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Lucy sat on the plush sofa, plucking at her skirt as she settled into the surprisingly comfy seat. The woman across from her smiled warmly, a pen and clipboard at the ready, legs crossed primly in a way that made Lucy think of Holly.
“So Lucy,” Dr. May began, “I’d like to get to know you a bit better. Do you mind if I ask you some standard intake questions? If there’s anything you don’t feel comfortable talking about right now just say “pass,” alright?”
Lucy nodded. This wasn’t her first haunting, as the saying went. “Sure.” She shrugged. “My life is an open book.”
“I suppose it is. My son is a big fan, by the way. He’s read all your books multiple times.”
Lucy frowned slightly. “Are you allowed to tell me that?”
“Why not?” Dr. May seemed genuinely surprised. “We’re getting to know each other, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know. None of my other therapists ever told me about their families.”
“Everyone is different with what they’re willing to share with others, how open they’re willing to be. You’ve been in therapy before?”
“Yes, UPRA made us all go after… everything. And then they had a mandatory program for all agents and former agents when things… came to light. I told Barnes I ought to be exempt from that one since I’m the one who wrote the book, but he just smiled and sent me to scheduling.”
“And now?”
“Now?”
“Why are you here now? Is there something in particular you want to work on?”
Lucy didn’t want to talk about the deal she’d made with Barnes this time. Maybe later, but she wasn’t sure she was going to stick with it yet. None of the previous experiences had yielded anything useful. “No, nothing in particular,” she said, looking away.
“That’s alright,” said Dr. May, still smiling comfortably. "Can I ask about your family?”
“They’re all still up North,” siad Lucy with a vague wave of her hand. “My mum and my sisters. My dad died when I was little.”
“When’s the last time you saw them?”
“Six months ago. My sister Mary had her first baby and I went up to meet him.”
“Do you have any other nieces and nephews?”
“God, I can’t even keep track anymore.” Lucy laughed. “I have so many.”
Dr. May made a note on her clipboard. “What is your relationship status?”
“Engaged,” Lucy said, waggling her left hand with the sapphire and silver ring.
“Congratulations,” Dr. May said, admiring the ring. “How long have you been together?”
“Six years,” Lucy said immediately. The anniversary of their walk when Lockwood had first kissed her had been only a few weeks ago. They’d marked the occasion with a picnic in the park.
“How long have you been engaged?”
“Um… four years,” Lucy said, with only the barest hesitation.
A note went on the clipboard. “And what’s his name?”
“Anthony Lockwood,” Lucy said, narrowing her eyes as Dr. May smiled indulgently in a way that reminded Lucy of Kipps. “I think you knew that already.”
“I may have seen it in the papers,” Dr. May allowed, “but in my experience, newspapers don’t always have the whole truth of things.”
“No shit,” Lucy scoffed.
“Quite. Any plans for the wedding? Or are you still enjoying your engagement?”
“Lockwood wants to get married in St. James’ Church because that’s where his parents got married,” Lucy said automatically. This speech had become well rehearsed over the past couple years. “And he wants to have the reception in this ballroom overlooking the Thames where DEPRAC holds all their really big fancy parties.”
“Downtown?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, nodding. “It has a nice view of the sunset.”
“Do you like fancy parties?”
“Lockwood does,” Lucy said with a half smile. “I tend to prefer a quiet evening in the back garden with a good book. Not exactly an appropriate wedding venue for the most famous agents in London, is it?”
Lucy chuckled and Dr. May smiled in response. “So plans are coming together then?”
“I guess,” Lucy said, then when Dr. May stayed silent, seeming to expect more, “To be honest, I don’t want to have to pick a venue or buy a dress or stress about any of that. I’m hoping Lockwood and Holly—she’s our friend and much more suited to wedding planning than I am—anyways, I hope they sort it out and I can just sort of hide until it’s over.”
“I’m not sure that’s how weddings really work,” Dr. May said, tilting her head.
“No, well, maybe it ought to be,” Lucy muttered and Dr. May let out a genuine laugh.
