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Warlock has become surprisingly adept at avoiding cameras.
Harriet notices this their first winter in Texas, if ‘winter’ is even an appropriate term for a place that shuts down in panic the moment a suggestion there may possibly be one snowflake in a hundred-mile radius comes up. She’s not sure why she still puts together these stupid Christmas letters, other than habit instilled in her by her parents - they’ve been dead for three years now (and good riddance), so she hardly needs to keep it up for them, and she doubts any of the networking connections masquerading as friends who receive them truly give a shit. But she’s doing the letter, and trying to think of a diplomatic way to cover Tad being fired from his post in England with no warning (he’s never confirmed it, but she thinks Warlock was dead-on), and browsing her phone for good photos for it.
The last one she has of Warlock where he’s smiling is from his birthday party, before they left England, covered in cake. Even then, the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes; Nanny Ashtoreth and the gardener had left pretty abruptly the week before, and he’s still not over it now. He did a decent job of pretending everything was fine in August, though.
But ever since they got to Texas, it seems she hasn’t been able to pin him down for a head-on photo. She has a few candid shots of him reading, usually with his headphones in - not that she can blame him, when Tad’s picking fights practically every day - but nothing where he’s actually looking at the camera. Harriet was hoping not to have to pose a photo, if only because she’s not sure any of them can fake proper Christmas cheer, but it looks like she’s going to have to.
When she does, Tad puts on his State Department smile, and her own is entirely plastic - but Warlock doesn’t even make an attempt. There’s no light in his eyes, and his mouth didn’t even so much as twitch. She’s glad Tad didn’t see the result in the moment; he’d have insisted on taking another and Warlock would have no doubt made some ghoulish face in response, setting out to deliberately ruin a thing he wanted no part of.
She knows that blankness. It’s been her weapon of choice for over a decade now.
***
They mostly don’t fight about money, which is something of a relief. It’s possible Tad doesn’t see the point; their pre-nup stipulates that all the money Harriet showed up with, and everything she was going to inherit from her parents for lack of a more dutiful child to leave it all to, is hers and hers alone. He only cares when he thinks something’s going to reflect badly on him.
They also mostly don’t fight about sex. Tad cheats and Harriet damn well knows it, but she doesn’t care enough about keeping him faithful to start shit over it (that would require interest she doesn’t have) - which doesn’t stop her from using it as a barb to get him off other topics and end the arguments. It’s probably a minor miracle she ever got pregnant, and these days she deeply regrets ever having agreed to have a child with him.
The bad news: Most of their fights are, sooner or later, about Warlock.
That’s been the pattern since he was born. First it was about his name (Harriet had been unlikely to go with Thaddeus the Umpteenth anyway, but his insistence on skyping into the birth clinched it); then it was about Tad’s unending string of broken promises to be there for his own child. Then it was about whether he needed a nanny at all, never mind the supremely weird one they ended up with.
(They absolutely needed a nanny. Harriet was in no shape to raise a child alone - she still isn’t - and she knew Tad was going to be useless. Nanny Ashtoreth in particular, odd as she was, clearly did something right for Warlock, as much as he loudly complains about missing her.)
The tone of the fights has been shifting since they left England, largely centering around Tad’s conviction that his son should obviously be a small clone of himself, as he was to his father, his father was to his grandfather, and back as far as the name ‘Thaddeus Dowling’ reaches. They’re about the long stretches between Warlock’s haircuts and his complete disinterest in sports (not that Tad would ever come to games, and if he doesn’t want to risk a concussion-related disorder just for some faint praise, Harriet can’t blame him) and his open disdain of Texas and the way he says he wants to go home.
Hell, she wants to go home too, but England is not the destination Harriet has in mind.
After a real bruiser of a fight on the cusp of Warlock’s fourteenth birthday - this one started with Tad having the nerve to say Warlock should ‘be over’ having his entire life ripped out from under him at a formative age by now - Harriet stops by Warlock’s room to make sure he escaped most of the noise. He probably did; there’s a reason he’s never far from his headphones. But if she can insulate him from a little bit of the damage, or apologise for it if he did hear something, she wants to. She owes him that much.
