Overcome

by Melanie Rachel

  “If you’d told me a year ago that I wouldn’t mind being wrapped around a woman’s little finger, I would never have believed you.” Richard tapped the armrest lightly with his fingers. “But to be honest, I just don’t care.”

  “The sign of a true love, brother,” Oscar proclaimed grandly, blowing smoke rings in Richard’s direction.

  “Stop,” his brother laughed, waving a hand to dispel the cloud. “I’ll be sure to tell Jane you’re the reason I smell like smoke.”

  “Yes,” Oscar replied, sanguine. “I’m sure she’ll believe you.”

  They sat in companionable silence for a time before Richard finally turned to face his brother. “Oscar,” he said critically, “You didn’t travel back to the city mid-week and call me over here just to praise Jane and blow smoke in my face. What’s going on?” He waited for an explanation, but Oscar just blew another smoke ring as he silently considered the gray February sky.

  “I wanted to give you a heads-up, that’s all,” Oscar said at last, without looking at his brother. “And I can count on you to tell Will.”

  Richard groaned. “I already don’t like it. California?”

  Oscar nodded, setting his cigar on a crystal ashtray. “Dad managed to get a closed session.” He watched his younger brother carefully before adding, “It’s not like either G or Elizabeth are in trouble, and they aren’t the only ones being called. It’s just testimony.” He bent forward, elbows on his knees, starting straight ahead. “It’s a congressional family squabble. Nobody wants this to get out, but they do want details. To prevent it from happening again, they say.”

  Richard grimaced. Squabble? If this was a squabble, I’d hate to see an actual argument. “Both of them?”

  Oscar nodded. “And soon.”

  Will dropped his whiskey glass on the coffee table. “When?” he asked coolly. The Darcy game face was firmly in place, meaning it was impossible to discern any emotion at all. Richard felt a pang when it appeared. Since his return home, he’d seen Will wearing it exactly once—on the flight to Palo Alto. That was a tremendous improvement over the past five years, when his cousin had barely even cracked a smile unless he was speaking about G.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied, “but barring any emergencies, next week sometime. They may already have placed the calls, but if not, it won’t be long.”

  “Elizabeth is doing so well in West Virginia,” Will muttered. “I hope this doesn’t knock her off track.” He glanced up at his cousin. “And G is getting ready for midterms. She probably had better plans for this weekend than flying across the country.” He sat back and tossed his arms behind his head. “A year ago, they’d have had to make that call to me,” he grumbled.

  Richard dropped onto the other end of the sofa. “A year ago, she’d have been living here, and she wouldn’t have been able to meet Wickham at all.” He fingered his own glass as Will straightened and checked his watch. “Who do you worry most about?”

  “G,” Will said, without any hesitation. “I know Elizabeth can handle herself. She’ll be more irritated than anything. G will be scared.”

  Elizabeth was taking her lunch break. She’d just completed three hours of what she now thought of as rewiring. Dr. Kwon and the other therapists had begun teaching her how to reevaluate the experiences that haunted her, to envision them not as obstacles that had damaged her but challenges that had built her into the person she’d become, the kind of person who could respond at De Roos in the way she had. They were nearly through the week now, and she was sure this program had been the right choice. She was still a little aggravated with Will, but she had to admit, he’d done well finding this place. He always does well by you, she told herself, and it’s okay to believe you deserve it. She stopped for a minute, then grinned a little. Dr. Kwon was now officially in her head.

  She checked her phone by habit and saw a number she didn’t recognize. Area code 202. Strange. There was a message, which she ignored. She didn’t really want to talk to anyone new just now. Her finger hovered above the voice mail icon, but she held back. I can check messages tonight, she told herself. It could be a job, but I can’t take anything new until I’m home anyway. If it’s urgent, they’ll need to find someone else.

  By the time she returned to her hotel that evening, she was too curious to wait. She played the message. It was an invitation to testify before the Senate. On Monday. She should call back for travel arrangements. Not really a request, then.

