“I bet she did,” Mia said, softer now.
“We went to dinner once. Just us. Charlotte suggested it in the way she suggested things she had already decided were going to happen, and we both agreed because it was easier than arguing with her.”
“Once?” Mia said. “Just once?”
Elizabeth hesitated. “A month,” she admitted. “We saw each other for about a month.”
Mia turned fully toward her. “That’s not once.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “It isn’t.”
“What happened?”
Elizabeth looked toward the window. Brooklyn moved outside, steady and unconcerned.
“I decided I knew exactly what kind of person he was,” she said. “Same as I had before. I just had more information to justify it.”
“And were you right?”
The question landed quietly.
Elizabeth felt it settle.
“I think I am,” she said. “Like you said, he’s monochromatic. You can’t touch anything of Darcy’s without him noticing it’sbeen moved an inch out of place. Let not even talk about suggesting changes to him. You might not understand it now, but that’s a difficult man to be with. And there were other things I found out that…”
Her voice trailed off.
Mia watched her with Charlotte’s eyes.
“That?” she asked.
Elizabeth almost answered.
The word was there, waiting.
She did not say it.
“He should be here any time now,” she said instead. “He texted yesterday. Said he’d be here by five.”
Mia held her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she looked away, turning back toward the window with the expression of someone who had received a non-answer and was choosing, for now, to accept it.
“MMD,” she said under her breath.
Elizabeth glanced at her.
“Mum would have liked this,” Mia said. “All of us. Here.” She said it simply, without weight, which somehow gave it more. “She would have said it was exactly what she wanted.”
Elizabeth’s throat tightened.
“Yes,” she said. “She would have. I guess that is why they jokingly added the clause in the first place.”
They sat together in the quiet of the apartment, in the particular stillness of a home learning what it was now.
At four fifty-eight, the buzzer rang.
THREE
MIA WAS OFF THEsofa before the sound had finished, moving across the living room with the particular urgency of someone who had been watching the clock without looking at it. She pressed the intercom button on the wall panel beside the front door, heard the street door click open below, and then stood there with her hand still resting against the panel as though she wasn't sure what to do with the waiting.
