A/N: I'm sorry for the long hiatus! I needed to reflect on the sequel after some distance, since I'm hoping to publish FoTH. I reread the sequel this week, and I really enjoyed. I guess I'm bias. I decided to pick it up again.

"We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit." – Persuasion

i.

Darcy started awake, and hated herself for sleeping.

Eli's arm was slung over her. Darcy felt his warmth, his calm—sleep had tempered his grief, at least for the moment, but she was heavy in every limb.

Last night, a text from George—he'd be late, they shouldn't wait up. Small mercies. Mercy, needed, was no mercy at all.

She shrank away from Eli. Her eyes were still sore and stiff. She dressed, quick and quiet, and checked the time. Eli's alarm wasn't set to go off for another hour.

She left a note.

Dawn was breaking in waves of pearl and calm and cold when she drove away. Cold, in August. It didn't seem right.

Few things did.

Darcy tightened her grip around the steering wheel, tightened her jaw, and stared down the road as if it was something to be tamed.

She drove out along the Island. If she made good time, she could take the eight-thirty ferry. At seven-fifteen, she called in sick. At a quarter to eight, she was sobbing.

The note on their dresser said not to worry, she only needed a day. So far, he hadn't called or texted.

She was strangely, awfully grateful for that.

Darcy bit her lips and squinted under against the rising sun. Her chest was drawing tighter and tighter, as if a drawstring was threaded through her throat. The panic attacks that had plagued her leading up to the wedding—directly before the wedding—had all but gone away until now, yet Darcy spent the ferry ride struggling to breathe.

The water was silver, and the air was clean with salt spray. There were too many people on the ferry, too many voices. The foghorn, the lapping of waves—she imagined pressing herself into sounds and sights and lights, as though all of it would take her away.

They docked mid-morning. It was hot. It was August again. And this was the end of all things.

Every road was familiar. She'd gone to school in Greenwich, known the lay of its idylls—and she had left them behind a decade ago, when they dared to stay the same in the face of tragedy.

She hadn't returned here for the better part of a year. Eli had never known this place.

This place no longer could be known, except as a memory. Darcy crunched across gravel, instead of skimming silver waves, but the air was still clean.

She opened the door to the house.

When she was eleven, she broke her leg, falling from a horse. Eli had run his fingers across the scar, once, and asked her how she had come by it.

She'd said she was riding her bike.

Somehow, in the intervening sixteen years, she hadn't told a soul the whole story. How the pain had been blinding, how terrifying it had been, her leg twisted under her while Dolly galloped away.

And her father had found her there, carried her back, her head pressed against his shoulder. She had cried and cried, but he hadn't let her go.

She didn't remember much about the emergency room or the long weeks afterwards, reading stacks of books with a cast to her hip. She remembered her father's voice in her ear, and the smell of the fields in the summer.

What is it like, remembering your parents?

A quick rush of anger, followed by insurmountable emptiness.

What is like, losing a child?

"Miss Dorothy," said Clarence, meeting her in the hall. "Where have you been?"

"I've been busy," she said, stilted and thin. Clarence had worked for her father. Even left to itself, the Greenwich house needed a staff—a larger staff than Pemberley, because of the horses. Unlike Mrs. Turner, though, Clarence had never really warned to his former employer's children. They were just names on a list—albeit names at the top of the list.

"The house is in perfect order," he said, a little disapproving. And Darcy knew why. This was the family estate—hell, she managed it, if from afar, and she knew that she was shirking it in the spirit of the law. She had shied away from it like one of the wayward thoroughbreds.

She hadn't called it home, truly, since she'd left for law school.

"I'm here now, aren't I?" She wondered if it looked like she'd been crying. "I've come to look it over, Clarence." In a different hour, she might have added, isn't it my right?, but nothing belonged to her today.

Clarence faded grimly into the shadows and Darcy went upstairs.

Everything was kept just as it should be.

