Maya came before Abigail had finished her coffee — let herself in with the key she'd had for six years, the same as always, except this time she didn't head for the kitchen. She went straight to the couch and sat, the particular stillness in her shoulders of someone who had decided, on the drive over, not to make a scene out of something that clearly wasn't going to change no matter how big a scene she made.
Abigail moved around the bedroom with the efficient economy of a woman who had packed for conferences a hundred times and had simply redirected the same muscle memory toward a destination she couldn't fully explain. Two changes of clothes. A folder of case notes she probably wouldn't need and was bringing anyway. Her passport, which she'd had to dig out of a drawer she hadn't opened in three years.
"England?" Maya said, from the doorway now, watching her fold a sweater with more precision than a sweater required.
"England."
"For the Vatican."
"That's what they said."
Maya crossed her arms, not quite hugging herself, not quite anything else either. "Are you sure it was the Vatican? It could be some serial killer looking for its newest victim."
It was, Abigail knew, exactly the kind of thing Maya said when she was frightened and didn't want the fright to be the thing anyone noticed — dress it up as a joke sharp enough to have a little real worry hiding inside it, offer it up sideways instead of straight on. It was a family trait, if it was anything. Their mother did a version of it too, just with scripture instead of gallows humor.
"Yes, Maya. It was the Vatican."
"Well, why you?" A beat, and then, quickly, the reflexive softening: "Isn't there someone more qualified? Sorry — no offense."
Abigail paused over the open bag, hands still on the folded sweater, because the honest answer was one she'd spent the better part of the last hour actively avoiding giving even to herself.
"Because I treat it like a system," she said finally. "Not a symbol."
"What if it's both?"
Abigail looked at her sister — really looked, the way she hadn't quite managed to all week, too busy circling phrases in a notebook and watching shapes disappear from windows — and the question landed somewhere it had no business landing this easily, from someone who hadn't read a single page of Abigail's research and had never needed to.
"Then I'll need to figure that out when I get there."
She zipped the bag. The sound of it felt, for half a second, more final than it should have for a trip she'd agreed to and could theoretically still cancel.
At the door, she stopped.
"Tell Mama I'll call when I land."
"She's going to want to pray over the phone." Maya said it the way you'd warn someone about weather — not a complaint, just information they'd want ahead of time.
Something loosened in Abigail's chest, small but real, the first thing all week that hadn't required her to think before she felt it.
"Tell her I'd appreciate that," she said, and meant it, and the smile that came with it was small but entirely unguarded — the kind of smile that belonged to the version of herself that had existed before laptops and emails and shapes in windows, a version she hadn't seen much of lately and was glad, distantly, to know was still in there somewhere.
She left.
Maya stood in the doorway a moment after the door had clicked shut, listening to her sister's footsteps recede down the hall, and then turned back into the apartment that suddenly felt larger for having one less person in it.
The laptop sat closed on the kitchen table, screen dark, exactly where Abigail had left it.
Maya looked at it longer than she meant to. She couldn't have said, if anyone had asked her, what exactly about a closed laptop unsettled her — it was just a machine, dark and silent and doing nothing at all, the most inert object in the entire apartment. And yet something about the stillness of it felt less like off and more like waiting, the particular quiet of a held breath rather than an empty room.
She crossed the kitchen. Closed it again, though it was already closed, latching it shut with a small, unnecessary click, as if the extra half-inch of pressure might matter.
It didn't make her feel any better.
She stood there a while longer anyway, in her sister's kitchen, in the quiet her sister had left behind her, before she finally picked up her purse and let herself out — locking the door carefully behind her, the way you lock a door when you're not entirely sure, anymore, what you're locking it against.