  “Well,” she said aloud, “I suppose I should be glad they didn’t want me this week.” She had a lot of things she’d like to say to them but doubted they would listen. Nosy, interfering politicians playing games with people’s lives. That’s what had started the whole thing. No, she had to admit, Will’s uncle isn’t that bad. Still a consummate politician, she supposed, but he seemed at least to care about what he did. Everest, too, seemed genuine enough.

  Elizabeth was aware that giving testimony had probably been inevitable. It had likely been stalled only because of Senator Fitzwilliam’s intervention and maybe her own work with Abby. Still, the more time passed, the more she’d allowed herself to think it wouldn’t happen at all.

  She flopped backwards onto the bed and wondered if Georgiana was being ordered to appear as well. Vaguely, she thought maybe that would be a silver lining. They could at least have dinner together before G had to get back to school. The senators had to take a break to eat, didn’t they? Maybe it wouldn’t take long. She could just tell them what she knew and leave. She covered her face with a pillow. Yeah, right.

  Will stood up and walked into the kitchen with his phone. When Elizabeth answered, he felt a wave of longing pass over him, and it was a few seconds before he recovered.

  “Will?” she asked, sounding faintly amused. “Is this just a heavy breather call?”

  He laughed a little. “Maybe,” he said, embarrassed, turning on his camera. “Just missing you.”

  The image resolved, revealing her smiling face. “Well, I had high hopes there for a minute,” she teased, but then her tone and expression grew serious. “I assume you heard?”

  He nodded. “G’s in a lab class until late tonight, but I left a message for her to call me.”

  Elizabeth heard a chair squeak. “They left me a voice mail,” she said. “G may not have heard hers yet.”

  “Did they give you a time?” Will asked.

  She grunted an assent. “Monday morning, bright and early. I thought they’d want to hear G first.”

  “They may just make you wait while she testifies,” Will told her. He was tapping the end of his penknife on the table, needing to do something with the nervous energy that he’d been holding in since Richard had given him the news.

  Elizabeth made a disgruntled noise in her throat. “That makes sense. I’ll have to bring something to do. Will they let me bring my laptop?”

  Will lifted his shoulders. “Don’t know. I can’t imagine they’d be thrilled about you tapping into networks while you’re waiting to talk to them about homeland security.”

  She released a soft giggle, and as usual, it threw Will off. You weren’t supposed to giggle when you’d just been ordered to the Capitol to testify before the Senate.

  “Not such a great idea, then,” she agreed. “What about a tablet so I can read? Music? Or am I supposed to sit there with nothing to do and looking suitably terrified?” She sniffed disdainfully. “I mean, sorry, boys, but this is nothing compared to De Roos.” She mumbled something. Will thought he heard her say, “Whole world’s dissected that.”

  Will gazed at her, wishing, for the millionth time in three days that they were in the same room. He was desperate to hold her close. The feeling showed up unexpectedly, and it never failed to stun him. She’s so damn brave. It occurred to him, then, that he’d not been as courageous himself. Not even close. The whole world hadn’t seen De Roos on film. He knew of at least one important holdout.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  He’d downloaded th
e videos in June, just after the attacks, and after sitting on them all this time, Will discovered that they weren’t that great. They were stationary, obviously, though having three from different parts of the room did help. When he’d viewed each clip once through, he watched again, using his admittedly incomplete knowledge of events to fill in the blanks as Richard and Elizabeth moved in and out of frame.

  It took him more than one viewing of the best video to see a shadow in the background. He squinted, paused the film. It was Richard, he believed, rolling to find cover and checking a weapon, unnoticed by the gunmen.

  He turned the sound off and moved the film forward and back to pick out details. Richard was still at the far end of the room. Based on the reaction of the terrorists, Elizabeth was behind the bar on the right of the room. They traded fire and one of the attackers fell. She remained out of sight until nearly the end of the recording, when without warning, she dashed out into the chaos and reached out. He watched her hands come back into the picture as she pulled something in. Immediately, she was separating a burning fuse from the neck of a bottle and stomping out the flames. Soft hands, he mused, like a goalkeeper.

