"Yes, Darcy."
He nodded. "Go and have a bath. Hot water. As long as you need. I will be here."
"You do not have to stay up."
"I know."
She looked at him. He was leaning against the counter with his arms folded, not blocking anything, not demanding anything. Just present.
"Thank you," she said.
"Go," he said. Simply. Without making it into anything.
She went upstairs and ran the bath hot.
FOURTEEN
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, MIA LEFTfor schoolat seven-thirty.
Elizabeth had made breakfast, helped her find the left shoe of the pair she wanted to wear, and reminded Mia twice about packing her history project due that morning. Darcy had appeared with his car keys because he was the one on schedule to drop her off, and Mia had kissed Elizabeth on the cheek and they had gone. Elizabeth had stood at the front door for a moment after they left and then gone back inside to make herself a second cup of coffee and sit with the quiet house and the morning.
She was at the kitchen counter with her laptop and her coffee, halfway through a paragraph she had been working on for three days, when the doorbell rang.
She frowned at the screen. Darcy had the door code. He would not ring the bell.
She reached for her phone and opened the door camera app.
Standing in front of the steps was Daniel.
What the hell is he doing here?
Darcy's suggested warm bath on Saturday had been exactly right. It had loosened something that the evening had knotted up, and by the time she came back downstairs and sat with him over a cup of coffee, the worst of it had passed. She had slept better than she expected.
On Sunday, Daniel had sent an apology message. She had seen it, read it once, and set her phone face down on the counter. Mia had come back from her sleepover twenty minutes later, full of everything Priya's household had done and said and watched and eaten, and the three of them had ended up on the sofa that evening with a film and leftover takeout and Mia wedged between them complaining about the ending before it had finished.
Elizabeth had given Daniel very little thought after that. The conclusion, when it came, was simple enough: men like him existed, they always had, and a woman simply had to keep her eyes open and protect herself accordingly. It was not a comforting thought. It was a true one.
Now however, she stared at the screen for a moment. Her first thought, arriving before anything more sensible could stop it, was that he had come to apologise. That he had thought about what had happened in the car and had felt the appropriate weight of it and had come to say so. People did that sometimes. People surprised you.
She put her phone down and went to the front door and opened it.
Daniel was on the step.
She had one second to register this before he put his hand flat against the door and pushed.
Elizabeth resisted, but was stronger. He was already inside before she could say a word.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?” she said. Her voice came out steady. She was aware of her phone on the kitchen counter, of the distance between her and it, of the fact that she was standing in the living room and he had just walked into it without being asked.
"I drove you home," he said. "First date, remember? You told me to pull up here."
She had not forgotten that on the first date she had given him the address to drop her at and he had filed it away.
"You need to leave," she said.
"I need to leave." He said it back to her with a smile that made her skin contract. "Right. Because you were so polite on Saturday? Because that was the respectful thing, what you did. Getting out of my car on a side street."
"I asked you to stop." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "You were touching me inappropriately without my consent. You did not stop when I asked you to stop." She held his gaze even as something cold moved through her chest. "So I left."
