She did not stop washing. "Yes."
"I need to say something."
She set the glass down. Turned off the tap. Turned and leaned back against the sink and looked at him. She saw it on his face immediately. It was right there, the same look he had worn eight years ago the evening he asked her to be his girlfriend — open in a way he rarely allowed himself to be open, and entirely deliberate.
She swallowed a lump that suddenly appeared in her throat.
"All right," she said.
He looked at her across the kitchen that had, over the past two months, become the room where they had said more honest things to each other than anywhere else.
"There is no easier way to say this," he said, "so I am going to get straight to the point." He paused, his eyes finding hers briefly before he continued. "When you left eight years ago, I told myself I could move on. I lied. I was in love with you when you left. I have been in love with you for every year since, which was inconvenient and occasionally maddening and entirely my own problem to manage. I managed it well enough that I convinced myself I had stopped. I had not. And then Charlotte and Richard's will put us in the same house and I have spent the past two months managing it again and I have run out of interest in managing it."
Elizabeth looked at him, her knees threatening to fail her.
"I am not asking you for anything," he said. "I am not asking you to feel the same or say the same or do anything with this. I am telling you because I am tired of not telling you, and because whatever comes next, I want it to start from an honest place." He looked at her steadily, in the full direct way he looked at her when he was not holding anything back. "That is all."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Elizabeth looked at this man who had said yes to raising a child he did not know how to raise but had been trying his best for the past two months, who had sat in a lit living room for two hours waiting for her to come home safely, who had walked into the house and hit a man for reaching for her, who had looked at her across Mia's sleeping head on Christmas Eve and not said a word and not needed to.
"I know," she said.
He heaved a sigh, but the lines on his forehead suggested he was waiting for more.
"I have known for a while," she said. "I think I have known since the night you sat in that living room waiting for me. And I have been trying to decide what to do with knowing it."
"And?"
"And," Elizabeth said, "I am also tired of managing it."
She closed the gap between them.
"I fought with the idea that I loved you," she said. "I was frightened of it. You were growing and building things and I was feeling left behind. Then, I let a stranger's words land on the insecurities I already had, and I convinced myself I was protecting myself by leaving. I stayed away because I knew that being around you would mean that I would—"
Darcy's hand came up and his fingers stopped her gently, the way you stopped someone mid-sentence when the sentence had already said everything it needed to. Then the gap that had been closing for two months closed entirely, and this time nobody pulled back. The kiss arrived with the full weight of the time it had been waiting. It lasted as long as it needed to. When it ended the kitchen was too warm for a Christmas afternoon.
Elizabeth pressed her forehead against his. He exhaled.
"Eight years," she said.
"I know."
"We are two people with very stubborn hearts."
"Speak for yourself," he said. "I let go of my stubbornness from the moment I met you."
She laughed. Real and unguarded, the best kind. His hand came up to her hair and they stood in Charlotte's kitchen on Christmas Day and said nothing because nothing needed to be said.
EPILOGUE
ELIZABETH’S PUBLISHER SAID YESin February following year after several meetings.
Elizabeth was at the kitchen counter when the email came through. She read it twice before she moved and then she sat very still for a moment and then she went upstairs and knocked on Darcy's office door, which use to be James’ office. She opened it without waiting for an answer.
He looked up from his laptop.
She said: "They said yes."
