Page 10 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

The trees painted black spiderweb shadows on the bay window as we shuffled around each other in the bright work lights of the kitchen, hitting the high notes of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” while the world beyond the shadows still slept.

I beamed, singing with my entire half-awake, raspy-lunged being.

It was almost impossible to believe I used to work in a drab cubicle, jumping every time the phone rang and listening to coworkers who were decades older than me complain about their spouses, their joints, their raises.

I dreaded being there as much as I dreaded driving there and home, looking over my shoulder at every noise, checking the rearview mirror like a nervous tic I couldn’t shake.

Every hour of the day felt like a bargain between the bad and the worse, and I couldn’t imagine any other options.

I didn’t know my life could be anything different, that it could be something beautiful.

Pastries & Dreams was the best job I’d ever had.

The store was open Tuesday through Sunday, and Blake told me I only had to work five days a week, but I didn’t have anything else to do and it felt wrong sleeping in while Blake worked downstairs.

A few part-time workers came in to handle the counter in the afternoons, but other than that Blake ran the whole place.

I learned everything I could to help her and make myself worth her unfounded faith in me.

She paid me cash weekly and I used most of it on groceries or items for the apartment.

The twelve thousand dollars I’d brought from my old life sat untouched in a safe deposit box, opened with the same student ID I’d found, in a town thirty minutes down the road. It would be there when I needed it.

Blake was scooping cookie dough and I’d started the first coffeepot of the day when a pounding at the back door made me splash water all over the coffeemaker and down my apron. My heart rate skyrocketed.

“Can you get that?” Blake shouted over the music.

I nodded, but it was hard to make my feet move. No one had ever come to the kitchen door. It led out to a small fenced backyard with only a few lounge chairs and a grill on the cement patio. Deliveries always came through the front and always during business hours.

Drying my hands, I went to the door and opened it. A man stood on the other side, fist raised. We both jumped when we saw each other.

“Sorry.” He stuffed his fist into the pocket of his flannel. “Sometimes Blake doesn’t hear the door over the music.”

“Take on Me” by a-ha wailed behind me, spilling onto the patio where the tree branch shadows rustled in the wind. The guy looked like a bear, tall and thick with a full beard and brown hair curling over his ears. I didn’t move, didn’t say anything until Blake shouted, “Well, look who it is.”

I retreated to the abandoned coffeepot in the sink.

“That’s far enough. This is a clean kitchen, dickwad.” Blake kept scooping while side-eyeing the guy, who followed her instructions and leaned against the door. “You haven’t responded to a single text I’ve sent you in the last two weeks.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Bullshit.”

“Blake has control issues,” the guy said to me. “If you’ve worked here for over an hour, you probably already knew that.”

“Chooch has communication issues. He thinks texts are just for reading.”

“The Home Alone tweets were funny.” He grinned and dropped a backpack next to the greenhouse, leaning down to untangle a cluster of cilantro stalks from the basil. The gentle movement from such a giant, burly guy made me pause, full coffeepot in hand.

“But Home Alone was from the nineties.” I spoke up, as if Macaulay Culkin was the source of all my confusion in this moment.

He laughed, plucking a yellow leaf from one of the plants. “You do know Blake, huh?”

Blake slid pans full of cookie dough into one of the ovens. “This is my new roommate and coworker, Darcy. Darcy, meet Chooch.”

“Charlie,” the guy corrected, but quieter, as though he was less sure of his own name than of Home Alone tweets. He smiled at me, flashing white teeth in his mass of beard before quickly looking away.

“If you stick around, you’ll see Chooch every few months. He’s got a hobby farm south of town.”

Blake was close enough that I could ask under my breath without Charlie overhearing. “Are you two together?”

The laughter that shot out of her was so loud it caused ear damage. Her pink braid swung toward the floor as she doubled over against the butcher block.

“What?” Charlie asked.

She didn’t answer and I felt myself blushing, even though I didn’t know why. Washing her hands, Blake picked up the backpack Charlie had dropped on the floor and took it to the stairs that led up to the apartment. He didn’t follow her.

“He’s my idiot brother,” she managed between giggles.

“Oh.” I could feel even more blood rushing to my face. “Hi.”

He nodded at me, returning the greeting. As soon as Blake disappeared upstairs with the backpack it felt suddenly quiet in the kitchen, despite the music.

“How’s it going so far?” He asked in the same quiet way he’d said his name.

I left without answering.

Charlie came back a week later with another backpack and he and Blake went through the same ritual—insulting each other with old familiar affection before Blake took the bag and disappeared with it.

I stocked the bakery case, filled the coffeepots, and dusted the counter, staying in the front room until he was gone.

I didn’t know what was in the backpacks and I didn’t ask.

Blake was entitled to her secrets as much as I was entitled to mine.

She’d never asked about my life before Iowa City, never made me come up with stories that I’d have to keep track of later.

Blake knew there was an uncrossable line in our friendship, a dark space that, if she tried to breach it, could swallow Darcy as though she’d never existed.

Once, when she served us both the unsellable ends of a loaf of banana bread, I took a bite and said without thinking, “It tastes just like my mom’s.”

“Half butter and half shortening. That’s the secret.” Blake stuffed a piece in her mouth and chewed, glancing at me. “Is that what she did?”

It was hard to swallow. The bite seemed to swell in my mouth.