  He reversed the video to see Richard, but his back was to the camera. Will stopped the first video and clicked on the second, taken from closer to Elizabeth’s position though still at an angle. He was rewarded with a tighter picture of Richard diving for cover. He reversed again, then slowed the speed to a crawl.

  Richard’s head turned to follow the bottle in the instant before Elizabeth rushed in. Will zoomed in, and something he saw there made him pause the film. He moved in close to the screen, examining his cousin’s face. Richard’s eyes had widened slightly, then relaxed, and one side of his mouth curled up in a smirk. It wasn’t something Will could say he’d ever seen Richard do before. It wasn’t anger, it wasn’t even fear. It was resignation.

  Caught on a shaky, poor-quality digital video, he was observing the moment Richard had accepted that he was not going to escape this attack alive. And he had found something about that which amused him.

  The first and second videos ended with the explosion. The third kept recording, but the phone had apparently been dropped, as the view turned to the ceiling. He turned the volume back on so he could listen, eventually making out Richard’s voice again, calling for casualty numbers before the phone was picked up and swung around the room at a nauseating speed. He reached up to go frame by frame. Only at the end did he get a brief glimpse of Elizabeth as she slid backwards into a booth, careful of her knee and soaked in blood. No wonder, he thought. No wonder it was the smell of blood.

  Will stood abruptly from his chair, striding to one of the room’s two large windows, placing his hands on either side of the casement, and leaning in towards the glass. He loved Richard, had looked up to him when they were boys, in many ways looked up to him still. But seeing his cousin staring down the inevitability of his own painful death with nothing but that expression on his face? Will felt something important shift inside him.

  When Richard told Georgiana that Elizabeth had saved his life, he wasn’t exaggerating. She had. He returned to his desk, wheeling his chair back from the wall where it had drifted when he stood. Still standing, he tapped the play icon and muted the sound to watch as Elizabeth left her own cover to pluck an incendiary device out of midair. It drove him crazy that Elizabeth didn’t prioritize her own safety—but that very characteristic had saved Richard and likely everyone else inside De Roos.

  You could take the full measure of someone in the way he or she faced death, and suddenly Will felt more than love. He felt respect. He felt admiration. He felt pride, real pride, not the puffed-up, ludicrous, false pride he’d displayed in front of Elizabeth the first time he’d met her. He felt grateful, deeply, profoundly grateful and inordinately proud to have them both in his life.

  Will rubbed his eyes with one hand as he shut down his computer and dropped back in his chair. He wasn’t sorry he’d watched, but instead of relief, he felt shaky and a little sick. Well, he thought grimly, that was worse than you thought it’d be.

  Elizabeth sat in an overstuffed armchair, her legs crossed, listening to Dr. Kwon lay out the steps to follow as she returned home.

  Dr. Kwon was perched on an equally soft but smaller armchair, leaning slightly forward, her hands lying gently in her lap. “I know you’re going to have a stressful few days in Washington,” she said in that deceptively soft voice Elizabeth had grown to respect. “But I expect you to use the skills you’ve learned this week to cope.” She smiled. “And you won’t be alone. Let those who love you help.”

  Elizabeth listened carefully without responding. The week had been difficult, but she felt good. Stronger than she had in a long time. After the second night, there’d not been any wild dreams stealing her sleep, and she hadn’t had a single headache despite her spat with Will. Dr. Kwon warned her that it was unlikely that either the headaches or the dreams would disappear forever, but they’d worked on how best to handle them.

  “I know, I know,” she replied with a small smile. “Keep practicing. Just like learning to do pull-ups.”

  “They were difficult to do at first, right?” the doctor asked, her expression serious, even intense. “But you practiced, even trained, until they became second nature. Same thing.”

