I call her up Wednesday and tell her I want to go shopping. She doesn’t blow me off this time, and our outing is reassuringly normal.
So I ask her if she wants to spend the night.
“Are we going to snuggle again?” she jokes.
“Maybe,” I shoot back, with a breezy smile.
I have said nothing about Mateo’s idea. My assumption is he wants to be the one to propose it, and I imagine it will go down much easier if he does, too.
When we get back home, Mia accompanies me to our bedroom so I can put my dresses away. She takes a tentative seat on the edge of the bed, her gaze wandering back up to where we all slept a few nights ago. I wonder if she’s reliving it in her mind. I wonder how many times she’s relived it since she left.
I sort of wish Mateo would’ve already talked to her about it, that way I could talk to her about it. There’s a lot to discuss, rules to establish.
“Do you like Francesca’s room?” I ask, stepping out of my walk-in and closing the door.
Mia nods, bringing her gaze back to me. “Oh, yeah. Her room’s great.”
“Her closet is even bigger than mine,” I remark.
“It’s incredible. It’s one of the first things I saw when I originally came to this house, actually. First Mateo’s study, then Francesca’s giant walk-in closet. I was completely blown away.”
I smile a little, imagining it. “I bet. What was your life like before? We’ve talked a little about your family, but not really before you came here.”
“My mom’s…” She contemplates for a moment, looking for the right word. “Lively? Youthful?”
“Irresponsible?” I offer.
Barely stifling a smile, she says, “Well, it’s not the word I would’ve used, but she did enjoy having a much older daughter to share the responsibilities. Which I get,” she adds, because she’s Mia. “She was a young, single mom so it’s not like she had a partner to help carry the burden. She had me instead. So mostly I would just watch my siblings. I helped out with them a lot until I met Mateo. Once I met him, he wanted me to live here, so he gave me a fake nanny job, paid my mom off, sent her half of my fake paycheck.” She rolls her eyes. “He paid her half of my fake paycheck all the way up until I started my first semester of college, and I haven’t even lived here since spring.”
“So, irresponsible and money-hungry? She sounds like June Cleaver.”
Mia shrugs, apparently as generous with others as she is Mateo. “She does her best, I think. It grated on me sometimes, but I got a lot of childrearing experience. Not that I’ll need it,” she adds, rolling her eyes.
“With Vince,” I say, ignoring the pang of guilt this gives me. Of course Mateo has to want to the 19-year-old who wants babies. Of course.
“Yeah,” she says softly, nodding. “Not as long as we’re together, anyway.”
“But, I mean, you’re still young. Trust me, I had a baby young, and that shit is hard. They’re adorable with their gummy little grins and their tiny little fingers and toes, but if the dad isn’t a team player and you don’t have a nanny? Hard. Draining. And you’re so young, Mia.”
“I wasn’t planning on having one tomorrow or anything,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’d like to finish college first. But if my choices are have one right now or not get one at all? I’d suck it up and have one now.”
“Well, do you really think you’ll end up with Vince, though?”
That one makes her wince. She also doesn’t immediately respond, grabbing a decorative pillow instead and toying with its tassel. “I don’t know.”
“Sorry,” I say, realizing that seemed emotionally detached. “I realize you guys have been together for a while, and you apparently went through a whole thing to get together in the first place. But, I mean, he’s your high school boyfriend. I’m pretty sure it’s more common not to end up with your high school boyfriend than it is to end up with him. Especially you two, with your… issues.”
It looks like she agrees with me, but instead of saying that, she tells me, “It’s complicated.”
“Is it complicated because you love him, or because your lives are so completely spliced together that you don’t know where you go after him?”
“Jeeze, Meg, I thought we’d talk about shoes, not this,” she says, lightly. When I only offer a faint smile, she tries to come up with an answer for me. “I love… parts of our life. Parts of my life. I really like college. I haven’t been going long, obviously, but I really enjoy going. I didn’t think I would get to go, because I didn’t think it would be financially feasible, and obviously Vince’s family is paying for it. I like our friendship—you and me,” she says, her eyes meeting mine. “This is important to me. I sort of lost my best friend when I got together with Vince, because she was a civilian, for lack of better word. She thought it was nuts to get involved with him, and she judged me pretty hard—which I understand.” Frowning slightly, she says, “You just don’t get it from the outside. It seems so cut-and-dry; they’re the bad guys. It’s insanity. Stay away. But then you fall down the rabbit hole and there’s so much more to them than that, and it’s just….”