Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Margot’s a smart girl, from the tip top of burnished brown hair to little delicate toes that pinch in most riding boots. She spends a lot of time looking at them - little pillars of salt at the edge of the tub sticking out from milky blue water, like they should dissolve or disintegrate. She’s looking at them now. 

Her mother says they’re cute once, both of them glancing down admiringly at them while they wait for the cordwainer to return with new shoes. Cognac brown this time; it’s summer, and she’s going to Jackson Hole for a Christian girls’ camp, a misnomer, or perhaps a euphemism. ( You’re thirteen now. Girls’ camps for baby faced children are for fun. Girls’ camps for teenagers are for problems, and you have a few. That’s what you’ve heard, anyway. ) 

The black shoes she had at the time were much too formal for a ranch, or so says Mrs. Verger, back-handed repressed bitch that she is. ( This, unlike the camp, is not a misnomer - just a phrase you grow alongside with your problems. You don't say it out loud for a few more summers, not confident enough yet. You still think it sometimes, even with her passing almost five years ago. ) 

“Not humble enough. Don’t you think, Margot?” asks her mother, packing her bags before packing her off for this shoe fitting. She smelled of menthols in the nineties, and the department store, but the expensive kind. Her hair was big and bottle-blonde, absolutely tortured but flawless and housewife perfect. 

“I guess so,” Margot says quietly from between hands and lips picking at her own simple braid, turning her heels, afraid to crease the untarnished ankles of the leather. It doesn’t matter that they can buy more - when it’s for Margot, it’s an expense. When it’s for Mason, it’s an investment, something to be written on tax forms. With only a couple years between the two of them, and more shoes bought for Mason than for Margot, she doesn’t always understand the difference.  

“You have such pretty feet,” her mother sighs, chin in palm, shoulder bag slung to the side. “You should have danced...too late for that, I guess, but then...well.”

“Well what?”

“Nothing.” 

There’s a pause there, where the reason for the trip reinserts itself between them. Jackson Hole. A Baptist girls’ camp for the problems, with more time spent on wearing out asses and ears with lectures than making friends. Margot’s had a few - lectures, not friends, but the bright side she supposes is getting to take her horse which is kind of like one if friends are defined by bribery with fruit and brushing their hair. 

She fiddles some more at her braid. 

“Dressage is kind of like dancing,” Margot says, pressing the balls of her feet to the floor until she can feel them whiten. Familiar; same as the stirrups. “Your partner just happens to be a horse instead of a man.” 

“I guess that’s better than the alternative,” her mother replies with a big sigh without explaining, Virginia Slims carton tapped gently, favorite lighter in hand. The cordwainer won’t mind if the best client in the state smokes a little. Better than the alternative to her leaving. 

( A lot of things are just slightly better than the alternative, aren’t they? Better to have you in the stables with the horses, admiring their sturdiness, than to have you admiring willow-armed women who sway at the feet-hips-legs. They touch each other gently at the waists to correct each other’s technique, or that’s what you’ve imagined, and you gently unfurl at that thought like your head could follow sunlight, a green-eyed daisy looking at lilies and wanting to card yourself between them, long and perfect in form. Your feet wouldn’t be so pretty if you would have done your years with them,  but you’ll have to make due for now with horses. Besides, you find your way to them eventually, feet intact and unbruised. ) 

“We work with what the Lord provides us,” says her mother in an exhale. “His plan is bigger than ours.”

And Margot is. 

Working with what she’s got. 

Since this consideration of her tiny girl’s feet, there’s been dozens of boots, dozens of camps, facilities, youth programs, and she’s surviving now. Margot’s outlived the menthols, and the hairspray, and the private religious counselling that eventually turns to private medical counselling, like someone might be able to talk her out of her lily-gathering for practical reasons, and she’s not just being a rebellious child who fights with her siblings and tries to break him rather than his toys. She’s taking a bath, fresh off a therapy appointment and watching the little columns of bone, skin, and nail pressed against the porcelain of the tub, and with all due respect, she thinks she might have a better plan for herself, thank you very much. 

---  

On paper, it’s a terrible idea. Out loud, it’s an embarrassment.

I, Margot Verger, am taking my destiny back by finding a man and settling down with what is a 50/50 chance of success, fertility and fathers aside. 

She tries it out in the bathroom mirror. She plans how long it takes to get to Wolf Trap, Virginia from where she is - 46 minutes in good traffic. Enough time to say it approximately 276 more times. They say it’s a habit after 30, so maybe between now and Will Graham’s house, it’ll sound better. 

Margot doesn’t know him outside a few sharp remarks and a night of trading therapy appointment pointers, but if he’s seeing Doctor Lecter, and Doctor Lecter wants to see him, Will Graham can’t be the kind of moral and mental fiber you want in a parent. Aversion to people, and trouble making eye contact when he’s not trying to make a point or intimidate in his strange, sharp way. Previous tenure in the modern equivalent of insane asylums. Bad taste in grain alcohol. A man. 

( Useful biologically, that last bit. You’ve certainly been told enough times that you needed to find one or how are you ever going to continue your prestigious line? Giving your obedience to your father and your future husband is obedience to god. You went on a bender just outside New Haven after the last time you heard that, made it a point to be a woman of the cloth by sticking yourself properly up someone’s skirt and have only the finest natural fibers of a political science major’s idea of a party dress gathered up around your ears, mouth busy with service, fingers busy with skill. You certainly have been giving out something , and now you’re asking for something to be given to you. )

Truly magnificent compatibility and planning.  Perfect circumstances for making children, or so she’d assume by all the people she knows from the country club, the church, the stakeholders party, the racetrack, the farms.

Even so, Will Graham has a particular hangdog look to him that appeals to Margot. She doesn’t have the egregious fantasy of “fixing” someone by merit of her goodness, so it’s not that. If she can't fix herself, she certainly can't fix Will. He’s decidedly bearded and muscled in concert with his classical handsomeness, so it’s not that either - Margot’s tastes skew decidedly Sapphic, and Will doesn’t even brush the edges of androgyny other than a sort of thinness that speaks more to stress and less to gender ideals. No, if she was making bets, it’s that he looks like he’s perpetually on the edge of being up to something but can’t quite figure out what he should be up to, and that’s a whole attitude and a half for Margot Verger, heiress, family outcast, and ne’er do gooder.

The broken front window would suggest some recent commitment to bad behavior, but the miserable twist of the corners of his mouth would suggest unhappiness with it anyway. 

“A stag got lost in a storm and broke through the window,” he lies, and he has a pretty liar’s mouth, a man’s or not. It curves smartly at the top-center - one side of a bracket that hasn’t been closed.

( Good - hold on to that thought. You’ll need that when you feel the stubble around it, something alien and unattractive when you’re accustomed to the soft pull of plusher lips. ) 

“Are you scarred?” she asks when he tries to flesh out his broken window with tales of battle and injury. She almost asks him to show with his arms how big he thinks the deer was, or name how many tines on its majestic head, tell her all about his big fish for his small pond of a house. 

“More than I probably know,” he replies.   

That sours her on making a joke, because like his expression, that’s also a whole attitude that contrition, obedience, and being decorative is never going to take away from her either, so she may as well be bad and it doesn’t matter how. That’s how all sons are made, right? That’s what she’d presume from the only other son she’s spent any amount of time around, no matter that Will doesn’t share that presumption. She’s wearing vulnerability as a mask tonight. She’s wearing eminent domain as her coat. She’s got privilege for perfume, and it smells like a way out of this mess, and he’s not seeing past any of it.

( On purpose, but you won’t know that for a long time. )  

Margot’s never entertained pregnancy as anything other than a regrettable accident, and the person she’s picking to entertain it with now is one too, but one makes due with the materials at the artist’s bench, and hers chisel serious mouths and disasters in common. 

---

The thing with 50/50 chances is that it can only go one way or another. Reading out the double blue lines of a test is like that too. 

---

“I had sex with one of your patients,” she says, smug, successful, borrowing her own body which is now different - not in the traditional sense of catching feelings for sex partners, but that her uterus is a time bomb that she set a clock on, and now she’s watching from inside the city hall she intends to blow up. Look upon my Motherhood and tremble! 

“Will Graham,” she adds, like it isn’t entirely obvious, and she teased at that conversation last time. 

Look upon unwillingly given Fatherhood!  

(Or please don't. This is your moment.) 

Doctor Lecter doesn’t move, just stares with his stereotypical therapists’ posture and folded hands. He reads like an alabaster bust, not like the decorative bookends that Margot’s father keeps in his study, absorbing the smell of cigar smoke and yellowing from misuse, but the kind they keep in museums that are supposed to be likenesses of men from older legacies. The kind she’s supposed to be perpetuating, cooking up even now if she's lucky. She’s thought about asking before, if he’s a secret cigar twirler himself with indulgences for bad children as long as they’re clever about it, but she never quite has the nerve no matter his supportiveness of self-care.  Or fratricide. Same difference, really. 

“What do you think about that?” she asks, leaning into the itchy collar of her blazer, full of gold tinsel like fireworks, celebrating herself. 

Not so neutral, as the moment’s pass. He thinks on how to respond too long for the polite academic response. There’s some matter of pyrotechnics going on behind the scenes with him now, lines of gunpowder being laid out but not yet ready to ignite. “Curious,” he says with just enough humor to maybe be earnest, but just enough she knows it’s projection. He doesn’t emote for anything but show, unlike her who has learned to emote for sympathy when all she’d like is that same enviable coolness. She raises her brows - more, surely there’s more. 

“Will Graham is not a lesbian,” he adds, and she very nearly scoffs at the obviousness of it.

She smiles instead. “He sure made a go of it.” 

( And boy did he ever. He lets his hair hang loose to cover his eyes and pretend. He used the uncallused sides of his hands to touch. He kept clear of the things he could do that made you feel small, let you push him around, pull at his bangs, avoid the roughness of his face, and while he’s not a woman, and you don’t find the lines of him attractive, you are appreciative of him in the abstract and in his consideration. There wasn’t a second Will Graham made a motion or a noise that would shock you into the reality of him, and you were grateful even as you relied on liquor, and pluck, and the vaguely nauseous feeling you get any time you try a new way to untangle from whatever you were raised to be into the person you are. )

( The satisfaction follows. It always follows - you just need to get past the nausea of waiting for the other shoe to fall. ) 

Doctor Lecter tilts his head, flares his nose, and inhales instead of sighs. 

It’s unusual, enough so to catch notice. There’s something animal about it - other, the sort of thing proceeding a kick to the head, or a tantrum that ends in the laming of a horse or a rider alike. She’s seen a few. She thinks she’s thrown a few herself. No work experience, no real career save the shiny collar of affluence, but a professional keenness that makes her turn her head to watch a powerful creature consider its mischief. 

“Did Will know of your intention to get pregnant, Margot?” he asks, and she listens.

No , comes the instinctual reply, something she could glibly toss out. No, did you call dibs? Did you want to offer that solution first in sessions? Force the issue? Do you not let people play with your things the way Mason doesn’t? She doesn’t say it though, because Margot knows the way she knows a horse tantrum that you shouldn’t ask the alabaster-faced generational aristocracy if they know it’s a person they are messing with. She can’t stable her psychiatrist for an afternoon and try again later. 

It surprises her how quickly she goes from successful to defensive, to be known so plainly even if it’s by the person who suggested the entire plan to begin with, even if he probably never intended her to draw her line in the sand with his favorite line in the sand.

She keeps her smile on. “Wasn't it your intention for me to get pregnant, Dr. Lecter?”

No, Margot thinks again. Not this way. Not this way, says the flinty look in Doctor Lecter’s eyes, oftentimes unknowable, but too akin to Mason’s the first time that he asks her to look at his new pigs, a punishment in mind that he hasn’t shared yet, but will. She listens with half an ear as he grounds his interest in renewal, life, and death, and tries to come back to psychiatry when it’s not what he’s really thinking of. 

( “Are you scarred?” you ask, being a smartass, but grasping for common ground. “More than I probably know,” he says, and is somewhere else, the way you are somewhere else in the hours that follow. ) 

That last one’s the one he’s trying to get around to. Death. She doesn’t know if he’s decided it, but it’s what he’s thinking of, and the same fervor that takes her watching her mangled clothes come up from the pigpen itches alongside the gold threads of her jacket. 

---   

Living this long after the passing of the elder Vergers has been an ongoing lesson in observation and the occasional frank acceptance that a lot about her life is really fucked up by design. “Oh well!” has been her catchphrase of choice, covering bruises with hand-milled powders and dabbing watery eyes with Hermes handkerchiefs. If she can’t get approved for that flat in Alexandria,  it's probably Mason. If she's missing a favorite brush, she's going to find it when Mason hits her hard enough with it to break it at the handle. Half the staff giving detailed accounts of how time is spent on the horse trails and beyond? Mason, and before that, old daddy Verger, who Margot sincerely hopes is burning in whatever hell is least acceptable for traditionalist old bastards. Life is a series of repeating patterns, and she’s getting good at spotting them and internalizing. 

Observation today observes that pregnancy isn’t a protective foil. It’s something that can be ripped off, a nuisance flyer on the windshield of the car, or an obstacle to be removed from the road, and observation and intuition says Doctor Lecter swats nuisances as readily as all the other men in her life. She had been afraid of the physical changes, maybe the commitments to children and irrevocably fucking them up by accident rather than design, but leaving his office is the first time she contemplates if pregnancy isn’t something also she should frankly accept will probably be ruined like most other things, and it’s just a question if it’s Mason or someone else. 

Margot is afraid of that prospect. She’s a little shy to admit how much she’s looking forward to escaping, when this is just another route to have closed in front of her, and she’s perpetually hamstringed and running too slow to jump the barriers and continue on. 

Margot taps the steering wheel nervously, sitting in the dark of the street, swallowing down anxiety like if her tongue still works and she can breathe around it, then everything’s fine, and that’s not an exceedingly low threshold for fine. 

Work with what you have, Margot’s mother said. 

Margot would say she has - regardless of god’s plan, which seems to often be a vast and vague stand-in for actual advice from the other adults in the room, it’s not been enough. It’s frustrating, being clever and it not quite surmounting the hill of Mason’s influence and caprice, or her parents’ resentment. Comeliness and gait are desirable in mares, cleverness a charming brooch, and only the first of those useful in Verger daughters. 

The money is not hers, so that’s not something to work with. The psychiatrist is giving her decidedly mixed messages of menace and support, especially now that she's fucked around literally and metaphorically with his favorite pet project, so that’s more of a dynamite stick with the ignition burnt halfway down. The Mercedes is in her name and paid in full, so that’s transportation, but hardly a complete solution. The baby is hers, but it’s also only valuable to her, and it’s probably a danger if Mason hears about it anytime soon, so that’s not either.

Well, Margot thinks with a frown, maybe that’s not entirely true. She rubs her middle - nothing of note to see, like it’s something she stole and hid under her shirt to flee the store. Someone unintentionally helped her steal it.

---

“I have a favor to ask,” she says at the doorway of Will Graham’s house for a third time, snowfall soft, quiet, and cold. 

There’s never anyone else out here, just dark snouted dogs and piles of wood in a house with a defunct fireplace. She likes that, the curious calm he surrounds himself in, even with the plastic-covered window and the perplexed frown that draws the bow of his lip deeper. Funny how he doesn’t fix it in the weeks between her visits, but Will seems the type to poke as a scab, and it’s kind of like one, isn’t it? She pushes past, as she did last time, everything in umber and sienna and wood panels in the space beyond, smelling of kindling, and fresh sheets. 

And he lets her. 

“If it’s the kind you asked for before, I’d be surprised,” he says with a huff and a wry look. “We drank all the whiskey already, and you left like you remembered the carriage is actually a pumpkin.” 

In a way, it was - sheets still warm, the sweat between them more from the heater and alcohol than their brief passions. Perfunctory sex, a girlfriend had once described it as before she found her preference for women. It’s a recurring story, and not one she thought to share with them. Margot feels the prickling of awkwardness at that. 

She shrugs it off. “Not exactly, though you could say I kicked the tires a little before going home to think about buying.” 

“You’re not buying in on me,” Will says like he found it etched in a stone and he’s surprised no one else has bothered to read it. He seems to fall on insights like that - he trips over them, they bruise his ankles a little, and he tries to memorize where they were between snows. That he lets Margot into the house is proof he doesn’t always remember. “Unless you found that whole experience more profound than the exit suggested.”  

( Tell him. Fulfill the cliche. )

“Investments are weird like that. May I have a seat?” she asks to stall, and he pulls the armchair closer to the heater without asking, because she’s cold. 

( And that’s why you’ll do it. You’ve taken the plan as far as you can. You need allies. You need, no matter the bad press and the wrong package, someone who will try to take care of you because you’re out of things by merit of yourself, and you’re selfish enough to tap into someone else. You already did once, so what’s another maxed out line of credit? You have sadness and disconnection in common with Will Graham, and that will be enough. )

She declines a drink.

He frowns at first, and then he says, “oh.”

Margot almost doesn't hear it. Very small, like someone might hear, and he's holding it in his hands to keep it warm. She almost sighs with relief at the obviousness of that. Will’s good at that, finding more of those stones to stumble over. Margot wonders when he’ll figure out that she’s got a whole field of them, and he should be careful kicking around in her snow without protecting himself. 

---

There are questions, but most are mild. If she’s ok, or if she wants to keep it, does she have a doctor she wants to see or anything that she needs to know about him. 

( “Can’t tell you much about my mother,” he shrugs, and you feel an unexpected kinship there, more than the sad looks. You didn’t know your mother either, and you still had to spend years like that before you finally outlive her. “I’m obviously a mess, but most of my and my father’s ailments are self-started and hard won.” )  

Will, like the first night she shows up, and the second, takes it in stride. Not a reactionary person, which comes as something of a surprise considering what little of his history she knows, but maybe that’s unfair - he always was the guy who didn’t kill all those people from day one. Margot wonders if he even has it in him looking at him now, tired and gold embossed at the edges from a half a century old space heater that casts an impressive glow. 

There’s a long pause in the conversation, he with a dog’s head in hand, pulling at their ears, pressing gently into the tear troughs of their eyes to wipe the matting wetness away. He has scratches across the knuckles and fingers, maybe from his mysterious window breaking stag, but they are pink and harmless next to the carefulness of his thumbs, and the dog’s obvious happiness.

( It’s why you’re here. Violence or tenderness for whatever needs it, easily given where you are selfish with yours. You learned that from the best. You don’t know where he did .) 

Margot swallows, and says what she thinks she’s supposed to say. “I thought you should know,” she says, turning her mug between her fingers, listening to her fingernails clink against it, barely heard. 

“No, you didn’t,” he sighs into the bottom of his. Warm water for them both, no actual coffee or tea at this hour. 

“No,” she concedes. “I didn’t.” 

Will nods, satisfied with that. “What changed?” he asks, still looking downward into the shimmer of the water. “Big family name, educated, progressive. You didn’t want a man, but you needed one at the last minute or else you would have never come here, at least not once you satisfied your curiosity about our therapist in common.” The way he says therapist sounds tortured, hissed instead of spoken - a sore point for him, a curiosity for her. Unlike Doctor Lecter, Will's feelings are already laid out and ready for ignition.

The question doesn’t bear a lot of thinking. She knows why. Margot could tell him he’s convenient, and handsome enough, that he’s got a melancholic and obliging nature that makes her feel safe because she hasn’t done anything to merit whatever it is that he occasionally cuts his words on and draws out his teeth. The bare minimum a man can do to make a woman feel secure, in the flavor of gum Margot likes best. 

Looking at him now, politely frowning into the floor, he’d probably accept it.  

Margot could also tell him her recent mantra of reclaiming destiny that keeps her moving mile after mile into his living room and onto his cock the last time, but that needs context. That’s about her, not about him. It’s hard to explain grudges against the push and pull of religious agnosticism and antagonizing, a lifetime of the passive aggression of other telling her to ask god to help her instead of helping herself, and how that ends with her giving penetrative sex the old college try, and she’s all out of ideas. 

“My brother is going to kill me someday if I don’t figure out how to get away from him,” she says, blank-faced, water in the mug tepid against the bottom of her lip. “And I hoped you would help me, because you seem to understand what that’s like.”  

He’s quiet for a long time about that too. 

---

The last of Will’s questions is easy to answer, and a little harder to admit. 

“Do you have somewhere safe to sleep?”

She doesn’t, though she has to think over it for a moment with a tight throat before she finally shakes her head and coos a little “no”, like it’s no big deal, and he doesn’t hesitate to make the bed with fresh sheets still a little hot from the dryer, like that’s no big deal either. That’s what she should have told him earlier, why she was here. That would have been the flattering thing to do. 

( But the other answer was true too, and maybe closer to it. )  

Chapter Text

“Just...consider it,” her mother says quietly while pushing loose hair behind Margot’s ears. It’s the night of college graduation, and she’s brought with her the entire entourage - Margot’s mother, not Margot. 

( You would have brought your current paramour - a middle-aged adjunct at the university that calls you her green-eyed monster, and thinks the bottom rib on either side of the chest is where you hold a young woman, rather like holding a vessel full of something. Your parents are the last on a list of invitees - they only know how to bottle things up. Your adjunct knows how to pour them out. )  

Margot’s father, Mason, business associates, smiling social contacts that are afforded seats at the commencement ceremony because this is one thing that Margot has done that makes him proud, and at last he can speak of her, if only for the night. With them also comes the son of a son of a client, one of the largest the family has ever had. He is blonde, and clean faced, and he smiles from the teeth and not from his eyes. He is single. He is looking to settle down. He makes her nauseous to look at, how certain he is that he must be wanted. 

( You’re too wild for stillness, especially now in the days before things got really bad. You haven’t needed to go aground yet, some poor pheasant waiting out the hunter’s gun or the forest fire. ) 

“I’d rather not,” she says, and straightens her graduation cap, bobby-pinned to her chignon and pulling at it until it hurts. The tails of her bangs fall back into her face, and ruin all the stage photos from the college photographer, but she likes those ones better because there’s not all those people in them. Just her.

---

It’s funny to think in hindsight that her parents would be absolutely ecstatic to hear she was moving in with a man to secure the future of her one-night stand baby. 

The image of her mother presents itself - perhaps in her Saturday morning best, when the housecoats and the still iron-fried hair of Friday night is sticking around with a wine sour mouth, and Mrs. Verger is full of advice and keen regrets. “I’m moving in with a boyfriend,” Margot would say, and the sleep-creased frown on her mother’s face would fade.  It’s easier to say boyfriend, even if Margot doesn’t know exactly what Will is to anyone. A boy, in that he has watery eyes carded by eyelashes that brings to mind someone younger than the scowling, tired man that he is. A friend in that he gives her things unthinkingly, and seems to accept her company like a breeze passing through, inescapable, coming through all the cracks in his house.  

“Answered prayer,” she thinks would be the first words out of her mother’s mouth as though it’s the only thing she’s ever asked God for, like out of wedlock fornication ( explicitly forbidden by the Holy Bible ) is better than the fact that she’s known to appreciate a pair of flirty kohl-lined eyes and how best to unsnap a bra clasp ( not explicitly forbidden - very much a grey area. ) Maybe the act of carrying a baby would sell her on the idea of traditional heterosexual marriage even if she’s going about in the wrong order, and Margot Verger will finally be over this rebellious phase of her life that has occupied about two-thirds of it thus far. 

As far as phases go, Margot thinks she might deserve some sort of prize for longest run, as though the entire thing was a conspiracy to irritate her parents. If asked, they would have said it was. 

That’s common, how they think it’s about them instead of her. 

She’ll happily take their fortune for her trouble. If there’s one thing Margot thinks she deserves for a lifetime of small and large put-downs, it’s the money that she was waiting for in exchange for putting up with them. Margot just needs someone to make sure she survives long enough to qualify for the prize. 

Staring at the ceiling of the farmhouse, from the awkward bed in the living room where she submits to the idea of reproductive biology and broader hands than she trusts at her breasts ( very tender tonight - bruised by pregnancy with nary a mark to prove it ), Margot listens to Will sleep in the dark. 

Or not sleep - she’s not quite sure with him. He took a while to settle himself once Margot is seen to. The dogs shuffle in the dark, and there’s an owl somewhere in the beech trees along the front drive, but otherwise there are no cars, or wild-eyed brothers, and Will is silent from the armchair that he takes as a gentlemanly gesture, because “you don’t want to sleep next to me - not really”. 