She knocks on his bedroom door to no response, then cracks it open. As expected, he’s got his headphones in, turned up so loud he doesn’t even look up from the book he’s… hopefully reading, and not just staring at. She really ought to tell him to turn it down a little, that he’s going to damage his ears if the music’s loud enough she can make out some of the lyrics from here. But cranking the volume was probably his whole idea, when the argument started, and anyway his song of choice is a little busy knifing her in the heart.
I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me reaches her ears, and Harriet closes Warlock’s door, retreats to her own room, and has a good cry. No one should have to feel at home in that particular song (she’d know, having felt it herself). That it’s her own kid feeling that low - that apparently, all she’s managed to teach Warlock about life is the value of blank faces and hiding in music - makes her feel like a goddamn failure, more than anything else in her life.
(More than her parents informing her she was getting married to a family friend’s son a good decade older than her, because Tad was a useful connection and she was causing some amorphous scandal by daring to be happy and independent. More than letting them marry her off like a bargaining chip instead of ditching the whole thing and begging Cathy to take her back.)
When she’s done feeling sorry for herself and the post-crying-jag headache has reached her teeth, Harriet gets a glass of water and something for the headache, opens the notepad app on her phone, and starts trying to figure out what to do about this.
In a perfect world, she’d divorce Tad and have done with it. But it won’t be that easy; he would drag out the fight as long as possible, especially over custody, and he’s the one with the relatively steady job, hefty inheritance for Harriet to fall back on or no. Warlock’s old enough for most judges to ask for his input before making their decision, but that wouldn’t stop Tad from contesting the ruling at every turn if it didn’t favor him in some way, and Harriet’s not fool enough to assume Warlock would pick her out of anything other than spite. So that’s going to have to wait until he’s eighteen; she can plan in the meantime, but not do much else.
In a slightly less perfect world, she’d have saved contact information for Nanny Ashtoreth after her sudden departure. Warlock’s made no secret whatsoever of how badly he wants to talk to her, and given Tad’s general uselessness and her own reluctance to get attached, Harriet can’t blame him one bit. He needs someone in his corner. But they’d barely needed contact details after the interview, since she stayed in the house alongside them; Harriet’s not sure she wrote them down at all.
In a slightly less perfect world than that, she’d have enough of her own kid’s trust to ask him what’s wrong herself. But she knows she doesn’t have that, ironically because she’s as badly burned by having everything she gets attached to taken from her as Warlock is.
In the world they’ve got, she ends up calling her therapist’s office and asking if anyone else there has an opening the same day as her next appointment. Maybe it won’t work, but she’s benefited from the outside perspective herself, and if she’s in her own appointment Warlock can rest assured she won’t be prying.
Warlock resists the idea at first, as Harriet suspected, but her genuine concern seems to strike enough of a chord with him that he goes along with it. He spends the next few days after that thoughtful-quiet instead of depressed-quiet, and then asks, the next time they’re home alone, if Harriet can book him a second appointment.
Between that and a sudden spike of international texting charges from Warlock’s phone that can only mean he somehow rustled up Nanny Ashtoreth’s number, Harriet allows herself a sigh of relief.
***
Tad throws a fit about the texting charges, because of course he does. Harriet tells him he can complain about Warlock texting someone that far away when he stops keeping in touch with his British girlfriends, and that’s the end of that argument.
Somehow, it takes him six entire months to realise Warlock’s also seeing a therapist. He never liked that Harriet took it up herself, but the idea that there might be a problem with the small clone he’s seeing (instead of the child he has, who’s on his way to being taller than Tad and not remotely interested in politics) seems to be personally insulting, the way he goes on about it.
The biggest problem in Warlock’s life is standing right in front of Harriet, but she doesn’t say that out loud.
In any case, something’s helped Warlock unclench a little. Harriet’s not sure if it’s having his old nanny as a lifeline or the therapy or both, and she honestly doesn’t care if the upshot is he’s less blank. She gives her therapist permission to coordinate with Warlock’s, if her own baggage can help her kid sort things out, but absolutely refuses to take that information channel in reverse. If she wants his trust, she’s going to have to earn it, so she leaves it at ‘Warlock’s not suicidal.’
