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Chapter Text

Lizzy Bennet is three years old the first time she hears her mother curse.

Kitty is crying again. Her sister has only been home for a few days, but the entire household has had more than enough time to get to know this new addition to the family.

Janey is still sound asleep next to her, totally unaware of the noise. But Lizzy can’t sleep no matter how hard she concentrates on the ceiling or presses her pillow to her ears.

She considers getting out of bed to go close the bedroom door, but Mommy had told her never to do that because the handle sometimes gets stuck, and she doesn’t want her and Janey to be trapped in the room if that ever happens. Plus, Papa had tucked her in so carefully that if she gets up, the sheets won’t protect her from the monsters under the bed anymore.

In the next room, the baby’s cries have woken up Mary, who joins in with her own wails.

Lizzy hears her parents’ door open, and the floorboards squeak as someone walks down the hall.

Then she hears Mommy mutter, “I hate the fucking baby.”

Her favorite stuffed bunny is in Mary’s crib.

Janey would say that it’s not the end of the world, that there are plenty of other things that are actually worth worrying about. But Jane is six and in school, and what’s important to her is that the boys in class all think she is pretty. She’s too old to play with stuffed animals like her sisters.

But to his four-year-old owner, Hopper the Rabbit is the bestest friend in the world and the trusty sidekick to her alter-ego, Super-Lizzy, and she’s already explained to Mary that she can’t have him. Too bad for Lizzy, though, that Mary only knows how to say Me want and No. And now Hopper has been kidnapped and drooled on by the Evil Superbaby.

Mommy doesn’t think it’s a big deal, though. Mary wanted to play with the rabbit, so she gave Mary the stupid rabbit. It doesn’t matter that Hopper belongs to Lizzy and Lizzy said no.

When Lizzy complains that it’s not fair, Mommy snaps, “If I had to buy a new toy for every one of you girls, we wouldn’t have enough money to buy you new clothes, or keep this roof over your heads, or pay for gas and food. Do you have any idea how much money it takes to raise four daughters? God, Elizabeth, can’t you have some compassion for your mother, for once? Why do you have to be so selfish?”

…Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to complain to Mommy about the stuffed bunny right after she had just been yelling at Papa about buying Lizzy a new bubble wand when they have to worry about paying the mor-gage or the car in-shore-ins.

After she finishes yelling at Lizzy, Mommy starts yelling at Papa again. The kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes from lunch, and now she can’t make dinner because he didn’t wash the dishes.  Papa says that he shouldn’t have to do the dishes because he was at work, and the person who made the mess should clean it up.

Janey decides to drag a stool over to the sink and wash the dishes herself, or nobody is going to eat tonight.

Mommy praises Janey for being such a good and understanding girl, unlike Lizzy. What a great help she will be with her little sisters, Mommy adds, patting her belly. Lydia will have a great role model in Janey when she joins their family.

From across the living room, Papa says, “Lizzy is a natural leader who won’t let anyone push her around. But go ahead and make sure you explain to Jane where babies come from, so she can grow up to be the perfect little housewife slaving away barefoot in her husband’s kitchen.”

On her first day of kindergarten, Lizzy steals the toy truck that Johnny Lucas had been playing with.

Johnny tells the teacher, and Mrs. Watson scolds Lizzy for not asking first. But she protests that her mommy does that all the time. She always gives her toys to her sisters Mary and Kitty without asking. And why should she apologize to Johnny if she didn’t do anything wrong?

 When Mommy comes to pick her and Janey up from school, Mrs. Watson asks to speak with her and Johnny’s mommy. Mommy doesn’t yell or scream when she’s told that Lizzy misbehaved at school, but she also doesn’t defend Lizzy against how unfairly Mrs. Watson treated her.

As soon as they get home, though, Mommy turns on Lizzy.

“You stupid, selfish girl! How dare you say I’m the one who taught you not to share your toys? How dare you make me look like a bad mother in front of your teacher?”

Lizzy learns that her mommy operates by different rules than other grown-ups.

Maybe she won’t get yelled at so much if she follows Mommy’s rules at home and the teacher’s rules at school.

To apologize for Lizzy’s rudeness towards Johnny Lucas, Mommy decides to take Mrs. Lucas out to dinner. Papa is working late, though, and Aunt Maddy and Uncle Edward are too busy to watch Lizzy and her sisters, so Mommy leaves Janey in charge.

Before she leaves, she tells Lizzy and Janey to not answer the door if anyone knocks and not answer the phone if anyone calls—not until Papa comes home from work. Or else the police will come and take them away from home and put them in a jail for bad little girls.

So Janey and Mary watch Teletubbies on TV while Lizzy rummages through the scrap paper bin in Papa’s office for something suitable to draw on.  Kitty, for once, is quietly taking a nap in her crib, and Lydia claps happily and makes gurgling sounds while seated on the sofa between Lizzy and Janey.

Lizzy accidentally staples her hand with Papa’s heavy stapler, so Janey gets up to put a Band-Aid on it. But while Janey is distracted, Lydia crawls too close to the edge of the sofa and falls onto the carpet below.

Mommy comes home to find a crying baby with a bump on her forehead, and Janey has to confess what happened.

Both she and Lizzy are punished with no TV for a week—Janey for not watching Lydia, and Lizzy for distracting her sister with her bleeding hand when she shouldn’t have been anywhere near the stapler.

Papa just laughs and says Mommy should never have left a seven-year-old in charge of four even younger girls. With Mommy for a mom, it’s not like Lydia can get any dumber, so there’s no harm done.

Lizzy isn’t sure what he means by that until she notices Lydia trying to eat the bar of soap while Mommy’s trying to give her a bath.

The incident with Lydia falling off the sofa doesn’t stop Mom from trying to leave the girls home alone again, though.

This time her reasoning is that Jane is 8 now, and Lizzy is 6, so the two of them should have a handle on things.

She’s still out shopping when Papa gets home from work to find five very hungry little girls who haven’t had dinner.

Lizzy has never seen Papa cook before, and Papa says he’s not very good at it. But between the two of them, they figure that they should beat an entire carton of twelve eggs because they’re all so hungry.

Papa ends up serving half-burned, half-runny scrambled eggs with way too much salt and pepper. The outsides of the smiley fries are scorched black, and the insides are still cold. They also leave a cooking pot on the stove too long and ruin it, and the smoke alarm goes off, which makes Kitty and Lydia squeal with delight from their playpen.

They eventually give up on the eggs and fries, which are inedible, and Papa gives everyone Cinnamon Toast Crunch with milk.

Mom is not happy with Papa, though, when she comes home.

“What? I told you, I only gave them cereal because the dinner I cooked didn’t work out—”

“Scrambled eggs and frozen fries are not a nutritious meal, Tom!”

Mom decides Jane is old enough to learn how to cook.

Pretty soon, Jane is the one who makes dinner for the family, while Mom lazes about on the sofa even when she is home in the evenings.

At least Papa actually tried, Lizzy thinks as she helps Jane peel the potatoes.

Lizzy gets in trouble again at school.

This time, Mary is in trouble too, and both Lizzy’s and Mary’s teachers want to talk to Mom.

Lizzy doesn’t understand what they did wrong. She and Mary have gotten hit plenty of times when Mom is angry with them, and Paige and Jenny Goulding had no right to call Mary ugly when they were playing at recess, so Paige deserved it when Lizzy pulled her hair and Jenny deserved it when Mary punched her in the face.

Mom just keeps telling the teachers, “I have no idea where they learned this behavior. I swear we don’t act like this at home.”

In front of the teachers, she tells Lizzy and Mary they should just tell a teacher the next time a student says mean things to them or their sisters.

But when they get home, she changes her tune to, “Why can’t you only learn good habits from me instead of the bad ones? Why do you both keep making me look like a bad mother?”

Then she turns on Jane, who’s sitting at the kitchen table quietly doing her homework. “And you, young lady. Don’t think I don’t have anything to say about your behavior, pretending you’ve been so awfully good when you can’t even set a good enough example for your sisters!”

All three of them get grounded.

Lizzy doesn’t think it’s very fair that Jane got punished, since she wasn’t even there at recess (the girls in her year have recently decided that they should stay inside and read chapter books because they’re too old to play in the schoolyard like babies).

Mom grounds Lizzy for an extra week for “talking back” and “questioning her authority.”

Papa takes them out for ice cream anyway.

Lizzy has decided that she really, really doesn’t like summer vacation.

School is fun. School is where her friends are. School is where the teachers let her read all the books she wants as long as she gets her homework done.

At home, she has to spend three months listening to Mary and Kitty and Lydia squabble while Mom forces her and Jane to learn how to cook and clean and do laundry.

Mom takes her shopping once, but they don’t go to the toy store or the candy store or anywhere fun. She takes her instead to Uncle Edward’s grocery store to help stock shelves and pick up canned beans for the family.

They have to take the bus home because Papa needed the car. The bus is very crowded because lots of people are going home from work at this time. Mom finds the last open seat on the bus and sits down, so Lizzy has to stand squished between a tall man who smells like cigarette smoke and an old lady with a cane who spends the entire ride glaring at Lizzy’s mom for some reason.

As people get off the bus, Mom motions for Lizzy to join her now that the seats are opening up, but Lizzy prefers to stand and look out the windows. She can watch the trees and the streetlamps whizz by and pretend she’s Super-Lizzy flying through the streets of Meryton—

The bus lurches as it starts up again, and to keep from falling over, Lizzy reaches out to grab the metal bar in front of her mother’s seat, accidentally pulling Mom’s hair in the process.

Her mother yelps in pain and shoots her a venomous glare, then refuses to look at her for the rest of the bus ride.

When they get home, though, Mom calls her a cruel and meanspirited girl. She doesn’t care that Lizzy was going to fall if she didn’t grab the bar. She doesn’t care that Lizzy says it was an accident. Lizzy was the one who had pulled Paige Goulding’s hair, after all, so she must have done it on purpose.

When Lizzy is 8, a new kid joins their school.

His name is Billy Collins, and the girls in Lizzy’s class immediately don’t like him because he farts and burps too much, and the boys don’t like him because he doesn’t like sports and he uses the big words in chapter books to sound smarter than everybody else even though everything he says is dumb.

But he’s nice to Mary, who doesn’t have many friends in her class either because she also likes to look for big words in her older sisters’ books, even though they’re too advanced for a 6-year-old. He lets Mary play on his Gameboy, and she doesn’t mind helping him dig in the dirt for worms during recess.

Mom invites Billy and his mom over to visit one weekend. Lizzy and Jane plan to say a polite hello to Mrs. Collins and then hide in their room while Billy plays with Mary.

But when their guests arrive, Mom immediately steers Billy into Lizzy and Jane’s room. “Oh no, Billy dear, you don’t want to play with Mary. She’s dreadfully boring and too young. These are Lizzy and Jane, Mary’s older and much prettier sisters.”

When their guests finally leave, Lizzy overhears Billy telling his mom that he’s going to marry Jane or Lizzy as the door closes behind them. Jane denies hearing anything of the sort, but she was busy trying to comfort a crying Mary.

And when Mom has to attend a very important dinner party the next weekend but can’t find her left shoe and so has to go wearing a very ugly pair of flats, neither Mary nor Lizzy offer any explanation for how the missing shoe eventually turns up under the sofa.

One of the many “housewifely” arts that Mom makes Jane and Lizzy learn is dancing. Every Wednesday afternoon, Mrs. Jones picks them up along with several other girls after school and drives them to her dance studio, and then drives each little girl home after class.

Wednesday afternoons are also when Mrs. Long from up the street is free to give Mary piano lessons.

Mom often reminds Mary that “it is a pity you are not as pretty as Jane or even Lizzy, or I would have signed you up for ballet, too. But at least lessons with Mrs. Long are cheap.”

On this particular Wednesday, Lizzy and Jane get dropped off at home after dance class to find Mom hitting and yelling at a crying Mary.

Apparently, Mary had finished her lesson and walked home to find the house empty. Mom had gone out shopping, and Papa was at work, and Lizzy and Jane were still at dance class, and Kitty and Lydia were still at the babysitter’s. At a loss as to what to do, Mary had wandered back up the street to Mrs. Long’s to borrow her phone, but the only phone number she had memorized was Papa’s office number. Papa had then called Mom’s cell phone in a rage and ordered her to go home.

“How dare you make me look like a bad mother,” Mom is still screaming at Mary. “Do you know what Mrs. Long could have done? She could have called the authorities! And do you know what happens to little girls who get their mommies in trouble with the authorities? They get taken out of the house by the police, and they and their sisters can never go home!”

Lizzy is 9 the first time she talks back at Mom instead of muttering what she’d like to say under her breath after she’s been sent to her room.