“I guess I’m just not used to all this pomp and circumstance.” Lucy sighed. “My sister got married in a tiny little church in the Cheviot Hills. It only fit about thirty people, but it was so old and lovely.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I don’t suppose we could just elope to Gretna Green, they way they always talk about in Jane Austen books,” Lucy said wistfully. “That way we could just skip straight to the fun part.”
Dr. May raised an eyebrow and Lucy felt herself blushing furiously. “I meant going on honeymoon,” she said quickly. “There’s so many places we could go. You know there’s the traditional France, Italy, Greece, but Lockwood said he would really like to go to Southeast Asia, visit Sri Lanka and Jakarta, places his parents travelled that he’s only ever seen in photos.”
“Adventurous,” Dr. May commented.
Lucy nodded. “George said he thought that Lockwood might be disappointed going there, though. That he’s probably built those places up in his mind. Plus, we don’t even know where exactly his parents went. I do think it would be nice to get married where they did.”
“Are you Catholic?” Dr. May asked.
“No.”
“You’d have to follow certain rules to be married at St. James. Is Lockwood Catholic?”
“No.” Lucy shook her head. “I mean, I think he was baptised there–I saw a photo one time. George made fun of his dress. But he doesn’t go to mass or anything.”
“Not even Christmas?”
“Well, he wakes up earlier than me so who knows, maybe he’s been sneaking off to mass without telling me.”
Dr. May’s eyebrows tilted up slightly in surprise. “Is that something you think he might do?”
Lucy coughed, and reached for the water bottle in her bag. “Sorry,” she muttered, taking a sip.
“That’s quite alright.” Dr. May waited patiently.
“What kind of rules?” Lucy asked eventually, recapping her bottle.
“Promising to raise your children Catholic. Going to premarital counselling with the priest. That sort of thing.”
“How do you know about all this? Are you Catholic?”
“I’m Irish,” Dr. May said with a half shrug.
“Kipps is half Irish. I suppose I could ask him if Lockwood is Catholic,” Lucy mused.
“Couldn’t you just ask Lockwood?”
“I could, but I don’t like to pry.”
“I gather Mr. Lockwood is quite a private person.”
Lucy nodded. “He’s so good at dealing with people and the press, I think most people don’t realise how private he really is.”
“Does it ever bother you, how secretive he is?”
“It used to. The Skull always said I liked how mysterious he was, and maybe there’s some truth to that. I liked that he was more open with me than anyone else.”
Dr. May simply nodded sympathetically.
Lucy took a breath. “After my… hiatus… during the Black Winter, I could tell he was really making an effort, trying to share more with me, and by then we’d been through so much together. We started dating officially after the fall of Fittes and he’s been as open as I think he can be since then. Though there was one time…” Lucy trailed off.
“Yes?” Dr. May prompted.
“There was one time, about two years after that, where we almost broke up. He became really secretive all of the sudden and I was in no mood to deal with it. We had just finished shutting down the last gate to the Other Side and I had to…” Lucy swallowed, looking away for a moment at the familiar sting in her eye. She kept thinking it would go away some day, but it hadn’t yet.
“Anyways,” she continued, clearing her throat, “he was purposely avoiding me and dodging my questions and I just lost it.”
“Understandable,” Dr. May murmured.
Lucy stared at her hands, her voice hushed. “We’ve never had such a big row. George and I rowed all the time, but never Lockwood. He doesn’t row with anybody and I’d never seen him so angry.”
Lucy became aware that her fingers had knotted themselves together so hard she was losing circulation. She prised them apart, trying to subtly flex and stretch them to get the blood flowing once more. She pasted on a smile and looked up, managing to almost meet the therapist’s eyes.
“It turned out he was planning some elaborate proposal,” she said, her nose scrunching up involuntarily. “I ruined the surprise, which was probably for the best.”
“Why’s that?”
“Apparently it was going to be embarrassingly public, in front of all our friends. Lockwood loves a grand gesture.” Lucy sighed. “When they found out, Holly and George both took my side and Kipps just said you’re on your own and took a holiday, which didn’t help Lockwood’s mood any.”
