Page 157 of Twice Chosen

Always.

Margaret closed the book.

For a long time she sat beneath the open sky, listening to the wind through the grass.

Perhaps the story was impossible.

Perhaps her grandmother, in old age, had written an elaborate private fiction with her husband.

Perhaps two people who loved one another for decades had invented a secret mythology simply because marriage had given them enough jokes to fill a book.

Margaret found she did not particularly care which explanation was sensible.

The lesson remained.

Years later, when her own husband lay frightened before a difficult surgery, Margaret held his hand.

He attempted to reassure her because frightened men sometimes believed comfort was easier to give than receive.

She said nothing.

Her thumb moved once.

Twice.

Three times.

His eyes opened.

Margaret smiled.

I am here.

That was all.

It had always been all.

For Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, it had been enough to cross pride, prejudice, grief, death, and whatever impossible distance lay between one lifetime and another.

They had been young together.

Old together.

Lost.

Found.

And given the strangest blessing imaginable--not the power to fix everyone they loved, nor the certainty of reproducing happiness exactly as it had once existed, but the chance to understand what love required before time taught the lesson too late.

When Fitzwilliam Darcy crossed a crowded assembly room toward a young woman who should have been a stranger, Elizabeth smiled at him.

He had found her sooner.

She had been waiting.

Margaret eventually showed the journal to her mother. Clara read it in silence over two evenings. When she finished, she did not call the story impossible. She simply sat with both hands around a cup of tea that had long since gone cold.

"Did you know?" Margaret asked.