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Then she gets out of bed, and pads across the cold floor in her bare feet, and pulls the other chair up beside mine.

"Then I shall sit with you," she says. "And you shall read it to me as you go. And if you leave anything out, I shall know."

***

It takes until dawn.

I begin with his proposal, because he began with mine.

"You said my family was beneath you," I read aloud to Jane, very low. "You said that my mother's conduct and my younger sisters' were a degradation. I was angry. I told you so at great length. I want you to know now why I was so angry. It was not because you were wrong. It was because you were right, and I had known it all my life, and I could not bear to hear it from you."

Jane draws in a breath. "Lizzy. Mama would—"

"Mama will never read it. And it is true." I keep my eyes on the page. "Is it not?"

Jane says nothing for a long moment. Then she says, very softly, "Yes. It is true."

I write on.

"You said you rejoiced in separating Mr. Bingley from my sister. I thought then that you were the cruelest man alive. I have since watched you write one sheet of paper to undo it, of your own accord, without a word from me, because I told you she walked out before dawn to cry. You did in a morning what I had been too proud to ask of you. I have never thanked you for it. I thank you now."

Jane's hand comes into mine on the desk, and holds on.

"I accused you of ruining Mr. Wickham. I repeated his lies in my father's house and at my aunt's table and to your face. I believed him because he was charming and you were not, and because he flattered me and you had called me tolerable. That is the whole of it. I have no better excuse. There is none."

"Lizzy," Jane whispers, "you are being very hard on yourself."

"He was very hard on himself. In his. He did not spare one word." I dip the pen. "Neither shall I."

Then I come to the part I have been dreading.

My own words. Had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner. Your arrogance, your conceit, your selfish disdain of the feelings of others. The last man in the world.

I write them all down. Every one, as near as I can remember them. And I find that I remember them very well indeed. I have heard them in my head every night since Hunsford, and every night for four nights now, in his voice instead of mine, flat and cold in a dark garden.

Under each one I write what it was worth.

"I told you I had known you a month before I knew you were the last man in the world I could marry. I had not known you a month. I had not known you at all. I had known a man standing against a wall at an assembly, and I hated him because he had hurt my pride. I said the last man in the world because it was the cruelest thing I could think of, and I wanted to be cruel."

I stop. My hand is shaking.

"It was the only lie I told you at Hunsford," I write. "Everything I said to you afterward was a kind of truth, though I told it badly."

***

The last part is the hardest.

The sky is going gray over the shrubbery. The candle has burned down to a stub. Jane has fallen half asleep against my shoulder, still holding my hand.

You pitied me, he said. You played along with a madman because you felt guilty.

"You said in the garden that I pitied you," I write. "I did not. I pitied myself. I sat by your bed and was sorry for myself, because I had thought myself so clever, and I had been so blind. The first morning I was guilty. I will not pretend otherwise. I did not tell you the truth because a frightened apothecary begged me not to, and because I was afraid of what it would do to you. That much was guilt.

But I did not walk with you under the limes for guilt. I did not let you tell me about your mother for guilt. I did not put my hand in your hair in the carriage for guilt, nor stand on Oakham Mount and say yes for guilt.

You said you have no means of knowing which of the things I say are true. I understand. I took that from you. I cannot give it back by saying so. I can only tell you what I know, and leave you to judge.

The proposal I gave you at your bedside, the one I invented, was the proposal I wished you had made. Every word of it. I sat in your aunt's bedchamber with your hand in mine and gave you the words I wanted to hear, because I could not bear to give you the ones you had really said. And then, day by day, you said them anyway. Not those words. But you said them. You have been saying them ever since, in everything you did. I made up a man who would rather be laughed at by me than admired by the whole world. And then I found out he was real."