"Mr. Darcy."
"Mia."
She studied him for a moment longer. Then a large smiled broke on her face.
"I will take the silence as a good sign," she said.
He did not argue with that.
EIGHTEEN
HE WAS PRESENT THAT WEEK. Not in the way he had been before — present in the house, available when needed, showing up where required. This was different.
This was Darcy with nowhere else to be.
He had cleared his schedule completely, as promised, and the absence of everything else seemed to clarify him. He was sharper and warmer at the same time, in the way people became when work was no longer taking up the part of them that other things needed. He remembered things. He noticed things. He was, for the first time since any of them had moved into the house on Hicks Street, entirely there.
Mia noticed within twenty-four hours and said nothing about it, which meant she was filing it away. Elizabeth noticed within twelve and said nothing about it either, for entirely different reasons.
***
The following Monday was for the Rockefeller tree like he promised.
Darcy had arranged it without telling either of them, which Elizabeth would normally have found irritating. Instead, she found that she could not quite produce the irritation.
He had a car waiting at ten in the morning and he stood at the bottom of the stairs calling up to Mia that they were leaving in five minutes and Mia came down in her good coat and a hat that had a pompom on it that she was wearing without any apparent self-consciousness, and they went.
The tree was enormous. Mia stood in front of it for a long time without saying anything. Elizabeth stood beside her. Darcy stood behind them both with his hands in his coat pockets and did not rush anyone.
After a while Mia took out her phone and took a photograph. Then she looked at it. Then she showed it to Elizabeth.
"Mum would have made us take a hundred of these," Mia said.
"At least," Elizabeth said. "And she would have insisted on being in all of them."
"She would have made a whole reel. With music."
"The most chaotic reel anyone has ever seen."
Mia laughed. It was a real one. Elizabeth felt happy seeing it on her face.
Darcy, standing behind them, said, "Should I take one of the two of you?"
They looked at each other. Then at him. Then Mia grabbed Elizabeth's arm and pulled her in and Darcy took the photograph and Mia looked at it and said, "One more. Your arm is weird."
He obliged and took another. She looked at it and said, "Better."
Afterward he took them to a place on 49th Street that Mia had read about online and that turned out to serve extremelygood hot chocolate. They sat at a small table by the window and watched Fifth Avenue outside.
Mia held her cup in both hands and talked about her friends, her school and a book she was reading. Darcy listened with the full attention he gave things that mattered to him
Elizabeth watched him do it and thought about nothing in particular.
She was not going to examine it; she said to herself.
She examined it anyway, quietly, on the drive home, looking out of the window while Mia fell half asleep in the backseat. She thought about a man who had been difficult to read for eight years. However, when he was speaking to Mia in that hot chocolate place on 49th Street, Elizabeth thought of him as the most readable person she had ever sat across from. She thought about Charlotte and James. She thought about their will and wondered if they had known that she would change her thoughts about Darcy if they lived together.
She had thought she knew how to handle the clause. How to handle living Fitzwilliam Darcy without getting emotional involved with him.
