No one said anything for a full minute.
“She is in the next room, you know,” Bingley said finally.
"I am aware of that too."
“And you are going to be in the same apartment for three years.”
“Unless one of us gets married first and the other has to leave and visit on a schedule.”
“Will that be you?” Bingley said.
Darcy let out a short laugh before he realised it. Marriage was the last thing on his mind. He was not with anyone, and the only woman he had ever loved wanted nothing to do with him.
“If I take your silence as a no, then it would mean that at some point—”
“Not tonight, Charles.”
Bingley sighed. Not impatiently. Just the sigh of a man who had known Darcy long enough to understand when to stop pushing and when to wait.
“Jane sends her love,” he said. “To you and to Mia.”
“Tell her thank you.”
“That said, you should really talk to Elizabeth about—”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me about it,” Darcy interjected before Bingley could finish. “If she wanted to, she would have said something in the past eight years. I mean… how difficult is it to say, ‘Hi, I broke up with you because of this or that’?”
“Well, ask Elizabeth directly yourself. She is right there.”
“Goodnight, Charles.”
Bingley laughed, warm and entirely unrepentant. “Goodnight, Will. Go and get some sleep.”
Darcy ended the call. He sat on the edge of the bathtub a moment longer, staring at the door.
He thought about Richard and Charlotte. How much he missed them. Then, unbidden, his mind drifted to Elizabeth. To four lines on a screen and eight years of not understanding them.
Would she be the first to marry, forcing him to leave? It would likely give him more peace… and yet, he did not want that. Was she even seeing someone? Engaged, perhaps? He doubted it. He would have noticed a ring, or heard Bingley mention it.
His thoughts shifted to Mia. It was only the first day of being her guardian, and already it felt overwhelming.
Richard, you should be here, not me.
“Yeah… it’s unfair, leaving me like this,” he muttered. “What do you expect me to do? Be a father to a fifteen-year-old? That’s going to be difficult.”
He exhaled, only then realising he had been speaking aloud.
Then he stood, grabbed his towel, and went back out into his room.
***
Elizabeth was sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard and her knees pulled up when Jane answered. Shehad waited until Mia’s light was off and the apartment had gone quiet before making the call, which had taken longer than expected because the apartment did not go quiet easily. It was full of small sounds — the radiator, the street below, the particular acoustics of a building that had been lived in for years by people who were no longer there.
“How was day one?” Jane asked.
“I survived it.”
“That is not the same as fine.”
