It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Mr. Darcy does not exist.
Many a young woman has spent years looking for her perfect Mr. Darcy, but Kate Thomas knows better. As a 29-year-old recently widowed southerner, she sets off to find herself on...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Mr. Darcy does not exist.
Taking a deep breath, Kate glanced at her phone. Fifteen minutes of her train trip from St. Pancras Station in London to Dover Priory Station remained. Her eyes drifted to the bright green rolling hills out the window as her thoughts wandered.
Moving to a country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean seemed so much more romantic at the age of fourteen when Kate and her best friend, Jennifer, first started making plans for their future. Those plans included visiting England to see the places enshrined in Jane Austen's books and find their very own Mr. Darcys, but as often happens, life intervened.
At twenty-nine, Kate was just now realizing that dream, minus the search for Mr. Darcy and the best friend co-traveler. Now that she was a grown woman with experiences beyond her years, she knew better than to waste time searching for the nonexistent Mr. Darcy. As for Jennifer, it wasn't like her friend abandoned her. Jennifer was now married, pregnant, and mother to three-year-old Emma. Moving them from Memphis, Tennessee to England wasn't practical. So much for teenage plans.
Kate frowned, remembering that she wouldn't even be here herself if it weren't for the death of her husband, Mark, nine months earlier. Biting her lip, she refused to let tears escape, and focused again on the quickly changing scenery outside of the train. This was supposed to be a time of refreshment and renewal, not a time to be stuck in her head. She was finally experiencing things she'd long thought were out of reach. This will be good, she silently assured herself. A chance to leave behind the pain.
If only she could convince Jennifer that she wasn't here to find her true Mr. Darcy. Kate stifled a chuckle at the thought. Ever since high school, Jennifer had been intent on ensuring Kate had her Mr. Darcy.
The first time Kate saw her then-future husband walk into her high school French class as a new student, all the girls swooned. He was so tall and handsome.
Later that year, when Mark and Kate started dating, Jennifer insisted he was Kate's very own Mr. Darcy—tall, dark, handsome, and from a very wealthy family. He even seemed a bit snobbish at first, though that quickly passed once he felt comfortable at the school.
Kate always said that Mark was not quite Mr. Darcy because he didn't have the accent. Now it was very clear the two of them wouldn't get the happily ever after Jane Austen intended for her characters. Jennifer assured Kate that her Darcy was still out there somewhere, and with the relocation, she would finally find him—accent and all. A sad smile emerged as she remembered those happy, carefree high school days—a sharp contrast to her current reality—and there it was again, that ever-present pain trying to rise to the surface. Nine months of counseling couldn't make it go away; perhaps an ocean of distance could.
The murmurs of surrounding passengers drew her back to the moment and brought a small smile to her face. She wondered if she would ever get used to the various British accents.
As Kate's gaze moved from passenger to passenger, no one gave her the sad eyes, and it was blissfully freeing to be an ocean away from everyone who knew, or at least thought they knew, of her pain. She'd told her new employer, Tracey, about her husband's death but had requested that she keep it to herself. This was Kate's chance to get away from the constant reminders of what she'd lost. Thankfully, her soon-to-be patient was unaware of Mark's death, and Kate planned to keep it that way.
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