Darcy watched her as she spoke. The way she did not quite meet his eyes. The way she folded the envelope once against her palm before slipping it into her bag, as though it might otherwise be seen.
“I remember you once saying that joining anything like dating apps were… unnecessary,” he said.
Elizabeth let out a breath that might have been a laugh, though it did not quite reach that point. She shifted her weight, one shoulder lifting slightly as though to dismiss it.
“A lot has changed about me since we were close.”
Her hand went to the strap of her bag again, pulling it higher, more securely than before.
Darcy inclined his head. “Of course.”
She nodded, but did not look at him.
“I am going to go upstairs for a bit,” she said. “I need a moment.”
“Of course.”
She turned before he could say anything else and went up the stairs, her steps even, measured, not hurried but not lingering either.
EIGHT
THE LANDING WAS QUIET AT SIX-FIFTEEN.
Darcy came out of his room in his running clothes, shoes in hand, moving without sound the way he always moved in the early morning when the house was still and he preferred to leave it that way. He went past Mia's door, fully closed, and he was nearly at the top of the stairs when he noticed it.
Elizabeth's door. Not closed.
Not open either. Just ajar. A few inches, no more, the kind of gap that happened when a door was not pulled properly to and the latch had not caught.
He stopped on his track.
He should pull it closed, he thought. A simple, ten-second task. He was already moving before he could stop himself.
He stepped across, reached for the handle, and was about to pull the door closed when, through the narrow gap, in the grey early light, he saw the bed.
Or rather, he saw what was on the bed. Clothes. Everywhere. A situation of such committed disorder that it took him a moment to process it as intentional rather than the result of something having gone wrong. Dresses over the headboard. A jacket on the pillow. Three pairs of shoes on the duvet. A scarf draped over the bedpost. Blouses stacked and restacked and abandoned. The whole room had the quality of a changing roomafter a particularly decisive shopping trip, except that nobody appeared to have made a decision at the end of it.
He was inside the room before he had decided to be inside the room.
He could not have said, precisely, what had carried him across the threshold. Perhaps, it was the curiosity of someone who had spent thirty-seven years believing that a room was either ordered or it was not, and this room was very much not, and it was directly in front of him. Neither explanation was going to serve him well.
Elizabeth was at the dresser. She had her back to the door, earrings in hand, and she saw him in the mirror a half second before she heard him. She had a half second to have an expression before she controlled it.
She turned.
"What are you doing in my room?"
"Good morning," Darcy said.
"That is not an answer."
His eyes went, involuntarily, to the bed.
"Why is your room like this?"
Elizabeth stared at him. "I beg your pardon?"
"The clothes. All of them."