Here was her old room—George's old room—the corridors, the piano room, her parents' room—

Darcy covered her eyes with her hand, dragged it down her face like a weight.

Anger, and a rush of something else—

She found her mother's room.

The long mirror made her look taller than she was. It always had. She was never so grown-up as she was in front of that mirror, and never so infinitely trapped in the past. This Darcy did not know herself.

The place didn't smell like Mom anymore. It was just pictures and fragments and—

I'm so sorry, the doctor was saying, in her head. Maybe he'd be saying it forever. Your baby doesn't have a heartbeat.

Fifteen, and she screamed at the blank faces to show her the bodies.

The baby is dead, she had said in return, and the doctor's face hadn't even moved, except for a shift behind his eyes that always, always mean that people were sorry because there was nothing they could do. You can say it.

Fifteen, and the man in front of her is saying, with that same terrible shift in his eyes, There were no remains.

Darcy turned from the mirror. She faced the cedar chest under the window.

"I lost her," she said. She had decided—known—in that instant that the baby had been a girl. "I lost her. And you. And Dad. And George, when it counted."

Downstairs, she turned abruptly to Clarence as she stood by the front door. Clarence, who had held her absence against her, was now waiting for her to leave. "Clarence," she said, "I'm going to sell this place."

"Miss Dorothy—" He shouted it out, an indignant puff of air. He had never shouted at her before.

She raised a hand. "Please don't try to argue," she said. "This isn't my home any more, and it's wasteful to leave it here, unused. I don't know quite when I will sell it, but I am selling it. Our lawyers will be in touch." Because yes, of course, the Williams retained their own lawyers.

Clarence did not move, did not speak again. He might have been a ghost, for all she knew. It was a lonely place now, and it did not belong to the living—not to her living, anyway.

To the front of the house, she said nothing. To the expansive gardens, the rolling, impersonal greenness, she whispered her goodbyes.

It could only be home to children.

ii.

He couldn't call in sick on his second day of work.

Eli slipped a noose around that thought and pulled it tight. He kept it there through a mechanically eaten breakfast and a grueling drive. Every time something else attempted to worm its way in, he tugged at the metaphorical knot until nothing else could fit.

But all such exercises could not last forever; in his pocket, Darcy's note was folded into a small square, relentless and remembered.

I need a day.

A day for what? To grieve—alone?

He shouldn't begrudge her the space. He shouldn't begrudge her anything. After all, he hadn't even been there when the news had come.

Today—the first day, after, he had one class. A second section—and thus, it was Ulysses, again.

I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.

Pain is far.

See: this was the cruel thing about life. It kept going. On and on, and you could break down or you could try to take time away or you could do any number of blind, stumbling parries against its onslaught, for all the good it did you.

Eli chose to do what did not come naturally to most of his family, but which did, after all, come to him—by nature or by grief.

Which was to say—he faked it.

And afterwards, he stared at himself in the men's room mirror for a long time.

He hadn't texted her. Hadn't called her. Had taken her note and folded it into that tight, sharp-corned square, and vowed not to hurt her by his clumsy efforts at comfort.

James. You could talk to James.

But he clawed at that suggestion, throwing it aside. James only knew the good; he couldn't tear it all down. Telling James—telling George, oh, God, telling George—would make it real.

You weren't even ready for a kid, you idiot. You were too scared to tell her, but it's true.

He picked up his phone on the way out to the parking lot. He dialed the number, not letting himself think twice about it.

"Elijah?"

"Hey, Mom."

"What's the matter?"

He blew out his breath. This was a terrible idea, and he knew it was, but he wasn't hanging up the phone. "I should be asking you the same thing, huh?" It was three-thirty. He'd prepped for tomorrow. His desk was neat as a pin. Painfully neat.

Pain is far.

"Do you really want me to follow your father to another godforsaken dump to live out the rest of my days in the same kind of filth I've had to put up with all this time?"

