Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — It's a Match, Page 9

About this chapter

Two days after Ms. de Bourgh's black car reversed out of the flagstone path, Lizzie is still standing at the front of the house doing arithmetic she doesn't want to do: nobody drives two hours to forbid a thing that was never going to happen. Which means somebody told that woman something. Which means Darcy hasn't closed the tab on her, and the waiting is unbearable. Then a car that isn't that car pulls up at the curb, Mrs. Bennet detonates, and Charles Bingley is in the front hall beaming at Jane with the whole rest of his life in his face. Behind him, silent, stiff, looking at nobody but Lizzie, is Fitzwilliam Darcy. Twenty minutes of the most excruciating small talk in the county follow, her mother gushing at Charles and pointedly freezing out the man who quietly saved this family, until Mrs. Bennet, engineering for Jane, accidentally engineers for Lizzie too: a walk, Jane and Charles drifting far ahead, and Lizzie alone on the leafy lane with the last man she ever told she could never want. Four minutes of silence later she does the bravest thing she has ever done and speaks first: she knows about Lydia. All of it. He tries to deflect, her aunt was never supposed to tell her, and then stops on the path and says the thing she has been unable to let herself imagine: he didn't do it for her family. His feelings haven't changed. One word from her and he will never raise it again. So Lizzie, who prides herself on reading people and got the only two that mattered completely wrong, tells the truth for once with nothing clever in it, and asks him to ask her again. The chapter closes on the same frame it opened, the same porch steps and the same golden lane, except she isn't watching an empty street any more.