Chapter 8
EIGHT
THE LANDING WAS QUIET AT SIX-FIFTEEN.
Darcy came out of his room in his running clothes, shoes in hand, moving without sound the way he always moved in the early morning when the house was still and he preferred to leave it that way. He went past Mia's door, fully closed, and he was nearly at the top of the stairs when he noticed it.
Elizabeth's door. Not closed.
Not open either. Just ajar. A few inches, no more, the kind of gap that happened when a door was not pulled properly to and the latch had not caught.
He stopped on his track.
He should pull it closed, he thought. A simple, ten-second task. He was already moving before he could stop himself.
He stepped across, reached for the handle, and was about to pull the door closed when, through the narrow gap, in the grey early light, he saw the bed.
Or rather, he saw what was on the bed. Clothes.
Everywhere. A situation of such committed disorder that it took him a moment to process it as intentional rather than the result of something having gone wrong.
Dresses over the headboard. A jacket on the pillow.
Three pairs of shoes on the duvet. A scarf draped over the bedpost. Blouses stacked and restacked and abandoned.
The whole room had the quality of a changing room after a particularly decisive shopping trip, except that nobody appeared to have made a decision at the end of it.
He was inside the room before he had decided to be inside the room.
He could not have said, precisely, what had carried him across the threshold.
Perhaps, it was the curiosity of someone who had spent thirty-seven years believing that a room was either ordered or it was not, and this room was very much not, and it was directly in front of him.
Neither explanation was going to serve him well.
Elizabeth was at the dresser. She had her back to the door, earrings in hand, and she saw him in the mirror a half second before she heard him. She had a half second to have an expression before she controlled it.
She turned.
"What are you doing in my room?"
"Good morning," Darcy said.
"That is not an answer."
His eyes went, involuntarily, to the bed.
"Why is your room like this?"
Elizabeth stared at him. "I beg your pardon?"
"The clothes. All of them."
"How," she said, slowly, "is that any of your business?"
"It is just —"
"You have walked into my room without knocking, without being invited, and now you want to have a conversation about my clothes."
"I was going to close the door. It was open."
"Then close it from the outside."
"I just think —" He stopped. Started again. "We have been here a month. I have my room arranged. I think it is reasonable to —"
Elizabeth raised one hand. A clean, complete gesture that meant stop and meant it.
"Whatever you think," she said, "is your business. Not mine." She put the earring in and reached for the second one. "And not all of us have a clinical need for everything to be in its place at all times."
"That is not what I —"
"It is exactly what you said. You walked into my space and the first thing you did was point out what is wrong with it." She set her hands flat on the dresser for a moment. "That is exactly what you always do."
The room was very quiet.
"Always," Darcy said.
"Always."
"Elizabeth —"
"It is actions like this." She turned to face him properly. Her voice was level, not raised. "You walking in here without thinking. Then standing there telling me what is wrong. This is why I had questions about us. Eight years ago. This is exactly —"
"You ended things because my room was tidy."
“I ended things because you cannot let people exist around you without assessing them.” Each word was measured, deliberate.
“Because you notice every little thing that is not the way you would have done it and you cannot leave it alone. Because you have this version of how things should be and anyone who does not fit it is somehow lesser to you. Because I found out that you—”
“I have never once criticised you for—”
“You are doing it right now.”
Darcy stopped, his thoughts catching up with what she had just said. “You found out what?”
She faltered, the words she had already let slip seeming to catch up with her. Her mouth parted slightly, as though to take them back.
“Forget I said anything, Darcy.”
Darcy opened his mouth to argue, but he could not find the words. The ones she had almost said caught somewhere in his mind and refused to settle. She had come close—closer than she ever had—to saying why she had left him with nothing but a message and no explanation.
His eyes drifted to the bed, then back to her, as though the answer might be there if he looked long enough.
She stood there in her nightgown, her hair loose, her earrings still in, watching him with that same steady directness she had always had, and for a moment, nothing aligned the way it should have.
“Please leave my room, Darcy.” She said after a brief moment.
“Elizabeth.” He said her name quietly, as though it might be enough to make her reconsider.
"I do not want Mia waking up and drawing conclusions because you are coming out of my room in your joggers at six in the morning and I am standing here in my nightgown." She turned back to the dresser and picked up her hairbrush. "Close the door on your way out."
He stood in the doorway for a moment longer.
He wanted to ask what she had been about to say.
The sentence had a shape to it, a weight, the specific gravity of something that had been held for a long time and had almost come loose.
She had pulled it back and he did not know what was inside it and he had been not knowing for eight years and the not knowing was in this room with them right now and she was brushing her hair and looking at the mirror and not at him.
Concluding that nothing else could be done to get her to talk in that moment, he turned and pulled the door closed behind him.
On the landing he stood for a moment, shoes still in his hand. Down the hall, Mia's door was still closed.
He went downstairs, pulled on his shoes at the door, and stepped out into the early morning. Then, he started running, his mind fixed on nothing but the unfinished sentence.
***
Darcy Capital occupied the fourteenth floor of a building on Park Avenue that had the particular quality of quiet that came from very good soundproofing and very expensive furniture.
Although he had studied engineering, and excelled at it, he had inherited the family hedge fund business, which he now ran with a level of precision that would have made even the most experienced figures on Wall Street envious.
Bingley arrived at his office at noon with two coffees and the expression of a man who had been patient for a considerable amount of time and had decided today was the day he spent some of it.
"You look tired," Bingley said after pleasantries, setting a cup on the desk.
