Archive of Our Own

If I say no to you will I still go to you

Begging a desperate grin

All eyes and mouth

Will I still shut you out

Will I eat all your ashes again

Despicable Animal, Wye Oak

The night after she slits her brother’s throat, feels her inheritance wrenched from her grip, watches her husband get crowned king through clear, unvarnished glass, Shiv dreams of DC.

Dreams of it that first night in flickering fantasy, the end of a film reel catching the thinnest part of the spool. Dreams of blue sky, the edge of a dripping chandelier, her hair longer than she’s ever kept it to block the chill of the air conditioning against the back of her neck. Feels the weight of binders in her arms, hears the sound her heels make against marble floors, the wooden gavel hitting the block in the House of Representatives, dreams of eyes on her, hard but focused, attentive, her own shoulders firm, her own words clear, certain, real, leaving her open mouth.

A hundred fractured pictures, memories, re-imaginings, that show up somewhere strange in her. A movie projected on the inside of her ribcage, broken up by the space between her bones, and she fumbles, wants to close the gaps for a clearer image or wrench the reel from its place, she doesn’t know. Just something to make a whole or nothing at all, to complete the picture or erase it, but the choice is made for her when she turns and there’s the light of Tom’s cell, breaking the dream, the show, blearing through the dark of their bedroom, the tap tap tap of his fingers on the screen like a creature trying to scratch its way into the theatre of her.

She swallows, her mouth mothy with sleep, throat rough as she pushes up onto her elbows in their bed.

“Matsson?” she asks, her voice thick, and Tom glances over his shoulder at her, an apologetic look on his face. He looks like shit, like he hasn’t slept in a week, which she knows he hasn’t. Right now, it helps.

“Yeah, he’s…European hours, I guess. Sorry, I can take this to another room.”

Shiv watches him watch her, keeps her expression carefully schooled, giving him nothing. A hundred looks cross his features, furrowing his brow and working the edges of his mouth. Too many of them she can’t read, but after a beat, he just nods, throwing the blankets back to pad out of the room, and she doesn’t watch. Doesn’t follow, not even as he opens their bedroom door and leaves it ajar in invitation, the hall light slicing across their bed, cutting her in two.

That’s not the point though. Tom is not the point.

The point is after the dreams of DC start, they don’t fucking stop.

Grow in detail, regularity, texture until it’s not chandeliers and attention but Joyce bitching about voters in Arizona, Darren kicking the printer as it jams for the fourth time in a row, stealing Holly’s sweet potato fries at the National Democratic Club while she presses her thigh into Nate’s beneath the table. It’s cheap drugs and cold beer and warm fingers unbuttoning her blouse, it’s late-night calls and notes for debate and stats that’ll etch themselves into the wall of her skull until they’re long out of date. It’s the fucking work. The rush of a new angle, a new lead, the thrill of showing up, showing off, grinning every time a pencil pusher made a snide comment about her last name, telling every skinny-tied Politico fuck who raises an eyebrow that my father and I respect each other’s opinions, we enjoy the debate, we might not cross party lines, but trust me, we know how to party.

The way she’d get them every time – a smile, a laugh, a conspiratorial look, like hey, who among us doesn’t fight family at Thanksgiving?

Like she could hold court out here in a city that felt like it might belong to her in all the ways New York didn’t, and that mattered, that felt good. Felt real, felt like it made her real in return, and maybe that had mattered too, that he’d seen it once. Not their father, but Kendall. How he’d been sent out for a meeting with some Republican lawmaker, playing errand boy for Dad, and he’d texted her after and they’d met up at some bar that served caramel popcorn and pumpkin ale, and she still remembers the night in every stupid, ugly detail.

The way it had been awkward at first, weird to see each other in her territory instead of his, the way he’d seemed young and narrow shouldered in his grey suit, his tie loose and his hair unkempt like he’d run his hands through it too many times. Remembers the way they’d had a drink and swapped stilted small talk about Rava and the kids, barely out of diapers then, and the boyfriend she hadn’t wanted to tell him about, but had in the end just to have something to say, and she’d been almost ready to make excuses, to leave when she’d had a call from the senator she was working for back then. Some fuck-up with the speech notes for an event Darren was supposed to be managing, and she remembers the way she’d steered his temper, guided him through, remembers Kendall watching across the booth as he’d thumbed the label on his beer, the way she’d felt almost nervous with him as her audience, which hadn’t made any fucking sense.

But she’d felt it, sharp as anything. The desire to impress him, which fine, she wanted him to go home and tell Dad she was killing it, but - - maybe it wasn’t just that. Maybe it was him too. Maybe she wanted it in that place she could never name, when she hung up and he said:

“You’re good at that.”

His voice was deep in that way it got when he was feeling earnest, and she’d hated that too. The way something in her had sparked bright, the way she’d had to hide her smile, grabbing her own beer to press to her lips until she could school her look into something smug instead of real.

“Obviously.”

“Obviously,” he’d echoed, cloying, faltering with a bad impression, and Shiv had thrown a piece of caramel popcorn at his face that he’d thrown back, a smile tugging at his lips, easy in that way he never was, and yeah, okay. It had just—

Felt like something.

Maybe.

They’d ordered another round.