"No. But—"

"You're all moved out. He's leaving. Do I have to stay, Elijah? Do I have to stay with him, still?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, blinked out a few tears, and shook his head, staring up at the sky. It was staunchly, wearily blue. Late afternoon; he needed to get going. Needed to get in his car and drive. "Of course not. I didn't mean…" Dad was upset, but of course Dad was upset. Eli didn't give a damn about that. Couldn't, at the moment. Pain is far.

"Why don't you tell me what's going on with you?"

Don't tell her. It's not worth it. It's not—but if being her favorite worth something, shouldn't he make it count? "Darcy…was pregnant."

"Was?"

"We lost the baby." It was easier to say than to live.

He heard her sigh. He clenched his fingers around the phone and bit his lip and squeezed his eyes shut again. God, he needed to work all of this out of his system. He couldn't go home like this.

Home.

I needed a day.

Mom didn't say anything for a long time. Then—"Oh, son. Oh, Eli." For once, there wasn't a trace of bitterness in Mom's tone, only sympathy. "I'm so sorry. Oh, this shouldn't happen to you."

"Well, it did." The words spoke themselves; he barely seemed to have any control over them. "Darcy's taking it harder, though. I don't know—I just—it was only yesterday, but it feels like forever. Is it supposed to be this bad? Is it—"

Mom said, "There's no rule. Grief just is. OK? There's no rule."

"OK." His voice was shaking. Damn, his voice was shaking. "I…I don't even know where she is."

"Darcy?" The faintest edge entered Mom's voice again. "You don't know where Darcy is?"

He shouldn't have said it. He screwed up. "She just said she needed to take a day. That's all."

"Hmm. Well, if I wasn't a goddamn cripple," said Mom, very softly, "I'd drive down there. I wouldn't leave you alone." The emphasis on the I was barely present, but he felt it.

All he wanted to do was lean into her voice, but he couldn't, he had to defend Darcy. "It's not like that. She just—she's really cut up about it, Mom. You should have seen her yesterday—" Except nobody should have seen that, nobody but it him. Those moments belonged to them, and them alone.

Mom sighed again. "Darling, you know my twisted heart only has room to worry about you right now. I wish I was there. I wish you were here. I'm so, so, sorry."

"Thanks, Mom." He swallowed. He was a lowly adjunct; tearing up in the parking lot wouldn't exactly win him any newbie awards. "Got to go. But thanks."

He thought he'd find the apartment empty. But Darcy was in the living room, cross-legged on the couch, with her phone in her lap.

"Hey," she said. She looked exhausted, but he didn't think she'd been recently crying.

(He loved her.)

(It wasn't always enough.)

"Hey," he said. There wasn't any way to start the next conversations in their life that felt right, so he figured he should just start somewhere. "Where's George?"

"Not here. He left about an hour ago."

Slowly, Eli said, "You told him?"

Darcy shook her head. "I didn't have to. He just knew. I look like hell. It makes sense."

"Where did he go?"

"He asked if he needed to stay. I told him—I told him it might be better if he stayed with Fitz this week."

Eli nodded, and sat down on the couch beside her. He'd forgotten to take off his shoes; it was one of Darcy's particularities. He hunched over to untie his shoelaces. In a moment, he felt her hand on his shoulder.

"I'm not OK," she said.

Eli let out a laugh, only it wasn't really a laugh. It was more of a sob, but there was no one else to hear it but Darcy. "Yeah, I know."

"I feel like it's my fault."

He turned his head sharply, facing her. "It's not."

Her eyes stayed on him for a long, grave moment. "Yeah, I know. Except knowing doesn't matter. It never has, for me. Not when—the worst happens."

He reached for her hand, ran his thumb over her knuckles, tried to bring some warmth to her always-chilly fingers. "So what does that mean?"

She tilted her head, letting her hair slip over her shoulder. Her eyes brimmed, but her voice was steady. "It means, I just want you to sit here with me, and hold me, and just…stay."

And that, at least, he could do.