That makes her frown to herself, thinking of his face twisting up and her relief. She supposes maybe she should pray about it, or meditate, or whatever makes it cosmically ok in her soul to be where she is, and do what she’s committed to doing. 

---

(Be honest. You’re a little afraid to admit to your avarice in exchange for his fatherhood, when all you see is someone trying to just do something right for once. You used to want to do that too. To please someone, gender and social designations irrelevant. )

---

Morning comes for them the way hangovers do - nagging, sore-headed things that demand consideration of the night before. Margot watches Will rise from the chair with cracking joints and dark circles under his eyes, dressed from head to toe in nearly prudish amounts of consideration. “Seeing you wear pajamas is hardly going to offend my feminine sensibilities more than the ejaculate,” she wants to tell him. “Thanks for that, by the way, all joking aside. I only winced initially - everything comes out in the wash, I think is the saying.”   

It’s unkind, but she thinks it anyway. 

He looks at his cell phone like it troubles him, watches the driveway suspiciously, and generally gives the impression of someone expecting a storm to descend at any given time. He doesn’t know Mason well enough to suspect it from that quarter, so his trouble must be his own. Maybe some more deer to tear out the windows, or marshals to draw more muddy ruts into the gravel just below the front porch. 

“What’s got your goat today?” she asks, and tries to not flinch, a phrase she’s heard a thousand times from her father, and later her brother. 

“You keep showing up on my doorstep,” he says with a raise of his brows, padding barefoot from one side of the living room to the other to find his glasses. The coffee maker is hissing. Four of the dogs tail him, two others sleep, one scratches behind its ears. It’s very domestic - she only feels out of place half the time, instead of all of it. “Got to keep an eye out for any more like minded individuals.”

“Fathering a lot of children this month?”

“No,” he drawls with a frown. “Even if I have an accidental aptitude for it, intentionality aside.”

“Always a pleasure to find a new talent,” Margot says with a stretch of the arms, and sees him fight a little half-smile, the same little one that she feels when he talks, like he’s adopted that too. 

“No,” he sighs, and hands her a mug of her own, glasses found and askew across the bridge of his nose. She fights the impulse to fix it. “It’s that I’m finding private property has a lot less meaning these days, with increasing frequency.”

“Sovereign nations are only as sovereign as the bordering countries allow,” Margot snipes, shrugging her way through the cup of black coffee. Better than plain water, steaming hot. This too he gives her without much thought behind it, and she takes it black with three heaping spoonfuls of sugar, only a little sorry at the way he laughs.   

“So choose your neighbors carefully?” Will asks. 

“Something like that. If you can.” 

He thinks about that for a while, restless at the windows of the house. The plastic covering the broken one sways sometimes in the breeze, crinkling in intervals between sips of the coffee, her leaning against the counter, him pressing at the tape holding everything in place. Seven dogs with twenty-eight feet between them all dance around him, begging for breakfast, or attention, to be let outside, to nip at each other’s ears, whatever they can get. “I can’t,” Will says when he finally puts his shoes on to let them out. “Used to try to. I’m sure you see how effective that’s been. Seems like everyone knows where to find me.”

Margot can’t really argue with that. 

Fortunately for them, no one comes today. Will puts her car on the backside of the house where no one can see it. He has to shovel the snow to do it - blade down, foot crushing down on it, heaving slush and ice over to the side. Thunk, shhhhhhh . Thunk, shhhhhhh . Thunk, shhhhhhh . Two hours of that in the early morning, sweating, wiping at his face with calf-skin work gloves. Not obvious to anyone who doesn’t come right up to the porch, clear enough that she can leave if she changes her mind. He covers it with a tarp to keep the worst of the frost and snowmelt from it, and it makes her think of summer houses with cotton covers on all the furniture, waiting for warm days.

Will still doesn’t seem satisfied with it, but it works for the moment, and centers him on something to do. At the very least, they can pretend she’s not here if anyone decides to check in on her, or another SWAT team shows up to check in on him, judging from his unhappy glances to the end of the gravel drive.  

She mostly listens to this, legs crossed at the knee, and phone tapping against her thigh as she holds it between thumb and forefinger. Thunk, shhhhhhh . Thunk, shhhhhhh . She supposes she can do something too. She checks her email. She clears her text messages. When that’s done, she turns the phone off, in dread of a call or a text, just in case. She’s a bad liar where Mason’s involved, as though her deceptions are a change in the weather and he feels them in his joints. The little screen going black is safety, as long as it stays like that. 

---

“I don’t know if we should stay here,” he tells her honestly. 

( “I’d like to explain why, but I don’t know how, I don’t think most people understand me even when I do,” is what his face also says after he’s done talking, and you know exactly how he feels. )

Margot taps the quiet phone against her thigh more frantically, weighing that. 

“Then let’s go somewhere you do know,” she concedes, pushing unbrushed hair over a shoulder and pretending that it’s always what she had planned. The drama of running away, and the fantasy of it working out.  

He offers to marry her that night before they leave and before her takes his armchair again in deference, if that’s safer for her, or a better buffer against Mason.

Margot purses her lips, thinks of the calculation in Doctor Lecter’s eyes, and tells him it’s probably not, not even to play pretend. 

---

Whether it’s from her own general life experience of succeeding downward, or her low expectations of men in general, or how humbly he lives in his house, Margot finds herself having to correct herself in regards to Will Graham and what he’s capable of.

She’s not a snob. Margot says this again - she’s not a snob, perfectly happy to pile into the front seat of his worn but well-kept Volvo, seat down in the back with seven dogs in little vests and collars at the ready to go, pressing against the back of her arm like she’s forgotten to touch them, and there’s nothing they like so much as a new person. Will throws a small and scuffed suitcase into the footwell behind his seat, but otherwise doesn’t keep much other than a manila folder full of papers, his laptop, and his phone, clearly comfortable with traveling light and often. All his things are maintained and clean, and even she steals a white shirt to wear under her cream and gold wool blazer, while he just nods, unbothered, thirty others just like it tucked into tidy, bleached rolls in the house, six taken with him. 

( But. ) 

She brings a hand up to the collar of the blazer, and the tailored line of her slacks and little pointy black shoes. That’s it. That’s all she has, except for a quiet phone and the keys to her car which she throws into the glove compartment like she’s concerned someone might steal it while they’re gone to wherever it is that seems like a good idea to someone like Will. It’s both more and less agency than she’s ever had. 

“You look like you’re going to vomit,” Will says when he turns on the engine.

She hums, stubborn. “Must be the morning sickness,” she says, knowing full well it isn’t, and for all that Will is good at finding things out, Margot sits in the absolute certainty that he can never really know her body, shared offspring or sexual advances or not, and she can have her secrets. 

( You shared it the way someone lends things they want back. )  

They turn down the road, house forgotten with her car, and with it one of the few things that’s hers. The nausea gets more intense, but it’s quiet, and she can at least melt down in abject mute silence. 

They get about three lights into a suburb, and one away from the entrance to the highway before Will speaks again. 

“It’s ok to be afraid of what’s going to happen,” he says, and she can barely hear him over the engine of the car, and the gravel and ice popping under the tires. He doesn’t try to be anything but quietly conversational in the bluelight hours before dawn.  “I am all the time these days. I don’t know the last time I felt like I had the whole story.” 

“It’s a good thing we’re going to be parents,” she murmurs around a tight throat. 

“Yeah, that irony seems to keep coming back for me,” he sighs as well, and turns a palm to scratch at one of the dogs, pressing the cold dark of their nose into his shoulder, anxious for reassurance and Will reassured in some way for being able to provide it. More subtext she can’t read, same as her. 

There’s nothing really to complain about. He drives smoothly. He asks her if she needs to make a stop. He talks to her like an adult, no head games, no condescension, fading carefully into the lining of his seat and the tree lined eastern seaboard, headed south.  

---

( “Family property in St. Augustine. Not exactly the Hilton, but it’s a good place to get away for a bit, and if I don’t die in the next couple of years, hopefully I’ll get to retire there. Maybe tan a little.” )  

( “Oh, Florida,” you reply, surprised. “Good plan - throw me in a bikini and put me out to sun with all the other reptiles.” Will grins a little at this, smile stealing it’s way onto his face, and you raise a hand to your middle again, thinking of yolks turned to claws and scales in the safety of shells. )

---

It’s a long way to St. Augustine - a day and a half of straight driving, and nothing but the sad looking wintertime groves of trees and marshlands between cities. Lots of damp looking beach houses with widow’s watches on top of them, so that wives cam aimfully grieve lost sailors explains Will. Nice to watch a storm roll in, not so nice for morosely watching for boats to come into harbor. ( “Something my dad taught me. He sails - think he’s kind of sad to not have had a watcher sometimes, but he’s an asshole, more so than me, so it’s not surprising he didn’t have anyone.” ) 

Margot scoffs at this, eying the little grey and blue cottages, and their peeling cheery paint, terraced porches cut into the sides of their roofs - like it’s a woman’s duty to think about that for the rest of their days and that there’s no joy save for staring out into the grey-green of the Atlantic from a balcony. Margot can’t imagine. She’d have long ago found a way to shack up with her fellow widows, and protected herself in the security of modest bereavement. She wonders how many did just that.

But it does make her think more about Will - one living parent who’s reclusive in common with him, some experience living on the coast with an aesthete mouth for words and trivia. She’s never seen a wedding band, or photos of someone in his house, but she guesses she’s never really asked what he’s leaving behind to do this...whatever this thing is he’s doing for her. She doesn’t really know him. She’s not really tried.

What are his ground rules? How far does the kindness go? Where does the train line end and she needs to take a cab or walk herself to the nearest street light, and through the dark to the next one? It’s suspicious how easily he takes to her needs, like he doesn’t have any of his own.

So she presses on that, to see if it hurts. 

“What kind of fixture do you see me as?” she asks, somewhere south of Raleigh - it takes her a bit to summon her courage, afraid he might change his mind if she doesn’t wait until it’s almost too late to turn around. “On the subject of watching, and expectations.” 

Will puzzles a little at that, tongue rolling between cheek and teeth. “Are you so accustomed to being a fixture that you think that you have to be one, or do you just think I’m in need of one?”

Margot shrugs, forehead pushed to the glass of the passenger window. They pass a trucker or two, a school bus, and a state trooper, which she gracefully pretends to not see Will flinch a little at. Guilty conscience, or maybe just bad memories - the man who didn’t kill all those people, but enough people thought that he did that it didn’t matter. “I have a decorative bachelors degree and once held a summer job at a coffee shop to prove a point. What do you think I’ve been to my family other than a fixture?” she says between sips of soda. 

Will nods, mouth moving to frown again. “What do you want to be?”

( Other than a mother goes unsaid. Will’s just along for the ride. He’s driving you hundreds of miles away from the things that might keep you from it. But what do you want other than that? )

“I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it,” she hums. “I think I might have wanted to be a mountie when I was nine. Red coat, jodhpurs, and all - renounce the United States and become Canadian, like it’s joining the circus instead of an actual career path for people and I can just ride my way into it.”

“With your family’s money, you probably could have,” Will says with a hand that reaches up and around his shoulder to softly press at the snout of the german shepherd mix, long head resting against the top of the car seat. He does it thoughtlessly and throughout the drive, and all seven of them jockey for his attention in rounds like this. Margot envisions herself as a particularly pedigreed dog herself, the front seat her bed, her pregnancy her way of pushing into his space, and him attending to it without hesitation. A real pretty bitch in the background.

Margot sits up, recrosses her legs, and caps her soda until it’s twisted too tight. “Maybe,” she frowns. Maybe she should have. She can hear it in her head - my liberal, lesbian daughter that moved to Vancouver to go into law enforcement her father would say with a laugh, a big joke between associates and legal underwriters who bequeath a singular dollar to her in the will for not playing along in that universe, but far enough away from home that it merits humor and the occasional stilted call instead of disappointment or the constant barrage of comparisons and expectations up until his death. ( Hypertension, poor diet, family history with heart disease. You’d laugh all the way to the cemetery about his literal bad breeding if people hadn’t been watching you. ) 

She sighs. “It’s the kind of thing you think is cool when you’re a kid and find to be pretty stupid when you’re an adult. Just a job, subject to all the same mundane inconveniences and disappointments. No horses either, unless it’s for an event, which is every bit as decorative as my current esteemed position of trust fund kid.”

Will nods, eyes fixed on the road, right hand still pulled up behind him to scratch around short white fur and a lolling tongue. “But for a few years it was something to look forward to,” he says. “Aspirational.”    

( What he means is precious, naive, a part of you replies snidely. )  

“Is this what we’re circling around to? Shoot for the moon and land among the stars?” she asks, suddenly angry and struggling not to show it. What about her reality is aspirational? The idea of red coats are dissolving into loose-fitting clothes and cocoa butter. The rides through the highlands are replaced with pushing strollers and playing at heterosexual normalcy with someone she doesn’t really know. Only running away is the same. “Wouldn’t you rather have something you want instead of trying to help me figure out what that is for me?”

Will thinks on that for the space between two freeway exits, chewing at the corner of his mouth. 

“You’ll be unsurprised to hear the things that I want as an adult are still mostly stupid,” he says, “and the low hanging fruit is to be a supportive father.” 

He doesn’t talk for a while afterwards, and Margot’s stomach is upset and full of bubbles, so she doesn’t either. 

---

Finding a hotel to accommodate seven dogs sounds difficult, but Will knows a little motor court in Savannah that he’s stayed in before - some kind of family friend that knows Will and his little entourage and is able to put them up last minute for a price Margot thinks sounds sketchy, but Will assures her is a favor, as long as they pay in cash. 

( He does - he whips out that little manila folder and hands off a few crisp bills, and accepts the keys given with a “thank you, baby - call your daddy, tell ‘em I hope he comes home safe” and you blink at the brief affectionate look he gives her in kind, a perfect match that takes him like an unexpected rain. “Empathy disorder,” he had told you two nights ago, something he prays the Punnett squares aren’t trying to hand down, the way you pray they don’t hand down your inability to fully commit to difficult decisions. )  

( You didn’t really commit to this. You let someone else do it for you. ) 

Even at this time of year, the air is balmy and sticks to her skin underneath the shirt and the blazer, and the roar of the tiny window-mounted air conditioner fights it as best it can, a room as large as her closet at home, and half as well lit. 

There’s a single queen bed in the room. Neither fusses over this - a quick negotiation of who should be closer to the AC unit, or where the dog beds should be clustered on the ground, but otherwise another white shirt handed off without complaint, and another night in what is now her two day old underwear in her own hand after a shower, and borrowing a spare toothbrush from the overnight bag while Will stands outside the motel door to talk to someone on the phone. It’s humbling. 

They’ll be able to take some time tomorrow to get settled and get her clothes and toiletries of her own in Florida if she doesn’t want to make due with gas station ones, so for now she just needs to treat it like a party gone a little too late into the night. One continuous walk of shame to America’s oldest city, subject to womanhood’s oldest trap. She knows those walks well enough, the kind of comfortable filth she can accept, though she typically leaves them smelling like a new perfume on a foreign counter instead of travel toothpaste. The trap is new, and cramps her stomach tonight. 

While she brushes her teeth, she listens. 

“Thank you for the invitation, but no...I won’t be available tomorrow or the night following...no, no profile or crime scene, just other plans to attend to. I’m sure you and Alana will enjoy your gift.” 

When she’s done, Will is done too. 

They stare at the blue glow of the parking lots lights on the ceiling until someone falls asleep. Margot keeps her hands over her middle, and dreams of sons that are made up of everything except herself, and do exactly as she asks, and wakes up startled several times to Will still staring at the ceiling, checking his phone hour by hour. 

---

The change from Georgia to Florida is imperceptible, save for the sense of arrival sneaking up with each exit on the highway. Margot wakes up with frizzy hair that breaks two of Will’s comb teeth, and a cup of decaf with a wilting egg sandwich from the drive-in near the motel is sitting in her stomach about as well as it sounds, and the nagging dread that this isn’t going to work, this isn’t going to work playing a tune with the weather forecast on a tube TV.

“Still nervous?” asks Will, sipping at burnt coffee, sitting at the foot of the bed. He could be her husband. They could just be going on vacation - travelling cheap, getting ready for sandals on the beach, comfortable nights on the couch thinking about what do they need to do to be ready for a baby, what should we name them, what does dinner on Friday night look like-   

“Aren’t you always?” she asks, and considers throwing up.   

The cheery mishmash of palm trees and beach homes is something she’s liked in the past - exotic family vacations after Christmas to get away from the chill, back when those could be fun, or spring breaks taken in cross country drives with sorority sisters, best friends, the occasional lover. These taste like Shirley Temples as a young girl, and daiquiris as a young woman, and salt around the mouth both ways. Today tastes like Sprite and unflavored chewing antacids that WIll keeps with his aspirin, which Margot assumes is part of the menu for expecting mothers, like a secret gluten-free option that is all just varying amounts of acid reflux.

Saint Augustine isn’t very far from the thoughtlessly blue and orange state sign that welcomes them to the state. Home , she tries on for size, but driving beneath the tangle of red roofs, palm trees, and scrub oaks that ambulate between novelty restaurants and gift shops with shells glued to things like that is the entirety of a vacation here summarized in neon dyes and flip flops, it doesn’t quite fit.

“So why Saint Augustine?” she asks. 

“Grandparents,” Will replies, “both dead, by the way, so there’s not any sort of heartwarming reunion and introduction waiting here. Only thing I have from my mother is a propensity to sunburns and the back half of a duplex on the island here. Not very likely that your brother would look for you here. It’s a bit...” he hesitates here, trying to flavor it correctly, “rustic.” 

“They’re going to find my car eventually,” she says, closing her eyes to the traffic. It’s stop and go, heading out onto a long expanse of bridge. Two lions stare them down from either side in plaster, gateway to Anastasia Island. Appropriate for missing plutocrats, especially discarded ones, she thinks with a hum. A good place for heirs and heiresses to come back unlooked for from social upheaval - she even has her very own Rasputin in Mason. ( He never does seem to die, but you also haven’t made a good effort of it, soft handed girl that you are with a taste for other soft handed girls. ) It’s an unexpected boost of confidence in the washed-out color of the ocean, creeping up on either side, like she should be here for the sake of irony if nothing else.   

“And I suspect I know who will find it,” Will replies in a sing-song voice. “One of three options, anyway. I did say that my house was popular lately.” 

“You don’t think Mason’s going to look for you, or is he in your math?” 

“I’m sure somebody will,” he shrugs. “But he’s not going to look for the holdings of a family trust that names another trust instead of a person. If he shows up, it’s someone else’s fault, not mine.”

Margot smiles. “I guess it’s dumb of me to assume byzantine estate planning is a province of only the wealthy. Or island retreats.”    

“Living on the water used to be the province of the poor,” Will rebuts, and pulls into the narrow roads of the neighborhood, the dull water of the bay disappearing with the white pillars and maws of the statues. Grass splits the concrete at the corners - winter vacationers mill between stop signs and the waving poles of fishermen at the walkway edges. “So I guess we’re both welcome, depending on who you ask.” 

---

The duplex is old - lilac purple with white filigree trim, an Easter egg on a boulevard of other absurd pastel buildings that are brined with marine salt. It’s charming, in that half a disaster kind of way, but people describe her that way, and she would describe Will in similar terms, so really the whole thing seems like the perfect place for them to add a half disaster baby and half disaster trauma bonding merkin relationship. 

( “Just...consider it,” your mother is saying, and the field lights are bright outside the stadium and you cut your eyes  away from her, and her guests, not yours. ) 

“Cute,” she says, like that should cover it.

Will snorts, and throws the car into park to let the dogs out to roam in the paved drive. They’re good that was, never straying far and made loyal by Will’s attention. Margot feels cross again at the idea of not being so different, but pets the shepherd mix when he sticks his nose in her hand anyway. Brotherhood, with both more and less teeth than what she’s accustomed to. 

The key to the house is behind the deck and under one of the shake shingles, a pulled tooth with a filling. It makes sense Will wouldn’t keep something this specific on a keychain where he can reach it anytime, but perhaps that’s not right either - maybe it’s weird that he thinks so little of it that he’s ok with keeping the only way in behind a mildewing wooden slat. He looks at it like it surprises him, and rolls his shoulders before ascending the stairs to unlatch the metal screen door.

( He said it was his mother’s family - you can sympathize with that kind of casual disdain for unwanted inheritance. You save yours for your toothy smile; you want the money, not the resemblance. ) 

“It’s probably musty,” he warns. “I haven’t been in for a few years, and my father is notorious for smoking where he’s not supposed to.” But Will walks in like he’s comfortable in that, opening old windows as he goes, flipping light switches until he thinks that’s good enough for company. 

He didn’t lie. It’s rustic, insofar as it’s trapped somewhere between an old cottage and the 1980s, complete with ugly seafoam formica countertops and a white couch, hazardously close to a large ashtray that isn’t empty. The kitchen sink maybe holds a pot and a half, and the chintz carpet looks like it escaped an airport terminal where it’s featured, and the wooden floor like it’s survived one too many storms where it isn’t. Two bedrooms, he tells her, one bathroom, probably the kind of wallpaper that makes you think you’re trapped in a nursing home. It’s a movie set more than a home to her. This is a stage, not where she’s expected to sit through months of feeling foreign in her own body - now she can feel foreign inside and out, she thinks with a frown.  

“Too busy to take a vacation and work on it?” she asks, sidestepping a glass side table, watching the palms at the other end of the lane waving at her. “Why didn’t you ever sell it, if you don’t like it?”

Will runs the kitchen tap for a moment, filling a glass and looking at it in the window light, before dumping it and filling it again. “Nostalgia. Passive equity. The novelty of owning a beach house,” he says. “Do you think that you’ll ever sell the Verger Estate when you outlive your brother?” 

Margot sighs, and drops herself onto the couch. It smells like stale cigarettes and potpourri. It very nearly smells like menthols if she turns her head the wrong way, and rather than spinning out into nausea as many other things do to her in the early weeks of pregnancy, it sits familiar and strange in her mouth. Two of the dogs jump up to sit with her - the long-haired one, Winston with the sad eyes, and a small spaniel mix that patiently noses at the back of her elbow with huffing sniffs. 

“Probably not,” she says, absently petting the curling hair of the smaller dog. “It would bother them more for me to have it than to sell it, and besides,” she sighs, Will handing her a glass of water that she holds it for a moment, “it’s mine.” 

The water here tastes limey, and is slow to uncloud. There are more dogs than sense, she can hear the street from the front windows, and she thinks the floor is liable to give way if she jumps hard on the corners, but out in the car, her cell phone is quiet and dead, and the address proudly shows no ownership that anyone would think to check for Margot Verger, and maybe not even Will Graham. If she can survive all the rest of her life up to this point, she can survive living with a stranger in a tiny townhouse long enough to get to pick what happens next.

( When you outlive your brother, Will had said. Not if. That makes you feel safer than the anonymity of 800 miles. ) 

---  

The front property belongs to a nice middle-aged couple that lives in Wisconsin who winter on the coast like migratory birds, and things are still orderly from their occupancy. It’s not likely they’ll see them very much, but Margot should decide how she wants to be introduced “to keep them from asking too many questions.” Will explains this between checking sinks for water damage, and windows for sticky panes, like he expects all of it to be in disrepair and must plan at once how to fix these. An irony, seeing the giant tarp holding his actual house together in the chilly Virginia winter. She’d laugh, but the handyman routine is a mask the way the socialite is Margot’s. A safe face to wear. 

Much like pulling the car to the back of his house, he’s not quite content, and palms at his pocket where his phone sits periodically, but never actually reaches for it where she can see. He places no calls, and sends no texts of his own. Whoever he’s expecting to hear from, he’s not in close enough confidence with Margot to share. 

She considers he’s avoiding someone too, and that maybe he doesn’t know what to refer to the two of them as either. 

( You also can’t picture that there’s no faults beneath his surface, waiting to rupture the same as the floorboards beneath the carpet. You’re smarter than all get out, even your hateful father said so, and Will Graham is undoubtedly doing this for you because he is compelled in some way to do that instead of something else. ) 

Margot spends this time drifting from room to room, exploring in the corners where here there’s an old secretary desk and matching twin bed, petite and long in the middle of a tiny spare bedroom, and here there’s a pink jet tub that was probably expensive in its day, and if she squints between the upstairs window and more palms, she thinks the masts of the harbor boats are waving to the west. 