Not suicidal is good. She can work with that. She can work with anything short of Warlock ending up dead because she overlooked something; if he’s not dead, she might have a chance to earn his trust. (Harriet’s therapist keeps gently prodding her to apologise, and she knows she needs to, but finding the right opening is hard. And she’s a little afraid he won’t accept - not being forgiven in any hurry, she can handle, but not knowing she burned the bridge beyond repair.)
They fall into a holding pattern for a while - Warlock being withdrawn but not utterly blank, Harriet and Tad fighting over their child, Tad not actually bothering to do anything to make the world behave the way he thinks it ought to, Harriet slowly plotting her eventual divorce. She’s pretty sure she could fill out the paperwork right under Tad’s nose and he wouldn’t suspect a thing, and she’ll do that if she has to; it helps that she used the move as a convenient excuse to have her own bedroom.
And then Tad breezes in one February afternoon in Warlock’s junior year, back from a business trip to DC, and says, “Great news! We’re going to China!”
Harriet greets that news with her best blank face, mostly because she’s still working out exactly how she feels about that announcement. “You’re what?”
“We’re going to China!” Tad’s still wearing his State Department smile, so Harriet doesn’t feel that bad about blank-facing him (but then, she never has). “I’ve been offered and accepted a post in Beijing. It’ll be great!”
“I’m not going anywhere, Tad. Neither is Warlock.”
Tad’s State Department smile finally falters. “What do you mean? Of course we’re all going.”
“I’m not uprooting Warlock again. He only has a year and a half of high school left, Tad, and more importantly none of us speak Chinese. Dropping our child into a completely different culture and language this close to the finish line won’t do him any favors. You want Warlock to get into a good college, don’t you?”
“Well, of course, he’s gonna be great at Yale. But he can do that from China just fine!”
The great thing about the blank face is that it doesn’t actually show Harriet’s simmering rage. If Tad took five seconds to look at reality, he’d know Warlock’s going to use college applications as an excuse to get the fuck away from his father’s legacy; she’d bet her inheritance on his short list being entirely British. Even if it wasn’t, Yale would be out because it’s a Dowling family tradition.
“I am not. Uprooting. Warlock. Again. He’s barely recovered from the move here as it is. You’re just going to have to make a fool of yourself without your trophy wife and child on hand. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll find some cute girl to fawn over you. You managed just fine in England and I was right there. Just think of the conquests you could make without me holding you back.”
Tad scowls, and with a final “Well, fine,” storms off in the direction of his bedroom. Harriet makes her own retreat, and hears the front door slam close to an hour later. She has no idea if Tad plans on coming back before he goes to China, and right now, she can’t bring herself to care.
She can’t be stuck in blank-face mode when Warlock gets home, though - as glad as she is that he missed this particular argument, she’s going to need to explain it - so she pulls up a playlist on her computer. One of her college friends (she can’t remember if it was Cathy or Stacy or Kevin or someone else entirely) found something that said changing the mood of your music can help change your actual mood, and she’s made mixes to that effect ever since. It both helps her stop hiding and lets her be angry or depressed or whatever - sometimes all of the above - before getting back on an even keel.
Naturally, she’s wallowing in the depressive part of the playlist (what is there to be optimistic about in the goddamn mess her life has become?) when Warlock gets home. She doesn’t know for sure that it’s him until he stops in the doorway to her bedroom, looking more than a little concerned, so she props herself up on her elbows and turns the music down some, so they can talk properly. “Oh, it’s you. Hi, honey.”
“Do you know how many murder investigations start like this?” Warlock blurts out, and Harriet nearly laughs. That’s her kid’s warped sense of humor, all right, and she really hadn’t thought about what this must look like. “Are you okay?”
“I’m… I will be. I was pondering the immortal words of Socrates, who said, ‘I drank what?’”
“What?”
“Quoting a movie, don’t mind me.” It’s one that Harriet thinks Warlock would enjoy, for all she hasn’t seen it herself since college (no mocking the government allowed in the Dowling household). She sighs, and figures this is as good a time as any to start in on the day’s bombshell. “Your father, in his infinite wisdom, accepted a posting in China.”