She’s still mad at Mom for the stunt she’d pulled last week, after she’d bought Lizzy a new pack of fancy mechanical pencils for school, only to return it to the store the next day because Lizzy was “being bad.”

Now she’s sulking as she climbs out of the car and enters the house because Mom had taken her out shopping and bought a sparkly pink raincoat instead of the green one Lizzy had actually wanted. But Lizzy let Mom buy the pink one because at least she wouldn’t be upset if Mom ended up returning it as punishment.

Mom can tell, though, that Lizzy doesn’t like the pink coat, so she lectures her about being grateful for everything her mother does. Doesn’t she know how expensive it is to raise five daughters? At least her mother had put in the thought to drive her to the mall to buy the damn thing.

Lizzy rolls her eyes. “Then I wonder why you bought the coat at all, if you could have just thought about buying it and then used that money to buy yourself more lipstick and earrings.”

That earns her a slap across the face.

In recent years, it’s usually Mary or Kitty who get hit because Papa is around to intervene if Lizzy’s in trouble. So she’s unprepared for the force of the slap nearly knocking her into the doorframe, or down the stairs to the garage.

Her cheek stings, but Lizzy refuses to give her mother the satisfaction of seeing her cry like Mary or Kitty.

“If you think hitting me is going to make me love you, you’re even dumber than Papa says.”

Mom slaps her again, but Papa gets home before she can make Lizzy apologize.

There’s a hand-shaped mark on Lizzy’s cheek the next day, so Mom makes Lizzy stay home from school. She also makes Papa take a sick day from work to watch the girls.

Papa gifts Lizzy a journal to write down her thoughts so that she doesn’t have to say the words she feels like saying out loud next time.

There are two things everybody knows about Kitty Bennet: she coughs a lot, even when she’s not sick, and she loves to draw.

She even gets her own pack of 24 Crayola crayons for Christmas, which makes her the envy of all the other girls in her year, since everyone else got the regular pack of 8 colors. Sometimes she’s magnanimous enough to share her crayons with Lizzy and Mary if they ask nicely.

And sometimes Lydia just takes them without asking.

Lizzy supposes she shouldn’t be surprised. So far, Lydia has been the only sister that Mom has never hit. Mom gives Lydia whatever she wants because “she’s the baby of the family” and “doesn’t know better,” even though she’s been telling Kitty to “grow up and act your age already” since Kitty was two.

When Kitty finds her precious box of crayons with half the tips worn flat or broken, Mom doesn’t see what the big deal is because “they’re just crayons, they’ll still work.” So Kitty tells Lydia she’s never going to play with her again.

In retaliation, Mom’s favorite necklace goes missing.

They eventually find it tucked under Kitty’s pillow.

Kitty’s eyes are wide with fright and her face even paler than usual when she protests that she didn’t put it there.

“I didn’t do it!” she shrieks. “It wasn’t me!”

Mom slaps Kitty for yelling. “Good little ladies do not raise their voice,” she says.

When Kitty wails that this isn’t fair, Mom confiscates her crayons and throws them in the trash.

Meanwhile, out in the kitchen where the other girls have gathered to avoid the notice of an angry Mom, Lizzy notices Lydia is seated at the table, swinging her legs and looking very pleased with herself.

It takes some prodding, but Lizzy eventually gets Lydia to confess that she was the one who stole the necklace, and she did it on purpose to get Kitty in trouble.

Papa just rolls his eyes and calls Lydia her mother’s daughter.

Lydia just says, “I’m only six!”

Mom agrees. Lydia is only six and didn’t know better. And Kitty was wrong to shout, she says firmly, so she should still be punished. Lizzy decides against pointing out to Mom that Kitty only started shouting because Mom yelled at her for something she didn’t do, since that would probably just earn herself a beating.

Logic is not her mother’s strong suit.

Neither is listening, or any kind of consistency, for that matter.

One weekend, Mom is in the kitchen and calls Kitty’s name. Kitty comes out of her room, only to be sent back with a “never mind.”

Minutes later, Mom calls for Kitty again, so Kitty shows up again, only for Mom to change her mind again.

And then Mom calls Kitty again, so Kitty replies, “What?” from her room without coming out.

So Mom calls again, and again Kitty replies, “What?” without showing up.

Finally, Mom screeches, “CATHERINE RENEE BENNET,” to which Kitty stomps to the doorway of her bedroom and shouts in response, “WHAT?!” which gets her in trouble for yelling in the house again.

A few days later, Lizzy’s teacher singles her out for getting the highest marks on the math test. She dashes home to show Jane, who had helped her study because she knew Lizzy was very nervous for this test.

The two of them are squealing with excitement when Mom comes storming into the room to berate Lizzy for yelling.

Lizzy points out that she was just excited, not angry, and last she checked, that doesn’t warrant getting yelled at like Kitty did. Mom grounds her anyway.

Papa just says Mom is irrational and not to worry about it, when he takes Lizzy to the movies over the weekend.

Their parents don’t fight a lot because Papa usually just ignores Mom when she’s in “one of her moods.” Or he’ll say something clever that goes right over Mom’s head, before locking her out of his office while she shrieks that she wishes she’d never met him.

Often when she’s yelling at one of her daughters, she says that if their family ever breaks apart, it will be all that daughter’s fault.

Lizzy is more than fine with that, especially if it means she can choose to live with Papa and never have to deal with Mom again.

Kitty is less thrilled at the prospect of a divorce, since if she and her sisters have to be split up between their parents, Kitty will most likely end up living with Mom because Papa thinks Kitty is the silliest of his daughters except maybe Lydia. And Lydia will want to live with Mom, and Mom will side with her against Kitty over every argument they have.

Mary, who had been the one to almost get the authorities called on them when she was six and got locked out of the house after a piano lesson, is terrified of upsetting her life as it is. She doesn’t want to uproot and start over in a new city if one of her parents moves away. So she hides the family’s copy of The Parent Trap VHS tape in the space behind the sofa. If nobody watches that movie, then nobody will be reminded that divorce is an option.

If there’s anything Mom loves more than bragging about Jane to the other moms or spoiling Lydia while being a petty dictator to her other daughters, it’s boys liking Jane.

Somebody leaves a cheesy love poem in Jane’s locker at school one day.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Every time I see your face,
It reminds me of you

Talk about uninspired. Lizzy hopes the aspiring poet has a solid secondary career path to fall back on. Mary makes exaggerated barfing noises because boys her age are disgusting. Kitty and Lydia echo the barfing noises, but only because they think it sounds funny.

Mom, however, is over the moon that boys are finally noticing Jane, and she’s convinced that Jane will marry the charming young man.

Lizzy doesn’t bother pointing out that Jane is only 13, and they don’t even know who wrote the note. She just exchanges ironic looks with Papa.

It gets even worse the next year when the poet is eventually revealed to be Simon Wilson, who asks Jane to their school formal.

Mom is positively erupting in paroxysms of ecstasy at the news and storms into Papa’s office demanding that he cut the other girls’ allowances so they can pay for a new dress for Jane.

“No,” he replies, not looking up from his reading.

“But—but this is a huge milestone for Jane! She’s going to remember this night for the rest of her life! Do you really want her to look back on her first school dance and only remember that she had to wear a tattered old dress because her father wouldn’t let her buy a new one?”

“If one formal is truly what makes or breaks Jane’s entire secondary school experience, then Jane had better learn to economize and stop giving her own money to Lydia. Maybe then she would be able to pay for a dress with her own allowance.”

Jane is standing there with perfect equanimity, but Mom throws a tantrum, complete with stomping her foot on the floor and screeching about how Papa doesn’t lift a finger for her girls, and if Jane doesn’t get this dress then Simon Wilson is going to have his head turned and marry that plain, mousy Charlotte Lucas instead, and she never wants to see Papa’s or Simon Wilson’s stupid faces again.

Papa calmly turns his newspaper and says, “Very well, but it’s truly unfortunate that you’re so decided against that young poet, considering I work a decent paying job now, and I’ve even set aside plenty of money for such special occasions for the girls.”

“Oh—Oh, Thomas Bennet! Don’t tease me like that! You can’t mean—Jane, Jane dear, did you hear? We must go shopping right now, I can just picture the perfect dress for you! It’ll be pink! And sparkly! And have the biggest, puffiest sleeves! And lace! Lots of lace!”

From her usual spot in the armchair beside her father’s desk, Lizzy puts in earplugs and waits for Mom to finish celebrating and leave them in peace.

What a pathetic, ridiculous woman.

When Lizzy gets her first period, she calls her Aunt Maddy.

Her school did make everyone take sex ed class, where the teachers basically told the girls, “One day you’ll look down and see something in your underwear and go, ‘Ugh, is that blood?’ You should ask your mom about it,” and that was the extent of it.

Aunt Maddy buys her pads and explains that her body is getting rid of blood and cells that it doesn’t need anymore, and that this is a perfectly normal process that she should not feel grossed out or ashamed about.

Unfortunately, Mom finds the used pads in the trashcan of the bathroom that the daughters share, and she asks Lizzy about them, in a whisper so dramatic that it completely renders moot her intention of being discreet.

She knows the pads are not Jane’s, since Jane isn’t due yet to get her next period for another two weeks, and the brand of pads she buys for Jane and herself don’t have wings. Mary is only eleven, and Kitty and Lydia are only 10 and 9, so the only other person they could belong to is Lizzy.

Lizzy thinks her mom is a creepy weirdo for even knowing Jane’s schedule, let alone for playing archeologist in her daughters’ trash, so she cuts Mom off before she can give a speech about “becoming a woman” and says Aunt Maddy already explained everything to her.

(A few months later, when Aunt Maddy and Uncle Edward are visiting for Christmas, Lizzy overhears Mom complaining to Aunt Maddy that she and Lizzy aren’t close and Lizzy didn’t even come to her own mother when she got her first period. There’s some muffled sniffling and sobbing before Mom brightens again and starts bragging about how Jane scored a homecoming date with a charming young man who writes poetry.)

Whatever. If Mom’s tears are genuine—and historically, she’s been 50/50 on that—she has nobody to blame but herself for the state of her relationship with her daughters.

Speaking of which, Mother’s Day is an ordeal every year in the Bennet household.

This year, Mom’s punching bag of choice is Kitty, whose teacher has the class make cards and write something heartfelt and grateful about their mothers, like “I love you” or “I appreciate everything you do for me.”

Kitty ends up drawing a picture of herself and Mom holding hands, and she even picks some wild violets that were growing in the schoolyard, but she can’t bring herself to write anything down besides “happy mother’s day” because she’d just gotten in trouble last week for telling an untruth.

Mom throws the violets in the trash and tears Kitty’s card in half, saying that it’s by far the worst drawing Kitty has ever made and she can tell Kitty put no effort into her gift.

She makes Kitty stand in the doorway of her bedroom to watch while she gushes over the presents she got from Kitty’s sisters: a nice pearl necklace that Jane had bought with most of her babysitting money; a generic store-bought card and bouquet from Lizzy; a box of chocolates from Mary which makes Mom grimace that Mary is trying to make her fat like herself but she supposes it’s the thought that counts; and, most particularly, a collage made of macaroni from Lydia which is just the most precious gift ever.

Then Mom makes Kitty sit down at the kitchen table and doesn’t let her leave until she makes her a new card that passes inspection.

Alliances between the Bennet sisters form as quickly as they break. It’s usually Lizzy and Mary (the more mature ones, at age 14 and 12) against Kitty and Lydia (the loud, obnoxious younger ones at 11 and 10). Jane rarely participates because she’s 16 and too above it all to get involved in petty squabbles.

But sometimes Kitty joins up with Lizzy, like when Mom takes Lydia’s side again and Lizzy’s sense of justice prevails over her self-preservation instinct. Or when Mary is having a superiority complex, and Lydia stole Kitty’s headband and Mary said, “Why does it matter who the headband belongs to? I care more about what’s in my head than what’s on it.”

Sometimes, it’s the three older ones against Lydia. But on the rare occasions when Lydia sides with Lizzy or Mary, Mom is quick to indulge Lydia and brew resentment in her other daughters.

Lizzy starts to suspect that their mother is actually trying to pit them against one another, especially when it’s a perfectly normal day and Mary and Kitty are mad at Lizzy for being civil to Lydia (because it is a perfectly normal day when two daughters are at odds with two others) and Mom, completely unprovoked, starts saying nasty things to Lizzy, who was just sitting there minding her own business.

