Charlie smirks at that. “What,” he asks, “love?”
Will shrugs. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly, and it comes out a lot quieter than he means for it to. “Any of it, maybe.”
Oh, Charlie doesn’t like that. He straightens up quick as if someone has pinched him, dropping a couple of undershirts on top of the suitcase. “Hey,” he says, taking half a step in Will’s direction. “You all right?”
Right away, Will realizes his mistake. “Yeah, of course,” he says, “totally. I didn’t mean—”
“Because I can cancel this trip. I don’t even really understand what a press tour is, to be completely honest with you. Probably they can just do it without me. Or maybe I can Skype.”
That makes Will smile. “Pretty sure they need you on-site, brother,” he says, trying to sound as sane as humanly possible. He is sane; at least, he’s pretty sure he is. He’s just... lonely, or something. Sometimes it feels like everyone he meets knows how to be a person except for him.
“A hologram, maybe,” Charlie muses, reaching for a pile of T-shirts. Will laughs all the way down the stairs.
***
Charlie tells Will to stay at the house in Pemberly Grove for as long as he wants to, and there’s technically no reason for him to find a place of his own, but once Charlie and Caro decamp to the East Coast it starts to feel a little bleak—Will shuffling around like Miss Havisham down the quiet, empty hallways, testing out line readings for the benefit of the artificial plants. He eats a lot of waffles. He hangs around on set. Georgia sends him a book of knock-knock jokes from Amazon, and he reads it cover to cover in a single go.
The longer he sticks around the more apparent it starts to become that the builder of this place should probably be on the receiving end of legal action or at the very least a dead fish in his glove compartment: On Monday the microwave door comes off in Will’s hand while he’s heating up a frozen bean burrito. On Tuesday, the A/C conks out. On Thursday he discovers a bright green fungus blooming under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, and by the time the weekend rolls around the urge to leave is starting to feel immediate, like he ought to make his escape before the whole place collapses around him and he finds himself standing in a pile of rubble in his boxers like something out of a comic strip.
On Sunday he runs out of shampoo, so he gets in the car and drives to Target, where he spends the better part of an hour wandering the pitilessly bright aisles wondering if he needs an Instant Pot or a Forgettle. He thinks he might stay there forever, subsisting entirely on Frappuccinos and cake pops from the Starbucks kiosk up by the registers, but his phone vibrates in his pocket as he’s staring hypnotized at an endcap display of multipurpose cleaner arranged in rainbow order. “There are a lot of different kinds of Swiffers,” he says, instead of hello.
“What are you doing?” Georgia asks.
“Having a dissociative episode in a big-box store.”
“Big night,” Georgia replies. He can hear the rustle and hum of the city in the background, horns honking even though it’s close to midnight on the East Coast. Will resists the urge to ask if she’s being safe. “I’ll look for you on the Sinclair.”
“‘Will Darcy’s Hollywood career ended before it began this weekend, following a psychotic break in the parking lot of a Los Angeles–area Target.’”
Georgia snorts. “Just get whatever you went in there for,” she advises. “I’ll order anything else you need.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he protests, even as he feels the relief flowing through him. “You’ve gotten me like a hundred things already.”
“And yet,” Georgia teases. “Families look after each other, right?”
Will blinks, surprised. It’s a thing one of their dad’s friends told them at their parents’ memorial service, Will and Georgia sitting side by side on the boat of a leather couch at their old house in Toluca Lake: “Families look after each other,” he intoned, leaning over them like an omen. “And from now on, your family is the two of you.” They used to use it as a joke when they were teenagers, covering for each other after curfew or passing the peas across the table at their aunt Marcy’s apartment on East 63rd Street. Neither one of them have said it in years.
“Yeah,” Will agrees softly. “I guess so.”
He almost tells her then, standing alone in housewares: That the movie is a farce and he should never have come out here to begin with. That he misses New York so much he can barely breathe. That he’s sorry and grateful she’s the one who found him that morning, slumped over the toilet in his bathroom. That he doesn’t think he actually wanted to die at all.
Instead he says good night and loads his eleven bags into the trunk of the Land Rover, then gets lost twice on the way back to Charlie’s. It’s not until he’s about to climb into the shower that he realizes he forgot the shampoo.
Chapter Sixteen
Lilly
Charlie takes off for a press tour a couple of days after the movie premieres, promising June he’ll text between interviews. “How long is he gone again?” Lilly asks, finding her out in the backyard later that week. Colin is still camped in their guest room showing no sign of vacating, but a few days ago Kit realized he goes out of his way to avoid seeing any of them in bathing suits, and since then they’ve all been spending a lot of time by the pool.
“I didn’t ask,” June reports with a shrug that’s not quite careless. “I didn’t want to be, you know—” She breaks off, waving her hand in a gesture presumably meant to indicatevulnerable in any way. “Now I feel like an idiot, though, because he’s in New York partying with the guys fromSaturday Night Liveand I’m here fielding calls fromCelebrity Hot Dog Showdown—who didn’t even want me, PS, they wanted Olivia and got the contact mixed up.” She sighs, tossing her phone onto the lounge chair beside her. “I haven’t heard from him, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.”
“You know,” Lilly says, sitting down on the lounge chair beside her, “you were kind of giving off that vibe.”
“Yeah.” June picks up her phone again, scrolling for a moment before holding the screen up so that Lilly can see Caroline Bingley’s Instagram page. The latest post is a picture of Charlie in aswanky-looking bar, his arm slung around a tall, smartly dressed brunette who Lilly doesn’t recognize until the moment she does—the same glossy, unidentified woman who was in the photo of Will from that New York gossip blog.
“Who is that?” she asks, ignoring a weird flare of jealousy.
“Will Darcy’s sister,” June reports immediately. Then, off Lilly’s raised eyebrows: “I may have sleuthed a little.”
