Mr. F.
The man behind the text in her phone late at night. The humour threaded through restraint.
It was infuriating, how easily her mind separated them, as though she had not been sitting across from the same man all along.
She told herself she was relieved that he had not texted. That the quiet was proof of her good sense.
And yet the absence sat in her pocket like a weight.
She did not hear from Mr. F.
She did not hear from Fitzwilliam Darcy.
And she refused to be the one to break the silence.
She spoke to Wickham only once.
Jane’s voice had lingered in her mind after that night—Ask for proof. Something real. Don’t let a stranger’s story become the only truth you hear.
So Elizabeth did.
She asked Wickham for evidence.
His reply came quickly, almost eagerly, as though he had been waiting for the invitation.
The first thing he sent was a photograph.
Two boys, perhaps thirteen, smiling too brightly beside an older man whose posture alone suggested authority.
“Me, you-know-who and Mr. Darcy senior,” Wickham wrote.
Elizabeth stared at it longer than she meant to. She had never seen a picture of Darcy’s father before, but the resemblance was unmistakable. The same sharp bones, the same controlled presence, even in stillness.
Then another.
A younger Darcy, stiff and unsmiling, already wearing restraint like armour. Wickham stood beside him, far more relaxed, an arm slung with careless familiarity.
Then another still.
A family gathering. A girl with softer features, but eyes that echoed Darcy’s.
“Georgiana,” Wickham wrote. “His sister.”
Elizabeth’s grip tightened around her phone.
She asked careful questions. Measured ones. The sort she asked when she was trying very hard not to be led.
Wickham answered them all.
And when she pressed further about Georgiana’s personality, he answered with the same cadence he had used when speaking of Darcy—easily, almost too easily, as though he gained nothing by speaking about it.
“She’s just like him,” he wrote. “Proud. Egoistical. They all are. They think being born into money makes them untouchable.”
The evidence piled up until it felt impossible to deny.
This was not a stranger spinning a tale for attention. This was a man who had been there, who had grown up alongside Darcy, who had been close enough to the family to have photographs that could not be conjured from nothing.
In every reasonable sense, it was convincing.