Lizzy is about to open her mouth with a retort to rival one of Papa’s when she sees Mom’s hand go back, as if preparing a slap, and she realizes Mom must be trying to push her buttons on purpose. Probably because she gets bored when she doesn’t have someone to pick on, or her hands get itchy when she hasn’t hit anyone in a while, so she’s looking for any excuse.

She also starts tracking the dates of these incidents when Mom is being even more unreasonable than usual, and she notices that they tend to occur for about a week every month.

Maybe Mary was onto something when she gave Mom chocolate for Mother’s Day.

Mrs. Bennet often blames her clashes with Lizzy on her “teenage attitude.”

Apparently, math and science classes aren’t appropriate for proper young ladies to take after they finish the bare minimum for graduation, nor are afterschool extracurricular activities like the school paper or student council, or ambitions to go to university like Papa.

“Why can’t you be more like Jane? She’s taking sewing and art classes like a dutiful daughter who will make a perfect wife for a rich man, maybe even a doctor, someday.”

Lizzy thinks she would rather be a doctor than marry one, but that’s probably just her teenage attitude talking again.

(A few days later, Mrs. Bennet complains that the male cashier at Target wouldn’t let her use an expired coupon, because “isn’t that just like a sexist man?” Obviously misogyny, if she can even wrap around her primitive brain what it is, is only bad when it personally affects her.)

Mary often retreats to her piano to drown out the racket when Mrs. Bennet is chewing out one of the other girls.

Usually that results in her being told to “stop making that demonic noise, I can’t hear myself think!”

One time, Mary keeps playing because she doesn’t hear Mrs. Bennet yelling at her from inside Lizzy’s room. Mrs. Bennet eventually has enough and stomps over, kicking the side of the instrument and interrupting Mary’s concerto with the sound of splintering wood.

Papa inspects the foot-shaped hole in the side board and determines that the damage is only cosmetic, not structural, and the piano still sounds fine.

Mrs. Bennet crosses her arms petulantly and says she only did it because Mary was determined to continue vexing her with that infernal noise. And she refuses to have the piano taken in for repairs because it’s old and worthless and Mary isn’t even that good at it. Besides, is anyone going to ask if her foot is okay? Nobody in this household cares about her!

As punishment for whatever she’d gotten in trouble for, Lizzy has to do something nice for someone else.

So she buys Mary an empty gilded frame from the charity shop, and Mary hangs it around the hole in the side of the piano. Papa agrees it would be hilarious to move the instrument from the back hallway to a place of prominence in the living room, and Mary makes a point of passive-aggressively dusting the frame every weekend and pointing out the “gift of abstract art from my mom” whenever friends are visiting.

Lizzy is 15 years old when Mrs. Bennet never dares hit her again.

She’s coming down the stairs when her mother slaps a 12-year-old Kitty, this time accusing Kitty of faking her cough to get out of going to school.

Kitty cries harder and hiccups and has another coughing fit so severe that her face turns purple.

Lizzy leans on the banister and slow claps sarcastically. “Congratulations, you hit her and she coughed again. Maybe if you keep doing it and hit her harder next time, it’ll stop the coughing for once.”

Mrs. Bennet glares up at her. “Watch your tone with me, young lady. You will not question my parenting methods unless you want to be hit next.”

Lizzy examines her fingernails. “Has hitting any of us ever gotten Kitty to stop coughing or me to stop mouthing off?”

“No,” Mrs. Bennet snarls, “but it makes me feel better.”

“You know that’s illegal, right? Hitting your kids when it’s not for discipline? Especially when you leave marks and force the kid to skip school, which I’m sure the police would love to hear about if the story ever got out to, say, a teacher at school?”

“I said, you better watch your fucking mouth or I’ll throw you out of my house right now!”

“Unfortunately for you, I know how to walk to the police station from here.”

“I’m not bluffing, Elizabeth. You will be next, and I will give you a story worth telling the cops about!”

“So…if Kitty”—who interrupts Lizzy with another coughing fit—“ends up dying because you wouldn’t take her to see a doctor, does that mean you’re okay with spending the money you saved for Jane’s future wedding dress on a funeral instead, and only getting to see Jane and Lydia when they visit you in prison?”

Kitty eventually gets diagnosed with asthma and put on medication.

Mrs. Bennet never apologizes, and she never brings the incident up again.

She does, however, continue to shoot Lizzy nasty looks every time Kitty has an asthma flare-up after that.

Chapter Text

War breaks out when Lizzy announces her intentions for after graduation.

Mrs. Bennet insists that Lizzy doesn’t need a fancy schmancy degree from a fancy schmancy university. “You may think you’re real clever, Miss Lizzy, but you’re a selfish, ungrateful girl for even thinking of it!”

“Selfish? What do you even need me here for? I have a full ride, and I’ve saved my own money, so it’s not like it’ll cost you anything.”

“It’s not right for women to go into higher education! At least Jane understands that and stayed home like I raised her to.”

“You mean Jane, who’s two years out of school and doesn’t have any marketable skills, who was never allowed to learn how to drive so any jobs she works have to be within walking distance or on a bus route, so she’ll never get a real job and move out, so all she can do is marry the first man you can sell her off to? That Jane?”

“Don’t pull that card again. It’s not my fault your father got it in his head that Miss Lizzy is a special little snowflake who needs to be taught how to do everything the way men do it. Jane never felt the need to be better than her own mother—”

“Oh, I see. You didn’t want us driving because you wanted to trap us at home, and you don’t want me going to university because then I’ll be more accomplished than you. You think I’m getting a bachelor’s degree to one-up you, and not because I want to, because you can’t fathom that the universe doesn’t revolve around you.”

“How dare you—”

“It’s always about you! Mary can’t take piano lessons from a real teacher because then she’d be better at it than you, but you have no problems showing her off to your dinner party guests. Kitty can’t be allowed to take real art classes because then she’ll be able to reach her full potential and people will see you’re a talentless hack in comparison. I bet once you marry Jane off, she’ll only be allowed to have four kids because you need to be able to brag that you had five. You need to keep us all down in order to keep control over us and feel better about your own life choices. Like it’s somehow my fault you were too stupid to continue your schooling.”

“You want to leave so bad, then fine! The minute you turn eighteen, you will get out of my house. I am done with you corrupting Mary and Kitty against me. I am washing my hands of you, and I expect you to pay me back every penny I wasted raising you!”

As glad as Lizzy would be to follow this eviction edict to the letter, Papa overrules Mrs. Bennet and lets Lizzy stay the summer.

It’s a novel experience, to be at a prestigious university and no longer feel like she’s competing for something impossible to achieve, for fear of a beating or disownment. Here she has people she can depend on—classmates who are happy to help each other out, even when they’re technically competing since they’re being graded on a curve.

She surrounds herself with a new group of friends, mostly people from her dorm. Her new roommates are cool and don’t mind that she needs them to be quiet on Saturday evenings when she’s video calling her Papa. She also befriends Charlie Bingley when he goes from room to room introducing himself, along with his roommate Joe Hurst.

Charlie’s other roommate, Will Darcy, is a lot harder to get to know. The resident advisors pair her up with him for icebreakers at orientation, but he’s not interested in talking to her beyond answering the perfunctory icebreaker questions. Lizzy’s fairly sure that she overhears him remarking to Charlie, “yeah, not my type,” shortly afterwards.

This she recounts to Papa during her weekly phone calls home, along with her sketches and impressions of the various characters she encounters at school.

Charlie is open and friendly with just about everybody. He kind of reminds Lizzy of a golden retriever in human form. Or of her sister Jane, if Jane were more inclined to sit with someone who’s having a bad day and lend a sympathetic ear, instead of always insisting that everybody should be happy all the time because everything is going to be fine and “it’s not so bad if you put things into perspective.”

Joe, on the other hand, is here to have a good time. He’s more likely to be found attending parties than studying, and Lizzy suspects that they would never have become friends if they didn’t happen to be neighbors and he didn’t have an impressive board game collection, which he brings out into the lounge for everyone to enjoy in the evenings.

Will Darcy is always hanging around Charlie and Joe, so Lizzy is frequently thrown into his company, though she wouldn’t really consider him a friend like his roommates. He’s awkward to talk to and unnervingly quiet and acts like he would rather gnaw off his arm than socialize. He strikes Lizzy as the “mom friend” of the three of them, who goes out to drinks because somebody has to be the responsible one and make sure his friends get home in one piece.

He also stares at her incessantly. As if Charlie and Joe were his friends first and he would like for her to go away now so he can spend time with his friends without their little shadow, thank you very much. Even more puzzling is how, once they discover that they have a shared class, he actually voluntarily comes up to her and offers to do homework and study together.

(Charlie calls what they do arguing. Will calls it discussing.)

“Blonde,” Lizzy declares confidently. “Definitely blonde.”

“Blonde with blue eyes,” Will Darcy adds.

“And don’t forget busty,” Joe Hurst chimes in gleefully. “That’s super important.”

They’re discussing whether Charlie has a type, considering the number of pretty girls he has brought back to his room on Friday nights, resulting in Joe and Will having to vacate to the lounge. Joe doesn’t seem to mind much, since he’s usually pretty drunk and promptly falls asleep on a sofa, and if he’s not drunk, then he breaks out a board game and ropes people (Lizzy and Will) into playing. Will, on the other hand, Lizzy suspects is less than thrilled about having to babysit a drunk Joe Hurst or endure Lizzy Bennet’s charming company while Charlie gets their room to himself to fool around with Hallie, or Tess, or Sara, or whoever his flavor of the week is. Lizzy has honestly lost track of their names at this point, and she suspects Will cares even less.

Charlie doesn’t seem all too happy that his friends have concluded that his taste in women boils down to walking, talking, life-sized Barbie dolls, because he changes the subject to speculating about Will’s type. “Knowing Will, he probably has a whole checklist of requirements.”

Will flushes scarlet but doesn’t deny the accusation.

“She probably has to speak, like, three foreign languages and play a musical instrument, at least. And she had to do Model UN or other nerdy things after school,” Charlie continues.

“And here I thought you were going to say she can’t drink alcohol, and she has to come from a rich family. And be a virgin,” Joe snickers. “Or be a specific height and under a certain weight.”

“I’m not that shallow,” Will grumbles. “Is it too much to ask to want to actually get to know someone before I sexile my roommates?”

Lizzy looks on with curiosity. “We’re not talking about what you’re looking for in a life partner, for ever and ever, after months and years of knowing each other. We’re discussing your type. You know, those physical characteristics that make you interested in a person at first glance—”

“I think the idea of a type can also encompass personality traits and not just physical ones. Otherwise, I guess I either don’t have a type or haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

“Really? In all your 18 years—”

“I’m 20, actually.”

“—you can’t count on one hand the number of girls who have made an impression on you without opening their mouth? Maybe you’ve been scoping out the wrong gender.”

“I have had girlfriends before, for your information. And I am interested in girls, if that’s what you’re insinuating. I just don’t like making snap judgments about what a person is like based on appearance alone. And I don’t like making small talk with people I don’t know.”

“But how can you get to know people without talking to them? That makes no sense—”

“Actually, people can be introverted and still make friends. We just don’t care for pointless blathering about the weather. I usually only talk to people if I know they have something interesting, or intelligent, to say.”

“Guess that explains why you couldn’t be bothered to get to know anyone at orientation, at a prestigious university full of top-notch students,” Lizzy retorts. “Nobody around with an intelligent thought in their head.”

He frowns. “You tend to twist my words and willfully misunderstand me, don’t you?”

“And you interrupt a lot.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

He shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t like when people are loud or talk fast. It makes it difficult for me to formulate a response while trying to keep up with the ongoing conversation.”

“I wouldn’t have to talk that way if I wasn’t afraid of being interrupted again. Especially when I have to talk to guys who think the right way to have a conversation with a girl is to constantly take a minor point she makes and go, ‘Well, actually…’”

He’s quiet for the rest of the evening and doesn’t emerge from his room the next day. She’s starting to wonder how long he plans to sulk about it (Mary once didn’t speak to Lydia for an entire three weeks after the latter spilled a bottle of nail polish on her old copy of Wuthering Heights), but then he knocks on her door, the tips of his ears red, and admits, “I owe you a huge apology.”

When he finds out about her home life, Charlie invites her home with him to spend winter break. The only regret she has accepting the invitation is having to spend a week with Charlie’s sisters. But she’ll take Lulu and Cara Bingley any day over Mrs. Bennet

“You named your houseplants Colonel and Fitzwilliam?”

“Technically, I didn’t name either of them. My Uncle Earl named one Fitzwilliam because it’s his last name, and I didn’t care enough to rename it.”

They’re up late, another Friday night in the lounge. Charlie has brought another Barbie lookalike home, and Joe had far too much to drink than usual, so he’s passed out on the sofa, and Lizzy has the recycling bin from her room at the ready, in case he throws up.

