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Her voice had gone soft, and Darcy’s throat tightened painfully. He stepped forward, thrusting the wilted violets toward her like an offering to appease a goddess—or perhaps a desperate barricade against whatever sentence she was about to pronounce.

Her lips twitched as she accepted them, lying flat in her palm. She crossed to the washstand and placed the pathetic specimens in the tooth-glass, where they listed sideways against the porcelain rim and continued their gentle collapse. She tilted her head and studied them.

“They are rather tragic, Fitzwilliam.”

“Elizabeth—”

“Did you rehearse a speech as well, or was the plan to let the flowers do the talking?” She turned to face him. “If so, the flowers are conveying a certain despondency.”

“You said your door was open,” he managed, his voice dropping an octave as the banter finally wore thin against the heavy thrum of his pulse. “You told me after Richard made a beast of himself that I might come to you. I did not imagine it.”

“Then we shall do without speeches.” She moved to the writing table and rested her hand on the stack of documents. Firelight played across the creased vellum and faded red wax. “I asked you here to set you free.”

The floor tilted beneath him. He had prepared for many things—anger, explanation, the sharp edge of her wit cutting through his defenses—but not this.

“Sit down,” Elizabeth said, watching his face. “You have gone quite white.”

“I would prefer to stand.”

“You would rather bolt, Fitzwilliam. Now, do sit before you require a fainting couch, and I am compelled to revive you with the last of my tooth-glass water.” She gathered a stack of documents and moved toward the fire.

He sat but did not dare to ask what she meant about setting him free, as if he were a fox kit or a fawn nursed back to health. He stepped forward, his heart hammering. “Elizabeth, if this is about the letters, I have not read them. I would not. I swear to you, whatever you wrote to your uncle, whatever you said about me—I have no wish to know. I would never⁠—”

“Fitzwilliam.” She crossed the space between them in three strides, cupped his face, and brushed her thumb along the sharp line of his jaw with a tenderness that undid him entirely. “I am not burning my letters. They are meticulous and detailed, a history our children may someday use as either a cautionary tale or a good laugh.”

His breath escaped him in a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “Then what⁠—”

“These.” She lifted the first document from the stack and held it toward the fire, letting the light show the handwriting through the vellum. His father’s firm, slanting script. The date: 1776.

“This is the original obligation,” she said, holding it over the flames. “The one your father signed when the bank collapsed.”

The paper caught, and the edges curled, and Elizabeth’s voice steadied as she watched it burn. “I am giving it back to you—to us.”

She let it fall into the fire.

Darcy opened his mouth, the protest—‘those are legal instruments, Elizabeth’—already forming, but the words perished as she reached for the next document.

“Seventeen seventy-nine.” She turned the paper so he could see his father’s hand. “Your father borrowed against the northern timber to pay for repairs to the west wing. My uncle bought the debt from a Bristol trading house.” She fed it to the fire. “The west wing is beautiful in the evenings. Light comes through the long windows, and the wallpaper is silk; your mother chose it. I am glad Uncle Henry saved it.”

His fingers gripped the arms of the chair.

“Seventeen eighty.” Another document. “The London merchants. Furnishings, plate, a pianoforte for your mother’s music room.” She looked at him. “Georgiana plays it every afternoon.” The paper curled and fell to ash.

“Elizabeth.” His voice emerged rough and strange. “Those notes are your inheritance. You cannot simply⁠—”

“They are mine,” she said, with a composure that would have done credit to a duchess. “Given to me by a man who trusted me to know what they were worth and what they were for. And I am telling you what they are for.” She lifted the next sheet. “Seventeen eighty-three. The year you were born. Your father took on additional debts to settle your mother’s lying-in and the christening expenses. Uncle Henry paid the physician directly and recorded it as a loan.” She held the paper above the flames. “You were a very expensive infant, Fitzwilliam.”

A sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh—more like something breaking loose from beneath his breastbone, where it had been lodged longer than he could measure.

“Elizabeth, please stop. You do not have to do this.”

She dropped it into the fire.

“I know, but this is the wall between us. The insurance policy my uncle took out for me. The guarantee that you could not afford to treat me unkindly.” Elizabeth’s voice cracked now. “This is every reason you could not say what you wanted to say. Every time you looked at me and swallowed the words because they would have sounded purchased.”

She placed the remainder in his hands: notes, IOUs, debts to private lenders, a painter’s commission for his portrait, a speculative shipping venture, a failed art house—all inscribed in his father’s familiar hand.

“Go ahead, Fitzwilliam, love. Throw it in the fire. Set us free so we can know ourselves.”