There are pictures - yellowing rectangles in old gold-foil frames. One is of Will, or she thinks it is - a boy with wide blue eyes, big ears, wet curling hair gone flat with its own weight above a round face and body wrapped in a big blue towel. He looks very small and thin, suspicious of the camera. He doesn’t smile. Margot thinks that’s why she thinks it’s him. 

Everyone else staring out from the walls she doesn’t recognize. Glamour shots from the 70s of a young woman with even white teeth to match the shingles of the house, an aging couple in matching collared shirts and bolo ties, nighttime sparklers that pick up the whiteness of feet beneath them but nothing else.  

It’s easy to forget Will is a person, that maybe his own mother blew smoke over celebrity rags on Saturday mornings too, or that he’s been called a disappointment before, or that college was an escape from people he knows to people he doesn’t. He lacks her social ease, or maybe her bluster, content to go with her suggestions, so probably not those things, because those are Margot’s things, and he’ll have his own behind the developed film, maybe a few more windows in need of an explanation. Not everyone is in therapy for attempted murder - a few of them have to be successful ones, surely. What kind of fucked up do you have to be to be the psychiatrist’s favorite in a progression of fucked up minds? 

She should ask him, Margot thinks and turns a frame in hand, hanging it back on its nail when Will appears in the hallway, dogs following with clicking nails.   

“You were a cute kid,” she says, and bends to scratch the shepherd mix behind the ears. Jack , she thinks he called him, like he hates the name but that it can’t be helped. 

“Cute like the house, I’m sure,” Will huffs, and Margot can’t help her own smile at that. Self-deprecating to the last. He looks at the frame with a squint. “Summer vacation, back when my grandparents still asked for me to come over. I think I’m six here,” he adds, tapping the glass. 

“Good memories, being six?” she asks.

“No, but the size of the ears say I’m not ten yet,” he says matter-of-factly. “That’s something I hope our theoretical combined genetics leave behind, for everyone’s sake. Having to grow into their ears.”  

“You could always just say ‘the baby’. Seeing as that’s what it is.” 

“In abstract for me,” he says. 

Margot feels heat in her cheeks and neck - embarrassment. “Do you not believe me?” she asks. Sometimes she doesn’t believe it herself, but that’s between her and the empty spaces of rooms, and glances in the mirror, and when she remembers she can’t unwind with a drink or go home.

“I don’t have skills with professional detachment,” Will interjects, scratching at the back of his head. “Or maintaining it, I guess. I keep finding that out, day by day, but sometimes it feels safer to start from there. I believe you,” he adds. “I just want to know where you want me to fall before it happens anyway.” 

Margot does too, but she doesn’t say that. 

---

Once it’s established the place is intact and hasn’t self-destructed in its long solitary wait for visitors, it’s time for groceries, and dog food, and hopefully some new clothes. Chinese takeout if they can find it. Margot feels lacquered with her own layers of sleep and unfamiliar utilitarian cotton. It’ll feel good to be clean and in her own things, even if Will won’t let her pay for them in anything but cash. 

( Another handful of crisp bills for her to carry before they leave. Not more than she’s ever had, but a near thing that leaves her awkward with confusion and gratitude - “you should have something in case something happens to me; we’ll figure out some more in the morning.” ) 

It feels good to have plastic bags full of things to wear, every bit as exciting coming from the local department store as it is coming from a high street shop. They’re all practical things - shirts of her own, underwear, socks, a few beach dresses that she thinks will grow with her. It’s kind of a relief to still be able to enjoy that, that the value isn’t predicated on the cost but instead the newness. Maybe she’s not totally broken by her upbringing. She enjoys a shower, and exceedingly soggy sweet and sour chicken that is neon red in its pool of sauce, and even manages to laugh a little when Will suggests that it’s probably carcinogenic and they’re both well on their way to being terrible parents.

They sleep in separate rooms this time - Will insists on her taking the larger bedroom with the larger bed, but Margot lays down on the creaking twin frame, watching the line of the gold frame with the blue-eyed boy glow in the light sneaking between the blinds of the window, and ignores him, waving him off with a “good night, thank you, this is fine for tonight, I’ll keep the door open in case I need you.” There’s only one bathroom, so it’s not like there’s an inherently superior space, and it’s quieter in here. All the noise comes from her - rolling on the bed frame, long sighs when she thinks her heartbeat is faster than she wants it to be or when the tag of her new nightgown itches at the base of her neck, shuffling her legs beneath starchy old sheets that smell of hall closet and artificial vanilla. 

It’s practically like staying in the same room with the doors open anyway. She watches the dim light of his cell phone come on and off until she falls asleep, a sort of lighthouse just down the hall looking for some kind of response. 

---

Margot wakes in the night, like the hotel the night before. This time, there are whispers.  

“I don’t have to be at your disposal. You should have left me in prison if that’s what you wanted.” 

A pause - the flashing of the phone screen down the hall, barely more than the glow of a digital clock, or a lamp from the far end of a long, dark house. She’s not entirely sure she’s awake, but she cuts her eyes to the hallway, and the sparse silhouettes of cheap frames shining dully, and the people are still in them, nameless and hidden in her disinterest in asking who they were. Will sighs, slow and measured, like he doesn’t want it heard by anyone and that’s how she knows she’s not dreaming, because the sound is honest. Whatever he was waiting on seems to have arrived.

( You wonder if he ever sleeps for fear of it. ) 

“Of course there are questions. Of course I know what it looks like -...Thank you for considering me ...I had thought maybe you didn’t know how to do that. No, I think, no- ”

There’s a clicking sound. Teeth coming together, grinding.  A longer pause, so long that she thinks that maybe he’s hung up. Maybe he’s fallen asleep waiting for a reply. Maybe he’s died, or closed the door, and it’s all the same for the moment.  Margot shuts her eyes to the outlines in the hall, and shuts her ears to the sound, and tries to sleep and trust that the teeth aren’t for her, and he’ll be there in the morning to not explain, the same way she doesn’t explain either. 

Chapter Text

It’s the mirror that does it for her, really. 

Surprising that it would be the last straw when the straws were already not very numerous, but the mirror is relentless and worthy of its distinguished position. Margot’s looking more bedraggled than she’s ever been in a fairly manicured life, and she hates how obvious it is in the glass. Some of these things she can see - others not. The unrelenting square of herself each morning and night insists on showing what it can and let her fill in the blanks. 

Bandanas around the top of her head while walking in the humidity because she has her grandmother’s thick, sometimes frizzy hair. Nails chewed in spots, and overlong in others, hormones battling nerves for supremacy. Acne takes parts of her face, and stress takes the others. Cocktails are replaced with supplements. Walks to the coffee shop are replaced with walks to the docks and back because she needs to keep her fitness up and her feet from swelling. Her breasts become two stones stuck to her chest, pressing painfully against her ribs. There are no horses here, or she's sure that would be taken away too. 

(Don't think about your horse. Don't think about things that you like that are left behind, and might not be there when you get back.)

Where’s the glow? she thinks, staring into the little medicine cabinet, prodding at the bags beneath either eye. When does she round out and become invulnerable to criticism, when she is vulnerable to everything else? she thinks, eying its edges that are flecked at the bottom corners with toothpaste, behind the tops of fish oil capsules, folate, the largest container of Pepto Bismol that a person can legally buy. 

( The spots annoy you, because you put them there. You are a graceless spitter. You apologize to Will about this once while trying your best to clean it with warm water and a face towel and he stops you because you’re making it worse. “Sold me on the idea that boys weren’t for me - I certainly don’t intend to swallow,” you hum around embarrassment, and he gives one of those pretty frowning smiles he makes when something is funny and he doesn’t want to show it but he can’t help it, he tears at the seams with it. )

Margot looks at it, and it looks back at her with her own face. The dark circles under her eyes, sprinkled with red dots are both new and old, burst capillaries from vomiting. The back of her throat tastes like bile and pretzel crackers in turns, and she thinks it would probably be more efficient to maybe not eat, but the nausea comes then too, and she’s been told by a very nice nurse practitioner that sees her in Jacksonville without the necessity of family health care plans and pressing questions about her income or why she’s paying in cash that she should try to get some nutrition in her even if it doesn’t stay for long. 

( “There’s medications for that,” she says, sunny as a spring day with her nitrile gloves and sonogram wand, and you marvel at that. Your parents used to throw that around, thinking antidepressants and vitamins would solve a lot of things for you, until they didn’t. “Isn’t there something we can give her?” they’d ask, and much like pregnancy, the only real cure is time and space. )

She turns out the light and closes the door. She’ll be back in a few hours to do away with dinner, and after that, more crackers. 

---

The first time Margot breaks up with a girlfriend, it’s on the downlow in a private girls’ high school at the edges of Arlington. Not her decision, mind you - Margot keeps things until they are taken from her. Letting something go is foreign. She thinks it was about being seen by a teacher, but the girl just says she’s changed her mind, that they’re doing something wrong, and she’s got college to think of , after all.

At the age of fifteen, still not driving, ( just starting to drink but no one knows or wants to ), there’s not anyone to talk to about it, or places to hide and lick at her wounds. Her girlfriend was who she had, other than a few people she hangs out with but hesitates to say she’s close to. Friends are for people who don't change schools like she does, and Margot’s parents are a non-starter. So erase that from the teenage fantasy, the drama and romance of the first time you get dumped. There’s no comfort from her mother, little pints of ice cream, talks about how she can do better, or how some people “just aren’t meant to be”. Those are for prom kings and queens, and other youths living manicured suburban lives that their parents have imagined for them, and Margot’s never fully been able to envision the same for herself. 

“What’s got you all bent out of shape?” Mason asks like it personally inconveniences him over waldorf salads and chicken marsala. He’s picked around the walnuts, left in a pattern matched to the china’s rim. 

( He’ll bitch about it before getting up and heading out to do whatever things Mason does as a young man coming into his cruelty. You avoid asking. You don’t really want to know what those things are yet. He’s still in the pulling your pigtails phase, and you’re smart enough to know that’s better than what everyone else gets. “I hate these greasy little bastards,” he’ll sneer, smacking chicken fibers between perfectly straight teeth, and your mother will sigh and scold half-heartedly. You keep your head down. )   

“Just tired,” Margot replies, and she is. 

Heartsickness look like a bad night of sleep. Heartsickness looks like biting the inside of a cheek, or stubbing a toe, and the wincing sticks in place, freezes there just like adults claim it will when children pull funny faces. At this stage, there’s nothing to suspect other than the usual things, assumptions made that there’s nothing she could be up to because the older, prouder Vergers have done everything they think they need to do to make a normal child out of their doe-eyed daughter. 

Will is always wincing, and that’s how she knows he’s pulling the same trick. He didn’t listen to the adults about keeping his face smooth either, and now he doesn’t know how else to look. He’s done everything he thinks he needs to do to act like a normal man, all the way down to making an honest woman of Margot Verger, the perennially dishonest. 

---

Will makes pancakes almost every morning for the first month, trying to push past her constant nausea in the afternoons and evenings with soft foods. When he finishes with that, he finds things to fuss with around the house, like they embarrass him, and he can hide them if he covers them up fast enough. 

“That’s what you make for guests,” he shrugs with that little wry smile of his when she asks on the third appearance of the steaming pile of dough in one week. He calls them flapjacks and insists on using the white corn syrup already in the cabinets to glaze his own with, this person she’s heard rattle off entire stanzas of Emerson and and doesn’t so much as blink at her scars and her stories about how she gets those scars, like he needs to make this veneer of wholesomeness and a blue-collar origin story over how entirely strange he actually is. Pastoral habits are his Clark Kent glasses, when every other word out of his mouth is Superman’s laser vision.

( You wear masks too. His just don’t always fall into place right, sort of like the glasses, constantly being pushed back up, straightened, pressed into the bridge of his nose like bruising force will help him. )    

“You’re pretty good at this domestic stuff,” she compliments him one day, mouth half full of syrup and dough. She has her own syrup, something blackberry that she picks up in a fit of impracticality while walking through a corner store. Not her first time in them, of course, she’s in her thirties now and there’s thousands in every county, but the chances to buy bright and cheap trash food come further and further apart as she loses opportunities to control her day. Will raises an eyebrow when she takes it from the bag alongside big oranges and lemons, but silently pulls it out morning after morning anyway.

“I am, contrary to the court of public opinion, perfectly capable of benignly feeding myself and others,” he snorts, and takes a bracing sip of coffee.  

“As opposed to malignantly?” she teases off-handedly, staring out the front window to the neighbors and the street. He’s making a face when she turns to look at him again that he doesn’t hide quickly enough.

Will sighs through his nose, takes a bite, clear syrup shellac gleaming in the too bright fluorescents of the kitchen. “Plenty of meals with bad intentions,” he says. “Shouldn’t break bread with people who don’t have your best interests in mind.” 

“Cheers to that,” she snorts, and drinks freshly made orange juice that makes her stomach a pit of acid, but everything does that anyway, and she needed something to distract her hands between the first time they nod at each other in the mornings and when the food is ready. She settles the empty glass, and that same face he was making falls back into place, like he doesn’t know it’s there. They’re both tired.

It’s hard to tell if it’s more than that. 

---

( That’s not true, though. It’s pretty easy to know it’s not that for him. You listen in the darkness, sometimes in the stillness of a golden lit afternoon like now, where you lay on the long but narrow line of your bedroom mattress, resting, while he frets down the hall. It’s almost like clockwork. ) 

( “I’m sure you’re fine without me. You’ve avoided Jack for a literal decade.” ) 

( “This is what I should have done anyway.” ) 

( “I’m retired from your sort of artistry. One piece, and my last.” )

( “Stop calling.” ) 

( Stop answering, you think, and watch the sun glint blonde-red-brown through your loose hair, crushed against the pillow in places, hiding your face like an overgrown vine in others. But like you couldn’t stop pressing against the desire to be a part of a family and the desire to follow your long-armed graces and muses, he can’t stop pressing against the desire to be a good man and the desire to be a terrible one with whoever’s on the other line. ) 

---

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home?” she asks him on a Tuesday, worrying at the edge of the wallpaper where it meets the frame of her bedroom door. 

From the floor, Will shoots her a glance that is something between wounded and ponderous. 

It’s as good a time as any to ask, while he’s tied up with a task, and doesn’t have somewhere to dodge the question. Will has been industriously painting the hallway until the whole of the house stinks of latex and a curious shade of morning glory blue takes over the liminal space between open bedroom doors that seems less for his benefit and more for hers. The cheap gold frames will practically glow from atop it, little yellow stars on an evening sky, Venus in the shape of the picture of the young woman that Will never identified properly, but Margot has come to suspect is his mother.  Very Mother Mary appropriate, very Spanish village of him, made all the more bizarre by not knowing if it’s intentional or not.  

The question seems to surprise him - not pleasantly, or even just out of inobservance, but like a bee sting and his first instinct is to swat at it. His brows draw low, and he recoats his roller brush as an excuse to look away for a moment and compose an answer. 

“What makes you think that?” he asks delicately.

Margot shrugs, rolling an ankle idly. Without the riding boots, it’s a little too easy, foot pivoting smoothly, none of the resistance of leather to keep her together at the joints. With how swollen her feet have been in the last few weeks, she’s not sure she’d even fit in them. 

“It’s been two months but you still act like an animal sniffing out a new stall. Lots of skittish looks at the door, waiting for all the other animals.”  

Will very nearly rolls his eyes, a half-grin taking his face captive. “You’ve been spending too much time with the dogs,” he snorts. “Or me. Probably that.” 

“Think I’m not capable of making a sentence scream like you do?” Margot hums. “What do you think that decorative private college degree is for if not sounding like all the other assholes at the shareholder dinner?” 

Will shrugs, and rolls a broad stripe of blue onto the bare wall. The ugly chintz paper and musty  wood of the hall fall away with each pass. It’s almost more alien than the dated pattern to watch it disappear - covering up the rightful owner. “Traditions are important to parents. If you’d asked me why I had to go turkey hunting at twelve years old when I was still afraid of guns, I would have told you it was because my father is a macho asshole, but he saw it as some kind of shared ritual.” 

Margot looks to the hall light, and back to the wall, considering that image - gangly boy, growing into his hands, thinking he might grow into his feelings too, but not before having the loudness of a rifle startle him, feathers flying. 

She sighs. “Pontifying about ROI is probably the shared ritual more than the prestigious college, but it sure makes a nice bragging point at the women’s luncheon.” 

( It did. You dressed in something scratchy and wool and sat quietly with your legs crossed and tried not to look at anyone and let people talk about your upcoming experiences like they were their own. “Did you hear that Margot’s attending Wellesley?” says your mother, smiling big like that’s something that actually matters to you. You care insofar it means that you can leave. You can be somewhere else, lines of states making fences between you and your family that you’re terrible at making with words. Filial piety, your advisor called it. Foolish, you said instead. ) 

Will nods, looking at his work. 

“You haven’t wanted to go home for a while,” he says, considering that and the paint in equal measure. He’s not wrong. “I don’t know why you’d think I’d want to. Not just because of this -” and he waves at the hall, “- though if you didn’t contemplate asking me to drive back on the first day after seeing it, I’d be surprised.” 

“I’m not choking up silver spoons at the prospect of some seasonal mildew and formica countertops, or old florals in the powder room if that’s what you’re implying. Not enough to get homesick.”

“I am,” Will replies, and frowns like he’s misspoken. “Choking, that is, not implying. This isn’t one of the memories I want to share - I want better for my child than what I had. That means no formica countertops, or peeling hallways. Those are easy to fix. It also means no Wolf Trap, or FBI, or any of the other things that like to go bump in the night. Those are...less easy to fix.”

Margot shuffles on her feet. “They don’t go bump in the night as much as they call, yeah?”      

There’s an awkward moment where Will doesn’t have a response to that anymore than he did to his wanting to go home. He doesn’t look away, but she thinks if he could do it without feeling like it was surrendering something, he would. 

A few breaths between them - a little wave of the usual nausea comes and goes, probably more from the paint than the topic. 

“Is there something you need from this conversation?” he asks. In turn, Margot feels a little embarrassed, the same way the first time she introduced herself and pushed a little too hard for him to introduce himself.

Instead, Margot runs a hand through her hair - tied at the bottom to keep it from blowing out in the spring humidity, sticking to her fingers when they get caught in the knot. “I just wanted to know if you knew what you wanted. You’ve been...” and she sucks her teeth for a moment, “...good about checking in on me. The mature co-parenting thing to do is to make sure you have the same. Or I’d guess so. Healthy relationships aren’t my wheelhouse.”   

“We should make a club,” he says in a low snide tone, pouring more paint into the tray, hands kept busy with work. “Thank you,” he adds, quietly and gentler now. “I don’t know what I’d even ask for, but it’s...nice to know I have the option.” 

Margot’s startled to feel that’s the truth, and pushes past a sudden shyness that makes her want to retreat. Show’s over, introverts return to their respective corners of the arena. “Whatever it is, you’d still have to pay for it,” she teases, and rocks on the back of her heels, turning to look at his work. 

“So, what is this anyway?” she asks. “You don’t strike me as having a passion for interior design - maybe projects, but not color theory.”   

“I’m nesting, I guess,” Will replies. “Got to start somewhere, and the hallway’s as good a spot as any. You’re welcome to do the same whenever you’d like - anything you want.” 

“Except to repaint the hallway.” 

“Not a fan of the color?” he asks, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, roller brush turning and turning in his hand. He doesn’t sound disappointed, but Margot feels it anyway, like he thinks he’s misjudged what she’d want, or that what he wants is offensive.

( Maybe it is; it just happens to not be the paint color. ) 

She shakes her head, smiling, and doesn’t know how to explain it doesn’t feel like her place to make changes. In a weird way, Virginia is still home, but the kind that’s a perpetual warzone. Margot knows to leave, even when things inside her want to stay, and there’s nothing that Will said that makes her think he doesn’t feel the same.  

“Blue for boys, right?” she asks, and crosses her fingers. "If you care about those kinds of things." 

---

Local family asks for investigation into disappearance of popular socialite , says the article header, with her smiling secretively in Mugler black beneath, eyes smoked at the edges, nothing of her poor relationship with the local family to be seen in them. She looks good in the photo - maybe a charity event, where the charity should have been the generous donation of whatever money was spent on the event and outfits directly, but the rich couldn’t bear to not be seen in their altruism. What’s a generous donation without a donor? 

Balancing Will’s laptop on her thighs, one of his white shirts pressed into the keyboard edge and erasing the edges of her in the vast brightness of the chenille couch, Margot thinks it’s a good thing no one would recognize her with the way she looks these days. 

She made it a long time without asking, but she gets curious eventually about Mason. Not that Margot isn’t always curious, but like the first mile on an unfamiliar path, she follows Will’s lead, she keeps the disaster percolating in the background and tries to train the compulsion of looking at a phone or the lifestyle pages out of herself and look forward to other things. Margot would commend herself on a job well done, reading paperbacks left in Will’s bedroom and going on walks with seven tethered dogs jockeying for his attention and hers, playing at newlyweds, or siblings, or friends - whatever fits the audience.  

( “Oh, who’s this?” asks the woman in the front duplex unit, smiling while Will looks at Margot with a tight mouth, never sure where the boundary lies here between you. “This is Margot,” he says, neatly sidestepping. “We’re staying together for a while.” )

But Margot is curious; about Mason and what people are saying about her. No good trying to claim a family fortune if they declare you dead before you can triumph over their convoluted rules to get it. 

( “How nice,” says the woman, looking between the two of you, two feet apart, too early in your pregnancy to show anything other than the yellowish tinge of someone that’s sick. The speculation is probably more exciting or wholesome than the reality - just old fashioned bad decisions. But maybe that makes it easier to guess, the more likely thing. ) 

She reads on, eyes glazing over descriptions of her finer qualities, pleasantries that make her sound more interesting than she is and more beloved than she ever has been. Mason calls her a “delicate sort”, like she’s waifishly wandering the streets of Baltimore just waiting to be crushed underfoot. Which, if she’s honest about it, she supposes she is, with Mason at every corner with his shiniest loafers on waiting for the privilege to be first. “My sister struggles with harmful thoughts sometimes. She gets these ideas about running away, you see, but we’re worried if that’s what happened here,” he’s reported to say. “We’ve made multiple attempts to make contact, but all of it has gone unanswered - very unusual. She needs my support, and a stable environment, and we pray that she or God forbid whoever’s taken her will come back, no questions asked.”  

Margot wants to just scoff and close the screen, but the phrasing is weird, how he beseeches more than just her as a silly girl, a stupid woman, a cat that’s slipped the door and gotten lost just down the street. No questions asked about what?

Well the car, of course. 

Given recent incidents reported and investigated at the David Dunlap Observatory, there’s concern that the location of the car may suggest foul play rather than psychiatric issues. Only recently reopened following the discovery of the body of Beverly Lynn Katz, and infamous for grisly dismemberments that have kept the building locked away from the public for the majority of the winter months, the white Mercedes-Benz belonging to Margot Verger was discovered a week ago sitting in front of the facility when the city parking enforcement ran the plates for a tow. 

Margot frowns at that.   

“They didn’t find my car at your house,” she says to the room, Will somewhere in the hallway and fussing with a lightswitch plate that never lights quite fast enough for his taste.

“Not yet anyway,” Will says unseen. 

“Not at all. Someone moved it somewhere more conspicuous,” she adds. “Maybe a week or two ago. Maybe you’re off the hook after all and they did you a favor - much more exciting people associated with the observatory than Will I-didn’t-kill-all-those-people Graham.” 

There’s no reply to that, only the thump of tools placed on the ground and the sounds of socked feet padding down the hall. Will is a breeze blowing in, standing behind the couch and uncomfortably close when a hand comes down to push the screen upwards. 

It’s not very often that Margot sees Will as anything other than a quiet and unobtrusive roommate that has a talent for verbal barbs, but a general preference to be seen as kind, or at least self-possessed. Now, inches from her head, a different animal inhabits the musty Floridian townhouse that she hasn’t seen. The reflection of his face in the glass is blank, but hawk-eyed, angry. He doesn’t look at her own shocked face in front of his, fixated on the words instead. His thumb at the corner whitens the pixels with the force of his grip. 

