Archive of Our Own

i.

For the fourth time that month, Andrea Sachs was sitting at Emily’s kitchen counter, eating yoghurt and furiously firing off emails.

Actually, today, she was running late and the way she was eating could more accurately be described as shovelling. When Emily emerged from the bathroom, make-up crisp and perfect, she watched Andy narrowly miss her shirt (Emily’s, the panic that flashed across Andy’s eyes was genuine and warranted) with a blob of dairy and what looked, from this distance, like a raspberry. Twenty years ago, Emily would have rolled her eyes aggressively. But today she felt the corners of her lips twitch upwards as Andy wiped the splodge on the counter away with her thumb, visibly thought about eating it, and then (thankfully) grabbed a paper towel and cleaned her hands.

Emily decided to make her presence known with the click of her stilettos, and nonchalantly flicked her hair behind her shoulders with a graceful wave of her head.

“Good morning,” she said primly, still with the trace of a smirk on her face.

Andy wheeled around from the sink and lit up with her infuriatingly pretty smile that Emily had not, against her better judgement, stopped thinking about for an undisclosed period of time.

“Morning,” she said, and hovered there, with the stark marble of the kitchen island between them, and months of building (and weeks of crashing) slap bang in the middle of it.

Here was the thing: Emily wasn’t sure what this was. Ten months ago she’d made the mortifying confession over lunch that Andrea had missed her chance two decades prior to enjoy Emily’s friendship. She was aware that the admission suggested that she had been pining after Andy for years (not altogether untrue), and the sickening look of pity on her face suggested that Andy Sachs had spent the best part of twenty years completely unconscious of Emily’s existence (not altogether true).

It had escalated quickly. Pals had turned to friends - real friends, not whatever Emily had going on with any other adult woman she’d ever met. Friends had turned into meeting Emily’s children, who (devastatingly) adored her to a concerning degree, lunch at least twice a week, and, importantly, one evening catch up that lasted into the early hours of the morning and had ended with Andy’s tongue in her mouth.

So here they were - sliding perilously close to some kind of domesticity. Eating breakfast in each other’s homes. Sharing clothes. Stomach-churning stuff, really, if you thought too hard about it.

Emily rounded the marble and reached for the satin hem of the shirt, running the smooth edge of the fabric over her fingertips.

“This looks good on you,” she said. She meant it, as well. She always meant her compliments, especially for her.

“Thanks. Got it from this really hot girl, have you met?”

That time she did roll her eyes. Andy could be dreadfully twee when she wanted to be. Annoying, but embarrassingly endearing

“Very funny,” Emily muttered, and gently guided Andy’s face towards her own, so she could examine her properly. A couple of stray hairs floated aimlessly above her head. She smoothed them down with the palm of her hand before carefully wiping away an escaped eyelash from her cheek.

“There,” she said, almost to herself. “Perfect.”

She caught her gaze then, entirely by accident. Difficult to avoid, really. Her eyes were so big and brown, and when you stood this close to her you could see the flecks of green that hummed through them, glistening in the soft light of the kitchen at 5am. Emily was learning (or relearning, she supposed) that Andy Sachs didn’t do things by halves. She persevered, she went all in on everything. Lately she had begun to understand that this nauseating can-do attitude probably applied to her as well. To whatever this was.

Andy kissed her. This was something that had begun to happen to Emily more frequently than she ever would have expected when Human Resources emailed her the name of their latest offering on a tight and harried Monday morning. Andy’s mouth met hers gently but with a force that confirmed Emily’s worst suspicions and produced a not unpleasant lurching feeling in the pit of her stomach.

It was entirely possible that she was in trouble.

“Mm,” Andy voiced suddenly before pulling away. “Breakfast.”

She reached across the counter and pushed a small bowl towards her - presumably the same thing she’d just eaten herself. Yoghurt, a few berries, a scattering of some kind of nut.

“For me,” Emily said, a little dumbly.

“Yup.”

“Andrea, I haven’t eaten breakfast since my kids were tiny. And even then it was under duress.”

“Hear me out,”

“I don’t have time - ”

“It’s quick! Easy to prep. And low fat, and good for you.”

Emily narrowed her eyes at Andy, who was doing that horrible wheedling face she did when she wanted something. The unsettling part was that all she seemed to want in this scenario was for Emily to…what? Take better care of herself?

“What’s this for?”

“Nothing. You hosted me in your home, I’m saying thank you.”

Emily begrudgingly picked up a spoon and sat herself down on the nearest bar stool.

“Hosted is one word for it. And, next time bear in mind - there are far more interesting ways you can thank me.”

Andy blushed, her face going an obscenely deep shade of pink. It was not an unfamiliar sight to Emily who, at this point, had made her blush more times than she could count, but it still made her chest flutter with a small amount of pride.

“Maybe,” Andy continued, her teeth tugging at her bottom lip. “It could be a regular thing. Breakfast.”

“Why the sudden interest in my eating habits?”

“Y’know. Most important meal of the day, and all that,”

“Andy,”

“Oh. I - um, I actually don’t know the science behind it - ”

“No Andrea. Why do you want me to eat breakfast?”

She brought the spoon to her mouth as she said it, as if to emphasise that she was trying.

“I just think - I guess I thought - ”

“Say it,”

“Eating something in the morning might make you feel a little less…” she trailed off, backing down from the personal pit she was digging for herself. Emily wasn’t going to let her escape so easily.

”Say it,” she demanded, before eating a spoonful.

“A little less cranky,” Andy sighed.

“Cranky?”

She froze, and Emily held her gaze as long as she could without smiling. She was so easy to fluster.

“You think I’m cranky?” she pressed. Andy squirmed.

“I mean. Not all the time. But you were when we first met, at least around me.”

Emily suppressed a smirk. She had never been described as a particularly sunny presence, but she had to admit that cranky was a fitting adjective for the person she’d been when Andy first arrived at Runway. The funny thing was, Andy was painfully unaware that much of Emily’s bad mood was caused by the deeply confusing experience of being in her orbit, which unfortunately had been almost all the time. It had made Emily unpleasant, perhaps more so than usual. How else could she have dealt with it?

“And you think my crankiness was caused by…what? A lack of yoghurt?”

“Need I remind you of the cube of cheese diet?” Andy said, sterner than her usual tone. “Yes. I worry about you. And I think that kind of hunger may have been affecting you psychologically.”

“Yes. Well, you of all people know that I eat more than that now.”

“I do,” Andy conceded, and leant over the counter on her elbows until their faces were level, their noses almost touching. “And it makes me feel very proud of you.”

Another kiss, deep and slow this time, catching Emily off guard with her spoon mid-air. She resisted the urge to pull her closer by the collar and crumple her otherwise perfect look. She also, regrettably, heard herself make a small involuntary noise, a squeak of happiness escaping her without permission - to which Andy smiled, her lips curling into her own.

“I gotta go,” Andy whispered against her mouth.

She almost said it, then. Felt it bubble up in her throat, unbidden and not at all pleasant. Andrea smelled of coffee and raspberries and Emily’s perfume and, god, she almost said it. Had she not been about to leave, Emily might have allowed herself the luxury. But she was standing there, in clothes that actually looked chic, and Emily couldn’t bring herself to make this any more complicated than it already was.

Instead, she clamped her mouth shut and nodded tightly, before pulling herself together and acting as normally as she could. A curt nod, in lieu of a smile, more like making a deal with a corporate client rather than saying goodbye to a beautiful woman she’d utterly and completely undone not six hours ago.

“Don’t cause too many disasters today,” she said, and as Andy pulled on her jacket, she winked and blew her a kiss, which made Emily jolt – she hoped imperceptibly. It was still a little alarming, the confidence that exuded from her these days. Emily had never, in all her life, felt that comfortable in her own skin. Why else would one go into fashion if not to build up high and impenetrable walls around oneself?

“We’re still on for tonight?” Andy said at the door, and Emily would have given anything to get right back into bed with her, lie there for the rest of the day drawing shapes across the smooth skin of her back.

“Obviously,” she said instead. “6 o clock, remember. Don’t be late.”

The smile Andrea gave her would silently get her through the rest of the day, choosing between gauche handbags at Coach and wishing she was anywhere else. Anywhere Andy Sachs happened to be.

ii.

It lingered in Emily’s chest all week - the words sat at the base of her throat as if she might cough them up violently at any moment, like some kind of mangy street cat.

She didn’t much like it. Experiencing human emotion this intense often made her feel like the universe was getting one over on her. The problem was that she didn’t use the words lightly - she never had. She couldn’t even be sure that she’d said them to Frank during the five gruelling years they were married - before she’d caught him, rather predictably, sleeping with the twenty-three year old nanny while their infant son napped in the next room.

But Andy wasn’t Frank. At this point she was more of a parent to her kids than their actual father was, and Emily was…well, very fond of her for it. Andy texted her every few hours to see how her day was going. Andy always split fries with her without having to be asked. Andy grumbled about getting up most mornings like a hormone-riddled teenager, and still Emily would choose the whole rigmarole of getting her out of bed over the empty space that would otherwise be there.

She watched as Andy lifted one poor choice after another from the racks of Chanel (not entirely wrong, of course Chanel was not often wrong, but wrong for Andrea).

“So I said that there was a real push for sustainability in fashion and that a piece on recycled wardrobes would give us a chance to focus on that, and do you know what Miranda said?”

“A scathing comment about your clothes, I assume?”

“Rude, no. She said we can’t all be as climate-conscious as you Andréa and looked me up and down in that way she has.”

“So, a scathing comment about your clothes.” Emily said, holding up a cropped blazer to Andy’s torso.

“Ooh I love this,”

“Obviously,” Emily said, and suppressed a smile. For all she had protested she knew nothing about fashion when they first met, Andy was never anything but excitable when they went shopping. Emily had always maintained that she only needed direction.

“Were you wearing that hideous blue sweater to work again? I think you ought to recycle that as a washcloth or something.”

Andy took the blazer from her and hooked the hanger onto her arm along with the rest of Emily’s selections. She smirked at her with that look she had, as if Emily’s Englishness was seeping through more than usual and as if she quite liked it.

It made Emily’s hands clammy.

“That sweater is symbolic,”

“Of the early 2000s, Andrea. Have some self-respect.”

“Yeah, well. The decades keep coming back around.”

“Not that fast.”

In the fitting rooms they settled into their usual routine. This largely consisted of Andy trying on look after carefully curated look and emerging each time with the awkward and slightly embarrassed expression of someone who wasn’t quite sure they’d got something right, while Emily sipped champagne and made helpful and constructive suggestions. This time Andy poked her head out from behind the curtain, looking a little flustered and very uncomfortable.

“I don’t know how I feel about it,” she said, tugging something at the back of her neck.

“Well show me, then,”

“They don’t go together? I think?”

“Do you not trust my vision, Andrea?”

“Of course I do. I just look a little…”

“A little…?

“Frumpy.”

“You look frumpy?”

“Yeah, frumpy. Like, it’s not sitting right. On my body.”

Emily gestured to her in the exasperated manner she often used around Andy, who, in Emily’s defence, always used whole chapters where she could have used three words. Her surgically precise copywriting skills didn’t seem to apply to all aspects of her life, at least not verbally.

