Unbidden, her mind drifted to the man in the next room who had looked at her at dinner in a way she did not have the right word for and was not ready to find one.
Then her thoughts turned to Jane’s last statement. Yes, Charlotte had always tried to play matchmaker. Everyone who knew about their relationship had tried to broker some sort of truce. Elizabeth didn’t give space for any.
Elizabeth shook the thought away. She was here to keep Charlotte’s trust and be a mother to Mia. Not to get distracted by men too full of themselves.
Transitioning from godmother to guardian was what she needed to figure out. In the morning, she told herself. She would think about it properly in the morning.
Elizabeth dropped her phone and slipped under her duvet.
Somewhere in the hallway, the radiator knocked twice and went quiet.
FIVE
IT WAS NOT THE RADIATOR.
Elizabeth was certain of this before she was fully awake. The radiator had a particular language — a knocking, intermittent and vaguely apologetic, that she had memorised over two weeks and learned to sleep through.
Ironically, Darcy had fixed it before his trip, which she had not asked him to do and had not thanked him for, and the apartment had been quieter since.
However, the sound that woke her was a different sound entirely. A scraping. A soft clatter. Deliberate in the particular way that sounds were deliberate at two in the morning when they had no business being made at all.
She lay still for a moment and listened.
It was coming from downstairs.
Elizabeth sat up. The room was dark and the street outside threw a thin stripe of light across the ceiling and she could hear her own breathing and nothing else for three seconds, and then the sound came again. Definitely the kitchen. Definitely something moving.
She reached for her phone first. Screen brightness down, 911 already pulled up, her thumb resting over the dial button like a question she had not yet decided to ask. Then she stood, moved to the corner of the room, and her hand found the baseball bat before she had consciously remembered it was there.
James’s bat. Derek Jeter, signed in blue marker on the barrel, acquired at some point during what Charlotte had called his deeply inconvenient Yankees phase. It had lived in the corner of the room she was sleeping in for as long as Elizabeth could remember. Charlotte had moved it from the living room, where it had hung like a trophy, to this room because where else did junk belong in an apartment with no basement or spare room? Elizabeth had considered removing the bat from her room, but decided there was no better place to put it.
She held it now with one hand and felt, briefly, that Charlotte would have found this very funny.
She moved to the door and opened it without sound. The landing was dark. She stood and listened. Mia's door was closed, the thin line beneath it dark and still. Good. She was asleep. Elizabeth pulled Mia's door handle gently, just enough to confirm it was properly shut, and then turned toward the stairs.
She went down slowly, the bat in her right hand, her left holding the phone with her thumb poised over the dial button.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The kitchen light was on, and there was a smell that was either burning toast or something adjacent to burning toast. Now that she was close enough, she could hear the specific sound of someone who did not know where things were, opening and closing cupboard doors with increasing frustration.
Not a burglar, then. Burglars, in her experience, were quieter about cupboards.
Rats?New York did have a rat problem. Rats did not, however, make toast.
Did a homeless person think no one stayed in the house because the owners had passed? That did not make sense either. They would have seen her and Mia taking walks, or Darcy driving his large electric four-wheel drive.
Unless, because he travelled and the car was not always outside, they had thought otherwise, she decided.
She rounded the kitchen’s doorframe with the bat raised and her thumb on the dial and came face to face with Fitzwilliam Darcy, shirtless, in grey jogger shorts, holding a bread knife and squinting at the toaster with the expression of a man engaged in a deeply personal conflict.
He turned at the sound of her entrance.
They looked at each other.
"You scared the absolute shit out of me," Elizabeth said.
Darcy set the bread knife down on the counter with great care. His eyes moved to the bat. Then back to her face. "I see you found James's bat."
"When did you get here?"
