“I suppose I could indulge just this once. No ballet mistress is harping on me.”
“Great. While you clean up, I need to take a look at Mom’s paintings to hang in the new townhouse.”
“Oh God! I’m such a self-centered brat! Congratulations!”
“Thanks.”
“Are you going to sell your condo?”
“Nope.”
“See, you have doubts.”
“I don’t have doubts. I just like the view,” he said, walking toward the connecting door to his father’s former lair.
“Well, you’d better enjoy your new townhouse while you can. Your so-called fiancé is probably rubbing her hands together, waiting ... plotting ... planning for a lucrative divorce. You better notgiveher Mom’s paintings!”
“Stop it. She’s not like that.”
She snorted at his back. “You clueless Millennial.”
He shook his head. “Said the single Zoomer who thinks she knows everything.”
Faced with the office threshold, he took a deep breath. He hated this room. In fact, entering still gave him anxiety even though the indomitable titan George Darcy wasn’t within. His relationship with his father had been complicated. It was no secret the man regretted being saddled with a love child at the start of his career, but conversely, he also held an odd sortof prideful expectation for his offspring. Whatever his father’s personality problem was, he had long reconciled that he would never meet the expectation. Why try? Now it didn’t matter in the least. Despite the anxiety and pressure to please, Fitzwilliam Darcy, the heir, had survived, becoming his own man with his own values and honor, while remaining his mother’s son deep, deep down.
Walking into the office, he was hit by dead, stagnant air. He could smell the dust and hear his father’s deep, raspy voice destroyed by a pack-a-day cigarette addiction. “Fitzwilliam, your mother tells me ...” That was the way of things his entire life. Mother was the consigliere go-between, watering down and diplomatically delivering second-hand information for her husband’s edification. She had a way of soothing the savage beast in the man to protect her children.
Still, in some way, the grief over his father’s passing had not lessened in time. He felt sorrow for the loss of the father-son relationship that could have been different, maybe normal.
Stacked against Grandfather Darcy’s desk, three deep piles of various-sized artwork stared at him. He smiled, remembering one of the front pieces, a tempera Long Island seascape. Carefully, he drew one after the other toward him, until stopping dead on a black-framed, unfinished sketch in the middle of the stack. The unsigned graphite pencil portrait of him was not drawn by his mother. He never knew she had this.
His mind went where it shouldn’t, where he vowed it would never go: his and Lizzy’s first meeting.
SEVEN
Meeting Lizzy
No matter how hard he worked to build his career with Pemberley Capital—attempting to please his father in the process—there was one non-negotiable indulgence in his work week: Friday lunch with his mother between teaching her fine art watercolor and figure drawing classes. This was their time, which never seemed to happen outside of the School of Fine Arts on W. 16thStreet or her private studio time at their apartment in the Dakota. Those two things drove him to sketch and dabble in painting, just to spend time with her. Warm and funny, she never judged him or had unrealistic expectations. She was a bright light against his father’s severity and hanging out with her was a place of refuge where he could be himself. She was everything to him. Oftentimes, he wondered how his parents ever stayed committed to each other, an absolute mystery given his father’s personality. Then again, he couldn’t find fault with everything about the man. George Darcy was honorable, having married a rebellious California heiress-turned-bohemian artist after getting her pregnant—with him—in his final year at Stanford Graduate School. But that was a ball of emotions to ponder another time. Today, it was Mother and Son time sitting on the blanket covering the model podium in the center of the studio, eating their usual picnic lunch: Chinese food from the cartons with chopsticks.
“I don’t usually pry, but…” Her comely smile matched the mischievous glimmer in her expressive blue eyes.
“Yeeesss?”
“There’s a reason, of course.”
“Just ask,” he chuckled.
“What exactly is your relationship with String Bean?” she pointedly asked.
He chuckled. “It’s Beanz. Same as it ever was. She’s just my friend.”
“With benefits?”
“What? No!” He laughed. “You’re my mother!”
“A mother can ask.”
“A mother shouldn’t even know the phrase. I’m not sleeping with Beanz. She’s just a friend and only became one because she was a package deal with Charlie. The two of them are like, like Luke & Leia.”