Watching someone put up a blank face from the outside is damn near terrifying, even if she understands why - even if she was hoping weathering the worst of the storm would stop this bad habit from being passed to a new generation. “Great,” Warlock says, voice devoid of all emotion. “When do we go.”
“We’re not going.”
Thankfully, that cracks the blank mask before Warlock can fully settle into it, if only in favor of confusion. “We’re not?”
For once, she gives him the short version of this afternoon’s fight. It’s the simplest way to both give Warlock the relevant information and ease his fears that his life’s about to be turned on its head without his consent again - and, hopefully, give him a crumb of hope that she does care. He does relax, as well as confirming her hunch that he’s only going to apply to British schools (or not denying it, at least).
“Anyway,” she says, taking the song off repeat, “I’ve been doing some thinking. For longer than today, really, but I needed to stew in it for a while. I’ve been a shit parent to you, Warlock, and I’m sorry. I want to try better than packing you off to a therapist or letting Nanny deal with it, if you’ll let me.” Harriet still thinks those were the best things she could have done in the moment, but her kid deserves better.
“Arachne.”
It’s an unconscious correction, Harriet’s pretty sure, and one it takes her a moment to really see the significance of - but it sparks a memory (Cathy talking Kevin down from a panic attack because he hadn’t meant to come out to his whole family over Thanksgiving dinner, but he just couldn’t be Brianna Jane a second longer), and she pauses the music as things click into place.
The absolute fit pitched at age seven over a super-short haircut Tad insisted on. The sudden proficiency at avoiding cameras that just so happened to coincide with the onset of puberty (Stacy, up from Haverford for a girls’ weekend, admitting it was the first time in years she’d wanted to have her photo taken). Hell, the therapist’s office has mastered the art of dodging pronouns when it’s time to book appointments, and she just took it for granted.
“Oh, is that what was eating at you so badly? I’m doubly sorry, honey, I feel like I should have seen that one coming.” Harriet can be a little charitable to herself. Being ripped away from all your support networks at eleven would be rough on anyone’s psyche without gender factoring into it, and even if she didn’t see the depth of her… daughter’s despair, she knew something was wrong. It could have been so much worse.
Still, she wishes she’d been paying proper attention.
Warlock-- Arachne rolls her eyes. “Not like it was one of your dresses I tried on when I was nine.”
“No, but it’s also not like I wasn’t involved in scheduling your haircuts, either. Besides, I watched some friends transition in college.” Harriet’s shoulders start protesting her position, so she sits up properly, and can’t help smiling as she considers her daughter’s dramatic choice of a new name. “Still on the spider thing, huh? It’s a good name for you.”
Arachne laughs, a touch hysterical. “I haven’t been off the spider thing since I was six. You can’t tell me it’s that much of a surprise. How’d you know I was talking to Nanny again?”
“Tad threw a fit about the international texting charges, like he’s not just as bad. I told him to knock it off and let you have someone in your corner for once.” Harriet sighs. “I swear, the second you turn eighteen I’m filing for divorce.”
“Why wait that long, if he’s leaving the country?”
“Because he’d come back just to start a custody battle over you, and you’ve been in the middle of our fights too much as it is. It’s past time one of us put you first.”
Arachne stares at her for a long few moments; when she finally finds her voice, it sounds like she’s close to crying. “You’re not forgiven yet, but this is one hell of a good start.”
“You know, I’ll take it. All I wanted was a chance to un-screw up a little.” Harriet turns the music back on. “Tell you what, if there’s anything in particular you want to do? There’s no reason for you to feel uncomfortable in your own home, not when I can foot the bill. Say the word and I’ll help you get there.”
“Well, Nanny says everything outside of your own head is set dressing anyway, and I’m not going to bother with anything at school. I at least wouldn’t say no to some clothes, though.”
That is some of the most Nanny advice Harriet can imagine. “Then we’ll get you some clothes. I can show you how to do makeup, too, but I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t like it. And… this isn’t just for now, either. Whatever you decide you want to do, I’ll help. God knows this is going to be hard enough as it is.”
“No kidding. Then again, I didn’t think either of you were going to get it.” Arachne trails off, staring at Harriet’s computer - and it’s only then that she realises the song changed, and remembers what’s next on this particular playlist. “You…”
“It came out the year I graduated college. To put it another way, the year I was married to your father. I needed it. I’m so, so sorry I helped make you feel like you needed it too.”