“Come out, then,”

“I already did that, thank you. It went well.”

Emily’s eyes rolled back into her head somewhat involuntarily, and pulled a laugh from Andrea that set something whirring in her stomach. God, she was so pathetic. Of course it was Andy. Of course she fell for the idiot who couldn’t tell Gaultier from Gabbana, or indeed her arse from her elbow most of the time.

Of course it was Andy, with her laugh smooth as bloody honey and her stupid goofy grin as wide as a double decker bus. The sound of it literally sent Emily’s body into motion, parts of herself she had refused to feel in years suddenly grinding into gear at the hint of a smile or any sign of basic affection. It was highly embarrassing.

Andy let the curtain drop and revealed myriad mistakes on the other side of it. She was right, she did look frumpy. Fixable though. Of course, fixable - Andy was Andy, she was gorgeous in a way that actually made her difficult to look at sometimes.

“Oh Christ,” Emily muttered, and put down her champagne flute with a carefully controlled click.

“You need to learn how to style yourself, come here.”

Emily swept her back into the changing room with such force that Andy made some kind of strangled noise followed by a yelp, which should have been deeply unattractive but instead only made the fluttering in Emily’s abdomen flutter in a much more pronounced way. She busied herself with the accessories, as Andy stood watching her work in the mirror with an expression that could only be described as impressed. As was her default position, Emily avoided making eye contact with her for as long as was humanly possible, because if she got sucked into those bloody big doe eyes it would all be over for her. Emily had a feeling, somewhere deep inside her body – and backed up by previous experience of having to take herself off into the supply cupboard at Runway to regain some composure every time Andy gazed up at her from the desk – that if she looked at her, in the eye, for too long it would make her crumble. She was fairly certain sometimes that, if Andrea just said the word, she would do terrible things, criminal activity even, just to earn a smile in return.

“You just need some coordination, Andy, it’s not that difficult. There.”

She pulled back to examine her handiwork, and found it to be perfect.

Obviously.

She tugged at the hem of the jacket to straighten it out, and felt a gentle puff of air hit her forehead.

“Hi,”

“Hello. You’re awfully close to me,” Emily muttered, and picked an imaginary speck of dust from the cuffs to delay the inevitable.

As predicted, Andy’s head dipped down towards hers. And, as predicted, Emily’s chin raised on instinct, bringing their eyes level. And, as predicted, Emily felt the ground shift beneath her.

“Kinda did that one to yourself, Em.”

“Oh. My god, Andrea - did you dress poorly to get me into a confined space with you?”

“I did not,”

“You did, you knew I couldn’t turn a blind eye to your appalling fashion sense and you used it against me.”

“I didn’t. Dressed poorly all on my own. But I’m not mad about the results.”

“Mhmm.”

Emily let her hands settle on Andy’s waist, slowly, little by little, so as not to make it obvious that it was deliberate.

“I also,” Andy said, her voice low now, so close that Emily could feel the breath between them. It was warm. It was comfortable, standing here with haute couture and Andy Sach’s surprisingly toned body beneath her fingertips. “I also wanted to ask you something.”

“What?”

Andy inhaled, in that way she did when she was about to start rattling off about something that could, again, be completed with a single carefully constructed sentence.

“If I could time it right, and if you could take the time off which I know is difficult and you have the kids, and Frank is Frank - ”

“Out with it, Andy,”

“I’m getting there,”

“Get there faster,”

“Would you come to Paris with me?”

“Oh,”

“What?”

“That’s - that’s not - um, what I thought you were going to say.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Not that, evidently.”

“So. Paris?”

“Paris. Is this a thing? Are you – are you doing a thing?”

“What thing?”

“A thing where you – you know – where you feel bad about Paris, which I’ve told you not to feel bad about,”

“Emily,”

“Many times,”

“Emily – ”

“I mean it was twenty years ago, for Christ’s sake, and, never repeat this to anyone else, but I have been known, in my time, to act somewhat unreasonably – ”

“I’m going to Paris. For fashion week. And I want you to come with me.”

Emily stared at her for a moment.

Bollocks, she thought.

Because she was going to say yes. Of course she was going to say yes, because Andy was staring back at her with those ridiculous eyes, and a pleading look on her face. And more than anything else, she wanted to say yes, which was, in and of itself, unusual, because Emily Charlton didn’t allow herself to want anything. She hadn’t for a long time.

But Andy was staring at her. And Andy cared about her. And Emily was only really starting to understand how to process that, twenty-something years overdue.

“You’ll be working, won’t you?”

“Not much. I have a couple of profiles and the rest of the work is just shows and fancy lunches. Which you can come to. If you want.”

If she wanted. Of course she wanted. She wanted, she wanted Paris. She wanted Montmarte, she wanted a river cruise on the bloody Seine, she wanted Andy, looking at her like this with a stained glass window from the Notre-Dame behind her.

“I have been to Paris before, you know,” she said instead, crawling back into herself in her usual way. “I’m English, it’s the equivalent of you hopping across to Atlantic City for the weekend. Only nicer.”

Andy laughed then. Again, it twisted something in her throat. Something jumped up from her chest and stuck there, pushing its way to the surface.

But she couldn’t say it, not now.

Of all the times to tell someone that, the worst choice was probably when they’d just offered to whisk you away on a swanky holiday. No, it had to mean something. It had to appear to mean something, something deeper than thank you for taking me to Paris.

She would get round to it, she was sure. She would.

She would.

“Have you been during fashion week?”

“I’m a fashion executive,”

“At Coach,”

“And Dior. Before, I mean.”

“I know.”

“And life at Runway didn’t just stop, after you. Fashion Week happens every year.”

“And you’ve been.”

Emily nodded firmly. As firmly as she could. She did go. Once, and it was disastrous, and she was almost certain it kickstarted Miranda’s campaign to boot her out, but yes. She’d been.

“But you haven’t been with me,” Andy said, softly. As if it meant something.

“No.”

“So?”

That stare. In this fitting room. In this light. With Chanel hugging her body and Emily gripping on tight. She opened her mouth to say yes, but the first thing that came out was:

“Oh bollocks, the kids.”

“The kids - ”

“Yes, the kids, my kids Andrea.”

“Yes, your kids. Bring them. You know I love them, I have no issues.”

“We’ll be at shows, I can’t bring my children to fashion shows.”

“You have a nanny, bring the nanny.”

Emily thought, for a beat, about them all. In Paris. Together. She thought of Bronwyn eating croissants and Roark using the little Polaroid she bought him for his last birthday and she thought of Andy, there, with them. Telling them not to cross the street by themselves because the French drive like maniacs. Holding Bronwyn’s hand while they wander around the Louvre.

She shoved the thought down, somewhere deep where she wouldn’t find it again readily, at least not by accident. Pull it together, Charlton.

“No, fuck that,” she said, as blithely as she could possibly manage. “They’re not old enough to appreciate Paris. They’ll only want to go to Disneyland.”

Andrea grinned at her in a rare, subdued way. As if she was trying to restrain herself from feeling too much happiness all at once. It was, regrettably, the most charming she’d ever looked in Emily’s presence. And that was not an easy feat - Andy was always the most charming person in every room.

“Just us, then.”

“Yes. Just us.”

Andy’s eyes twinkled. They actually twinkled, in a way that Emily had never seen in real life. And before she could dwell for too long on just how horribly gooey that made her feel, Andy was taking her in her arms and holding her. Here. In a changing room at Chanel. And Christ, Emily actually felt her body melt into it, like she’d never been held in her life. She had to stop it somehow, it was all a bit much. She felt a defense mechanism sparking to life somewhere in the back of her head, her fight or flight struggling to choose between the two. She mumbled into Andy’s hair:

“And Miranda, I suppose.”

What an arse, she thought.

But it was okay. Because Andy laughed. She always laughed, aware of Emily’s many barriers and short-comings, defenses and fucking battlements built as high as she could get them. And she wanted her anyway.

So it was okay.

iii.

“Mummy, it’s not fair, Roark had it for ages before I did.”

“Bronwyn, bunny, you have to share with your brother. What happened to the schedule I made for you?”

“Daddy lost it,” Bronwyn’s weird little Anglo-American accent whispered into the phone conspiratorially, and Emily rolled her eyes at her daughter’s cherubim face which filled the whole six inch screen. Terrifyingly, Bronwyn’s own little blue eyes did the same. Exactly the same. She silently thanked God she hadn’t become her own mother quite so quickly.

“Of course he did,” she muttered, with a level of disdain that she normally kept out of the children’s earshot when discussing their father. “Put your brother on, then.”

Roark’s face, equally angelic, took his sister’s place. God, she missed them.

“Roark, sweetheart, you have to share with your sister. You can have the switch for ten more minutes and then it’s Wyn’s turn.”

“But Mummy – ”

“Not another word, young man. It’s almost your bedtime anyway. Look at you, you’re not even in your pyjamas.”

Roark smiled goofily, and a little worryingly, at the screen.

“We don’t have bedtime at Daddy’s. He says Saturday doesn’t need bedtime.”

Andy, who had been washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen down, snorted – Emily assumed involuntarily – and immediately froze, catching her eye with a sheepish look. The rules were the rules, and Emily’s rule was that neither of them made any comments about Frank and his sub-par parenting while Bronwyn and Roark could hear. Emily herself had to admit that this rule was becoming particularly hard not to break. His parenting was truly on the floor at present. Below the floor. Almost six-feet under the floor. She couldn’t blame Andy, really.

“Right, well Mummy will be having a word with Daddy about that later.”

“Can we talk to Andy?”

Bronwyn wrestled the phone from her brother’s tiny grip, during which a small one-act play of a sibling argument took place between them, and resolved itself with the screen now being filled with one side of each of their faces, squashed together.

“How do you even know if Andy’s here?

“Because she’s always there, Mummy,” Roark said, as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. Andy was always there.

“She is not always here. That’s a gross exaggeration, darling.”

“What’s a gross exasperation?”

“It means. Oh bl - blooming hell, it means you’re telling fibs, Roark. Or just that you’re wrong about something.”

She said it with a slight, unavoidable, smile on her lips, so her children – her sweet, lovely, precocious, very-far-away-from-her children – would know she wasn’t really cross with them at all. Andy was watching, she could see out of the corner of her eyes, and was smiling giddily.

“But she is there, isn’t she Mummy? I could hear something while you were talking.”

Andy paused, waiting for permission. Emily sighed and rolled her eyes, just as Bronwyn had done, and Andy, correctly, took that as her cue.

“Yes,” she called out from the counter. “Hi guys.”

“Andy!”

Emily held out the phone for Andy, who walked across the kitchen to where she was sitting, her feet curled underneath herself on the sofa. She sat beside her on the arm, with Emily’s head just out of the frame, and began to talk to them in a way that Emily had begun to notice recently.

Andrea was good with children. Andrea was so good with children, specifically her children, that it did something to Emily’s insides. Listening to her talk to them, like it was the most natural thing in the world, made something in her squirm. Not an uncomfortable squirm, not even a confused squirm. The squirm was pleasant, the squirm was affectionate. The squirm was also a little bit sad.

