Chapter 4 #2
“Yeah… it’s unfair, leaving me like this,” he muttered. “What do you expect me to do? Be a father to a fifteen-year-old? That’s going to be difficult.”
He exhaled, only then realising he had been speaking aloud.
Then he stood, grabbed his towel, and went back out into his room.
***
Elizabeth was sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard and her knees pulled up when Jane answered.
She had waited until Mia’s light was off and the apartment had gone quiet before making the call, which had taken longer than expected because the apartment did not go quiet easily.
It was full of small sounds — the radiator, the street below, the particular acoustics of a building that had been lived in for years by people who were no longer there.
“How was day one?” Jane asked.
“I survived it.”
“That is not the same as fine.”
“I know.” Elizabeth looked at the ceiling.
Charlotte had DIYed the painting of the ceiling.
She had even stuck a small paper star… no, forgotten it during painting, up there years ago, right above the bed, crooked by approximately fifteen degrees, and had never straightened it or bothered to remove it because she said imperfection was character.
Elizabeth had forgotten about it until tonight.
“Mia joked at dinner. And it was genuine. And then she went quiet and I had absolutely no idea what to do.”
“So, you just kept quiet?”
“Nope. Darcy passed her bread and I asked her if she wanted more pasta.”
Jane giggled softly.
“She ate two more portions, so I am choosing to call it a success.” Elizabeth exhaled. “She is so much like Charlotte, Jane. The way she looks at you. Like she understands you without you having to say a word.”
“Charlotte was like that at fifteen too,” Jane said. “You just don’t remember because you were fifteen too and you thought you were the perceptive one.”
“I was the perceptive one.”
“You absolutely were not, but we’d argue about that some other time.” Jane’s voice was warm. “How are you, Lizzie? Not Mia. Not the apartment. You.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth, then closed it.
It was the simplest question and somehow the one she had been least prepared for.
Everyone had been asking about Mia. About the logistics.
About the apartment and the arrangements and how things were going to work.
Nobody had asked about her, specifically, in the quiet, direct way that Jane asked it, and Elizabeth felt the question arrive somewhere unguarded and stay there.
“I don’t know,” she said. Honestly.
Jane waited.
“I keep thinking of her,” Elizabeth continued.
“I know,” Jane said softly.
“I found one of her voice notes this morning. From two months ago. She was rambling about a recipe she was going to try, going off on some tangent about whether parchment paper was actually necessary or just something people said to seem serious about cooking.” Elizabeth laughed, brief and sharp, with an edge to it.
“I listened to it four times. I couldn’t stop.
It was three minutes and forty seconds of her talking about parchment paper, and I sat on the kitchen floor and listened to it four times. ”
Jane did not say anything for a moment. It was the kind of silence that was not empty.
“She is everywhere in this apartment,” Elizabeth continued.
“The hand soap in the kitchen. The books on the shelves, all sideways, every single one. There is a paper star on the ceiling in here, Jane. Right above the bed. Fifteen degrees off centre because she thought imperfection was character. I am lying here looking at it and I cannot decide whether it is comforting or unbearable.”
“Maybe both,” Jane said quietly. “Maybe it is allowed to be both.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. “I miss her,” she said. Simply. Just that. “I miss her so much it feels structural. Like she was holding something up that I didn’t know needed holding.”
“I know,” Jane said. “I know, Lizzie.”
They were quiet together for a moment. Two sisters on the phone in the dark, not needing to fill it.
Then Jane said, “And how are you coping living with Darcy?”
Elizabeth knew immediately what Jane meant. She had known it was coming from the moment Jane answered. Jane had the particular gift of hoping everyone would find romance just as she had.
“For Mia’s sake… we can coexist.”
“Lizzie.”
“What do you want me to say? I am living with my ex and we have to co-parent for the next three years. We’ll act like adults and do what’s best for the child.”
“Are you even talking?”
“We try our best. At least at dinner, we discussed the school schedule and the radiator. That’s talking.”
“You discussed a radiator.”
“It is a very loud radiator, Jane.”
Jane made a small sound that, in a less refined person, would have been a laugh. “Did you speak to him? Actually speak to him?”
“We spoke about the radiator. And Mia’s school. I just told you—”
“About anything real, Lizzie. Did you have a single conversation about anything that mattered?”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“He is going to be in that apartment for three years,” Jane said, not unkindly. “You are going to have to find a way to be in the same room as him without treating it like something to be survived.”
“I do not treat it like something to be survived.”
“You were just describing dinner with the energy of someone filing a report after a difficult military mission.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together. Outside, somewhere in the apartment, she could hear a door close softly. His room, probably. She knew the direction.
“He looked at me at dinner,” she said. She had not meant to say it. She said it anyway.
“He looked at you.”
“In a way that… I don’t know how to explain it. Like he was trying to work something out and was not going to ask.”
Jane waited.
“I am not ready for whatever that conversation is,” Elizabeth said.
“I am not ready for it, Jane. We have been here one day. Mia is fifteen and she just lost her parents, and the last thing this apartment needs right now is whatever eight years of unfinished business looks like when it finally has nowhere left to go.”
“No,” Jane said quietly. “I understand that.”
“Good.”
“I just think,” Jane continued, in the careful tone that meant she was going to say the thing Elizabeth did not want to hear, “that you ended things the way you did for a reason. And at some point, you are going to have to know whether that reason was true.”
The apartment was very quiet.
“Jane.”
“I know. You don’t like talking about it.”
“Yes.”
Then Jane said, “Charles says to give his love to Mia.”
“Tell him thank you. Tell him to bring those almond croissants she likes when they come on Saturday.”
“Already bought,” Jane said. “I bought them this morning.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly. “Of course you did.”
“Get some sleep, Lizzie.”
“I will try.”
“And Lizzie.” Jane paused. “Even though they weren’t thinking of their deaths, Charlotte and Richard did not put you both in that apartment by accident. You know that, right?”
Elizabeth looked at the paper star on the ceiling. Crooked by fifteen degrees. Full of character.
“Goodnight, Jane,” she said.
She ended the call and lay in the dark for a long time, in the one guest room that still felt strange in a cosy apartment, under Charlotte’s star, listening to the apartment settle around her.
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.