Page 24 of Fluffed and Folded

“I…” she trailed off and turned helplessly toward the inside of her apartment. “I was, um…” Her hand came up and made a vague motion. “I don’t actually know. Crazy people stuff, apparently.” She swallowed hard, lip wobbling. “There are so many blanks. I don’t realize I’m out of it until I get snapped back, and then I can’t remember.” A lone tear trickled down her cheek. No one appeared to be watching them, but Eli couldn’t be certain. The apartment complex thrived on gossip. He slipped inside the door, clicking it closed behind him.

“Come on,” he said and herded her to her couch. She sank into it, blinking up at him in confusion.

“Should you be in here?” Her hand wiped her wet cheek.

“You owed me a break in. It’s just good manners,” he said.

She laughed, but it sounded weak.

“Did you eat today?” he asked.

She shrugged.

He sniffed. “It smells edible in here. Did you cook something?”

She perked up, looking surprised. “I must have.” She started to stand, but he put out a hand to halt her.

“I’ll go check.”

“Make yourself at home,” she said with an attempt at sarcasm that fell flat when she curled into a sad little ball and rested her head on the arm of the sofa.

Eli went into the kitchen, noting the apartment was cozier than his, despite the fact that he thought he’d done a pretty good job of decorating. This one looked like a family place, not a lone bachelor hangout. There were pictures of a couple on the wall, in various poses, but he didn’t pause to regard them. Instead he went to the kitchen, lifted the lid on a pot on the stove, turned the burner off, and gave it a stir.

“Chicken and dumplings,” he muttered to himself as he held the spoon aloft and let the contents drip back into the pan.“Huh.” He hadn’t taken Darby for a comfort food kind of girl. If he’d had to guess, he would have said she was the type to get sushi takeout delivered by someone she kept on speed dial. As before, he realized he had stereotyped her and vowed to do better at not letting his preformed impressions get the better of him. He dished up a bowl and carried it to her, finding her asleep on the couch, curled up like a street urchin who had wandered inside for the warmth.

“Darby.” He said it softly, but she still startled awake, eyes wide with momentary confusion. “I have food.”

She sat up and ran a hand through her tumbly curls, pausing when her fingers got stuck. Instead of taking the time to unsnarl them, she merely abandoned the effort and reached for the bowl he held out to her. “Thank you.”

“You cooked it. I’m merely the delivery method.” He perched on the edge of the coffee table across from her. “So you can cook.”

“I don’t like to eat out. Plus it’s cheaper.”

That gave him pause. Was Darby having financial problems? He didn’t think she worked, but he assumed she received her income from the apartment building. Maybe not, though. Maybe her husband had left her with unresolved debt.

She stirred her dumplings listlessly, staring into the bowl. “I grew up poor,” she blurted, apropos of nothing. “In the middle of nowhere Mississippi. I had to drive forty minutes to get to the gas station where I worked as a waitress. That was where Ham found me.” She took a bite.

Eli waited her out, sensing she wasn’t done talking.

“I’d never left my small town, figured I would probably be there until I died. It was a depressing thought. Ham was charming, a talker. He was traveling through and I thought it was something that he could pick up and travel whenever he wanted, felt like a dream to me. He told me about the placeshe’d been, about Washington DC, about his carefree lifestyle. It sounded so wonderful, but at the same time I sensed that he was lonely, and maybe a little sad. He was almost forty years older than me, but we had that in common, a sort of sad desperation that made us feel isolated.” She stirred her dumplings some more. “He stayed in town for two weeks, and by the end of it we were engaged. I like to think we both had good intentions, that we genuinely believed we were in love. Now, ten years later, I don’t know.” She finally took a bite.

“Was the marriage…bad?” Eli asked.

She shook her head, waiting to speak until she swallowed. “No, nothing like that. Ham was kind to me, generous, caring. But I was eighteen years old. I had no idea how sheltered I was until I wasn’t anymore. The things I knew could have fit in a jelly jar. And all of a sudden I was living ten hours from everyone I knew, in a city a hundred times the size of the one I left, with a husband who had four decades on me. Culture shock is probably the best way to describe it. It’s complex because on the one hand I realized how much I’d missed out on by marrying at eighteen, but on the other it made me realize how much I would have missed out on by staying there.”

She listlessly stirred her dumplings. “Who taught you to cook like this?” he asked.

“My meemaw.”

There it was, the one tiny phrase that shattered the remainder of his image of her. The pristine, standoffish, beauty queen ice princess Darby was nothing like the tumbly haired widow who made dumplings and talked about her meemaw.

“I’m so tired,” she said, staring listlessly at her bowl.

“It’s almost like blacking out and prowling in other people’s houses at night has consequences,” Eli suggested, but in a light enough tone to tell her he was teasing.

She finally cracked a smile, her first since he entered her house. “Of all the things I thought I’d become, crazy wasn’t on my radar.” She pushed away her plate and curled into a little ball on the couch.

“What was on your radar?” Eli asked curiously, but too late, she was already asleep. He finished his bowl of dumplings, trying not to feel like a creeper as he stared at her. As much as he had resisted getting involved or getting close to her, he was invested now, and it was uncomfortable how worried he was for her. She was a stranger, and yet in a weird way she had become his responsibility. Even Tristan thought so.

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