And God, it’s just so fucking stupid, she thinks, waking up wet eyed and tight chested, because Kendall’s not the point either. Kendall’s not the planet life orbits around, he’s not the most important one, he’s not the oldest, he’s not the heir, he’s not the one to fill their father’s suit. Kendall got what he deserved which is nothing and no one, she’d made sure of that, and she feels it in every tired and aching inch of her. Feels it even as she grabs her cell and pulls up his name, feels it as she looks at the last message he’d sent her: you ready for this? minutes before the board meeting. Feels it as something inside of her starts to gape, as her fingers hover a hairsbreadth over the screen.

She hadn’t bothered replying then, and she knows he wouldn’t either if she texted him now.

No, it’s about her, she thinks.

She’s the point.

It’s about what she’s still got, the moves she can still make, it’s about leverage and the future and finding space in this new world even if she has to cut-tear-carve her way back into it. She was one point of a triangle two weeks ago – her, Tom and Matsson – and there’s no reason she can’t be again. She thinks it, she decides it, she can almost halfway be sure of it as she strides through security at Waystar and gets to the elevator, pressing for the C Suite, only to get a text from Roman.

Well, not a text exactly.

A forward of today’s New Yorker cartoon.  

No caption or commentary come with it, but the picture speaks for itself anyway – an exaggerated illustration of all of them playing Monopoly on top of their father’s coffin, her, Rome and Kendall bickering over Piccadilly, oblivious as Tom sneaks his Get Out of Jail Free card into Matsson’s hands in exchange for a few bruised cards.  At the head of the coffin, Connor stands up, cards a mess and cash depleted, the text bubble from his mouth reading: “Vote for me as your next Banker!”

On the nose, she thinks, grimacing at the image of Tom’s sweating forehead and nervous smile, before she uses two fingers to zoom in on her and her brothers. She takes in Roman’s hunched figure and Hitler youth haircut, his Vote for Mencken button, and Kendall’s droopy look and taped up paper crown, and she’s used to her own cartoon – the high cheekbones and square jaw and small eyes, only this one - - her gaze dips.

A round, firm belly.

Shiv stares at it, breath caught in her throat.

Ding.

The elevator grinds to a halt and the doors lurch open, and Shiv’s left to fumble flicking her phone screen off when she’s met with ten foot of cousin, Nepotism Fezzik himself.

“Hey, Shiv, um, how are - - you look nice.”

“Okay,” she replies, waving her phone vaguely at him. “Sure, you too. Business Barbie finally made it to the top floor, huh? Tom in his office?”  

“He’s uh, meeting with Gerri and Karl actually,” Greg says, and Shiv feels her jaw click shut as she tries to step around him and finds him moving with her, blocking her way off the elevator. She stares up at him, feels a heat rise in her chest because he can’t seriously think he can stop her. She peers around him, spots a tall head of blond hair and what looks like a custom Ed Hardy jacket, and cute, she thinks, glancing back up at Greg who has apparently not stopped talking. “So he asked me to, y’know, to keep you company, maybe pick your brain about a few things, cousin-to-cousin. I was kind of also hoping maybe to ask if you’ve heard from Ke—wait, Shiv, where are you going?”

She’s halfway across the office before he catches up (she’s had 36 years getting around her brothers, she’s not sure how or why he thought he’d have a chance at stopping her), the vague vibrations of cell phones and the clack of fingers on keys slowing as the slack jawed fucks in the bullpen pretend they aren’t watching her. Whatever, Shiv thinks with a sniff, she knows what she’s doing.

“I know my way around, Greg, so why don’t you go make yourself useful, I’m sure someone here would kill for a cappuccino.”

“I’m actually off coffee duties now, but uh, Shiv, we do have a room set up for you, if you want to come with me.”

She doesn’t, obviously, and when he tries to grab her arm, she sends him a filthy look back.

“Greg? Fuck off.”

If he replies, Shiv doesn’t hear it. Instead, she beelines to her father’s office, still set up with all of his things – a penthouse tomb – only it’s not her father hovering behind his desk, but Matsson. He lifts one of the helmets, turning it over, leaving oil smears from his fingers on the metal as he does, and Shiv lets the door click shut behind her, takes a breath.

A beat.

All fucking smiles.

“Dad was a bit of a collector,” she says in lieu of a greeting. “He liked history, legacy, but you know that.”

If he’d seen her come in, he makes a performance of pretending he hadn’t. Of reeling back a little, cautious, letting his gaze dip to the lines of her body, and she resists the urge to adjust her blazer, newly tight with what’s growing inside her, and she leans back against the door. Plays coy.  

“Hey,” he says, and he seems curious more than anything, which well. Good. That feels like something she can work with.

“Hi.”

“You visiting the boss man?”

It’s ambiguous, drawing a blurry line as to whether he means Tom or himself, which is, she’s sure, exactly what he intended. She pushes off the door, tossing her hair over her shoulder, and moves until she can rest a hip against the desk. A casual sort of ownership, after all, she’s never needed to put her feet on the furniture or piss on the carpet to stake a claim.

“Was hoping to have a chat with Gerri actually,” which she wasn’t, but she can be ambiguous too. “You talked to her about your little reverse vampire situation yet?”

Behind them, the glass walls of her father’s office feel almost like a painting, New York sprawled out in light and lines, the winter sky a clear and frosty blue. It leaves everything inside warm by comparison, cast into a bright and fractured intimacy. Her gaze leaves Matsson to the scattered photos, one of her, one of Reagan, one of her father alone in front of the first studio he’d acquired, younger, his hair just a shade darker than hers is now. All familiar pictures, all hand-picked by her father. The ones that were most important to him. She swallows, glances back at Matsson, who exhales a low chuckle.

“Thought I’d wait until we’re through the transition, you know? Don’t want people distracted.”

