Chapter 19
NINETEEN
DARCY's SISTER, Georgiana arrived on Christmas morning at ten o'clock with two large bags, a wreath she had made herself, and a smile that could melt the hardest of faces.
Mia had the door open before the knock finished.
"You are taller," Georgiana said, pulling her into a hug immediately. "You were not this tall when last I saw you."
"I grew four centimetres," Mia said into her shoulder. "Mr. Darcy measured me."
"He would."
The two cousins exchanged pleasantries, condolences and gist before Elizabeth came downstairs to join the party.
Elizabeth had been trying for minutes, not to stand at the foot of the stairs before Georgiana arrived.
She had made cinnamon rolls, arranged the kitchen, and reorganised everything she thought needed reorganising.
The truth was that she had heard about Georgiana Darcy for years — from Charlotte, from Bingley, from Darcy himself in the small ways he mentioned her without meaning to — and had never once been in the same room as her.
Even at Charlotte’s wedding, she couldn’t remember being introduced to her.
When Darcy told her a day before Christmas eve that she was coming, Elizabeth realised that she had more feelings about her coming than she had expected.
Georgiana looked up from Mia and saw her as she came downstairs.
There was a pause that lasted a moment too long, and Elizabeth felt the first stir of worry before Georgiana said, “Elizabeth?”
"Georgiana." Elizabeth came forward. "I have wanted to meet you for a long time."
"Likewise," Georgiana said. "A very long time." She said it with a smile that was her brother's smile, which Elizabeth had not been prepared for and had to absorb for a moment.
"I hope you do not find it strange that I feel like I already know you," Elizabeth said. "The resemblance is uncanny."
Georgiana smiled. "I stalked your Instagram when William told me about his girlfriend eight years ago." She glanced toward the kitchen where Darcy had appeared in the doorway. "It is a pity we never got to meet properly."
"I am sorry about that," Elizabeth said. Quietly. Meaning it.
"It is all in the past now." Georgiana said it simply, without making it into anything larger than it was.
"When he told me you two had to move into the same house with Mia, I felt sorry for him.
" She paused. "But if what he has been telling me these past two weeks is anything to go by, you are well past that. "
Elizabeth looked at her. Then, briefly, at Darcy.
"Yes," she said. "We are."
"Cinnamon rolls," Mia announced, already heading for the kitchen. "Before Mr. Darcy eats them all."
"I have not touched them," Darcy said from the doorway.
"Yet," Mia said.
***
The morning settled around them quickly— without fuss, without negotiation, finding its shape naturally.
Georgiana and Mia moved around each other with the ease of people who had to see each other.
They sat at the kitchen counter while Elizabeth iced the rolls and Darcy made coffee and by eleven it was simply Christmas morning.
After breakfast they exchanged gifts.
Mia had bought Darcy a book about the best luxury item for the year. She had asked Bingley what he would want and Bingley had known immediately and she had ordered it and wrapped it herself.
"How did you know?" Darcy said, when he opened it.
"Uncle Bingley said you had been wanting it for months but would not buy it because you thought it was an indulgence."
Darcy looked at the book. "It is."
"I know," Mia said. "That is why I got it."
Mia had bought Elizabeth a notebook. The right kind — red cover, good paper, the kind that felt serious in the hand. Inside the front cover she wrote, ‘for the novel after the one you are pitching’
Elizabeth read it and held it close to her heart. Afterwards, she hugged Mia.
"You are going to cry," Mia said.
"I am not."
She was, slightly. She looked at the ceiling to stop it and Darcy, across the room, said nothing and looked at his book and the corner of his mouth did something she pretended not to notice.
Georgiana gave Mia a small gold bracelet.
Their mother's. She said she had been carrying it for a year trying to work out who it belonged with, and that once occasion warranted that she visited, she had known it belonged with Mia.
Mia put it on and wore it for the rest of the day and the day after that and every day after that as far as anyone could tell.
Darcy's gifts came last.
He produced two boxes, small and dark, the kind that announced their contents before they were opened. He set one in front of Mia and one in front of Elizabeth.
Mia opened hers first. She looked at what was inside. Then she looked at Darcy. Then back at the box.
"Mr. Darcy," she said.
"You are welcome," he said.
"This is a diamond bracelet."
"Yes."
"A real one."
"I do not buy the other kind."