Because (and this really was a thought she tried not to examine too precisely) what would her life have been like if she had done all this with Andy? What pain could she have spared her children if Andy had been there from the beginning? If Andy had held them in hospital, and given them their first baths, and put them to bed each night, the duties of parenting shared – truly shared – with a person who cared about them both as much as she did.

Yes. Not a thought she wanted to sit with for too long. It wouldn’t change anything.

“You guys, is the switch really that important?”

“Yes because,” Bronwyn chattered, breathless from excitement as she normally was when talking to her. “We justgot a new game, and Roark is going to finish all the levels before I get to play it.”

“You know you can play it again though, right Wyn? Like, the game will still be there when he’s done with it.”

“It’s not the same, Andy,” and Bronwyn said this with such grave sincerity, that Emily and Andy both found themselves chuckling at her in tandem.

“Right, I’m sorry.”

They continued to chatter, voices overlapping, and Emily, having thought about the what-ifs for far more than her daily allotted time, foolishly allowed her mind to wander, instead, to Andy’s kids – chilling in a fertility clinic somewhere across New York – and wondered if she’d ever get to meet them. The thought was a new thought, and as soon as the thought unravelled itself in her head, she brushed it away, into the mental cupboard of things we really shouldn’t think about but might allow when we’re struggling to sleep, and it really ought to be the last resort.

“Hey, Rocky, I heard the recital went really well, your mom said you were amazing,” Andy pivoted, acknowledging, without Emily’s prompting, that the video game was taking up too much of their head space this late in the evening.

Rocky was not a nickname Emily had approved. It was so violently American that she really ought to have hated it, but coming from Andy it wasn’t quite so offensive.

Roark grinned his little gappy grin, and took the phone off to the corner of the room to show Andy his new clarinet reed, and Andy, dutifully, nodded with enthusiasm as she did every time Roark told her any new information about clarinets.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there, buddy, but I promise I’ll come to the next one.”

“That’s okay, Mummy said she sent you a video,” Roarke said, and something in his voice made Emily soften, because he was fine. Actually fine. He knew, implicitly, as she did, that when Andy Sachs promised something, there was no chance it would be forgotten. She would be there with Emily next term, watching him squeak out a wind composition, beaming and filming the whole thing. His father would probably be at a hockey game.

“She did, and you aced it. Alright, you guys. I’m gonna give you back to your mom. But I’ll see you both soon, okay?”

They shouted their goodbyes to Andy as she handed the phone back to their mother and squashed their faces together again.

“Alright my darlings, goodnight. I love you so much, I’ll see you on Monday. Wyn, baby, will you give the phone to Daddy for a minute?”

She felt Andy brace herself beside her, physically tensing up a little and, before heading back to the kitchen, she gave Emily’s hand a squeeze.

“What?”

Frank’s voice did different things to Emily than Andy’s. Frank’s voice set her teeth on edge, it made all the tendons in her fingers clench and lock, muscle memory from a marriage that, if it weren’t for the children, she would view as the most costly and foolish decision of her life.

“Frank, can you maybe muster up the energy to do a smidge, a morsel, of parenting, and get them into bed in the next thirty minutes.”

“Jeez,” he groaned into the phone, and Emily wished, for a brief burning moment, that she could reach through the screen and scratch his eyes out. “Lighten up, Emily. What kids have a bedtime on a Saturday?”

“Your kids, Frank, your kids have a bedtime routine every day of the week that should have begun forty minutes ago.”

“Yeah, whatever. See you Monday.”

“Frank, don’t - ”

He was gone, and the kids were gone, and, as if by magic, Andy was standing looking at her with two glasses of wine in hand and an expression that made Emily want to cry.

“Oh god,” Emily crumpled into the corner, as far as she could get herself into the crevice between the sofa and the cushions, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

“I actually think if I died tomorrow, you would have to apply for custody.”

“Em,”

“I’m putting it in my will, Andrea.”

“Sure, sweetie.”

Andy sat in the opposite corner, took Emily’s hand away from her face, and gently, ever so gently, pulled her over. Emily settled into her chest, and squeezed the bridge of her nose, hoping it would curtail the oncoming migraine that she could feel behind her eyes.

“It honestly feels less like co-parenting and more like having your kids plucked into a different dimension where you have absolutely no control over them.”

“I know, hon.”

“God, I’m just so tired Andy.”

“I know, Em. You need a break.”

“No I’m just. I mean, I’m tired. I’m tired of having to do it all by myself.”

Andy kissed her forehead, her lips pressing gently along her hairline. Emily felt her exhale, and pull her closer, and she would have liked to stay there forever.

“You’re not doing it by yourself.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I have an ex-husband with the emotional capacity of a thimble.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” Andy ran her fingers down the length of Emily’s arms, up and down so gently that it was dangerously close to sending her to sleep. “You have me though.”

You have me. Andy did school pick-ups, and bedtimes, and maths homework (badly). Just last week Bronwyn had asked a question about babies that Emily had struggled to answer, while Andy handled it, much to everyone’s surprise, very smoothly. She pushed herself up, hovering over her guiltily.

“I — ”

“I mean, maybe I was being a little presumptuous -”

“It’s not that,”

“It’s okay, you don’t need to explain”

“No, I do, I just — I need a minute.”

Andy dutifully went quiet and held her gaze, which Emily gracefully avoided. Sometimes she was so kind it actually hurt a little bit. Sometimes she treated Emily with so much care - Emily, who hadn’t, that she could recall, received a word of genuine affection in more years than she could count — that she winced at it when it came, even from Andy’s lips.

“I have always been alone.”

Forty and freshly divorced, juggling a co-parenting schedule with a literal thumb of a man.

Thirty-five and rocking a screaming baby to sleep in the middle of the night, the thumb in question soundly asleep at the other end of the corridor.

Thirty-one and practicing her French pronunciation for hours after work just to seem credible at Dior.

Twenty-one and drowning in a new country and a new job that was kicking her arse, starving herself just to feel like she belonged.

“It’s not very easy for me, Andy,” she said, and kept her voice very level to make sure she kept everything tightly locked inside. “I’m having to sort of rewrite myself. To accept help.”

Andy nodded and looked at her with a kind of sadness that was difficult to ignore.

“I’m glad that you’re trying, though,” was all she said, and the weight of it plucked at something in Emily’s ribs, and the backs of her eyes prickled, an amber warning that if she didn’t come up with a really good distraction soon, she would start sobbing uncontrollably on Andy’s chest.

She surged forwards without thinking, beyond the knowledge that being as close to Andy as she could physically get would make her feel better, even if only for a while.Their lips met and Andy moaned, and Emily knew with a tug in her stomach that the wine would go undrunk, the living room untidied, and she wouldn’t have to think too closely about how safe she felt.

How Andy then, at twenty-two, and Andy now, pressing impatient hands to the insides of her thighs, were the only two people who had ever made her feel held.

Not alone.

iv.

“Your parents, Andy,”

“Yes, Em, my parents.”

“Your mother and father?”

“That’s them.”

“You want me to meet your parents?”

Andy sighed and lowered her paint roller to look at Emily with a gently exasperated expression.

She had informed the children, in her usual no-nonsense tone, that Santa and his elves did not redecorate bedrooms. Bronwyn wanted pastel green because it was her favourite and it complimented her eyes. Roark wanted red because it was the colour of a race car.

She had also reminded Andy, three separate times before the paint was chosen and the trays and rollers purchased and the rooms cleared and taped up, that experience in an activity did not necessarily translate to skill.

But Andy enjoyed DIY, and didn’t know how to say no to them and as a result, was now standing in Roark’s empty bedroom, wearing her oversized Northwestern shirt, and was covered practically head to toe in red paint.

“No, see you’re making it into a thing and it’s really not a thing.”

“It’s meeting your parents, Andrea.”

“No. They’re in town for the weekend, they’re taking me out to dinner, they asked if I was bringing anyone, I’m taking you.”

“Oh I’m sorry, have we been introduced before?” Emily questioned dryly. Andy did not catch on.

“No?”

“Then I’m fairly certain this qualifies as meeting your parents.”

Andy turned back to the wall and began finishing the section she’d been half way through. She was, in fairness, better at painting walls than Emily had expected, though somehow messier than she had prepared herself and her pristine furniture for.

“I don’t want you to freak out about it —

“I’m not freaking out — ”

“A little,”

“Not at all. It is a thing, though.”

“Does it have to be?”

“Andy,” Emily exhaled and sat on the edge of Roark’s sheet-covered bed. “You practically live in my house, you’re a care-giver to my children, you’re decorating their bedrooms for Christ’s sake — it’s a bit of a thing. I would just prefer that we call it what it is.”

“Okay. Okay, fine. Yes, I would like you to meet my parents.”

“Right.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

A beat, in which Andy turned around and stretched up to reach the seam between the wall and the ceiling, a streak of paint following behind. Another beat, in which Emily allowed herself to fully realise the magnitude of the thing. A third, in which her brain began to quietly initiate a meltdown procedure and fire rapid stress messages out to the rest of her body.

“Oh god, they’re going to hate me aren’t they?”

Almost immediately, which Emily tried not to notice too much, Andy had carefully placed the roller down and was at her side.

“They’re going to love you,”

“They will not,”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

Emily could rattle off a list of reasons for why people didn’t like her, not least peoples’ parents and extended family. Frank’s had always thought she was uptight — his mother had once called her cold and unfeeling, which she ordinarily wouldn’t have disagreed with, except she had chosen to say it when Emily was attempting (and failing) to feed her newborn child, provided as an explanation as to why her infant daughter was screaming so loudly.

She was not, at least knowingly, kind to people.

She could be snappy, and demanding, and waspish. She could be all those things with Andy, who was never anything except patient and open with her in return.

“You said they always hated that you went back to Runway,”

“You don’t work at Runway.”

“Yes, but I’m one of the reasons you left.”

“You know that’s not true.”

It must have been a little bit true, even if Andy would never admit it. Emily hadn’t even been told, not until after it had officially gone through Human Resources. Miranda had simply returned from Paris and the desk opposite hers remained empty. Andy didn’t call her, not until the clothes, by which time she’d already been replaced. Why would she have called her? She didn’t owe Emily anything. And yet, Roy arrived at her apartment with a railing full of high fashion that still smelled like her, the scent of her cheap perfume quarantined within the garment bags.

“My parents worry. But they don’t hate anything. And they won’t hate you.”

She thought of Andy, and her Midwestern upbringing, yellow cornfields and state fairs, and compared it to her own — grey, a little isolated, the psychological warfare of an all-girls boarding school. Realistically, it was her parents who would dislike Andy. With her deeply American forthrightness and her smile — her smile. Emily maintained that she had never seen anyone smile as wide as that, so wide it would send most English people into a coma. Come to think of it, she now doubted whether her mother had ever smiled, or whether her father had ever so much as brightened at anything beyond a pleasing result at a cricket match.

Andy would be beyond them. Her children already were.

So Emily was careful. She chose an outfit (after several days of deliberation) that made her look elegant and pleasant and not at all sharp. She could not imagine that Andy’s parents were in any way sharp.

