Chapter seven

Chapter Seven 

Mara POV

Dorothy Voss was not what I expected.

I had built her in my head as formidable. Elegant, yes, but cold in the way money made people cold. What walked through my door, slowly, with a cane she clearly resented, was something else entirely. She was small, sharp-eyed, and she looked at Lily the way starving people looked at food. Like she had been waiting a long time and was trying very hard not to show it.

Lily, who trusted no one quickly, walked straight up to her.

"Are you sick?" she asked.

Dorothy looked down at her. "Yes."

"Mommy said. Are you going to get better?"

"No."

"Oh." Lily processed this with the bluntness of a three-year-old. "That's sad."

"It is," Dorothy agreed. "But I'm here now. That's something."

Lily took her hand and led her to the couch like she owned the room, and I stood in my own hallway watching this woman I had never met get exactly what she came for, and something in my chest went very quiet.

Elias appeared beside me. Not close enough to touch, just close enough that I was aware of him in the particular way I had been aware of him since he walked in an hour ago.

"She never does that," I said quietly. "Goes to strangers."

"She went to you once," he said. "When she had no one else."

I looked at him. He was watching his mother and Lily, and his expression was completely undefended in a way I had not seen on him before. It was the face of someone who had forgotten to protect himself for a moment and hadn't noticed yet.

I made myself look away.

Dorothy stayed for forty minutes. She asked Lily questions and actually listened to the answers. She asked me questions too, about my work, about the apartment, about what Lily ate and what she was afraid of and what made her laugh. She wasn't testing me. She was memorizing. I understood that. She was building something to carry.

When the driver knocked to say the car was waiting, Dorothy stood slowly, and Lily said, "Will you come back?" with the total confidence of a child who had already decided the answer.

Dorothy looked at me.

I looked at Elias.

He looked back at me, and something passed between us that wasn't quite a question and wasn't quite an answer, and I said, "Yes. She'll come back."

Dorothy touched my arm as she passed. Just briefly. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

Elias walked her out. I stayed inside with Lily and helped her put Clover to bed in the elaborate ritual that preceded every nap, and I was fine until Lily said, without looking up, "I like Elias. He asks good questions."

"He does," I said.

"Is he going to come back too?"

I tucked the blanket around Clover's head. "I think so."

"Good." She said it the same way she said everything. Like it was just a fact she was reporting. I envied her.

He knocked twenty minutes later. I had assumed he left with the car.

I opened the door and he was standing there with his jacket on, hands in his pockets, and he looked, not uncomfortable exactly, but like he had decided something and wasn't sure yet if it was the right decision.

"She's asleep?" he asked.

"Trying to be. Fifteen minutes and she'll be out."

"Can I wait?"

I stepped back. He came in and we ended up in the kitchen because that was the room furthest from Lily's door, and I put the kettle on because I needed something to do with my hands.

"Your mother is extraordinary," I said.

"She is."

"She didn't pretend to be Lily. About being sick. A lot of adults would have."

"My mother doesn't pretend about anything." He leaned against the counter across from me, arms crossed loosely. "It used to make me angry when I was young. Now I think she's the only honest person I know."

"High bar."

"It is." His eyes stayed on me. "Marcus told me what he asked you. About what happens to Lily if something happens to you."

I turned to check the kettle. "He told you that."

"He tells me everything eventually. I think honesty is love language." A pause. "Is he wrong? Do you have someone?"

"I'm working on it."

"Mara."

The way he said my name did something I chose not to examine. I turned back around.

"I have Priya listed as an emergency contact," I said. "And Jonah. But formal guardianship paperwork, no. I've been meaning to."

"For three years."

"Don't."

"I'm not criticizing. I'm saying I understand it." His voice was even, not hard. "Doing the paperwork makes it real. Makes you think about being gone, and you can't afford to think about being gone because you're all she has."

The accuracy of that sat between us.

"When did you get perceptive?" I asked.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "I've been told I'm a slow starter."

I laughed before I could stop it. It surprised us both. His expression opened in a way I hadn't seen yet and I felt it like a physical thing, the fact that I had done that, that I had made him look like that.

I handed him a mug to recover myself.

He took it. Our fingers didn't touch. I was aware that they didn't.

"I want to be in her life," he said. "Not as a legal concept. As a person. But I also know that requires you to trust me, and I have given you no reason to yet."

"No," I agreed.

"So tell me what you need."

I looked at him across the width of my small kitchen. At the man who had shown up on my doorstep two weeks ago looking like something held together by habit, who had sat on my floor today asking my daughter the right questions, who was standing here now asking me instead of telling me.

"Time," I said. "And consistency. Don't show up and then disappear."

"I won't."

"You don't know that yet."

"No," he said. "But I know I mean it."

I believed him. That was the problem.