"George Wickham was my father's ward," he said. "He grew up in our house. My father trusted him completely, paid for his education, and when my father died, he left him a significant sum in his will." His voice was even. Controlled. "Wickham took the money and spent two years going through it. When it was gone, he came to me and said the provision had been insufficient. I offered to help him run the logistics firm he inherited with my team, to remit the profits to him directly. He was already running it into the ground, yet, he refused. He wanted to sell it outright. It was either I bought it or a stranger did. So I bought him out. Eight hundred thousand dollars. It was gone in six months. Gambling and other things. Then he came back asking me to hand the business over to him. That was when I refused."
Elizabeth's jaw tightened.
"I do not know when or how you met him," Darcy continued, "but Wickham has been telling versions of that story for years. He finds what a person already half-believes and makes it feel like proof."
"It is your word against his," Elizabeth said slowly. She heard, even as she said it, how thin it sounded.
"James knew," Darcy said. "Some of it, at least."
"You should not use your late cousin as an alibi."
"I am not." He looked at her directly. "Wickham's story was not something I discussed widely. I had spent years not talking about it because talking about it meant talking about what he nearly did to Georgiana, and that was not my story to tell without her permission."
Elizabeth was quiet. "What did he do to Georgiana?"
Something painful moved across Darcy's face. It was the restraint of someone who didn’t like recollecting a story, but was forcing himself through it anyway.
"He nearly got Georgiana to marry him when she turned eighteen. Told her it was legal and romantic and that they had always been meant for each other. She was eighteen. She believed him because he had known her all her life and she had no reason not to." He paused. "Luckily, I had hired a private investigator to keep track of his debts so they would not reach the family name. It was through that I found out the plan. He intended to get Georgiana to sign over her portion of the inheritance once they were married. He had told her a story version of me that was designed to make her trust him over her own brother. By the time I reached her she had almost convinced herself that I was the problem."
"What," Elizabeth exclaimed.
"He is very good at finding the crack that already exists," Darcy said. "With Georgiana it was her need for independence from me. With you it was your uncertainty about whether you were enough. He did not create those things. He just walked through the door they opened."
Elizabeth was quiet for a long time.
She thought about the dinner where she had met Wickham. It was a mutual friend’s gathering Lydia had forced her to go to. Charlotte had been there, which had made it seem entirely coincidental. Wickham had found out she was in Darcy’s circle within twenty minutes of meeting her. She had found him easy to talk to, particularly when he made no attempt to ask for her number or ask her out.
She had thought then that he had no motive. He was someone who seemed to want nothing from her. She had not told him they were dating, just to hear what he had to say, because from her experience, people did not speak about millionaires that way to their girlfriends or their wives. It had been a silly game—her playingI just know Darcy casuallytohear what he had to say. By the end of the night, and three conversations with him, he had told her everything.
"You half-believed I thought less of your work," Darcy said, breaking her chain of thought. "So he gave you a story that confirmed it. And the evenings I went quiet, the days I did not call — those were not contempt. They were the way I have always been with the people I care about most. I go inside myself sometimes. I have been told my whole life that it is something to fix and I have been working to fix it. However, whatever I said or did not say was never because I thought less of you. Not once."
"You said I could be more," Elizabeth said.
"Yes," he said. "I said that."
"And that did not mean —"
"It meant I could see what you were capable of before you could see it yourself. Not more than what you were. More of what you already had." He looked at her. "You are pitching a novel to a publisher now. You were not doing that eight years ago. I am not saying I caused that. I am saying I saw it coming and I expressed it badly and I have been sorry about that for a long time."
The floor blurred slightly in Elizabeth's vision.
She had been so certain. For eight years she had been so absolutely, quietly, completely certain. And sitting in this room now, in Charlotte's house, she understood what Charlotte had been trying to say every time she said: you make up your mind about people very fast, Lizzie.
"I was wrong," she said.
Not to him. To herself. Out loud, but to herself.
"Elizabeth —"
"I was wrong," she said again, and her voice cracked on the second word, just slightly, like voices cracked when something that had been held rigid for eight years finally gave at the joint. "I ended us because of a story a stranger told me in threeconversations which confirmed my insecurities, and I never once asked you. I never once said: is this true. I just decided and I closed it and I —"
She stopped. Her hand came up to her mouth briefly.
Darcy crossed the room. He did not say anything. He simply stood in front of her and opened his arms and she stepped into them and he held her, solidly.
She did not cry for long. She was not built for long crying. But she let herself have the moment. The years of it. The waste of it. The relief of finally knowing what it had actually been.
When she stepped back she wiped her face with the back of her hand and said nothing for a moment.