She began practicing responses to the expected questions in the bathroom mirror when Andy wasn’t there, or when she was asleep. What is it that you do followed promptly by and what exactly is a Senior Fashion Executive. Emily would explain it in a way a high school history teacher and a dental nurse from Ohio would understand, and she would explain it without a hint of her usual condescension that she reserved, as armour, for people outside of her world because they were smart people and they would detect it. One had to be smart to produce a daughter like Andy, with her insightful questions and her precise journalistic conversational athleticism.

She considered lying about how they met, sensing that any mention of Andy’s first ordeal at Runway would send the evening into freefall, but of course, Andy would get there first. Andy, who loved Runway more than she would ever admit, because it gave her a chance to prove herself, this girl from Ohio always at the top of her class who had never once felt out of her depth. And because it brought her all manner of luxuries she’d never even known she cared about, and would not admit to caring about if pressed. But most of all because it brought her Emily.

And they would not know, because Andy would not let them, how appallingly Emily had treated her in those first months.

And it would all be absolutely fine.

***

Somewhere between the main course and the dessert menus, Andy leant over to her and said, in a whisper that her mother caught and her father missed in his small talk with the waiter, “Are you gonna be okay if I run to the bathroom?”

And Emily said, in a voice that she had rehearsed for eight days and that maintained her usual level of fond snark and enough reassurance that Andy believed her: “yes, Andy, I think I will manage.”

She left as the menus arrived, and Emily gave the list an arbitrary scan with her eyes, cool and controlled, before landing on the black coffee she would inevitably order and the pecan pie Andy would almost certainly convince her to split.

When she looked up, Andy’s mother was watching her with a question in her mouth and an excitement in her eyes that made Emily want to run.

“So you two are serious, huh?”

“Serious,” Emily said, neither a question nor an answer.

“You’ll have to forgive my wife,” Richard chuckled. “Andy hasn’t introduced us to anyone since an extremely disappointing choice of boyfriend in college.”

“I resigned myself to her singleness years ago,” Lorraine said, over her wine glass with a roll of the eyes. “She never even has people to mention, let alone bring to dinner.”

“Yes,” Emily said, unsure of where the conversation was headed and feeling very unstable because of it. She was half-convinced she was about to get a run-down of Andy’s full list of exes with a droll review of each. But Lorraine lowered her glass and Richard took off his glasses and all she could see in their faces was the same kindness that seemed to emanate from their daughter like sunlight.

“I suppose,” she continued, “that’s what she chose, isn’t it? The moving, the job. All of it.”

“But now there’s you.”

She said it pointedly, but in a way that was final. Not a probe, not nosiness, just a simple fact. Andy Sachs had been on the run for twenty years, chasing stories and getting down to the meat of every issue she came into contact with, and now there was Emily. With a whole life pinned down in one place, waiting for her.

“We’re not –” she hesitated.

We’re not. Because they weren’t. They were balancing over the edge of something, always, half-committed and yet never enough to say it out loud.

“I don’t know,” she pressed on, and formed the words very carefully in her mouth. “I’m not sure what Andy said. But we’re just seeing how it goes.”

She noticed, as she set her own glass down, with the condensation wet against her hand and the cold chill of the wine seeping into her fingers, that it was possibly the least sure she had ever sounded about anything. After all, it was her who had insisted this was important. Her, who had made sure Andy acknowledged this for the milestone it was. Her, who asked her every night, with a tenderness she had never shown to another living adult, to stay longer, to be there when she woke up.

“Honey,’ Lorraine said gently, and now she touched Emily’s hand across the table and smiled at her with a face that looked so much like Andy’s it knocked all the wind out of her. She tried not to flinch at the contact. “You wouldn’t be here with us if that were true.”

“We –”

“All due respect, Emily,” Richard cut in politely, “I have never – and I really do mean never – seen Andy look at anyone the way she’s been eyeing you tonight. Her sister doesn’t even look at our son-in-law like that, and they’ve been blissfully married for ten years. They’re sickeningly in love.”

“It’s – it’s very complicated. The circumstances are frankly appalling. I have two children and a pathological narcissist for an ex-husband. I won’t involve Andy in all that.”

“She’s already involved,” Lorraine said gently.

In fairness, Andy had just spent an hour gushing about the kids as if she had birthed them herself, recounting to both her parents, in minute detail, the key points of Bronwyn’s field hockey match the previous weekend. Andy had quietly, and without fanfare, involved herself so deeply in Emily’s life without either of them noticing, that it was now impossible to imagine a daily routine without her.

She decided not to push it. Continuing this conversation would mean confronting the nature of the thing that sat between them. This softness that had worked its way into their relationship and was ever present in every touch, every word, every brush of lips against skin, that told Emily that this was something important. That Andy was more to her than whatever she was allowing her to be.

“Like I said, it’s very complicated.”

She delivered it with a politeness that also said with a complete and desperate sincerity if we don’t stop talking about this soon I am going to implode.

The sentiment was noted and respectfully complied with.

“Can I ask you a question?” Richard said, and he leant forward with the same look on his face that Andy got when she was stuck on the syntax of a line.

“Of course,” Emily replied, with a gentle reminder of her impending implosion lacing her voice.

“This Runway job. Is she happy? I know it’s high profile and all, but it’s so different from the stuff she was writing before, and I – forgive me if this involves you at all, but – I didn’t like what that place did to her the last time.”

“She is,” she said confidently, without pausing to think. She knew the answer to this one. “Runway is not for the faint of heart, but Andy is not faint-hearted. And she wasn’t faint-hearted when I first met her, but you’re right. It did what Runway always does, what Runway did to me, which was chew her up and spit her out.”

Emily felt the tight clipping of her words on her tongue and knew she was back on form, crisis from the earlier line of questioning averted.

“It cost her something then. It swallowed her and totally demolished any room for anything else, and that’s what it did to me for almost ten years before Miranda showed me the exit with a handsome severance package and a top spot at Dior, but no thanks for the back-breaking effort I’d given her for a decade.”

“It costs her less now because she knows who she is and what she wants. And she’s surrounded herself with people who know that what she does, while it might not seem like it on the surface, is just as worthy as reporting on a political crisis somewhere three time zones away. Not more important, not as urgent, but worthy. She sees the worth in it now.”

She honed in on the consonants to nail down her point, and felt that she could have gone on for far longer about the things that made Andy happy. The thought hit her suddenly and made her squirm in a sort of reluctant, comfortable way. Lorraine was having to physically force down a smile. Emily could see the muscles in her upper lip straining to stay flat, to not follow the upward lift they so desperately needed. Richard nodded, as if the answer was more satisfying than expected.

“Good,” he said. “That answers that. Lorraine, they have panna cotta. I’m going to have the panna cotta.”

Emily nodded once. Firm, like a full stop at the end of her sentence. She lowered her menu and sipped her wine and watched for the familiar sweep of dark hair. It did not come, because apparently Andy had chosen to go to the loo in a different hemisphere.

“You know, I was engaged when I first met Richard,” Lorraine said, sweeping her eyes over the dessert list but not really looking.

“Lorraine,”

“What? I’m making small talk Richard, it’s a fun fact about me. Not many people know that.”

“Small talk,” Emily huffed. Americans had a terrible grasp of the concept. Small talk was weather and brief job descriptions, not being made to learn someone’s romantic history against your will.

“He was my high school boyfriend, we got engaged right after senior prom,” Lorraine ploughed on. She was undeterred by Emily’s expression (her best and most practiced glare).

“And then he went out of state for college. And, of course, we did the pretending for about a year. Calling each other once a week on the dorm room phones, writing letters. Long distance wasn’t like it is now, we didn’t have the FaceTime like you kids — ”

“I’m forty-four, I remember dial-up internet for God’s sake.”

“And I remember before the internet, Emily.”

Richard laughed, dryly, and both women shot him a look that made him grimace and clear his throat.

“Anyway, I switched some classes halfway through the year and Richard was in my Intro to Psychology, with his musty sweaters and his glasses. I was a goner. It caused a whole thing, my mother was inconsolable, but I gave the ring back.”

Emily shifted slightly, and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

“Mrs Sachs — ”

“Listen to me Emily,” Lorraine leant forward at a speed that made Emily flinch a little. Andy was so like her, in her intensity, the way she narrowed her eyes when she was at the centre of something. “Because we’ve got about forty seconds before my daughter finishes reading whatever New York Times article she opened in the line for the bathroom.”

Unfortunately, Emily knew exactly which one it was. Andy had been saving it for a spare moment to read in full. That’s exactly where she will have been, Emily thought and held back an audible tut. Reading The Zombification of America and leaving her out here fighting for her life.

“The circumstances are bad,”

“Appalling,”

“Right. Appalling. They always are just when you don’t want them to be. You’re right, you have two beautiful kids and a pig of an ex. The second of those things might go away someday, but the first won’t. They’re not circumstances, they’re your life. And I don’t think Andy’s too bothered about that.”

“I’m not saying I know exactly what’s going to happen if you let her in. But I do know this. For twenty years I never had reason to believe she’d settle down. She was in a new job every six months, usually in another country, she barely ever had time to talk. Then she reconnects with you and suddenly I can get her on the phone whenever I want. Sure, she’s at the office most of the time, but we can keep track of where she is now. You dropped a whole ready-made life into her lap, and from where I’m sitting it looks a lot like she wants it.”

Emily thought about Andy waiting up with Roark after a nightmare. Letting Bronwyn practice braiding on her hair. The pasta dish she learned to cook in Sicily that she broke out when Emily had a long day. The vigour with which she cleaned the house when Emily worked late, just so she’d have nothing to fret over when she came home.

“I’d take her word for it,” Richard said, and smiled at her in such a simple way that Emily felt something inside her break loose. “She’s usually right about these things.”

Lorraine was already back to the dessert menu, the conversation over before Emily could respond, and, right on cue, Andy appeared from the back of the restaurant. Lorraine, with her back to Andy and no confirmation that she was there at all besides the complete knowledge of her daughter’s habits, said in the easiest voice in the world:

“Panna cotta sounds good, honey. It all sounds good, I can’t decide.”

Andy eased back into her chair and placed her hand on Emily’s thigh under the table. The squeeze she delivered was only light but at this point enough to set Emily on fire, accompanied by her usual smile, soft and relaxed.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes. No one died, I’d say it was a success,” Emily said tightly.

“Great. Splitting the pecan pie?”

***

After stilted hugs and handshakes and nice to meet yous and pleasantries, Andy kissed her parents goodbye and put them into a cab while Emily ordered a car. Lorraine waved at them as they left and gave Emily a look which Andy thankfully didn’t notice.

She slid her hand into Emily’s as they waited, and squeezed gently. Emily thought about the lecture she’d been given and tried very hard not to turn around. She tried not to think about the fact that they would now go home, to Emily’s house where Andy might as well live, and that they would settle into the space they had made for themselves when the children weren’t there. Still domestic, Andy running last minute edits on her team’s features while Emily folded laundry. Then tomorrow, when the children came back from their father’s, they would eat together and help them with their homework and put them to bed, and it would all be done as a unit of four.

As if they had always been that way.

She was aware now that Andy was trying to get her attention, saying something about the evening going well, but all she could think about was Richard, 500 miles away, worrying about his daughter and what her office was doing to her.

“I was really awful to you,” she said, so quiet Andy was only just able to hear over the traffic.

“You were?”

“Really awful,”

“When?”

