She pressed her lips together, hard, as though she could contain something that had already started to move through her chest, something that did not yet have a name but was gathering weight with every second she stood still.
It's just an accident.
Nothing else.
It has to be.
Then she was moving again, one hand raised for a cab.
ONE
Two weeks Later
"WHAT THE HELLare you doing here?"
Elizabeth hissed the moment Fitzwilliam Darcy walked into the waiting room of Kellman and Associates, Attorneys at Law, on a grey Thursday morning fourteen days after Charlotte and Richard Fitzwilliam had been buried.
She had arrived early. Deliberately early, because arriving early meant she had time to sit down, arrange herself, and be composed by the time anyone else walked through the door. She had a coffee she was not drinking and her hands in her lap and seven minutes of hard-won composure, and then the door opened and there he was, and all seven minutes evaporated instantly.
Darcy stopped just inside the doorway. He looked at her with the particular stillness that had always made her want to say something sharp, just to see if she could move him.
"The same thing you are doing here, I imagine," he said.
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only accurate one available." He crossed the room, unhurried, and sat down in the chair two seats away from her. Not next to her. Not across from her. Two seats away, which was somehow both considerate and infuriating. He set his jacket over the arm of the chair and looked at the closed door of theinner office. "The lawyer called me on Monday. He said my presence was required."
"Your presence," Elizabeth repeated.
"Those were his words."
She looked at him for a long moment. He did not look back, which was its own kind of answer. He was doing the thing he had always done — sitting inside his composure like it was a room with a locked door, giving nothing away, waiting for the situation to resolve itself around him.
Eight years, she thought. Eight years and he looked exactly the same and she was still sitting in rooms trying to read him and getting nowhere and Charlotte was dead and Richard was dead and she had not slept properly in fourteen days and the last thing she needed right now, in this waiting room, in this moment, was Fitzwilliam Darcy being exactly who he had always been.
She turned back to her coffee.
***
They had been in the same building twice in fourteen days and spoken fewer than a hundred words to each other.
At the hospital, she learned what the voice on the phone had not said.
Charlotte had succumbed to her injuries. Richard had been pronounced at the scene.
Elizabeth had stood very still and heard those words arrive somewhere very far away. She had said thank you after the doctor, whose name she would never remember, told her they had done everything they could. It was a strange thing to say, but it was the only thing available.
With her knees weakening, she sank into a corridor chair, head spinning, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee gone cold, when Darcy arrived.
She heard him before she saw him — his voice at the nurses’ station, quiet and controlled, asking for the Fitzwilliam family.
He came around the corner and stopped when he saw her. Something moved across his face. She did not have the capacity to interpret it.
When the tears she had been fighting finally won, she did not hear him move. She only knew he was there because the chair beside her shifted, and then he was seated two seats away, steady and undemanding, like a wall you could lean against without it asking anything of you in return.
He did not say anything. He did not try to.
At some point he got up and came back with two cups of coffee and put one in her hands without asking whether she wanted it. She drank it without looking at him. It was bad coffee. She drank all of it anyway, because it was warm and it was there and it gave her hands something to do.
