LESS THAN AN hour later, Liz lay in her spinning hotel room bed in the dark while poor Jane stood in the courtyard below, still being interviewed in front of blinding lights; although Liz had experienced one of the superlative nights of her life, surely by now Jane had to feel some doubt about the manner in which she’d decided to get married. Abruptly, and somewhat nausea-inducingly, Liz sat up, turned on the nightstand lamp, rose from bed, grabbed the plastic card that was her room key, and hurried down the hall.

After Liz had knocked on the door, Mary opened it with a toothbrush in her mouth, a foamy outline of toothpaste around her lips. “What?” she said.

“That time you ran into Darcy at Skyline,” Liz said, “did you tell him Mom still wasn’t speaking to Lydia?”

Suspiciously, Mary said, “Why?”

“I think he ended up talking to her afterward.”

“Oh,” Mary said in a slightly friendlier tone. “He did.” She turned and walked toward the bathroom, and Liz followed her. Mary spat into the sink and rinsed off the toothbrush’s bristles. “At Skyline, he asked if he should. Because of his job, he thought he could explain the trans stuff in terms of Ham’s brain.”

“So he told her it’s like a birth defect?”

“I wasn’t there for the conversation, but that seems to be Mom’s one and only talking point.”

Meaning Darcy had salvaged her family’s happiness in not one but two ways; in addition to bringing Jane and Chip back together, he had facilitated the reconciliation between Lydia and Mrs. Bennet. But why? For whose benefit? Neither situation affected him directly, and in neither case had he sought credit—indeed, Liz suddenly recalled Darcy deflecting the question when she’d asked at their dinner in New York how he knew Mrs. Bennet and Lydia were no longer estranged—yet his efforts far exceeded basic kindness.

Mary turned off the faucet, and the sisters made eye contact in the mirror. “In case you don’t realize it,” Mary said, “you got superdrunk tonight, and you reek right now.”