“You know when.”

Andy paused and cocked her head, a crease between her brows as she ran back through the evening, the past week, twenty years ago.

“Oh,” she said, and Emily’s stomach dropped at the sound, because Andy knew exactly what she meant. “Oh, god, did my parents say something to you?”

“What?”

“Y’know, I saw my dad once — one time — in that whole year I worked for Runway and he never stops bringing it up,”

“Andy,”

“He’s like obsessed with the fact that my boss derailed one dinner, and that wasn’t even anything to do with you — ”

“They didn’t say anything,” Emily cut in, as gently as she could.

“Oh.”

“I was just,” she continued, and kept her gaze firmly on the space in front of her, where her breath was hitting the cold air in puffs of smoke. “I was horrible to you. Relentlessly horrible. And I really didn’t have any reason to be.”

“Hm,” Andy said. Emily noticed the smirk on her face and pursed her lips before Andy pulled her by the hand until Emily’s arm was wrapped around her back.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she murmured against Emily’s lips. “I always kinda liked it.”

Forgiveness flowed from Andy like water. Emily didn’t understand it. Holding a grudge had always been one of her greatest skills, and here was Andy, showing her that there were other options. Choices that didn’t make you brittle over time, didn’t make you feel like you were constantly about to cave in on the hollow space inside you.

It hovered in her chest, this fullness she had only been able to name in her head, now pushing up to her throat, to her tongue. It would not break free, in the quiet between them, the smallest space between their lips. It went dormant behind her teeth and Andy closed the distance quickly, chaste, and stuck her arm out into the road.

“Car’s here,” she said, her eyes still on Emily. “Let’s go home.”

v.

Emily was having, once again, the morning from hell. It had begun with a phone call at 4am from Milan, and a geriatric leather artist (Giorgio, with whom she had an established professional relationship that had never, in sixteen years, had reason to be called into question) all but begging for her forgiveness at the other end of the line.

The tassels for the Fall collection handbags were delayed. Delayed in that the whole shipment had been cut to the wrong specifications and thus the whole shipment would have to be remade. Giorgio had fallen several places on her list of trusted artists.

“Te lo prometto, se loro non sono qui a venerdì, manderò un sicario professionale alla tua casa. Capisci?”
(I promise you, if they are not here by Friday, I will send a professional hitman to your house. Do you understand?)

She’d meant to hiss it threateningly down the phone. Instead, she shouted, quite loud, and woke Andy, who had been sleeping soundly beside her, with a start.

“Si, si, Signora Charlton, mi dispiace,”

Giorgio pleaded for absolution over the speaker before Emily cut the call short and sat, bolt upright, typing furiously into her phone. Milan would pay for this, she thought, and she was so irate her mouth began to form the words as she typed, not quite as silently as usual. This was Andy’s cue, letting her know she wouldn’t be getting back to sleep any time soon. She rose, and leant forward to Emily, hunched over her blistering email, and kissed her gently on the shoulder.

“Coffee?”

“Oh, most definitely,” Emily said, still barely able to contain her rage.

Coach was a steady series of putting out fires, which, on consideration, could be a descriptor of any of her previous positions. Runway was putting out Miranda-based fires, or sometimes Andy-based fires, and many many designer-based fires, and Dior continued to be all of those things (minus Andy), but still - Coach was worse. Coach seemed to be a convention of all the most incompetent people in the fashion industry, all gathered together to form one elite superteam of idiots. And so Emily, possessing more brain cells than the rest of her staff combined, remained the only person available to put out said fires.

In the space of an hour, emails were sent, lives were threatened, more fires began, and one executive assistant came perilously close to being physically eviscerated by only the sound of Emily’s voice.

And all the while, Andy was in her kitchen, making coffee and preparing yoghurt and putting out other fires that followed her home.

She emerged, still in her dressing gown and battling a pounding headache, and Andy had spent enough mornings there that she was ready and waiting, with coffee, breakfast, and aspirin.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m about to throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge, Andrea.”

“Please don’t do that.”

“Actually, you’re right, it would be humiliating to perish that close to Brooklyn.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing,” she said, with only the hint of a wobble in her voice that she hoped Andy didn’t catch, but already knew, deep down, that she did.

“Em,”

“No, really, it’s fine. The Fall collection is basically crap, and I mean really genuinely crap, and the only thing that was worth anything were these bloody handbags but they’ve been derailed - no, assassinated, they’ve been assassinated - by shoddy leatherwork and it’s fine, it really would be fine, except I’ve also got to drive to the fucking Hamptons to meet with a shareholder who, for reasons that escape me, refuses to enter Manhattan.”

“You’re Emily Charlton, tell him to meet you,”

“Oh, believe me Andy, it is a small mercy to women everywhere that he doesn’t leave the house much. Despite the inconvenience.”

Andy smiled at her, and it eased the headache, just a little. She smiled back almost on instinct, soft, the kind of smile one would only notice if they were familiar with the shape of your mouth, and everything paused. Then she remembered the day, the leather, the god-awful Fall collection, and the headache came back with renewed vigour.

“Can I be absolutely horrid and ask you to sort the kids?”

“Of course. You’re not horrid.”

“Thank you. Thank you, I owe you my life,” Emily said, head in hands. “I’d give you my first born child if she wasn’t already obsessed with you.”

“Want some good news?” Andy said, rounding the island carefully, as if the slightest sudden movement might send Emily running.

“Please,”

“You’re really hot when you speak Italian.”

***

The plan was simple. The plan, executed well, as Emily executed most things, was to drop the kids at their school breakfast hour, drop Andy as close as she could get to Elias Clarke, swing by the store to verbally assault her team, and drive out to bloody Long Island and back before her scheduled call with corporate at 2pm.

Simple.

Instead, they sat for an hour in the worst mid-town traffic Emily had ever seen. A cyclist clipped her wing mirror with just enough force that it was now a little wonky, and Andy rolled down the window to shout at him as he rode away, blissfully unaware of how much worse he’d just made everyone’s day. The kids bickered so much that even Andy snapped at them, for which she apologised immediately and profusely to everyone in the car. It did shut them up though, and for that Emily was grateful.

The line for school drop off was long and infuriating, with the new health and safety rules stating that kids had to wait until they were in the green zone to leave their parents’ cars meaning that she was stuck with her children, despite there being ample amounts of sidewalk for them to be safely ejected onto. By the time she’d hurried them out of the car, escaped the drop-off queue, and got back out onto the street, she was twenty minutes behind schedule and there was construction on the corner of 10th.

She would have to leave the gutting of her assistants until later.

“Em, this is ridiculous. I’m just gonna walk from here and let you get to work.”

“No, you can’t. It’s miles.”

“I’ll be fine. Look, there’s a subway stop right there.”

“The subway?”

“Well, I’m not gonna get a cab in this traffic, am I?

Andy smiled at her again, but the tension headache that was beginning to form in her brow was already established enough that not even a soft curve of Andy’s lips could ease it.

“Andy, I really can drop you - ”

“It’s okay, I have been on the subway before.”

“Yes, but now you’re used to luxury,”

“And Miranda is used to me being on time.”

Emily frowned at her knowingly. She was always on the cusp of being late to every meeting, not that it ever ended up being a mark against her. Somehow, since she’d returned to Runway, Andy was like Teflon.

“Sort of,” she admitted with a wince. “Look, you’ve had an awful morning, I’m taking something off your plate.”

She was being helpful. But, unbeknownst to her, leaving Emily now, at 7:45 in the morning in a line for the backed up intersection of 10th and West 33rd, was the absolute worst thing she could do. Mostly because Emily really felt like she might be about to cry, and that was something she only allowed herself around Andy, so that she could tell her she was being totally reasonable and that she was actually a very well-adjusted person.

But she looked at the stream of cars ahead of her, the red light that had been glaring at her an inordinate amount of time, and sighed.

“Right. Well. Remember to properly sanitise your hands when you get off the train,”

“I will,”

“Do you have your emergency perfume?”

“In my bag.”

“Good, at least you won’t smell like the underworld all day.”

“I will be fine,” Andrea said with a softness that did nothing to improve Emily’s emotionally precarious state, and leant over and kissed her cheek.

“Be safe,”

Emily nodded.

“Text me when you get there,”

Emily nodded.

“Try not to kill anyone,”

Emily shook her head.

“I cannot promise you that, Andrea,”

“Okay. I love you,”

Emily froze.

Andy froze.

Andy had frozen halfway out of the car door and had done it so abruptly that another cyclist almost collided with her. When all Emily could voice in response was a quiet - an infinitesimally quiet - squeak, she turned back around with an expression that made Emily whither. It was not unlike the face of a baby deer who had just seen their mother killed by a cold-blooded hunter.

“Aw, crap.”

Nobody breathed for what felt like a year.

I love you. Andy had said I love you at 7:45 in the morning in a traffic jam, at the intersection of 10th and West 33rd. Andy had said I love you like it was the most natural thing in the world, to love someone like Emily.

Andy had said I love you almost thirty seconds ago and Emily had still not said it back.

“Emily,” Andy tried, in the silence that was filling the now extremely small feeling SUV.

“I - it’s fine,” her voice was tight. Genuinely physically difficult to get the sound out of her body.

Andy adjusted herself, so she was facing the driver's seat, and she was staring. Again. In the way she always stared at Emily. In the way that meant, it was now crystal clear, that she loved Emily.

“Em - ”

She was trying. She really was trying. She had maybe never tried so hard for anything else in her life. She tried so hard she felt it pulse at her muscles, ready to burst at the seams. It was on the tip of her tongue, the sentiment set just behind her teeth. Straining to escape.

I love you I love you I love you.

“I - ”

But the light was green now, and a space had opened up in front of her, and the cab behind her was flashing her, and revving, and driving up her arse, and so instead:

“I - I need you to get out of the car.”

Andy’s shoulders dropped so deflatedly, and the look on her face was so downtrodden, Emily would have liked the ground to swallow her whole. A spontaneous sink-hole in the middle of Manhattan wouldn’t have been out of keeping with the rest of her morning, in terms of disaster level.

“Em,” Andy said, and now her voice was small, and Emily was just sitting there looking at her with her mouth open like a dead fish. The car behind her blared its horn, and both of them jumped.

“I’m sorry, Andy it’s -”

The horn, again.

“I need you to get out of the car.”

***

Bollocks. Bollocks. Fucking buggering bollocks.

It was not the first time Emily had driven through a panic attack. White-knuckling the steering wheel, she tried her hardest, mid-cold sweat, not to crash her car into the verge and get herself impaled on the dense woodland of the Long Island Expressway. A two hour car ride was far too much time alone with her own thoughts.

Who says that to ‘I love you’, she thought rapidly, speeding past Lake Ronkonkoma a good fifteen miles above the limit. She could have said so many things. To Andy. To sweet, doe-eyed, idiotic, clumsy Andy.

I love you I love you too I think I’ve been in love with you since you first wore that pair of Chanel boots I am very fond of you Andrea you are very important to me Andrea please don’t leave me in the middle of this traffic jam Andrea I love you

But instead, she had said I need you to get out of the car.

