinking. “You’re making it worse,” she repeated, not sure whether she was talking about him or her.
“No,” he said, unconvincingly. It was what he wanted to be true.
“If I hadn’t been here, would you have... kept taking your meds, gone to the doctor, therapy... something? Anything?” she asked.
Teagan’s lips flexed. “I would rather have had you,” he said, like she’d ever have made him choose. Darcy jerked back like she’d been slapped. How dare he put that on her?
“Why would you lie about something like that? Why wouldn’t you just tell me you’d been sick?”
“It’s not just that I was sick. It’s my brain chemistry. It’s... sometimes it’s lifelong,” Teagan said, face still tilted down to the floor.
“You were telling me to make a lifetime commitment two hours ago! You didn’t think I needed to know?”
As if Darcy didn’t come with her own baggage, with a whole lifetime’s worth of damage too. Was that something he was weighing? Was it something he expected her to weigh?
“I came here with you to do a job you don’t need done. And I don’t know—I don’t know what you need. I know I’m not trained for it. I don’t have anything, Teagan. I don’t have a job or a car or a family. I don’t know how to do this!” she said.
One corner of Teagan’s mouth pulled to the side in a grimace, the same side he smiled with. He made the same face when he was joking, but the only person he ever joked about was himself.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d come here if you knew it was something other than alcoholism,” he said. His shoulders clenched. “And then later... I thought you’d leave.”
Darcy covered her face with her hands. He didn’t thinktoo highly of her, if that’s what he’d thought. That she’d just quit when she realized she couldn’t fix him. Everything she’d thought about him, he didn’t think about her.
“And so you decided to worry about making sure I wouldn’t leave, and nothing else,” she said, her lips feeling heavy and numb. It felt true when she said it. That was the problem in a nutshell.
“I worry about everything,” Teagan said quietly. “And you can always leave.”
Darcy’s chest heaved. That sounded pretty final. It was what he expected her to do. Teagan reached into his jacket pocket and fished around until he came out with the pink square of the valet ticket. He pressed it into her hand, their fingers brushing until Darcy jerked hers away.
She looked down at the ticket, not sure what he meant by the gesture.
“You can take the car,” he said, voice so soft she could hardly keep up. “Don’t worry about getting it back to me. I’ll stay in the city or take the train. Keep it as long as you want.”
When she looked back up, she met his eyes. They were hard and glittering like gemstones, holding onto her face as though he was trying to memorize it. He really expected her to go. He expected her to break both their hearts and walk away like none of this had meant a thing to her. That was the kind of person he thought she was.
“Okay,” Darcy mumbled. “You’ll need to get your own self home tonight, then.”
Teagan nodded stiffly. He shoved his hands in his pockets, but not so fast that Darcy couldn’t see them shaking.
“I’ll get the otters,” she tearily offered, before she remembered that she hadn’t even had a chance to tell him aboutthe problem with their enclosure here. Her nose was running. She was so angry she could barely see straight, and all the heartbreak she’d been so certain an hour ago that Teagan would never inflict on her was fracturing her chest. She didn’t know how she was going to drive like this. She just needed to go.
Without another word, she spun on her heel and fled the bathroom.
Outside, Sloane was dry heaving over an azalea bush. Adrian held the bag of otters under one arm and Sloane’s purse under the other, his face eloquently expressing a wish to be free of all members of the Van Zijl family, their friends, and their business partners. Darcy took Sloane’s purse from him and took out her phone. She held it in front of Sloane’s gagging face until it unlocked on the third try, then flicked to a rideshare app. She pushed the phone to Adrian’s chest as she relieved him of the otters.
“I called a car. They both need to go home,” she told Adrian. “Teagan and Sloane both. You’re in charge. Good luck with everything.”
Adrian called after her in consternation, but Darcy made it a point to get away from all her failures as quickly as possible, and she thought this was probably the biggest one yet.
twenty-eight
