Chapter 11
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 writing because 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.
He looked up from his coffee.
Mia's eyes moved to Elizabeth with immediate interest. "The date?"
"The date."
"Tonight." Mia absorbed this. "Right. Okay." She checked her phone. "That is Priya's mum outside. See you later."
She hugged both Darcy and Elizabeth and left, the door closing behind her.
The kitchen was quiet. Elizabeth was at the counter with her laptop and her coffee and the composed expression of someone who had said something and was waiting to see what happened next.
"What time are you leaving?" Darcy said.
"Seven."
"And coming back?"
"Late, probably. Don't wait up."
He set his cup down.
He knew, even as he opened his mouth, that he was about to make a mistake. He knew it the way you knew a step was going to creak before you put your weight on it. He put his weight on it anyway.
"That is a bad example," he said. "For Mia."
Elizabeth looked at him.
“What?”
"Coming home late from a date with someone you are just meeting is a bad example for Mia."
"Mia will be asleep," Elizabeth said. Her voice had gone to the level tone. The one that meant she was not going to raise it because she did not need to. "And even if she were not, Mia knowing that the adults in her life are allowed to have a life is not a bad example. It is a normal one."
"I am not saying you cannot go."
"Good. Because that is not a conversation you have any standing to have with me."
"I am saying the timing —"
"There is no timing," Elizabeth said. "I am going on a date. That is what is happening tonight. You can disagree with it or not. It does not change anything."
He looked at her. She looked back. The kitchen held them both and did not take sides.
"So you would rather leave your family here," he said, "and spend the evening with a stranger."
He heard it the moment it left his mouth.
Not the words themselves. The word. Family. The way he had said it. Like it was already true. Like he had been carrying it as true for longer than he had acknowledged.
Elizabeth's expression changed. Not softened. Changed.
"Darcy." She set her laptop down. "We are not a family."
He said nothing.
"Mia is our family. She is the person we are here for, the reason we are in this house together, and she is the one thing that matters between us.
You and I are not a family. We are two people who made a promise to a fifteen-year-old girl and we are keeping it.
" She picked up her laptop again. Her voice was even.
Precise. Not cruel. "The best we are is friends.
And that is generous on some days. But it does not mean I cannot have a life outside of this house.
It does not mean either of us has to stop existing as a person because we are sharing a house. "
The kitchen was very quiet.
He looked at her for a long moment. He had more to say. He had quite a lot more to say, none of it useful, all of it true, and he looked at her steady face and her steady voice and decided, for once in his life, to leave it where it was.
"Goodnight," he said.
Elizabeth blinked. "It is eleven in the morning."
"I know what time it is." He picked up his coffee. "I meant for this evening. I hope your date goes well."
He walked out of the kitchen.
He went upstairs. He closed his bedroom door, fired up his MacBook, sat on his bed and looked at the quarterly projections that were still half finished on his screen and did not touch them.
We are not a family.
He had known that. He had known it before she said it. There was no need for a reminder that this was a practical arrangement between two adults who had made a promise.
He had known it. So why was he feeling a stab in his chest from the moment she reminded him?
Darcy had no answer to that. But it hurt to be told off like that. Perhaps, somewhere in the past week, he stopped feeling that Mia was the only reason why they were both in the same house together.
And that, Darcy thought, was the problem.
That was precisely and entirely the problem.
And he had no idea what to do about it except sit on his bed and look at numbers that meant nothing and wait for the day to become evening so that Elizabeth could go on her date and he could be alone in the house with the quiet and the ceiling and the very clear understanding of exactly where he stood.