Arachne starts sobbing. Harriet pulls her daughter into a hug, like she should have been doing this whole time, and thinks, as they both take a few minutes of catharsis, that things will be all right after all.
***
She thinks the hardest part of the adjustment is going to be the name, and Harriet does slip up - a lot, at first. But Arachne’s pretty understanding about it, calling her original name a ‘vegetative name’ rather than properly dead because of school. The effort seems to mean more than perfection, so Harriet keeps trying. Sooner or later, she’s sure, it’ll sound natural.
Arachne is a treasure - whip-smart and morbid and compassionate and struggling to see any of that about herself. If Harriet didn’t know better, she’d say her daughter was raised by a literal shoulder angel and shoulder devil (as it is, ‘Morticia Addams and Dickon Sowerby’ is still a strong possibility). She likes math and history; she’s still deeply, deeply homesick; she’s considering getting a pet tarantula once she’s out on her own; she’s having trouble drawing the line between deserving good things and coming off as entitled to them. She plunders Harriet’s music collection and rants about the deplorable state of pockets on women’s clothing and proves next to impossible to pry out of bookstores.
To think Harriet nearly lost this.
The actual hardest part sneaks up on her; she doesn’t realise she’s been smiling and nodding her way through dinner like it’s Tad’s self-important rambling until Arachne snaps, “And then I’m thinking of buying a unicorn, Mom, are you listening?”
Shit. “God, honey, I am so sorry.” Harriet’s at least explained why she does that so easily, by now (she was both relieved and a little disturbed Arachne understood so well), but that doesn’t excuse falling back on it for no good reason. “Let’s try that again.”
“AP classes. They don’t offer one for history and I’m not sure I’d trust Texas to get anything other than the Alamo right anyway, and I’m definitely doing calculus, that’ll be a piece of cake. I can’t decide if I want to try to do the physics one too, or if that’d be too much.”
“Well, I’m a liberal-arts nerd, so I’m probably not the ideal person to be asking. I know one of my college friends mentioned there being two different types of AP physics, though, so you might want to look into which one your school offers, and think about whether it’d get confused with the calculus from there.”
“Good point. See, I knew I wanted to ask you for a reason.” Arachne still gives her a pointed look, but Harriet can’t say she doesn’t deserve it.
“I wish I could promise that won’t happen again, but we both know I’d be lying.” And lying, at least, is one thing Harriet has managed to avoid doing to her child. “I am trying to cut it out, though, I promise.”
“You think I’d let you off that easy if you weren’t?”
Harriet laughs a little. “No, I really don’t.”
Still, there are times when she absolutely feels like she can nail this parenthood thing, and now they’re not all about keeping Tad from doing more damage than he’s already done. She’s the one who looks up name-changing processes, as she doubts Arachne’s even thought of it, it was hard enough when Harriet got married, and it’ll be that much easier if Arachne grapples with the legal side of things before she gets entrenched in all the 21st-century adult identity entails. She asks for Arachne’s input on the divorce proceedings, what’s worth keeping when they leave Texas and what they can sell with the house, and what Harriet should even do with her life now that she’s abandoning ‘diplomatic spouse’ mode.
“You’d make a good Dread Pirate Roberts,” Arachne says, completely deadpan.
“...Your nanny’s a terrible influence. I am not taking up piracy, young lady.” But Harriet’s too busy trying not to laugh to really sell indignation, and the reflexive smile Arachne gives her for ‘young lady’ is worth her weight in gold.
“Every time I’ve ever asked Nanny what I should do now, she says I have to figure that out for myself. I think that’s probably true now, too. I can’t tell you what you want, and nobody else is trying to make you do what they want. I want you to be happy - God knows we’ve both lost enough of that - but I don’t know how you’re going to get there, other than divorcing my father and moving out of the state, and you’re already working on those.”
Maybe Nanny Ashtoreth wasn’t such a terrible influence after all. Then again, if Harriet’s on to something with the Morticia Addams theory, she could have done a lot worse for Arachne. As much as Harriet regrets having had a child with Tad and tying herself down for that much longer, she can’t bring herself to be at all remorseful about having Arachne in particular.
