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 waveof 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 beyondto 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 lether 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. Itonly 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.”
