see him happy. And that’s you, Lizzy.”
“Caro, I don’t think he will ever want to see me again after today.”
Caroline reached out and rubbed Elizabeth’s arm. “Of course he does. He loves you, and one little spat isn’t going to change that. Couldn’t you see it during ‘Feel Me’?”
Elizabeth nodded, her lips tightly pressed together, and Caroline took her into her arms and hugged her. “It’s okay, Lizzy. You go home, and take a couple of weeks to get your head together. Darcy will be waiting when you come back.”
Elizabeth blinked back her tears. “I will.”
Elizabeth walked to her sister, suddenly very tired. “Let’s go,” she told Jane. Jane nodded and found her eyes resting on Charles.
“Have Alex get the car, okay, Lizzy?” she told her as she stared at Charles.
Elizabeth nodded and stepped away, letting Jane have her needed privacy.
Jane signaled to Charles that he could come to her now. “Can I touch you?” he asked softly.
Jane shook her head no.
“What happened, Jane?”
Jane knew she owed him an explanation. “I realized some things this afternoon, that Slurry was hurting us all, and we needed to stop it. To pull away.”
Charles’s eyes revealed the pain he was feeling. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“I tried,” she said, her voice dropping to an intense whisper. “I tried to talk to you and all I got was ‘wait.’ And I waited, and what did I get? ‘It’s All a Joke’!” Jane stopped and visually struggled to regain her control.
“So you did hear that?”
Jane nodded, her eyes cast downward.
Charles pushed aside a surge of anger. “Jane, that was never about you. I don’t know how you could ever even think it was.”
“But I did!” she answered him, her voice full of wretchedness. “I did! I thought you were tired of me and I thought you wanted to break up with me. And frankly, now I don’t know what to think.”
Charles’s expression sobered. “My God, Jane, I love you!”
Jane looked like she had been struck. “Please. Don’t say that.”
“Jane?”
Jane took a deep breath. “I have to go.”
“But we need to talk.”
Jane shook her head. “Charles, I don’t trust you, so I don’t know what we have to talk about.” She turned and left the room, rushing so he wouldn’t see her tears.
The next morning, Jane took Elizabeth to the train station. Mechanically Elizabeth got a ticket and took the metro north to Grand Central Station. There she took a subway down to Greenwich Village.
As she rode, her mind traveled like a train on the same track. She remembered the events of yesterday, from waking up in Darcy’s arms, all the way to her talk with Caroline. She traveled the same route again and again, without finding any answers.
She was so deeply lost in her thoughts that she was only slightly surprised to find herself not at the lot where she had left her truck a lifetime ago but at Darcy’s building. She realized that her thoughts weren’t going to give her any peace, so she entered the building and asked the doorman to announce her.
The doorman was a kind man who had been in the Darcys’ employ since the late seventies. He recognized the young woman from her last visit. “I’m sorry, Miss Bennet. Mr. Darcy is away and won’t be returning for a few weeks.”
Elizabeth was shocked at the disappointment she felt. She thanked the man and left the building, feeling completely adrift. Numbly, she returned to her truck, paid the huge bill, and started her drive home.
Automatically, she turned her radio on. She smiled when she heard Jane’s voice singing to her.
With a deep breath, Elizabeth accepted that she was going down. She couldn’t avoid it. She didn’t know where he was and couldn’t contact him for at least two weeks.
Oh, she knew in an emergency she could reach him, through Caroline or something, but this was hardly an emergency.
No, she had to face her worst demon now: herself. She had two weeks to do what Caroline told her to do: pull herself together and figure out what she wanted. She laughed to herself. She didn’t need two weeks. All she needed was twenty minutes. She wanted him.
The song ended and the announcer came on. “That’s Long Bourne Suffering, who really stole the show at the MTV awards last night. And you can see LBS. They are touring with Slurry now and they have dates coming up at Madison Square Garden at the end of this month. I’ve got tickets for that show for caller number twelve…”
The words died away but not the impression. It was a surprise to Elizabeth to realize that she had reached one of her goals. Her band was being talked about on a major radio station. Somewhere, during the tour, she had become a hit. Oh, they still had a long way to go, but they had made it.
Elizabeth found the knowledge puzzling. She had dreamed of this for so long and she had expected that when she made it, she would feel different, be different. She looked in her rearview mirror at her reflection.
The face she found there was basically the same, but as she stared, she found tiny differences.
The other thing that surprised her was how little her success meant to her. She was surprised and certainly happy. But she certainly wasn’t fulfilled as she had always imagined she would be. Success had proven to be not a panacea but merely a job. She received satisfaction from her job well done, but that only went so far. She found that she still needed something. She needed Darcy.
He wasn’t perfect, that was for sure, but she needed to talk to him. She needed to find out what she felt for him, to figure out if he was right.
With a deep breath she realized her train of thought had finally stopped. She had the answer she needed. And now she needed to wait.
Chapter 15
On Thursday Mrs. Bennet answered the phone at her home. “Oh hello, dear. No, I haven’t asked them yet.”
Elizabeth and Jane exchanged a look. They were enjoying a quiet dinner with their parents. Both of them
