"I'm just saying we never have anyone over."
Ellie looks at me. I shrug. "She's not wrong."
"Okay." Ellie smiles, and it reaches her eyes in a way I haven't seen before. "I'd love to, thank you."
We eat at the table with the archive photographs pushed to one side. Lily talks through most of it—her project and photographs, which decade she thinks had the best architecture. Ellie listens and asks follow-up questions while she eats two helpings of the chicken without commenting on it, which is better than a compliment. I sit across from them and eat my dinner and don't think about how right this feels because if I think about it I'll have to do something about it.
Lily finishes the project by seven. She yawns, enormous and fake, and stretches.
"I'm going to my room. I'm tired."
"It's seven o'clock."
"I'm tired fromresearch." She kisses my cheek on the way past, glances at Ellie. "Thanks, Miss Frost. The incorporation photos are perfect."
"Anytime, Lily."
Her bedroom door clicks shut.
Ellie's gaze lands on the closed door, then on me.
"She's not very subtle, is she," I say.
"No." Ellie's mouth twitches. "She really isn't."
I pour coffee and hand her the blue mug, not Maren's, and lean against the sink with archive photographs spread between us on the table.
"Dinner was really good, thank you," Ellie says. "Where did you learn to cook?"
"Maren's recipe cards." I take a drink. "After she died, Lily was four and living on chicken nuggets. I gave it about three weeks before I decided that wasn't going to be our life, so I started working through the cards in order. Burned everything for the first three months. Lily ate it anyway."
"She was four."
"She had low standards. I had low skills. We met in the middle." I lean back against the sink. "I like it now. Cooking. Didn't expect to, but it turns out chopping veggies for forty minutes is the closest thing to meditation I've got."
Ellie smiles at that, a real one, not the polite version she wears at the checkout desk. "I'm terrible at it. I eat cereal most nights. Or toast, if I'm feeling ambitious."
"That's bleak, Miss Frost."
"Says the man who just admitted he burned three months' worth of meals."
"I improved. Have you?"
"I've upgraded to toast with butter." She lifts her mug. "This is as domestic as I get."
"What do you do after the library closes?"
"Walk the coast path if it's still light or read. I'm in bed by nine most nights." She pauses. "When I moved here, I wanted a town where nobody expected anything from me after six o'clock. Portland was all dinner plans and couples' friends and holidays where I smiled until my face hurt. Here I just... stop at six. Lock the door, walk home, eat my cereal."
"I get that," I say, because I do.
She looks at me for a second longer than she needs to. "Yeah. I think you might."
We sit with that for a minute. I drink my coffee. She drinks hers. It's the most comfortable silence I've had with another adult in years.
Ellie breaks it. "You know, Lily tried to put me on a reading schedule last Saturday. She left a list of titles she thought I should get through before the end of spring break."
"She does that. She made Knox readEarthsealast summer. He called me at midnight to ask if the dragons were metaphorical."