I could smell the burnt crumbs and coffee in my mom’s cramped kitchen, hear the whirr of her wheezy refrigerator that the landlord said was fine, and see the locks on the front door, the two that came with the apartment and the special one she’d ordered online, with its shiny metal and promises of safety.

For a second I could see the exact contour of her slight neck and shoulders, the way they curved more the older she got.

She denied it whenever I pointed it out, but I saw the weight of everything that pressed on her small frame.

The way her hands shook when she set the banana bread on the cooling rack.

I read once that fetal cells stayed in a mother’s body after a child was born and the reverse was true, too: a mother’s cells lived in her child’s blood and tissue for decades.

Maybe that’s why it felt like I’d been transported directly into her kitchen, why she was so clearly imprinted in my head. We carried each other inside us.

Tears clogged my throat and I forgot what Blake had asked.

I nodded, trying to swallow the knot, to bring myself back into the present.

This was exactly the life my mom had wanted for me.

But it was a life without her, a life where she only existed as stray cells wandering unmoored through my blood.

Movie night became a Sunday tradition, the one night of the week we could stay up late without worrying about turning the ovens on at 4:00 a.m. We rotated through eighties films and rom-coms, with a giant tub of popcorn between us on the couch as we debated the best characters and which parts of our favorite films stood the test of time.

Charlie started joining us, too. He was a strange but not completely unwelcome addition, since he brought beer and boxed theater candy.

Last week I’d let slip that Milk Duds were my favorite and tonight he set a box of them casually in front of my spot before we all settled in.

The three of us sprawled on the pink couch in a pile of blankets and pillows, passing snacks and watching Say Anything , but my head wasn’t contemplating Lloyd Dobler as much as the tasting notes of Milk Duds and how I might be able to reimagine them for the bakery.

“What about a dark chocolate muffin with a salted caramel drizzle? Maybe with an espresso base to balance the sweetness?”

Blake shushed me and shoved the popcorn into my lap. “It’s almost the best part.” Her whole body exhaled as the iconic shot came on-screen—Lloyd standing outside Diane Court’s house, blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” with a massive boombox held over his head.

“That’s stalking,” Charlie said through a mouthful of Raisinets.

“Shut up. It’s romantic.”

“You’re telling me you wouldn’t call the police if your ex--boyfriend stood on your property playing your sex soundtrack on repeat in the middle of the night? Look, she can’t even sleep because of that asshole.” Charlie threw a Raisinet at the screen.

“He’s not standing on her property. He’s in the street.”

“Disturbing the neighbors.”

The two of them bickered for the next two scenes. I half listened while thinking about muffin recipes, until Blake demanded I take a side. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to choose a sibling and I’d always come through for Team Blake. This time, though, it was harder to see her point.

“It . . . could be sweet.” I hedged, even though the idea of someone tracking me down and standing outside my window made me put the popcorn back on the coffee table.

“It’s emotional abuse,” Charlie said, and his deadpan tone made me snort. I swallowed the laugh, scrambling to back Blake up.

“It’s a grand gesture,” I said. “The hero has to do something out of their comfort zone to win their love. Grand gestures are a pillar of the romance genre. The entire trope was probably built around that exact scene.”

“See?” Blake elbowed Charlie, looking smug. “The grand gesture.”

As she leaned into her pillow to watch the ending, Charlie and I looked at each other across her back.

Even though I’d gotten used to seeing him, something about his presence made me feel unbalanced.

Maybe it was his size, the way he filled a doorway or took up half the couch.

Maybe it was how most of his face was obscured by his beard and shaggy hair.

He could have been intimidating or straight-up scary if he wanted to be, but he never came off that way.

He deflected attention, deadpanning or shrugging off direct questions, and even seemed to dissociate from his constant arguments with Blake, as if baiting her was as familiar and unremarkable to him as breathing.

And his eyes. His eyes were the softest brown I’d ever seen and they’d never gotten angry.

Not once. The first time I met him I thought of a bear.

Now I thought of a teddy bear. A sort of sweet, sexy teddy bear.

Blake talked over the movie, pointing things out that neither of us paid attention to. Charlie was still looking at me, shaking his head slightly at my defense of Blake, but on the verge of smiling, too.

Emotional abuse , he mouthed.

Grand gesture , I mouthed back, feeling an answering smile spreading across my face.

Later that night, Blake was brushing her teeth and I was washing dishes when a noise outside brought us both to the living room.

“Do you hear—?” Blake cut off as the noise registered and her face transformed from confused to murderous. She marched to the sliding glass door and pulled it open.

Charlie stood in the yard, holding an iPad above his head that blasted the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” into the night. As Sting sang, “Every move you make, I’ll be watching you,” he slowly pointed two fingers at his eyes followed by one finger up at Blake.

“You’re an asshole!” she screamed, spitting toothpaste at him before stomping back inside.

“Exactly!” he shouted back, swinging the iPad down and stopping the music as his gaze shifted to me. In the sudden quiet, his voice dropped to a huskier pitch. “Right?”

Heat flooded through me, catching me off guard. I’d known something was there, but I wasn’t prepared for the force of the sudden knowledge zinging through my body. God, I was attracted to Charlie.

It felt dangerous to agree with him and impossible not to.

He stood underneath the balcony, staring up with those chocolate eyes, the iPad dwarfed in his giant, gentle hand.

The silence stretched out and it was only when Blake came back with a pitcher of water, dumping it over the balcony, that I forced a laugh and ran back into the safety of my newfound home.