Shiv hums, pushes off her father’s desk as Matsson lowers the helmet back down to the cabinet behind it.

“Uh-huh, yeah, of course, but you also want your new team here ready to act, and in the current climate—”

“Hey, when are you gonna - - you know,” Matsson makes a pop sound with his mouth, and when he knows Shiv’s looking at him, he makes a point to hold his hands out at his belly like he’s holding a basketball to it. Her jaw clamps shut before she can help it, hand dropping, and it almost finds her belly before she course corrects, sliding it down into the pocket of her slacks.

“Not for a while,” she replies, playing it off. “Why? You having second thoughts on Tom already?”

Matsson just laughs, the sound tuneless and grating in Shiv’s ears, and she bites her tongue as he shifts sideways, picking up the photograph of her behind her father’s desk. It’s one she knows too well. A photo of her from before she and Tom had even met, one where her hair was long and her face still round and soft with the last flush of her adolescence, even though she was well into her twenties when it was taken. She can even remember where it’s from – a father’s day photoshoot with the two of them for Vogue, a story about the beautiful, promising daughters of hard, powerful men. Her father had had every one of them printed, framed, hung around all of his houses, offices, yachts.  

She’d even kept one of them herself.

“It wasn’t personal,” Matsson tells the picture of her. “Just you aren’t too experienced, yeah? And there’s all that history and you being around means your brothers’d be around, and women - - this isn’t like, a sexist thing, women just change their minds. I’ve seen it a hundred times, women think they want something, think they’re highflyers, then they get like you…” he turns around then, really looks at her, as he continues: “…and see their kids mushy little pumpkin face and they decide they want to be mommy full time. Want that wife life, you know?”

His voice is soft, cloying, and Shiv can’t take her eyes off his tragic hairline and his pallid skin, his gauche new money fuckboy jacket that he thinks makes him look like a corporate disruptor instead of a dipshit dipped in fool’s gold. Whatever look is on her face though has him dropping the photograph of her and sidling around the desk, smiling as he gets close enough to her that she can smell the acidic edge of his cologne.

“Maybe that’s not you though. After you have it, we’ll talk again, yeah? Either way, there’ll be something to celebrate, and I am…” he lowers his voice again, his gaze dropping to her breasts. “Very good at celebrating.”

“Uh-huh,” Shiv says. “Assuming I don’t have someone better to celebrate with by then.”

He just laughs again, looks up, waving Greg through the closed door, dismissing her, and Shiv swallows it she swallows it she swallows it.

It’s a memory as she leaves, not a dream, but one that feels just as vivid, just as true as the ones of DC: her and Rome on the grass below the treehouse, the rope ladder pulled eight feet up, out of reach, and Roman says he doesn’t care. Roman says he’d rather play video games or Naughty Nanny, but Shiv does care. Shiv cares because Shiv can hear them, Kendall and Stewy, laughing and talking and - - and conspiring, she knows they’re conspiring - - code words and ways to sneak out after bed time and games to play without her and she knows it, can feel it in her toes and her tummy and scratching behind her eyes, and Shiv is nine years old and Kendall is thirteen, and he thinks that just because he’s a teenager now, just because Daddy’s started calling him a man instead of a boy that he gets everything first.

She tells Roman as much, sure of it, and Roman says he doesn’t want to play their lame games anyway, and Shiv doesn’t either, but that’s not the point.

“We can climb up,” she tells him, reaching for the lowest branch of the tree, bark rough beneath her palms, and it must signal like a flare, because Mom’s yelling at her from across the garden before she’s even finished pulling herself up. Siobhan Rose Roy, who on earth do you think you are? Climbing trees like Orphan Annie. Get down from there, you’ll ruin your shoes.

And maybe she’d have been able to let it go, maybe, but after dinner, Stewy goes home and she’s up in her room and she can see it through the window, hear it. Kendall halfway up the rope ladder, Roman on his heels, talking a mile a minute about the types of bugs he thinks hobos eat, and Kendall saying I bet they eat worse than that, and she feels it again, hot as anything. Not in her tummy, but in her legs, swelling up like a rubber balloon in her chest, pushing everything else out of the way, and Roman had said he didn’t care, Roman didn’t even want to play, but he was still the one Kendall picked. It was still him that got to go up in the treehouse, it was still him Kendall snuck out of bed.

It pulses hot. Thick. Her throat closed and her legs moving before she can stop them and she storms into Kendall’s room and she spits in his bed and she yanks off the heads of all his favourite action figures and she cuts up his blanket, the stupid one he got from their old Nanny that he pretends he doesn’t still sleep with, and it didn’t make her feel any better, but at least she knew it would make Kendall feel worse.

Roman texts her again that night, not a cartoon this time at least but a comment about Connor and Willa being back in New Mexico for a few days. Finally putting the old commune on the market, should I buy it? Always thought I’d make a good cult leader, and the place has great bones. Real Waco meets Burning Man potential, hey on a related note, you heard from Kendall since you 🔪

Shiv blinks, types how the fuck is that a related note?

Adds: and maybe don’t put your cult plans in writing or you’ll be done before you even start.

Dipshit.

The typing ellipsis appears on the screen, but Shiv doesn’t wait for him to reply. She has a shower, dries her hair, tries to wash the sting of the day off, pours Tom’s favourite cologne down the sink drain, tells the chef that she feels like lamb instead of chicken for dinner and ignores the dart of pleasure she feels in Rosaline’s barely concealed look of annoyance at the late instruction, then Shiv folds back onto the couch to read the barrage of messages Roman’s sent back in the meantime.

