Lizzie was sure that talking to Lydia was the answer. Getting home and talking to Lydia with reason and compassion, some logos laced with pathos, was the fastest way to right her own wrongs. To amend for being so disconnected from everything going on in her sister's life.

Her anxiety from Pemberley to here was about getting in touch with Lydia, the rest would follow easily.

Which all goes to say – Lydia's reaction was a surprise.

Lizzie barely had time to blink before Lydia fled the room and raced up the stairs, her door slamming shut as if this were another one of her and Lizzie's bickering matches. The reality was this was so much bigger than the two of them.

Lizzie's anxiety heightened. The urgency was still there, but her outlet was gone. Getting to Lydia was no longer point B of her plan. Point B was now a nebulous concept that floated just outside Lizzie's grasp. The den felt simultaneously cavernous and smothering. It was like being buried alive, but with too much space.

For the next thirty minutes Lizzie paced between her room to Lydia's, pressing her ear to the closed door to make sure she could still hear her soft, hollow sobs. All the while she refreshed her phone's browser with the naïve hope that this was all a prank or a dream or a weird glitch in the space between internet and reality.

After all, there was a difference between the two. Right?

What Lizzie wouldn't give to have Jane home. This wasn't her wheelhouse, her forte or anything thing close to her expertise. She was the analytical one. She was the one who maybe spent more time judging a situation from afar than actually participating in it. The point was, she wasn't the one who could comfort Lydia best – even though she was the one with the most responsibility to do so.

Pacing and refreshing weren't enough. Lizzie went back into her room and booted up her laptop, tapping her leg impatiently as the screen loaded.

There was only one thing she was good for in situations like these. Research, information, facts and data were well within her wheelhouse. She was just weeks away from holding a degree that told the world she excelled at it. Research was her defense against her mom's relationship diatribes and she never failed to pull out a well-researched fact when arguing with Darcy. She only hoped that information could be as strong an offense as a defense.

The site was even more repulsive on a laptop screen. Something about the low-budget, 1999 level HTML made the entire thing that much more offensive. The textured graphics, the glittering text, the tiled background. These weren't details that mattered, but they managed to enrage Lizzie even more. How quickly the site had been slapped together by scheming assholes without a bit of thought for a young woman they cared nothing about, let alone her lack of consent to the transaction. She was a name on the register. After all, sex sells.

The countdown clock sent her mind racing. Time was ticking. She had to start moving.

Lizzie swallowed her anger enough to research Novelty Exposures. It was a Van Nuys based company, no surprise there. She had grown up hearing jokes about the San "Pornando" Valley. It was one of those things kids learned about in middle school and couldn't let go of. It had always felt like an urban legend, but now? Now it was her reality.

She tried to look up the domain owner, but the address belonged to a parent company in New York. Her skin crawled as she imagined someone signing off on the domain name, not even batting an eye as they signed a check to one George Wickham. Her stomach churned and her throat tightened.

Unfortunately the amateur website design didn't extend to the company's ability to hide their asses. Clearly they spent their money on lawyers and not content creation because Lizzie couldn't find any actual way to contact the company.

She went back to the website. The numbers continued to fall, the image of Wickham and Lydia wrapped around one another made her physically sick. Time was still ticking.

There was internet silence on Wickham's end. Nothing about the tape, nothing posted by George period. Lizzie could barely read the replies between him and Lydia just a couple days earlier. She couldn't last more than a minute on their video in Vegas. Facebook was a wasteland.

Facebook did reveal one thing: News travels fast on the internet.

Lizzie's inbox was full of Facebook messages from "well-meaning" high school "friends" who always knew this might happen with Lydia. They wanted Lizzie to know that they were there for her even though her sister had humiliated the family and ruined her life forever.

Lizzie was halfway through decimating her social network when she finally deactivated her profile and slammed her laptop shut.

Shit.

That had accomplished nothing. If anything it made it clear just how out of control the situation had become. George had taken advantage of Lydia and knew well enough to cover his tracks. There was nothing Lizzie could do and yet here she locked up in her own room on the internet while her sister cried across the hall.

Lizzie stared at her closed laptop, the power light blinking on and off mockingly.

She shoved it under her bed and went down into the kitchen. A few minutes later she at Lydia's door holding the mug that Lydia had painted for Lizzie's 10th birthday. It was covered in so many splotches of colors that some areas had bled together in the kiln and turned brown.

Lizzie knocked softly at the door, knowing full well Lydia wasn't ready to answer. She lowered her to the ground, careful to keep the tea from spilling. Lydia might not be ready, but that wasn't the point. Lizzie would be there when she was ready.

She would have tea. She would be a sister. That's what she should have been doing all along.