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"Was it not? You did not have to watch it." He turns his head away from me, toward the house. "I did. I have been watching it for a quarter of an hour. Every walk at Rosings. Every word I said to you about my mother. About my sister. About Pemberley." A pause. "About the trout. Good God. And you walked beside me and nodded and said go on, and the whole time you were thinking poor man, he does not know."

"I was not thinking that."

"What were you thinking, then?"

"That I loved you!"

It comes out of me too loud. It rings off the garden wall. Somewhere in the shrubbery a bird starts up out of the laurels with a clatter of wings.

He goes very still.

"That I loved you," I say again, more quietly. "Not at first. Not that first morning. But on the walks, at Rosings. Under the limes, when you told me about your mother. When you sent Mr. Bingley back to Jane, all by yourself. When you laughed for the first time. I have been in love with you for weeks, Fitzwilliam. I did not mean to be. I did not want to be. I tried so hard not to be, because I knew it would come to this." I am crying now. I do not try to stop it. "I kissed you on Oakham Mount because I wanted to. Not because I pitied you. Because I wanted to more than I have ever wanted anything. And I have been so afraid, every single day, of this. Of you remembering. Of you looking at me the way you are looking at me now."

I step toward him across the gravel.

And I take his hand.

I do not think about it. My hand simply goes out and finds his in the dark, the way it has found it a hundred times since Kent. Under Charlotte's breakfast table. On the walk down from Oakham Mount, gloves off. In the carriage, in his hair. His hand is cold. Colder than mine. I hold it in both of mine and lift it, the way I did that morning at Rosings, when he showed me his letter to Bingley, and I press the back of it against my wet cheek.

"I love you," I say into his knuckles. "That is the truth. That is the only true thing I have left to give you. Please."

For a moment, he does not move.

For one moment, his hand stays where it is, against my cheek, and I feel his fingers tighten very slightly on mine. As though some part of him, buried somewhere under all that cold, still remembers how to hold on.

Then he lets go.

He does not snatch his hand away. That would have been better. He does it slowly. Deliberately. He turns his wrist, very gently, and draws his fingers out of mine one by one, the way one might take one's hand out of a child's sleeping grasp so as not to wake it. And then his hand is gone, and there is only the cold air against my cheek where it was, and my own two hands closed on nothing.

Nothing he has said has hurt like that.

Nothing anyone has ever said to me, in my whole life, has hurt like that.

"You would say anything now," he says quietly.

"Fitzwilliam—"

"You have been saying things for six weeks. Beautiful things. You are very good at it. You made me a proposal out of thin air that was better than the one I made you, and I wept to hear it." His voice does not shake. "I have no means of knowing, Miss Bennet, which of the things you say are true. You have taken that from me. I do not think I shall ever have it back."

Miss Bennet.

Not Elizabeth. He has called me Miss Bennet before company a hundred times since Rosings, and always with my name hiding just behind it. Not now. Now it is the name he would give a stranger.

I stand there with my empty hands, and cannot speak.

He looks at me a moment longer. Then he holds out his hand, palm up, not toward me but a little way off, as one holds out a hand for a hat.

It takes me a long moment to understand what he wants.

His coat.

I take it off my shoulders. My fingers are clumsy. I hold it out, and he takes it from me by the collar, very carefully, so that our fingers do not touch, and puts it on, and does up the buttons one by one. His hands are perfectly steady.

There is something in the buttonhole. Dried and brown and crumpled, hanging by a pin. I see it in the light from the window as he settles the lapel.

The forget-me-nots.

He has worn them every day since Oakham Mount. I did not know.