I need you to get out of the car did not feature on any list anywhere of the most romantic lines of all time. Clark Gable did not say I need you to get out of the car in any classic movies. Even thank you, the universally acknowledged worst thing to say in response, would have been better than I need you to get out of the car.

The only small solace was that Andy was out that night. Dinner with Lily. She would be home late. Lily would hear all about it over some sort of vegan dish, about how stupid and cold and emotionally stunted she was. And when Andy got back they would have to talk about it because Andy liked to talk about things. Perhaps Emily could pretend to be asleep. Or dead. She could pretend to be dead.

She parked somewhat shoddily on the driveway of Mr Willard’s six bedroom home and inhaled sharply. Panic attack buried, she put it behind her, or more accurately stuffed it into her mental lockbox, and got on with her day.

Andy
10:17
Em, I’m sorry

10:42
Did you get there okay?

11:28
Emily??

11:35
Missed Call

11:53
Missed Call

12:01
ok, this morning aside, please let me know that you’re safe

12:13
Missed Call

12:14
Emily
Yes I’m fine

Emily wished that she could turn her phone off. Or throw it into the Hudson. But she had a job and children, and so instead when she finally returned to the office she asked one of her youngest and most tech-savvy assistants to silence notifications for Andy, which earned her several raised eyebrows.

The nanny picked the kids up, and at home Bronwyn and Roark ate risotto (Roark picked out the peas. Andy would have convinced him to eat the peas, because Roark, much to her delight and his mother’s dismay, thought that Andy was cool and this meant that he did whatever she told him). She helped them with their homework (almost had a breakdown over fractions and was seriously worried, only for a few minutes, that Bronwyn might be illiterate) and got them into their pyjamas. Bronwyn had a mild meltdown about a stain on her backpack that Emily noticed while packing her things for the next day, but soon they were in bed and she was tucking them in.

“Mummy?”

“Yes darling?”

Roark’s blonde hair stuck up on his pillow and he nestled himself deeper into the blankets as she smoothed it down for him.

“Are you and Andy gonna get married?”

“Oh god, not you too,” she muttered. Roark opened his eyes and frowned at her.

“What?”

“Nothing, darling,” she cleared her throat and tucked his stuffed elephant into the crook of his arm. “No. We’re not getting married, why would you ask me that?”

“Well,” he yawned. He was barely there, really, these were the ramblings of a half-asleep elementary-schooler, but still the suggestion winded her. “You married Daddy, and you definitely like her more than him.”

Emily laughed. It was the first moment of levity she’d had all day. Maybe she should get Roark to say it for her. That would certainly get her out of ever having to do it herself - he was very cute, and it was exactly the kind of sickly sweet gesture Andy appreciated.

“I do like her more, you’re right. Goodnight, love.”

She was pretty sure he was already asleep by the time she’d kissed him on the forehead and turned out the light.

On the sofa, with a large cup of tea, she practised saying it, under her breath. It should not have been that difficult. The worst part was, she knew that she would bottle it. She could say it now, to the wall, to her glass, to the contact photo of Andy on her phone, but when she was in front of her it would freeze again. She had just carefully laid herself down on the cushions with her hands over her eyes, when the front door clicked and the woman herself came thundering into the apartment with all the grace of a freshly-born giraffe.

“Emily?”

“Shush,” Emily hissed, shooting an arm out from her prone position. “They’re asleep. I’ve just had a rather traumatic bedtime, actually, so if you could try not to break the precarious peace that would be lovely.”

Andy, quieter now, peeled off her shoes and shuffled into Emily’s view, perching on the coffee table.

‘Don’t sit on that, it’s vintage.”

She rolled her eyes, gently, not unkindly - Andy never did anything unkindly - and slid down to the floor, where she hugged her knees to her chest. She looked small, Emily noticed. She had not seen her look small since the first time they’d met. The first time Miranda had picked her apart, and at the time Emily had laughed – had found it amusing when it happened to other people, but not least her. With her disregard for fashion and her blasé attitude, in the beginning, to the job that a million girls would kill for, that Emily would have killed for. And she had found it comforting, in a way, to see Andy flail like that, because it had made her feel like Andy had flaws. And she had spent those first weeks searching desperately for flaws and continually pointing them out. Andy had to have flaws because Emily had to find reasons to push whatever pathetic emotion she had been feeling – for a freshly graduated journalist in clunky department store pumps – deep down until they were suffocated.

She did not usually look small these days.

The Andy she knew today, in this life, was expansive and uninhibited and did not shrink herself. Like she was doing now.

“You haven’t answered any of my texts today,” she said.

“Yes,” Emily sat up slowly, so as not to aggravate the headache that was now entering its tenth hour. “Well, you know. Been busy. With leather, and Italians.”

“Uh-huh. Can we talk about it?”

“Must we, Andy?”

“I’m sorry -”

“You’re sorry?”’

“Yes, Emily, because I had a plan,’ she said, a little frantically. She was gesticulating, dangerously close to Emily’s half-finished tea, and sounded like she might have been even closer to tears. “I had the whole thing meticulously mapped out, and it was going to be lovely, and calm, and it wasn’t going to happen for a while because I didn’t want you to completely freak out and push me away. I had a whole plan, Em, and I swear to you, on everything that is good and holy, that the plan did not include dropping it on you in the middle of traffic.”

In the brief quiet that followed, something in Emily relaxed. A terseness in her muscles that she had attributed to general panic and adrenaline, but she registered now was, in fact, something else.

Relief.

All day, she had been subconsciously hanging onto a fear that Andy would take it back.

“But you did mean it?”

“Of course I meant it.”

There was not, realistically, a universe in which Andrea didn’t mean it. Emily knew this because inside her head, in the titanium lock box of things she didn’t think about, was a litany of things she had been noticing about Andy Sachs for several months. The list included, but was not limited to:

1) the fact that Andy was, as Roark had so astutely pointed out, always there.
2) the face Andy made at her when Emily swore, which happened, on average, nine times a day, so long as the children weren’t present.
3) the words Greek yogurt being written on Emily’s shopping list every week in a journalistic scrawl. Emily opted for the low fat organic version every time, but the sentiment was still very touching.
4) the quiet way in which she loved Emily’s children. Quiet in that it was implicit and reliable, something they had never had from anyone but their mother.
5) the fact that everything in her apartment now lived in pairs. Two mugs to wash up in the morning, two wine glasses to fill at night, two sides of the bed to make, two toothbrushes in the bathroom cupboard.

It was, on reflection, a rather lengthy list. Andy meant it, as she meant most things, with such sincerity that the tears which had been threatening to escape her ducts all day now broke free, and poured down her face. As if she wasn’t embarrassed enough already.

“Fuck,” Emily whispered, at the risk of being subjected to the afore-mentioned look.

“What is it?”

“It’s just – I can’t – oh, Jesus, Andy don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what, baby?”

“Like – like that. Your face is all…mushy. And the pet names aren’t helping.”

Andy had knelt up, the second she caught the shimmer in Emily’s eyes, so that they were a little more level, and she placed her hands on Emily’s thighs and applied gentle pressure that said yes, I am always here.

“I call you those all the time,” she said with a slight chuckle.

“Well yes, but – they’re infused with something now, aren’t they? They mean something.”

“Oh, honey,” Andy traced the pads of her thumbs across Emily’s cheeks, collecting her tears and mopping up her probably ruined mascara. “They‘ve always meant something.”

“Oh god, have you just been pining over me for months?”

“I wouldn’t say pining, Em, it’s been pretty good for me,” Andy laughed and kissed the tip of her nose.

She had to admit, the last year had been maybe the most hassle-free of her life. It may not have seemed that way to an outside eye, but she had a job that, while frustrating and consisting largely of babysitting fashion-inept morons, encroached very little on her personal life. She had time, now, to go to all the parent nights, and clarinet recitals, and spelling bees, and actually sit down and eat a meal with her kids most nights.

She had Andy, who was the only person she’d ever had that was becoming quite essential to her. Rather embarrassingly, Emily Charlton had been in the most functional, dependable, and dare she say loving relationship of her life for longer than she even knew.

And the worst part was, it felt cripplingly humiliating - to feel this way and still not be able to say it out loud.

“I’m sorry about this morning.”

“Don’t worry about it,”

“I do though - ”

“Em - ”

“Because what if I can’t ever say it, Andy?”

Andy’s hands travelled down her body, from her jaw, to her shoulders, to her arms, to her hands. Emily was not used to having feelings, which she knew. It was something that had become apparent very quickly, the way she avoided Andy for days every time she felt like they were getting a little bit too close. She’d overcome that, little by little, and Andy had made herself comfortable in the various pockets of her life that Emily had allowed. But then there was the natural progression from the having of feelings - the voicing of feelings, which was a whole new concept for her.

The thing was, she had been quite certain for a long time, there was a part of her that didn’t work. There was some kind of switch that should have been flicked on during her childhood, maybe one genuine act of love from her mother might have done it, that was buried somewhere in the depths of her psyche. By now, the switch was dusty and stiff and probably a little faulty and she didn’t know how to get it back in gear.

“This is why I had a plan,” Andy said, so gently it started Emily off all over again. “I was going to tell you that I didn’t – I don’t – expect anything from you. I don’t need you to say it back, I just needed to say it because it was true.”

“But that’s not fair,” Emily whined, in a voice so like Bronwyn’s nine-year-old protestations that she mentally made a note never to show an emotion in public again.

“You can never say it back, if you’re not ready,”

“I will, Andy, it isn’t that I don’t want to.”

“I know,”

“It’s just hard, for me,”

“I know,”

“Because of Frank and — because of everything, really.”

“I know.”

She knew. Andy knew and she was still there, at Emily’s feet, looking at her like she held up the sky. Maybe one day the switch would work.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

And Emily knew she wasn’t.

“I do have one tiny request, though,” she said. A shy smile spread across her face, and Emily nodded, eager to give her anything she could manage.

“Do you think, if you’re comfortable – obviously – we could maybe think of a name?”

“A name?”

“A name, a label I guess.”

“For what?”

“For us.”

Oh. Oh. A name. Now that she thought about it, she didn’t really refer to Andy as anything. Just Andy. Everyone in her life seemed to just know who Andy was, and more importantly what she was. In fairness, Emily didn’t often make new friends so she didn’t usually have to think about introducing her into conversation as a concept. But when she looked at her now, so patient, so ready to love her in any way Emily would allow, it made her wilt.

God, she was awful.

“Are you kidding?”

“Em –”

“I haven’t let you give it a name,”

“It’s okay -”

“Why are you with me?”

“Because I love you. Very much, and you are impossible and wonderful and terrified and so it’s okay.”

“What do you want to call me?”

“I mean, right now I just call you Emily. Or my Emily, which sometimes feels a little intimate around strangers.”

Emily agreed wholeheartedly.

“Yes, we need to find you an alternative,” she said fondly, and, now that she had mostly calmed down, she felt able to pull Andy closer to her, and rest their foreheads together.

“The obvious choice would be girlfriend,” Andy said, kneading her fingers into Emily’s hips, which, she was well aware, made her squirm.

“Well not that, because that’s disgusting,” she muttered, and Andy laughed and gripped her hips tighter and Emily felt safe.

“Okay. How about partner?”

Partner. Serious, could be mistaken for a business associate in the right circles, didn’t make her sound twelve years old.

