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Mary started bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet after overhearing something at the continental breakfast bar. The waffle on her plate threatened to fall into the floor with all of her bobbing.
“Anne,” she loudly hissed. “You’ll never believe who that guy is!”
“Mary,” Charles responded instead. “I hope you didn’t invade his privacy.”
“Of course not,” she protested. “I would never invade somebody’s privacy.” She missed the looks that Derek, Anne, and Charles shared as she continued to talk. “I heard him answering his phone.” Turning back to her sister, she grinned, “That’s our cousin, Will!”
“Well,” Anne wanted to roll her eyes. “That doesn’t really matter since he just left.”
“Oh,” Mary pouted. “I was hoping that we would get the chance to talk to him.”
“He doesn’t really look like an Elliot,” Derek commented.
“He was adopted by our Uncle Warren,” Anne explained, talking over her sister's excited chatter.
Charles opted to start reading on his phone to help block out his wife’s rambling.
“So,” Derek grinned. “He’s not biologically your cousin.”
“Much to Elizabeth’s joy,” Anne smirked.
Prodding her sister next to her, Mary redirected her attention away from the husband that was paying her no mind. “Do you think we should go talk to him?”
Derek was the one to point out that Will had gone back to his room.
“Did he?” Mary asked, turning all the way around in her seat and scanned the room for him. “Oh. That’s disappointing. I wonder if the front desk will tell us his room number.”
“I doubt it,” Charles mumbled from what had caught his attention.
“What was that?”
“It would be a liability issue, Mary,” Anne sighed. “They cannot tell us what room he’s in just because we are family.”
“But we know him.”
“And if we knew what room he was in, then that would be a different issue altogether. But we don’t,” Anne reasoned. “And unless you go from floor to floor and knock on every single door, we won’t.”
Catching the gleam that had entered her sister’s eye at the suggestion, Anne quickly added, “And if you do that, we will get kicked out of this hotel and it’s Spring Break so it’ll be near impossible to get another room let alone four.”
“Where are Etta and Isa?” Charles asked, looking at Derek from over his phone.
Shrugging, Derek dug into the bowl of cereal he had gotten. “I’m not next door to them.”
“But I thought you would have...”
“Charles,” Anne interrupted. “Your sisters are in the room next door to you because you didn’t want Isa sneaking over to Derek’s room. You also told me, if I heard Isa in Derek’s room to send her back to her own room. Isa stayed in her room to my knowledge.”
Making eye contact with Derek, she withheld the information that she had been in Derek’s room watching a movie until they fell asleep. Isa had made an attempt to enter his room, but Derek had sent her on her way without opening the door.
“They probably stayed up late watching a movie and are still asleep,” Derek pointed out. Looking towards the elevator once he heard their giggles, he added, “Here they come now.”
“Oh good,” Charles distractedly replied. “I was getting worried.”
“Morning!” Isa chirped. “That bed was surprisingly comfortable for a hotel room.”
“Oh, waffles!” Etta exclaimed.
“I want some coffee,” Isa added.
The table fell silent as the girls moved off to get some food before returning. Isa, plopping herself down in the seat beside Derek, leaned over and started to whisper. Etta, rolling her eyes on her sister’s other side, took a sip of her coffee before closing her eyes in bliss.
Mary, acting like a dog with a bone, piped up, unable to drop the topic of Will Elliot, “We should still introduce ourselves to him. He’s our cousin.”
“Mary,” Anne tried to reason, “we have no reason to try to talk to him ever since our fathers dissolved their law partnership.” It still troubled her that the two brothers couldn’t even get along enough to make their law firm work, but at the same time, she knew that there was no possible way she would ever work with her sisters.
Not even for a million dollars.
“Whatever,” Mary dismissed her sister. “Will was over at our house practically every day after school.”
“He broke Elizabeth’s heart,” Anne tried again, aware of their audience.
“That’s funny,” Mary practically snorted. “Elizabeth doesn’t have a heart.”
“Mary!” Anne hissed, aware of the giggles coming from the Musgraves sisters. Derek and Charles had politely looked away, but she could tell that they were listening as well.
“Well, she doesn’t,” Mary shrugged. “Can somebody pass me the coffee?”
Anne, both embarrassed and angry, glared at the wall behind Derek, who had happened to land in the chair across from her. It was one of the seats he’d been avoiding most of the semester just to keep people from digging into their changed relationship standing.
He knew she wasn’t glaring at him, and waited until she looked at him again before mouthing, “Are you okay?”
Shrugging, she reached for the orange juice in front of them.
By now he knew what type of person her sister was.
“You will tell Father though, the next time you speak to him. I’m sure he’d love to know about us running into William,” Mary asked, not looking at Anne as she searched the table for the strawberry jam.
“If it comes up,” Anne mumbled, aware that Mary wouldn’t grasp the full meaning behind her sister’s non-committal comment.
“Good,” Mary replied. “Has anybody seen the strawberry jam?”
“It’s right in front of you,” Charles answered, not looking up from the news app on his phone.
“I wish you’d put that away.”
Derek happened to look up and towards the front desk at that moment. He’d have to tell Anne later that he saw Will checking out of the hotel. He doubted the other man would enjoy having Mary ambush him in the lobby when all he was trying to do was leave.
