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Sunday brought the Gardiners, as it often did, wrapped in wool and good cheer.

Their children tumbled into the shop ahead of them, boots leaving snowy smudges across the entry tiles. Elizabeth welcomed them all with practiced ease, smiling as she ushered the youngest toward the back room with a warm bun and a softly spoken reminder not to tip over the crate of tins again.

Mrs. Gardiner removed her gloves slowly, watching Elizabeth the entire time.

“Well,” she said, settling into her usual seat by the front window. “You look brighter than last week. There's a warmth about you today.”

“Perhaps it's the fire,” Elizabeth replied, pouring tea.

“Or perhaps it's a certain gentleman with storm-grey eyes who’s been haunting your corner table.”

Elizabeth handed her aunt a cup and gave no reply.

Mr. Gardiner, gentler in his inquiries, accepted his tea with a kind smile. “We met a friend of yours two days ago. Mr. Darcy.”

“Oh?” Elizabeth replied lightly, trying not to spill.

“He was at Hatchards,” her uncle said. “Very civil. Spoke quite highly of your establishment.”

Mrs. Gardiner sipped her tea, eyes sharp. “He looked… well. A touch restless, perhaps. The kind of man who has something on his mind.”

Elizabeth took her own seat and folded her hands in her lap.

“I believe he does.”

The Gardiners glanced at each other, then back at her.

“And what might that be?” her aunt asked gently.

Elizabeth hesitated, then reached into the drawer below the till. She withdrew the note Darcy had left and handed it across the table. Mrs. Gardiner read it slowly, then passed it to her husband.

“A quiet sort of confession,” he murmured after reading. “And no less sincere for its quiet.”

“Do you want him to return?” her aunt asked.

“I do.”

“And if he were to come with more than tea on his mind?”

Elizabeth looked down. Her fingers traced the rim of her cup.

“I don't know yet,” she admitted. “But… I don't dread it. Not anymore.”

Mrs. Gardiner reached across the table and took her hand.

“You need not be certain, Lizzy. You only need to be open. Sometimes the heart does not declare itself in thunder, but in the way it leans toward another in silence.”

Elizabeth gave a soft, wry smile. “You’re beginning to sound like the poetry Mr. Darcy brings me.”

“Well,” Mrs. Gardiner said, sitting back with her usual elegance, “perhaps he and I have both learned a thing or two in your presence.”

Meanwhile, across Town, at the Bingleys’ townhouse, Georgiana Darcy was doing her own share of inquiring.

She had watched her brother change these past weeks. Not in sudden, dramatic ways, but in the subtle shifts that spoke of hope: the softening of his voice, the quicker step when leaving the house, the way he read and re-read one particular book of verse.

Now, as she sat across from him in the drawing room, she could not help but ask.

“You go often to Gracechurch Street.”

“I do,” he replied, not looking up from his paper.

“To The Silver Spoon .”

He folded the paper carefully. “Yes.”

“And Miss Bennet?”

His gaze met hers.

“She is well. Independent. Stronger than even I remembered her to be.”

Georgiana watched him. “Do you hope for something, Fitzwilliam?”

He was silent for a long moment. Then:

“I hope only to be worthy of whatever she might allow.”

That evening, Elizabeth stayed behind after Sarah had gone, claiming a need to inventory the tea blends—but in truth, she simply wished to be alone with her thoughts.

She moved through the shop with a cloth in one hand and a pencil tucked behind her ear, ticking off jars and tins and weights of dried leaves.

But the rhythm was interrupted, again and again, by her memory returning to the letter in the drawer, to Darcy’s voice as he said her name, to Georgiana’s clear, admiring eyes.

To the quiet way he asked for nothing—only to be allowed to stay.

And the even quieter way she had begun to wish he would.

The bell above the door did not ring that night.

Darcy did not come.

She told herself it was just as well. Sundays were rarely his habit. Perhaps he had gone to see friends. Perhaps he needed rest.

Perhaps he, too, was afraid of hoping too much.

She turned the sign to Closed , drew the curtains against the snow, and lit the shop’s smaller lamp. The fire was low. The hush of the city after dark settled around her like a shawl.

She sat in the window seat and drew her knees up, the book of poetry Darcy had lent her resting on her lap.

She did not read it tonight.

She only held it.

Across the city, at a long, candlelit table in the Bingleys’ drawing room, Darcy listened politely as Caroline Bingley prattled on about the season’s entertainments. Her voice, as ever, had that polished tone of practiced indifference—too refined to be warm, too deliberate to be sincere.

“I do wonder,” she said, stirring her wine absently, “what keeps you in the City this long, Fitzwilliam. It’s unlike you. Are you not due back at Pemberley for estate business?”

Darcy offered her a bland smile. “There are things here I find… of value.”

“Indeed? Do tell.”

He said nothing more.

Across the table, Jane glanced at her husband with a knowing look. Bingley only shrugged, faintly amused.

After dinner, as they parted for the night, Georgiana slipped beside her brother and touched his arm.

“You should tell her, you know,” she said softly.

He looked at her. “Tell her what?”

“That she’s no longer someone you admire in silence.”

Darcy looked away, out the frost-laced window toward the direction of Gracechurch Street.

“Soon,” he said. “But gently. I would rather say one true thing well than many things too fast.”

The next day, the snow let up.

The clouds cleared into a pale, soft blue, and the air held that crisp stillness which made sounds travel farther and time feel briefly suspended.

Elizabeth arrived early to the shop.

She lit the fire. She arranged the chairs. She set the book he had lent her on the corner of his usual table, beside a clean napkin and a freshly polished spoon.

And then she opened the drawer beneath the till, pulled out a blank sheet of cream paper, dipped her pen into ink, and began to write:

Mr. Darcy,

If you are to return today—and I do hope you will—then allow me to ask one thing in turn…

She paused. Smiled.

Then continued writing.