The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet (38 page)

After they came out of the den, my mother pounced on them. But it was okay, because they were so happy and smiling, no amount of maternal flailing was going to take it away from them.

“Oh, Jane! Think of all the wonderful restaurants you’ll go to! And all the parties Bing will take you to!”

“Actually, Mom, since I’m the one with the job in the fashion industry, I’ll probably be taking
him
to the parties,” Jane replied.

“Darling, give the girl some breathing room,” Dad said, wedging his way in between them, forcing Mom to turn her fawning squeals onto Bing. “Now Jane, I know you’ll be
happy—but I just want you to tell me that this is truly what you want. If so, I will be kind and welcoming, and take the irrevocable step of letting Bing view my train collection.”

“Dad, I know what I’m doing.” And she kissed his cheek. “Go ahead and show him your trains. It will be your last chance for a while, since we’re leaving in a few
days.”

Jane . . . Jane just took the biggest leap of her life. A new city, a new job, and giving Bing a second chance.

He wasn’t happy without her. He wasn’t happy, period. He’d finally acknowledged how much he let others influence his decisions, and decided to make one of his own.

And while Jane managed to survive without Bing, she is flushed with love when he’s around. But they are both different people from before, and I think it’s a good thing they are away
from their families and other influences while they try to learn how to be with each other the way they are now.

I’m so proud of her. And I wonder if I will ever be that brave. Because I don’t know what’s next for me. I have my thesis to finish, another independent study to come up with,
but then what? What’s in Lizzie Bennet’s future?

I started re-watching my videos to see if I left myself any clues as to what my path should be (God, my makeup in the first few videos was horrrrrrrible). But I’m just as clueless now as I
was then. Sometimes all I think I’ve gained from the past year is a record of it.

That, and I’m a hell of a lot better at making videos now.

Actually . . . I’m really good at it.

Charlotte is in town! My beautiful bestie, having finished production on Game of Gourds, has earned a spring break the likes of which this town has never seen! There will be
beer bongs and wet T-shirt contests, and incredibly bad decisions being made!

Just kidding. I think we Bennets have made enough bad decisions this past year—why go back for more when we (well, Lydia and Jane at least) finally started making good ones?

But Charlotte is back for a couple of weeks, and I think the world is better for it. Except for one thing.

Since Charlotte has been following the drama in the Bennet house remotely, she is very eager to revisit all of it. Lydia (Char still hasn’t found out who took down the website), Jane (she
can’t believe Bing quit med school!), but most of all . . . Darcy.

“Why do you keep bringing up Darcy?” I asked, exasperated. We were back in the library, back in our graduate school cubbies—although our original ones had been reassigned, and
we were relegated to the back near the bathrooms where no one wanted to be. But still, it was just like old times.

“Because it’s the one thing that’s unresolved!” Char replied, loud enough to get shushed. “Oh, shush all you want, Norman—I don’t go here
anymore.”

“Speaking of, you didn’t have to come find me in the library. I was going to meet you at the theater.”

“Yeah, but I knew you were here and I was early.” Char shrugged. “Besides, I have to head to LA tomorrow for a couple of meetings and you are dodging the subject.”

“And by subject I assume you are not referring to my thesis, which I am currently trying to compose?” I replied.

“Not unless you’ve changed your thesis to a 150-page report on the recently discovered virtuous aspects of one Mr. William Darcy.”

“You know, I don’t know if I like it when you have nothing to do. You turn into my mother.”

“Lizzie . . .”

“Look, I told you—Darcy and I . . . we aren’t anything,” I finally said. “We aren’t friends, and we aren’t more than friends. There might have been a
time when we could have been, but I haven’t heard from him since I left Pemberley Digital, and I don’t expect to.”

“Why not?” Charlotte asked softly.

“Because . . .” I tried. “Because I don’t.”

It was just a missed opportunity. That’s all. And it sucks, especially because it seemed like . . . it seemed like I might have not only missed an opportunity, but missed something
important. But I can’t go back in time.