She wonders if he’s ever broken one of his toys like Mason. 

“I didn’t ask for the favor,” Will sneers, pushing himself back and towards the hall once more. “If it’s a favor at all. It’s not, by the way,” he continues, and disappears.

( “A stag got lost in a storm and broke through the window,” says he, and you laughed at the idea of its violence, or that he’s even capable of matching it. You didn’t ask what the stag was, but as time passes you know now it wasn’t a deer. ) 

Margot supposes she doesn’t often consider the possibility of people being interested in messing up someone else’s life. It’s so often her own that it’s almost unthinkable that someone else has a dark star in their skies, with smothering intentions, that threats are endemic to a small square of land she puts her feet on step by step. Again she considers that Will is running too - theirs is a relationship of survival, safety in numbers.

Again she considers that Will shares similar dark impulses, with less of a tether, maybe cut shorter still with no outlet. They’re both without therapists now, except each other, and that’s less therapy and more the kind of conversations you have late at night and hope the other person forgets, and you wonder party after party if they’ll tell, if they’ll remind you.  

She stares at the screen, and her own fair face smiling vacantly for the camera above rows and rows of useless words, until one of the dogs knocks her hand from the keyboard and she turns to scratch at their ears. 

---  

Before dinner, same day, same glass table with the scratch on the side closest to the window and pock marked with syrup she can’t be bothered to mop up, Margot listens to Will tap nails into the framework of wainscotting for her room - something elegant for a space tied somewhere between a grandchild’s bedroom and the final resting place of a single woman. Maybe another relic of Will’s unseen mother, never mentioned next to his strained relationship with his father. Margot considers if Will feels like he’s erasing her. Or if he thinks about her at all. 

( You try not to think about yours, but her bleached hair is near most doors. The smell of the menthols in every bar, like she’s watching you palm the side of someone’s waist beneath a blouse .) 

Margot’s supposed to be on a walk, but she’s tired today - the expectant kind, not the standard, frowning kind, and expectant mothers should take it easy or something, if the nurse practitioner is to be listened to the way she listens to the afternoon. The palms are shushing each other outside in the wind. The commuters drive by on the street, humming down narrow lanes.

“How is that better? How? ” Will asks the empty space of her room above all this, echoing down the furnitureless hall. Tap, tap, tap , the hammer goes. “You’re not an arbiter of my intentions and needs, and your alterations are, as always, unwanted. Do you have to insert yourself in everything?” 

Yes , thinks Margot, drumming her fingernails in time with hammer swings. Tap, tap, tap.  

--- 

Will’s caller is who moved the car. Margot’s not stupid, not at this point in her life, and she knows this the way she knows threats. 

( Maybe you’re stupid a few times. You’re prone to error. You’re as vulnerable as the next person to the machinations of people you grew up around, always hoping that they might come around to the reality of you, not the glossy print idea that they have of what that is. ) 

His absolute reluctance to name who it is makes Margot not...nervous, per se, but healthily skeptical. She doesn’t like being sheltered - that’s how you spend a decade convinced you’re doing relationships with other women wrong, only to find it was important after all, sorry about the years of contradictory statements, sorry about the disowning if you try to do something to fix that. That’s how you get stuck living with a sociopath for a caretaker in  your thirties when you really could have made a stronger argument that living away from home is character building, and that Margot may yet fall in love with a man if she could just have more than a week to herself to meet one. Her parents would have bought it. Mason might have forgotten about her if she had. 

She supposes she’s doing that now, sans Mason forgetting. Margot rolls a shoulder, and flops onto the couch only to sit with knees together, head upright, cheap beach dress bunched at mid-thigh and a thrifted knit sweater that hides her shoulders and neck, as she likes. 

Mason clearly feels deprived with nothing to distract him in the months that have passed, or else he wouldn’t have bothered with the press statements. Margot rather thinks he’s always thought she would make a better case number than a person, but Mason is fickle. Maybe he thought he’d murder her if he found her, and it’s a terrible inconvenience to now have to rely on law enforcement and let them know she’s gone at all. Margot Verger could have disappeared, by her own hand or his, and no one would say a word, save to ask where she was at for the derby parties  - “doesn’t she like these kinds of things?” they’d ask, and forget, and that would be it. 

( He wasn’t always like that - well, not entirely anyway. You think in some atrophied way, Mason loves you. Like an object he keeps forgetting about but can’t seem to throw away as an adult, but as a child, he showed you parts of his world, shared some small things about his life with you, before he knew he had the privilege of power over you. )

( When Doctor Lecter implied you lacked conviction to kill him, he was right. You don’t know if  you’ll ever fully have it, but maybe just enough to get it done when the time is right, six months from now. )  

Margot rolls her shoulder again - the one with the once broken arm. It’s healed now. It only hurts occasionally. Down the hall, she can hear the pages of a book turn. She can imagine the little black phone sitting unused and quiet in the side table. A dog sneezes - probably Harley, maybe Buster. This is all familiar now. It’s restful. In most respects when she thinks about it, Will has kept his promise. Mason hasn’t found them, and it just so happens that someone found her car and moved it before Mason could connect it to Will, so maybe he never will. 

Margot guesses she owes them a favor. 

Will seems to owe them something else. 

At night, Will reads in his room, dogs pressed against him. This is him at his most peaceful, curled bodies crowding his bed, little wheezing snores music with the black crickets that come in from outside. The small white dog, Zoe, takes a liking to Margot and sometimes foregoes this to settle into Margot instead, hot bodied and softer to press up against, but tonight finds Margot alone and thinking. 

She reads the article a few more times, enjoying the heat of the laptop on the top of her legs until it burns a little. She thinks about whether she needs to eat something. She thinks about Will’s thunderous look. 

She thinks on that again. If that look feels safe. If she can manage another six months alone, and years after that if it’s not. 

It’s not uncommon, the thought to leave. Daily, in fact. She’s a flighty creature by nature, allied to herself, occasionally diplomatic with others, and the domesticity of their arrangement occasionally chafes. Margot doesn’t know where she’d go, but it wouldn’t be especially difficult. She doesn’t have a lot, Will’s generousness aside, and three months pregnant doesn’t show anymore than a night of drinking. ( Something you sorely miss - no one will blink at a moon faced Margot - you’re a regular after all. ) 

She comes back to what little good advice she has: work with what you have, Margot’s mother says. 

The money’s not hers, but that hasn’t stopped her from using it before. 

Margot taps the black cover of the laptop, before sliding it out. She uses it all the time, but now, it feels like sliding a bottle out of the nightstand on her Daddy’s side of the bed. Something to anticipate, turned in careful fingers to make sure it goes back exactly how it was. 

If Will’s as bad an idea as what sets her in his orbit, or as bad as the other things spinning around him alongside her, Margot guesses she’s always got what she trusts - money. 

That solves most things.

She checks her credit accounts for closures, or inquiries, or payments, just to be sure. Margot won’t use it, not now, but it’s good to know if she even can . How like Mason it would be to just wave his hand and have the accountant cover all those foolish things she comforted herself with through the winter ( shoes, an arm brace, therapy ), always expecting that she’ll come crawling back. But how like him it would be to close all of them in a fit at her absence for so long, nothing to follow up on, no indulgences to suggest what she’s up to. 

Is this you? the page asks, stupidly. Please confirm with the code we’ve emailed to your account.

She does. 

She sighs in relief when it loads, and with that, all the familiar numbers. Everything in its right place, balances auto paid, nothing of note since the day she goes to the drug store, and confirms that she’s got a plan, no matter how ill-thought out or wonderful it feels from day to day. 

---

“I’m thinking of starting to get a few things for my room,” she says in the morning, leaning on the counter. Testing Will’s mood.  

It takes a few minutes to show itself. The bag of pancake mix hits the formica. The mixing bowl is at the ready, and Will’s hands turn a milk carton like he expects to find a missing child printed on its side - jury out on if it’s Margot or Will. They’re kind of like neighborhood kids playing house, so why not. 

He nods cautiously. “Whatever you need,” he says, as he always does when she needs support. “I should be done with the wood paneling at the end of the week if you want to pick a color?” 

She shakes her head. “I meant more like baby stuff. A crib, maybe, though I guess it’s a bit early for that. Maybe a chest of drawers or something to start putting away stuff as I get it.” 

He nods again, more earnest. “Whatever you need,” he repeats. 

In the fluorescent light of the kitchen, he always looks paler than he is, sun spots and freckles normally hidden coming out to dance in tiny pinpricks across his nose the way the broken capillaries do on hers. She wonders if he can empathize with that too, body echoing hers because that is what he does and can’t stop himself from doing.  

“What do you need?” Margot asks. 

He stirs the batter, whisk hissing against the walls of the bowl. 

“This is good,” he says, almost too quiet to be heard over his work. He sounds like he’s smaller than her. Not entirely true, she thinks, but maybe Will measures good the way she does: in periods of quiet, not necessarily happiness. That's fair. That's hardly worth calling out when she can't be equally honest. He shifts in front of her - “...Maybe the occasional confirmation that it is for you too. As long as you’re happy with it, this is good.” 

It is, she admits. A period of quiet. It’s better than she’s had in years, since she was away for school. Margot considers the half-finished pieces of the house, the comfortable but seawater scented old ones  that linger, Will’s chameleon face that sometimes reminds her of her own. She wonders if he ever tried to explain away what he was feeling at the dinner table here, hiding between plates and emotional distance, those yellowed faces in the paper photos watching and wondering if he needs to just sleep or if there’s something broken, and him unable to ever say. 

( You already know he does that. He did it last night. He’ll do it today, and you’ll be shy of poking at that, like he might frown at you the way he frowns at the phone, or the laptop, or the empty wall when no one can see and he doesn’t think to hide. )

Margot says nothing for a long time, leaning on the heel of her palm. “Just white, I think,” she says. “For the walls. Keep the wood grain down low. Seems a shame to cover up the bones of all your hard work when you’ve put so much into it.”

Will smiles, another boyish one that sneaks on his face. “Traditionally you want to cover up the bones, but hey, out and proud, right?”

“Out and proud,” she huffs with amusement, the joke ambushing her, and forgets that she wanted to leave, or that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and that he doesn’t either or what he wants at all, or what's "good". There's time enough to answer that.  

Chapter Text

Margot becomes a socialite. 

It did not grow native in her, even if it flourishes in her parents and brother, and presumably her affluent grandparents that come before. Seeds planted in the wrong soil will still sometimes sprout, and so she is given whatever kinds please her family, and waits to see if anything thrives. She doesn’t know if there’s value in something born inside, but Margot supposes she’s turned out to be a lesbian despite growing up surrounded by picture perfect straight couples wearing their Baptist values on their tongue and their wealth on their sleeves, so there must be something to the idea naturalborn traits. 

Margot decides entertaining is not one of hers. However, in typical Verger family values, practice makes perfect.  There are many chances to do so in a business as prolific as theirs. 

Her parents start her with the polite introductions and the teasing implications of showing their company’s children around, the same way her father might show a packing facility to an investor. 

“Shouldn’t Mason do this?” she asks, and no. 

“Mason should be with me,” says Mr. Verger with a confidence that defines most conversations with him. They are orders, not to be argued with. “You go along now and show the kids our idea of fun.”  

Maybe that was smart, Margot thinks in hindsight. But maybe that’s why Mason is a pervert and likes the idea of diddling children as an adult, because he doesn’t recognize himself as ever having been one. His idea of fun has never been made to play nice with others the way Margot’s has. 

So Margot learns the right things to say and dress and politely show her teeth. She entertains . She doesn’t pay much thought until she is older what those things mean. “Look at what good friends we can be. Look at all these nice things that we have, and what that can mean for you,” is what they boil down to. “Look at what an attractive young girl I am with an attractive estate that prosperity gospel dictates my parents are owed. Aren’t you jealous? Don’t you want some of that?” 

Garden parties. Galas. Holiday events that invitations are both sought after and expected depending on who they know and who they work with. And Margot does it each time, even though she has no real concept of have and have-nots, and that she’d really just like to go back into the house, and that it’s uncomfortable when her parents and their friends joke that she’s gotten herself a boyfriend at the end of the party. 

She’s just doing what she’s been told to do. All that entertaining amounts to as a young girl is showing some faceless man’s sons and daughters where they keep the horses, and asking if they’d like to ride them. She tells them where the dewberries grow in the unkempt edges of the west field on the property and takes a handful, and they snap thorned canes from them and whip the branches around like swords, because that’s what kids do, and Margot doesn’t know yet that she’s different from any of the other kids in a way that would matter to their parents. 

“Do you go to vacation bible school too?” they ask each other because that’s something they did recently, and surely all good Baptist children do, which Margot most certainly is, yes, she swears . “Does yours have a lake? Does yours teach you how to make bracelets, and glitter crosses, and give you awards for memorizing the book of John?”

( How about teaching your lesser worth, that your submission is necessary, like the Holy Bible isn’t full of self-assured queens alongside Christ-blessed magdalenes? How about teaching the sin of wanting to cut your hair short, that you’re destroying your glory and beauty if you do, because a man might not find you attractive and you’re supposed to be cowed by that? How about teaching the importance of purity, like you’re a flower constantly avoiding being trampled in the mud but have no way to get out from underfoot, so you’d better have the sense to never grow in mud to begin with? ) 

( But no, of course they won’t get that - most of them are boys, and you’ve learned to love rising up in the grime that you were planted in. )

“I don’t want to show your father’s business partners and their wives around anymore than you do,” her mother says between dinner and the cutting of a very pretty sheetcake that Margot remembers as having derby-red roses piped across it, blotting at her derby-red mouth, checking for stray hairs around her face. Mrs. Verger fidgets at the pocket of her summer dress, wanting badly to smoke, but smoking is unfeminine and unchristian, and she can be neither in company. 

“We are called to fellowship with our flock. Think of all the joy and love you miss when you keep to yourself,” she says, wiping the sweat and dirt of the dewberry vines from Margot’s cheek with a wet paper towel, and tries out a smile from the center of her freshened face.  

Margot thinks her mother says this to make her feel better about it. It doesn’t. Margot’s mother is dead these days, so Margot can’t ask if it wasn’t actually to make her mother feel better. It’s unthinkable, next to her poise and skill in the crowd that day that her mother ever struggled with anything, so Margot puts it out of her mind and lets her mother keep that shiny veneer of perfection in at least one memory. 

The insistence for Margot’s fellowship diminishes significantly after she outs herself as having an interest in showing the daughters instead of the sons around. 

“No comments about my future girlfriend this time?” she drawls over the dinner table. “We sure did get along . Heard her father was in the industrial machines business. Wouldn’t that be great for everyone?” 

But appearances are important, and enterprising young women don’t earn their religiously gatekeeped fortunes from the safety of their bedrooms. Mr. and Mrs. Verger must find new places to correct Margot with smiles and hopes of Prince Charmings and her transformation into a steadfast Ruth, and Margot must continue to show something of her thoroughbred qualities like that is important. 

She wants the money, so it is.

The events become less religious - more of the showboating, less of the vacation bible schools, because adults learn to combine those things, and she is not welcome at most official conventions and parties of her parents’ congregation. She’s a pretty young woman, and pretty is good press, and so Margot Verger goes to where she might have some written on her and her family’s behalf.   

“Miss Verger, what are you wearing tonight?” asks many a reporter from the edges of rooms with sponsored backdrops and self-congratulatory programs. 

“A smile,” she teases, and moves through the crowd talking about vacations, and the nuisance of the construction near the gallerias, and the program for the theater companies which everyone surely relates to, and against her nature, she enjoys it. She lets the reporter sort out what designer and season she’s wearing. Let that be the mystery instead of if she’s having a good time. 

—

In a similar way, Margot thinks she can make herself content with Will Graham.

Repetition. Practice the skill of being a partner, but not loving one. The same way she’s a naturalborn introvert made to be social, Margot is a naturalborn lesbian with no real confusion about it these days. With practice, she will have a capacity for affection for the man carefully painting the corners and edges of wainscotting in her room. 

She watches now as the lines of white slowly erase the people that slept here before her, feet swinging against a desire for stillness because she feels stiff today. 

Will doesn’t make her make conversation, with himself or with the neighbors. Margot would think it was something wrong with her, but she’s learning that Will is more at ease in either a soft quiet or in sharp observance. Small talk is an act of pain that he has learned to indulge to get to one or the other. Margot persists here as she does in getting into his living room time and time again - there’s interesting stories rattling around the mute line of his mouth, and he is all she has in the way of company these days.

“Was this your room?” she asks, and absently rubs the side of a breast that gives a bruise-sore throb at the pressure, sitting at the edge of the bed. It’s not a new feature of being pregnant, but one that she absently worries at, like a loose tooth. “Is that why you wanted it when we moved in?” 

( “Ask questions of your guests,” says your mother. “So they know you are interested in them and their needs.” ) 

Will doesn’t respond immediately, finishing his brushstroke in a measured stillness of his hand. All the veins are raised from the tension in his tendons - more masculine than she wants to think about, or how they held her at the crease of the knees not so long ago to make room for an industrious mouth. 

“Do you have specific rooms in houses that you don’t belong to?” he asks.

“I have favorites that people recognize,” Margot says. “At least if they care to. West wing bedroom in a summer cottage. Third floor vanity hall bathroom…most closets,” she adds with a hum. 

“My grandparents didn’t care to recognize much about me beyond my mother,” Will replies with a bland dryness that endears him to her, no matter the veins in the back of his hands. It’s nice to have a friend in other people with bad familial relationships, no matter how terrible it sounds. “This was my room in that it had the smaller bed, and they kept a few toys in the closet. I figured you’d be more comfortable on a mattress that isn’t fifty years old, not that I’m mortally bound to it. Do you want them?”

“Your grandparents? After that glowing recommendation?”

Will laughs. “The toys,” he says. “Primitive, probably halfway destroyed. I think there might be a rolling phone and stacking rings in there. Probably leftovers from when my mother was a baby. They didn’t really care to invest too much in me in case it got back to my father.”  

It’s hard to picture these people, even if she knows the kind. Well-to-do, elderly, undoubtedly uptight about their out–of-wedlock grandson. She’s had Easter brunch with their type. Margot’s probably dragged a few boys like Will around between sermons and buffet plating, so maybe dragging him here now is just a long-standing tradition with different circumstances. 

( “Be gracious,” says your mother, flicking ash from the smoking end of her cigarette. “Always find the bright side.” ) 

“They cared enough to let you inherit it, didn’t they?” Margot asks. “Weird trusts and Breakfast Club aesthetics aside. No strings attached to your sexuality from the looks of things either, so that’s a plus.” 

“If they thought they had reason to worry about that, I wouldn’t be surprised if my inheritance was generously donated to a Lutheran charity, just like yours” Will says, and takes aim at another stretch above the unpainted trim. “They weren’t exactly known for their tolerance of anything outside of the status quo, and I’m hardly what I’d refer to as normal, but I was family, and I guess they were traditional about that too.”

Margot traces the edge of a wooden plank with her toe, feeling for splinters and nodding her head. “That you deserve to inherit because you’re blood.”

Will shakes his. “That they thought I was…retarded, I suppose, and it was their responsibility to make sure I had somewhere to go.”   

There’s no anger in how he says this, insults aside. A dip of the brush, and a slow turn to keep the paint from  spotting the floor, but none of his usual frowning and thoughtfulness. The observation is history, as understood as mathematical formula, or chemical structure. 

Mechanical reaction, really. Rare but well rehearsed for optimal effect. 

Margot doesn’t wince often, but she winces at that. It’s so irrevocably how he sees the relationship that there’s nothing she can really apologize for, even if the urge is there. People don’t say they’re sorry that ants eat bird chicks, or that some fruits inevitably rot on the tree. It just happens. 

“Sorry about your family’s poor view on atypical thinking,” she could say, but what’s that other than pandering? “It sucks that your talent scares people into believing you’re incapable, or capable of more and you’re just pretending at normalcy and bad at it,” she could say, but what is that other than saying what he already knows? 

Will, when he stops another long line of paint, shrugs off her invisible discomfort. It must be obnoxious knowing everytime you leave someone speechless with no real way to counter. Most people would apologize for ruining the mood, but Will hasn’t been one for much of that even amidst his perceptiveness and blunt introspection. Considering the two of them had sex to the same kind of mood, Margot guesses he doesn’t have reason to think she’s bothered by that kind of awkwardness anymore than he is. 

Rubbing at her belly absently ( only gently disturbed by what’s living inside it - like you made the whole thing up, a mountain out of a molehill ), Margot lets a long, quiet sigh go. Seems wrong to expect something other of him now.

Will wipes at the brush with paper towel, speckling the backs of his hands without meaning to. 

“It doesn’t bother me,” he says wiping harder until his skin rolls and wrinkles with each pass. “The way people see me. I got over that a while back, or I’d hardly be where I’m at today. Hard to be bothered when you can understand why they see what they do.” 

Margot snorts. 

“I understand that my parents were raised with archaic morals and an equally archaic sense of justice,” she says, “that they thought I’m going to hell if they didn’t stop me from kissing girls behind the bleachers and all violence that amounted to less than hell was an acceptable solution.” The road to hell is paved with good intentions intones a youth pastor about Margot, instead of everyone else. 

“Doesn’t stop me from being hurt by it,” she adds with tight anger. “Didn’t stop them from hurting me, even when presented opportunities to change their minds.” 

Margot lets a tight breath go and leans backwards into the springs of the twin mattress. She has begun to recognize and take comfort in their stalwart obnoxiousness. The right upper corner is loudest, like many a shoulder has turned in the night there until they have come loose. Lots of thoughts, spinning in the night before she even arrived. 

“Most people don’t change their mind once it’s made up,” Will says with a roll of a shoulder. “Ignorant, intelligent, they’re all the same,” he snorts.

“Animals,” Margot says into the white of the ceiling and its warm afternoon glow, trying to not think of Mason and his pigs. 

“So it’s been suggested to me,” Will says cautiously, and makes the face he does when trying to not think of someone else.

( You know the look - a submissive glance away, wanting to change the subject. Tight mouthed. Too used to letting things go to get properly angry. He’s a third kind of animal that he doesn’t name, but you know as one of the same stock; the fearful kind .) 

“A dumb animal throws their head because they don’t know what else to do, but a clever one does knowing it might hurt yours,” Margot says, turning into her hair and Will working to contain his mess. “Which kind did you get knocked in the face a few too many times by?”

“The clever kind, and many times since I left myself open to it…A natural consequence of not trying very hard to change my own mind,” Will says and smiles with half his mouth.  

“Then it sounds like we’re both not very good at reading clever animals after all,” she says and stares at the ceiling again, pleasantly blank. “Or at least not very good at understanding why they do it isn’t the same as not being hurt by it.”  

Will doesn’t respond, wiping his hands until nothing comes away. 

Margot’s heart softens for him watching him excuse himself to the hall bathroom and the sound of running water, scrubbing at the skin until it is clean. 

( Maybe you could learn to love him as a person rather than a man, as you’ve learned to love yourself. He is you in other circumstances, in a broader body, with just as sharp a tongue but unversed in using it. By choice, he says. By not wanting to play with the other kids, says you. But you’ve learned to enjoy worse things, and maybe you’re called to fellowship with your flock after all. )

She stands from the bed to twirl the brush and the small droplets of paint that she is not experienced enough to avoid. 

( Being a partner still needs work. ) 

—-

“I finished up the trim,” Margot says when Will comes back. She doesn’t tell him that she’s also dripped paint into the carpet, and that she hasn’t the slightest idea how to remove it, but it hardly seems like the worst thing that could happen to it in its no doubt countless years of absorbing nicotine and bearing witness to whatever the fuck Will’s family arrangement was before starting an equally fucked up one with Margot. 

History being a flat circle, and all that. 

Will looks at the trim with hands hidden in jeans pockets - his wrists above the denim are rubbed raw. “It’s a little uneven,” he says bluntly, and doesn’t apologize now anymore than any other day. 

Margot nods, and very nearly smiles. Doesn’t hurt when she anticipates it - almost makes it comical. Maybe that’s what Will means about understanding people. She can be part of a decidedly rarified club of people who maybe can understand him .

