AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ted Milligan. Technically Edward, but he goes by Ted.”
“And what does Ted do?”
“He’s in advertising. Milligan Concepts.”
Wylie nodded and raised his mug to me. “Well—tell Ted I appreciate the support.”
“I love your music too,” I said, all in a rush, like maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. Was it breaking some kind of unspoken social contract? Did this only work if we pretended that he wasn’t a gigantic megastar? “My dad played the Nighthawks all the time, so I just grew up on it. And I feel like I would have loved it even if I hadn’t been named for the song, but since I was, it just made it so much more special.…” I felt my face get hot and I looked down and concentrated on buttering a piece of toast.
“Well, I appreciate that. Darcy.” He smiled, then leaned forward. “If you want—I can tell you something. But only if you promise to only tell your dad, and nobody else.”
“I mean, I did sign that NDA,” I said, my voice faux serious. “Should we add an addendum?”
“I’ll call C.J.,” he said, matching my tone. “So.” He speared a forkful of eggs but didn’t eat them yet. “It’s about the song, and where the name Darcy came from.” He took a bite, then rested his fork across his plate. “If you’re sure you want to know. This is real privileged information here.”
“I do want to know.”
“Okay. But this is just between you and me. And Ted. Right?”
“He won’t say anything,” I said, meaning it. Partially because I wasn’t actually sure I was going to be able to tell my dad about any of this. I couldn’t go into part of it without going into all of it. But was I really going to be able to keep this from him? That I’d not only met Wylie Sanders—which, twelve hours ago, would have been miracle enough—but that I’d talked to him, and stayed in his guesthouse, and eaten his very good breakfast scramble?
Wylie nodded, took a sip of his coffee, and then a deep breath, like he was preparing himself. “So it was about this girl—this was after Paula and I split, but before I got together with Kenya. I wrote the song all about what I was feeling for her, and I wrote it with her name. But at the last minute, in the booth, I changed my mind. It didn’t seem fair to her—to say in a song what I hadn’t yet told her in person. To put it all under a giant microscope.”
“That makes sense.”
“So I’m in the studio, I have the song, but I need a new name. And Laura, the sound engineer, was reading while she waited for me to get my act together—Pride and Prejudice. And I looked at the book, and just like that, there it was—Darcy. We did three takes, and had it in the can.”
“So… it came from Mr. Darcy,” I said, feeling like I needed to clarify this. “As in… Fitzwilliam Darcy?” I was a huge fan of the book and movie adaptations, but it had literally never occurred to me that this was where my name was from.
Wylie laughed. “Yep. You don’t meet many Fitzwilliams these days.”
“Sure don’t.” I kept my voice light even though my head was spinning as I tried to synthesize this information. It turned out, in the end, that all the people who asked if I’d been named after an Austen character had actually been right. “Wow. That’s—not what I was expecting.”
Wylie’s brows drew together. “Should I not have told you?”
“No,” I said after a moment. “I’m glad I know.” As I said it, I realized it was true. How often do you get the origin of your name from the person responsible for it? And I did like the story behind it—that it had been created out of Wylie’s integrity, wanting to shield this woman from too much scrutiny. And that the song had been more than just a love song, like I’d always assumed—it was a message in a bottle, intended for one recipient.
And I couldn’t help liking that I was one of only a handful of people in the world who knew the truth about the song—and, in turn, my name. In the future, when people would inevitably ask me where my name came from, I would just tell them what I’d always told people—that it was from the song. But I would know the real story, from the only person who could have given it to me. “I feel like someone just told me who ‘You’re So Vain’ is about.”
Wylie laughed, shaking his head. “Your dad raised you right, that’s for sure.”
“He would very much appreciate you saying that.”
“Feel free to pass it along.”
I speared some eggs, then set my fork back down. “Wait, so what happened? With the girl who wasn’t Darcy?”
Wylie leaned back in his chair, holding his mug. “Nothing really ever happened. We had one night—one of those epic dates.” He smiled, and it was like I could sense that he was leaving this kitchen, this table, Nevada—and going to wherever this memory was located. “It was one of those dates that goes all day, and into the night, and you just have so much to say…”
“Um.” I rolled up the corners of my napkin and then flattened them down on the table. “Right.”
“But then…” The faraway smile that had been on Wylie’s face dimmed out. “I don’t know. It was almost like we couldn’t move on from it. Like we’d had this perfect moment, and we didn’t want to do anything to mess it up. Which is what I wrote the song about—the wonderful date, then followed by nothing.”
“Oh.” That was not how I’d expected the story to go, honestly. I sat with it for a moment. Wylie was staring down into his coffee cup, and in the light streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I could see the lines on his face. I somehow knew that he was no longer on that epic date with the girl, but back here, in the aftermath of what might have been.
“It’s always better to know,” he said after a moment. “You can’t keep something on the shelf just to look at it. Even if it’s not going to work—it’s better to find out.”
“Did she ever know? That ‘Darcy’ was about her?”
