10. Mia
MIA
Three weeks of silence will do things to a person.
I'd cataloged all of Ludo's journals on the second shelf. Eaten my weight in Sophia's cooking.
Emma dragged me to a trivia night at the bar on Pine Street. I got the pop culture questions wrong and the history questions right. The table noticed. I changed the subject.
Every morning I went to work. Every night I came home. And I pretended I wasn't listening for footsteps in the corridor that never came.
He was gone. Sophia told me he'd left for a family matter. She didn't say more.
I didn't ask. She didn't offer.
We kept busy. We kept quiet. And neither of us mentioned the man whose absence filled the house.
The studio door stayed shut. I walked past it twice a day and kept my gaze forward.
I was an adult. I was a professional. I had not spent three weeks replaying the way his hands shook against my jaw.
Liar.
Fine. I'd spent every one of those days replaying it. Every second.
The paint on his fingers. The sound the coffee mug made when it hit concrete. The way he kissed my tears without asking a single question.
But that was then. This was a morning in March. The mountains had snow on them and I was driving up to the Castle with a coffee so large it needed its own seat belt.
Sophia had called the night before. "Come in the morning," she'd said. Nothing else.
Her voice had that quality it got when she was keeping a secret. A warmth pressed down tight, like a lid on a pot about to boil over.
I parked. Cut the engine. Sat there for a minute with my hands on the steering wheel.
He might be back.
He might not be back.
Either way you have a job to do, so get out of the car.
I got out of the car.
The front door was unlocked. Sophia's doing. I stepped inside, set my bag on the bench in the hallway, and heard a sound that stopped me cold.
Humming.
Not Sophia. Sophia sang Hindi film songs under her breath while she cooked.
This was a different kind of humming. Small and tuneless and happy. Coming from the kitchen.
I rounded the corner.
A little girl sat at the breakfast counter on a stool that was too tall for her. Her legs swung in the air, bare feet nowhere close to the footrest. She had a bowl of cereal in front of her and she was picking through it with the focus of a surgeon.
Dark curls. Wild, thick, falling past her ears.
Green eyes.
I knew those eyes.
She looked up. Studied me for a long second. Then she said, "You're pretty."
My throat closed.
"Are you Daddy's friend?"
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
A five-year-old who was her father in miniature was evaluating me from her perch at the counter. I had no words for the moment.
"I'm Mia," I managed.
Avery's mouth fell open. She dropped the spoon.
"Mimi?"
The word hit me somewhere behind my ribs. A place I didn't know existed. A child I'd never met had said a name I'd never been called. And she made it sound like I'd been missing from her life for years.
"Mommy told me about you," Avery said. She slid off the stool with the confidence of someone who had been climbing things her whole life.
Avery walked right up to me. Tilted her head back. Those green eyes, her father's eyes, locked on mine.
"She said you are nice. She said you help Daddy."
I crouched down so we were eye level. My lower back protested. Cold mornings did that. My coffee was still in my hand. My heart was doing a thing I couldn't name.
"Your mommy was right," I said. "I do help your daddy."
"Good." Avery nodded once. Firm. Business settled.
"Do you like pancakes?"
"I love pancakes."
"Good. Because I do not like the green cereal pieces." She pointed at her bowl.
"They taste different. Everyone says they do not, but everyone is wrong."
I glanced at the bowl. She'd sorted every green loop into a small pile on the counter. The rest of the cereal sat in the milk, waiting.
"They do taste different," I said.
Her whole face lit up. Like I'd handed her a winning argument she'd been building since birth.
"See?" She grabbed my free hand. Her fingers were tiny and sticky with milk.
"Mimi, will you make pancakes? Sophia said I could ask."
My gaze went past Avery to the kitchen. Sophia stood at the stove, back to us, wooden spoon in hand.
She didn't turn around, but her shoulders were shaking. She was laughing. Or crying.
"I will make you the best pancakes you've ever had," I told Avery.
"Better than the ones in the restaurant with Daddy?"
"Better than those."
She squeezed my hand. "Okay. I believe you."
I set my coffee down. Found the flour. Found the eggs.
Avery climbed back up to the counter and directed the entire operation like a tiny general.
"More," she said when I poured the batter.
"That's already a big one."
"Bigger."
I poured more. She nodded her approval.
"Daddy likes big pancakes too." She held up three fingers. "He eats three. I eat two."
"Mommy used to eat one and give me half."
The past tense hung in the air. Used to. Mommy used to.
"Mommy is in heaven now," Avery said. Same tone she'd used to tell me about the cereal. Matter of fact.
A thing she had been told and accepted the way children accept weather. It rains sometimes. Mommy is in heaven now.
"But she told me that heaven has good food so I do not have to worry."
