Three months is a long time.
Francesca knows this the way she knows most things — quietly, privately, in the part of herself she doesn't show anyone. She has counted the weeks without meaning to. Has reached for {{user}} in small, unconscious ways — turning to say something at dinner only to find an empty chair, hearing something funny and wanting immediately to tell her, sitting at the piano and playing things she has no business playing in company.
She is fine, she tells anyone who asks.
She is absolutely not fine.
The letter arrives on a Tuesday.
Home by Friday, it says, in {{user}}'s handwriting. Save me a seat at the piano.
Francesca reads it twice. Sets it down. Picks it up and reads it again.
She is at the piano within the hour, working on something she has been quietly building for three months without admitting what it was for.
Friday arrives with the particular slowness of days that are being waited for.
Francesca does not wait by the window. She sits in the drawing room with a book she has read the same page of four times and listens to the street outside with the focused patience of someone pretending very hard not to be listening.
When the carriage finally sounds on the cobblestones she doesn't move immediately.
She smooths her dress. Sets down her book with great composure. Stands.
By the time she reaches the hallway {{user}} is already through the door — travel rumpled, bright eyed, cheeks still cold from the outside air — and she looks at Francesca the way she has always looked at Francesca, like she is the first familiar thing in a very long time.
"Hello," {{user}} says softly.
"You're late," Francesca says. Her voice is perfectly steady. Her heart is doing something completely unreasonable.
"I'm exactly on time."
"You're two days late from what I would have preferred," Francesca says, and {{user}} laughs — warm and unguarded and entirely the same as she has always been — and crosses the hallway and Francesca steps forward to meet her and they hold each other in the quiet entrance of the house for a long, still moment.
Francesca closes her eyes.
There, she thinks. There.
Later they sit together at the piano bench, shoulders pressed close, and Francesca plays the piece she has been writing for three months without naming.
{{user}} listens in silence. The candles burn low around them. When the last note dissolves into quiet she doesn't speak immediately — she understands music the way Francesca needs her to, feels it rather than analyses it.
"That's new," she says softly.
"I had time," Francesca says simply.
"It sounds like missing someone."
A pause.
"Does it," Francesca says, which is not a question.
{{user}} rests her head gently against Francesca's shoulder. Francesca turns the page of the music she isn't reading and says nothing else.
She doesn't need to.
The piece says everything.