“You know you don’t have to accept that, right?” she said.

“Charlotte, can we talk about something else, please?” I said, shutting down that line of conversation. “What are these meetings you have in LA?”

“Shopping around Game of Gourds—we want to make it our launch series in our entertainment division, expanding out from our informational videos. It’s an entirely different
business model and we need to finance and market it accordingly.”

“You should use the game platform itself,” I said. “Package the first five episodes together and end on a cliffhanger, so the investors want to see what happens
next.”

“Not just one episode?” Charlotte asked, taking out a pen.

“No—the episodes are short; let them get sucked in,” I replied. “That can work for your marketing strategy, too—launch with little expectation, let word of mouth
build, and then once five or six episodes have aired, media blitz. This way people have something to binge-watch and get sucked into.”

Charlotte smirked at me. “You want to take my meetings for me? You’d be good.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got a thesis to finish.”

“Heck, I should hire you right now—so you don’t go and start your own company right under my nose.”

I looked up from my papers to Charlotte. But her head was buried in writing down what I had been saying.

Meanwhile, it’s what
she
had said that captured my attention.

* * *

“Dr. Gardiner!” I called out, racing down the hall. I don’t know why I’m always running down this hall, but this time it seemed particularly important
that I reach my faculty advisor in the greatest haste.

“Lizzie,” Dr. Gardiner replied. She was used to my affinity for haste. “What can I help you with today?”

“I think I got it.”

“It?”

“I mean, I think I figured out what my last independent study can be. My own company.”

That got her attention. “You have a company now?”

“No . . . it would be a fictional company. But I would write up a full prospectus as if my videos and their success were the launch project for my own company. Initial start-up goals,
five-year projections, market strategy, everything.”

Dr. Gardiner considered me for a moment. An uncomfortably long moment.

“Well, that certainly qualifies as creative.”

I took a deep breath. “Listen, the one overarching thing I learned at Collins & Collins, and Gracechurch Street, and especially at Pemberley Digital, is that I have the ability to do
this,” I said, boldly. “To be in this industry. Heck, to build a company myself. Dr. Gardiner . . . I can do this.”

Dr. Gardiner considered it—and I quietly panicked—until her face split into a smile.

“Why not,” she said, shrugging. “I’ve agreed to everything else this year.”

“Thank you!” I gave in to the incredibly unprofessional urge to hug my teacher. “Thank you so much!”

She stumbled back a little bit with the force of my hug, but kept smiling. Finally, I realized just how uncouth this was and released her.

“Sorry,” I said.

“That’s quite all right,” she said. “Lizzie, I want you to know, you have certainly made this past year interesting. As a teacher, you learn that good students are a dime
a dozen. Interesting ones? They are what you hope for.”

I blushed, and then took my leave, knowing Dr. Gardiner had just given me the biggest compliment she could give.

Now, I just have to live up to it.

“Hi, Mary,” I said when I answered the door. “I forgot you were coming over.”

My emo cousin just stared at me. “I’m helping Lydia catch up in her math class. She missed a couple weeks, what with . . .”

“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “Actually, do you have a sec? I would like to talk to you about something.”

I hadn’t really forgotten that Mary was coming over. In fact, since Lydia mentioned it yesterday, it was all I had been thinking about.

Because it was possible that my humorless, dry, only-owns-the-color-black cousin Mary had some answers. And I had a lot of questions, most of them stemming from what Lydia told me a few days
ago.

We’ve all been wondering who or what caused the Website That Shall Not Be Named (™ J. K. Rowling) to mysteriously disappear from the Internet just a day before it was intended to go
live. Charlotte couldn’t find anything, I didn’t even know where to start looking, and Dad was so relieved, he stopped investigating and started focusing on Lydia’s recovery.

But Lydia didn’t forget. Lydia did some digging.

And she discovered that the website ceased to exist because of one William Darcy.