Will sighs as Joe rolls over in his sleep onto his back, and moves to reposition him on his side again. Lizzy makes a mental note to go dig up some aspirin for Joe’s inevitable hangover tomorrow.

“And the other plant?” she prompts Will once they’ve settled back into their respective seats. “Why Colonel?”

“My Aunt Catherine gave me that one after my parents died. She named it Soldier, I think as a reminder for me to ‘soldier on,’ but my sister thought it deserved the rank of Colonel instead.”

She hadn’t realized his parents were dead. Car accident on his 18^th birthday. He would have started his undergrad studies a year sooner if not for it.

Will doesn’t seem offended by her personal questions, though. He smiles ruefully at her from where he’s curled up in his armchair and says, “So what about you? I told you my tragic backstory. Anything you’re hiding?”

Lizzy maintains for years later that the only reason she shares her past with Will is because she was slightly tipsy and she trusted him not to blab to the rest of their floor. It had nothing to do with his sleepy smile or how ridiculous he looked trying to fold himself into an armchair that was clearly not intended for someone who is all arms and legs.

(He invites her to spend summer vacation in Pemberley with him and his extended family.)

Mrs. Bennet calls occasionally, usually when Lizzy is still in class because the concept of time zones continues to elude her, so Lizzy deliberately takes her time returning her missed calls. What’s the point of answering when all she’ll get is an earful about how she never calls or visits?

Clearly, Mrs. Bennet has forgotten that Lizzy has been disowned.

Or maybe she’s mad that disowning Lizzy did not have the intended effect of bringing her into line, so now she’s trying to reel her back in to take back some form of control over her.

Or maybe it was just said in the heat of the moment and she didn’t actually mean it.

Whatever. It’s high time somebody taught Mrs. Bennet that her words and actions have consequences, and decent people should apologize for them even if they didn’t mean them.

Lizzy isn’t going to hold her breath though.

“What a bitch,” she mutters, pocketing her phone, after yet another lecture about being a dutiful daughter.

“Your mom again?” Will asks sympathetically.

When she isn’t busy blabbering about which rich and handsome young man has moved into the old Netherfield mansion in town for her to throw Jane at, all Mrs. Bennet wants to do is complain about how Lizzy never visits.

“You should tell her next time that you’re spending spring break with a boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” she scoffs. “And then she’ll really want me to visit, so she can meet him. That’ll really show him he ought to stick around.”

Her first boyfriend breaks up with her for “playing mind games.”

She’s not heartbroken—they weren’t serious, and she’d only agreed to go out with Matt because she was flattered by the attention now that she’s no longer being compared to Jane and coming out second-best—but she is embarrassed that she may have subconsciously learned some troubling behaviors from her mother.

Joe offers to beat Matt up. Charlie says any guy who isn’t willing to stick with her through rough patches isn’t worth keeping around.

Will points out that going silent and insisting she’s “fine” when she clearly isn’t and then getting mad when Matt couldn’t read her mind is toxic and immature behavior.

“I don’t do that though,” she tries to protest.

“When was the last time your mother or one of your sisters apologized for something she did against you?” he asks mildly.

She can’t say.

“How often did you wish they would come groveling? And when was the last time you communicated, with your words, to your family, that you weren’t okay with something they did?”

Oh.

Will’s family are a mixed bag.

His Aunt Catherine gives a lot of unsolicited advice, from how to pack a suitcase to how to choose the correct undergraduate major for one’s zodiac sign. His Uncle Earl is always busy with work, which Lizzy suspects is due to wanting to avoid his wife, Will’s Aunt Cheryl, who is a fussy mother hen who has nobody else to fuss over now that her sons are fully grown. The older son, Will’s cousin Andrew, is apparently expected to take over Uncle Earl’s business someday, so he’s always busy at work, too.

Will’s little sister Giana asks Lizzy to watch a horse movie with her.

His cousin Anne exists.

His other cousin Nate is closest to Will in age and seems to have been closer to his cousin growing up than to his older brother Drew. He doesn’t bat an eye at Will’s bringing a female friend home for break and immediately begins telling Lizzy all of Will’s most embarrassing childhood secrets.

Denny Harris breaks up with Kitty after cheating on her with Lydia.

Papa is highly amused when he relays this news to Lizzy over the phone, especially the part where Lydia maintains it was an accident. With Mary off at music school and Jane working a steady job and able to afford a small apartment with a roommate, maybe he’ll finally get some peace and quiet in the house now that Kitty is no longer speaking to Lydia.

Lizzy hears about it from her sisters a few days later.

Mary has taken Kitty’s side. Lydia insinuates that Mary is just bitter because she’s so unattractive that she never had a boyfriend, so Mary asks her if she’s ever even slept in the same bed twice. Lydia shouts that at least Denny preferred her younger sisters over boring, pimple-faced, perpetually single Mary. So Mary and Lydia aren’t speaking anymore either.

Jane’s take on the Kitty-Lydia-Mary drama is that Denny just wasn’t the right man for Kitty, but she has every faith that the right man will come along someday, which in Kitty’s opinion completely misses the point, but what else did she expect from Jane?

Lizzy also tries to stay uninvolved, especially now that she’s a resident advisor and has to resolve enough squabbles as it is, what with incoming first-years having to learn how to coexist with a roommate.

But Kitty shouts, “Why can’t you just be on my side, for once, when there’s nothing in it for you?”

She wonders if Kitty may benefit from some therapy, if she has defined her entire identity around being right and having more people in her camp than Lydia’s.

Jane just reassures Lizzy that she’ll find her Mr. Right someday too.

Well, whoever Lizzy’s Mr. Right is, it certainly isn’t the latest guy to run for the hills upon finding out what her family is like.

This one doesn’t even get to the part where he meets her Papa over video call. He only sticks around long enough to learn why it’s so important to her for him to get along with her father, before ghosting for a week and then sending her a perfunctory “you’re cool and all but I’m just not feeling it, you know?” text.

She’s a little insulted, but at least he didn’t waste her time like the last guy, who threw a fit when she expressed reluctance to take him home on break to meet her family because it made him feel like her “dirty little secret.”

Her friends bring her ice cream and bad romantic comedies to binge while trying out her new dartboard with a picture of her ex’s face on it.

“Do you think it was me?” she asks Will.

“Hm?”

“The way I talk about my mom. Do you think I come off as whiny and unfairly painting her to be the villain when she’s not here to defend herself?”

“Are the things you say she did untrue?”

“No. But I never talk about the times she did something nice for us because she felt bad.”

“Do you think you what happened to you wasn’t abuse because you think abusers have to be all bad all the time?”

“No.”

“Then what makes you think what you said was unfair?”

“Well…you’re going to think this sounds stupid, but aren’t abuse victims supposed to…keep quiet? Because they don’t think they have it that bad? And if I’m blabbing about it, then wouldn’t that mean I wasn’t really abused?”

“…Is that what Todd told you?”

“No, that was Brad, before him.”

He’s silent for a moment, because Will always measures his words carefully before he has to deliver a brutally honest message.

“It’s not for me to say,” he says finally. “But I think there were better ways she could have handled things. She was the adult, so the responsibility was hers to be the adult in the situation. You’re not responsible for downplaying the hurt you felt for other people’s sake.”

Will sleeps over a lot in Lizzy’s dorm room when Charlie sexiles him from their shared apartment.

She doesn’t mind. It’s like the good old times, when they used to pull all-nighters together during their first year. And one of the perks of being an RA is that she gets unrestricted access to the kitchen downstairs, which comes complete with a working stove. Will’s chocolate-chip pancakes are to die for.

“So she framed the hole in the—wait, are we talking about the sister who’s working at her BFA, or the one who’s still in school?”

“The one who’s going for her BFA in music.”

“I thought you said your sister moved out because she wanted to be a painter.”

“That’s the younger one in art school. I have two sisters who are getting their BFAs, Will. Try to keep up.”  She rolls over to face him and winces as her elbow strikes something hard, probably the leg of her desk.

“You know you could just take the bed, right?” He sounds amused. “It is your bed.”

(It’s dark, but she reaches out and smacks his arm.) “And leave you to suffer on the floor alone? Not going to happen. Either we both take the bed, or we’re both sleeping on the floor.”

“I told you, sharing a bed with me probably isn’t the best idea. I tend to either snuggle or push the other person onto the floor.”

“Then scoot over. I don’t want to risk rolling into this table leg again.”

The free ride to the fancy schmancy university helps Lizzy land a cushy office job after graduation. It’s not the kind of work that she’s passionate about, but considering that she’s able to afford to live alone in a modest one-bedroom apartment with just a bachelor’s degree, she can’t really complain. At the very least, if she keeps her head down and saves up for a couple of years, she can probably put herself through grad school and land an even better job in the future.

Her friends have scattered since graduation. Will Darcy moves back to Pemberley to be closer to his sister. They stay in touch and text every so often, but work keeps him pretty busy too, so Lizzy doesn’t see him much.

Charlie Bingley has moved to Meryton and purchased the old Netherfield mansion. Apparently, he’s enjoying the suburban/backwoods life away from the chaos of the city, even if his sisters hate it.

Joe Hurst lands an even cushier job where he can work from anywhere, so he always seems to be on vacation. Last Lizzy heard, he’d gotten engaged to Charlie’s sister Lulu.

Then Jane meets Charlie when Lulu Bingley (soon to be Hurst) is a client at the bridal shop where Jane works as a seamstress.

It’s not that Lizzy doesn’t love Jane. Because she does. Jane is her sister, after all, and probably the one that Lizzy clashed the least with growing up.

But, God, talking to her is like being force fed store-bought canned cake frosting sometimes.

“Are you sure you won’t be able to make it? I can ask Charlie if he has some nice friends he can introduce you to. We could double date.”

“Are you really asking me to fly thousands of miles across the country to…go on a blind date?”

“It wouldn’t be so far away if you moved back,” Jane points out. “What about Charlie’s best friend, Will? You two looked pretty cozy at Joe and Lulu’s wedding. We could invite you and Will to stay with us at Netherfield.”

“…You do realize that I knew Charlie first, right? And Will is one of my best friends? As in, platonic friends?”

“All the same, just think about it. We miss you over here, and the whole family would love to hear about your adventures at school.”

“Yeah, I’m sure Mom’s dying to see me again.”

“She does miss you, Lizzy. She asks me and Papa about how you’re doing all the time, and she’s sad that she doesn’t hear from you much.”

Considering Jane has also claimed to have overheard Mrs. Bennet telling people just how proud she is of Lizzy for going to a prestigious university and making a name for herself, Lizzy puts about as much stock into Jane’s little white lies and her attempts to mollify her as they deserve.

Will spends a week at Lizzy’s apartment, after turning up unexpectedly on her doorstep.

His sister Giana, just recently gone off to university, had apparently been going out (at 17!) with some man in his late 20s who still lurks around the undergraduate campus. Lizzy doesn’t ask how much money Will had paid the guy to stay away from his sister, but it must have been enough to live on for some time, considering he’d been a grad student but was recently expelled. The story isn’t entirely clear to her, but Will and Wickham used to know each other, and Wickham might have gone after Giana as revenge.

Giana hadn’t taken kindly to Will springing a surprise visit on her, and they’d had a huge fight after she found out about the bribe.

At any rate, Will needed some time and space, so he packed a bag and set out to visit Lizzy.

“We should just adopt each other,” he grumbles into her living room floor. “I want a sister I actually get along with.”

“Where is your sister anyway?”

“I sent her off to stay with Uncle Earl for the rest of the semester. Her grades were in the toilet anyway, so it’s not like continuing at that school would have done any good for her.”

Lizzy sighs. “You do realize that’s the problem, right? Your relationship won’t get any better until you actually talk to her.”

“Says the girl who never speaks to her own sisters.”

“Hey, I literally talked with Jane on the phone last week.”

“And Mary? Kitty?”

“They’re busy with school.”

“And Lydia?”

“Please. She only remembers she has sisters when she needs something from us. And don’t think I didn’t notice you changing the subject, Mr. Darcy.”

“Ugh. But what if I just want to sulk?”

She ruffles his hair. “Fine. You can sulk with me for a week. But then you’re going to go home and talk to your sister. Like an adult. Because that’s what you are.”

“Isn’t that kind of hypocritical of you?”

“Yeah, but that’s why I tell people to do as I say and not as I do.”

“Okay, Mom.”

Through some unfortunate series of miscommunications, Mrs. Bennet invites Will Darcy to Meryton to celebrate Christmas with the Bennets as Lizzy’s boyfriend.

