EPILOGUE
ELIZABETH’S PUBLISHER SAID YES in February following year after several meetings.
Elizabeth was at the kitchen counter when the email came through. She read it twice before she moved and then she sat very still for a moment and then she went upstairs and knocked on Darcy's office door, which use to be James’ office. She opened it without waiting for an answer.
He looked up from his laptop.
She said: "They said yes."
He stood up from his chair, crossed the room, and kissed her, and she laughed into it.
"I knew you’d get it," he said.
"You could not have known, you just found out." Elizabeth giggled.
"I knew since you told me you were pitching it. You are too good a talent for them to Passover."
"That is such a sweet thing to say," she patted him on the cheek.
"I know.”
She laughed again and then planted another kiss on his lips.
Mia, who had been listening from the hallway and had apparently decided they had been allowed their moment for long enough, said: "Does this mean I get a signed copy?"
"You can have the first one off the press," Elizabeth said.
"Obviously," Mia said. "I discovered her." She went back to her room.
***
Darcy proposed in October, which was exactly one year after Elizabeth had counted fourteen seconds in a lawyer's office and said yes to something she had not expected to be asked of her.
He did not make a production of it. He was not, as Elizabeth had observed over the course of a year, a man who made productions of things. He did it on a Tuesday evening after dinner when Mia had gone upstairs and the kitchen was quiet.
She said yes properly then, out loud, and Mia, who had absolutely been listening from the top of the stairs, said “finally”
She came down and hugged them both and then said, “I have opinions about the flowers and I am not negotiating on about it.”
They were married the following spring. It was a small wedding. Just the people who mattered. Jane and Bingley, Georgiana, the Bennet sisters and Mrs. Bennet who cried more than anyone and denied it and her father who gave a speech that was funny and slightly too long.
Mia stood between them at the front and wore the gold and diamond the Darcy siblings gifted her during Christmas. She held Elizabeth's bouquet when required and looked, for the entire ceremony, exactly like Charlotte would have looked if she had been there.
Which she was, in every way that mattered.
That year, Mia turned seventeen in September.
Elizabeth and Darcy, having decided, had started the adoption process in the spring, quietly, without making an announcement, because some things did not need to be announced to be true.
The paperwork took months and required patience of the kind that Darcy was built for and Elizabeth was not, and there were forms and hearings and a family court judge who asked Mia directly what she wanted to which she said, “I want them both.
Officially. I want it written down somewhere that they are mine and I am theirs.
And so it was arranged.
On the day it was finalised they went to dinner, the three of them, at the Thai restaurant on Smith Street. Charlotte's table. Mia ordered Charlotte's order.
Halfway through the meal Mia looked at her plate and then at the two of them and said, "I have been thinking about what to call you."
Elizabeth looked at Darcy. He looked at Elizabeth.
"You do not have to —" Elizabeth began.
"I want to," Mia said. "I have been thinking about it for a while." She looked at Darcy. "Dad." Then at Elizabeth. "Mum." She said it simply, the way she said things that she had already decided.
Elizabeth couldn’t hold back the tears that streamed for her eyes. Even Darcy blinked his eyes severally, but he didn’t cry.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Darcy reached across and put his hand over Mia's. Elizabeth did the same.
They sat like that for a while. In Charlotte's favorite Thai restaurant. At Charlotte's table. Three people who had been put together by grief and a will had become, somewhere in the middle of all of it, a family.
Outside, September carried on. The city moved. The evening was warm and unhurried and entirely itself.
They drove back home slowly, the three of them, on the streets they all knew by heart. Back to the house that had been many things and was now simply, completely, a home.
From the back seat, Mia looked at her new parents.
She was one year away from eighteen, one year away from everything the will had promised her — the apartment, the accounts, the independence her parents had set aside for her. She could see it coming. She was not in a hurry.
She still missed them. She would always miss them. There was not a day that passed without something — a smell or a phrase,— pulling them close again. That had not changed and she did not expect it to.
But sitting at the restaurant, looking at the two people who had shown up for her in every way that counted, she thought about a will written in jest by two people who had never planned to die soon, and she thought: they knew anyway. Even without knowing, they knew.
Mum always knew. Mum and Dad always knew what was best.
Even from wherever they were now, they had managed it.
Mia smiled.
Mr. Darcy and Aunty Elizabeth — or rather, Dad and Mum, she decided — a very good family to have.
THE END