Hmm, good advice, you’re in the cult! A high-level position in the inner sanctum. You can do whatever Gerri’s job was.

Unless you think I stand a chance of swaying Gerri…

Pretend I didn’t send that, text withdrawn, you saw nothing, if you ever bring this up you’ll be out of the cult etc etc etc

And re: K – I’ve heard word he’s 🍳

Shiv frowns at the little saucepan emoji. Cooking?

She pastes it into Google, but all she gets is hot pansexual which is definitely not what Roman means, and she’s about to send a question mark back when the door opens and Tom steps through.

The air shifts like it always seems to these days, like it has maybe since he made CEO, since he chose her father over her, or maybe even earlier, maybe since he started flirting with a prison stint. It doesn’t chill, like, god, what a fucking cliché that would be, but it feels - - tighter almost. A spring pushed down, like the weight of them is too heavy for the moment. She swallows, slides her phone into the pocket of her pants and sits up straight.

“Hey,” she says, and suddenly she realises Tom’s holding more than just his usual shit from work. In his hands is a box, which he lowers carefully to the dining room table as he pivots back to look at her on the couch.

“Hey,” he replies, and he looks almost surprised to see her here, or underprepared for her, maybe. Something. An oddly cautious expression on his often oddly cautious face, and it makes her stand up. Makes her close the distance between them, eyes first on him, then the box on the table.

“Good day at the office?”

“Sure. Matsson was in, but it sounds like you saw him.”

Shiv hums, offering nothing, and glimpses instead the top of a frame in the box.

“What’s this?”

Somewhere behind them, she can hear Rosaline in the kitchen, the fzzt of the gas stove top and the whir of the oven, can hear the hum of the central heating and feel it soft as a gloved hand on the side of her cheek, but none of it matters when she sees the first photograph.

Her father and Reagan, shoulder to shoulder, hand in short, fat fingered hand.

She glances back up at Tom, her face carefully blank.

“They’re from your dad’s office,” he tells her, like she didn’t know, like she hadn’t seen Matsson handling them hours earlier. She watches as he shrugs out of his blazer and drops it to the back of one of the chairs. Leaving it for Tilda to put away later. “I - - it’s been suggested that I move in fairly quickly, just for the. You know. The optics.”

The words settle, and right, Shiv thinks.

Right.

“Oh, sure,” she says, glib. “Clear out the ghosts.”

“Something like that. Marks a transition, I guess.”

Shiv sniffs, can’t help it, something hollowing in her chest, wondering if Matsson suggested this before or after their conversation there even though she already knows the answer. She thumbs through the photos of her father with heads of state and right-leaning leaders. A few cultural figures, a few musicians. Morrissey and Johnny Cash. That hollow feeling grows a little colder.

“Roman knows a guy,” she says, shooting for flippant. “Some sort of business shaman, if you want to waste some money making the place smell like sage.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tom replies. His hand finds the edge of the box, the opposite side to where Shiv’s are, curling tentatively around the cardboard. “We’ve packed up most of it now, but I just thought you might want these? Or your brothers might. Since they were obviously important to him.”

There’s something earnest to his tone, genuine, and she wonders if he means it, but in the same breath, she thinks these are worthless and he knows it. The only value in them the frames, the glass, the paper they’re printed on – all of them are otherwise online. Digitised in the family archive. The helmets, the medals, the war memorabilia are a different story though. She wonders if he’s kept them, if Matsson has. Her father’s lone hobby turned a spoil of war. A game of guess who this belonged to?

“I kept the photo of you.”

Shiv blinks, pulled from her thoughts.

“You kept my father’s photo of me,” she echoes, looking back up at Tom, and he must hear something in it, because he takes his hands from the edge of the box, shakes his head.

“It’s just a photo, Shiv. A nice photo.”

“Of me.”

“Of you.”

The one Matsson had his hands on in the office before he made clear she’d be fuckable to him again after she’s had this thing. The photo from the Father’s Day photoshoot. The one of her before Tom, before Waystar, back when she was working in DC, back when she was promising.

The thought sinks somewhere deep in her, and she tucks her hair behind her ear, pushes the frames back in the box until the one of her father and Reagan faces up again, and somewhere in front of her, Tom shifts his weight.

“He didn’t have any pictures of your brothers in there, you know. Guess you were the favourite.”

It’s something, she knows, an offering maybe more genuine than anything he’s offered her lately, but all she can think is what does that matter? Where the fuck has it ever gotten her?

She turns, offers him a flat smile, and Tom gives her one back.

“You heard from any of them?” he asks, reading her silence apparently as an opening. “I’ve been expecting a press conference, assassination attempt, at least a notes app diatribe on Instagram, but the radio silence feels positive, maybe? Like something new?”

And yeah, it probably does for him.

Shiv shrugs, shoulders stiff as she rounds the table, pulling her cell from her pocket and texting Roman.

So Tom’s clearing out Dad’s office.

His reply is almost instant.

Surprised it took him this long. Tell him the medals are mine.

She rolls her eyes, rocks her jaw, feels - - tense mostly. Shitty. Tries to rotate her shoulders back, loosen herself up, and she thinks Kendall would have something to say about it. That he’d see it for the territory claim it was at the very least, and she almost pulls up his number, thinks maybe this is enough to break the cold war between them right now, but stops herself.

