Swipe Left on Mr. Darcy — Ghosted, Page 4

About this chapter

The glow of the party lasts exactly as long as it takes for Bingley to vanish. Jane waits — a day, three days, a week — for a text that never comes, until Caroline sends one instead: a long, cool, immaculately polite message explaining that Charles has gone back to the city for the foreseeable future, that he's been so busy, that they all think he's better off focusing on himself right now. Jane, being Jane, reads it as kindness and blames only herself; Lizzie reads it as an execution. She can't prove anything, but she can count: Darcy watched her family embarrass themselves at that party, wore that cool little verdict on his face all night, and days later the best thing that ever happened to her sister evaporated. Over coffee, her pragmatic best friend Charlotte Lucas refuses to let her convict a man on a feeling — 'you don't KNOW he did it' — and lays out her own unromantic gospel about how these things really work: that maybe Jane should have shown her hand sooner, that comfort and security outlast butterflies, that wanting less gets hurt less. It doesn't land. Between Mrs. Bennet's operatic grief over the lost fortune, her father's dry cruelty, and one raw, honest midnight conversation where Jane finally admits it hurts, Lizzie's suspicion hardens into conviction. By the last page the two charges against Mr. Darcy — what he did to George, what she's certain he did to Jane — have fused into a single cold certainty, and she is done giving him the benefit of the doubt.