Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, MIA LEFT for school at seven-thirty.
Elizabeth had made breakfast, helped her find the left shoe of the pair she wanted to wear, and reminded Mia twice about packing her history project due that morning.
Darcy had appeared with his car keys because he was the one on schedule to drop her off, and Mia had kissed Elizabeth on the cheek and they had gone.
Elizabeth had stood at the front door for a moment after they left and then gone back inside to make herself a second cup of coffee and sit with the quiet house and the morning.
She was at the kitchen counter with her laptop and her coffee, halfway through a paragraph she had been working on for three days, when the doorbell rang.
She frowned at the screen. Darcy had the door code. He would not ring the bell.
She reached for her phone and opened the door camera app.
Standing in front of the steps was Daniel.
What the hell is he doing here?
Darcy's suggested warm bath on Saturday had been exactly right. It had loosened something that the evening had knotted up, and by the time she came back downstairs and sat with him over a cup of coffee, the worst of it had passed. She had slept better than she expected.
On Sunday, Daniel had sent an apology message.
She had seen it, read it once, and set her phone face down on the counter.
Mia had come back from her sleepover twenty minutes later, full of everything Priya's household had done and said and watched and eaten, and the three of them had ended up on the sofa that evening with a film and leftover takeout and Mia wedged between them complaining about the ending before it had finished.
Elizabeth had given Daniel very little thought after that. The conclusion, when it came, was simple enough: men like him existed, they always had, and a woman simply had to keep her eyes open and protect herself accordingly. It was not a comforting thought. It was a true one.
Now however, she stared at the screen for a moment.
Her first thought, arriving before anything more sensible could stop it, was that he had come to apologise.
That he had thought about what had happened in the car and had felt the appropriate weight of it and had come to say so.
People did that sometimes. People surprised you.
She put her phone down and went to the front door and opened it.
Daniel was on the step.
She had one second to register this before he put his hand flat against the door and pushed.
Elizabeth resisted, but was stronger. He was already inside before she could say a word.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?” she said. Her voice came out steady. She was aware of her phone on the kitchen counter, of the distance between her and it, of the fact that she was standing in the living room and he had just walked into it without being asked.
"I drove you home," he said. "First date, remember? You told me to pull up here."
She had not forgotten that on the first date she had given him the address to drop her at and he had filed it away.
"You need to leave," she said.
"I need to leave." He said it back to her with a smile that made her skin contract. "Right. Because you were so polite on Saturday? Because that was the respectful thing, what you did. Getting out of my car on a side street."
"I asked you to stop." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "You were touching me inappropriately without my consent. You did not stop when I asked you to stop." She held his gaze even as something cold moved through her chest. "So I left."
"I was being friendly."
"I told you no," Elizabeth said. Clearly. The same word, the same tone she had used in the car. "Daniel. You need to leave this house right now."
He ignored her, his eyes roaming around the living room.
"This is a big house," he said. "For a freelance writer. Hicks Street, Brooklyn Heights." He looked at her. "How do you afford this exactly? Because your writing gig doesn't cover this kind of address. So what is it? Someone paying for all this?"
"That is none of your —"
"Some kind of arrangement, is it? Sugar daddy situation?" He took a step toward her. "Because if that's the game you're playing, you could have just said. All that playing hard to get when really —"
"Do not," Elizabeth said.
He kept moving.
"Get your hands off me."
She was already stepping back, his hand just beginning to reach for her, when a voice came from behind him—
from the front door, which neither of them had noticed opening.
"Who the hell are you?"
It was not a question.
Darcy was in the doorway, still in the jacket he had worn to drop Mia at school.
His gaze moved from Daniel to her, measuring, taking in more than was being said.
A moment later, his expression settled into something that suggested he had drawn his own conclusion.
When it did, he looked back at Daniel, his gaze sharpening in a way Elizabeth had never seen before.
No, it was not anger.
It was something colder. More deliberate.
Daniel turned. “Who are you?”
"I asked first," Darcy said. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him and the living room got very small. "And I suggest you answer me before I decide the answer does not matter."
"This is a private conversation —"
"There is nothing private about a man who has let himself into someone's house uninvited and is advancing on her in her own living room.
" Darcy's voice was completely level. That was the part that was most frightening, Elizabeth thought, distantly — not that he raised it, but that he did not.
"So I will ask one more time. Who are you and what are you doing in this house. "
"I'm a friend of hers —"
"You are not," Elizabeth said.
Daniel looked between them. Something shifted in his face, a recalculation, and then he did the thing that made everything that followed inevitable — he stepped toward Darcy instead of toward the door, the specific move of someone who had decided that aggression was still an option.
It was not an option.
Darcy hit him once. Clean, controlled, the kind of punch that came from someone who knew precisely how much force the situation required and used exactly that amount.
Daniel's head snapped back. He staggered.
His shoulder hit the wall and he slid down it slightly and then found his footing and stood there with his hand over his face and his eyes very wide.
Darcy stepped back. He straightened his jacket.
"Get out of this house," he said. "If I see you near Elizabeth again, near this address, near anyone in this household, I will have you arrested.
I have her account of your disgrace, I am sure the door cam has a recording of you on the doorstep, and I have the resources to make your life considerably more complicated than it currently is.
" He opened the front door. "Do you understand me? "
Daniel, his nose bloodied shook his head positively.
Without as much as a word, he took the safer option and left.
***
Elizabeth stood very still.
Darcy turned. He looked at her with the careful attention of someone doing a quick inventory.
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Did he touch you?"
"He did not get the chance." She exhaled slowly. "You came back."
"I forgot a document at home." He looked at her steadily. "I am glad I did."
Elizabeth looked at him for a moment. "How did you know he was the guy from saturday? The door is soundproofed. You could not have heard us from outside."
Darcy was quiet for a beat.
"The car," he said.
"What?"
"The night you came home late. The first date.
" He glanced towards the kitchen. "I was constantly checking through the window to see if you were coming.
I saw a car pull up and later spotted your figure in it.
I saw the make, the model, the colour." He paused for air.
"When I turned into the street this morning and saw it parked outside the house I had a fairly good idea of what I was walking into. "
Elizabeth stared at him.
"You looked out of the window," she said.
"Yes."
"You memorised his car."
"I noted it."
"Darcy."
"It was late and you had not been answering your phone and I did not know who had driven you home," he said, with the even tone of someone presenting a perfectly reasonable sequence of events. "It was a reasonable thing to note."
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment. He looked back without flinching. Then he winced, rubbing his hand.
Her eyes travelled to his knuckles. They were red and already beginning to swell where he had hit Daniel.
"You are going to act like that does not hurt," she said.
"I have had worse," he replied.
Elizabeth laughed despite herself. "Come here."
He moved toward her and she took his hand and led him to the kitchen and sat him down at the counter and got the ice pack from the freezer. She wrapped it in a cloth and pressed it against his knuckles and he sat there and let her.
"I hope you can see why dating strangers off Ember is not the best option," he said.
Elizabeth laughed properly again, genuine and unguarded. "I hate to say I do."
"Good. Because the man you gave a second chance, after behaviour for which he should frankly be in a cell, comes back here looking for what exactly? A third attempt?"
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. "Are you saying this is my fault?"
"I did not say that."
"It sounded close to that."
"It was not." He looked at his hand. She kept the ice pack in place. "I am saying what did you ever see in him?"
"He seemed decent," Elizabeth said. "He was charming and he listened and he said the right things. He seemed like someone who paid attention." She paused. "He was not terrible at the beginning. That is what makes it harder to understand."
"It is not yours to understand," Darcy said. "What he is has nothing to do with what you saw in him."
She looked at him.