I flipped the pancake. My hand was steady. The rest of me was not.
"That sounds right to me," I said.
"Are you going to cry?"
I blinked. Stared at her.
"Your face is doing a thing." Avery tilted her head. "Sophia's face does that thing too. I think it means you are sad."
"I'm not sad," I said. Which was not true.
"I'm happy to meet you." Which was so true it hurt.
"I wanted to meet you for a long time. Mommy said you are the lady at Daddy's house."
Avery picked up a piece of non-green cereal and popped it in her mouth.
"She said I would like you." She chewed once.
"She was right. I do like you."
A place in my chest came apart. Not breaking. Opening.
Like a door I hadn't known was there.
We ate pancakes at the counter. I cut Avery's into small pieces and she drowned them in syrup. She ate each piece with her fingers because the fork was "too slippery."
She told me about the mountains. She told me about the airplane, which was "loud but good."
Her favorite color was purple. Second favorite was yellow. Third favorite was "the color of Daddy's paintings when they are still wet."
She talked with her mouth full and waved her arms when she got excited. Syrup on her chin, her cheek, her nose. Somehow on the back of her hand.
I had never spent real time around a five-year-old. I had no idea what I was doing.
It didn't matter. Avery didn't need me to have a plan. She just needed me to listen, cut her pancakes, and agree that green cereal loops were a crime against breakfast.
That I could do.
The air changed while I was kneeling beside her, wiping syrup off her chin with a paper towel.
No sound. No footsteps.
But the back of my neck went warm. Something in my chest pulled tight. The same pull that hit me every time he'd stood on the other side of a window.
I looked up.
Tony was standing in the kitchen doorway.
Three weeks. Three weeks since I'd seen him.
The sight of him made every nerve I owned go quiet. Not in the way silence is empty. In the way a held note is full.
He was thinner. The breadth of his shoulders was the same but the rest of him had pared down. Grief takes what it always takes.
His curls were longer, wilder, pushed back from a face that hadn't seen enough sleep. His eyes were red-rimmed. Shadows under them that hadn't been there before.
He looked like a man who had spent three weeks watching someone die. Then gotten on a plane with a five-year-old. And hadn't stopped moving long enough to feel any of it.
He looked at me.
Then at Avery.
Then at my hand on Avery's cheek. The paper towel, the syrup, the stack of pancakes between us.
His daughter's bare feet swinging. My hair falling over my shoulder. The flour on my shirt.
And something crossed his face that I wasn't prepared for. Not relief. Not exhaustion.
Not the careful blankness I'd seen in the studio.
Hope.
Raw, unguarded, and so fragile it looked like it would shatter if either of us spoke.
I didn't speak. He didn't speak.
The kitchen was full of morning light and pancake batter and cereal loops sorted by color. A five-year-old's sticky hands between us. And neither of us could find a single word for what was happening across ten feet of tile.
Then Avery turned on her stool.
"Daddy!" She launched off the seat. Tony caught her in one motion.
Big arms, small body, dark curls against dark curls. He held her against his chest. Her arms went around his neck and she pressed a huge kiss to his cheek.
"Mimi made pancakes." Avery bounced in Tony's arms. "They are so good, Daddy. Better than the restaurant."
Tony's eyes stayed on mine over Avery's curls. I watched him breathe. In, out, slow, the kind of breath a person takes when they're trying to hold too many things at once.
"Mimi?" he said. His voice was rough. Low.
The first word he'd ever spoken to me.
My face went hot. "She, um. She named me."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close to it.
Close enough to make my pulse stutter and my hands grip the edge of the counter.
"Daddy," Avery said, pulling back to hold his face between her small hands. "Can Mimi live here? She is very good at pancakes."
Tony's eyes went to his daughter. Then to me. His jaw worked once.
I was going to combust. Catch fire and burn to ash right here beside the pancake batter.
They'd find a pile of flour, a paper towel, and the charred remains of a woman who could not handle a five-year-old's question.
Behind us, Sophia turned from the stove. She pressed her lips together. Her chin trembled once.
She walked to the refrigerator, opened it, and stood there looking at nothing until she had herself under control.
Tony didn't answer the question. He didn't have to.
He held his daughter and watched me across a kitchen full of syrup and cereal and morning light. The word he'd said hung in the air between us.
Mimi.
My name in his daughter's voice. And his.
Avery rested her head on Tony's shoulder. She yawned.
"I think she should live here," she told him, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "She agrees about the green ones."
Tony's mouth twitched again. He pressed his lips to the top of Avery's head.
And I stood there, covered in flour, heart wide open. Falling for a child I'd known for forty minutes. And a man I'd known for weeks and understood not at all.
I was in so much trouble.