It was probably Jane. It’s like she thinks that if a male thing and a female thing even sniff in each other’s general direction, then they must be in love with each other.

Lately Jane seems to have put on even more airs now that she’s engaged to Charlie, with their mother singing her praises for being the first Bennet sister to land a rich man and score a marriage proposal.

“I’m sure it’ll work out once you meet a good man who likes you for you,” Jane tells Mary when the latter is stressed about her future career prospects as a concert pianist.

“Don’t worry, you’re still young and have time to find the right man, even if you do spend so much time locked in your studio,” she adds to Kitty.

She’s like a less offensive but equally annoying Mrs. Bennet. Perfect privileged Jane, the apple of her mom’s eye with her perfectly pleasant prince, living in her pristine castle in wonderland, acting like all the world’s problems can be solved if a woman just does her duty and gets married and pops out 2.5 babies that she’ll just magically know how to raise right.

The look on Mrs. Bennet’s face when Will greets Lizzy with a hug before emphatically introducing himself as just a friend is almost worth returning to the site of her childhood traumas after five years’ exile.

While it’s good to see Papa again, she’s less enthusiastic about having to endure Jane and Charlie’s lovey-dovey PDA, or being caught in the middle of the ongoing Mary-Kitty-Lydia feud, or watching Mrs. Bennet bully everyone at the table and having to make nice with her abuser because “blood is thicker than water” and “it’s high time you put aside your differences and spent the holidays with your family—might give you some idea of starting your own someday.”

Family, more like FML-y.

Sure enough, her family immediately starts embarrassing themselves.

Mary, one semester away from graduating with her music degree, only wants to talk about how she’s already making a name for herself in the concert pianist scene as critics compare her performances to those of “early Beethoven.”

Lydia, at 19, is as shameless as ever, regaling her dinner companions with tales of the guys who have left their girlfriends for her, while her mother looks on with fond (and vocal) approval of her conquests.

From the opposite end of the table, Kitty audibly mutters that at least Lydia is officially too old now to be on any reality TV shows about having babies at 16 and becoming a dropout, to which Papa guffaws and Mrs. Bennet purses her lips and shoots back something about how at least Lydia had the sense not to waste her parents’ money on something as useless as art school. No, Lydia will follow in Jane’s footsteps and marry a rich and handsome man.

“And what a rich man Jane has caught,” she continues even more loudly when Lizzy kicks her foot under the table. “Just imagine what a grand house she’ll live in, and what fine jewelry she’ll have, and what a nice car she’ll drive—or be driven in. You did say you have a chauffeur, didn’t you, Charlie dear?”

Charlie just smiles and says he’s happy to buy his angel anything she wants.

Mrs. Bennet nags Papa next. “Lay off the mashed potatoes, Tom. You’ve asked Kitty to pass them to you three times now. You know Doctor Jones doesn’t like you eating too much carbs or butter.”

Papa serves himself another helping of the mashed potatoes and continues eating as if she had never spoken.

So Mrs. Bennet turns to Will and says, “I hear you’re worth several hundred million more than Charlie.”

Lizzy blushes crimson, as Will ignores the statement and politely thanks her mother for including him on the invitation as Lizzy’s friend.

Mrs. Bennet glowers. “I should have known that Lizzy was still single. Selfish, headstrong girl she always was. No man of quality would want her, but can you blame a mother for wanting to think better of her daughters? Never mind. We’ll just have to adjust the sleeping arrangements. Mary, Kitty, and Lydia can share their old room. Jane and Charlie will have her and Lizzy’s old room to themselves. Will can get the guest room, and I’ll just move the bedding for Lizzy to the living room sofa.”

Papa cuts in at that moment. “And where, pray tell, is Mary supposed to sleep if you force Lizzy to take the sofa?”

“What on earth could you mean by that, Tom? I said, Mary will share her old room with Kitty and Lydia. Is your hearing so far gone that you missed that the first time I said it?”

“Perhaps, but it’s certainly better than your powers of perception, if you hadn’t noticed that Mary started sleeping on the sofa when she was ten.”

“But she has a perfectly usable bed in her room! Why on earth would she move to the sofa?”

Mary coughs. “Actually, we pushed the three toddler beds together to make one big bed when we got too tall for them. But it was too crowded for all three of us to fit.”

“And none of you told me?”

“Didn’t think you’d care if we brought it up,” Kitty sniffs, flicking her napkin away. “You would only complain about having to buy new beds for all of us.”

“Yeah, and beds are expensive. Fixing my piano when you kicked it in was too expensive. Don’t we have any idea how much money it takes to raise five daughters? God, Mary, why do you have to be so selfish?”

“I am so sorry, Charlie dear. I have no idea what’s gotten into these two tonight. They’re normally perfectly well-behaved and good-natured girls. It must be what they learned after they moved out of my home, like that bad influence sitting over there by your friend. I assure you that our family is not too poor to afford real beds for my daughters—”

“Maybe you’d buy them if Lydia had told you,” interjects Kitty, “but she wasn’t going to since she got the whole bed to herself after she kicked Mary out to the sofa and pushed me onto the floor.”

“I did not hog the bed! You take that back!”

“Besides,” Mary adds, “it really wasn’t so bad once Lydia started spending her nights out partying and sleeping around—”

“Yeah, wasn’t Lydia just saying she had her eye on Jenny Goulding’s new boyfriend? Maybe Mary and Lizzy won’t need to fight over the sofa tonight if Lydia can hit up the bars after dinner and accidentally fall into his bed—”

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here! Mama, they’re being so unfair—”

“Perhaps it would be best if Lizzy and I take our old room, and Will and Charlie stay at Netherfield,” Jane says, with her usual Jane-ish serenity.

“Or Lizzy and Will can come with us to Netherfield!” Charlie suggests. “There’s plenty of room, and—” 

“What business would Lizzy have being at a place like Netherfield, and with a man she’s not even dating? Charlie dear, it’s so kind of you to offer, but you don’t need to feel like we expect you to take in our strays. No, Lizzy will stay in her old room, and Will can have the guest room, and Jane and Charlie can go back to his house! What kind of mother would I look like if my own daughter couldn’t spend Christmas alone with her fiancé—” WINK, WINK “—because he has to host his friend? It would be even more distasteful to expect Charlie to keep a hussy like your sister under the same roof.”

“And having your daughters sleep on the sofa isn’t distasteful?” Papa chimes in cheerfully.

“Shut your trap, Tom—”

“Mary,” Lizzy says desperately, “why don’t you go and open up the piano? I think we could use some music after dinner.”

Mrs. Bennet blows up everyone’s phones for weeks after Charlie declines her New Year’s invite, blubbering about how badly Elizabeth embarrassed her at Christmas. And how dare Mary and Kitty’s make Charlie think our family is too poor to afford beds for everybody!

Lydia is inclined to agree that if anyone’s to blame for the comment about the beds, it would be Mary and Kitty, for airing their grievances and the entire family’s dirty laundry for their dinner guests to see.

Kitty predictably blames Lydia right back, for cheating with Denny and boasting openly about conquering other women’s boyfriends, as if being the 21^st-century version of a notorious flirt like Scarlett O’Hara is something to be proud of.

Lydia retorts that Mary and Kitty are just bitter and jealous.

Mary turns the blame back on Mrs. Bennet, for never letting Jane learn to drive and thus making her walk three miles in the rain when Charlie’s sister Cara invited her out for brunch, and signaling to them that the Bennets can’t afford a second car.

Jane, for her part, refuses to hear anything negative about Cara Bingley, even though Lizzy had only needed to meet her once to conclude she’s a real piece of work. She also refuses to hear anything negative about Mrs. Bennet or any of her sisters. Charlie is free to spend New Year’s as he pleases, and she’s happy that he’s kept in touch with his university friends.

Kitty retorts that at least with Charlie out of town, Lydia won’t be able to sink her claws into him too.

Lizzy leaves the family group chat.

In the lead-up to the wedding, Jane asks Lizzy to be her maid of honor.

Lizzy hesitates at first. Will has agreed to be Charlie’s best man, and he’s already freaking out about having to give a speech in front of hundreds of strangers because he hates public speaking. And she’s not entirely sure what she would say as maid of honor either, considering she’s probably closer to Charlie than to Jane. How embarrassing would it be if both their speeches gush about how great a person Charlie is, with Jane only added on as an afterthought?

In the end, it doesn’t matter because Mrs. Bennet takes charge of the wedding preparations just like she’s taken charge of everything else in Jane’s life, elbowing Lizzy out of the way and trotting Lydia out as maid of honor instead.

Jane acquiesces to having Lydia be her maid of honor, just like Lizzy expected. She also lets Mrs. Bennet choose the color scheme, and the flowers, and the entrees, and the wedding favors, and the seating arrangements, and the cake flavors. Which is just as well, because Mrs. Bennet would just pitch a hissy fit over any decisions Lizzy would’ve made.

When Mary balks at Mrs. Bennet’s demand that she play the organ free of charge “for family,” Charlie, his smile only slightly strained, agrees to just hire an actual organist.

Will doesn’t mince words the next time he’s in town to visit.

“Can I ask you something? It’s about Charlie and Jane.”

“Of course.”

“What do you really think of their relationship? Do you think they’re making a mistake?”

She grimaces. “I’ll admit, I didn’t think Charlie made the smartest decision when he proposed after only a few months of dating…”

“Exactly. He’s had casual flings that lasted way longer. And they’re both young. She’s 26, and he’s only 24.”

“…But I wouldn’t say this is the worst decision he’s ever made,” Lizzy allows. “I know he’s going to be saddled with my mom for a monster-in-law, but Jane herself is harmless.”

“Harmless? That’s…some praise, coming from her own sister.”

“You’re thinking of Gia, aren’t you? And…Wickham?”

She’s loath to bring up his name, but Will just shakes his head emphatically. “I don’t think Jane is with Charlie for his money, even if your mom only seems to value him for his family’s wealth. But what I’m worried about is…Do you think Jane actually loves him? Or do you think she’s using him as her ticket to freedom?”

“Freedom from Mom? I don’t see why she would. She and Lydia were always Mom’s favorites. And Jane is a hopeless romantic. You could convince her she’s in love with Jabba the Hutt if you try hard enough.”

He throws back his head and laughs. “If I didn’t know you better, Lizzy Bennet, I would think you were jealous.”

She jabs him in the ribs, which only makes him laugh harder.

“Yeah, I’ve always wished my mom would sell me off to the first man who bid on me. Can you blame me for being jealous that Jane got snatched up first?”

He tickles her back until she cries mercy.

“Okay,” she says once they’ve sobered up. “I just wanted to point out that anyone who can still love a Bennet sister after meeting her crazy dysfunctional family is automatically good enough in my book. I would say he’s ‘too good to be true,’ but this is Charlie we’re talking about. So I’m not opposed to the marriage out of any concern for Jane. And—I’ll admit it—I’m a horrible sister for thinking Charlie can do better. But I’m not Charlie, so it’s not like my tastes matter here.”

“Right. They’re both adults, so they’re free to make whatever choices they want and deal with the consequences later—”

“Like that time we left Charlie to puke his guts out after those frat guys convinced him to chug that, ah, mixed alcoholic beverage of questionable content.”

“—But it’s marriage. I just don’t want Charlie to wake up down the road and realize he’s unhappy and regret rushing into this before he’s had a chance to really get to know Jane. And she deserves someone who didn’t just marry her on a whim.”

“While Charlie isn’t super picky, I will say that he’s also never proposed to any of his previous obsessions. From the way he talks about Jane, he’s pretty convinced she’s the one. Plus, he gets enough shit as it is from Lulu and Cara about his engagement, so we’d both probably be disinvited next if we try to suggest postponing the wedding.”

“But what about your mom? She’s already completely taken over the wedding preparations, and Charlie and Jane are happy to let her. But can Charlie truly be happy married to someone who is content to go along with whatever her mother wants? What if one day he and your mom are on opposite sides of an issue? Whose side would Jane choose then?”

“Considering how much Charlie hates conflict, he would probably bend over backwards to accommodate Mom anyway. As for Jane…she’s usually happy to agree with anything anyone else says. So if she’s going to be married to Charlie, then I would hope that Charlie will surpass Mom as the voice of authority in Jane’s life.”

“…You’re really not making me feel better about this.”

“Hey, I don’t get it either. But I’m not the one getting married. Charlie knew all about what my mom is like, long before he ever met Jane. He should know by now what he’s getting himself into. And he did disinvite both his sisters from the wedding, so he is capable of standing up for himself and for Jane.”

