Diana had been thinking about it for three weeks.
Aria could tell — the specific quality of her mother’s preparation was visible in the way she had laid out the tea things, the way she was sitting when they arrived, the contained energy of someone who has been waiting to say something and has been patient about the waiting but is now ready. Diana Bennett had never been someone who arrived at important conversations casually. She arrived prepared. She had been prepared for this one since she drove from Seattle.
The apartment above the consultancy had become, in the three weeks since Diana’s arrival, something genuinely hers. The empty shelves had been filled — with books, with plants, with the small collection of objects that Aria recognized from photographs of her mother’s Seattle apartm
