Chapter 12
TWELVE
THE DATE HAD BEEN DECENT.
That was the most honest thing Elizabeth could say about it.
Decent. He was pleasant and well dressed and he had done his research, chosen a good restaurant, asked questions and listened to the answers.
She had laughed twice at things he said.
He had laughed more than that at things she said, which was either a good sign or a sign that he was trying very hard, and she had not been able to decide which.
His name was Daniel. He worked in publishing, which was interesting enough, and he had opinions about books, which was more than she could say for the last person she had been on a date with.
He was considerate and attentive and by nine o clock she had understood, with the quiet clarity of someone who had been paying attention to themselves for long enough, that she was not going to fall in love with him.
She had not said this. He was trying too hard to be told that.
When he suggested a club — a place his friend had recommended, good music, just for an hour — she had said yes because the evening felt unfinished and because the alternative was going home and she had not been ready to go home yet.
She was not sure what she had not been ready to face. She had not examined it too closely.
The music had been loud and the dance floor had been full and somewhere between the second song and the fifth she had stopped thinking about anything at all.
Not about Daniel. Not about the date. Not about Darcy's face that morning in the kitchen or him thinking they were family or the very precise way he had delivered goodnight at eleven in the morning.
Not about images of his bare chest that played in her whenever he looked at her.
Not about Charlotte or James. Not about any of it.
Just the music. Just moving. Just the particular mercy of a loud room that required nothing from you except to be in it.
She had not noticed the time.
By the time she looked at her phone it was twelve forty. Four missed calls on her screen. She turned to Daniel and told him it was time for her to leave. He offered to walk her out, and she let him.
Outside, she said she would take the subway, but he insisted on dropping her.
The drive was uneventful, aside from him asking whether she lived alone. She said she did. She did not have the energy to explain Mia—or the fact that she was living with her dangerously attractive ex.
Daniel said goodnight in the driveway. Elizabeth insisted there was no need for him to get out of the car.
He leaned in and stole a quick peck. Elizabeth did not mind.
She just needed to get inside.
The house on Hicks Street had its light on in the living room.
Elizabeth stood on the front step for a moment before entering the code and letting herself in.
***
He was on the sofa.
Not asleep. Not reading. Just sitting, in the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting and had decided that was what they were doing and had stopped pretending otherwise.
The television was off. The lamp was on.
He looked up when she came in and she watched his face make a decision about itself.
He settled on steady. She could tell the effort it cost him.
"It is one in the morning," he said.
"I know."
"You said late."
"This is late."
"Elizabeth."
"Darcy." She set her bag on the hook. She was tired and her feet hurt and she did not have the energy for this in the way she usually had the energy for this. "We discussed this. I said late. You said goodnight. I went out. This is how it ended."
"I called you."
"The music was loud. I could not hear anything." She looked at him. "I am home. I am fine. You can go to bed."
"I tried four times."
"I know. I saw them when I stepped outside."
"And before that?"
She opened her mouth. He held up one hand. Not in surrender. In something else, something that stopped her before she could start.
"I am not doing this to control you," he said.
His voice was still steady. Still level.
But underneath it something was moving that the steadiness was not quite covering.
"I am not telling you that you should not have gone or that you owe me any account of your evening. I am not saying any of that."
She waited.
"This is New York," he said. "It is one in the morning. You were with someone you do not know, in a place you’ve probably never been, and your were unreachable for close to three hours." He looked at her steadily. "What if something had happened to you?"
The living room was very quiet.
"I am an adult —"
"I know you are an adult. That is not the point.
" Something shifted in his voice. The steadiness thinned, just slightly, just enough.
"The nightlife in this city is not safe for anyone at one in the morning regardless of how capable they are.
And you matter to people in this house. You matter to Mia.
" He stopped. He looked at his hands for a moment.
"She has already lost one mother. Losing you would cripple her.
I would not know how to explain it to her. I would not know how to —"
He stopped.
Elizabeth stood in the hallway of Charlotte's house at one in the morning in her good dress with her shoes hurting and she looked at Fitzwilliam Darcy sitting on the sofa with his hands in his lap and his jaw set and his voice carefully controlled except for the places where it was not, and something settled in her chest that she had not been expecting.
He was not angry about the date.
He had been sitting there for God knew how many hours, quietly unraveling, and when she walked through the door, the first thing he did was steady his voice so she would not hear it.
She had seen it.
"Darcy —"
"I do not know why I keep trying with you.
" He said it quietly. Not bitterly. Like a thing he had been thinking for a while and had decided to say now simply because he was tired and the hour was late and the pretence of not saying it had run out.
"You do these things and I cannot tell if it is deliberate or if I am simply someone you have decided does not deserve the basic consideration of a phone call.
" He stopped. Shook his head. "I have not done anything to you.
Whatever you believe about me, whatever you decided eight years ago or yesterday or this morning, I have not done anything to you that should make me someone you punish by staying out until one in the morning without answering your phone. "
The silence that followed had a weight to it.
Elizabeth could not find the shape of what she wanted to say. She could not find it quickly enough and he was already standing.