Instead, she looks up at where Tom’s undoing his tie, his big hands making slow work of it, before she tilts her head back to the box. Is she supposed to keep them then? These photos? Pack them into storage or find places to hang them? Would her brothers want them? Would they keep them, if they were the ones they were given to? Would Kendall or Rome have left them up on the cabinet at Waystar if they’d stayed in charge? Would Shiv have, if Matsson had picked her?

The thought curdles thick as cream, and she wants a drink, so she has one.

Pours it neat at the bar in the corner of the dining room, relishing in the burn in her throat and the way it unwinds something in her tired head, and she’s pushing it to her mouth for another sip when Tom snaps, exhausted.

“For fuck’s sake, Shiv.”

She pours herself another.

Can’t you feel it?

It’s Nate’s voice, low and warm against the shell of her ear, and Shiv glances back over her shoulder, takes in the long and handsome lines of his face, clear, somehow, over the blur of the crowd around them.

“He’s gonna go all the way,” Nate says, and suddenly it’s a cacophony of sound – cheers and hollers and the fuzz of Gil’s microphone, the tenor of his voice, the laugh of one of the hosts, and Shiv feels like she’s been popped out of plastic and dropped straight into this. Into the loud and screaming moment. “I know it.”

“Okay, calm down.”

“It’s real, Shiv,” he tells her, and she feels it catch. Whatever enthusiasm that’s burning so bright in him, she feels it at the ends of her hair and the hem of her blazer, feels it start to take hold, and she hates it, she does. That her first instinct is to stamp it out. “It feels good, it feels like there’s hope. He’s the real fucking deal, and we could be the ones to get him in the House. You’ve gotta - - fuck - - you’ve gotta feel that.”

Does she? Shiv looks at him, looks back at Gil over the swollen crowd, a sea of blue, wielding banners, waving scarves, looking at him like a congregation to a pulpit at mass, like he has the answers, and does he? Fuck if Shiv knows, but she thinks this is a light through a tunnel, and she feels Nate’s body heat radiating behind her, and she might not feel Gil, but she feels that, feels it like something real, and it’s easy to lean back into him, to feel his slender, solid chest against her back, to tilt her head up, and say yeah, I feel it, to watch him smile, convinced he’s made a convert of her as he leans down and closes the distance between them, mouth wet and open and drunk on a future that won’t ever leave his imagination.

Bzzzt.

Bzzzzzzzzzt.

Shiv exhales, rolls over in bed, flailing an arm out at Tom only to find he’s still curled up asleep, his own phone blank on the bed beside him, and Shiv forces herself awake, forehead furrowed as she blinks her eyes open properly. Her cell hasn’t rung overnight since Tom was crowned, not for anything that wasn’t mom or Connor at least anyway, and she reaches over, fumbles to find a number glaring back at her that she doesn’t recognise.

Still, she answers.

“Hello, am I speaking to Siobhan Roy?”

The voice is almost hard to hear, crowded by other sounds, by background television and electronic beeps and other phones ringing and thumps and chatter. Shiv sits up a little straighter in bed, pushing the sheets down to her waist.

“You are, who’s this?”

“My name is Adaline Torres, I’m calling from the New York Presbyterian Hospital in Lower Manhattan. Your brother, Kendall Roy, has just been admitted with a suspected opioid overdose. He’s currently in critical condition. We were informed by an employee of Mr. Roy’s that you were to be called directly as his next of kin.”

There’s a thrum in Shiv’s head that sounds like a sea, a swell that crashes against the cliffs of her skull, and she swallows, tongue feels thick, eyes heavy, mind still catching up.

“Oh,” she says, curving her body away when Tom suddenly throws a hand out to palm at her hip, mumble something she doesn’t hear. “Is he - - ”

Dead, going to make it, completely fucked, she doesn’t know the question, doesn’t know what she wants to ask, and even less what she wants the answer to be. Can’t dredge her thoughts from the swell of noise in her head, and she blinks and she sees her brother wild eyed and stammering in that glass chamber at Waystar, she blinks and she sees him giggling on the kitchen counter in Barbados, she blinks and she sees him sitting opposite her at that bar in DC, when they were little more than kids, ordering them a third, fourth, fifth round until they ended up back at her apartment, prank calling Con and Rome and smoking weed so potent it took her weeks to get the smell of it out of her couch.

Now though, she just looks to her closed bedroom door, thinks she can hear Mondale snuffling from his cage in the other room, thinks she can hear Tilda using a camp light to clean the en suite so she doesn’t wake them, can see all the ways her apartment is alive while she sleeps, and fuck, why does that even matter?

“The doctors are with him now, but we’d suggest getting here as soon as possible. If you come around to the West Entrance, we’ll have security there to meet you. Do you know how to get to the West Entrance? If you have a pen and paper, I can give you instructions.”

The first thing she thinks, sliding into the cab (not trusting her driver not to report back to Tom or Matsson or whoever it is they answer to now), is that he wasn’t kidding about the horse.

Which, y’know, Shiv doesn’t know why she’s surprised by that, because Kendall wouldn’t know a joke if it stuck its finger in his eye and its dick up his ass. Kendall never grew a funny bone, never inherited Dad’s hard wit or their mother’s snide one, and it was always a point of pride for her. Always felt like it meant something that she could prize a smile from the maws of monsters while Kendall was only ever offered scorn. A gecko that thought it was king cobra. Flat toothed and soft jawed while she was the one with fangs, and she’d loved it as a girl, when she was young and stupid enough to think it meant anything.