“That’s a fair point. But I started to write my speech, and I kind of hate everything in it. Everything I’ve written about Jane is so…bland and impersonal. It reads like I googled ‘best man speech templates.’ I feel like I’ve hardly gotten enough time to know her, so I just can’t understand how he’s barely known her for longer than I have, and yet he just knows that she’s the one.”

“No, I hear you. But I lived with Jane for 18 years, and she’s just…like that. She’s never had any ambitions beyond becoming whatever ideal housewife Mom wants to mold her into. What you get with Jane is exactly what it says on the tin.”

“…I can say that she’s obliging, then. And loyal. And…always willing to see the best in everyone?” He groans. “That sounds even dumber now that I’m saying it out loud.”

She pats his arm with only a little exaggerated patience. “Don’t worry. At least it will be better than whatever Lydia can come up with as maid of honor. You just have to power through one evening, and then you’ll be free of us. If Lydia botches her speech, she’ll have to hear about it from our sisters and our new brother-in-law for the rest of her life.”

He blinks. “I can’t believe this is really happening. Charlie’s going to be your brother-in-law. And Joe is going to be your brother-in-law’s brother-in-law.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to settle for only being his second-favorite Bennet sister. Are you sure you don’t want to follow their lead and permanently join my family, too? Mary is the quiet, studious type, like you. And I hear Kitty is single again.”

He snorts. “I did offer for us to adopt each other, remember? You’ll always be my favorite.”

She looks across the floor at him then, and something shifts—it’s as if tonight she’s seeing him for the first time, and something about the earnest expression in his eyes sends an unexpected but not wholly unwelcome shiver down her back.

Lizzy was expecting her mother to be her usual awful self at Jane’s wedding, but this has to be a new low even for her.

Mrs. Bennet arrives at the venue in her old wedding dress, a blindingly white 1980s monstrosity with enormous sleeves that were clearly a rip off of Princess Diana’s. Then, as if it wasn’t tasteless enough for her to upstage the bride by wearing not only white but a wedding dress to someone else’s wedding, she calls even more attention to herself by screeching that she earned the right to wear her dress by virtue of being the mother of the bride. Lizzy would be gratified that Charlie had disinvited both his sisters, if not for the fact that Mrs. Bennet’s shouting was directed at his aunt, who was sure to report it all back to Lulu and Cara before the ceremony was even underway. She wouldn’t even blame Charlie if he decided to convince Jane to elope with him while they still have time before the ceremony.

Having thoroughly mortified her daughters with that display, Mrs. Bennet then proceeds to exact revenge on Mary specifically, for her refusal to play the organ for free, by demanding that she be dropped from the wedding party. The bridesmaid dresses are ill-fitting on Mary, she sneers, and Charlie only has two groomsmen against Jane’s three bridesmaids, so the numbers are uneven. Besides, Mary would blemish the photos with her glasses and her permanent scowl when everyone else in the wedding party looks so photogenic.

Jane, as Jane-like as ever, tries to mollify both parties by suggesting that Mary remain in the bridal party (because she deserves to share her big day) but sit out the photos (to appease their mother), which is met with an incredulous scoff from Mary, Lizzy, and Kitty.

Lydia, as maid of honor, does nothing to help smooth over the situation because she’s too busy sexting one of the groomsmen, so Mary ends up storming out altogether, yelling over her shoulder that she hopes Jane’s marriage crashes and burns because she couldn’t do the bare minimum and stand up to a common schoolyard bully who's desperately trying to relive her glory days and forget she’s a washed-up loser whose own husband can’t even stand her.

Well, no one goes after her or speaks out after that outburst, since any step out of line against Mrs. Bennet would only further ruin Jane’s big day. Seething, Lizzy makes a mental note to check her mother’s Facebook after the wedding and prepare her own statement to set the record straight, just in case Mrs. Bennet decides to go on a social media tirade and set all of Meryton’s self-righteous matrons on her third daughter. 

Because in this family, this would be the type of shit she has to worry about on her sister’s wedding day.

Chapter Text

With the Mary situation taken care of, Mrs. Bennet turns her attention to the bridesmaids’ shoes. Lizzy had brought heels, in order to somewhat match her sisters in height, as her mother requested. But Mrs. Bennet takes issue with now nice Lizzy’s heels are in comparison to Lydia’s flats and determines that the maid of honor must not be outdone, and so she sends Lydia off with Papa’s credit card to go buy herself a new pair of heels—even though Lydia is already the tallest Bennet sister and has no need for additional height, and the bridesmaid dresses are floor-length and nobody will be seeing their footwear anyway.

At any rate, with so many other, practical things still to worry about, Lizzy decides it’s not worth arguing on principle, and so she leaves to go oversee the other preparations. The caterer is just informing her that there was a mix-up with the entrees when Lydia returns from the mall, prompting Mrs. Bennet to show off her newly acquired Louboutins to any and all unwilling guests who had the misfortune of turning up early to tour the Netherfield mansion. Lizzy grits her teeth and tells the caterer that they’ll just have to do without the beef entrée option.

Lydia also mysteriously disappears some time after the groomsmen start arriving, so Lizzy ends up being the one to dig out her checkbook and settle a dispute between Mrs. Bennet and the photographer she was apparently trying to stiff. Then, when Lydia emerges very unsubtly from the men’s dressing room (followed soon after by an even more disheveled-looking Bingley cousin), Mrs. Bennet fusses all over her and whisks her back to the bridesmaids’ dressing room to have her ruined hairstyle put to rights, so Lizzy has to be the one to rearrange the seating arrangements now that Mary won’t be at the wedding.

When Lizzy rejoins her sisters in Jane’s dressing room with about half an hour left until the ceremony, Mrs. Bennet clucks disapprovingly at the tendrils of hair that are already starting to escape Lizzy’s updo (thanks to her constantly having to run around doing what should be the maid of honor’s job), and threatens to have her sit out the ceremony if it isn’t fixed in time. But before the stylist can get on that, the zipper of Kitty’s bridesmaid dress gets caught and tears a hole down the back, and then there’s an uproar when Lydia discovers her brand new Louboutins have disappeared. Lizzy decides to make herself scarce and go looking for the missing shoes herself, since Kitty, Lydia, and Mrs. Bennet are too busy blaming each other for this latest series of mishaps to actually do anything productive.

Lizzy almost runs face-to-chest into Will at the foot of the stairs. She gives him a very rushed, very condensed rundown of the crisis (missing shoes, torn dress, and hair that she’ll never get a chance to fix if her family doesn’t give her a second to breathe). Godsend that he is, Will immediately volunteers to hunt down the shoes and a sewing kit and make sure that Charlie is ready for the first look, then catches her by the hand before she can dash off again.

“I don’t care what your mom thinks,” he says. “You look perfect.”

As it turns out, Lizzy does get her hair done in time, Jane does repair the torn zipper on Kitty’s dress (Lydia being neither competent at mending nor present to discharge her maid of honor duties), the missing Louboutins are found (behind a large potted plant, where Mrs. Bennet must have absentmindedly placed them when she got distracted by her fight with the photographer, even though she insists it was Mary trying to sabotage the wedding), and the ceremony does proceed as planned (once Kitty finds Lydia in the bathroom with her tongue down Charlie’s cousin Dave’s throat).

Then they move to the reception hall at Netherfield, where dinner is eaten and toasts given, and Jane and her new husband share their first dance, and Jane and Papa share their father-daughter dance (after Mrs. Bennet bullies him for not getting on the dance floor fast enough, snapping, “For pity’s sake, Tom, you lazy son of a bitch, get over there and at least look like you’re trying to put in some effort for Jane!”). And then the rest of the wedding party do their traditional dance—Lydia with Will, the best man; Kitty with Dave Bingley, the cousin who had been snogging Lydia in the men’s dressing room earlier in the day; and Lizzy with the other groomsman, who happens to be the worst dancer ever.

Lizzy focuses on the floor, trying to keep her toes out of the way of her own dance partner’s fumbling steps while blocking out her mother’s crowing about how her darling Lyddie is sure to be next to the altar, with how cozy and adorable she and the uber-rich best man are together.

It was stupid to let one casual compliment before the ceremony get to her.

It was stupid to feel her anger welling up at the smirk Lydia had thrown her way when she’d turned around and grinded against Will.

It was even stupider to feel her heart skip a beat at the sight of Will pulling away from her youngest sister as soon as the dance was over and intercepting Lizzy as she made to go back to the tables, offering his hand with a crooked smile.

It was stupider still for her to take him up on his offer, and wind her arms around his neck, feel him curl a hand protectively around her waist and pull her closer, inhale the familiar scent that she’s long come to associate with warmth and safety, and suddenly not be able to look him in the eye because the DJ chose that moment to play “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”

She’d fled to the back garden as soon as the song was over, to cower in the colonnade while trying to grapple with the horrifying sensation of butterflies doing flip-flops in her stomach. He’s her best friend. Of nearly six years. Who’d explicitly stated that she wasn’t his type, that she was like a sister to him. Who’d take a bullet for her, and vice versa, because they’re best friends, and who, next to her father, is the most important person in the world to her, and she’d never intentionally hurt him because she adores him as a friend. It’s just the romantic atmosphere of the wedding. She can’t go and catch feelings like every bad trope in bad YA fiction.

Kitty is out in the garden, too, having apparently slipped away from the reception in favor of hiding in the gazebo at some point after the conclusion of her dance with that skeevy cousin of Charlie’s. Her back is turned, so Lizzy is preparing to alert her sister to her presence and join her when she realizes Kitty is not alone.

“I know, she’s such an asshole,” she’s saying to the person huddled on the bench beside her. Lizzie realizes belatedly that Mary is still here. “After you left, she started picking on Lizzy for her shoes, and she called me a fatass when my dress tore. And people kept coming up to me at the reception and asking where you were. I wanted to tell them to ask Mom directly.”

“Guess we’ll see what kind of cover story she can come up with to save face. Probably going to accuse me of having a diva fit and storming out because I couldn’t stand the spotlight being on Jane instead of me for one minute, or something.”

(Lizzy did, in fact, overhear Mrs. Bennet telling Charlie’s grandparents something to that effect—“You know how aspiring musicians can be when they think they’re more famous and important than they actually are.”)

Kitty puts an arm around Mary in response. “Don’t worry. If Mom says anything less than the truth about what happened, I’ll have Hill write up a statement and set the record straight on Instagram.”

“Doesn’t stop all of Meryton from hating me.”

“Your fans are the ones who matter. Meryton doesn’t. Forget them all. Lydia’s probably giving Charlie’s cousin a blowjob in the bathroom by now, if she hasn’t switched to making a move on the best man yet. Jane’s probably still gushing about how lucky she is to have such a perfect family, and how we’ll all find our own perfect husband someday. And you’d think Mom was the one getting married, with how much attention she was drawing to herself.”

“And I didn’t even hear a word from Lizzy after I left. No ‘that was shitty of Mom, are you okay?’ No ‘you should come to the reception as a fuck-you to Mom.’ No ‘do you still want to be seated with the wedding party, or do you want to be moved as far away from Mom as possible?’ Can you believe, after we talked and I decided to stay, I showed up at the reception, and she’d even taken away my seating reservation?”

Lizzy waits for Kitty to point out that Lizzy was too busy putting out fire after fire, because Lydia was too busy shirking her maid-of-honor duties, and Jane could never acknowledge the mere existence of a problem, much less get off her ass to try and fix it, and Mrs. Bennet had made it her personal mission to get in the way as much as possible and make everything twice as hard as it needed to be. Besides, Mary was the one who had shouted she was leaving and then stormed off. It’s not like Lizzy could have known that she’d changed her mind and stuck around.

But Kitty just cringes. “I know, and it was so awkward when nobody spoke up about Mom kicking you out. Lizzy wasn’t going to back me up, and I couldn’t speak up alone because then Mom would have just thrown me out too, and it would have made an even bigger scene.”

“It’s just like Lizzy,” Mary snorts, “trying to keep up appearances so we don’t tip the guests off that there was drama in the bridal party. It’s always about how we make her look. Of course she’d side with Jane and Lydia when she’s not the one that Mom is picking on.”

“…Yeah, I gotta admit, I was pretty disappointed in her, too. She’s normally so quick to jump into a fight if it means going against Mom.”

“Probably content with anything that happens to us as long as she’s Dad’s favorite.”

“Or, being friends with the groom and all, making sure his wedding day goes smoothly is more important than standing up for her own sister. And then she’ll leave town when it’s over and forget she has a family again until the next time it’s convenient for her.”

Mary mumbles something that Lizzy doesn’t catch, before Kitty suddenly springs up and stamps her foot on the ground.