"Goodnight, Elizabeth," he said.
He walked past her toward the stairs. He did not slam anything. He did not raise his voice. He went up the stairs and across the landing and his door closed and the house went quiet.
***
Elizabeth stood in the hallway.
The lamp was still on in the living room. Warm and steady, the way he had left it, the way it had been on since before she came home, the way it had been on because he had been sitting in it waiting.
She sat down on the bottom stair.
Her shoes were still on. She did not move to take them off.
She thought about the restaurant, the club, the music, and the quiet mercy of not having to think for a few hours.
Then she thought about Darcy’s voice. The steadiness of it holding and then thinning, just in the places where it mattered, just enough to show what was underneath.
He had not shouted. He had not accused. He had simply told her what he had been sitting with for hours and she had stood there in her good dress and defended herself anyway, which was the part that sat badly now.
She had not thought—not once, all evening—to send a single line that she was fine and would be later than she expected.
It would have taken four seconds.
It had cost him more than two hours.
She sat on the bottom stair for a long time.
Then she took off her shoes, turned off the lamp, and went upstairs in the dark.
She walked past her room to his door and stopped.
Her hand came up slightly, not quite to the wood. Not quite a knock. The intention of one.
She stood there.
Three seconds. Long enough to feel what she was not doing.
Then she let her hand drop and went back to her room.
Slumping into the bed with her dress still on, she lay in the dark looking up at Charlotte's crooked paper star and thought about a man who had sat in the living room, waiting for her to come home safely.
She turned her head against the pillow.
She owed him an apology.
The thought arrived without drama, without negotiation. Just landed and stayed.
She closed her eyes.
Sleep did not come quickly.
***
Elizabeth was downstairs before six the following morning.
It was not because she had slept well. She had not slept well. She had stared at Charlotte's paper star for a long time and then slept badly and woken at five-fifteen with the apology still sitting where she had left it, unchanged, patient, waiting to be used.
She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen counter. She waited.
At six-ten she heard Darcy’s door. His footsteps on the landing. The particular sound of someone moving through a house in the early morning who was trying not to disturb it.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway in his running clothes, shoes in hand, and stopped when he saw her.
They looked at each other.
"I am sorry," Elizabeth said.
He did not say anything immediately. He looked at her with the careful attention he gave things he was not sure about yet.
"Last night," she said. "I should have sent a message when I knew I was going to be later than I said. It would have taken me ten seconds and I did not think to do it and I should have." She looked at her coffee. "You were right. It was not fair to leave you waiting without any word."
Darcy was quiet for a moment. He set his shoes down by the door.
"Mia came back at seven-thirty," he said.
Elizabeth looked up.
"She waited up. She did not say she was waiting, she was watching something on her phone on the sofa, but she was waiting." He leaned against the doorframe. "She went to bed at ten. I told her you had probably just lost track of the time."
Elizabeth's chest tightened.
"She believed me," he said. "Or she chose to. Which is its own kind of grace, from her."
"I did not think about Mia," Elizabeth said. She said it plainly, because it was true and because dressing it up would not make it more or less true. "I was thinking about myself and I did not think about who was here waiting."
"No," he said.
"I will come back earlier next time."
Darcy looked at her. His expression softened—not entirely, but enough to settle into something quieter, the way things did when they had been held at a careful distance and were, for a moment, allowed to rest.
"There does not have to be a next time," he said. "I am not telling you not to go out. I am not saying that." He picked up his shoes again. "I am just asking for a message. One message. So I know you are alright."
"One message," Elizabeth said.
"That is all."
She nodded. He nodded. It was not a grand gesture. It was not a resolution of anything larger. It was two people in a kitchen at six in the morning agreeing to something small and specific and meaning it.
"How was it?" he said.
She looked at him.
"The date," he said. His voice was entirely even. "How was it?"
She watched him for a moment. He looked back at her steadily with the particular composure of someone who had asked a question and intended to hear the answer regardless of what it cost him to ask it.
"Decent," she said.
"Decent."
"He was pleasant. We went to dinner and then a club. The music was good." She looked at her coffee. "He was not —" She stopped.
"You do not have to —"
"He was cool," she said. Simply."
Darcy said nothing. He was looking at the floor just to the left of her, with the expression he wore when he was deciding what to do with something.
"I am sorry too," he said. "For last night. The things I said."
"You were not wrong about most of it."
"I was not entirely right either." He looked up. "The way I said it. It was not —" He stopped. Considered. "You are right that you do not answer to me. I know that. I let the hour and the worry get ahead of the point I was trying to make."
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment.
Eight years, she thought. Eight years of deciding who he was and filing it and not reopening the file, and here he was in their kitchen at six in the morning apologising for a thing he had not entirely done wrong, and she did not know what to do with that except sit with it.
"We are both tired," she said.
"Yes."
"Go on your run."
The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly.
"There is coffee," she said. "When you get back."
He looked at her. She looked back. Something passed between them that was small and careful and not nothing.
"Thank you," he said.
He put on his shoes at the door and went out into the early morning.