The thought now makes her sniff, push herself back into the cracked leather seats, try to remember the instructions the woman on the phone had given her, and yeah, she thinks, Kendall’s not funny, but maybe life is, because it’s there, in the back of that shitty yellow cab at two in the morning, that she feels it move for the first time.

It feels like this:

A flutter, the tug of a mascara brush through lashes, the flap of a butterfly’s wings, caught between your hands. Nothing at all and everything at once, and there is someone growing inside her and she has lost everything but this. Tom’s anchor laid clean in her, dragging her across the sea floor, a tether, the old ball and chain. All she’s good for, less than she deserves, or maybe more. A womb with a view, a maker of a monster, or worse, another hurt and angry child, and she feels ill, feels violent, feels vile.

She asks the driver to pull over so she can puke her guts out into a cold Manhattan street.

Do you feel it? Nate had asked her, eyes on Gil, that afternoon in DC.

Is it real? Tom had asked her, eyes on her, that night on the floor that was supposed to be hers.

The lights glow yellow through the glass doors of the hospital, and it’s Colin there who greets her, not hospital security, standing like fucking Lurch at the mouth of the Addams’ Family home. Shiv nods at him as she strides up the stairs, failing to hide her surprise even as she falls into step beside him.

“He wasn’t long in emergency,” he tells her as he leads her in, the bustle of the hospital loud around them as they quickly get to one of the elevators. Colin takes out a key from his pocket – one presumably given to him by the hospital staff – to unlock a floor on the elevator pad. “I made sure they moved him to a private ward as soon as one was ready, and I’ve called the firm to send someone over with the NDAs. They’ll be discreet.”

“Right,” Shiv sniffs. The elevator lights are glaring, the music tinny through the speakers, and Christ, she just feels sick. She presses a hand to her mouth. She can still taste vomit. “And how did this happen exactly?”

“I don’t know all the details at this stage. He’d given me the week off, said he had some strategic planning to do in light of the recent events, so I was at home. A sum of money was paid to me this evening. Not of my usual salary. I wasn’t expecting it, so I went to discuss the matter, and…”

His weird robot voice trails off, Shiv can’t look at him, wets her lips.

“A sum of money?”

“A substantial sum of money. It was deposited into my bank account.”

Shiv nods, not entirely able to process it.

“Have you called Rome and Con? Rava?”

“No, he only had listed Mr. Roy - - Mr. Roy Senior, that is, and you as the next of kin, so I thought I should follow the established protocol.”

The established protocol, right. That makes more sense than her being listed as next of kin after the last two weeks, but then maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Kendall hadn’t changed it on purpose, maybe Kendall wanted her to be the first to know when he died (has to get the last word somehow, fucking prick), maybe he didn’t think Rome or Con could handle it, maybe he just didn’t think she’d show. Shiv blinks, sucks on her teeth, feels the elevator judder to a stop.

“Okay, well, in future, he does anything like this again, you call all three of us, yeah? Actually, he does this again, you just call Connor.”

Colin nods, expression carefully blank as the doors open, and Shiv steps out into the quiet of the private ward. They’re barely a few paces down the hall when a nurse appears in front of them, grim-faced and tired.

“Siobhan Roy? Just this way.”

Here’s how it went: Narcan and CPR at the scene and Narcan and CPR in the ambulance and Narcan and CPR in emergency. A mechanical ventilator now he’s here, 100 grams of activated charcoal, fluids. Endless dripping bags of fluid, and now endless fucking questions: do you know what he uses, has he done this before, when was the last time you heard from him, did he appear sober then, how long has he been sober (was he even sober these last few months at all?)

Any information you can give us will help.

Can you give us any information at all?

(There’s a world, she thinks, where the last thing she ever says to her brother is Fuck you.

There’s a world, she thinks, where the last thing she ever heard him say was Shiv, no, wait.)

“Well, isn’t this pleasant?” Roman says, tugging off his coat in the private waiting room that had been organised for them, and Shiv, despite herself, felt something in her breathe a little easier.

It’s not that she’d been waiting for him exactly, not even that she’d been waiting for long. It can’t have been more than a half hour since she’d called him, tight voiced and short worded because it was all she could manage, and Roman hadn’t asked questions. Wasn’t in the habit of it anymore, at least not when it came to Kendall, but he’d told her he was on his way and to call him if there were any changes before he hung up, only to call her straight back and tell her to leave him on the line so he could listen, like there was anything to hear but Shiv’s unsteady breathing and the vague distant sound of nurses’ feet. Still, she’d left him on speaker until the elevator had made him lose reception, and she’d never say it, but maybe it had helped.

Made her at least feel slightly less alone in this claustrophobic, cheaply-fit little waiting room.

Now though, Roman tosses his coat over the arm of the chair and pulls her into an awkward hug, the sort of two-armed affair they’ve never been especially good at without Kendall there to pull them closer.

“It’s insane they don’t set these rooms up better,” Roman says, voice a little hoarse as he lets her go. He waves a flippant hand out before he laps it, frowning at the creamy painted walls, the small birch topped counter, and the magazine rack in the corner filled with faded newspapers from three weeks ago – their father’s obituary still in the cover headlines. “A TV, a bar, some vitamin drips. Big Pharma would kill to sponsor it, set these things up with drug samples. Nothing hard, just like, y’know, Viagra, Valium and diet pills.”

Shiv snorts, wrapping her cardigan around herself as she slides back down into one of the round-backed bucket seats.