“Alright, yes. Partner.”

“Partner.”

Their lips met and, for the first time since 4am, Emily relaxed her body. If she was really honest with herself, Andy was the only person she ever completely relaxed around. Even with the kids, she spent so much time trying desperately not to make the same mistakes her mother had made with her, that there was a part of her that was always rigid around them.

But she was working on that, and it started with Andy holding her and telling her everything was okay.

“What was the plan, then?”

Emily nudged Andy’s nose with her own and watched as her already brilliant smile cracked wider.

“You really wanna know?”

“Yes, tell me how much nicer this could have been.”

“Okay,” Andy whispered and raised herself up, knees either side of Emily’s legs, to settle in her lap.

“First, I was going to surprise you at work – not in front of anyone, obviously, I don’t have a death wish – Nigel was going to help me pick an outfit from the Runway closet that you would like and look absolutely devastating in, and he would turn a blind eye while I stole it for one evening,”

Slowly, as she was talking, Andy kissed along the sharp points of Emily’s face, her cheekbones, her jaw, and Emily softened, as she always did.

“And I was going to take you to that champagne bar you’ve been wanting to try,”

“Andy,” Emily whispered. It was involuntary. She was now so relaxed she felt a little bit liquidy, with a body above her, and lips running down the stem of her neck, to the collarbone that was exposed beneath the now undone collar of her shirt.

“We were gonna go to Le Coucou,”

“Le Coucou,”

“Mmhm, Le Coucou,” Andy rolled her hips in Emily’s lap and she malfunctioned. “Because they do that thing we had in Paris that you wanted to eat everyday,”

“The crepinette,”

“Yeah, the crepinette,” she kissed her softly and Emily hummed into her mouth. “That’s when I was going to tell you.”

“That,” Emily said stiffly, trying to retain the smallest amount of composure, “is so not the kind of date you normally plan.”

“I know,” Andy grinned.

Her hips were still rolling, only subtly, soft waves of movement that were so minute but still so very much there that it was driving Emily a little bit insane. She could feel her own hips surging up, desperate to meet it. Andy noticed, and bit her lip, which only made it all worse.

“It’s not everyday you tell a girl you love her,”

She sank lower into Emily and cradled her head in her hands, gently but firm enough for it to catch her off-guard, her jaw being led up to Andy’s mouth.

“Then, if it all went well, I was going to take you home and make you see God,”

Then suddenly Andy’s mouth was on hers in a blinding kiss, so forceful it actually made her sway, and then push back, braced between her hands and the sofa. Emily exhaled into her, her voice trailing afterwards in an embarrassingly breathy moan.

Andy bit, just grazing with the tips of her teeth, pulling until their mouths were mostly apart and then, all of a sudden, she was gone. Emily chased her lips with her own and gripped her tighter.

“But I guess I ruined it. Oh well,”

Then, in a movement that was so infuriatingly smooth – unlike anything else Andy ever did with her body – she slipped off her lap and stood, halfway turned around by the time Emily knew what was happening. In her highly compromised and exceptionally vulnerable state, she somehow managed to catch her hand before she walked away, and tugged (harder than she meant to) until Andy was back on top of her, a now extremely ungraceful and annoyingly desirable heap of limbs.

“Absolutely not,” Emily scolded. She had regained some of her regular personality now, no longer a writhing mess. “You seem awfully certain of your abilities there, Sachs.”

“Oh, I am.”

Emily slid her hands under Andy’s shirt and dug in, ever so slightly, with her perfectly manicured fingernails. Andy shivered and stretched taller, allowing Emily more space, more skin, more everything.

“Think you can prove it?”

“You bet your ass I can prove it,” she grinned, and she was already halfway through removing Emily’s blouse, quick fingers tracing over her ribs.

Emily kissed her and rocked their bodies closer and tried, so hard, to say it over and over in her head. Perhaps, she hoped, if she could think it with enough conviction it would be easier to say out loud.

I am very fond of you Andrea

Please stay with me Andrea

Don’t leave me Andrea

I love you Andrea

vi.

In hindsight, she had put far too much pressure on this evening.

In hindsight, she should probably not have chosen a dress that made Andy visibly malfunction, to the point where she’d spent the whole night waving other people over just so they could bask in how glorious Emily looked in said dress (Versace, red, neckline deeper than was wholly decent).

In hindsight, no amount of planning or preparation was ever going to have made this easier - this being the long-awaited and highly anticipated declaration of her feelings for Andrea Sachs. This, she knew, was also somewhat moot, given that, three weeks prior, Andy had formally given notice on her lease and was in the process of moving four decades worth of life into Emily’s house. She was also aware, quite deeply, that Andy already knew. Andy probably didn’t even need her to say it, because she could read Emily like a book. Not even a challenging one. By now, her feelings were so overwhelming for her, and painfully obvious to everyone around them, that it must have been like reading one of her kids’ old picture books.

But, at this point, it was something of a personal goal.

She had decided that she was going to have to say it, and by god, she was going to say it tonight - even if it killed her.

It was the first time Emily had ever attended Runway’s annual charity gala in a role other than Miranda Priestly’s long-suffering first assistant. No longer would she be forced to follow her boss around, a full champagne glass in hand for her at all times. No longer would she need to remember anyone’s name, let alone people she hadn’t even met. Tonight, she was a guest, taking her place as Miranda Priestly’s former long-suffering first assistant, attending on the arm of Miranda Priestly’s former second assistant turned long-suffering but enthusiastic Senior Features Editor.

On the arm of Andy Sachs, she had discovered, was an excellent way to enter a party. Andy turned heads when she entered rooms, and this, Emily noted with a wave of pride, was in part because she was the most beautiful person in every room, no matter the occasion. Andy stood next to supermodels and fashion designers and there was no contest. She could have been stood next to bloody Marilyn Monroe and her smile would still make every person in the room look at her instead.

Christ, she really was in deep.

It was also because Andy Sachs was a name that meant something now in this industry. It wielded power and influence, and the mention of her at a gala like this made the room twitter with excitement.

It was also because Andy Sachs was the safest Emily had felt in years. There was no discomfort in these evenings, because she and Andy spent them together. Even when talking to other people, Emily felt the way they were tethered to each other, catching each other’s eyes and smiling knowingly, a shared joke across a crowded room about the loud pattern of a guest’s blazer or the mispronunciation of a designer’s name.

Emily watched her as she made very polite conversation with a very boring woman, her face showing not a trace of the exasperation with which she would recount the conversation to Emily later, under the covers of their shared bed.

“Miss Charlton,” a voice greeted her surreptitiously. A hand pressed a champagne flute into hers and a shoulder bumped her with an undercurrent of friendly affection.

“Nigel,” she said, without turning.

“Does Six need a rescue party?”

Andy’s brown eyes flitted past them, pausing briefly when they met Emily’s. A raise of the eyebrows from Charlton, Kipling looked deliberately into a corner, Sachs smiled small and warm and gave a gentle, almost invisible, shake of her head.

“No, she’s fine. For now.”

The shake said no, I can spare a few more minutes of kindness for this woman, this woman with a necklace the size of a Christmas ornament and a wallet that funds the majority of Runway’s philanthropic ventures, but the second my glass is empty I will require assistance.

Emily added assistance into her schedule for the evening. Four, perhaps five minutes from now. She would check in again and go from there.

“Good. That’s Christine Van Bulen, she’s half the reason tonight even materialised.”

“All going off without a hitch?”

“Never without a hitch.”

Nigel was staring at her. She could feel it, boring into her cheekbones, obvious even as she looked straight ahead, still staring herself at the grace with which Andy managed a room these days.

“You still haven’t, have you?”

Nigel’s voice was not unkind. Not even shocked. Perfectly even and unsurprised, and even a little sympathetic.

“No.”

“You will.”

“I will.”

He said it with a certainty that she felt she didn’t deserve. Even the children had said it to her, so casually, as if they said it to everybody, which Emily knew they didn’t. Bronwyn had mumbled it while drifting off to sleep, and Roark had said it as Andy dropped him off for football practice. As if it was a totally normal and everyday occurrence. Andy had recounted both incidents with a glowing smile and Emily had felt even more disappointed in herself for not being able to give her the same thing.

Nigel was looking her up and down now, the Versace only just making its impact. And it did make an impact - she had ensured it. The neckline, the way it contoured itself to the lines of her body, the way it revealed her legs when she walked.

He waggled his index finger at her and sipped his champagne.

“Who is this for?”

“For me, Nigel, I like to look good.”

“Not this good,” he said flatly, and if he had given Emily the space to be offended by it she would have been. Instead he continued. “You always look good, this is not good. This is ruining lives good.”

“Thank you,” she accepted, pressing her lips together and finally pulling her gaze away from Andy to look at him from the corners of her eyes.

“Now, I won’t ask again because of course I already know who it’s for,”

“Nigel,”

“But what is it for? That’s the question. Because you could wear a hessian sack and Six would still stare at you open-mouthed like a horny teenager —”

“Nigel,”

“But you’ve chosen to forego the easy option of the hessian sack and instead gone for something utterly devastating. Are you trying to kill her?”

Emily ignored him, drained her own champagne glass and fiddled with the bracelet dangling from her wrist.

“Is tonight some sort of event, some special occasion?”

It was, unbeknownst to everyone but Emily, even to Andy, an anniversary of sorts. Andy said it more easily, when the realisation came to her she had shouted it from the rooftops, or wanted to, at least, had only held off for fear of scaring Emily away. Emily had lived with this kernel of affection — deep, terrifying, overwhelming affection — for twenty-two years, since she’d stood in this museum atrium with a disgusting cold and an anxious second assistant beside her.

Loving Andy had barrelled towards her unceremoniously, charged at her like a crazed bull that she had been desperately trying to avoid being cornered by for two decades. Because that night, Andy had gone home to her boyfriend, her useless waste of space boyfriend, and Emily had gone home alone to nurse a headache and a blocked nose and an empty feeling in her stomach. She decided then, her head hovering over a vapour bath, that this was not something she would ever have, and she had spent the next several years building her life around its absence.

So yes. Special occasion. Though Nigel didn’t need to know that.

“Yes, Nigel. A charity gala. Do try to keep up.”

“It’s tonight, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you're talking about.”

“You’re telling her tonight. The dress, the night, the staring. It all adds up.”

She looked away to focus very hard on the clasp of the necklace of the woman in front of her, caught red-handed in the cripplingly embarrassing act of having feelings.

“Thank god for that,” Nigel hummed approvingly, and when Emily finally mustered up the composure to look back at him, he was smiling kindly at her.

“Don’t celebrate too soon. I haven’t managed it yet.”

“Rip it off like a bandaid. It’s the only way,” he winked at her as Andy walked towards them, free from Christine Van Bulen and looking all the happier for it.

“Six,” he said, charming as ever, and pressed champagne into her hand now, seemingly able to spontaneously conjure them out of thin air whenever they were required.

“Nigel, please tell me I’m done schmoozing for the night?”

“Not even close,” he said, a little apologetic, his edges softened, as they always were for her. “But I can delay the next round.”

“Thank you,” Andy’s fingers were already tangling with Emily’s, fastening around her like a plant that had been uprooted, now finding ground again. “C’mon, baby.”

