Chapter 2
TWO
"WHEN IS MR. DARCY coming?"
Mia was sitting on the kitchen counter again, one leg tucked beneath her, the other swinging idly.
There was something watchful about her, something that missed very little.
She had Charlotte's eyes, Elizabeth thought.
Wide and still and quietly assessing. And perhaps Richard's stillness too — that particular quality of patience that made you feel, when he looked at you, that he had already decided to wait you out.
They were in the house on Hicks Street — a two-floor duplex, four bedrooms upstairs, the kind of Brooklyn brownstone that Charlotte had loved on sight and Richard had pretended to be practical about before agreeing to immediately.
It was full of their things. Charlotte's books stacked sideways on the shelves because she had never bothered to stand them upright.
Richard's framed photographs on every available wall.
The kitchen still smelled faintly of the particular brand of hand soap Charlotte had used for as long as Elizabeth could remember.
It was Mia's home now. It was also, as of two days ago and one lawyer's office, Elizabeth's home too. And Darcy's.
Elizabeth was still working out how she felt about that.
"Mr. Darcy?" Elizabeth looked up from the box she had been sorting through. She stressed the Mr the way you stressed a word that was doing something you had not sanctioned. "Did he ask you to call him that?"
"That's what his staff calls him." Mia reached for an apple from the bowl on the counter. "And he and my dad are the same age. It felt strange calling him by his first name."
"Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth repeated, as if testing the phrase and finding it structurally unsound.
"I like it." Mia bit into the apple. "It makes him sound like someone out of one of those old novels you read."
Elizabeth gave a small, unimpressed sound. "That feels dangerously accurate."
Mia watched her for a moment. The swinging leg slowed.
"You don't like him, do you?"
Elizabeth did not answer immediately. "That is not —"
"It is," Mia said. Not unkindly. Just certain. "I know you don't."
"Mia —"
"You used to come round all the time." Mia turned the apple in her hands, looking at it rather than at Elizabeth, which made it easier to say.
"When I was little. You and him both. Not together, but, you know. Around. And then at some point you stopped being in the same room without it getting weird. I noticed.”
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. She set down the folder she had been holding.
"That is adult stuff," she said. "You do not need to worry about it."
"I'd understand."
"You are fifteen."
"So?" Mia looked up. "I talk to my friends about their boyfriends all the time. I'm not going to fall apart because two adults had a situation."
Elizabeth blinked. "He was not my boyfriend."
Mia's expression shifted. Sharp with something that looked very much like the particular satisfaction of a suspicion confirmed.
"He wasn't," Elizabeth said, hearing herself. "He is not my type."
"No?"
"No. He is —" She paused, searching. "Bland. No colour. No sparkle. Just principles and silence and very strong opinions about where things should be placed."
Mia's mouth curved. "MMD," she said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Monochromatic Mr. Darcy." She said it easily. "That's what Mum used to call him sometimes."
Elizabeth stared at her.
The laugh came before she could stop it. Short and real and slightly helpless, the kind that arrived without permission and left just as quickly, fading into something quieter, something that sat closer to the bone.
Charlotte, she thought. You called him that and you never once told me.
Mia smiled properly. Brief, but real. The second Elizabeth had seen since the accident, and it cost something to receive, as small good things often do when everything else is still raw.
Elizabeth shook her head slowly. "Your mother," she said, "was unreasonably perceptive."
"I know." Mia's smile faded. She slid off the counter and crossed the room, dropping onto the sofa beside Elizabeth with the loose, unselfconscious ease of someone who had been doing that since she was small. "How did you two meet?"
Elizabeth looked at her. The question was simple and the answer was not and Mia was sitting close enough that she could feel the warmth of her beside her, this fifteen-year-old girl who had Charlotte's eyes and Richard's patience and was asking about the beginning of a story that had, apparently, not yet ended.
She exhaled.
"Your mother's wedding," she said.
Mia went still.
Elizabeth felt it immediately and looked at her. "Is that —"
"No." Mia shook her head. Small. Deliberate. "Keep going. I want to hear it."
Elizabeth nodded, slowly. "I flew in from London.
I was living there at the time, freelance work, a terrible flat in Hackney that I was convinced had personality.
Your mother had been telling me for six months that I needed to come home.
" She paused. "She was right, obviously.