“Package it up as the Roman Roy experience, your contribution to US healthcare,” she counters, and it’s not particularly good, but Roman gives her a half grin anyway. He looks oddly put together, in slacks and a navy button down to her t-shirt and cardigan (which sure, are bambi silk and cashmere respectively, but still), and his stitches have mostly healed since she saw him last, although the skin is still a liverish yellow around it, the last gasp of a bruise drawing a muddy line down his forehead.

He looks weirdly better in general, Shiv thinks, watching him collapse backwards onto one of the other bucket seats. Like maybe the last two weeks without Waystar (without them) has been good for him, and briefly, it’s hard to stomach. That he could’ve squirmed out of this intact when she and Kendall - - well.

Not a good thought.

Her stomach turns with it, acidy and unpleasantly full, even though she hasn’t eaten in hours, and she sniffs, looks down at the ugly woollen carpet of the waiting room. Let’s her attention fix on a few pilled spots – dragged, probably, by chair legs – before she sits back and crosses her legs.

“They tell you anything when you got out of the elevator?” she asks. “They haven’t updated me since I got here.”

“Probably nothing new then,” he replies. “Narcan, charcoal, machines, still critical, etcetera, then they started the usual interrogation like they haven’t been reading about his tweaker ass in Page Six for the last quarter of a fucking century. Hey, did you see the nurse with the weird mole? I’m pretty sure she treated him last time.”

Shiv frowns.

“You mean she treated Dad at Mount Sinai?”

“No, I mean Ken after a bender. Maybe not at this hospital, but nurses move around and shit, right?”

And honestly, Shiv doesn’t think that’s entirely fair. She knows he’s been using again, knew he relapsed in New Mexico, but he’s also been himself still. Hasn’t been frequenting hospital like it was the office like he was in those months before he and Rava split, or in his college party days. She shifts her weight, uncomfortable with the sliver of protectiveness she feels for him suddenly, and she hears the chair sigh beneath her as she watches Roman fold his arms over his chest, gaze fixing on the ceiling.  

“Come on,” she says. “It’s been a while since we were last here with Ken. Like, he’s been drinking, obviously, but he’d been - - he’s been better.”

Across the narrow space between them, Roman just gives her a disbelieving look.

“Are you serious? You remember he almost drowned like, three months ago, right? Like did you read the tox report from Italy?”

Shiv blinks, mouth open for a second, gaze darting over Roman’s face, trying to tell if he’s fucking with her. When she can’t tell, she just asks it:

“No, did you?”

“Dad left it out for me.”

Which - -

What?

“Dad left it out for you,” she says, flat, eyebrows raised, and Roman nods, shrugs, arms still crossed over his chest as he lies sideways in the bucket seat, and Shiv leans forwards in hers.

“Oh, in one of your super-secret meetings?”

“Yep.”

Roman pops the P, shifting down enough that his ass hits the arm of the seat and his legs are slung fully over it, getting comfortable as Shiv leans forwards, apparently un-fucking-bothered by her tone. “Always love to see what’s floating around our big brother’s insides. A lot, by the way. Really loved the downers that weekend though. Shouldn’t be surprised, you know he loves a race to the bottom.”

The thought sits somewhere strange in her, and Shiv’s not entirely sure why. Not that there’s not plenty of reasons – this is the sort of disgusting shit Rome always got up to with Dad, the fucking brown noser, only way he ever won was when she and Ken both had already lost, but it’s still something. The knowledge that Roman would be willing to read it. Would she? If Dad had offered it to her? Fuck, the fact that Dad would pull that information at all, but then—

That tightness, back in her chest.

Did he know about that because Comfrey had called them, or did he know about it because he just knew? And if he knew that, could pull those files, did he know she was—

No, God, he would’ve said something. Wouldn’t have Tom taking appointments with every divorce lawyer worth anything, would’ve wanted that line of inheritance secured for the grandchild she’d give him, wouldn’t have left that distance stretch between them, he would’ve wanted hers, even if he never really wanted—

Ken’s.

Fuck.

Ken.

She swallows, her throat rough, glances back up at Roman, who’s gone back to staring at the ceiling.

“Well,” she says. “I doubt it’s the same nurse that it was in Italy.”

“I meant before that,” Roman clarifies. “March Mania of 2013, that one where he was really…” he makes a cuckoo sound. “…before rehab tour number 134. The spring we thought his nose was going to fall off.”

And okay, sure, Shiv thinks, squinting a little back at Roman, and she doesn’t remember that one so well. Thinks maybe it was when she back in DC, when she and PK were imploding, right before she met Tom, and that’s not an especially good thought either. God, she’s just tired already, and it looks like Roman is too, because his hands find his knees, drumming out a dumb little rhythm in that way he does to get rid of nervous energy, and she opens her mouth to say something, what, she’s not sure, when suddenly Colin’s slunk in.

“I got through to Connor,” Colin says, and right, she forgot she’d asked him to do that. “He’s been back in New Mexico at the ranch with his wife, but he’s heading to the air strip now. ETA probably five to six hours.”

ETA five to six hours, Shiv thinks, glancing at Roman who drops his chin to hide a smirk. Who the fuck even talks like that?

“Thanks, Colin,” she says, and when he doesn’t leave right away, she adds: “We’ll let you know when we need you again.”

It’s enough at least to make him slip back out, and Shiv follows him with her gaze, seeing his hulking form move down the hall through the narrow glass panel on the door. It’s not that she’d never had security, or even assistants, but she’s never had them in the way Dad and Ken did. Do. Never pulled them close enough they thought they should stick around past the cursory, and the thought sticks somewhere funny. Gum to a synapse. She looks back at Roman.