“What did he do?”
“He went out for a walk and we barely saw him for three days. But he apologised in the end and when he finally did propose it was much more intimate. Just the two of us on a bench by the river at sunset.”
“That sounds much nicer. You also prefer your privacy, I take it.”
Lucy nodded.
“Publishing the books must have been a big step for you,” Dr. May continued.
Lucy shrugged. “I don’t mind people knowing. I just don’t like talking about it, if that makes any sense.”
“It does. There’s a layer of distance, a shield, when it’s written down.”
“Is that why everyone wrote letters back in the day? It was easier to say what you meant when you didn’t have to say it?”
“I expect that’s quite true.”
“Maybe that’s why he was so bad at talking,” Lucy snorted.
“Who?” Dr. May asked with a frown.
“Oh, nobody,” Lucy said quickly. “Just an old friend. He’s gone now.”
“Are you referring to the skull? The one who told you about Marissa Fittes?”
Lucy gave her a sharp look. “You remind me a bit of George,” she said shortly. “He’s always been stupefyingly perceptive and overly inquisitive.”
If Lucy was hoping for any hint of sheepishness at this accusation, she was disappointed. Dr. May simply smiled at her expectantly.
“Yes, alright,” Lucy said with ill grace. “I meant the skull. I expect it would have had many things to say about Lockwood and I getting married. Even more about how long it’s taken us to get our shit together.”
“Hmm,” Dr. May pursed her lips in a considering way. “The skull challenged you on a lot of difficult topics, I think.”
“It liked to stir up trouble,” Lucy grumbled, wondering where the therapist was going with this.
“It seemed like you two had a complicated relationship.”
“It wasn’t a relationship!” Lucy exclaimed.
“Wasn’t it? Oh, not a romantic one,” she said at Lucy’s horrified expression. “That wouldn’t really have been practical, would it. But you were something to one another. It meant something to you, by the end, didn’t it?”
“I… yes, he was important to me.”
“I notice sometimes you call the skull a he…?”
“He was a he.”
“…but other times you use it. Can I ask, why is that?”
Lucy frowned, considering, trying to trace the path of memory back.
“Well,” she said slowly, “early on it was just this evil thing, you know? It was always lying and manipulating us–well, mostly me. I didn’t come to trust it until I was on my own for a bit and didn’t have anyone else.”
Lucy chewed on her lip, remembering how lonely that winter had been, how foolish she had been. Still, looking back, she didn’t think she could have done things any differently with what she’d known at the time.
“By then I’d grown a little more comfortable with having it around and even relying on it a bit,” she continued. “Then I lost it and realised how important it had become to me.”
“Even in your books though, you mostly used it. In fact you’re doing it now.”
“I suppose it’s easy to slip back into the habit.” Lucy shrugged.
“What habit?”
“The habit of dehumanising it. I wanted to keep it—him—at arm's length.”
“Why is that?”
“I just… I used him. He was a tool, like my rapier or my torch. I needed him to be just a tool because otherwise what did that make me?”
“He wasn’t just a tool, though. You cared about him, didn’t you?”
“I relied on him, but I didn’t want to. The skull kept saying I was caught between two worlds, life and death, but I didn’t want to be. Even for an agent, I was unusually drawn to death. I empathised with ghosts and walked paths that few have ever cared to tread.”
“You felt the emotions of the dead and wanted to help them,” said Dr. May kindly. “To move on. To right wrongs. I think that’s quite admirable.”
“Then why didn’t I help the skull move on?” Lucy asked bitterly. “Why didn’t I empathise with him? True, he was a rude little shit and could alternate between caustic and sweet in seconds but… he was a person. A foul, dead, detestable person, but even so. I used him, kept him locked up.”
“It’s understandable,” Dr. May said reasonably. “He was dangerous.”
“Aren’t we all,” said Lucy, starting into the middle distance, wondering what Skull would say if he were around to see her now.
“You did set him free in the end.”
