“Leopold. I know we saw each other not long ago, but I miss you. How are you doing? Are you eating?” She holds him at arm’s length, examining him in the same way she does me.
“I eat constantly, Dana. I promise.”
“He does,” I confirm. “He ate an entire pizza in front of me last week.”
“That’s not nutrition. That’s survival.” She takes the loaf from him and sniffs it. “Oh, this is beautiful. Rob, smell this bread.”
“I can smell it from here, love.”
Leo catches my eye and grins, and the ease on his face—the complete absence of the anxiety that used to follow him into every social situation—brings me the same sense of peace as listening to the waves lapping on the rocky shore. This is what my parents have always given him. A place where his shoulders come down. This town has been that for him, too.
Neve walks in, apologizing for having to finish a work call in the car, and Mom immediately gushes over her, hugging her tightly and commandeering her for a conversation about Portuguese tile work that will almost certainly last the entire evening if left unchecked. Dad opens the wine. Leo starts slicing the bread. And I’m standing in my cottage, watching the people I love fill this house, and the only thing missing is?—
The front door opens.
“Hello? It’s—Hi. I’m here. I’m late, I know. Tammy’s back on her shit. Sorry, the door was open, and I didn’t know whether I should knock or—I brought dessert. It’s store-bought. I didn’t have time to—anyway.”
My girl is standing in the hallway holding a bakery box like it’s a grenade, wearing jeans and a pink, cropped button-down I’ve never seen before, which means she bought it for tonight, which means she cares about this. Something she would rather die than admit to.
Her eyes sweep the room—Mom and Neve on the couch, Dad by the wine, Leo with the bread knife—and I watch the exact moment she clocks me. The tightness in her shoulders decreases by about forty percent.
“Beth!” Mom is off the couch and crossing the room before I can make a formal introduction, which is fine because formal introductions aren’t Dana Darcy’s style. “Or do you prefer Billie? You and Peter with your multiple names. So cute. Anyway, I have been dying to meet you. Come sit down. Do you drink red? Rob, pour Beth a glass. Peter, why are you just standing there? Take this from her.”
Beth shoots me a look—half panic, half amusement—and I slide my hands under the bakery box and lean close enough to whisper, “Just let it happen. Resistance is futile.”
“Your mom is a force of nature,” she whispers back.
“You have no idea.” I chuckle knowingly.
Within ten minutes, Beth is on the couch with a glass of wine. Mom is asking her about the cottage renovation with the intensity of a journalist conducting an investigation. But it’s the right intensity—genuine, interested, impressed—and it makes Beth’s defenses come down. One by one, like locks clicking open. She starts talking about load-bearing walls and foundation work with the confidence she has on a job site. Mom nods along like she’s taking mental notes, and Dad has migrated closer becauseRob Darcy has never met a structural detail he didn’t find fascinating.
“So you did the framing yourself?” Dad asks.
“My crew and I, yeah. The entire south wall had to come out and be rebuilt. The previous owner had done some… creative things with the supports.”
“Creative,” Dad repeats with a dry smile. “That’s generous, I’m sure.”
“I’m being polite for your son’s sake. What they did should be criminal.”
Dad laughs—a real, full laugh that surprises everyone in the room except me, because I know what Beth does to people. She disarms them. Not with charm or performance, but with the blunt, unpolished honesty of a woman who doesn’t know how to be anything other than herself.
Leo catches my eye from across the room and raises his wine glass slightly. A silenttold you so. He’s been telling me for weeks my parents would love her. I believed him. But believing it and watching it happen are different things, and watching it happen is making my chest so tight I excuse myself to check on the chicken.
Dinner is loud. My small family has never been quiet—Mom talks with her hands, Dad interjects with deadpan observations that take people a beat too long to catch, and Leo has come alive in the way he only does around people who feel safe. Add Neve’s dry wit and Beth’s tendency to start a sentence in one place and end it somewhere entirely different, and the table sounds like a dinner party for twenty rather than six.
Mom tells the story of how she and Dad met—at a bus stop in Mississauga in 1989. He offered her his umbrella, and she told him she didn’t need it and then stood in the rain for twenty minutes to prove her point.
“I married her a year later,” Dad says with hearts in his eyes. “She still won’t share an umbrella.”
“It’s a matter of principle, Robert.”
“It’s a matter of stubbornness, my love.”
Beth is laughing so hard, she has to set down her wine glass, and the sound—open, unguarded, her whole body in it—makes me forget there’s a bureau vote in twenty-eight days, a job offer from Martin in my inbox, and an entire life in Toronto waiting for an answer.
Leo starts the story of how he met my parents, and Beth’s face shifts as she listens. She knows the broad strokes—Leo lost his mom young, his dad checked out, my family became his. But hearing him tell it, hearing his voice softens when he talks about my mother teaching him to bake, my father taking him to hockey games, and the Christmas morning he woke up at our house to presents under the tree with his name on them—I can see it landing differently for her. She’s doing the math. Comparing it to her own parents. To Tim, who showed up at her job site to tell her she was embarrassing herself, and a mother whose name she rarely mentions and whose approval comes with conditions attached.
Under the table, her hand finds my knee. Just resting there. An anchor.
