Elizabeth stayed where she was at the kitchen island, both hands around a mug that had gone cold twenty minutes ago. She told herself this was because she was comfortable.
A few seconds passed. Then the front door opened.
He came in carrying two bags, one leather, one canvas, and paused just inside the doorway, a habit she had almost forgotten and then recognised at once. A brief, deliberate pause while his eyes moved through the room, noting what had changed and what had not. It took him a second. Then he looked at Mia, and something in his face shifted. A smile followed, softening him completely.
"Mia."
She crossed to him and wrapped her arms around him, and Elizabeth watched it happen as you watched something you had been quietly bracing for. Not because it was bad, but because it mattered, and mattering had become more complicated since the accident.
He did not return the hug immediately.
Mia pulled back slightly, making a face that said she had understood him before he had spoken, the particular expression of someone who had known this man long enough to read the pause.
"I need hand sanitizer," he said. "I've been on the subway."
"Guest bathroom," she said. "Same as always."
"Thank you."
He set one of the bags down beside the wall — not dropped, set, with the particular care of someone who knew exactly how much each thing weighed and treated it accordingly — and disappeared down the hallway without another word. Mia watched the space where he had been. Elizabeth watched Mia.
"Well," Elizabeth said.
Mia's jaw tightened, just slightly. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to talk about Mr. Darcy’s hygiene."
Elizabeth opened her mouth, and then closed it, because Mia was right and they both knew it and there was very little point performing otherwise. Mia looked at her with questioning eyes, steady enough to make any lie feel thin, no matter how carefully constructed.
Darcy returned a minute later, sleeves resettled, composure reinstated to whatever precise standard he held himself to, which was several standards above what most people considered necessary. He crossed back to Mia with the air of a man completing something he had only briefly interrupted, and stood before her with the careful attention of someone who had been thinking, on the way over, about what to say.
He wrapped her in a warm embrace and then said, “I should have called sooner. But there were things I needed to resolve before I could clear my schedule to be here.”
Elizabeth heard the phrase and felt, privately, the same thing she always felt when Darcy spoke in the language of logistics about something that had nothing to do with logistics: a particular kind of impatience she had spent years learning to keep off her face, and had only partially succeeded at.
“It’s fine,” Mia said. Then, with a precision that was entirely her father’s, economical and deliberate: “Aunt Elizabeth explained the clause. I understand it.”
His gaze moved across to Elizabeth. Brief. Level. The kind of look that didn't offer anything and didn't ask for anything either, which she had once found maddening and now simply found familiar, which was perhaps worse.
"I imagine she was thorough," he said.
"She was," Mia confirmed.
"Your parents," Darcy said, more carefully now, "made the decisions they made because they wanted the best for you. That should count for something. I want you to know that I believe it does."
Mia nodded. "I know," she said. And then, quietly, in a way that didn't reach for comfort or offer it, but simply stated a thing as true: "I know they did."
Elizabeth looked toward the kitchen. "Mia — check the bread. It should be ready by now." She kept her voice easy, practical.
Mia looked between them, reading the room with the same unhurried accuracy she brought to most things. Her brow furrowed, but she went.
The apartment went quiet for a moment, as if it recognised the two people in it had a history.
Elizabeth turned.
"Two days," she said. "Her entire life has been reorganised since I told her about the clause two days ago, and you arrived asking for hand sanitizer."
