Darcy said nothing further, but the tense lines in his jaws suggested he had a lot he was keeping to his chest. He changed lanes smoothly, indicated, did everything a person driving a car was required to do, and Elizabeth looked at his profile in the dark and looked away again and looked back at the window.
"Mr. Darcy," Mia said.
"Yes."
"Even if she dates someone else." Mia's voice was different now. Quieter. Genuine in the specific way she was genuine when she had stopped performing the conversation and was just in it. "You will always be my favourite. Regardless of who Aunty Elizabeth brings home."
Something shifted in the car. Elizabeth felt it.
Darcy was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice was even, unhurried, the voice he used when something had landed and he was deciding how to carry it.
"Thank you, Mia," he said.
"I mean it."
"I know you do."
Mia settled back in her seat. The pick and mix rustled. Outside, Hicks Street appeared at the end of the block.
Elizabeth looked at her window.
She did not look at Darcy.
She was not going to look at Darcy.
She looked at Darcy.
He was already looking at the road. His expression was the composed, controlled one he wore when he was not going to let anything out, and his hands were perfectly still on the wheel, and Elizabeth turned back to her window and did not say anything for the rest of the drive.
ELEVEN
THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED WAS, without anyone announcing it or agreeing to it, easier.
Darcy noticed it on Tuesday evening first. They had stayed at the table after dinner — not by design, not because anyone had suggested it — simply because Mia had started an argument about whether a book was better than its adaptation and neither he nor Elizabeth had been prepared to let it go unchallenged. They had been there for forty minutes before he looked up and registered the time.
He could not have said what had shifted. Something about the cinema, perhaps. Or the drive home. He could not identify the moment. He simply knew that something had.
Elizabeth talked at dinner now. About things that were not the schedule or the house. She had opinions about a documentary she had watched and she delivered them the way she delivered everything — directly, without softening, expecting to be pushed back on. He pushed back. She was usually right and he told her so when she was, which appeared to surprise her each time.
He noticed that. He said nothing about it.
Mia noticed everything and said nothing, which was the most concerning version of Mia. He had seen her adding to her phone at the kitchen counter on Wednesday morning, focused and unhurried, and he had not asked what she was writingbecause he already knew. It had to be a list of what he and Elizabeth were doing right together or wrong. Kids were funny that way.
By Friday the house felt different. Not resolved. But easier in the way a room felt easier when the air had been allowed to move through it.
He had thought, going to sleep on Friday night, that perhaps this was simply what it felt like when two people stopped fighting the situation and accepted it. Nothing more than that. Practical. Sensible.
He had believed this for approximately fourteen hours.
***
Saturday arrived unhurried and Darcy was at the kitchen counter with his second coffee when Mia came downstairs, bag already over her shoulder, announcing Priya's mother was collecting her at half past ten.
"What are you two doing today?" she asked, looking between them.
"Working," Darcy said.
"I am going out tonight," Elizabeth said.
