Elizabeth spoke first.
"You said yes without considering if I wanted this or not."
Darcy looked at the street. "Yes."
"You did not even seek my opinion.”
"No."
She turned to face him. "You could have waited. You could have at least —"
"There is a fifteen-year-old girl," he said quietly, "who just lost both her parents. She has no grandparents who can take her. No aunts. No uncles. No one." He paused. "What else was I supposed to say."
It was not a question. It did not need to be.
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked away, back at the street, at nothing in particular.
He was right. She knew he was right. She had known it the moment the clause was read, which was precisely why she had counted to fourteen and said yes anyway, and precisely why it annoyed her that he had not needed to count at all.
"Charlotte's apartment has four bedrooms," she said finally. "There is enough space."
Darcy nodded. That was all.
He reached into his jacket pocket for his phone. "My car is two blocks over. I can have the driver bring it round."
"I will walk."
He looked at her. "It is cold."
"I know." She was already moving. "I need the air."
She did not wait for his response.
Half a block passed before she let herself breathe properly. Then another. The city moved around her, indifferent and unhurried, entirely itself, and Elizabeth walked without direction, without destination, just forward, just cold air, just the particular October light that had been there the morning Charlotte sent her twelve seconds of laughter and was still here now, unchanged, which felt like an offence.
The full weight of what had just happened settled into its actual shape somewhere around the third block.
Charlotte and Richard were gone.
Mia needed them both. Every day. Under the same roof. For three years, until she turned eighteen and the court said they were done.
And it had been Charlotte's idea. Of course it had been Charlotte's idea. The clause, the careful arrangement of two people who had spent eight years avoiding each other into the same four-bedroom apartment — it had Charlotte's fingerprints all over every word of it.
Elizabeth had spent eight years keeping a door closed and Charlotte had, from beyond a legally notarised document, simply removed the door entirely.
She almost laughed. She almost cried. She did neither.
Charlotte, she thought. You absolute menace.
She could almost hear the laughter. Twelve seconds of it. Bright and unhurried, exactly as it had always been.
TWO
"WHEN IS MR. DARCYcoming?"
Mia was sitting on the kitchen counter again, one leg tucked beneath her, the other swinging idly. There was something watchful about her, something that missed very little. She had Charlotte's eyes, Elizabeth thought. Wide and still and quietly assessing. And perhaps Richard's stillness too — that particular quality of patience that made you feel, when he looked at you, that he had already decided to wait you out.
They were in the house on Hicks Street — a two-floor duplex, four bedrooms upstairs, the kind of Brooklyn brownstone that Charlotte had loved on sight and Richard had pretended to be practical about before agreeing to immediately. It was full of their things. Charlotte's books stacked sideways on the shelves because she had never bothered to stand them upright. Richard's framed photographs on every available wall. The kitchen still smelled faintly of the particular brand of hand soap Charlotte had used for as long as Elizabeth could remember.