Nigel was already gone, intercepting the chair of the New York Children’s Hospital with yet more champagne and a witty comment on the canapés. Andy was free to squeeze Emily’s hand and pull her through a throng of people, dodging tuxedos and evening gowns, into a quiet corner, secreted between the North American Mammals and Ocean Life galleries.

Andy always kissed her like it was her only chance of survival.

Emily moulded to it, letting the feeling sink down into her like water after a drought, and allowed her weight to settle into Andy’s hands, strong against the small of her back.

“Not very professional of you,” Emily admonished against her lips, and Andy groaned, only quietly, into her mouth.

“I so don’t care about that right now, Em.”

“Hm. You have approximately three minutes before we’re caught. Miranda sniffs out slipping workplace standards like a bloodhound.”

“I’m not at my workplace,” Andy argued, her hand running over the fabric of Emily's dress, down to her hip and the dimples that sat underneath the crimson satin.

“A poor excuse,” she said, in a voice that was meant to sound strict but ended up being much more tender. Andy caught it, and smiled at her softly.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“I know,”

“Like, now. Like twenty minutes ago.”

“I know.”

“Why did you wear a dress that makes me want to do unspeakable things to you?”

“For precisely that reason, darling.”

Emily pushed gently upwards to press her mouth to Andy’s, a hand tucking the dark hair that had fallen forward back behind her ear. Hair always down, ready for Emily to dip her hands into, but she couldn’t — not yet — because speeches would start soon and Andy couldn’t look dishevelled on stage. Emily would check her before that time, make sure her lipstick was in place, any smudges accounted for and tidied.

Andy broke away and drew her in, to press their bodies together, Emily’s red satin against the black crepe of her evening dress.

Now. It would have to be now, hidden in this corner of the American Museum of Natural History, pressed against her in the low light of windows that looked out up to the navy sky above Manhattan. Because they were here, in this hall of all the wonders of the Earth and Andy Sachs was looking at her like she was a miracle.

Emily Charlton, the eighth natural wonder of the world.

“Andy,” she said, and she noted that her voice was less regulated than it would otherwise have been, than it was a moment ago when she was sparring, trading flirtations like currency.

Had she said it then, Andy would have smiled. She would have nudged her head gently to the side and kissed her temple and said it back, whispered it into her hair like a prayer. And Emily would have felt it — the relief that she was sure would flood her body once she finally achieved The Goal. And then she would be able to say it constantly, casually. When she woke up and when she left the house, texting it quickly before a meeting, at the end of messages sent to assure Andy she had reached different locations without incident.

But instead, she was interrupted; the twinkling chime of a cake fork against crystal, and she swung round to see Miranda Bloody Priestly on stage, usurping the moment and depriving her, once again, of all the things she wanted.

Andy was unbothered.

“Em, what is it?”

“Nothing,” Emily forced out, the frustration now a lump of pain in her throat, where the words had skidded to a violent halt a moment earlier.

“Baby,”

“The speeches are starting,”

“I have a minute,”

“You don’t,” she said firmly. Miranda was talking and soon she would say Andy’s name and summon her to the podium.

“Emily,” Andy protested, gently and fondly, like she was amused by the level of stress Emily was operating at.

“Andrea,” she said, the legal name always used with finality, the syllables themselves a full stop. “Later, please.”

Andy accepted the command, as she always did when she knew it was important. When she knew Emily was at breaking point. So, instead of achieving The Goal, Emily pulled out her emergency vanity kit and tidied up the smudged pink edges of Andy’s mouth, before sending her up to the front to take her place as Runway representative, award-winning journalist, and acclaimed biographer.

Andrea Sachs, a natural wonder of Emily’s world.

***

She had blown it, The Goal, the moment in which she would have become worthy (in her own eyes only) of Andy’s affection. She chewed her lip in the car, tugging at her mouth the whole journey home while Andy ran her thumb over her knuckles, their hands in the centre of the back seat.

“Em,”

“Mm?”

“You okay?”

“Yes,”

“Sure?”

“Yes, fine.”

Andy nodded, aware she was lying and more aware that another question would not reveal the reason why. Emily felt the silent acknowledgment, the graceful granting of more time, and leant against the leather of the headrest.

The not saying came naturally to her. She had skilfully not said for many years; tactfully ignored it and diminished it in the short space of time they had shared an office, expertly pushed it down in two decades of distance, and masterfully kept mum in almost eighteen months of friendship and intimacy and quasi-cohabitation. Saying it had not been on the agenda. Saying it was not in the plan until recently, until Andy had blurted it out one morning in a traffic jam in the same slightly clumsy way she did many things.

So, the saying became insurmountable, or seemingly so. A feat of which Emily, with her exaggerated brand of British stiff-upper-lip emotional repression and her battle scars from a messy divorce and an even messier marriage, was simply not capable.

Andy unlocked the front door with her key, and smiled warmly at the babysitter as she smiled warmly at almost everyone, while Emily hung up coats in the closet (organised by person, then season, then by colour) and placed them side by side. Hers beside Andy’s beside Bronwyn’s beside Roark’s.

The babysitter, paid upon delivery of a full report to ensure her children had not been absolute terrors, departed as Andy removed her heels, and when the door clicked shut, a thundering of two small feet descended the stairs.

“Andy!”

“Bronwyn Charlton, what are you doing out of bed?”

The telling off was from Emily, the highest number of words she had uttered since the hidden corner of the museum, at which her daughter buried her face in Andy’s midriff, her growing arms wrapping around her for safety. And Andy hugged her back.

“Much as I appreciate the greeting, Mom’s right. Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I was waiting for you,”

“Wyn, it’s almost midnight,” Emily said, softening her tone and delivering a warm stroke to her head.

“But I wanted to see you guys,” Bronwyn protested. “and I need a bedtime story.”

“Did Leah not read to you?”

“She did, but Andy does the voices. Leah does not do the voices.”

“It is so late, Winnie,” Emily said, hoping a kind word and the use of her babyish nickname might encourage her back upstairs.

“Please?”

She looked up at Andy with her blue eyes, inherited from her mother, and an expression that was more than a little emotionally manipulative, and Emily watched as Andy relented.

“I don’t mind,” she said to Emily softly. “Really, you change. I’ll only be a minute.”

Triumphant, Bronwyn skipped back up the stairs, Andy following her dutifully, while Emily began to strip herself of the evening’s events.

Kettle on, herbal teas brewed. Upstairs, her satin dress replaced by satin pyjamas, her skincare regiment followed to letter, her emails checked and her to-do list completed. Emily was the master of the evening routine, honed over many years of loneliness, even when married. Many years of entertaining oneself after the day was done, after the kids were asleep.

By the time the routine was finished, it had been almost forty-five minutes. Andy was still not back, and she wondered, for a moment, if Andy, easily swayed as she was, had been duped into reading Bronwyn an entire novel. She pushed herself back out of bed, and stepped softly across the hall to her daughter’s bedroom, where Andy’s voice could still be heard. Bronwyn’s copy of The Wind in the Willows, Emily’s from home, sat on the nightstand with the bookmark approximately one chapter ahead of where it had been the previous night. Andy sat above her, stroking her hair gently, and talking to her in a voice so quiet Emily couldn’t make out a word of it.

Bronwyn was teetering between sleep and wakefulness, her eyelids fluttering up and down, her mouth responding to whatever was being whispered to her with barely audible and probably nonsensical words.

Emily leant against the doorframe watching, and ached with something unnameable.

Sometime during the next few minutes, Bronwyn drifted into sleep, and Andy pressed a kiss to her forehead and drew the blankets up to her chin. She stayed there longer than was necessary. Just a breath, in which she sat, staring at this child who was not hers but wasn’t not hers with a look on her face that made the unnameable thing in Emily’s chest balloon to twice its original size, and it grew so wide and so suddenly that she made the executive decision to remove herself from the situation. She left the doorframe, silently and efficiently, leaving Andy to stare and think and feel the unnameable thing that was slowly taking root in all of them.

In bed, Emily finished her tea and skimmed a Runway article on her phone, while Andy changed into her most treasured enormous T-shirt and slipped into the covers beside her.

“Thank you for that,” Emily said quietly, looking decidedly not at the face that rested on her shoulder for fear it would make her weep with the something unnameable still lodged in her chest. “Bronwyn. You didn’t have to.”

“Of course I did,” Andy said, very simply. As a fact.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” she returned, and dusted a kiss over Emily’s skin. “You didn’t have to.”

“Of course I did.”

Two facts uttered with finality. Of course they did.

“Feel like telling me what’s on your mind?”

“No.”

“Emily,”

“Shan’t.”

“Okay.”

Andy reached over to switch off her light, sinking them into darkness, before returning to Emily and burrowing into her soft parts, an arm wrapped around her middle, knees slotting snug behind Emily’s, and the tip of her nose just close enough to nudge an earlobe.

“Goodnight baby,” she whispered, and pressed her lips to Emily’s neck. “I love you.”

Emily’s breath hitched in her throat. She was always surprised by it, caught off guard and made to look unprepared.

Here it was. The Goal. Presented to her on a silver platter, so easy now to just respond in the way one was supposed to respond. One extra word tagged on the end of the same regurgitated sentence and it was achieved.

“Must you be so gooey all the time?”

Oh, she was an arse. An absolute sodding arse, who was incapable of feeling any kind of normal human emotion, or, at the very least, dealing with it at all appropriately.

“You know,” Andy propped herself up on her elbow, so that Emily could make out the shape of her in the dark, her own body pinned between Andy’s arms. Without light, Emily couldn’t tell whether she was smiling, but she could hear it in her voice, the hint of a laugh in her throat. “You’re gonna have to say it back some time.”

Here there was a beat. In this beat, Andy waited for a response and Emily, briefly, wanted to die. She was probably almost on the verge of stress-induced tears when Andy chuckled shyly and said:

“Crap. That was a joke, Em. Not a good one. I’m sorry.”

Emily stayed still, said nothing while Andy floundered above her. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark now, the crease between Andy’s brow just visible, brown irises shining.

“It was dumb, Em. Really, ignore everything I just — ”

“I do, you know.”

She heard herself say it before she’d even registered the thought. Something about Andy sending herself into a spiral had triggered it like a reflex.

“I — ”

“I really do. You know that, don’t you?”

Now Andy was silent, frozen still like she was afraid to move, for fear she’d scare whatever had gotten into Emily away. The silence produced a drop in her stomach, a moment in which she was terrified that Andy didn’t know, had never known, and that Emily had left her in the dark all this time.

“Please Andy, tell me that you know that?”

“Yeah,” Andy whispered, quick to soothe any trace of anxiety in Emily’s voice. “I know.”

“Good,” she said, and exhaled until the ache between her ribs dissipated and Andy kissed her gently, their faces clumsily finding each other in the low light. “I have for rather a long time.”

“I know, Em.”

Emily turned her body, so that her face could settle into the crook of Andy’s neck, lips grazing over her collarbone, and wrapped her arms around her so that all space between them evaporated.

She filed a mental status update:

The Goal was still a little way out of reach. It wouldn’t be long now. The sentiment was out there, and Andy was staying, and there was time. There would always be time.

For tonight, this was enough.