She looked up then, the tears spilling freely at last. “But I would have understood if you had.”
“I would not,” he said. “Because I know you. I knew something must have kept you—something beyond your power. And when no answer came, when silence stretched longer than I could bear… I feared many things. But not that you had forgotten me. Not that you had ceased to care.”
She closed her eyes.
“I told myself,” he continued, “that if anything remained between us, it would begin again at Pemberley. I hoped—if you were still mine—you would come.”
Elizabeth looked up at him slowly. Her voice, when it came, was low and uncertain. “Then… you believe me? About what I told you—about the life we shared?”
Darcy was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I dreamed of you, here.”
Elizabeth turned her eyes to his, uncertain.
“I do not think it was memory,” he said slowly. “It could not have been. And yet it felt real—more real than the days I lost in silence. I saw you standing at the foot of a bed. You were smiling. Your hair was down, and there was light behind you. You looked at me as though nothing in the world could part us.”
She said nothing, but her hand curled more tightly around his. Her cheeks coloured faintly, warmth rising in answer to his words.
“Then the dream shifted. I was in the garden at Pemberley—my favorite place, near the fountain. I knew it instantly, though the air had a golden stillness I have never quite seen. And there was a boy.”
Elizabeth’s breath caught.
“He had dark hair—like mine—but your eyes. He was laughing. Running. He called me Papa.”
His voice softened as he spoke, the memory—or vision—still vivid in his mind.
Elizabeth looked down. “I never saw him run,” she murmured.
He said nothing.
“He was only six weeks old when I fell,” she continued, her voice steady, though something in it shifted—gentler, wistful. “That was the last I remember. He had just begun to smile. I was still learning how to hold him.”
Darcy’s hand tightened slightly in hers.
“Then perhaps,” he said quietly, “we both dreamed of the rest. You through what was lost. And I through what I never had.”
She lifted her gaze slowly, her eyes full.
After a pause, he said, “There was more.”
“After James,” he went on, “you were walking ahead of him—laughing—and in your arms... a baby.”
Elizabeth stilled.
“A girl,” he said quietly. “Very small. She had curls—just beginning—and wide eyes, solemn and curious. She stared at me as though she knew me. As though I ought to do something.”
Elizabeth’s brow knit. “You dreamed we had a daughter?”
He nodded once. “You held her like you’d done so a hundred times before. And she looked at me, then tucked her head beneath your chin. It was only a moment. But I remember it with more clarity than any waking hour.”
“We never had a daughter,” Elizabeth said softly. The words carried no bitterness—only wonder, and the soft grief of something almost real.
Darcy’s smile was faint but unshakable. “Not yet.”
Chapter 57
His smile lingered, faint but unshakable. “Not yet,” he had said—and the words hung in the silence that followed, soft as breath. Elizabeth brought his hand once more to her cheek, holding it there.
“You saw James,” she said, almost to herself. “You saw him running. That means something.”