“Yeah,” she says, pushing red-blonde–brown hair that hasn’t seen a salon in five months and grows like it knows it, “but it’s done, and I probably should help a bit. Earn my keep. Make hay.” 

Make some use of herself, and try to remember this is a two way street and that everything gets easier with time. 

—

It’s not all doom and gloom and wallowing in the no-good-terrible past that refuses to disappear with the wallpaper and the carpet. 

Sometimes, the dewy storms from the coast bring the salt smell of a gentle spring with them, because time inexplicably passes even if the memories don’t. The tourists pad down the street with their flip flops and rolling suitcases, gathering margaritas and laughs to them. Margot and Will pad down the street with them, seven leashes tethered at Will’s wrist while the dogs pull in all directions. She’s showing a little bit these days, so the tourists keep their laughs gentle, and say nothing too rude when they must stand aside to let their carefully-maintained chaos go by. 

If that doesn’t describe them in their entirety, Margot thinks they may defy description. 

Today, they pass the front of a restaurant emptying their grease trap in the alleyway, and Margot abruptly and quietly heaves into a swaying mound of grass that was otherwise safe in the cover of an orange tree. 

Sometimes, Margot doesn’t even throw up for a whole day, and while it’s not today, isn’t that something? 

“You ok?” Will asks kindly, but without much urgency. 

“Having a great time,” she says, and reminds herself that this is what she wanted. 

—

( Things you did want: the fluttering kick of a foot that is no bigger than your thumb. It surprises you when it finally happens, like one of your organs has gone rogue and decided between the stress, the lack of respectable foods like tapas and sushi, and the constant vomiting, it’s no longer worth staying around, but it’s a baby and you put it there with great intention if not necessarily great deliberation. You smile, and rub at the rise of your belly button. )

( Things you didn’t want: the surety that you should offer to let Will feel, who is sitting on the other end of the couch with a book in hand and his cell phone banished to the back of the house after it buzzes one too many times, but your unwillingness to be touched keeps it to yourself. “Be hospitable,” your mother would have said, like guests have a right to your body as much as your time, and your baby is no more than another thing you have to show people, but that’s unfair, because technically the baby is Will’s too even if he never insists on you admitting to that. )

( Things you also didn’t want: the reminder that you’re still selfishly parasitic. )  

—

The first sign of trouble after the discovery of the car is long in its appearance, and slow in its consequences. 

There are many signs, actually, but only one that is obvious to her, and Margot only recognizes it because it feels like it was tailored to make her fail. She is a person of marked tastes, and while she has learned to wear her fast fashion polyester that stretches at the waist and the bust with relative sweaty grace, there are other things that are so intrinsically Margot Verger that it was only a matter of time before someone baited a trap with it. 

Will blunts the majority of reality for her. People treat her differently with him in her shadow, looking the part of the blue collar son that she knows he is, with the scientist’s mind running a dry commentary in the background that makes her crack smiles like eggs. Hundred dollar bills come easily for groceries, appointments, and the occasionally shy-bought infant clothing, to the extent that Margot begins to keep a small selection under the mattress in case things go more southwards than Florida. There could be a hundred murder attempts daily, and she’d never know because Will comes and goes from the hardware store or the charter docks in the same mode and mood everyday. 

The mood being surly, and the mode being somewhere between Blanche DuBois mournfully returning to the Tarantula Arms and Heathcliff stalking around the moors of Yorkshire, but that’s Will, and Margot’s come to like him anyway. 

No, Margot doesn’t think to notice anything beyond the alien landscape of her own body and how profoundly uncomfortable she is sandwiched inside of it. She is a hormonal pock-faced simpleton caught between a fetus and a hard place, which is why every time someone tells her that motherhood suits her that she’s sure they haven’t had a single coherent thought since Reagan was president. Usually men, middle aged and older. 

( Not Will, but you suspect that’s because Will knows it makes your skin crawl. His observations are more literal, and descriptive of a problem in need of solving. “You look puffy today,” perhaps, accompanied by a glass of water and the suggestion you keep your feet up. “You should ask about how many antacids you can take.” “You should let me carry your bag.” ) 

( “You should stop using my physical problems to escape your mental ones,” you’ve considered replying while hoisting a tote onto your protesting shoulder, but that helps no one, and if he’s willing to go up to bat for you, you can at the very least not jeer at him from the dugout. ) 

It feels good though, the first time it comes from a woman. She’s not had many chances to hear it from one, so it shocks her with shy pleasure when she does.  

Despite the surly attitude, Will doesn’t really factor into why this feels rare and dangerous. It’s not their habit to restrict the other, so long as they acknowledge the danger each time. Little treks to the Publix on the south end of the island are to be expected if she’s not going to lose her mind in the same two bedroom, one bath time capsule that is their hideaway. The occasional charter of small fishing boats to ride the waves between the Matanzas River and warm water of the Atlantic is to be expected if Will is expected to do the same. 

Lots of expecting and expectations between the two (- three -) of them.

She has walked the bridge today, away from the relative privacy and security of the island and her mutual missing persons, but Margot’s been advised that it’s good to get up and move around. Will promises to pick her up promptly at 3:00 pm, just as long as she promises to call him on her little hockey puck of a burner phone if she feels even kind of uncomfortable or unsafe. 

Moon-faced Margot is still recognizably Margot. She’s especially aware of this passing the stone lions at the edge of old Saint Augustine, looking for all the world like the Mediterranean instead of the place she will buy cheap flip flops or a snow cone from this evening if the mood suits. The hairs on her neck stand up at their open mouths. Their eyes are white and unseeing, but allreaching. There’s not really anyone of note crossing the bridge with her, or watching at the plaza at its end leading into the old core of the city, but she feels the weight of a rock-heavy gaze. 

Hindbrain instincts, a psychology professor will tell her in college. The good instinct to be watchful and afraid, even from the relative safety of a bookstore with only thirty minutes to go until her ride arrives. Margot is nervous enough flitting between shops that she never does quite settle on what she’d like to do, so she settles for the quiet sanctuary of a bright store with high shelves, and only a couple of ladies behind the counter at first glance. She can burn time here, with the door in her periphery.

“You look really pretty,” she hears from behind her. “Sorry if that’s weird.” 

A cautious lilting voice, with a self-deprecatory humor coasting along at its end. It’s hard to feel properly wary around something you’re attracted to.  

Margot turns - careful of her feet and the gravity of her body that feels prone to being heavy, not pretty. Her usual retorts and eyerolls wither at the image of a young, pink-cheeked woman with freckles that need charting. She was an ingenue like that once. Was she half so baby faced and darling? 

Margot smiles despite herself, a tight wry one. 

“I’ll take that back-handed compliment,” she says, and turns the page of a book that she didn’t ever bother to read the title of, just looking for something to make her feel she belongs. 

The young woman goes from pink to red cheeked, embarrassed and irritated the same way teenagers get at their parents when corrected. It makes Margot feel a bit old, thinking of it that way, but then again, this girl is young enough to not read it as flirtatious, and she swallows down her own impulse to press on that nerve for the fun of it.

“I didn’t mean it like-” stammers the young woman, twisting long strands of brown hair between her fingers that hang curtain heavy and smooth even in the humidity.  

“I know how you meant it,” Margot sighs and smiles fully. “Pregnancy. The shiny, flushed face thing that everyone says is attractive, but is really just a combination of hot flashes and poor blood pressure. The entire enterprise is weird,” she says carefully with a shrug. “Four out of ten, could not honestly recommend or revisit without a cocktail.” 

“I think that’s how a lot of people end up that way,” the young women says with a shy red-lipped grin, looking up from her hair once more with big blue eyes.

There’s a comfortable pause between strangers where everyone is pleased and clever - liminal friendship that will evaporate as quick as hot breath in cold air, but a lovely simple thing in the moment. Margot can pretend for a scant second that she’s on vacation, she’s on campus, she’s meeting people and everything is fine and she’s not on the run from her own sibling on account of the fact that she’s financially and probably soon to be physically broke because she can’t renounce her preference for awkward pink-cheeked girls holding copies of-

Margot peeks at the cover of the book. 

-Copies of Jude the Obscure like a talisman and a lure. 

( Not really your taste comes the chasing thought. Not a Sexton or Woolf or Ashbery, caught in observation of routine and living and writing outside of it. Not much of a fan of Hardy and his angry female leads, especially Jude and his relationships with both falsely pregnant women, and women who refuse to have sex or get married at all, which strikes a chord that you’re not totally able to say you like listening to these days. ) 

“Maybe just a water next time,” Margot says, smile feeling plastic and fallen. 

( Kind of rude of the universe to put it under your nose right now. Ironic to the point of suspicious, like the friendly but ultimately kind of judgy parishioner would have trotted out in a Sunday sermon and said that he thought you should read this after he's done. )

The young woman seems to sense the change in mood, and absently combs the long hair from her face out of habit to catch on her ear. 

It doesn’t catch - that prompts another fluttering hand, combing it down instead. Something crosses her face then - sullen determination. 

She leans forward, into Margot’s space. 

“Someone is following you,” she says, and shelves the book behind Margot’s head. “Just thought you should know.” 

And just as quick and quiet as she first appears, the young woman waves with a hand and vanishes around a display of pirate novels and coffee table books that look nice but no one ever reads more than once. 

Shit, thinks Margot. Mason, you sonuvabitch, just…shit.

 —

Because Margot isn’t an idiot, she tells Will in the silence of the car ride back to the duplex, her toes twisting and curled with each moment to relieve the pressure in them and the anxious cadence of her heartbeat. She’s not very straightforward about it initially, but she does eventually tell him. 

“How do they pick honeypots for FBI operations?” she asks apropos of nothing. 

Will replies in proper form, if not his typical kind. 

“...What?” 

Margot blinks, and doesn't wait for him to follow. “I mean, surely it’s not just a volunteer basis. Everyone’s got to have their type, especially targets in high profile cases.” 

Will seems kind of at a loss, even a tad embarrassed.

Maybe that didn't make sense. Or it's just Hollywood bullshit, and it's way more boring than that. 

Margot shrugs, and shifts in the chair of the Volvo to let her head lean against the glass, per tradition. “It’s fine if you don’t know - I get you’re more on the dead bodies end of the spectrum than the James Bond espionage and cartel kingpin raids.”

To her alarm, Will laughs, giddy like he’s been tickled, or perhaps is finally mentally breaking. It’s sooner than Margot anticipated, but it’s just that kind of day she guesses. 

He calms quickly though. Thankfully.  

“You’d be surprised,” he says and waves his hand from the steering wheel. “The dead bodies don’t stop as much of that as you’d think. Sure, covert operators. Whoever is best suited for the job and willing, I guess. Maybe not even both. You know considering what great fun months of getting someone to open up to you is. Think somebody sent you your own Cinderella?”    

“More like a Snow White,” Margot says, and tells him about her Jude -wielding young sweet thing, and Will just frowns deeper and deeper and deeper with each repeated description. Hair black as ebony, lips red as a rose. She’d think he was jealous, or thought she was crazy, but pulling into the alley and the damp warm of the patio entrance and the barking of the dogs, he seems at a loss of what to do other than to say they should call in Chinese food for pickup instead of being seen at the grocery store. 

—

She takes Will into her appointments now, mostly because she forgets things halfway through doing them, but also because Will insists on at least seeing her to the door. 

It’s the family clinic obstetrician that sees Will sitting in the car the first time and gently suggests that the waiting room isn’t the same as having him in the examination room, if he’s comfortable coming inside. 

I insisted , Margot mentally replies. 

“Cooler in the lobby than out in the heat,” says the obstetrician. “I know some men don’t like getting involved in women’s appointments and would rather just not know anything - lots of squeamishness about pregnancy,” they add with a private amusement that they see fit to  share now, as though its a joke that only the two of them are in on. 

Margot very nearly screams But what about my squeamishness and desire to know nothing? She only doesn’t because whining is unbecoming of light conversation, and she’d rather die than be honest this far into her destiny manisfested. 

She also would have rather never been told about her organs rearranging themselves or her ribcage expanding amidst a litany of other transformative ailments, but the obstetrician hears it from a baker’s dozen of clients a day, and Margot quietly reigns herself in with feline indignation at the idea of being in their number. She doesn’t know how anyone could want this when their brother hasn’t threatened them with sororicide first. She certainly doesn’t know if she would have gone through with buying the whiskey and making the drive to Wolf Trap had she any idea what it would entail. 

( The transformation of yourself. Always about you, isn’t it, like you’ve done nothing that transforms Will? ) 

“Yeah, he can come in,” she says mildly. “I guess he always should have,” she adds, and nods to the reminder of their cooperation. 

Be a good partner , she reminds herself. Share .

Margot walks awkwardly back to the car and the pinch of Will’s concerned face. 

He puzzles at her approach, one ear listening to the parking lot with the window rolled down, and the other covered by his cell phone, listening to the drone of that instead. Maybe his face is pinched for his caller, and Margot has simply never seen because Will is good at being heard and not often seen, and he barely recognizes her approach as anyone more important than the random families and individuals going about their business, ignorant of his existence.   

He hangs up, phone disappearing like it burns him to hold.

“What’s up?” he asks. 

The paranoid desire to take it from him rises, but Margot doesn’t think Will is traitorous so much as perennially dishonest about what he needs. He’s not calling Mason to cut himself loose. He’s taking calls from his buck in the window, or whatever shape the thing had before the glass was broken. She suspects he took strange calls before her, and it’s only in the course of five months of watching him that she’s seeing the pattern. 

( New location, but same old Margot, same old Will. Perhaps you haven’t transformed anything in either of you. ) 

“You want to see what the Buffalo Trace family of beverages has wrought?” she asks with a lightness that she doesn’t think is entirely phony, but isn’t entirely not. 

Will nods, never having asked for so much as a paternity test, an ultrasound, or a timeline linking him to the moment, and takes up the cross of biological father without complaint. “Easier to make sure everything’s alright from inside the building anyway,” he says, and dutifully listens to the assisting nurse practitioner without any of the awkwardness Margot feels about hearing the exact same things. 

—

“Boy stuff after all,” the obstetrician laughs when they leave and congratulates Will on his son when he seems surprised by it. Margot doesn’t know if she told him before about that detail. She’d say it was accidental, but that would likely be a lie.  

—

Will may not be honest about what he needs - other than the rare desire to be validated in his headfirst dedication to Margot’s plans anyways - but he is consistent in his secret indulgence of whatever else he is hiding. 

Margot knows Will is an only child with one easy tell; he never closes the bedroom door. In fairness to him, Margot has lived in a twenty bedroom estate for most of her life and only started closing the door when she learned masturbating was the fastest way to fall out of God’s light, which also meant she started doing it early and often. 

Mason was content to ignore that she existed, and in turn the open casement of her bedroom door, beyond the theoretical acknowledgement that she was, in fact and in accordance to the state of Virginia, his sister and almost certainly entitled to some family money if she played her cards right. Even then, if he didn’t suspect he’d catch her in flagrante with another woman for the chance to watch, and he’d know if she did, Margot’s bedroom is a subject of abject boredom. His cruelties to her are triggered by her resistance to do what he wants her to, not by the temptation of her adult body. A closed door is a signal of hiding something - it's safer to leave it open and not catch his attention at all.   

It’s possible Will doesn’t even do that much, judging by his hesitant hands with her all the way to climax. There’s no tell-tale shyness that he might be heard pleasing himself through the old duplex walls. He’s not even particularly shy about the phone calls either now. What reason is there for secrecy? The nightmares come anyway, she can picture him saying in his usual matter-of-fact way.

( He’d prefer you didn’t see them when they try and take him more hungrily in hand than you did, but he’s been robbed of his modesty when whatever took advantage of him before you thought to, and pays no attention to your worried morning stares. )  

( You are worried. Just not for him. ) 

The reason is likely simpler, and humbling. Will doesn’t close the door because he wants to be able to listen for intrusion, a night creature to his core in spite of early riser practices. Someone could be trying at the door. Margot could be in danger.

Margot often thinks prison must have been a real doozy for Will, and tries to think how much worse it was than sleeping down the hall from Mason with only a door between them. Obviously it is. Obviously she’s not had as much to be scared of. 

Margot shakes her head to the dark of the bedroom and the cool sheets. 

He’s whispering in the dark again tonight, always somewhere between angry and tempted. He’s more angry in these hissing night calls since the girl in the bookshop, leading Margot to think her Jude-wielding ingenue is in the employ of the same mystery person that hotwired and reparked her car, probably completely unattached to the Vergers and their many splendid thugs.

“Why would you keep mocking me with lookalikes of her?”

“You don’t want me to have anything that isn’t you.” 

“I AM content with this.”     

Not particularly, Margot thinks to the sound of it sliding down the hall, but if they both keep telling themselves that it’ll be true soon enough. She said it herself. Do something thirty times and it will become a habit.

( “I really ought to quit,” says Mrs. Verger in front of the bathroom vanity, and coughs behind a mouth made coral lily pink. She didn’t. ) 

Old habits die hard, she thinks, and listens to Will fight against whatever it is that he thinks he can’t have. Margot slides into her own thoughts of what those are for her - long haired, wicked mouthed, soft waisted women, and pays no mind to the open door. It’s to be expected and welcomed if she’s to slide her fingers down past the crest of her belly to the sensitive split of her legs and ask God to turn his sight away. 

Everyone should get to indulge a little bit, she shakingly exhales to the tune of resentful arguing, just for a quick taste.   

—

The consequences of the bookshop are likely slow to come to a head partially in thanks to the bookshop. If someone was watching Margot, they are no more obvious about it now than they were when the young woman saw fit to tell her. 

“An imposter,” Will sneers when asked who it was, too incensed by it to be defensive. “A bad joke and a warning.” 

Another wellness check passes with staff and expecting families looking at her and Will like they’re a charmingly morose if attractive couple. “The two of you will make pretty babies,” says an expecting mother who properly defines the glow that Margot has felt deprived of. The phrase makes her gag, but she says thank you while Will does his best impression of a charmingly morose mannequin in the spirit of their unintentional couple’s costume. The baby is still healthy, and he looks less like a legume each time, and more like the manifestation of her dream of safety with each little finger and toe. 

The long stretch of the twin bed and its squeaky mattress makes way for a handsome tallboy dresser that she ferrets small things into where she doesn’t have to look at them or feel like she has to take the tags off, like this is a temporary embarrassment and everything will be back to normal shortly. The unopened box of a nice bassinet leans against the wall beneath the tired gold of the family photos that Margot tacks up to the image of Will frowning at them. This too wards off reality - it is Will’s room even if he has orphaned it, and Margot insists that she remember that in the spirit of gratitude that he gave it to her. 

( “Be thankful for what we have been given,” says your mother, tucking you in at night. “It’s the Lord’s will that we have it, and it would be the Lord’s will if it were taken away.” ) 

When the baby is born and she’s fabulously and unaccountably rich again, she’ll give Will whatever he wants for wearing whatever mask she hands him without resistance. Handyman, bodyguard, banker, boyfriend - Margot’s keeping all the receipts. She would hate to ever hold a debt. 

The carpet in the front room makes way for the oak planks beneath it. The kitchen counters gather bottle brushes and parenting books that Margot buys because that’s what you do when you had shitty parents, and both she and Will seem to have those in spades. The slim waist of her beach dresses make room for the greasy planet she’s truly becoming. But still, nothing passes through the front door or across their path walking down the avenue in the balmy air of the coast.  

“Think they got scared off?” she asks while disentangling Zoe from Harley’s leash, so determined they are to get at the bright bloom of orange day lilies in the greenbelts down the street. 

“Predators get scared off by bigger predators,” Will says like the cryptic asshole that he reliably always is. 

Whatever he means, it doesn’t seem to amount to much other than him looking vaguely harried and nauseous at times. Which is great, because he looks a bit like Margot when he does and gives her opportunities to tell him at length about sympathetic pregnancies, and that maybe he should try his hand at lactating when the time comes. 

—

Maybe it’s because they’re looking for trouble that makes things feel more fraught and useless when nothing appears. A watched pot never boils, but considering no one really wants this one to boil like a couple of masochistic adults with a preference for emotionally edging themselves to the point of frustration, it’s a kind of stupid idiom. Vigilance means the day no one wants to happen doesn’t need to happen right? 

Obviously that’s why it doesn’t happen during the day, in hindsight. It waits for night, as most bad thoughts do. It waits for Chinese food night, like Murphy’s law heard her speak into being that “nothing but garlic chicken will do”.

“Chopsticks?” asks Will, swinging the door of the Volvo into the evening dusk and the damp parking lot of mainland strip mall. “Extra soy sauce packets?”

“A glass of chardonnay and a trip to Singapore,” she replies, and leans the car seat back as far as it can go. Her boy is at home underneath the bottom right of her ribcage tonight with a foot in her liver, and if she is to feel this way, Margot wishes it could be by those means instead.

“Maybe next tax season,” Will snorts, and they both hold grim smiles - how very middle class of them, something heard from the mouths of middle aged men and women that are not the two of them, who are neither of those things but still somehow in the middle of something . 

Will looks around the parking lot, frowning and considering, but he often does that. Margot reaches for her seatbelt with a groan of acceptance, but he makes a motion with his hand as to say sit back down. 

“No, hold tight,” he adds and throws the car keys at her. “No point in getting up if you’re uncomfortable. Lock the doors and drive off if you have to, bearing in mind if you do it before I get back that there’s no garlic chicken for you.” 

“God forbid,” she sighs to the roof of the car, listens to the chiming of his open door, and closes her eyes to the sound of it slamming shut. 

Margot isn’t particularly concerned to be alone here. Neither of them is terribly inclined to eating out in St. Augustine, Margot by preference for better quality, Will by a general apathy for food, but they know this place fairly well by now. Beef with broccoli is a universal flavor that both can shake hands over when all the fun things are stripped from Margot’s diet in the name of nutrition and safety for their unnamed third dinner guest.

( You baby, Margot. Your baby, not an unexpected additional setting at the supper table, remember? ) 

Margot opens an eye to survey as Will disappears through the glass doors.

Here are the double dumpsters in remarkable proximity to a small sitting area in the front. Next to it, the owner’s waterspotted back sedan, and behind it the employee of the night’s ride - a rough looking utility van, like the one they use for supply deliveries. There now to the right, the nail salon that glows with tracer lights and the neon of two soft hands glowing in pink and blue, with a spill of purple orchids to either side of a roughed up front desk. All as it always is. A couple of men even do their best to brave the cafe table in the shadow of the dumpsters to enjoy a balmy dark blue night.  Margot doesn’t envy them their seating, knowing it would smell of rancid oil. 

Margot leans back in her seat again, rolling the keys in her hand. Her back hurts. Her chest is tight. She doesn’t know the last time she felt at home in her own body, and now she has no choice but to drown that sensation in sweet and sour sauce the color of cherry chapstick. At least she’ll feel full by her own hand that way. 

She takes a quick glance to the white lights inside the shop, and Will slouched in front of the cash register, making himself look smaller than he is. Maybe that’s a habit instead of nature too - trying to look more at ease with people and only looking uncomfortable and wilted.  

That’s not totally fair to Will, she amends. He’s the brooding type, not a missish houseplant left too long without water. He’d be right at home with the orchids next door if he’d let himself stand up straight and put down whatever he uses to distract himself for five minutes, be that tools, or paint cans, or the detritus of his grandparents’ summer house that he doesn’t want but doesn’t throw away either. 

Margot’s thinking of photos in cheap frames and chintz curtains, and pays no mind to the parking lot. She’ll think later that this is why she doesn’t catch the gentle tap on the window of the car, made deliberately enough to be caught quickly. 

Tip, tip . 

Will shuffles on his feet. The baby does the same, pressing on her bladder like it’s personally offended them. Margot raises a hand to the round side of her belly and presses back in tentative correction. Greet pushes with shoves, just like children do. 

There’s a movement in her periphery. 

TIP, tip , the second falling quieter as she whips her head around. 

Margot sees the fedora and suit jacket more than she sees a person, but it’s in the form and function of one that she knows very well. After all, Carlo has been her dour shadow since he darkened the Verger's doorstep. She should know him just as well as Mason - they’re practically inseparable. 

Inseparable, Margot considers wide-eyed and searching for the cafe chairs - the other man, what about the other-

“Miss Verger,” says Carlo, distracting her in his mafioso best, kindly and muffled from the outside of the door. He is dark eyed, but he always has been when he looks at her. The glow of the strip mall signs barely touches him in his outfit, absorbed into the black of its pockets and folds. 

