Emma + Elsie Meet Fitzwilliam Darcy

Chapter 2 ~ Emma

Emma pulled Elsie by the elbow, dragging her into the dining room, where her neighbor, Jace Knightley, was speaking to her father.

“The Ford Fusion has been doing particularly well this year,” Jace said, “but—”

“Good!" Emma exclaimed, bulldozing through their conversation. "You're here. We need to deal with this Chuck Bingley fiasco right now."

She reached her arm around the door to the kitchen and felt her way to her father’s medication. “Daddy, have you taken your pills today?”

“Not yet,” her father replied, though it was already an hour past when he was supposed to have taken them.

"I have no idea what a ‘Chuck Bingley fiasco’ is,” Jace said, irritated, "but I'm going to take a wild guess that it's another one of Emma's fascinating seating chart emergencies."

"Jace Knightley, no wonder they let you into graduate school.” She turned to her father. "Do you mind, Daddy? It’s Friday—your work talk can wait through the weekend, can't it?"

"Of course," her father said, just as Jace said, "Actually—"

Jace locked eyes with her, then glanced at her father, sighing. "Sure, that's fine. We can talk on Sunday after the wedding and all of it's... intense duties are finished.”

“Oh!” her father moaned. “If we are talking about the wedding again, I don’t want any part of it. Why Miss Taylor feels the need to get married is beyond my comprehension.”

Emma felt a twinge of guilt in her gut. Her father hadn’t handled the stress of Annabeth’s wedding and subsequent plan to move out to live with her husband very well over the last several months.

Worse, she knew that this was only a prequel to what he would feel when she went off to college. She knew she would speak to him every day, but it didn’t seem like enough. Since her sister had left, she had taken good care of her father. They had a routine and life, just the two of them—and now, she was leaving him to start her own life.

She had enough nerves just worrying about herself and her own transition; worrying about her father’s well-being on top of that was something that she had pushed to the back of her mind to make room for the wedding. Once it was over, though, she’d have to give it more thought to her father’s arrangements—something she wasn’t looking forward to.

In the meantime, she did everything she could to quell her father’s anguish and make him as comfortable as she could.

“Daddy, maybe you should take your pills along with one of Annabeth’s cupcakes to the patio. You can watch the birds—I think I saw some blue-winged teal outside earlier today.”

She hadn’t, and her father likely knew that, but he did love the prospect of seeing a blue-winged teal.

“Yes,” he replied vaguely. “What would I do without you, my little Emmy?”

She smiled, pulling one of their good china plates from dining room cabinet and placing a cupcake in the center of it, then dropping his medication next to it. She turned around to see that Elsie had already poured him a glass of milk from the kitchen, bless her. Elsie was one of the few people who understood the two directions she was pulled in—her love for her family versus her desire to grow up and be an adult.

“Thank you, Elizabeth,” her father said, taking the glass from Elsie and the plate from Emma. “What brings you to visit my dear daughter, today?”

“She was showing me her graduation party plans,” Elsie said.

“Daddy, it’s going to be amazing,” Emma gushed. “I have everything planned out, and I’ve invited almost the entire school—”