Toward the end of Arachne’s senior year, Harriet heads down to the school and asks to see whoever’s in charge of getting diplomas printed. She’s not terribly surprised when that turns out to be the secretary who greets her; if you want to find out what’s going on in a school, you ask the secretaries.
“My child is wrapping up a legal name change,” she says, hoping this won’t get out and put Arachne in an awkward position - but this particular step will help, in the long run. “We chose not to say anything about it to the student body at large, but… it would mean a great deal to us both if the diploma reflected her proper name. I have the paperwork to back it up, if you need to see it.”
The secretary nods. “Not the only one in her class who’s changed names since enrolling, but everyone deals with that in their own way. What’s the name for the diploma?”
“Arachne Charlotte Dowling.”
“...You know, that sounds on brand. Does she want to be announced under the new name?”
“Better not,” Harriet says. “She doesn’t know I’m here - I doubt she’s thought about how much trouble it’d save if her diploma doesn’t have a dead name on it. The announcement won’t follow her halfway around the world.”
Besides, there’s the off chance Tad will decide he should put in an appearance so he can be a pompous ass about having contributed exactly nothing to this end result. Harriet will not ruin Arachne’s moment by kicking that hornet’s nest if she doesn’t have to.
“That it won’t.” The secretary smiles. “The staff’s buzzing about her getting into Oxford - especially since otherwise, I don’t think the class is leaving the state, unless it’s for the military. I hope the fresh start does her good.”
Harriet grins. “Oh, I don’t doubt it will.”
***
Neither of them want to stay in Texas a second longer than they have to, so they head for Philadelphia as soon as the school year is formally over. Harriet relaxes almost immediately; her parents’ house was never quite a home in the emotional sense (that was Bryn Mawr, all four years), but there’s nothing saying she can’t make it one now. Just having a base of operations where all the choices are hers is an immense relief.
Granted, it’s also kind of terrifying, after so long. But she’ll figure it out.
“I feel better already,” Arachne says, after they’ve recovered from the multi-state move enough to start doing some touristy stuff. “It’s still not home, at least not for me, but… why’d he pick Texas of all places? This is more interesting by a long shot, and he wouldn’t have had to commute as far when he had stuff to do in DC.”
“I don’t know if you noticed, honey, but your father’s an idiot. Besides, he’s also self-absorbed enough to think going to his ‘home’ was more important than anything else. I’m just glad he isn’t competent enough in his self-absorption to actually try to enforce it.”
“No kidding. He screwed us both up enough as it is.” Arachne’s quiet for a few moments. “Do you think… could we get away with going to Pride?”
“Well, I highly doubt he’s going to read any news coverage. Or think we’re in a different state than where he left us, for that matter. I probably won’t decide if I want to until the day of, but if you want to? Go for it.” Harriet hadn’t even thought of that, but now that Arachne’s raised the prospect she’s going to be debating it right up until the day of, she’s sure of it. If Tad does somehow hear about it, it could hurt her position in the divorce, at least with the kind of lawyer he’s likely to retain, but she could always say it’s for Arachne’s sake more so than her own.
(If she does go, it’ll be at least as much for her own sake.)
For their first weekend in the area, Harriet intends to take Arachne up to Bryn Mawr and show her around her old stomping grounds. (If Arachne had shown any interest in staying in the States, Harriet would have suggested she apply - the Seven Sisters have largely gotten the sticks out of their asses about a uterus being integral to the female experience, these days - but her daughter’s heart has always been in England.) The plan lasts right up until they pull up on campus and are greeted by a “WELCOME CLASS OF ‘05” banner over the gate.
Arachne’s the one to process it first. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
“...Yeah. It is.” She’s not sure how she overlooked the notice - probably, she assumed it was yet another plea for donations - but now that it’s in front of her, Harriet’s breath catches. She wants to run away. She wants to storm the gates. She couldn’t possibly show her face after the clusterfuck that was graduation. She has to know if they’ll still have her. She can’t bear it if the answer’s no. She can’t bear missing it if the answer’s yes.