“Yes, I did eventually.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I spoke to him on the Other Side,” said Lucy. “I saw him for the boy he’d once been. Then I was facing death myself and I didn’t know if I was going to come back or move on and something clicked. I didn’t see him as a thing anymore. In facing death, I found I didn’t fear it either. I’d lived a life I was proud of. I’d be able to face everyone—the skull, my old team, all the people who died while I lived—and I would be able to tell them I didn’t give up.”
“You didn’t die though.”
“No,” said Lucy ruefully, “but only because Lockwood turned up at the perfect moment, just like he always does.
“He gave you a reason to keep fighting, to stay alive.”
“Well, more that he brought a cool, ghost-defeating ray gun and distracted Marissa’s pet ghost long enough for me to escape.” Lucy smiled at the memory of Lockwood appearing in a blaze of glory, his shirt in shreds, his smile as warm and easy as though he were joining her for morning tea.
“But also, yes, I did want to keep living,” she said. “I wanted to see George and Holly and Kipps and my sisters and to have another Christmas at Portland Row, to make up for the one I had missed the year before. I wanted to have my first kiss and my first taste of champagne and watch the apple tree bloom in the spring.”
She stopped to take a breath. Dr. May waited patiently, seeming to sense there was more waiting to be said.
“When I first came to Portland row,” she said eventually, “I was just trying to survive. Lockwood was the one who showed me I wasn’t just a tool to be used up. He told me that wasn’t how it was going to be and I believed him. So yes, I wanted to live. Not for him, but because of him.”
Lucy found herself staring out the window at the blazingly blue sky, a rarity in London. How glad she was that they had both lived to see it again.
“Of course, if it hadn’t been for the skull, we both would have died up there,” she said absently.
“The skull saved you?”
“He did, in the end. I suppose he saw me the same way I saw Lockwood. He had been alone and scared for so long, wanting nothing but to escape his jar. I don’t think he’d really thought past that. We were both focused only on surviving until someone showed us a better way. I have to hope he found peace.”
“Do you think he did? Is that why he didn’t come back after he saved you?”
“I saw him one last time, actually. I volunteered to help UPRA take down the fences that Marissa had erected on the Other Side, the ones that were keeping souls trapped. The last time I went through, I found him waiting for me. He told me he was going to go through a portal, to wherever that might lead, and that he’d come to say goodbye.”
Lucy could feel the tears gathering in her eyes, but she also wanted to laugh, remembering the way the skull had rolled his eyes at her when she’d told him she would miss him.
“He told me that I had better put up a bloody great monument in his honour, and write a bunch of rude things about Lockwood and George on it. He also wanted me to leave his skull lying around in unexpected places to frighten Holly.”
“Well, it sounds like he accepted the way it all turned out, at the very least,” said Dr. May.
“Yeah,” Lucy said, nodding, her voice far away. “Yeah.”
Dr. May handed her a box of tissues. Lucy blew her nose, surreptitiously wiping her eyes. She was never normally this sentimental.
“Actually,” she said, remembering something she’d mentioned earlier, “that was the week Lockwood tried to propose for the first time.”
Dr. May raised her eyebrows. “No wonder it fizzled. Did he know?”
“No. I told him later, but not then.”
“I see,” said Dr. May, tapping her pencil against her chin. “You two don’t always tell each other what you’re feeling, do you?”
“We tell each other more than anybody else,” Lucy said, hunching her shoulders slightly.
“Have you told him you aren’t ready to get married?” Dr. May asked, as casually as though she were asking about the weather.
Lucy’s head snapped to her. “What? I never said…”
“You said…” Dr. May flipped back a page on her clipboard. “…you don’t want to pick a venue or buy a dress or stress about any of that.” She looked up at Lucy again. “None of that sounds to me like you’re eager to be married.”
“Well, so what?” Lucy demanded. “We’re only twenty two!”
“Oh, absolutely. You have all the time in the world,” Dr. May said, her face as serene as you please. “I just wondered if you’d told Lockwood how you felt.”
Lucy clenched her jaw, biting back an angry retort. “I can’t tell him,” she ground out, “He’ll think I don’t love him——that I don’t want to marry him.”
“But you do.”
