Jane made a small sound that, in a less refined person, would have been a laugh. “Did you speak to him? Actually speak to him?”
“We spoke about the radiator. And Mia’s school. I just told you—”
“About anything real, Lizzie. Did you have a single conversation about anything that mattered?”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“He is going to be in that apartment for three years,” Jane said, not unkindly. “You are going to have to find a way to be in the same room as him without treating it like something to be survived.”
“I do not treat it like something to be survived.”
“You were just describing dinner with the energy of someone filing a report after a difficult military mission.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together. Outside, somewhere in the apartment, she could hear a door close softly. His room, probably. She knew the direction.
“He looked at me at dinner,” she said. She had not meant to say it. She said it anyway.
“He looked at you.”
“In a way that… I don’t know how to explain it. Like he was trying to work something out and was not going to ask.”
Jane waited.
“I am not ready for whatever that conversation is,” Elizabeth said. “I am not ready for it, Jane. We have been here one day. Mia is fifteen and she just lost her parents, and the last thing this apartment needs right now is whatever eight years of unfinished business looks like when it finally has nowhere left to go.”
“No,” Jane said quietly. “I understand that.”
“Good.”
“I just think,” Jane continued, in the careful tone that meant she was going to say the thing Elizabeth did not want to hear, “that you ended things the way you did for a reason. And at somepoint, you are going to have to know whether that reason was true.”
The apartment was very quiet.
“Jane.”
“I know. You don’t like talking about it.”
“Yes.”
Then Jane said, “Charles says to give his love to Mia.”
“Tell him thank you. Tell him to bring those almond croissants she likes when they come on Saturday.”
“Already bought,” Jane said. “I bought them this morning.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly. “Of course you did.”
“Get some sleep, Lizzie.”
“I will try.”
“And Lizzie.” Jane paused. “Even though they weren’t thinking of their deaths, Charlotte and Richard did not put you both in that apartment by accident. You know that, right?”
Elizabeth looked at the paper star on the ceiling. Crooked by fifteen degrees. Full of character.
“Goodnight, Jane,” she said.
She ended the call and lay in the dark for a long time, in the one guest room that still felt strange in a cosy apartment, under Charlotte’s star, listening to the apartment settle around her.