How did he do this? He bought the company that George sold the tape to. Novelty Exposures (or the company it was hiding) is now owned by Pemberley Digital. And in so doing, he bought all of
their property, including the sex tape. The most amazing part is that George had not only sold the tape to the company, but universal rights to it. So if he ever leaks a frame of it anywhere, he
will be in violation of his contract and sued so fast he’ll have to leave the planet to escape extreme pecuniary damages.

Of course, this doesn’t solve everything. George is still free to roam the world. Free to try to pull this stunt on other women, although I would hope that any woman in that situation
would perform an Internet search history of George and see my videos. But I can’t guarantee it.

Sometimes, the bad guy does get away with it. But at least this time, he didn’t get away with hurting my sister.

However, my big question is—why would Darcy do that? Why would he save Lydia? He’s never even liked Lydia, being that she’s too “energetic” for his tastes.
I’ve been thinking it over and over for days, and whether he did it because he still feels responsible for how despicable George is, or . . .

Or he did it for me.

Which is impossible to wrap my head around! While we might have gotten close to something happening at Pemberley, ultimately nothing did. And in the grand scheme of things, I’m still just
the girl who shot him down and called him names on the Internet. I cannot fathom why someone in his position would do something so large for any reason, let alone me.

So I decided he didn’t.

Lydia didn’t reveal anything about how she found out. It could have been just from a friend of a friend through the grapevine of Internet life. But . . . Lydia assures me she’s not
wrong. So I need to check with my own sources.

“So, Mary,” I began, more than a little unsure how to broach this subject. “How are you? I haven’t seen you since Lydia’s birthday party.”

“Really? Because I was at your house for Christmas.”

“Oh . . . yeah. I remember now.”

“And I was here last week, hanging out with your sister. We passed on the stairs, and you said, ‘Hi, Mary, I forgot you were coming over,’ much like when you greeted me just
now.”

“Okay, you make a solid point.” I stopped her before she could list the few hundred times I’ve forgotten about her existence in the past twenty-two years. “But, um . . .
that’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about. You and Lydia are close these days.”

Mary cocked her head to one side. “I guess.”

“So, did she tell you anything about how she found out . . . about who took the website down?”

Mary looked genuinely surprised. “You mean she didn’t tell you?”

“She told me that it was Darcy, but not how she found out. And it doesn’t make that much sense to me, so I thought—”

“It was him,” Mary cut me off. “Our source is solid.”

“Mary . . .” I sighed, suddenly tired. “I need to know. Please.”

Mary glanced around quickly, then shrugged, putting her bag on the floor. “Lydia’d been thinking a lot about the website. Obsessing over it, really. The only conclusion she could
come to was that George had taken it down, because he hadn’t known how much it would hurt her. That somehow she’d gotten through to him.”

I could feel my brow coming down in a flat line. “George didn’t contact her, did he?”

“No,” Mary assured me. “Her counselor told her that was a common hope in betrayal situations, but not likely. But I knew that she’d keep holding on to the hope until she
knew for sure. So, I figured we should get into contact with the one person we know of that also knows the real George.”

“Who?”

“Gigi Darcy.”

“Wait . . .” I shook my head, trying to comprehend. “Lydia called Gigi?”

“No. There’s no way Lydia was ready for that. So I friended Gigi on Twitter, and we messaged.” Mary’s eyes lit up with anger. “She told us that her brother had
immediately begun to search for George, the moment he heard about the sex tape. George had been hiding out in a beach resort when Darcy found him, sipping a margarita and cashing in on
Lydia’s pain.”

I could barely breathe. “And then what did he do?”

“George wouldn’t budge,” Mary continued. “But Darcy did get the details of the sale to that porn company from him—who he actually sold it to, I mean. With so little
time, Darcy knew the only way to stop the company was to buy it. So he did.”

I stood there, in total shock for what must have been a full minute, because Mary began to squirm.

“Did you need anything else?” she asked. “Lydia’s probably wondering where I am.”

“Hm? Oh, right,” I said, shaking off my haze. “No, I’m good. And thanks.”

“No problem.” Mary sighed the sigh of the long suffering.