“More than anything but…” Lucy swallowed hard. “He wants to get married and start a family and I don’t want to just be the replacement for what he lost. I want him to love me for who I am, not what I can do or who I remind him of. Does that make me selfish?” Lucy couldn’t help the tremble in her voice. She felt shaky and unsteady all over, like she’d just connected with an angry Visitor, rather than sitting in a brightly lit office having a fairly prosaic conversation.
“Not at all,” Dr. May said gently. “But I wonder if that’s how he sees it?”
“I… I don’t know,” Lucy whispered, “and I don’t… I don’t know how to ask.”
The therapist was quiet for a moment, allowing Lucy to gather herself together. Lucy took several steadying breaths. She uncapped her water bottle and took a sip.
Finally, Dr. May spoke again. “If you’d like, I have some worksheets that I use for premarital counselling. You fill them out separately and then compare answers with your partner. You wouldn’t believe the number of couples I see who are shocked to learn that their partner doesn’t want any children, or they want seven.”
Lucy coughed to cover the squeak that escaped her at that. She was sure Lockwood wanted kids. He was always smiling at the children playing in the park and would often stop to chat to the five year old who lived down the road, acting like they were best mates.
“My mother had seven children,” said Lucy. “She never had much time for the younger ones.”
“I take it you were one of the youngest.”
“Yeah, I was the last,” Lucy said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“So you maybe have somewhat complicated feelings about family also?”
“I… suppose. I hadn’t really thought about that.” It was Lockwood’s family that she most often thought about, Lockwood’s past that haunted Portland Row, no matter how many layers of paint they slapped over the wound.
Dr. May watched her with an inscrutable expression. “I think I will send you those worksheets. Even if you’re not ready to share with your partner, they might help you to think through what you want, if nothing else.”
Lucy nodded meekly as she made a note on her clipboard.
“Our time is almost up,” Dr. May continued, “do you mind if I ask you one more question?”
Lucy started. The time had passed so quickly! Hadn’t she said at the beginning that this was just the intake session? What the hell else did they even have to talk about after all that?
Dr. May seemed to take her silence as permission. “Why do you call him Lockwood? It seems oddly formal for someone you’ve been engaged to for four years.”
Lucy could feel a familiar blush rising on her cheeks. Other people had asked her that question several times over the years. Not her friends, who seemed to understand, but the press and people she met at events and her sister Mary had all been puzzled by it, so she had a ready answer.
“I always tell people it’s to keep my professional and personal lives separate. It’s important for an agent and especially when you work with people you’re close to.” Most had accepted it at face value, though Mary had kept teasing her for months before finally getting bored. Now she had a baby to occupy her mind, thank goodness.
Lucy drew in a breath and held it for a moment before continuing. “But the real reason… when I call him Anthony he gets this look like… like I’m the most amazing thing he’s ever seen in the whole world.”
Dr. May frowned. “Do you think… Are you worried that if you use it too much he might not look at you that way anymore?”
“You really do remind me of George,” Lucy said dryly, but she gave the question a moment of consideration. “I suppose… I suppose I might be. But mostly I just don’t want to share it with anyone else. It’s too special.”
Lucy looked down at her hands in her lap. She toyed with the sapphire ring, watching it glitter in the sunlight coming through the office window.
“You know, I’ve been thinking…” she said quietly. She took a breath. “I’ve been thinking maybe we should get married at St. James, but then just have the reception in the back garden, and maybe spend our honeymoon in the Lakes District. Less pressure, less publicity. We could rent a cabin a long way from anyone where we can just be the two of us for a little while and not worry about anything else. There’ll be time to explore the world later.”
“That sounds lovely,” said Dr. May and Lucy smiled shyly at her.
“Well, that’s all the time we have today. I’ll get those forms for you and maybe next time we can talk a bit more about what a marriage is beyond just the wedding.”
Lucy gave her a startled look, but Dr. May simply stood, that serene and knowing smile painting her lips, and Lucy scrambled to do the same.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Lucy.”
“Thanks. I mean, same.”
They shook hands.
“Same time next week?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, “same time.”