“Seriously, forget them all,” she declares. “None of them give a shit about anyone but themselves. After tonight, it’ll be just you and me. Did you know your show in Leipzig sold out last week? Let’s focus on your crowds of adoring fans in Europe. We’ll take Prague by storm, and then Vienna, and Milan—and don’t think I forgot about treating you at that gelato place again…”

Lizzy slips out of her high heels and walks away in the other direction as swiftly and quietly as she can. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop—she swears she was going to join in and ask Mary if she was doing okay, until they had brought her own name into it.

She hadn’t even realized that Mary was already so accomplished as a concert pianist, despite being only freshly graduated with her BFA, that she has an agent and a dedicated Internet following, or that she’s booking major gigs and international tours.

And what was that about, going to Milan again? She remembers Mary had mentioned being in Italy during Easter break last year, but she had no idea that Kitty had gone with her. Or that she and Kitty were so close that Kitty is going on this upcoming concert tour of Europe, too.

For the longest time growing up, it had been Lizzy, and Mary, and Kitty. They hadn’t always seen eye to eye—especially when Mary was caught up in her own self-importance, or when Kitty was trying to passively court favor with their mother by being Lydia’s shadow. But with Lydia being the golden child and Jane almost never incurring any of Mrs. Bennet’s wrath once it became apparent that she was the prettiest among them, they became the three middle daughters who could consistently be drawn from whenever Mrs. Bennet needed an easy target, so it was often necessary to join forces.

Is Lizzy the odd one out now? In a family of five daughters, Jane and Lydia were often paired together by virtue of being the only two daughters who still live in Meryton and speak to Mrs. Bennet. And Mary and Kitty, the other two black sheep, had both escaped to the same art school and apparently grown closer for it.

If she’s being fair, Lizzy can’t exactly blame Mary and Kitty for feeling abandoned when she’d moved out at 18 and never looked back. She’d called home often enough while away at university, but usually only to speak to Papa. But she did check in on their birthdays and send them money to help them save up for art school. How could her sisters accuse her of being indifferent to and tacitly in approval of Mary’s expulsion from the bridal party, when she was too busy working her ass off to ensure Jane’s wedding didn’t disgrace their entire family because Lydia sure as fuck wasn’t going to put in any effort? How could they look at all the work she’d been forced to do today and think it was a signal that she’d sided with Lydia and Mrs. Bennet’s faction? Do they truly think so little of her?

She pulls out her phone and furiously taps out a message.

Sorry about the reception seating. I’d assumed you wouldn’t be there after you said you were leaving, but my bad for not being able to read minds. But sure, keep assuming that it was because I was siding with those bitches, if it makes you feel better—

Someone else is leaving the mansion and walking down the garden path towards her. It looks like it might be Aunt Maddy, but it’s hard to tell through the blur of tears.

She thinks she hears her aunt calling her name, but she quickens her pace and ducks behind the cover of a trellis, down a meandering little side path, only stopping once she encounters some stone benches and she’s sure that her aunt hasn’t followed. Aunt Maddy was likely acting as an emissary, dispatched by Mrs. Bennet to come outside and track down Lizzy because she’s needed to resolve some crisis or another.

A little while later, she hears her aunt and her sisters’ voices calling for her. They’re from close enough that Lizzy suspects there’s only a row or two of rosebushes separating them, so she curls up on the bench and waits for them to give up and assume she went back into the house.

Her phone rings. It’s Kitty. (Thankfully, Lizzy had it on silence for the wedding, so it doesn’t draw any attention.) They must have realized she overheard them once Aunt Maddy mentioned seeing her in the garden not too far from the gazebo.

She declines the call.

Is it immature and counterproductive to sulk and avoid her sisters, instead of just being the bigger person and talking to them? Probably. Will Darcy was right when he’d pointed out that she has a tendency to give the cold shoulder and then get annoyed with people when they can’t read her mind and figure out what they did to upset her. But Lizzy Bennet has never claimed to be rational and mature one hundred percent of the time, and she doubts she’d be able to have a calm and reasonable conversation with Mary or Kitty right now anyway.

She’s not even sure who is the biggest target of her anger:

Mrs. Bennet for being a spiteful and vindictive hag, utterly lacking in basic human decency?

Jane for her inability to grow a backbone and for even thinking that there could be a morally upstanding middle ground between keeping her sister in her wedding party and kicking her out?

Lydia for foisting all the maid of honor’s duties onto Lizzy while getting all the credit? For viewing other women as her competition and flirting with anything and everything in pants, like an animal pissing all over the place to mark its territory? (She wonders if Lydia was secretly jealous that Jane is the first Bennet sister to get married. She wouldn’t put it past her to try to sabotage the wedding by doing less than the bare minimum.)

Mary and Kitty, for excluding her from their circle, as if the bridesmaids and seating fiascos were Lizzy’s fault? For painting themselves as the sole victims and Lizzy as the big bad villain, as if running herself ragged today for the sake of the wedding was a direct slap in their faces?

Or herself, for not standing up for Mary, for kind of deserving at least some of Mary and Kitty’s resentment, and resenting them right back because she can’t swallow her pride and face them?

“Are you still out here avoiding your family, or are you just afraid you’re about to turn into a pumpkin?”

If her emotional state weren’t in such turmoil, she might have been able to appreciate how incredible William Darcy looks in his tux, with the fairy lights in the garden softly twinkling behind him like a halo. As it is, she just stares dumbly.

After her aunt and sisters gave up their search and rejoined the party, Lizzy had wandered around a bit more among the topiaries because she wasn’t feeling up to company. In hindsight, she’s not sure why she didn’t expect him to come looking for her, when she and the groom are the only people in attendance he really knows here.

Will frowns when she doesn’t reply.

“Did something happen to upset you?” he asks gently.

“Nothing,” she blurts. Then, “Everything. I don’t know! My family is a mess.”

“I couldn’t help but notice that Jane was down one bridesmaid during the ceremony, and Mary and Kitty just had a shouting match with your mother over the punch bowl.”

“They had—a what? Oh great. So they really are going to make it everybody’s business then. Kitty just can’t help herself, when Mom’s determined to push her buttons. Don’t tell me—was Lydia recording the whole thing, too?”

“Lizzy. What happened?”

She couldn’t lie to her best friend even if she wanted to. Especially not after he sits down on the bench beside her, his warmth seeping through the sleeve of his shirt and jacket, pressed against her bare arm.

Will listens quietly as Lizzy relates what happened prior to the ceremony, what she just overheard in the gazebo, and the rollercoaster of emotions that ensued when she learned just what her sisters think of her.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he begins hesitantly, “why didn’t you speak up? I would have expected you, at least, to have something to say about it, even if Jane would have immunity in your mother’s eyes, as the bride.”

Lizzy shrugs helplessly. “I didn’t want to make a scene and further embarrass Jane on her wedding day. Mom would have just kicked us out, too, and then there would be even more questions at the ceremony as to why none of Jane’s sisters are willing to stand up with her. Not that it matters anymore, after Mary and Kitty’s very public falling out with Mom. It’ll reach all of Mary’s music fans on Instagram by tomorrow, if Mom hasn’t bashed her all over Facebook yet. Believe me, I wouldn’t mind the truth about what Mom did to Mary getting out, but not if it ruins Jane’s memory of her wedding day.”

“I understand the focus should be on your oldest sister since it’s her wedding, but what happened to Mary was—”

“Heinous? Unacceptable? Utterly devoid of human decency? I know.”

“Right now, half the people in that reception hall think that Mary stormed off in a fit of jealousy, and that it broke Jane’s heart not to have her there. So why not tell people the truth? Show them exactly what kind of person your mother is, and show Mary that you care?”

“Because! My family is already the laughingstock of Meryton, and me getting involved would only make it more apparent that we can’t present a united front, that my sisters can’t fight their own battles or resolve things privately… People would pity us, or mock us and think we’re exaggerating and making it all up for attention. Or if they believe us, then they’ll blame us for being too stupid to speak up and report the abuse. Because none of us ever told a teacher, or a doctor, or the authorities. They’ll ask, ‘if what you say happened is true, then why did none of you ever say something while it was happening? Why come forward now?’”

She’s crying openly now, tears streaming down her cheeks and probably ruining his (very expensive) tuxedo jacket as he wraps her into a hug.

There’s no point in hiding. He’s seen her like this before (once, when he’d happened to come across her just as a very, very rare phone call with Mrs. Bennet had devolved into a tearful screaming match that had nearly ended with her phone smashed to pieces on the floor). He’s also seen her laughing so hard that her makeup ran and her stomach hurt and her cheeks ached from smiling. He’s seen her ugly-crying after a sad movie, and seething with jealousy when she spotted her ex-boyfriend moving on after only a week, and every other emotion in between.

“At first, I didn’t speak up because I thought what went on in my family was normal,” she mumbles into Will’s shoulder. “I thought every other family was like us. I think I was five when I learned that we had to go by different rules at school than at home. I did tell my Aunt Maddy, once… I told her, ‘Mom hits us all the time!” I remember my aunt got really concerned, and she had to clarify with Jane that Mom only hit us when we were being bad. And then she sat us down and said, very seriously, that what I said could get my parents in trouble if people misunderstood me. And that my parents love us, and Mom only disciplines us because she loves us, and we should be good little girls for Mom so that we don’t stress her out. I was only six or seven at the time, and I didn’t have the words to explain that she was wrong and I meant what I said. So I guess I decided that the grown-ups couldn’t be counted on.”

She feels him tighten his arms around her. “I’m sorry that none of the adults in your life stepped up.”

She smiles ruefully as she pulls back. “At the risk of sounding like every abuse survivor ever, it wasn’t that bad—at least, not once I got older and more capable of physically defending myself. I started keeping her in line by threatening to report her, and she didn’t dare hit me again after that. I wasn’t going to do it, though, since I’d lose my leverage if I did. And I didn’t have any video cameras or tangible proof, so it would have been my word against hers. Jane and Lydia would definitely back Mom up if it went to court. Maybe even Kitty, if she was coached and threatened enough ahead of time. Papa could have filed for divorce, but the courts tend to favor mothers more than fathers, so it could have blown up in my face with all five of us being forced to live with Mom. I planned out my escape by getting Papa to teach me to drive, and I learned how to cook and do laundry for myself and be as self-sufficient as I could, so I wouldn’t be forced to move back home if university didn’t work out.”

His hands are still on her shoulders when he tilts her chin to look him in the eyes. “Lizzy, I know nothing I can say will change what happened to you, or how much it sucked, but I believe you.”

Will thinks the problem is her father.

“I’m serious,” he insists. “You and Mary and Kitty were all treated badly by your mother. Why else would they feel that you don’t belong in their group, if it weren’t for the fact that your father favored you?”

“Papa doesn’t play favorites! I wasn’t the only one he took out for ice cream and movies when we were being grounded for nonsensical reasons.”

“But your mother did hit you less because he would intervene on your behalf. Can you say that he did the same for Mary or Kitty?”

“Even if he did it less with them, that doesn’t mean Papa’s responsible for any of the shit Mom did.”

“But he could have stepped in. Even when the target was you. Why did he wait until after she was done before sneaking you out for ice cream? Why not make it clear, regardless of which daughter was being hit, that that he doesn’t approve of her methods for discipline?”

“Maybe he thought if he spoke up, then she’d hit us harder the next time he wasn’t home! Maybe he was afraid she would play the victim and make him out to be the abuser and then take custody of all of us! What makes you think you know better than the people in my family?”

“Lizzy, I know he’s your father and you love him, but you weren’t there tonight. When Mary and your mom had their fight, he didn’t get involved at all. He didn’t do anything to convince them to resolve their issues in private when the shouting drew a crowd. He just served himself a big slice of cake and sat back to enjoy the show. When Mary ran off after that fight, he didn’t go after her to make sure she was okay. I also heard him telling multiple guests that it was a blessing that Kitty and Lydia haven’t been on speaking terms because those two could never string together a sensible sentence between the two of them. He referred to Jane as Lydia twice by mistake at the reception, as if he forgot whose wedding he’s at. He called Lydia her mother’s daughter three times this morning, at least within my hearing, in a way that was clearly meant to disparage his own daughter and the mother of his children—”  

“Oh, my bad, I didn’t realize you were suddenly my mom’s biggest champion—”

“I’m not taking sides here, Lizzy. It’s not as simple as black and white, Good Dad versus Evil Mom. The fact is, your father is not kind to your sisters. And it seems like most of your sisters aren’t that close to him, or to each other. That can’t all be blamed on your mom. Your father is a grown man, not some hapless victim she’s keeping hostage at home. Why didn’t he defend you or your sisters more? Why did he never visit you, in the six years since you moved out? He’s certainly not afraid of Mrs. Bennet, considering the number of times he spoke up at Christmas dinner to undermine and embarrass her. Nothing’s stopping him from speaking his own mind or making his own decisions. I don’t mean to overstep by getting involved in your family’s affairs—”

“Well, you are overstepping. Consider it a best-friends-exclusive privilege that I’m still standing here listening to you spout this horseshit, because I would have thrown you out of my life by now if it were anybody else.”

