The girl in the doorway had a hot-pink band-aid circling a finger and what looked like stickers decorating a pair of very grubby navy Converse sneakers. "Two?" and her eyes widened as if two were unimaginably better than one. "That's inconceivable." She looked up at Ella accusingly, as if denial of dogs was just one on a list of very many sins, and Ella reached out and yanked off the knit hat with a grin and a very small roll of the eyes aimed at Luke.
The house smelled like a home. Coffee, layered over the mixture of scents that meant people lived here, entrenched in routine and lives and ways of doing things. The apartment she had woken up in, that had an emptiness to it still, like it was waiting to be filled up, a dolls house without dolls.
"I like it because it's green," Elizabeth informed Gus as if they were already friends. Ella knew her daughter the way she knew the lines on her palm but why she was the way she was, that part? She didn't know. She could see Coop in the easy way Elizabeth began conversations and the reading everything that wasn't nailed down. But the rest of it? Mystery. "And green is the best color. Mommy likes pink."
Ella winced, and she looked at Luke. "Pink is how most stuff in our old neck of the woods comes," she said, dry. "Is that coffee?"