Patricia Wen made contact on a Tuesday.
She'd sent a formal letter through the agency — the proper channel, the clean legal avenue she'd described to Jerrica, the kind that announced itself as official without being threatening, that said we know you exist and we would like to talk in the careful language of people who understood that the words themselves were less important than the tone they were delivered in. Daniel had confirmed it went out the previous Friday. Which meant Roseline Osei had received it, or would receive it, over the weekend, and that the earliest they could expect any response was this week, and the latest was never, and the distance between those two outcomes was where all three of them were living.
Jerrica didn't talk about it. This was different from her usual not-talking — the operational silence of someone managing information and deciding what to distribute and when. This was quieter than that. More internal. The compass pointing somewhere she hadn't mapped yet.
Maddie noticed and catalogued and let it be.
Bella painted.
This had become, over the past weeks, her primary response to uncertainty — not avoidance exactly, more like translation. She took the thing she couldn't resolve and moved it into the work, and what came out on the canvas was not the thing itself but its shape, its emotional temperature, the feeling of it without the literal content. Maddie had started to understand this as its own kind of intelligence, a way of processing that was as valid as the marble notebook and possibly more efficient.
On Tuesday evening, three of them in the room after dinner, Bella's phone buzzed on the bed beside her.
She looked at it. Her face changed.
"It's from Mr. Okafor," she said.
Jerrica looked up from her notes. Maddie marked her place in the book she was reading — a library copy of a naturalist's journal, dense with observation, the kind of writing she wanted to do someday if she ever figured out what her observations were for.
"The showcase?" Jerrica said.
"There's a woman coming." Bella read from her phone, slowly. "Someone Mr. Okafor knows. She's — she directs the Vermont residency program. The one that accepted me. She's coming to the showcase to see the work in person." She lowered her phone. "He wants me to have three pieces. I only submitted one."
"How much time?" Jerrica said.
"Showcase is in eight days."
"Can you do two more in eight days?"
Bella looked at the wall above her bed, the blank pale yellow of it, in the way she looked at surfaces she was about to make into something. "Yes," she said, with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what they're capable of when the reason is sufficient.
"Then that's what you do," Jerrica said, and turned back to her notes.
It was, Maddie thought, one of the better exchanges she'd witnessed between them since the fight in the kitchen — the directness of it, the absence of management. Jerrica had not asked what the pieces would be or whether Bella needed help or offered to create a schedule. She'd just answered the actual question, which was: is this possible, and Bella had answered it herself, and then it was simply a thing that was going to happen.
She wrote it in the margin of the naturalist's journal and then felt guilty and erased it.
Roseline called on Thursday.
Not through Patricia, not through the agency. She called Daniel Yoo's direct line, which she'd found from the letterhead of the formal contact, and which technically she wasn't supposed to use for informal communication, but which Daniel had given her anyway because — as he told Jerrica afterward, with the slightly conspiratorial quality of a man doing the right thing slightly sideways of procedure — he thought she deserved more than a letter.
He called Jerrica immediately after.
Maddie was in the kitchen attempting to make rice, which Mrs. Holloway had said was fine and which was turning out to be either fine or a disaster depending on the next ten minutes. She was watching the water intently — not because it helped, she understood that a watched pot et cetera, but because she found the watching centering — when she heard Jerrica's voice from the hallway, the particular cadence of it, and put the lid on the pot and turned the heat down and went to the doorway.
Jerrica was standing at the foot of the stairs with her phone pressed to her ear. Her free hand was flat against the wall beside her, palm open, fingers spread — a posture Maddie had never seen before, something between steadying herself and feeling for something.
"Yes," Jerrica said. Then: "When?" Then a long pause in which her expression moved through several things too quickly to read. Then: "Okay. I'll be there."
She hung up.
She stood at the foot of the stairs with her hand still flat against the wall.
"Jer," Maddie said.
"She called Daniel." Jerrica's voice was even but not entirely controlled. "She wants to meet. All three of us." She paused. "Saturday."
The rice water was audible from the kitchen, a low rolling sound working up toward a boil.
"Saturday," Maddie said.
"At the Groundwork Arts Collective. Where she works." She finally took her hand off the wall. She looked at it briefly, as if checking that it was still hers. "She said she'd been thinking about us since she got the letter. She said—" Jerrica stopped.
"What?"
"She said she thinks about us a lot. In general. That it's not—" She stopped again, and this stopping was different from the others. Something was happening in her face that Maddie associated with the moments when Jerrica's infrastructure came under pressure from inside rather than outside. "She said it's not a day that goes by that she doesn't."
