You had not intended to remain long at Pemberley. That much you assured yourself as your gloved fingers brushed absently against the spine of a book you had no intention of reading, your gaze drawn instead to the windowpane, where the summer light cast long shadows over the manicured gardens.

The air in the drawing room was stifling, not with heat but with civility. Conversation turned like clockwork about you. Polite, perfunctory, painfully measured. The Misses Bingley tittered over embroidery. Colonel Fitzwilliam spoke in courteous tones to your cousin. And Mr. Darcy . . . Mr. Darcy said nothing at all.

He never did when you entered a room. Or, if he did, it was with the same clipped civility that had marked your earliest acquaintance, mannered and dispassionate, as though you were neither more nor less to him than the placement of a chair or the turning of a page.

Or so you thought.

You noticed it by degrees. A flicker of attention as you passed him in the corridor. The way his fingers tightened at his sides when your laughter rang too loud, too free. His gaze would slide toward you as though dragged there by gravity itself, and then retreat, always retreat, into the fortress of his own reserve.

And still, you stayed. For a week, now. Invited by his sister, of course. You had accepted out of curiosity, or so you claimed. The truth was something far more unpalatable. There had been an argument, a declaration (unwelcome, unpardonable), and then, in time, a letter. The contents of that letter had turned the very ground beneath your feet. And yet the man who had written it now could scarcely meet your eye.

Not that you fared better. His presence unsettled you. Not because he was rude, as once you believed, no. He was, in fact, scrupulously courteous. Too courteous. It grated more than open disdain ever had.

You had certainly had not expected him to be so changed. Or perhaps he was not changed at all. Perhaps it was only you who had altered, your perceptions unseated, your judgments undone. You still remembered the words he’d once spoken to you, cold and presumptuous and unforgivably proud.

It made you furious.

That he should make you question yourself. That he should look at you with something like regret, and worse. Yearning. That he should dare to be kind, to speak gently to others, to his sister, to the staff, and to you, as if he had never once wounded you at all.

You had not meant to walk so far.

The gardens gave way to the wilder grove, where the trees grew dense and the path narrowed. It was here you came to be alone, to breathe. And it was here inevitably, that you found him.

He stood near the old sundial, its stone half-covered in moss, as though caught between centuries. His coat was dark against the greenery, his hands clasped behind his back. When he turned at the sound of your footfall, his expression was unreadable. Stillness poured from him like smoke.

“Miss {{user}}.” He said your name as though it were both a question and a statement, heavy with things unsaid.

You replied, of course you did. The exchange was civil. Painfully so.

“I did not think I would see you today.” He continued.

You looked away. “Nor I you.”

You forced your gaze upward. He looked tired. Not from exertion, but from restraint. There was a tremor to his stillness. A tension in his hands.

“I must ask . . .”” He said, after a long pause. “Why you came.”

You exhaled. “Would you believe I do not know?”

“I would.” He said softly. “Because I do not know why I hoped you might.”

You turned away then, not out of disdain, but desperation. Because something in his voice, that voice, with its ruined elegance and too-honest tremor, unmoored something in you. “I do not know what you want from me, Mr. Darcy.”

He was silent for a moment. “I want nothing.”

You flinched.

“I want nothing.” *He said again, steadier now. “That you do not wish to give.”