Not asleep. Not reading. Just sitting, in the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting and had decided that was what they were doing and had stopped pretending otherwise. The television was off. The lamp was on. He looked up when she came in and she watched his face make a decision about itself.
He settled on steady. She could tell the effort it cost him.
"It is one in the morning," he said.
"I know."
"You said late."
"This is late."
"Elizabeth."
"Darcy." She set her bag on the hook. She was tired and her feet hurt and she did not have the energy for this in the way she usually had the energy for this. "We discussed this. I said late. You said goodnight. I went out. This is how it ended."
"I called you."
"The music was loud. I could not hear anything." She looked at him. "I am home. I am fine. You can go to bed."
"I tried four times."
"I know. I saw them when I stepped outside."
"And before that?"
She opened her mouth. He held up one hand. Not in surrender. In something else, something that stopped her before she could start.
"I am not doing this to control you," he said. His voice was still steady. Still level. But underneath it something was moving that the steadiness was not quite covering. "I am not telling you that you should not have gone or that you owe me any account of your evening. I am not saying any of that."
She waited.
"This is New York," he said. "It is one in the morning. You were with someone you do not know, in a place you’ve probably never been, and your were unreachable for close to three hours." He looked at her steadily. "What if something had happened to you?"
The living room was very quiet.
"I am an adult —"
"I know you are an adult. That is not the point." Something shifted in his voice. The steadiness thinned, just slightly, just enough. "The nightlife in this city is not safe for anyone at one in the morning regardless of how capable they are. And you matter to people in this house. You matter to Mia." He stopped. He looked at his hands for a moment. "She has already lost one mother. Losing you would cripple her. I would not know how to explain it to her. I would not know how to —"
He stopped.
Elizabeth stood in the hallway of Charlotte's house at one in the morning in her good dress with her shoes hurting and she looked at Fitzwilliam Darcy sitting on the sofa with his hands in his lap and his jaw set and his voice carefully controlled except for the places where it was not, and something settled in her chest that she had not been expecting.
He was not angry about the date.
He had been sitting there for God knew how many hours, quietly unraveling, and when she walked through the door, the first thing he did was steady his voice so she would not hear it.
She had seen it.
"Darcy —"
"I do not know why I keep trying with you." He said it quietly. Not bitterly. Like a thing he had been thinking for a while and had decided to say now simply because he was tired and the hour was late and the pretence of not saying it had runout. "You do these things and I cannot tell if it is deliberate or if I am simply someone you have decided does not deserve the basic consideration of a phone call." He stopped. Shook his head. "I have not done anything to you. Whatever you believe about me, whatever you decided eight years ago or yesterday or this morning, I have not done anything to you that should make me someone you punish by staying out until one in the morning without answering your phone."
The silence that followed had a weight to it.
Elizabeth could not find the shape of what she wanted to say. She could not find it quickly enough and he was already standing.
"Goodnight, Elizabeth," he said.