The kitchen was quiet except for the rice water.
Maddie crossed the hallway and stood beside her sister and said nothing, because sometimes the thing you offer is just your physical presence, the fact of another body nearby, the reminder that the space around you is occupied by someone who is paying attention.
After a moment Jerrica said, very quietly: "What if she's good, Maddie?"
Maddie understood the question. Not what if she's good for us, not the practical version. The harder version: what if she's good, what if she's exactly what they'd needed four years ago and didn't have, what do you do with that grief alongside that possibility. How do you hold both at once without one poisoning the other.
"Then we figure out what good means," Maddie said. "For us. Right now. Not four years ago."
Jerrica nodded, slowly, the nod of someone who has heard something useful and is going to have to repeat it to themselves multiple times before it settles.
"Go tell Bella," Maddie said.
"I know."
"I'll finish the rice."
Jerrica looked at her. Something in her face did the thing it rarely did — came briefly, quietly undone, and then reset. "You're making rice?"
"Attempting."
"You put the lid on too early. The steam needs to build first."
"I put the lid on thirty seconds ago."
"Take it off for two more minutes." She was already heading toward the stairs, something having reorganized in her bearing. "And don't touch it after that."
"I know how rice works."
"You've never made rice before."
"I read about it."
Jerrica stopped on the second step and looked back at her with the expression that was not quite a smile but that lived in the same neighborhood. "Of course you did," she said, and went upstairs.
Maddie went back to the kitchen. She took the lid off the pot. She watched the water find its boil with the patient, comprehensive attention she gave to everything, and she thought about Saturday, and what a woman in a yellow cardigan might be, and whether the wanting and the fear of the wanting could exist in the same place without destroying each other.
The water boiled.
She put the lid back on.
Saturday arrived the way significant days sometimes do — ordinary on the surface, the morning proceeding through its usual architecture of cereal and the too-dry Holloway toast and Marcus's horizontal television watching, all of it normal, all of it slightly unreal. Like a stage set. Like the visible part of something much larger happening just underneath.
They took the bus. This had been Jerrica's decision — not the train, not a rideshare. The bus, because the bus took longer and the longer route was something she'd said she needed without quite saying she needed it, and Maddie and Bella had understood without requiring explanation, which was one of the better things about the three of them.
They sat in the back, Maddie at the window, Bella in the middle, Jerrica on the aisle. This was their default arrangement in any side-by-side seating — arrived at without discussion, a settled geography of the three of them in space. Maddie had written about it once in the notebook: we always arrange ourselves the same way. Youngest at the window. Oldest at the edge. The one in the middle holds both.
Bella was holding both now, visibly — her hands in her lap, her shoulder touching Maddie's on one side and Jerrica's on the other, the physical fact of her connecting them the way she always did, the bridge function, the one who moved between.
"What do we say?" Bella asked. She wasn't asking for a script. She was asking whether there was a strategy, which was Jerrica's domain, which was why she was asking Jerrica.
"We don't say anything planned," Jerrica said. "We listen. We ask questions." She paused. "We don't decide anything today."
"What if she wants to decide something today?"
"Then she can want that."
They were quiet for a few stops. Outside, the city moved past in its usual indifferent way — storefronts and pedestrians and the Saturday particular quality of traffic, looser than the week, more lateral. Maddie watched it and felt the notebook's absence — she'd almost brought it, had stood with it in her hand for a moment before deciding to leave it at home. Today was not a day for recording. Today was a day for being fully present in the thing, without the safety of the observer's distance.
"She works with kids," Maddie said. Not for the first time — she'd said it when she found the website, written it in the notebook. But it needed saying again in this context, on this bus, twelve minutes from where they were going. "She chose to work with kids who need things. That's a choice a person makes every day. It's not nothing."
Neither of her sisters responded, but she felt Bella's shoulder press slightly more firmly against hers, which was response enough.
The Groundwork Arts Collective was in a narrow building between a hardware store and a Dominican restaurant whose lunch service was just beginning, the smell of it reaching the sidewalk in warm generous waves. The building had a green door, the specific green of old paint that had been covered by newer paint that had mostly chipped off to reveal the original. A handmade sign in the window said OPEN SATURDAYS 10-4. Below it, smaller: making art is an act of survival.
Maddie read it twice. Filed it.
Jerrica stood at the green door for a moment. Not long. Just a breath.
Then she opened it.