Page 107 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Her aunt shook her head. "No, but I knew something was wrong. You never really reacted to your father's death. You were sad and quiet…but no real grief. I was worried about you. You’d been moody that Thanksgiving when you came home. Then you came back and just sleepwalked through your dad’s funeral. When you went back to school, you cut off regular contact, and then you supposedly went to work at a camp during that summer. I knew something else was going on. I could tell that was a lie."

"Why didn't you talk to me at some point in all that?"

"I tried at the funeral, and I called you later at Haverford. But Lizzy, you were always vague, evasive."

The beginning of years of vague and evasive,Lizzy thought.

"I gave you space. I knew you, Lizzy. You're capable, smart, and strong. But your relationship with your father…"

This had been on Lizzy's mind too. "What about it?"

"When you were young, you were blind to your father’s faults. You worshiped him. Later, I believe you began to notice the faultlines in his character, but that never kept you from remaining worshipful toward him. It was a habit, automatic by that point, and I don't think you realized how ingrained it was.

“Then he died. And you seemed at loose ends, not in some minor way but…existentially. And then, all of a sudden, you weren't.

"You were gone that summer, and then you came back and said you had a government job in D.C. but told us nothing very definite about it. I eventually did the math—the secretiveness, the travel, the faint but noticeable scars. It was the change in you that really clued me in?your omnipresent tiredness, your shadowed eyes, and your new habits. You scanned every room for exits. There was the generalized suspicion, the taut, almost painful alertness. Maybe I've read too many novels and seen too much TV, but 'spy' was the word that came to mind, although it took me a long time to believe it. It seemed incongruous…until I realized it wasn't."

It took Lizzy a moment to process all of that. Once she did, she knew Aunt Christine was right about it. All of it. She had been so caught up inside the events and changes that she had not understood how any of it looked from the outside.

"What do you mean, until it wasn't?"

Her aunt pursed her lips, thinking. "I don't know how to explain it well, but there was something about your dad—his way of seeing the world." She gestured with her hands, indicating her struggle for words. Aunt Christine was an educated woman, verbal, and not often at a loss. "Thomas wanted to be and often was an ironist. But too often, he couldn't sustain the energy for that. When he couldn't, his irony collapsed into cynicism. It's a common spiritual digression, psychological digression. A pilgrim's regress." She shrugged at her phrase with a wan smile. "Something like that happened to you when he died, a regression…at least that's how it seemed to me. You've seemed quietly desperate since he died, lost in mute unhappiness you didn't, wouldn't fight. You just accepted it."

Lizzy saw herself then as she had not seen herself at the time. What was that line of Kierkegaard's that she had read in college, the one line that was common knowledge, fodder for countless memes?Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.

Since joining the Company, the way she had been living forward was not a way she wanted to understand backward. So she’d avoided it. She never allowed herself the time, space, and rest required for a meaningful backward glance. She had kept increasing her forward speed, kept her foot on the gas to prevent slowing, stopping, to prevent backward understanding.

Until the Wickham mission.

Until Fitzwilliam.

Until he somehow helped her re-establish a relationship, a conversation, with herself. By inspiring her to look backward, he had opened a new path forward. Forward and not backward.

Until love.

Love slowed her, stopped her. Fitzwilliam…and his talk about checkers. Lizzy had turned herself into a sacrificial piece for Kellynch, a means to his ends. A bureaucrat without a bureaucratic conscience.

Her aunt waited for her to speak. And so Lizzy did.

My beginning was an end."My career in the Company started when I went back to Haverford after the funeral…"

She omitted classified details, but she related the story of Agent Bennet to her aunt all the way to Ned and Fanny, all the way to Casper Mountain, all the way toWives and Daughters,to the lines through “Ned” and “Fanny” that had been replaced by “Fitzwilliam” and “Elizabeth.”

Sitting in the shop surrounded by wedding gowns, they cried together.

It had grown dark outside while the two talked. Closing time.

They closed the shop, and Lizzy drove home in the windy dark. When she parked at her house, she noticed a car roll by slowly and then speed up before it pulled into a driveway farther down the street. She noticed it but did not worry about it, done with the years-long daily burden of paranoia.

As she got out of her car, it started to snow. She pulled her coat close to her in the blowing flakes and walked inside.

***

Thursday, November 26

Thanksgiving came. Aunt Christine and Uncle Hubert hosted Lizzy and her mother at their house along with some of the Gardiners' neighbors. If Fitzwilliam had been there, it would have been perfect, but he wasn't. She’d hoped for a text or a call or something—butnothing.

That evening, she did get a phone call…not from Fitzwilliam, but from Charlie and Jane. They had visited some of Charlie’s D.C. friends for Thanksgiving and had secreted themselves in a room of the house to call Lizzy. Charlie was the one on the phone, although Jane had taken it from him for a moment to say hello and give Lizzy her love.

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