“You’ve been away from home a while,” he says in the familiar cant of his accent. “Won’t you turn your phone on and think of poor old men like me that worry?” 

Margot crushes the keys in her hands until she can feel the aluminum on her bones. She clicks the lock twice, and wonders what she looks like in her cheap dress and lazy braids, and growing comet of a stomach, just a couple scant months from critical impact. 

She doesn’t get to find out, because as soon as she thinks she’s found something clever to say- 

( “I hate roaming charges.” “I hate good Catholic men who think I want to accrue them to be told I am a stupid girl.” “I am one, but I hate it anyway, and could you do me the favor of warming up the car? I’d like to leave for town, and you’re good for nothing other than that anytime it comes to me.” ) 

-Will is jumping across the front of the Volvo with a force that she can feel the hood bend and creak, all teeth and wiry arms looking for something to throw from a window once more. 

“Who’s your friend, Miss Verger?” says Carlo, stepping back. “Can’t say I’ve known you to be the type to bring boys home. Suspicious, don’t you think?” 

He doesn’t step far enough away before Will’s hands are knocking the smug look right off his face along with his hat. 

There’s a moment that Margot entertains the fantasy that everything is great and this is totally fine, and in a way it is - Will doesn’t waste time talking or waiting to see what Carlo’s intentions are, or if there’s a gun which there undoubtedly is. He allows Carlo a few sounds of furious protest before bodying him on the asphalt of the Chinese combo takeout like there’s nothing he’s wanted to do more for the months they’ve been in Florida leading to this moment. Perhaps he really has just been looking for an outlet that a phone call or a closed bedroom door can’t provide.

( The way you’re looking for an out constantly, even though the only ones you have at this point are the maternity ward or a grave - maybe it’s the same for him, if you consider the man who quit his job to help you nest in the warm southern shoals of the Atlantic, and never protests a moment of it. ) 

There’s something of a wild satisfaction in Will’s face when he licks the pain from his upper teeth after catching a punch in the nose, and he winces in pain looking as animal and savage as a kicked stray, but he also snarls somewhere between anger and a smile as he pushes Carlo into the neighboring parking spot.

Carlo is up and sputtering in dull huffs from the other side of the car windows, cursing a storm. “You sorry son of a whore-”

Will doesn’t give him the pleasure of his response, only kicks at the man’s shoulder to push him back to the ground before he can scramble up and away. 

“The other man,” Margot croaks when the presence of mind reminds her to. “ Will , there’s another-” and like she’s summoned him from nowhere, perhaps between the trash cans, another figure that Margot doesn’t know runs up to deliver a firm kick that rolls Will down to Carlo’s level. His mouth and nose blooms with blood, a bull caught in his own red flag.  

Where are the clever little women with shameful books to let me know what to do, Margot thinks somewhat desperately, scrambling into the driver’s seat with her head in a swivel between Will stumbling up from the asphalt with the second man holding him by a fistful of white shirt, and the ignition that she cannot keep her hands from scrambling around, missing the keyhole over and over in her anxiousness. 

Where does a single woman of some compromised fortune find a glock in these circumstances , like Margot has ever known what to do with one, and would by divine providence now if karma would just drop one into the back seat. 

She manages to start the car, and wonders if she’s supposed to let Will in, be the getaway driver for once, but when she glances out to the right, Carlo is still on the ground, and the second man is barely able to hold ground against Will who has gotten out of his grip and fights with cracking blows of forehead to forehead as readily as thin, long fists. 

She struggles to look away from them - the rigid fingers and hands that he assembled a changing table with, that make box pasta and thread fishing weights and gently remove the tear tracks from the fur of elderly dogs and corners of not-young-but not-old women who can’t seem to pull it together - but they are split and white with the force of his grip. They piston into the cavity of the man’s left eye like it’s meant to be there, magnetically pulled. 

She thinks she sees bone like a split bowl. She thinks it might be possible that the man will recover from that, and she knows it’s not. She thinks maybe he’s going to kill him, and she’s going to be tied up in a much more unclear way than the simplicity of pregnancy or death, and she doesn’t know if she’s prepared to play accomplice this way. 

Another punch, another crack. Pottery of a man’s face, being broken away from the mould.

She swallows around the terror of indecision. 

Drive off if you have to , he had told her. 

Is that easier? Not jeopardizing what little legal feasibility she has to inherit, assuming he even survives the two gangsters? Margot could appeal to Carlo’s better nature, assuming he has one, to let her un-boyfriend go, but she doesn’t see Carlo when she glances to where Will’s work has been swift and hatefully powerful. She could beg Mason for his mercy by phone, appeal to his sense of importance. 

She feels guilty even considering it. Will Graham, perennial whipping boy and sad-eyed man seems prepared to murder a man to allow her to live as she pleases here, in Florida, relatively unknown and unbothered until the rest of her destiny can be made clear. How she can leave him here after everything…well, that’s business, but it seems like the poor kind. 

Margot considers it anyway. 

She throws the car into reverse.

On the outside, Will drags the second man into the space between the dumpsters and the glow of the pink and blue hands of the nail salon, panting around the blood and snot running from his nose. He spares her a glance - a sharp one, wincing like it’s him that’s been punched until his head caves in. He’s had some practice at both those things - the head caving in, and the wincing judging from how well he does either.

He moves his mouth to say something. She’s halfway to the exit from the parking lot when she fills the space between them with what she thinks he’d say. Margot should know something of it - he’s been her only source of constancy since she knew she had conceived.  

Stop , maybe. Come back. Is this still what you want, is there something I can do different , and no, Margot doesn’t think there is. The same Will Graham that didn’t kill all those people, who will go from paying for dinner pickup to savaging people she’s seen beat the sense out of erstwhile men in the back yards and barns of Muskrat Farms.  

From the space she leaves in her retreat, Carlo passes between bumper and curb, shaking out the pain of falling, reaching into his coat for the trademark silhouette of a Beretta. She doesn’t think Will can see him in time. 

Let me know if this is good, he had asked and sounded as if he never knew what that would be on his own, and Margot acts on the certainty that it is, as long as she wants it to be. 

“Jesus fucking christ,” Margot says to the windshield with watery eyes, resolved.

She throws the Volvo back into drive, and floors it before Carlo can get within another foot of Will Graham, who may not be what she wanted, but is something good. The crunch of the wheels rolling over a man who weighs upwards of two hundred pounds is quieter than she thought it would be, but Margot by nature is very quiet, and that is how things should be.   

—

There’s an awkward moment between Will loading the bodies into the trunk of the Volvo like a man on fire and him gently putting styrofoam containers of their food in the backseat that she feels the compulsion to apologize. 

( You should. You were going to leave him. ) 

Instead she says “I’ll have to rethink my next car. Nice high clearance. Really efficient storage space.”

Will laughs, and Margot thinks she’s forgiven. 

—

“You still doing ok?” he asks in the kitchen while turning a carton of crab rangoons on the counter like a talisman, not quite brave enough to say more but brave enough to risk a glance at her face and the roundness of her middle. “No…complications?”

It’s charming, how he sidesteps that every time. Obnoxious too, after months of cohabitating and now a shared double homicide on a Tuesday night because no one could be bothered to cook, but Margot supposes she hasn’t really invited him into that part of her world beyond the coitus that builds where it will transpire. 

( The jeweler doesn’t consider the metal of their work the father of their craft - the craft is theirs, and you are learning the cleverness of your hands and mind when not trapped in your family’s home. )  

“Well,” she says, swallowing around the anxiety that’s coming back to the knowledge of having had two men dead within six feet of her person, and her name written on the cause of death. “I could have lived without the vehicular manslaughter today,” and opens the top of her own carton where the garlic chicken is tepid at best. 

That’s fine, she thinks. Both of these things are fine. Will is a forensic profiler. Will is very capable of…rehoming erstwhile wildlife. Will has a microwave. 

She focuses down on that last one, hunger returning with the feeling in her face. Baby Verger is still in the minutes of Small snacks between meals to keep the nausea away, the obstetrician tells her, and Margot looks at her bag of water crackers with a hand that still shakes a little with adrenaline, Chinese food turning on the spinning plate as it warms.   

Will, unwilling to have his mood lightened but never able to let the verbal irony die on its feet unseen and unremarked on, says, “Could you have?” 

Dad jokes, Margot thinks and rubs at the twinge in her abdomen ( a person, you are working on making a person ), probably come with the territory. “You seemed to have it under control. Surprisingly so, unless you knew going in that something was wrong.” 

Will shrugs. “Who the fuck wants to eat in the shadow of last night’s trash?” 

Margot nods - so he did see them, clearer than she had on the narrow strip of patio. “Tonight’s trash, I guess,” she says nervously, pulling her dish from the microwave. How callous that sounds - but even thinking of everything after those tap taps on the window is a void of engine noise, and the gentle rise of the tires of the car. That’s what she’s driven over. Tonight’s trash. 

She taps her chopsticks on the edge. She tears three packets of soy sauce open until the white rice is drowning, and still she can’t find the hunger she knows she felt just a few hours ago. 

“Will…” Margot starts, “what will you do with-” 

“Our dinner?” he asks, cutting her off. “Eat it. Save the leftover. Maybe take some for lunch to the docks.” 

He doesn’t explain any further than that. He finds his appetite too, and eats with a vigor that she hasn’t seen in seven months of watching him. Had to work it up, Margot thinks between too hot and too cold bites of salty-sweet food, relieved at the small foot kicking at her kidneys with similar enthusiasm.  

—

It’s not vehicular manslaughter if you did it on purpose , the moon says to Margot from outside the bedroom window. How gracious of Will to change the subject from that too. 

She sleeps remarkably well for a first-time felon, and Will does too. It’s only when she remembers her first impulse was to run away in the morning that she feels dread come to lay under her pillow like a tooth. 

— 

We should strategize , Margot thinks over sparkling water in a juice glass, sprawled along the seam of the couch while Will cleans his nails over the kitchen sink with the flat of a utility knife. Get our plan together for when Mason finds out what happened. Get another one over on them while we have more information than they do. 

They’re a good team so far in that respect - two out of two average, if one ignores that they were warned about the second time they’ll have to come up to bat. As long as she can control her aversion to conflict or dependance long enough to stay in the room, and he can control his aversion to being honest with himself. 

The handle of the knife scrapes the sink. How he doesn’t flinch with each scrape of the knife beneath the seams is beyond her, but considering the riot of color that is his bruised face, Margot assumes he’s accustomed to some risk of pain. He wears his injuries as easily as an old ratty sweater - what’s a knife next to them? 

Healthy, totally stable parents, she and him. 

Instead when Margot opens her mouth, she says, “Don’t you ever miss therapy?” because that’s likely where a totally stable person would march straight into after the day they’ve had. 

This nettles Will enough to stop cleaning his fingers, flexing each like they’ve been shocked. “No,” he says on a suspicious rise. “I didn’t like it growing up, and I can’t say it’s been healthier for me as an adult. Some things can’t be fixed in an hour once a week.” 

A careful choice of words there, from someone prone to bluntness but not upset - at least not in front of her the way that he might be prone to it for front windows, and stints in jail, and whatever other bullshit he occasionally alludes to but never really explains. 

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” Margot sighs. “I know internalizing trauma is de rigueur amongst men.” 

“Internalizing trauma is an evolutionary benefit if applied carefully,” Will replies, leaning into the counter and scraping away once again. “Don’t know why telling a stranger your most intimate thoughts somehow changes how it shaped your behavior.” 

Will could be right. Maybe in a decade or two they’ll find the whole industry to be an exercise in self-harm if put in front of the wrong confessional. Perhaps some things shouldn’t be put into words that another person might hear and give instruction in how to avoid those thoughts, or finesse them, if Margot and Will’s present psychiatrist had anything to add to the conversation. 

And what do those look like, when she’s not just haunting the office doorstep, curious what’s being said inside when it’s about him and not about her? Will Graham, that didn’t kill all those people, and Doctor Lecter, who likely thinks it’s wonderful that he might have even if he didn’t actually. Healthy, like Margot killing Mason would have been therapeutic. It’s nice that someone knows that she wants to, so long as she’s careful to not say that she’s going to. 

“Wouldn’t you say after being so intimate with your therapist that you’re not strangers anymore?” Margot asks with a smirk and leans over the back of the couch. 

She is treated to the image of Will accidentally cutting himself, his face flushed in a way that doesn’t read angry as much as embarrassed - caught in the act. 

Margot thinks that’s the first time that hits her properly, in all of its messy glory. 

It kind of irritates her that she didn’t see it sooner.  

( “Will Graham’s not a lesbian,” Doctor Lecter says in practiced stillness and pointed facts, unwilling to give anything away, constantly churning soil for someone else’s things to take. It’s February, he could have said with the same determinism, so confident that you shouldn’t want Will that it’s a law of nature. ) 

Margot carefully lays back down, thoughts galloping. The phone calls, the interference, the allusions to someone helping in the wings of the theater without permission, and Will’s constant aggravation and grievance that it’s happening, but never once stopped.  

( Because Doctor Lecter doesn’t want Will to want you, because you are an accident of acquaintance through him, and boy must that sting .)

“I guess maybe you’ve never really been able to cancel your appointments fully, have you?” she asks, and reconsiders the glint of Hannibal Lecter’s eyes on her own last appointment. “You’re just taking them remotely at different hours.”    

She wonders if Will’s even aware of it, no matter all those calls. Doctor Lecter’s attachment, and his own reluctance to break it no matter that he says he doesn’t want it. Not everyone is so singular in knowing their preferences as she was, Margot thinks, and takes a long stinging sip of the bubbling water as Will sucks the blood from his cut and says nothing. 

( “I found him first,” Mason would say, and boy, wouldn’t it aggravate Doctor Lecter to have the same sentiment leave his mouth, no matter how much more attractively crafted it would be. ) 

Chapter Text

It’s been awhile, but Margot knew it wouldn’t be never again - Will’s bad habit, done over the course of eight months. She didn’t know if she would catch him at it with how often she sleeps in her third trimester, but Will struggles with subterfuge anytime it concerns this, like it builds pressure in his chest until it must rupture. 

Margot knows well the burning pressure of an old flame sending messages in the night. She would dare to say she looks forward to seeing it in Will, now that she understands more of the sordid picture. An unfortunate trait shared between her and Mason other than twee names that start with an M - the inability to look away from something violent. 

( Your father taught you to not avoid seeing a slaughter. Slaughter is what puts food on the table. You are to be accustomed to it in a way that befits the household, and that is how you can watch Mason send a scarecrow of you into a pen of pigs to be eaten and merely ask him if that’s all he needed. It is ironic that the same is true of Will, through different means, but slaughter all the same. ) 

Margot doesn’t hear the start of the call, but she catches enough to know Will is angry the way he never is with her.

“I would thank you for the warning, but if it was warning me against you or someone else is anyone’s guess. Suffice to say the problem is temporarily less of a problem, no thanks to you.” 

Good evening, Doctor Lecter , Margot says to herself in parody of their appointment rote. She rolls to her side in the dark and listening with half an ear, cupping the restless side of her abdomen where the baby stirs. 

It’s been a week of no calls, as though Will is afraid he will tell on himself the way he hasn’t within twenty miles of the scene of their crime. Where suspicion of anyone passing them on the street or down the alley to their house may cause him to flash his teeth in common with the dogs, he is otherwise as silent as the grave.

Margot’s surprised he can manage it, going so long without an emotional outlet, but Margot also sees that Will is about as codependent as a polar bear, and the two of them have only come together for the necessity of procreation. Her necessity, not his. 

Tonight he sounds miserable with a matching animal hunger. She supposes talking is a kind of a nourishment - perhaps a week is time enough to feel starved after all.  

“What, you want credit with none of the risk? Want to tell me with a straight face you wouldn’t have done something if the two of us had stayed, maybe throw your pen name up on another headline? Make me think I’ll hurt any offspring of my own?” 

Margot pauses at that, confused. 

Will continues onwards though. “That was rich, by the way,” he says, “pointing a finger at me, calling me the daughter eater and then come in at the last minute to say it was you all along. It must bother you to know I can have children other than the ones you deign to gift and take back from me.”

That sounds less safe than the man she’s accustomed to seeing for appointments, or the one she’s chosen to shack up with. It’s a shade nearer to the doctor that makes her hesitate with full truths. As for Will, she’s never pretended to know his exact color or shape, only that it is an obliging one. 

Whatever the response is from Doctor Lecter, Will is unimpressed with it. 

“Then what do you want?” he asks, not as an argument. Margot thinks he truly wants to know. “Are you really so above me that you can’t even say? Why can’t you just be straight with me?”

Obvious reasons, Margot thinks and feels very clever through the fog of fading sleep. The straightness and the straight honesty. Difficult when you’re not good at either. But Will ought to know that, secretive mess that he is. 

“Why don’t you do something useful if you’re so concerned?” and he seethes and says it with such a spitting righteous anger, she feels sorry for him. 

This time when Will hangs up, he is not subtle about it. He stomps down the hall and into the bathroom where the medicine cabinet rattles at his intrusion and the light flares on in a yellow glow in the hallway that Margot watches through the open door of her room. 

Will breathes hard for a minute - two - three. 

The shower curtain hisses on its rails, and the tub roars to life with water. Above the hum of this, the clanging drop of something into it, loud against the porcelain before it is drowned. 

The bath tap runs for a long time - several baths over, going from steaming to tepid to cold. Margot thinks she hears Will step into it - not to grab what he’s dropped, but to just sit in it, splashing water. Perhaps up his arms as he does washing after fishing, or on his face and neck when the humidity bothers him in the simmering heat of the St. Augustine afternoons.

Useful , Margot muses to herself, wondering what that would be, and doesn’t sleep even after she hears the water drain and Will drip his way back to his room; fully clothed judging from the wet slap of his feet on the hallway floor. She imagines him as the six year old hung on her wall, big eared, shivering, carded wet eyelashes, coming home from a summer afternoon in the cool Atlantic to a family that didn’t really want him there, and considers if she’s really that much better to come home to. 

Do something useful , she thinks and shudders away from the expectation of that.   

—

Family, in its most literal usage, means the people that a person is related to by blood - mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters in a long lineage of shared surnames. Medici, Windsor, Glücksburg, Hohenzollern, that sort of thing. The Vergers have a great respect for this kind of legacy.

“Doing honor to the hard work and faith that our forefathers have put into building our good reputation and wealth,” says good old Daddy Verger. 

“The aspiration of a dying generation of nouveau riche,” Doctor Lecter says once in a therapy session, with all the amused but subtle condescension of someone who is recognizable of being the Old World kind of rich instead.

“You know what they say,” she replies, arch and emboldened from the seat of Doctor Lecter’s office. “The first builds, the second maintains, the third destroys.” 

It amuses Margot at the time as well, too deep in her resentment to her recently passed father and his entailment of the estate away from her and her deviance from heterosexual protestant life. It’s a comfort to hear gentle voiced men encourage Margot to hate him and Mason, and exact vengeance if it pleases her to. It’s only in hindsight that Margot can see it for the presumption that it is, because she is a Verger too, fourth generation social climber, like it or not. 

What the fourth generation does, she’s never heard, so she doesn’t think to take offense.   

Margot misses family the way it was before her parents pass, resentment or not - her mother first from lung cancer, her father not long after from a heart attack, the excesses of enjoying his product a bit too much finally coming home to punish him. 

( “Luke, chapter seven, verse thirty-four…the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and ye say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners,” says a ten-year old you for the assembly. You will be given a merit pin for memorization, a silver and white dove carrying its olive branch. You will understand none of the context, only that you will be rewarded for being able to say this and wear that without thinking about it very much, and that’s what will please your parents. )  

Margot thinks this is what initially draws Carlo Deogracias’ kin to the young Mr. Mason Verger, who sees the economic success of their father and grandfather before him as a kingdom that is owed to him. Mason doesn’t care much for wives tales of his generational success, so long as its his to manipulate. What is an empire without its centurions to keep the edges of their country defined? Deogracias is an old name too, driven from Almeria to the warm landscape of Tuscany and searching for a banner to wave. Mason likes that kind of thing as much as he likes his own.

“Your sister is a very lovely young woman,” Carlo tells Mason while Margot sits in awkward stillness over what she is told is their first family dinner since the passing of both their parents, twirling her fork in her spoon to make tidy bites of linguini. Carlo watches her bring them to her mouth, and Margot considers the grind of her own teeth to avoid catching his gaze. “Seems a shame she’s unmarried this late,” he adds in what Margot can only assume is the typical sorry male bid for her attention. 

“Margot is resistant to the ol’ squeeze chute,” Mason sneers and laughs, his mouth full of food and red with sauce. He never does learn to chew with his mouth closed, no matter their mother’s soft scolding. “Doesn’t much like a man nosing around her legs where she’d much prefer some lady. I don’t have much hope of ever being an Uncle Mason. She’s an animal of her own ambitions, right Margot?” he adds with a grin that promises any answer she gives will be the wrong one.   

Margot twirls another bite of pasta against her spoon, the fork tines scraping against the silver. Never talk with your mouth full, Mrs. Verger had always said. 

Carlo and his brothers take as well to that as expected of any Roman Catholic men of rural leanings would, and never drop from the moue of her closed mouth. “Disappointing for you,” says Carlo. “To have a useless sow in the house to eat your food then.”   

“Good thing I like pigs as pets as much as I like them for meat,” Mason says cheerfully, and insists she stay with him through dessert, digestifs, and after dinner goodnights.

He stomps her foot at the doorway of the house, and insists she send everyone off with a kiss, “like the Europeans do, for our guests.” Later, she will go to urgent care and be told that she has broken three of her toes, and have to make excuses of how careless she was on the front steps of the Muskrat Farm’s elegant stone entry. 

“See, she’s useful,” he says with a proud golf clap of gloved hands, while Margot bestows a tight lipped press to the sides of rough cheeks through watery eyes, not a stumble to be seen despite the pain in her foot and the furious clench of her jaw that rages against rasping five o’clock shadow, and the inability to pull away even if she wanted to. Carlo laughs as red-mouthed as Mason does and bids her a lovely night. 

—

( “That would be unlady-like,” your mother would have said, and made excuses for you so that it never happened. At least she was consistent in that - all sex and potential expressions of it save the kind for making more children are a sin. ) 

( You wonder sometimes what she really thought about sex at all if she wasn’t socially obligated by religion to have it, to have you and Mason, if maybe you’re just like her and you’re just having a baby for the money too and you never would have entertained it if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. You don’t begrudge her the faith, anymore than you begrudge her the smoking or your drinking, which are all just coping mechanisms in a world that doesn’t give you a lot to work with. )

( You realize you don’t know much about your mother, just that you miss her sometimes. ) 

— 

It’s a fluke that Will and Margot ever meet. With her new understanding of Doctor Lecter, she wonders if he would congratulate himself or curse his role in it. 

Margot Verger, a talented child whose talents extend to places that her parents would prefer they didn’t in carefully clipped fingernails and drinks shared in clandestine bars and lecture halls. Will Graham, an anomaly of a man wearing everyone’s desire on his sleeves to the detriment of his own, and in fear of what it would be if he knew what it was. The hallowed arched mezzanine of Doctor Lecter’s office enjoys all manner of rarified and tragic children of God, even the ones most removed from His Word. The only word in this place is the good doctor’s, and all of them perverse and true. 

To Margot is delivered the gospel of her liberation: kill her brother that denies her health and fortune. To Will: kill anyone that denies him what it is he wants, even the man he was before it was known.  

It’s almost a relief to find out they’re not just miserable outcasts of their families, but also two miserable queers, playing at nuclear family. The kind of coming out story you don’t share at brunch, Margot snorts from her reflection in the bathroom - water spotted, face penny round and red and thankfully clean. 

