Darcy’s hand dragged down his face, slower this time, as though the movement might buy him a second to rearrange what had already happened.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, though even as he said it, he knew how it sounded.
Elizabeth looked at him properly then.
“I did.”
Two words. Flat. Unimpressed.
“I called you,” she continued, each word placed carefully now. “Your phone was on do not disturb or whatever you have it set to when the rest of the world apparently becomes optional. I called. She called.”
Her voice held steady until the last part.
“She tried calling you too.”
That one did not land the same.
Darcy felt it, sharp and immediate, cutting through whatever defence he might have reached for.
Elizabeth turned her head slightly, her gaze flicking toward the stairs before returning to him, as though she had not meant to look but could not quite help it.
“You know she cancelled on her friend,” Elizabeth said. “Told her she couldn’t go with them to an hangout because you were taking her out.”
Darcy did not move.
“She kept checking the time,” Elizabeth went on, quieter now, the anger thinning just enough to let something elsethrough. “Thought maybe you were running late. Then she thought she got the time wrong.”
Each possibility sounded worse than the last.
“And then she realised you just weren’t coming.”
The room felt smaller suddenly.
Darcy exhaled, but it did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and it was insufficient the moment it left him. “I— I forgot. I didn’t—”
There was nothing to complete that sentence with that did not make it worse.
He stopped.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Upstairs.”
He turned instinctively, already moving.
“Darcy.”
He stopped.
Elizabeth’s voice had changed again—not softer, not angry, but firm in a way that held him where he stood.
“Don’t go up there and wake her up like that fixes it.”
He did not turn back immediately.
“She cried,” Elizabeth said.