She was always right. I just preferred not to give her the satisfaction immediately. "
Mia made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"I arrived two days before the wedding. Your mother picked me up from the airport herself, which she did not have to do, and spent the entire drive telling me about your father's family.
His cousin in particular." Elizabeth looked at her hands.
"Fitzwilliam Darcy. She said he was private.
Said he was the kind of person who took some time to understand.
I remember thinking: that is the most diplomatic thing Charlotte Lucas has ever said about a person and I should probably pay attention to it. "
"And did you?"
"Absolutely not." Elizabeth said it flatly. "I saw him at the rehearsal dinner and decided within twenty minutes that I knew exactly what kind of person he was."
"What kind was that?"
"The kind who stands near the window at parties and makes everyone feel like they should justify being there."
Mia considered this. "That does sound like him."
"In fairness," Elizabeth said, "I later learned there is a reason for that. But at the time I simply filed him under difficult and moved on."
"So you didn't like him from the start."
"I did not dislike him. I was indifferent to him.
Which, if I am being honest, he probably returned.
" She picked at a loose thread on the sofa cushion.
"Darcy’s and your father's friend, Charles Bingley, was also at the wedding.
He and my sister Jane sat next to each other at the reception and did not stop talking for four hours.
I spent most of the evening watching that happen and feeling relieved that somebody was having a straightforward time of it. "
Mia’s brows lifted slightly. “So that’s how Uncle Bingley met your sister?”
Elizabeth almost smiled. “It is. They were unbearably obvious about it from the start, which is either very romantic or very annoying depending on how much sleep you’ve had.”
Mia huffed a quiet laugh. “I think Mum would say romantic.”
“She absolutely would,” Elizabeth said. “Bingley is Darcy’s closest friend. So after Jane and Bingley got together properly, our circles kept overlapping. Dinners, events, your parents’ gatherings. Darcy was always there.”
“And you were always there.”
“And I was always there.”
Mia waited.
Elizabeth exhaled softly. “I moved back to New York properly about eight years ago. I’d been going back and forth before that, but I finally stayed.
Got a place in the East Village. Started writing full-time.
And your mother, who had been trying to get me back in the same city for years, immediately began inviting me to everything she organised.
Which meant I saw Darcy about once every two weeks whether I wanted to or not. ”
“And?”
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment.
“And we started talking. Properly. Not just polite conversations across dinner tables. He had opinions about what I wrote, which I found both irritating and interesting. I had opinions about the way he moved through the world, which I imagine he found equally irritating.” She paused.
“Your mother found the whole thing extremely entertaining.”
“I bet she did,” Mia said, softer now.
“We went to dinner once. Just us. Charlotte suggested it in the way she suggested things she had already decided were going to happen, and we both agreed because it was easier than arguing with her.”
“Once?” Mia said. “Just once?”
Elizabeth hesitated. “A month,” she admitted. “We saw each other for about a month.”
Mia turned fully toward her. “That’s not once.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “It isn’t.”
“What happened?”
Elizabeth looked toward the window. Brooklyn moved outside, steady and unconcerned.
“I decided I knew exactly what kind of person he was,” she said. “Same as I had before. I just had more information to justify it.”
“And were you right?”
The question landed quietly.
Elizabeth felt it settle.
“I think I am,” she said. “Like you said, he’s monochromatic.
You can’t touch anything of Darcy’s without him noticing it’s been moved an inch out of place.
Let not even talk about suggesting changes to him.
You might not understand it now, but that’s a difficult man to be with.
And there were other things I found out that… ”
Her voice trailed off.
Mia watched her with Charlotte’s eyes.
“That?” she asked.
Elizabeth almost answered.
The word was there, waiting.
She did not say it.
“He should be here any time now,” she said instead. “He texted yesterday. Said he’d be here by five.”
Mia held her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she looked away, turning back toward the window with the expression of someone who had received a non-answer and was choosing, for now, to accept it.
“MMD,” she said under her breath.
Elizabeth glanced at her.
“Mum would have liked this,” Mia said. “All of us. Here.” She said it simply, without weight, which somehow gave it more. “She would have said it was exactly what she wanted.”
Elizabeth’s throat tightened.
“Yes,” she said. “She would have. I guess that is why they jokingly added the clause in the first place.”
They sat together in the quiet of the apartment, in the particular stillness of a home learning what it was now.
At four fifty-eight, the buzzer rang.