( You think Will would bristle at that, being called queer. But maybe he wouldn’t - maybe that face would settle more easily on him than the others that people have given him: soothsayer, murderer, psychopath, father. )

( Lover he cannot stand. “Willing bystander,” he says dryly when you tease how to introduce him to people, and sure, you’ve never really considered him one, but you cannot drop the image of Doctor Lecter hissing it to him in secret, or in a riddle as most things Doctor Lecter says are. And would Will turn the flustered, winching pink he does when you catch him by surprise with something simple as a compliment? Would he tilt his head to let the words flow deeper in, the masculine line of his neck made soft by want? But it might not be like that though, you chide yourself. )   

( But it might be, you think anyway. )

Today they will take a roundabout walk to Crescent Beach that is alive with tourists and easy to disappear into. Margot wants to dig a hole in the sand and hide, lay flat for the first time since her body started really changing. In the occasional fit of discomfort and anxious waiting, Margot wants to be like a sea turtle and just lay her baby like an egg to be warmed by the sun while she leaves for the ocean. She can resurface on the other side of the world, change her name, pretend that her body isn’t any different than it was in her twenties, teens, childhood. 

They’ve stayed as close as they can to the duplex as they can without starving to death or missing check-ins with the family planning clinic, but neither is dumb enough to think that everything is tidily solved. There are three Deogracias brothers, and only one of them dealt with. There is one Verger brother, and he is as vocal as ever in local news coverage that begins to ask for her to be declared dead. She can’t be of course, but Margot knows Mason surely thinks of her as being so, and is only temporarily inconvenienced by it not happening yet. 

“You’ll need a hat and sunglasses,” Will says from the living room, dressed like he always is. “So people don’t recognize you.” 

“Do you know many people who don’t take a hat and sunglasses to the beach?” she asks and handily braids her hair to one side as she would to wear the riding helmet. She misses the weight of it sometimes - doesn’t even know what it would feel like to put it on again after so long without. 

“Point,” Will says with a wry smile, and leashes seven dogs as competently as she braids. 

He moves more loosely following the Chinese food disaster, which sounds like a very different matter than the reality of it. The tenseness of his jaw never really fades, but Margot thinks that’s more a trait than a choice these days, something she might see in her own son’s face as he gets older. Will’s hands are relaxed, if still a bit unjured. His gait is confident, albeit a little sore. Everyone feels good after a run through the steeplechase without mistakes, and he is getting better with every race start. 

Perhaps Doctor Lecter is right: murder does do a lot for self-esteem. 

“Do you think this will ever be normal?” she asks.

“Having to hide in plain site?” 

“The two of us,” she says, shaking her head and dabbing sunblock the way Mrs. Verger dabbed eye cream each night into the dark circles there. “You’ve been hiding in plain sight for a while - don’t know how to make that normal if it isn’t already.”

It doesn’t quite spoil Will’s mood - he still digs her a spot to lay flat to the sand and press an ear to the ground - but he’s not much for lying directly, and they’re fond enough of each other to not press that any harder than his busted knuckles or dark eye of his own. He favors them the way any other man would twist a wedding ring, and that feels like it should be his.  

He has no phone these days, so he has to fidget with something. She doesn’t ask him about it, because she doesn’t think he’d be able to explain. Better that he keep his bruises fresh himself than to find something else to throw his unhappiness against.

—

Will stares a while at the shingles near to the doorway when they get home, adjusting the loose one with a careful hand. It has slid slightly downwards, to smile with its crooked tooth from the long line of its purple painted wooden brothers. 

“Guess I should tighten this one up,” he says, and presses with fingertips until it stays still, once he sees that the key is as he left it. 

“Add it to the list, somewhere behind the water filter and the bathroom fan,” she says with a heaving sigh, just anxious to sit down and get off her feet. 

—

The closer to the end of pregnancy Margot becomes, the worse the drawbacks seem to be. She waddles, and can’t go very far without needing a break. This is partially because she goes to the bathroom on a bi-hourly basis. She sees the first of her stretch marks that cocoa butter can’t fix on a woman that used to be a size 2. She is kicked from the inside most nights, and left almost entirely alone during the days where she can’t keep a train of thought longer than two cars between the forgetfulness and how tired she is. She begins to show signs of gestational diabetes, and is handed a guide of things that she ought to be eating other than fast food takeout and Will’s concept of a satisfying breakfast. 

She thinks she minds this one more than the constant urinating. 

“Do you have any strong feelings about names?” Margot asks over a pretty plate of chicken that is cooked to merciless doneness. She is told this is an excellent source of B vitamins and protein, and that she should not at all be resentful of Will’s own plate of a beautiful white bass fillet because she is building the baby’s brain so he doesn’t come out with as many stupid ideas as Margot has.

Alas. 

“Do you have any strong feelings against some names?” he asks, hedging his bets. Smart man, she thinks, and takes a resentful chewy bite. Anything that helps.

“My father is a Randall, and a guy in my parents’ church congregation that thought he could clear up my confusion about dick was a Travis. Incidentally, my feelings were indeed cleared up, and I would rather be axe-murdered before using either of those.”

Will lets himself slip into a small smile. “Those names kind of speak for themselves,” he says, and takes a steaming bite of his dish. “Even the one you’re skipping.” 

“The country club Christmas card list is just a progression of the same thirty names in different iterations. Lots of seconds and thirds there,” Margot snorts, and takes a sip of powdered lemonade that is more ice than drink. She is told this is to keep her blood sugar lowered, and since a lemon has likely never so much as passed over the jar of mix, there is no real acid reflux to speak of either. “Mason doesn’t bear mentioning unless you’re actually a lot more oblivious than I thought.”    

A few more weeks, Margot thinks with a small amount of terror, taking a bland sip. 

“Hopefully there’s no Will Graham the seconds,” Will says between bites. “I wouldn’t wish that on someone, much less my own son. And I’d sooner name a baby after an entomologist than my father. There’s quite enough of both of us without throwing a new one into the ring.”

He chews a thought with his food before spitting it out. “I think you mean to keep the Verger name anyway,” he says like it is known, not that he guesses.

It is known. She does. She’s never said as much, but Will pulls thoughts out of air like water vapor. It condensates somewhere only he can see.

“Maybe no Garrett,” he hums onwards, allowing her to keep her secrets. “Probably no Jack, if you’re really asking. But it’s up to you, Margot,” Will says as carefully as he can. “Let that be your gate to keep.”  

“Probably not the name you’re skipping either,” she says with her own teeth working lemon pepper and fibrous meat between another sip of her drink. If he can poke at her, then it seems fair that she poke at him.  

Will frowns, and cracks his thumb with the press of a finger. “All the men that have had a profound impact on my life are not the kind I name children after,” he says while lifting his plate, and Margot quietly concedes to the same. 

She doesn’t tell him what she has picked out though - she’s not entirely sure she’s picked something out at all, and she’s running short on time to decide. Perhaps they’ll hand the baby over to her and ask, and she’ll be stupid with drugs, and say that he doesn’t have one, or maybe every one that she’s considered because it seems like an awfully big task to pick something like that for a person. 

Margot notes that Will doesn’t have anything he wants either. No fondness for Jameses or Devons, or fantasies of Robinson Crusoes and good old boy Tom Saywers. Nothing more than her continued passive approval that what he is doing is right, which is to give her the means and security to have a child.   

They have an icebox pie made with cheesecake pudding mix and sour cherries, because those are low in fructose, and cups of decaf coffee as a treat. The baby keeps her up despite there being no caffeine, and no hastily whispered calls in the night. 

—

They come to dread both that Mason will find them someday, for surely he knows that he will not be hearing from Carlo any time soon, and that Margot needs to deliver by necessity of having no more space in her body to grow the heretofore unnamed Verger baby. Still six weeks off from the blessed event’s due date, and she’s already agonizing that it’s too long off.  

Given their track records with Murphy’s Law, neither is entirely sure that both Mason and his nephew won’t decide to arrive at the same time, like being a Verger boy demands inconvenience to everyone else, and the baby is merely perpetuating a genetic trait.

 Nonetheless, Margot and Will can do nothing but make go bags. They are needed in either case, so that this time maybe she’ll be able to leave with more than a blazer and a small collection of things that fit in her pockets. Margot would like to know at least that is accounted for, whether it’s to rush to the hospital or to find a better hole to hide in. Possibly simultaneously - she always did fancy a trip to Mexico, even though she never entertained needing a birthing plan while there.

For good luck, she tucks the blazer into her bag even though she can’t fit in it anymore - maybe someday. Maybe never at all. She hears some women never come back into the exact shape that they were before, but that seems appropriate. She’s peeling some of the clay she’s made of away to make another person. Why should she expect to be perfectly repaired, like she’s just dyeing her hair?  

Also for luck, she tucks the first white shirt Will gives her so that she could sleep comfortably next to the blazer. It’s a ratty thing, broken and worn in at the hem and collar, but it’s the first thing she has from her new life, and that feels like it’s meant to go with her too. 

—

Margot and Will have one last good morning, before things finally come to their inevitable decline. Inevitable in that one can only wait so long in suspense before an answer comes. Decline in that Margot thinks they’ve both known from the moment they pull into pick up their dinner order and kill two men that it’s not really possible to go back to playing at happy unwed expecting parents.

( The answer revealed to you both in the aftermath of Carlo is that you are with Will because he keeps you safe to live and process the way a normal person does. Will is with you because you give him something to refocus his wild need to do something on, something that’s not what he didn’t want to do instead. You see it in him leaping over the front of his car with burning eyes, excited to split skin. He sees it in your initial impulse to abandon him to do that, and neither of you can erase that with shopping trips and dog walks and family portraits and baby showers. The Florida coast is long but finite, like a walk down a long hall, and eventually you must both arrive at some end. )   

The routine is typical - dogs clipped into their tethers once more, feet slid into sandals that don’t press at the swollen tops of Margot’s feet, and both her and Will wiping at the small curling hairs at their own necks to push the sweat away. It looks like it might rain, but these days it seems like it always might rain, big thick drops that sneak up from the beach and leave as quick as they came, so Margot grabs an umbrella to twirl behind her head, close to her neck. 

Can’t run away from or kill every kind of inconvenience, she thinks with a sigh as Will locks the door and checks the spare key behind the shingles, no matter how much they try. 

It is near to the Fourth of July, and the streets of Anastasia Island are lined with cars from out of town, and all the patios of every restaurant are swung open and welcome. Everyone and every window wears the American flag like it’s their very own - ironic in a city founded by Spain, but what’s the United States but a series of cognitive dissonances wrapped in traditional values? Will smiles when she points it out. 

In another life, maybe she would be one of them, here with college friends, or in an earlier one, with her family. Red, white, and blue bikinis and breezy caftans worn with pin curls and hangovers. They would drink icy mint tea and stroll the long boardwalks that carry people over the dunes, and everything would be a measure of their leisure. People would kiss because they still love each other - lips at the spots where sweat falls for paramours, cheeks for her mother who doesn’t want to mess up her makeup, but dab a little at Margot’s mouth for color and for the special occasion. 

( “For the holiday,” your mother says to you, and presses the bullet of the lipstick to your mouth. “Now blot it, so it doesn’t get on your teeth.” )

( Will has a bloody smile, and maybe yours was too eating sweet and sour sauce and indifference after riding home like nothing happened - you don’t know if that blots. )   

Margot watches Will with half an eye to the side, marking the subtle way he untangles dogs from each other, and weaves around people with a marked observance of their faces. She wishes for that kind of simplicity for him. Will would probably entertain the fantasy of it for the innocuousness of it, if she were to ask. Maybe he’s even doing it now. It’s harmless enough, pretending to be someone normal. Both of them have a lot of practice at it, so they’d likely do it well. 

Margot wonders what he’d prefer instead. He doesn’t seem to get asked very often - guilty as charged, she adds and absently rubs the side of her belly. 

“What do you wish you had right now?” she asks. “Anything at all.” 

It’s apparently a less complicated question to him than she’d normally suspect. “A New Orleans snowball,” he says after a moment’s consideration. 

“Considering what little I know of Louisiana, I can’t decide if that’s a real thing, or your equivalent to a cold day in hell and you’re just pulling my leg,” Margot hums, smiling. 

“While I can’t say I wouldn’t be at home with that second guess, it’s a dessert,” Will says with a huff of laughter. “Shaved ice, syrup, sometimes a gum ball at the center, ice cream if you’re feeling fancy. I liked Tiger’s Blood and Creamsicle as a kid…takes the edge off the heat, and got me out of Daddy’s way in the summers.”

“So a snow cone,” she says, and Will actually seems to take offense to that.   

“ Not a snow cone,” Will says between shakes of his head, eyes closed, mouth tipped upwards at the corners, and somewhere else.

It’s never lost on her how much memory rules Will’s life - they live under one of the roofs of his awkward childhood, and sleep in beds that haven’t changed much since then. They take comfort that they share this between Anastasia Island and Muskrat Farms where they do not share attraction or preference. What a relief it is to say oh, you too? to all these little hurts made by his uncommon mind and her uncommon tastes. 

Looking at him now, it seems a shame that so little of his memory is happy like wherever he is now. She can’t follow him to the snowball stand with his father anymore than he can follow her to where her mother presses peony pink rouge to Margot’s lips and tells her what a beautiful woman she’ll turn out to be. She’s never had the ability to reach into someone like that, and she doesn’t know the words to translate her own handfuls of good moments.

“I don’t have a car or the bladder capacity to make a quick trip across state lines, so what else?” she asks.

Will sighs, and doesn’t reply immediately. They walk several blocks without incident or bathroom trips, and soon the expanse of wooden boardwalk opens up to the vast blue-grey of the open ocean. A misting rain blows up under the umbrella and sticks sand and brine to their faces and hands, dogs shaking it from their coats. It should be unpleasant, but it’s light and easily washed off at the shower station, already filled with gleeful kids and parents making the most of their own vacations. 

“Let me think about it,” he says thoughtfully, brushing it from his face and from the coarse fur at Harley and Winston’s backs. “And you’ll be the first I’ll tell when I know.”

Ah, to be privy to Will Graham’s thoughts before anyone else - a very rare souvenir to take back home with her indeed. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she says from a time before she had sense enough to know that.      

—

It is a sweltering day mid-week that finds her sweating into the ugly couch, on the opposite end to the dogs who want nothing so much as to bury her in their kind, warm bodies. Margot runs boiling hot these days and can’t suffer to even sit next to them, but she lets them lay at the bottom of her feet so long as they don’t cover them. They mean well, and she can’t really say she doesn’t appreciate their watchful eyes and ears while Will goes out to forage at the grocery store. 

“You should come with me,” Will says before going, with his wallet in hand. 

Margot waves him off and threatens to spontaneously combust if she has to go out into the humidity today. “Just get the basics - it’s not like I’ve never stayed by myself,” she says. “I promise to run over anyone brave enough to come inside - I’m probably big enough to do it without the car.” 

He says nothing to that, shrewd enough to only clarify if she needs the chocolate or strawberry flavored glucose shakes. 

He also gives her his handgun, which comes in the flavors of ominous and unfamiliar. 

“Are you sure I need that?” she asks. 

( It’s not the first you’ve seen it, but it’s the first time he’s left himself without it, or trusted her enough to be able to use it - everyone’s got their security blanket, you guess, and shuffle unused credit cards with Margot Verger winking off their fronts like swear words, and consider if you’d ever let him use them. )

( No, you think, turning the gun in hand before slipping it under the couch pillow nearest to your head, and try not to think of sleeping atop the shallow grave of a monster. )

“It’s better than nothing,” he shrugs, checking the safety. 

Everything in his face is ugly with doubt, and she wishes she could make it better for him, but Will is a creature that looks for problems and exits where there are none, and Margot doesn’t pretend to be able to fix that. She doesn’t even know if she can aim the damn thing, but it feels like a kindness to not mention that.  

He does eventually leave - no more than an hour’s time, he promises, though he certainly can’t account for the out-of-town beach traffic on a hot day like this one. He checks the windows and locks the door for her, and rumbles down the entrance to the alleyway like if he’s quick here, maybe the rest will follow in similar fashion. How he’s optimistic about this, but absolutely nothing else puzzles Margot, but Margot is far too tired to comment or care. 

Margot keeps the blinds closed to the day, the lights off, and the ceiling fan whirling like it means to lift the entire building.  She closes her eyes to the spinning blades, and listens instead for the crunch of gravel and the jingle of keys to the front door. What she gets is the snuffling nose of Winston pressing against her elbow, checking in to make sure she’s aware of him. She absently pulls at the fine hairs of his ears gently with her eyes closed, and tells him to lay down and sleep.     

She does instead, dozing at the roar of engines on the main road, people talking and laughing down the sidewalks that she’s become familiar with. Birds call and cackle between the palms, and in turn the palm leaves rustle with the passing of their wings and the sea breeze. 

I’ll miss this someday , she thinks, mind drifting at the sounds. She’ll miss knowing what Will heard between naps and summer vacation and what little attachment he has to his grandparents. 

The crack of wood in the walls expanding and contracting. The drip of the faucet over the sink. Sighs and snores of dogs, panting on the floor. 

Eventually, the gravel outside rustles, something moving against the side of the house with careful knocks to the siding. After a moment, steps come up the porch and the deadbolt clinks with the turn of the key. The dogs rise to click their nails and pant at the entrance, and Margot lets them pass without comment. Only Winston stays sitting and vigilant against the motion of the door, Margot passing fingertips around the pull of his collar. 

A voice comes with the opening of the door. Young, female. 

Not Will’s.

“God, even the inside is a spa,” it says over the familiar dance of dogs vying for attention.

“Nothing that won’t pass by the end of the day, or that you won’t learn to deal with as we go further south,” says another, this one as known to her as Will’s, maybe moreso. “Florida hasn’t known a cold winter since the last Ice Age. You haven’t acclimated to anything but.”

Margot’s eyes fly open to stare in dread at the window, hand drawing up to the couch cushion while the rest of her tries to stay stock still. 

The gun , she thinks. At the cool brush of metal against her fingers, she dares a glance to the side where the entry glows with the sunlight and damp air streaming in.     

“Oh,” says the surprised but unforgettable face of the blue eyed young woman at the bookstore, who stops waving her hand to cool her neck and face from the long spill of dark brown hair. It is frizzy and sticks to her sweaty cheeks, but even now she doesn’t pull it back.

There’s three loud steps, and before Margot can pull her hand and the brick-heavy steel of Will’s favorite contingency plan out from behind her own sweaty head, a hand clamps down with such force on her wrist that she’s certain it will be broken. 

( You know the feel of it - you’ve fallen from the withers of many a fine gelding and mare who stopped just shy of the jump. You learned the fear of their shining shoed hooves, and the fingers on you now feel as surely made of iron as theirs. )

Margot grunts in pain, trying her best to roll and pull away. 

“Oh,” says Doctor Lecter, like he thinks it’s funny, steadying her with another vice-like grasp of her shoulder and the gun dropping between them. When she looks over him, and the hard lines of his face, and the cold-eyed assessment he makes of her from head to toes, lingering awhile at her undeniable and comically obvious state of expecting, she wonders if he ever believed her when she said she slept with Will Graham. 

“I do apologize Margot, I wasn’t expecting you to have stayed behind,” he says in the same tone as always, like she is merely late for an appointment, or that he must unfortunately cancel. 

( You did call him a thoroughbred, before this all went literally south. You can see that same kind of beastial spirited temper in him even now. ) 

“But all is well,” he continues with his gentleman’s candor, pushing her to sit with inarguable force that doesn’t match. “You can tell me your news, and I shall tell you mine.” 

—  

The man she remembers from the years of therapy that surveyed her works of violence, and hath said that they are good if a little half-hearted, does not look much like this one. 

They are the same of course, but Doctor Lecter as she recalls him is a person of absolute tidiness in dress and speech. He takes care to not wrinkle his bespoke suits. He crosses his legs as a signal of their familiarity during sessions, leans in to listen where appropriate, and has likely never had an unmeasured word thrown into the mix between them. 

This one, standing at the kitchen sink with a Sig Sauer in hand and watchful, tired eyes, looks like someone dragged him backwards through a week–long bender that he just happened to have a change of clothes for. A hunted fox, she thinks, who long thought he had evaded the hounds. 

“Will does certainly have an eye for the lived-in,” he says, turning to consider the room. 

“Small talk, Doctor Lecter?” she says, swallowing around the lump in her throat. Margot hasn’t had the pleasure of being the other woman before. She doesn’t think Doctor Lecter would take very kindly to the comparison, but neither does she feel quite like the other man, and panic demands the cool sense of miserable irony that she has coasted along with for most of her life, so she thinks it to herself anyway.

“A segue, from the surprise of our visit,” he says with an elegant shrug. 

“Breaking and entering,” the young woman says from the couch, sitting very prim and upright, but passing nervous, shaking hands over the tops of the dogs’ heads in a way that speaks to her strong desire to do so. Will did the same, that night she came over to tell him the truth. The dogs, being the most obliging sentries that she thinks she has ever been forced into a hostage situation with, take this with great happiness and delight, save Winston who stands with hair raised at Margot’s side, the only good man in the room. 

“Trespassing,” Margot corrects on Will’s behalf. It sounds like the sort of thing he’d do. Maybe frown severely a bit, and have a Charlie Brown-esque piece of self-reflection to share with the general audience and make them wonder if home improvement is the only thing between him and abject destruction. She’s learned to like his brand, but it’s definitely a recognizable one. 

“A little light battery before dinner,” she continues, airy and amused despite herself, “but go off, I guess.” 

“Honestly, probably the least messed up thing we’ve done in the past twenty-four hours,” the young woman mutters to Harley’s ears, favoring the left one. She looks small in her jean jacket, none of the clever girl that charms Margot with her red cheeks and smile to be seen, glancing between Margot and the doctor like she expects everything to go wrong.

( She looks at you like she expects him to kill you. The farm hands do that sometimes - look at a sickly animal and expect the call to be made by the herdsman if it’s fit for the saw or simply a cull. Judging from how Will talks to Doctor Lecter when he thinks no one is around, maybe the young woman is clever after all. )  

Abigail Hobbs, she recognizes when she considers the context - Margot’s never been one to follow the news beyond the society pages, but in hindsight she could kick herself for not making the connection between Will’s incredible unhappiness when Margot describes her for the first time, and his hissing anger only a couple weeks before on the phone. How she’s alive, Margot has no idea, only that the absent hand that tries to move her hair away from her face continuously forgets the absence of an ear. 

Not entirely eaten, she is relieved to note, but dressed clean and stylish and red cheeked with the weather and she is only being dropped off to stay the weekend. A living child of sorts from a previous marriage. 

You really did have it bad for him , Margot thinks, and isn’t sure if she means Doctor Lecter or Will.  

Doctor Lecter smiles like he doesn’t quite mean to when Abigail Hobbs talks - his smiles are in the eyes rather than the mouth, the hellfire gleam of someone who knows something forbidden and won’t share. That she recognizes, perhaps the first honest reaction she managed after telling him about her poor attempt on Mason’s life. He’s proud of her, as he was proud of Margot. 

Margot notices now the fine lines in his face are less so wrinkles, and more so cuts, like he’s been in a fight. That seems right somehow - that his joy and his age are scars that are mistaken for aging. Margot can’t imagine him any way other than he is now, not as a younger man, nor an elder one. They make portraits of people like him, meant to only be remembered one way. 

“It’s been some time since I’ve seen you last, Margot,” he says. “I see things are turning out rather well for you.” 

Margot purses her lips, and rolls her tongue. She’d disagree on principle, but truthfully, things are doing just that if one excludes this moment. “I have an attentive-” she says and pauses.

( -roommate-adoptive brother-fellow depressive-not a lover-not your lover- ) 

“-partner in the venture,” she finishes diplomatically.

“Ah yes,” Doctor Lecter says, turning the gun on the counter with the kind of casualness one would a water glass. “Your matter of business . Is Will aware of your stake in its success, or perhaps you’ve offered him one of his own?”       

Yes…No. Mason he knows. The homophobia he knows, but Margot doesn’t think she’s ever really told Will the truth of her inheritance - cured by the good Christian blessing of bearing a son. She doesn’t think it would change anything that he did, a dutiful son and grandson himself, but she also doesn’t think he’d want to know. She’s afraid to find out. She hopes she never does. 

Selfish, she thinks. 

Opportunistic, Doctor Lecter’s eyes say in return when she does not answer. He always did have a good read on her. 

“He’s not in it for the money, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Margot says, and considers the lines of her own face until she feels them smooth and disappear, ladylike and polite. Doctor Lecter keeps a straight face as she says it, but something in his shoulders seems looser knowing that. Even old money knows jealousy of others, she guesses. 

