It was hammering it down when I stepped out of the office onto the pavement, which shouldn’t have surprised me. This was, after all, the week than just kept on giving. My newly washed hair was instantly plastered to my head, and my hands shook as I fumbled my phone out to call Jane. When she didn’t answer, I wiped the rain off the screen and called Bingley instead, assuming they’d be together. Neither answered. A sob escaped me and I immediately bit down on it, refusing to shed another tear for him.
I wasn’t used to feeling vulnerable. I was a self-sufficient kind of gal, more than used to handling some very big problems on my own. But this felt different. In amongst the panic and the outrage was a pain I was unfamiliar with, and I desperately needed somebody to tell me it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.
In lieu Jane’s calming words, I went in search of the next best thing and took two buses to the museum where Mary worked. I received plenty of strange looks en route, and one lady in nurses’ scrubs asked me whether I needed help, but that was only to be expected given that I was intermittently sobbing and muttering with rage for the entire journey. I probably looked half wild.
Mary took one look at me and led me to sit in the staff room while she went to ask her boss whether she could take an extended lunch break. I tried to calm myself down as I waited, but my deep breaths kept coming out peppered with furious expletives, and when I caught sight of myself in the crooked little mirror hung on the wall above the mini fridge, the mascara smudged down my face nearly sent me over the edge. It wasn’t fair that the universe had allowed Darcy to look so perfectly put together as he hurled his unfounded accusations at me, while I, the innocent party, passed the entire mortifying encounter unknowingly looking like roadkill. I was so done being the butt of life’s joke.
Mary collected me and my despair from the staffroom not long after, insisting on carrying my bags as we walked the short distance to her and Tam’s place.
“I can manage,” I mumbled.
“Your hands are shaking,” she replied, as though that was a valid reason to overrule me. I let her carry them, slightly alarmed to see that she was right—and then cross about it. Darcy didn’t deserve the sort of distress that prompted the shakes. Geez, I was so angry!
“Would I be right in thinking this has to do with your absolutely massive ‘little white lie’?” Mary asked as we walked.
I glared at her. “If the words ‘I told you so’ pass your lips, I’m turning around and going home.”
Ignoring my threat, she shook her head. “I knew this would end in disaster.”
“Mary, even you couldn’t have predicted that me pretending to be Bingley’s girlfriend would result in me losing my job and being threatened with jail time!”
She snapped her head around, and I had to give it to Darcy—not a lot could rouse Mary to surprise, but his stratospheric hissy fit had managed it. She gaped at me with open astonishment, both eyebrows raised and her mouth agape. It didn’t last long before her pragmatism kicked back in, and she hustled me along the pavement even more quickly, one arm protectively around my shoulders.
In short order, we were sat at her breakfast bar in dry clothes—mine borrowed from her wardrobe—eating cold leftover pizza while I relayed everything that had happened that morning. When I got to the part about George Wickham, Mary let out a curt little grunt of displeasure.
“I definitely should have predicted that his crawling back out of the woodwork would spell trouble. Everything that man touches turns to ash.”
I didn’t bother to argue, because Mary would never be persuaded that George was anything but a walking catastrophe. “Regardless, whatever he may or may not have done, I haven’t.” The back of my eyes started to burn again as the hurt rolled back in. “I can’t believe Darcy thought I would.”
Mary scrutinised my face for a moment or two before asking, “Since when did you give a rat’s arse what Darcy thought of you? What happened to him being a knob?”
“That was only when I first knew him. Although, after this morning, I’m starting to think my first impression wasn’t so far off the mark.”
“Before this morning, though? Had you started to like him?”
I wished I could say no, because perhaps then I might not feel so devastated, but there was no point denying the truth. My tears spilled over before I got my answer out, and I was still trying to swallow back another sob when the front door banged, and Tam’s voice drifted along the hallway.
“You’re going to have to repeat every word of that, verbatim, from the beginning, and you only have yourself to blame for starting without me.”
“I texted her,” Mary explained when I looked at her in confusion.
Tam appeared in the doorway, saw my fresh tears, and lost all her swagger. “Oh, babe! Come here!” She lunged towards the breakfast bar and pulled me into a hug that was all bosom and Jo Malone. She really was the Yin to Mary’s Yang. I adored them both, and for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand, that made me cry even harder.
“I don’t understand it,” Tam said after I’d repeated my story and fleshed it out with a few more details I’d forgotten on the first telling. “I thought you said Darcy was clever, but he’s clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic if he thinks you could ever do something like this.”
I shrugged weakly. “Don’t ask me to explain it, it makes no sense to me either.”
I couldn’t even tell them the worst of it—how Darcy had done all this despite knowing what losing my job would mean to Dad. Mary knew nothing of that part of my life, but Darcy did. He was the only person who knew, because I’d trusted him with the secret. And he’d trampled over the knowledge with a carelessness that shredded me to my core.
Neither my sister nor her girlfriend could possibly understand the helplessness I felt when I whispered, “I need my job.”
They exchanged a look, and Tam said, “You don’t need to worry about that, surely? Once Bingley gets back and explains everything, it will all be resolved.”
I shook my head, laughing bitterly. “Then I really will be going to jail, because I’m going to murder him.”
“Can I watch?” Mary asked, no hint of a jest in her tone.
Tam’s expression made it clear that she, too, was out of patience with Bingley. “Do we need to perform some sort of intervention in that relationship? I’m not sure Jane is safe with someone this careless.”
They both smirked but I couldn’t bring myself to join in with any humour. It was all too raw. “It doesn’t matter what Bingley says, or how quickly everything is explained. I will still know that, however briefly, Darcy was still content to believe that I’m a cheat and a liar.”
“You are a liar. You lied about dating Bingley,” Mary pointed out. Ever the pedant.
“I didn’t do any of the rest of it. It hurts that he thought so little of me.”
“Does it matter?” Tam asked, circling back to the question Mary had put to me, just before she got home. “Just how much do you like him that his opinion should upset you this much?”
“I think…” I started to groan, because it was all so complicated and nonsensical, but the groan turned into a sort of hiccuppy sob. “A lot.”
And despite my anger and my indignation and all the reasons I had to despise him, my head was abruptly full of everything I liked about Darcy. How he frowned before he spoke because he was always thinking carefully about what he wanted to say. How he was the only person I’d ever met who geeked out more than I did about LiDAR scanners. How he never once let go of my hand while I got stitched up in A&E.
But none of that mattered now. Now he hated me—even more than I’d worried he would—and while my tender feelings for him floated dead in the water, my fury was fast gathering pace. He hadn’t trusted me; he’d readily thought the very worst of me; he’d thrown the hardest parts of my life in my face and made them even harder to bear.
“I’m going to go,” I said quietly, interrupting Mary and Tam’s attempts to convince me everything would be okay. “I’d like to be at home when Jane and Bingley get back. To see what can be salvaged out of this mess.” It wasn’t my heart, that was for sure.
Mary offered to order me a cab, but I declined. It had stopped raining, and I needed to clear my head.
“Okay. We’ll call later to see how you’re feeling, then.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told them. I would be; I’d survived worse. I had to be, for Dad. But even the years of misery he and I had battled together didn’t feel as significant as this hurt. This one, I wasn’t sure I would ever get over.
