Blue arrived on a Wednesday at two in the afternoon, which was not when she had said she was arriving, which was characteristic.
She texted him from the car: I moved the flight again. I'm twenty minutes away. Don't panic.
He was not panicking. He was in a meeting that he wrapped up in eight minutes through sheer applied focus, cancelled his three o'clock, and was at the house by two-fifteen.
Blue was already inside. This was the other characteristic thing. Blue did not wait outside. Blue rang the bell once and if nobody answered she used the key she had cut for herself three years ago without asking and which Roman had decided not to argue about because the argument would have been long and he would have lost it.
She was in the kitchen and she had found the mangoes. He bought them because he liked them and Seraphina had, somewhere in the past month, started eating them for breakfast, so he bought more, and Blue had apparently located them within four minutes of arrival.
