Page 19 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

She opened her mouth to say so and discovered that speech, at least in her current condition, had chosen not to cooperate. Something tight and hot and entirely unreasonable had settled in her throat, as though it had taken up residence there without the courtesy of an invitation and was now refusing all attempts at eviction.

She pressed her lips together. She looked down at her hands. She breathed in, then out again, with the sort of careful discipline one acquired only after a very long acquaintance with things that did not go as planned.

She was not crying. She was absolutely, categorically, and under no circumstances going to cry. She had not done so in front of another living soul since she was twelve years old, and she was certainly not about to begin now, in her brother’s London sitting room, with a cup of coffee she had not even finished as witness to her dignity.

Unfortunately, her eyes seemed to have developed opinions of their own. They grew uncomfortably warm, traitorous things that they were, and then, quite without her permission or consent, two tears slipped down her cheeks as though they had been waiting for precisely this moment to make their escape.

“I needed you,” she said, and the words came out so small she barely recognized them as her own.

Still, there it was. The sound of it, thin and broken and entirely unlike the composed voice she had carefully cultivated for twenty-one years. She heard the crack at its center with a sort of distant horror, as though it belonged to someone standing just behind her rather than to herself.

“I needed you, Charles.”

He made a sound then, something low and pained, and she thought, rather absurdly, that it might have been her name. She could not be certain. Her vision had gone inconveniently soft at the edges, and her breathing, which had always been such a reliable companion, appeared to have taken the opportunity to abandon all sense of propriety.

“I needed you,” she said again, and this time it did not come out quietly at all.

It came out in pieces.

Something in her chest, which had been held together with nothing more than sheer force of will for rather longer than any sensible mechanism should be expected to endure, finally gave way. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, but it was a poor defense. The sound that escaped anyway was unflattering, and she was suddenly too tired to care.

“Every morning,” she heard someone say, though she could not quite locate the person doing the speaking. “Every single morning I woke up and I begged. In whatever manner a child can beg when there is no one to hear it. For someone to come. For anyone to notice what was happening in that house and– and to stop it.”

She still could not look at him right now. Looking at him felt impossible, like attempting to stand in the center of a storm and pretend one was unaffected by the wind. Instead, she looked at her hands. They were shaking, which she found irritating but not entirely surprising.

“And when she died–” she continued, and her voice wavered in a way she would have usually found unforgivable in anyone else. “Charles, when she died, I was so happy. I was ten years old, and I stood at her grave, and I was the happiest I had ever been in my life up until that point. I thought it was finally over. I thought I was finally free of her.”

She pressed her hands flat against her thighs, as though she might physically compel them into stillness if she simply exerted sufficient will, and felt them betray her anyway with a fine, persistent tremor.

“I was wrong,” she said very softly. It did not sound like much. It never did, she thought distantly, when one was admitting to something that had taken years to understand.

“Because it can never truly be over. She was gone, yes, but her voice remained. It was still there, inside me, every single day, and I could not make it stop. I could not outrun it, or argue with it, or correct it into silence. I simply had to live with it. Live with her still inside of me.”

She drew in a breath. It shuddered on the way in, as though it, too, had lost its confidence.

“I was punishing myself for existing. That is what I was doing. It is the only honest way I know to describe it. I had spent the first nine years of my life being told, in every possible manner a person can be told such a thing, that I was a burden. A mistake. A creature so thoroughly unworthy of occupying space in the world that the most acceptable course of action was to for me to not occupy it at all.”

Charles made a wounded noise at her last remark.

Her fingers tightened against her skirts.

“And when she was gone, I continued the work she had started.”

Somewhere across from her, her brother had gone very still. She could feel it rather than see it, that particular kind of silence that meant a person had been struck quite thoroughly speechless.

“I was twelve years old,” Caroline said, and her voice fractured neatly on the words. She did not try to repair it. There seemed little point. “I was twelve years old, and I was making myself smaller and smaller because some part of me had genuinely come to believe I deserved to disappear. That I owed it. That everything she had said to me every day of those nine years was simply the truth, and the only honest thing I could do was to act accordingly. To stop eating until I withered away just as she had.”

She made herself look up, though the instant she did so she rather wished she had continued to study anything else in the room, including the grain of the table or the unfortunate arrangement of the curtains.

Charles’s face had gone a most alarming shade, all colour drained away as though someone had opened a window inside him and let the life out. It did not comfort her. If anything, it only made matters worse, for grief, once it had landed in someone’s heart, tended to soon infect all those around them.

“I needed my brother then,” she said, more softly now, as though raising her voice might somehow make the past more solid and therefore more unbearable. “I needed my family. I was a child and I required someone to tell me that she was mistaken about me. That I was worthy. That I did deserve to be loved. That I was not ugly. That I deserved to liv-” She stopped then, because the sentence had become too sharp to hold without cutting herself on it.

She swallowed once, carefully, as though that might restore some order to the inside of her throat.

“We all know,” she said at last, her voice steadier by sheer force of will, “that if it had not been for Louisa, that would have been the end of me.”

For a moment, there was nothing further to say that did not feel dangerously close to breaking something that had, up until now, remained just barely intact.