Fuck it, she’s done being a coward. “I’m sorry, honey, I know you were looking forward to this, but… there are probably some people here that I need to talk to.”
“Like the mysterious Cathy?”
“How--” Harriet sighs. “No, I know how. I can’t get through the second verse without choking up.” That more than anything is the only reason she hasn’t actually talked about Cathy yet - it hurts too much, even after all this time.
“You can’t get through the sixth line without choking up, Mom.” Arachne smiles. “Go ahead. It’s a big city, there’s decent public transit around here, and worst case I’ll get a Lyft home or something. How long’s it been since you really did something that was just for you, anyway?”
Arachne’s got her there.
The check-in staff are glad Harriet could make it - she’s apparently not even the first person to show up without properly RSVPing, which helps her feel a little less embarrassed - and point her to the space the trivia club alumnae have staked out for themselves. On the way, Harriet wonders if ‘alumnae’ is still the proper plural when Kevin’s in the picture, mostly because the mess of gendered plural nouns is an easier puzzle to chew on than whether Cathy even bothered to show up, or will want to talk to her.
The club-specific reunion is in a dorm lounge, sparsely decorated - but then, that was never really their focus. There’s music playing (no doubt with some kind of theme Harriet hasn’t been here long enough to pick up on), and Mental Floss back issues on the coffee table, and a decently stocked snack table under the window, and a dozen or so of the old guard milling around. They’ve all changed so much in the last - who allowed it to have been twenty goddamn years, anyway?
“Harry!”
She couldn’t say who sees her first, but suddenly she’s being mobbed by her old friends and it’s like they just did this yesterday. When the whirlwind clears, she finds she’s been deposited in a quiet corner of the room - and face to face with Cathy. Of course.
The laugh lines around Cathy’s eyes are more pronounced, and there are silver strands shot through her dishwater hair, but God, she’s still beautiful. “Hey, stranger.”
“Hey.” Harriet can hardly breathe, never mind speak. Given that she hardly knows where to start, it’s just as well.
“Nobody was sure if you were going to make it, what with your dear husband making an ass of himself in China.”
“Yeah, well. I didn’t follow him there to begin with.” Harriet takes a deep breath, and decides to address the elephant in the room before it gets any worse. “Look, I - I know I lost any right to ask for what I want years ago. When I agreed to be their pawn because I didn’t know how not to be. But I miss you, I’ve missed you every day for two goddamn decades, and I’m sorry, and I don’t want to cut you out of my life again.”
Cathy sighs, looking away like she does when she’s trying not to cry. “I’m not going to tell you it didn’t hurt. You know how I feel about lying.”
Harriet nods, finding her shoes very interesting.
“It wouldn’t be what it was, not when we’ve both changed so much in the meantime. But… you know how you said I shouldn’t wait for you?”
“Yeah?”
“I tried not to wait, believe me, but no one else was ever the same. It’s always been you, Harry. There’s nothing I want more than to have you back, however that ends up working out. Can’t really see it ending any worse than the first time.”
Harriet chances looking up again; Cathy’s smiling, and pulls her into a hug. She lets herself melt into it, still half terrified she’s going to wake up but determined to make the most of it until she does.
“You shaken off Tad the Useless for good, then?”
“August. We’ve fought over our kid too much as it is. I’m not going to let him do that again.”
“Well, if you need any help… I probably shouldn’t take your case myself, but I can get you a good lawyer. Helps that they won’t want to disappoint me and miss out on the next round of fat paychecks when entitled idiots fight over the custody of their Ferrari.”
Harriet laughs - of course Cathy’s using her power to mock the deserving when she’s not helping people who truly need it - and then almost startles out of the hug entirely, when the music shifts to a very familiar piano chord. “All right, which one of you complete assholes put that on the playlist?”
There’s laughter from the direction of the music station, a cheerful, utterly unrepentant tenor (probably Kevin, in that case), but before she can go investigate, Cathy pulls her close again, and kisses her for the first time in too damn long.
Legally, her hands might be tied for just a little longer. But her parents are dead, and Tad doesn’t hold any more power over her, and everyone she really wants to please will be pleased by her reclaiming her happiness.
Harry Rochester breaks free on a Saturday morning.