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"Let me. Please. You have said all of yours. Eleven pages of it. Let me say mine." He turns his hat round in his hands. He looks down at it as though it might tell him where to begin. "In the garden at Longbourn, I said that you pitied me. That you played along with a madman. That you managed me."

"You had every reason—"

"I had no reason. I had pride. It is not the same thing." His voice is very low. "I had been made a fool of, and I knew it, and I could not bear that everyone had seen. My cousin. Your father. Mrs. Collins. My valet, for God's sake. I could not bear it. And so I did what I have always done. I made myself cold, and I made myself right, and I put the whole of it on you."

I cannot look away from his face.

"And I said," he goes on, "that you would say anything now. That I had no means of knowing which of the things you said were true." He stops. "That was the cruelest thing I have ever said to anyone. Crueler than anything at Hunsford. Because at Hunsford I did not know you. And in that garden I did."

"Fitzwilliam."

"I knew," he says. "I want you to understand that. I knew the moment I said it that it was not true. I had known it for weeks. I knew it on Oakham Mount. I knew it in the carriage, with your hand in my hair. I knew it every morning on those walks. And I said it anyway, because it was easier to believe you had lied to me about everything than to believe you had lied to me about one thing, out of kindness, and loved me the whole time."

The willows are very still. Out on the lake, a swan calls.

"Do you know what the worst of it was?" he says. "When the memory came back?"

I shake my head.

"Not Hunsford. Not the last man in the world." He says the words quite steadily. "I could have borne that. I had borne it once already. I had walked back to Rosings in the dark and sat up all night and written you a letter, and I had borne it." He looks down at the hat in his hands. "The worst was thinking the last six weeks were a lie. That every morning I had walked beside you, every word you had said to me, every time you looked at me, had been a kind of play, put on for a sick man. That I had been happy, for the first time in my life, and none of it had been real."

His voice cracks on the last word. Only a little. He looks away across the water until it steadies.

"That was what I could not forgive," he says. "Not that you refused me. That I thought you had taken the only six weeks I ever had, and made them false."

"They were not false." It comes out of me fierce and fast, the way it came out in the garden. "Not one day of them. Not one hour. They were the truest weeks of my life."

"I know," he says quietly. "Now."

***

He reaches into his coat.

When his hand comes out, there is a small fold of paper in it. He holds it out to me, and I take it, and unfold it on my palm.

Forget-me-nots.

Dry. Brown. So brittle that one of the tiny flowers breaks off at the stem as I look at it and falls, weightless, into my glove. And through the stems, still fastened, a plain little pin. My pin. The one from my collar, that I unfastened on Oakham Mount with fingers that would not stop shaking, and pushed through his buttonhole, and smoothed the lapel down over.

Now you shall not forget this one.

"I found them in my trunk," he says, "the night I came home. Still in the coat. I had worn them every day since the hill, and never once looked down." He pauses. "Lowe saw them. Every morning, brushing that coat. He left them where they were. And this afternoon, when I came out of the house without my hat, he followed me down to the lake with them in his pocket, and said he thought they might be wanted."

I look up at him.

"Lowe," I say.

"Lowe. Who has known me since I was nineteen and has never once in all that time told me what he thinks of anything." His mouth twists. "He told me today. He said you looked at me the way his wife used to look at him. He said he would know that look anywhere."

The flowers blur.

"I sat on the floor of my room that night," he says, "with those in my hand, and I knew. No one could have kissed me the way you kissed me on that hill out of pity. I knew it then. I have known it for ten days. And I have sat in that library and looked at the lake and refused to know it, because I was too proud to ride a hundred and fifty miles and say so." He looks at me. "And so you rode it instead."

"I did not ride. I came in my aunt's carriage. My uncle complained about the roads the entire way."

"You stayed at the George, in Northampton."

I go still. "How did you—"