“Look, I’m sorry if this is upsetting to hear, but I don’t think you’re looking at the full situation objectively. I only meant that sometimes it’s helpful to have an outsider’s view of the situation, if you have decades of unhappy memories that may be influencing your perception of people and events.”

“Oh, so he’s moved on to accusing women of being emotional now!”

His shoulders stiffen in irritation. “Lizzy, I’m just offering a different perspective, that maybe you haven’t dealt with your past in the healthiest way. I know what I said about your family may not be what you want to hear, and arguing in good faith isn’t something that’s typically done when your family is involved, but I would appreciate if you could hear me out and not willfully misinterpret what I’m saying.”

Will has never, in all their years of knowing one another, taken on that tone with her.

It stings, being chastised by a friend. It’s even more mortifying than the time he’d pointed out how she’d behaved immaturely toward her first ex. Because how many times has she wished that her family could resolve conflicts by acting like adults, instead of taking cheap shots and going for personal attacks? And yet she did take the low road and hurl accusations at Will that he doesn’t deserve, that aren’t even relevant to the discussion they’re having.

She turns away before the tears fall again.

“You’re not my therapist,” she chokes out. “And I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I mean it.”

She hears him sigh. Then, “Okay.”

He’s silent for a long moment, and she wonders if he’s gone back inside. Leave that Loathsome Lizzy alone to her miserable self, she can picture Mrs. Bennet saying. She’s happiest when she’s driven everybody away with that attitude. Come back to the party, where everyone’s celebrating the happy couple. Have I mentioned that my Lydia is single and exceptionally eligible?

He clears his throat. “It’s getting cold out. Can I offer you my jacket? Or something to drink? I think there was still some hot chocolate going around.”

“You go ahead and enjoy yourself. I’m going to need a minute to myself.”

The same wedding, a different hour.

Will brings her a slice of cake as a peace offering, even though he famously hates red velvet and refuses to go within ten feet of it. It feels like they’re back in familiar territory when he teases her to enjoy her Play-Doh cake, and she retorts that at least it’s not the chocolate-pineapple abomination that Joe and Lulu Hurst had at their wedding.

Lizzy absentmindedly backspaces out the message she’d written earlier and been prevented from sending to Mary by the arrival of Aunt Maddy. Mary’s already had her day ruined multiple times over, and Lizzy doesn’t need to give her another reason to hate her. Best to deal with that some other time.

“When Giana ran off with that older guy,” she says tentatively, “how did you two manage to make up? How long did it take before she forgave you?”

Will stiffens, like he always does when the Wickham debacle is brought up.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “It was months before she would even take my calls. But it was more out of embarrassment than any lingering anger toward me. Gia was always hardest on herself. Blamed herself for falling for cheap tricks and needing me to come to her rescue.” He leans his elbows on his knees, staring down at his hands. “We got through it, though. I guess it helps that, with our parents gone, I’m the only family she has left.” He glances at her, still huddled on the bench. “You should explain to your sisters that what happened with Mary’s seat was an honest mistake, and you’re sorry you contributed to her feeling unwelcome. They’ll forgive you.”

“I doubt that. Mary’s grudges are legendary.” She sighs at the half-dozen more missed calls that have come in from her sisters while she’s been talking to Will. “And my phone’s been on silent, so now they probably think I’m ignoring them out of spite. Trust my sisters to take any little thing and make it out to be a personal attack against them.”

Because that is what their upbringing in the Bennet household would have taught them, isn’t it? She considers Jane: perfect, proper Jane who would make the picture-perfect housewife, who won’t worry her pretty little head over anything that isn’t related to housekeeping or childrearing. Charlie will discover in time, if he hasn’t already, that his new wife has no original thoughts of her own and would rather ignore problems than acknowledge that they need addressing. Lydia has turned out to be a carbon copy of Mrs. Bennet, with her attitude of entitlement and her preoccupation with being viewed by men as the most desirable out of her sisters. She considers Mary: perpetually single and cast aside by her mother as the least attractive, but now with adoring fans and sold-out concert halls. She wonders if any of it would truly make Mary happy, to measure her own self-worth by the extrinsic value of other people’s approval. And then there’s Kitty, the one who was forever in Lydia’s shadow, who now thinks everything is a competition and people need to be on her side.

They certainly don’t feel as a loving family ought. They don’t feel like real sisters, just inmates from the same prison they happened to all grow up in. What does it say about Lizzy that she’s at Jane’s wedding, and yet she’s closer to the groom than to her own sister? That Mary and Kitty’s reaction to Mary’s public humiliation at Mrs. Bennet’s hands was to blame Lizzy for being complicit? That she can’t even honestly say she loves Lydia? That she knows for a fact that none of her sisters would be there for her if it really mattered?

(Papa would, though. Will is entitled to his opinion, but he’s still wrong.)

“I’ve been living on my own for six years, and I didn’t even go back to visit for the first five. I got into university, got a job, and became self-sufficient, so I would never have to go back and depend on my family for financial support. But now I’m wondering…if I had never left…would I be on better terms with my sisters? I can’t say I was ever besties with any of them, but I thought I was at least closer to Mary and Kitty than to Jane or Lydia. Jane and Lydia were always Mom’s favorites. But now Mary and Kitty have each other, and they’re off having their own exclusive grand adventures that involve concert tours of Europe, and they don’t want me there. Maybe they felt like I abandoned them, like I chose my friends at university over my sisters.”

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis. Your sisters were young when you left, and while it isn’t a rational conclusion to come to, it’s expected that they would feel like they were being cast aside for a new crowd. I would hope, though, that at this age, they would be able to talk to you about their feelings and work through them like adults.”

“But I’m so sick of having to be the bigger person because no one else will. Do you know how many times I had to bite my tongue today? Kitty’s dress tore, and Mom was too busy calling her fat to do anything useful, like fetch Jane a sewing kit. Lydia’s shoes went missing, and Mom was too busy blaming Mary to go look for them herself. The caterer mixed up the entrees, and Lydia was too busy showing off her new shoes that she didn’t even need, so I had to deal with that. The photographer wasn’t being paid fairly and threatened to leave, so I paid her with my own money, when this was something Mom and Jane should have settled months ago. It’s like they only invited me to the wedding to do their dirty work for them, not because the bride and I are family or anything.”

Is there anybody in her life that actually loves her, besides Papa? She has her friends from university, sure, but she and Charlie haven’t spoken about anything but Jane and wedding things in the past year, and she would bet her annual salary that she won’t hear from him again until Christmas, and only because he’ll want to gush about married life. And Joe has made it clear that he’s sticking by Lulu, and he wouldn’t even come to Charlie’s wedding because his wife isn’t welcome. And Will—nope, not going to follow that train of thought tonight.

“Is it me, then? Am I the common denominator? Is there something I’m doing that I’m not aware of, like testing people’s willingness to be there for me by doing and demanding more and more horrible things until I drive them away, like some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of being ‘abandoned’?”

“Lizzy, no. I don’t think that’s it. Do you remember how Charlie was, the first year we met? Can you imagine that Charlie telling his sisters to mind their own pompous business if they told him the girl he was seeing wasn’t good enough? Let alone going no-contact when they tried to break off his engagement?”

She tries and fails to picture an 18-year-old Charlie Bingley, who once couldn’t decide between waffles or French toast for breakfast without consulting his friends, standing up to his pushy sisters and insisting he’s found the love of his life. The mental image does make her laugh, though.

Will continues, “He wouldn’t have done any of that if he didn’t have your self-confidence as an example. And Hurst, he was constantly sleeping late because he couldn’t be bothered to set an alarm before bed. I would have continued waking him up in time for class and setting alarms for him, if you hadn’t pointed out that he was a grown man who didn’t need me to mother him.”

“If I recall correctly, he only started setting his own alarms because I figured out his passcode and would make the alarm go off every 30 minutes starting at 2 a.m., and he needed to check each night to make sure I wasn’t pranking him again.”

“Still. You made him pull himself together and take responsibility for himself, and now he’s making six figures and can afford to take vacations every other month. Both Charlie and Hurst are better for having known you, Lizzy.”

She forces a smile. “So I pranked Joe into taking his studies seriously, and I scared Charlie to the point of learning to assert his boundaries. What did I do for you? Teach you to cuss like my mom? Get you to consider switching careers and becoming a therapist if Pemberley BioTech doesn’t work out?”

“You tease, but I am a better person for knowing you, too.” He coughs and tucks his chin into his neck. “You were always teasing me for the size of my ego. And you weren’t wrong.”

“Oh?”

“Do you, ah, remember that conversation we had, about whether I had a…type?”

“You mean when I called you out for mansplaining and always interrupting me? How could I forget?”

“No—” and here he flushes bright red “—I meant, what we were talking about before that came up.”

“Your checklist of accomplishments your ideal girlfriend would have? I vaguely remember something about having to speak three languages and how you didn’t have any specific physical traits like height or hair color that drew you in.”

He clears his throat. “Well. Um. You’re going to laugh hearing this, but…at the time, I thought you were, you know, into me.”

She does laugh. “Seriously? You thought the best way to get your crush to like you was to act like nobody was good enough for you?”

“That wasn’t exactly what was going through my head. You were really pretty, sure, but I just thought I was hot shit, so of course you’d be interested. It was like you shattered my entire worldview when I realized you thought I was a condescending and self-absorbed dunce. It bruised my ego, but I didn’t actually have a crush on you, at the time. Not until—” He stops abruptly and somehow blushes even redder.

She digs her fingernails into her palms. “Not until…?” she prompts, willing her heart rate to calm down.

“…Until later in our first year. When you starting going out with Matt, during the spring semester. Then I realized you only saw me as a friend, and you weren’t reading anything deeper into our talks, or when I invited you to visit Pemberley.” He grins sheepishly. “I’m sure 20-year-old me was crushed that you weren’t able to read my nonexistent signals, but now I’m just glad you never suspected anything because I was such an idiot.”

Oh. So it was a missed opportunity by more than five years.

She frowns, recalling something else. “Oh gosh, and then after Matt dumped me, I went to you to rant about the breakup!” She buries her face in her hands and peeks up at him through her fingers. “I had absolutely no filter because I thought that was just how we were. I’m so sorry. If I’d known, I never would have aired out my problems like I expected you to fix them, or made you feel like I was looking for a rebound!”

(She also remembers belatedly that the reason Matt had broken up with her was because of her own immature and petty grudge-holding. Well, given her behavior tonight, it’s no wonder Will feels comfortable talking about his former crush now.)

He shakes his head vehemently. “I never saw it that way. I was pretty much over my delusions and my butthurt by the time Matt was out of the picture, so I just took it as you going to a friend for support. And I was grateful that you saw me as trustworthy and dependable, even though I didn’t feel like I deserved it. At the very least, I learned an important lesson—to actually say what I mean when I want something, instead of assuming I’m entitled to it. So I was even more grateful for the chance to be your friend for real.”

Maybe it’s for the best that Will got over his crush on her relatively quickly. There’s no way a relationship would have lasted if they had dated in university, especially if he had made his sentiments about her family known earlier on. She’s too prone to anger, too prone to defensiveness, to be what he’s looking for, and even more so back then. She’s tried to stay friends with some of her exes in the past, but there was no getting around how awkward it was to have to act normal around somebody and try not to think, “I used to make out with this person.” Breaking up with Will could have imploded their entire friend group.

Besides, they’re both heading back to their own lives in their separate home cities tomorrow, because life still goes on after a wedding. Best not to wonder about what can’t be. He’s at the stage in his life now where he’s focused on growing his biotechnology startup and revitalizing his hometown, while she’s…ignoring her mother’s phone calls and actively avoiding Meryton as much as possible.

At best, they’ll get in touch every now and then, keep track of each other’s lives peripherally for a few years until life gets too busy and takes them down even more diverging paths. She’ll call him when her mother pisses her off, and he’ll call her when he needs to vent about Giana. Then he’ll meet someone more suitable to his lifestyle and settle down, and she’ll maybe slog along at her job until she figures out if she wants to go to graduate school or just save up enough money to live alone comfortably.

Maybe she’ll get a cat. Maybe, if she’s feeling ambitious, she’ll even reach out to some of her sisters and try to be a part of their lives, too. After they work out their own mommy issues, of course.