  “Right.” Elizabeth nodded, pretending to be solemn in return, one foot tapping slowly on the carpet. “Emotional pull-ups. Got it.”

  The therapist shook her head. “It’s been wonderful working with you, Elizabeth,” she said with a genuine smile. She stood and handed her a business card. “If you need us, we’re here.”

  Elizabeth took the card and stood to leave. “Dr. Kwon, that sounds suspiciously like ‘get out.’” Her eyes sparkling, she added, “So I’ll just say thanks, and I hope I never have to speak to you again.” She held out her hand.

  Dr. Kwon smiled as she offered her own. “That’s my hope, too.”

  Will fidgeted anxiously at baggage claim on Friday night, waiting for Elizabeth’s flight to arrive. He’d flown down to DC at the end of the work day, arriving just ahead of her plane. She’d completed her program at the end of the afternoon and taken a shuttle to the airport to catch a late commuter flight. She’d sent a quick text to confirm she’d made it in time and would see him soon.

  When he glanced to the top of the escalator, there she was, carrying her bag and searching the room below. His smile widened as he took her in. She was wearing form-fitting jeans and a beat-up brown leather jacket. Her hair was down, tossed casually over one shoulder. She hadn’t seen him yet, and he just watched her, enjoying the moment when her eyes at last found his, her head tilting just a bit and a wide smile brightening her expression. She was very nearly beaming at him.

  He felt an enormous wave of relief crest over him. There she was. His Elizabeth.

  As she came closer and he moved to meet her, he realized she was wearing her birthday present. He reached out to hold the lantern pendant in his palm as he leaned in to give her a kiss.

  “I thought maybe you didn’t like it,” he said quietly, almost shyly. “I know you don’t wear a lot of jewelry.”

  Elizabeth put her arms around his waist. “I can say this, considering where I’ve just come from—you’re a nut job, Will.” She sighed happily and tightened her hold, laying her head on his shoulder. They stood like that for a moment before she pulled away a bit to look him in the eye. “I love it. I was just afraid I’d lose it if I wore it everywhere.” She covered his hand with her own. “I needed a part of you with me this week.”

  All the stress Will had felt, the ache of her absence, the confusion of their argument, the nausea of watching the videos—it was all released by the loving touch of her hand on his. He kissed the top of her head and felt himself uncoiling. “Hi,” he said in a low voice.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  “I hate small planes,” Elizabeth groused as she tossed her suitcase up on the bed and opened it. She be
gan to pile most of the clothes it contained to one side.

  “You aren’t the only one,” Will grimaced. “You can’t even buy leg space on those puddle-hoppers.”

  “And you feel every single bump,” she nodded, commiserating. She strode to the closet to grab a white plastic bag from a hangar. She took it with her to the bed and began filling it with her clothes.

  “What’re you doing?” Will asked, amused.

  “Laundry,” she shrugged.

  “Elizabeth Bennet,” he said, feigning shock, “do you mean that you’re going to pay the wildly inflated rates to have a hotel to do your laundry? I’m horrified,” he teased, pulling his own clothes out of a suitcase and putting them away neatly. “Should I be checking for a pod under your bed?”

  “Please,” she responded, with a wave of her hand. “First of all, terrible movie.” She shoved the mound of clothing into the bag. “Second, I’m not paying for this. The Senate wants to pick my brain, they can pay to clean my underwear.” Her lips twisted in what Will thought might be consternation. “Of course,” she added, “I wouldn’t say it exactly like that. . . “

  He chuckled. “You should,” he assured her. “I bet the Senate would love it. Read it right into the official transcript.”

  She huffed at him and cinched the top of the bag. She grabbed the order sheet and a pen. “Do you think we could . . .”

  “Eat?” he interrupted and grabbed her for a kiss when she scowled at him. “You are entirely too predictable, love.”

  “Fine,” she said, whirling away, tossing her hair in his face before turning to raise an eyebrow at him. “Can we?”