“And I’ve learned to be in it for more than that,” she concedes, and represses the urge to place a hand to where she knows a small foot was in the early morning hours before - someone who’s face she doesn’t know, but that she is looking forward to learning. “You should know how that feels. Isn’t that why you’re single parenting through months of separation too?” 

Doctor Lecter frowns, and looks away from either of them for a moment. Margot wonders if it’s the parenting with Will that bothers him, or that she is too. 

Abigail Hobbs takes this as most young adults do - with the roll of her eyes and a small frown of resentment. She says nothing to contradict it, but Margot knows what that’s like, being stuck in someone else’s expectations. 

Margot allows herself to turn to look at her, but not again back to the gun. It’s tempting to reach for it, even knowing the attempt would fail.  

Somewhere an ice cream truck rumbles down the street. Kids run after it, and the gulls after them. It’s nice that things go on as normal without them. 

Speaking of expectations, there’s no way Will isn’t due back soon, if he’s not already pulled into the drive. Margot will confess to being the perennial pessimist that she is, but she can’t see how Will wouldn’t react as well to this as he did to having his takeout interrupted by thugs. Margot can’t picture Doctor Lecter being rolled into the trunk of the car, made into something of least importance to be shoved somewhere small, behind styrofoam containers of overfried chicken and bottled sauces, but she can see Will with blood in his mouth again, up against something his wiry hands aren’t prepared to be bruised by. 

It hurts most, hurting things you love. 

“I have been unable to reach him,” Doctor Lecter begins, licking at his bottom lip thoughtfully, “and thought it best to make certain the two of you were still well.” 

“First time being ghosted?” Margot snorts, and makes to stand. “I think that’s what you yourself have called a personal boundary to me a few times. Seems like a drastic reaction to break into his family’s summer house and hold a pregnant woman at gunpoint.” 

Doctor Lecter smiles with teeth this time, each cut line in his face straining and scab red. It’s kindly - not the cold thing that she expects from someone so jealous of something that only ever existed in his head. That Will chose Margot, when what he really chose was to take a time out after being pushed on the playground one too many times. 

But maybe it’s obvious now, the way he is obvious to her; that Will never really belonged to her as much as he wanted to belong to something.

“As Abigail has said,” he says quietly, and unbothered by her choice to stand, “it is perhaps the least drastic thing I have done this week.”  

Margot thinks she may be dumb enough to think that’s romantic. 

The asphalt of the driveway pops with the movement of car tires, sunlight off the windshield flashing from between the blinds. She’s never thought of any of those things as scary before now, but she holds her breath, shifting her weight to brace. 

“And here is the last of our players,” Doctor Lecter nods, and bids Abigail come stand with him behind the kitchen counter. Margot doesn’t let herself worry at this. All she sees is someone pulling their kid back from the street, holding their hand until it’s safe to cross again. 

(You really have gone soft with your motherhood, even if in the same sentence you would roll him over with the nearest vehicle given the chance. To make sure you still can do it if you need to, you insist, and let one of those long breaths you’ve been practicing loose to steady your nerves.) 

—

The first words out of Will’s mouth are said so quickly and harshly between his handfuls of plastic bags that she almost thinks she’s misheard him. He doesn’t lift his head, storming the front door with a crinkled newspaper in hand, trapped in his own loop of a thought. 

“Mason’sdead,” he robotically declares between the mundane clink of cans and glass bottles - rushed like he can’t stop it from happening anymore than he can the news itself. 

Margot turns between Will and the kitchen, tongue tied at what she should even say to preface what’s about to happen. 

Your ex is here - he thought you’re a cheating whore but he misses you and likely thinks I could never give you what he could, she tries on for size. It fits in a way. Both in the drama and comedy of it. Will has never stayed up late for the off chance to hear her voice. He doesn’t hold phones like they burn his hands with her written word.  

Your daughter-by-proxy is here, she continues. She flirted with me at the bookstore once to let me know someone wanted to hurt me and that it would hurt you if they did, so I hope you don’t mind. They took your gun, but in the way that adults take sharp things out of the hands of toddlers that don’t know what they’re doing with them, and I have never so much as raised a gun. 

“...What?” she gasps, when Will starts to make sense. 

“Hannibal Lecter killed Mason Verger,” he repeats, blinking rapidly at the floor before he all at once looks properly into the shuttered dark of the living room and kitchen instead, and the shadows standing there. 

Will closes his eyes and blinks slowly after that, dark eyed and each glistening pearls in the flushed shore of his face. 

The two men stand in tense contemplation of each other, somewhere outside time the same as Will’s memory. Margot doesn’t have the talent to follow him there, to know what he’s thinking, but maybe Doctor Lecter does, and maybe that’s why it’s always been so hard for Will to cut the guide line between them. Maybe the whole thing falls apart if he tries. 

He says it once more, this time to Doctor Lecter like he can’t quite believe he’s there: “Hannibal Lecter killed Mason Verger…not as The Chesapeake Ripper. As Hannibal Lecter.” 

It sounds like a big task, casting aside a name like that. 

“I did,” Doctor Lecter replies, voice soft and happy. 

Will swallows, at a loss. He glances again between everyone, looks at Abigail Hobbs to Doctor Lecter’s side, and Margot, who does her best to project that she is not afraid. No sudden movements. No startling the animals in the tight walls of their pen. 

A few cars pass in traffic outside. The plastic bags in Will’s hands come to rest on the shining surface of old, wooden floor. 

Will looks at Margot again, bereft of the rage that characterized so many of the times he spoke to Doctor Lecter before. 

Are you ok? the look asks. 

Margot had wondered if he’d storm the formica countertops like the hood of the car. Perhaps he’d have armfuls of saltines and sugar-free candy and cast them aside as fishermen cast nets, and the room would explode into the violence that creeps under his skin and she’s realized has nowhere else to live. “Take that you strangely manipulative bastard,” Will would yell, and Margot would cheer him on, and peace would be restored to the hall at night and the elephants in the room, as a professional relationship with their joint therapist would be the order of the hour once again.

It’s clearly more complicated than that, she understands, watching Will press at the fading wounds on his fists like a gambler’s tell.  

“And you came here,” Will says with shaking breath, head turning to Doctor Lecter once more, sounding not entirely sure if that’s true. “After I told you not to.”  

“I have,” comes the thick reply. 

“Why?”

A harder ask, even harder than the loss of pride in his name. Why did Will help her? Why did Margot think to ask? Why does anyone do anything? They all stare at each other looking for someone to speak first, listening to the fan blades whirl above. 

Eventually, Doctor Lecter finds his words. 

“I wanted to help you,” says Doctor Lecter very deliberately, rounding the kitchen counter to stand in front of Will. He looks as if he needs something to do with his hands, flexing fingers and knuckles just as bruised as Will’s were. “As long as you are here, you could not move forward in time. And,” he pauses, finds his courage wherever he hides it in the stone of his face, made kinder by where the sun cutting through the slats of the blinds finds his face and makes it July warm with the rest of them, “I wanted to be where you are.”   

The humid breeze presses through the front door, and rustles the newspaper and the sweat on their brows. Dogs press their noses to Will’s leg in greeting and warning, unbothered by the strange tension of the room. Will looks to them, eyes hidden from the man that comes near enough to catch the edge of a grocery bag with a very handsome black boot. 

Will turns to her again, looking for something in Margot’s face. An answer, not if she’s alright this time, but if he can do something that he’s uncertain if he should. His brows draw down in thought, wet-eyed, asking if it's alright.   

(You’re the last person standing that can tell him no.)

She nods. 

(You would never, when all that he’s said to your every request is yes.) 

And rather than explode into the angry wind that has kept her sheltered for no reason other than she asked him to, the slouching insular person that she has occasionally seen coaxed into laughs and soft moments, Will becomes very fragile indeed, and lets his face be cradled on either side by broad hands and the sharp face and mouth of a person Margot would have never imagined Will capable of permitting it. 

Will’s hands are reaching and white and dotted with purple and yellow jewels against the black of Doctor Lecter’s shirt, the faded twins to the ones that keep Will for their own.

—

The curtain really ought to close on something as touching as a balmy afternoon reunion between consummate murderers, but rather than rest in the afterglow as they probably ought to, Will recovers from his moment of tenderness with a swift argumentative insistence that is both frustrating and comical. 

“Just hug it out,” Margot fantasizes yelling, grabbing a bottle of strawberry protein drink from the floor with the elegance of a whale asked to do a handstand. She doesn’t, even if she’s made it a point to shoot straight with her words where Will is concerned, as one does in Rome, but she certainly thinks it, gently guiding Abigail Hobbes to the back of the house. 

She is buzzing with the shock of having her lifelong chain of second child severed, navigating the hall with one hand to the walls. She wonders if it any moment she will feel pain, like Mason’s death takes a vital part of her with him, and something like a foot or a thumb will simply be gone, but Margot simply feels the creak of the wood floors between her bare feet, and the familiar pop of the plank that sits two deep from the left of her door under her heel, as normal as anything in near to eight months of this house.  

Margot has questions, but they will have to wait. It’s difficult to give them space, especially with Abigail glancing backwards periodically, tailing awkwardly behind her to the little room and it’s clean white walls still smelling of lumberyard and paint. She passes thoughtful hands over baby clothes, small toys, the wooden top bar of a crib that still has plastic on the mattress like they can return it if they just don’t take off the tags. 

Margot sees that she’s a bit lost though - without supervision, when she’s never known much else. She’ll have to have her own awkward conversation with Will soon enough, and waiting for the belt to fall has always felt worse than the actual punishment.   

Margot closes the hallway door at the first angry raise of Will’s voice down the hall, Abigail’s eyes cutting from it to the little frames on the wall, golden bright with late evening glow. 

“They need a few minutes of privacy, I think,” Margot hums.

“They need five centuries of privacy,” Abigail mutters. “ Hannibal takes his time getting to the truth, even for the simple things.”

“Think they’ll kill each other?” Margot asks, and remembers the gun sitting idle and rock-cold on the counter, awaiting its return to whatever hidden place it belongs in. 

“I don’t think Hannibal has it in him to try,” sighs the young woman, arms crossed and standing in the airflow of a box fan. “Not for lack of ability, but what he left behind in Baltimore isn’t exactly the easy work of a nine-to-five. He’s tired.” 

“Neither does Will,” Margot replies. “Not for lack of ability, but lack of drive. Otherwise I think he would have done it before the two of us ever met. Takes a long time for him to come to decisions about himself, but everyone else is a book that he’s read and folded his favorite pages of many times.” 

“Think he’s a good father still?” Abigail asks a little wryly. 

Margot allows the possibility that it’s not to shame her as much as it is to comfort Abigail. The first child Will is given and had taken away from him, if not in the traditional way. She can’t really belong to them the way that Margot’s baby will belong to Margot, but choosing family you see a part of yourself in has its own unalienable traits. Whoever Abigail Hobbs used to share kin with doesn’t matter as long as she is happy with whoever she does now.

She wants to feel safe with Will. Safety is a kind of happiness that Margot has wanted from him too. 

“The best,” Margot says. “Despite having the concept forced on him twice.” 

Abigail nods, fingers fidgeting at the ends of her hair. 

“They really don’t teach guys enough about the perils of family planning,” she says with an airy dismissal when she finds her voice again that makes Margot smile, and think she’ll be alright. Another ambitious girl, to keep Will Graham on his toes.  

—  

The madonna blue between the main space and the bedrooms has always been a bit much, but in the best way. Margot thinks she will buy or paint something like it - maybe carpet her floor at home in the dense faces of hydrangeas, or a beautiful coat that she can wear when she misses the smell of old house and salt air. 

It is here that Margot is handed the keys of the Volvo with a guilty look and a soft apology that Will cannot be present for the birth of her child, alongside her Mercedes keys that had been hidden in the glove box since before they ever left Virginia. With that, another tidy bundle of cash similar to all the countless others he’s given her, save that this one is much thicker and held carded together at the ends by rubber bands. 

She considers all of these things reasonable - she doesn’t really need the money, but she will need a car to get home by road or by plane alike, the latter if she is quick about it. There’s nothing but lawyers to handle between now and her Verger boy arrives, and then she really won’t need anything. 

Margot doesn’t know if she ever fully realized the image of Will with her and the baby. She likes to think it’s because both of them knew that it wouldn’t happen. The baby was meant to be hers. He didn’t mean to give her one, but has seen to it that she have it all the same.  

 A good man with taste in bad ones , she thinks to herself, smiling. Everybody likes the naughty kind. She’s built her adult life on that premise.  

“Don’t spend it all in one place?” she jokes, and turns it in hand. “Is this my bribe in exchange for pretending to be a hostage for almost a year?”  

That’s the agreement that they come to after a short amount of time sitting in the living room, Will still simmering in his anger, and Doctor Lecter looking for all the world like he’s been offered a Nobel Peace prize. The marshalls will be looking for Doctor Lecter and anyone connected to the heinous murder of Mason Verger and his employees in a very fine Baltimore private practice, and Margot is hardly suspicious under the guise of kidnapped victim of the known-to-be unstable Will Graham. How brave she’ll be, carrying a baby to term after all that time with him. How will she ever dry her tears with all the gobs of money that she’ll have then?

(And how coy you’ll play as to who the baby belongs to. “Someone not with us any longer,” you’ll say, and all the nosy blue hairs of your family’s social circle will pay you on the back and call you a stalwart woman, a Rachel, a mother of wished for and late-in-coming sons.) 

“Anyone that’s a problem for you has been taken care of,” Will says to their hands joined by the keys and dollar bills. “You can go wherever you want. You can go home if that’s where you want to be. I’d drive you, but-”

“But you’ll miss the boat out,” she finishes for him.  

Margot thinks it embarrasses him to trip at the finish line like this. He’s been so good at everything else, it’s unthinkable that he won’t see his hard work realized. But that is obligation, not passion. Not a need the way stealing away in the night is, as it was for her.  

“It’s what you wished you had, right?” she asks quietly in the calm blue of the hallway. 

Will frowns, head turning down the hall. “To be a fugitive?” 

“To be with him, without anything in your way.” 

He doesn’t really know how to answer the truth of that, but it’s really not something you reply to anymore than you reply to a command. It is just something to be done. Will shuffles on his feet, looking for something to say where he normally is a great confluence of truths himself. It feels good to get one in on him. 

“I…” he starts, glancing back to the front of the hall again. 

“You promised I’d be the first to know,” Margot says to stop his fretting, and combs the hair and sweat at the sides of his face down behind his ears. 

(You knew it in yourself, the day you accepted what you are and that you knew what you wanted, no matter how you had been raised, or then schooled, or then shamed into thinking otherwise. You stared in the bathroom mirror of the church reception hall in your family Easter best, ears still ringing from the exit choir chorus. You will still go to a beautiful brunch, and trade side-embraces and side-kisses to cheeks to please your parents, and think about that moment of clarity for the rest of your life. You see it again the day you resolve in the bathroom of Muskrat Farms that you will take your destiny as surely as you can pluck something from a shelf. You’d know the look on anyone else’s face, because you would have given the world for someone to say it was ok to accept it, and not spare doubt another hour of your time.)

(That can be your payment for what Will has given you.) 

He rests his head on her shoulder for only a moment - the proud, heavy home of Will Graham, who is and isn’t a lot of things, and Margot thinks she will miss him and this strange dimension of time they’ve shared, seeds waiting for spring.

—

Margot is suspicious of Will’s detachment and easy escape from places he lives when their journey together begins. She understands it to be a blessing now as they come apart and drift. 

He takes no clothes, no pictures, no documents, not even his glasses this time. The fishing tackle is left forgotten with his tools. The pancake batter and boxes of bread crumbs for frying fish sit open and stale in the pantry that Margot never really learns the order and contents of. He takes only Hannibal Lecter, Abigail Hobbs, one Sig Sauer of absolutely no worth considering his aptitude to murder with bare hands and Margot’s inability to even grab it before someone can stop her, and six dogs. 

(“Harley likes you best,” he says, leaving the seventh with apologetic passes of his hand over the rough fur of her back, “and she’s too big to travel safely. She’ll be good at nannying and riding beside a horse.” You, with a preference for Harley even if Winston is the only smart dog of the entire bunch, gratefully accept her company on the couch and watch the rest pull and click-clack their way down the front steps. You won’t be totally alone, though with the baby still inside you, you guess you wouldn’t have been.) 

“You’re taking this all rather well,” says Doctor Lecter, situating her against the couch cushions as he found her before. 

“Everyone deserves to be whisked away and not have to think about how they got there at least once,” she shrugs. “He did it for me - it only seems fair you can do it for him. I’ve gotten my turn on the swing already.” 

“You’ve always been a pragmatic girl,” Doctor Lecter says, looking over her face for what she assumes must be the lie there, and knows he’ll find none. She loves Will - just not the kind that kisses at midnight, or celebrates anniversaries, or holds hands like shared prayer. She wants him to be happy, and for reasons beyond her ability to empathize with, this is what will make him that. 

“Observant,” he continues, a little exit interview for just the two of them who start the whole charade of these passed months to begin with. “Misanthropic to a fault, but an excellent judge of character. The great mothers amongst predators have their choice of mate to sire their young and go on their way,” he adds, uncapping the needle of a medical sharp with blue gloved hands. “I cannot fault you setting your eyes on the same one.”

“But you could fault me if I kept him.” Margot smiles around the cords tied at her wrists - not tight, and mostly for show. 

Margot Verger, heiress apparent, captive mother divine. She likes the fantasy of it, if a little less so the victimhood of it. What a headline she’ll be next to the charnel house photos of what Hannibal Lecter leaves of her brother, right next to primary election results, and the grand opening of a gallery. She’s already recorded an emergency call Doctor Lecter will phone in for her when they leave. They have promised it will be promptly, so that she will not have to wait long to use the restroom. Indignities are to be suffered for greater purpose, and this time for a cheap price. Pregnancy has fortunately stripped Margot of much of her modesty about such things.

“Sleep tight, Margot,” he says, depressing the plunger of what she is also promised is a safe sedative to keep the narrative unimpeachable. 

“In the morning,” he says from a distant place, “you will have everything you set out to have.” 

—

Margot wakes cotton mouthed and annoyed to the press of people: neighbors, the paramedics, and Harley. She doesn’t remember much about that day, other than the permissible press of an ultrasound wand that says everything is a-ok. The week that follows goes by in a blur of camera flashes, the drone of airplane engines, and several interviews with local police, FBI, attorneys, and company shareholders. 

Everyone apologizes for the inconvenience in such a trying time, expecting a baby and all. 

Margot hopes they keep that attitude of contrition when she isn’t too. She’ll miss that about Will - that she is Margot first, and everything else is a temporary symptom of that. 

The baby kicks her when the sun goes down until the sun comes up just as much in Virginia as he does in Florida. So she has that of Will to hold on to at least alongside the dog and the wad of cash. She also receives the deed to the duplex, wedged between one and five dollar bills where it can remain humble and still pass to Will’s son. 

—

(You think that’s the only time you ever truly recognized that, turning the document in hand, now that it has no teeth that remind you that Will’s are sharp and occasionally gleaming red. Your son, who is also Will’s son, who might one day open up his mouth and look the same. It’s another gift he can leave behind without intruding now that he is well and truly gone, the careful handed man that you never were attracted to, but you did care for.) 

— 

Muskrat Farm does not change much without Mason there. It’s improved, mind you, but hardly a new and undiscovered utopia of freedom, wealth, and sapphic bliss, held in reverence and joy forever and ever amen. This is the house that she was raised in with her parents. Each room promises a memory. It stinks of fear where Mason once boxed her ears. It stills her desire where she is forced to play princess for men that are foul not because they are men, but because they do not see her value. 

It is hers though, and conquering queens don’t take castles just to relist them with the local real estate agent. There’s not much that can’t be defanged with the presence of a large stuffed giraffe, or mylar balloons that say “Oh Happy Day!” on them with dancing bears and sunshine and rainbows that are totally in earnest. 

The baby will keep some of the fear away. Hopefully he will replace it.  

Margot resents Will in the last days before her pregnancy comes to its entirely normal end - at the local reputable hospital, with plenty of drugs, and absolutely no subterfuge. Will, she knows, is either in Cuba or further south, and has really done nothing to deserve her ire beyond being part of the responsible party that leaves her miserable in her own body, contemplating if infants care at all about eviction. She supposes she’s become dependent on his deflecting all scary things that go bump in the night. She didn’t need it before, but it was nice for a time to have that.

She reminds herself where she can of the good things he’s left her with - her legacy, her health, partially in thanks to killing everyone who threatened her legacy through bad food options and Hannibal Lecter, but that’s not the point. 

She can be herself. She can entirely ignore all callers if she feels like it, because the only reputation to defend is her own. Meatpacking is as good as it will ever be - who really worries about the religious and sexual leanings of their butcher, so long as they don’t do it on the packing floor?      

He leaves her with one more good thing, largely by accident, though that seems to be a trend for Will. 

“Do I have the right house?” Margot hears from the warmth of her lounge chair on the veranda one day, soaking up the warmth of the summer day. She hasn’t bothered to close the front of her gaping maternity shirt today save the top couple of buttons, letting the imminent Verger baby enjoy the sun too - he’s known nothing but Florida for months, and deserves to enjoy the heat too.  

“Are there many houses on the block to confuse it with?” asks Margot, blinking sleep away from behind her sunglasses. She raises them, face pink, eyes dancing, the lady of the house, and smiles at her guest. 

Dark hair, red lips, Margot’s signature favorite. Unlike Abigail Hobbs and her girlish charms, the visitor she opens her eyes to is a proper solid woman in a tailored white blazer and sundress of her own. Margot entertains that this is the honeypot that was meant to be sent to her originally, like this woman was lost in the mail and Abigail Hobbs a replacement product, and that Margot’s only sorry to feel like the size of a literal dwarf star next to her. 

“You must be Ms. Verger,” says the woman, arms crossed and amused. 

“Margot, please,” Margot says with a wave of her hand. “You’ll make me sound like my mother talking like that. Now, did you recognize me by my ability to blot out the sun, or the only person brave enough to sit half-naked and leave cocoa butter on a marble plinth? Apologies for the state of undress,” she adds with a gesture - what can you do? - and smooths another button in place. “I find there isn’t much that fits at this point.”

“Not at all, your beauty precedes you in a way that your reputation could never dare,” the woman laughs kindly, eyes taking in all of Margot in her breezy open shirt and little shorts with appreciation, but her face falls as the moment passes and glides to the floor. “My name’s Doctor Alana Bloom,” she says at length. “I think you might be the last person to have seen my friend.” 

Margot hums at the sting of disappointment, but allows herself the fantasy of the woman’s attention anyway. “Doctor Bloom, if it’s your colleague you’ve come asking after, I have to say my relationship with Hannibal Lecter was strictly that of a patient and therapist.”

“Just Alana,” she hears in reply, Alana Bloom shaking her dark haired head. “And rather, the friend is Will Graham. I have the displeasure of having been Hannibal’s…ex-girlfriend? Alibi?” she tries, nose scrunching in a way Margot finds charming. “I keep trying out different ways to explain it, and I don’t know if any of them fit.” 

“Best to lead with names for yourself instead of what you were to him,” Margot says, sitting upright to cross her legs, and scratch Harley’s head that comes up to rest against a knee. “I’m sure Doctor Lecter does. I hope Will learnt to do the same.” 

Alana sees the dog and brightens with the day, smiling again at Margot sitting as comfortable as she can. “Fair,” she says with a hum of her own. “Keep the parts you like, and let the rest go with the tabloids and obituaries?” 

“Just like that,” Margot says with a sly smile. “Let me be the first to welcome you to Muskrat Farms, my fellow widow in spirit but never in name. Shall we remember the men fondly as our last vigil, and move on to better things?” 

“I hear widows get away with quite a lot,” Alana teases, and Margot thinks she’d like to keep doing just that for the rest of her life, whether she’s a widow-mother-heiress or not. 

—

(“Morgan, for the seaside,” you giggle to the maternity ward nurse, half delirious with the rush of birth and the curious numb from the waist down left by your epidural. You feel like a tide receding now, with Morgan outside you, his own little body of water made up of the gentler parts of you. The nurse asks if you’d like your first guest, who you’ve giggled with for nights and nights prior to now in your shared vigil, putting the moon to bed together, and who has waited without complaint for you down the hall so you can put the moon and the baby to bed together tonight as well. )