Mia picked it up very carefully, turned it in the light and said nothing for a moment. Then she said, "I love it," with a directness that had nothing performed about it. She put it on next to Georgiana's bracelet and held her wrist up
"Mum would have loved this." Her voice was steady. "She always said diamonds were for women who had earned something." She looked at Darcy. "I have not earned anything yet. But I will. Thank you."
Elizabeth opened hers next.
Her eyeballs nearly popped out of the socket when she saw the necklace.
"You did not have to do this," she said.
"I know."
"This is — Darcy, this is too much."
"It is not," he said simply.
She looked back at the necklace. Delicate, precise, exactly the kind of thing she would have chosen herself if she had ever allowed herself to choose something like this, which she never had. She held it a moment longer than she intended to.
Then she put it on.
Georgiana, who had been watching all of this with the quiet attention she brought to things she found interesting, received her own box last. She opened it, looked at the earrings inside, and said: "Thank you, big bro."
***
In the afternoon Georgiana and Mia went upstairs to watch something, and Elizabeth and Darcy were left in the kitchen with the remains of lunch. The quiet that had been building all week settled around them as they worked.
Elizabeth was washing up. Darcy was drying. The radio was on low.
"She likes you," Elizabeth said.
"Georgiana?"
"Mia."
"I know."
"She did not have to." Elizabeth handed him a glass. "She could have been difficult about all of this. She had every right to be."
"She is remarkable," Darcy said.
"She is Charlotte's," Elizabeth said. "All the way through."
They worked in silence for a moment. Then Darcy set his cloth down and turned.
"Elizabeth."
She did not stop washing. "Yes."
"I need to say something."
She set the glass down. Turned off the tap.
Turned and leaned back against the sink and looked at him.
She saw it on his face immediately. It was right there, the same look he had worn eight years ago the evening he asked her to be his girlfriend — open in a way he rarely allowed himself to be open, and entirely deliberate.
She swallowed a lump that suddenly appeared in her throat.
"All right," she said.
He looked at her across the kitchen that had, over the past two months, become the room where they had said more honest things to each other than anywhere else.
"There is no easier way to say this," he said, "so I am going to get straight to the point.
" He paused, his eyes finding hers briefly before he continued.
"When you left eight years ago, I told myself I could move on.
I lied. I was in love with you when you left.
I have been in love with you for every year since, which was inconvenient and occasionally maddening and entirely my own problem to manage.
I managed it well enough that I convinced myself I had stopped.
I had not. And then Charlotte and Richard's will put us in the same house and I have spent the past two months managing it again and I have run out of interest in managing it. "
Elizabeth looked at him, her knees threatening to fail her.
"I am not asking you for anything," he said.
"I am not asking you to feel the same or say the same or do anything with this.
I am telling you because I am tired of not telling you, and because whatever comes next, I want it to start from an honest place.
" He looked at her steadily, in the full direct way he looked at her when he was not holding anything back. "That is all."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Elizabeth looked at this man who had said yes to raising a child he did not know how to raise but had been trying his best for the past two months, who had sat in a lit living room for two hours waiting for her to come home safely, who had walked into the house and hit a man for reaching for her, who had looked at her across Mia's sleeping head on Christmas Eve and not said a word and not needed to.
"I know," she said.
He heaved a sigh, but the lines on his forehead suggested he was waiting for more.
"I have known for a while," she said. "I think I have known since the night you sat in that living room waiting for me. And I have been trying to decide what to do with knowing it."
"And?"
"And," Elizabeth said, "I am also tired of managing it."
She closed the gap between them.
"I fought with the idea that I loved you," she said.
"I was frightened of it. You were growing and building things and I was feeling left behind.
Then, I let a stranger's words land on the insecurities I already had, and I convinced myself I was protecting myself by leaving.
I stayed away because I knew that being around you would mean that I would—"
Darcy's hand came up and his fingers stopped her gently, the way you stopped someone mid-sentence when the sentence had already said everything it needed to.
Then the gap that had been closing for two months closed entirely, and this time nobody pulled back.
The kiss arrived with the full weight of the time it had been waiting.
It lasted as long as it needed to. When it ended the kitchen was too warm for a Christmas afternoon.
Elizabeth pressed her forehead against his. He exhaled.
"Eight years," she said.
"I know."
"We are two people with very stubborn hearts."
"Speak for yourself," he said. "I let go of my stubbornness from the moment I met you."
She laughed. Real and unguarded, the best kind. His hand came up to her hair and they stood in Charlotte's kitchen on Christmas Day and said nothing because nothing needed to be said.