"I am fine."
“Claiming you’re fine doesn’t mean you don’t look tired,” Bingley said, settling into the chair across from him with the ease of someone who had been sitting in it for fifteen years and considered it partially his. “How is the house?”
"It is fine."
"How is Mia?"
Darcy's expression shifted. Just slightly. "She is good. Better this week than last. She has a friend, Priya, they have been spending time together after school. It helps." He picked up his coffee. "She has a history essay due Friday. I will help her with the outline on Thursday evening."
"Look at you."
"It just an outline."
“You’re planning to help a fifteen-year-old with her history essay by Thursday evening instead of going to a conference or attending some tech startup pitch event.” Bingley smiled. “James would be very pleased.”
Darcy said nothing. He looked at his coffee.
"She called me Mr. Darcy the other day," he said. "In front of her friend. Her friend found it very funny."
"Do you mind it?"
"No." He considered. "It suits the dynamic, I think. She is not looking for another father. She does not need that from me. She just needs someone who shows up." He set the cup down. "So I show up."
Bingley looked at him with the warm, unhurried attention he had always had. "You are better at this than you think you are."
"I have no basis for comparison."
"That is exactly what I mean." He crossed one leg over the other. "And how is the other situation. It has been close to a month. Has anything gotten better between you and Elizabeth?"
The question landed in the office and sat there.
Darcy put down his pen. "She picks fights."
"Does she."
"Not loudly. Not in front of Mia. But there is always something.
The other day, it was the radiator I fixed without asking.
Then there was a wrench I moved. Or the way I load the dishwasher.
" He sat back. "She has an opinion about everything I do and she delivers it in this very precise, very level tone that is somehow more irritating than if she simply raised her voice. "
"That does sound like Elizabeth."
"This morning —" He stopped.
"This morning what?"
"I stumbled into her room."
Bingley put down his coffee, his eyes widening. "You stumbled into her room?"
"The door was ajar. I was going to close it. Then I saw the state of it and I —"
"You went in."
"I went in," Darcy nodded. "And I said something about the clothes on the bed. There were clothes everywhere, Charles. On the headboard, the pillow, everywhere. And I simply pointed out that —"
"Will."
"What?"
"You stumbled into her room," Bingley said, with great care, "and your first instinct was to comment on her clothes."
"It was objectively untidy."
"She is a grown woman in her own bedroom."
"Our shared house."
"Her bedroom," Bingley said. "Her private space. That she did not invite you into." He picked up his coffee again. "And you went in and told her it was untidy."
Darcy heaved a sigh, realising it did not sound as straightforward as he had intended. His thoughts had been elsewhere all morning—on a half-finished sentence, not on something as simple as speaking to her about the privacy of her room.
"When you put it that way —"
"How would you put it?"
Darcy said nothing.
Bingley was quiet for a moment. Then, with a teasing smile, he said, “You sound like a man in love.”
Darcy looked at him. "I beg your pardon?"
"A man who walks into a woman's room at six in the morning and immediately concerns himself with the state of her wardrobe." Bingley gestured vaguely. "Like a nagging husband who cannot help himself."
"That is not —" Darcy stopped. "I am not in love with Elizabeth."
Bingley said nothing. He drank his coffee.
"I am not."
"All right."
"We have a complicated history and we are living in close proximity and it has been an emotional few weeks. That is all it is."
"Of course."
"Stop agreeing with me in that tone."
"What tone?"
"The tone that means you do not agree with me at all." Darcy pushed back slightly from the desk. "You have been using that tone since university and it has never once meant what it sounds like it means."
Bingley smiled and set down his cup. "You never got over her. Did you."
The office was very quiet.
"Not really," Darcy said, rubbing his eyes.
He said it simply, without drama, the way he said things he had already made peace with at some point in the past and was now simply reporting. Bingley did not react with surprise because he was not surprised.
"I thought I had," Darcy continued. "Closed it.
Filed it. It was eight years ago and it was a month and the way it ended was —" He stopped.
"I thought I had put it down properly. And then James and Charlotte's will put us in the same house and it has been four weeks and I am walking into her bedroom at six in the morning to comment on her wardrobe so clearly I had not put it down as properly as I believed. "
"No," Bingley said. Gently.
"It is possible," Darcy said, looking at the window, "that some of it is the grief. James. Charlotte. Being in their house every day. Feeling the weight of what they left behind. It makes everything feel —" He paused. "Closer than it should be."
"Maybe," Bingley said. "Maybe some of it is that. But Will." He waited until Darcy looked at him. "The heart wants what it wants. There is no shame in it."
Darcy looked at him for a moment. Then he looked back at the window.
"The heart," he said, "had better learn to recognise when something is not available to it.
" He picked up his pen. "Elizabeth does not want anything to do with me.
Not in that way. She has made that consistently clear since the day we moved in.
She even signed up to a dating service recently.
She ends every conversation the moment it gets close to anything real.
" He set the pen down again. "I know that.
I accept that. And when I have made peace with knowing it, I will have peace. "
Bingley looked at him for a long moment.
"Is that what you tell yourself?" he said. Not unkindly.
Darcy did not answer.
Outside, Park Avenue continued fourteen floors below, indifferent and unhurried, and Bingley finished his coffee and did not say anything else about it, because he knew when Darcy had said everything he was going to say and when pushing further would only close the door.
He stayed another forty minutes and they talked about the company and Mia's history essay and whether Jane's suggestion about Thanksgiving was reasonable or not, and at no point did either of them mention Elizabeth again.