“Did you know Colin works for Ken now?”

“Yeah, he cozied up to him at Dad’s funeral.”

Which—

Shiv blinks.

Did she know that?

She wracks her head for it, tries to remember if Kendall had mentioned it, or if she’d seen Colin following Ken around like the Ghost of Christmas Past in the hours between the funeral and Barbados and the board meeting, but nothing comes to mind. Colin’s felt like part of the furniture since Dad hired him though, like a particularly imposing, vaguely sentient bookshelf, but she thought they put him on the curb for collection and now he’s appearing in rooms he shouldn’t. Apparently at invitation. She frowns, squinting back at Roman.

“Do you know why?”

“He was Dad’s ratfucker, wasn’t he?”

Rolling her eyes, Shiv leans back in her chair, drops her arms over the sides and gestures with open hands.

“He was Dad’s muscle.”

“Sure, that too, also his body burier bestie,” Roman concedes, then, with a little kick of his leg, he adds: “Dad liked people who could be more than one thing though. Probably why he never liked any of us.”

The words are offered so casually, so flippantly, that they almost take Shiv by surprise. Sneak up on her in a way she’s not expecting, and she shakes her head, feels them heavy, strange, unorganised in her chest, and exhales. This fucking morning.

“He loved us,” she says, because if there’s nothing else, at least she knows that, and she’s not going to let Roman poison that well at 2.30 in the morning in a fucking hospital waiting room.

“Yeah,” Roman agrees. “But that’s different. Like I love you, but I don’t like you, y’know? And I definitely don’t fucking like Kendall, so.”

“Don’t.”

The words come out of her faster, sound deeper than she’d expected. Torn from somewhere guttural, and she doesn’t even know why. She knows she doesn’t like him, has hated him sometimes, hates him maybe even now, in this moment, but there’s a wall between them right now and he might not come back around it, and she just - - she can’t, maybe. Fuck.

If it surprised her, it seems to surprise Roman too, who suddenly swings his legs around to sit up properly, his attention fixed on her face and he’s seeing something, maybe, that she doesn’t want him to be seeing.

“Oh, are we lying to ourselves in case he—” Roman mimes cutting his throat, and Shiv shoves herself up to her feet, fists her hips, walks over to the window. Sure and steady steps that might be able to stamp this dread out of her, all of this shit that she’s struggling to keep at bay.

“He won’t die,” Roman tells her, and she can’t see him now, but he sounds so fucking sure. “Trust me, he doesn’t actually want to be alone with Dad in the PetCo Mausoleum. He’ll wait for Connor to pop off before he jumps off Hudson Yards.”

Her breath hitches, despite herself.

“You’re an asshole.”

“He won’t die,” Roman says again, and Shiv thinks how can you know? Shiv thinks he could, Shiv thinks he’s been on borrowed time since Italy, since earlier, since God knows fucking when.

She thinks the last text he sent her was you ready for this?

She thinks obviously fucking not.

There’s something to hospitals that always feels timeless. Not in the sense of architecture or design of course – Shiv doesn’t think anything says 2010 corporate chic like the particular brand of fluorescent lighting and fissured ceiling tiles she’s staring up at right now – but in the sense that time seems to stop moving at a normal speed. Like they find the elastic in every second of every minute and stretch until they start to tear. Like hours are something malleable instead of unrelenting and the fabric of the night, day, whatever, can be cut, torn and restitched until you’re left thinking it’s been days even as the first bleed of sunrise drips down the Manhattan skyline.

Which: right.

Only two or three hours then.

She hasn’t slept so she hasn’t dreamt, which is a relief more than anything. She’s not sure she could live down mumbling about DC with Roman in the room playing Candy Crush on his phone, and her gaze skirts back over to him sprawled out in the chair opposite her, his eyes glazed and his fingers swiping up over jellybeans and lemon drops. He hadn’t turned the sound off, and when she’d asked him to, he’d only turned it up, so the tinkly music and the whooshes of matched pixels echoes loud in her ears. She makes a point of huffing loudly, elbow on the arm of the chair, chin dropped to her raised fist.

Roman’s attention darts up to meet hers at the sound, eyebrow raised, and she gives him a flat look back, before turning her attention to the closed door behind him and the long, narrow plaque on the top of it. The Bloom Room. Then, smaller underneath, generously donated by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

A project, maybe, for her. Something she could do, finance a waiting room, a ward, an entire hospital wing. It’s not Waystar, but she might be done humiliating herself there after yesterday, and it’s not DC, but DC won’t have her back after Mencken (at least not the part she’d be willing to work with) and this is - - something. A heart foundation for Dad, or if Kendall dies, she could open a rehab in his name, which he’d fucking hate, and the thought makes her snort even as it takes hold. She shifts her weight in her seat.

She can see the angles, the headlines – keeping the memory of her brother alive, helping others in the way she could never help him – Global Woman would run it, piece of cake, but maybe Forbes would too, Time, god, if she could get it into Harvard Business Review, like the cap for all the puff pieces they ever ran about him in their bullshit alumni section.

The thought twists, sour but strong, and she likes it as it sinks lower, aches in her belly, and she blinks away the pressure that hasn’t shifted from behind her eyes.

Let’s make it a deal, she thinks to him. You don’t make it out of this, if you leave that vote our last conversation, I’ll do this to you. I’ll make sure that when people think of you they never think almost heir, they’ll just think junkie with a death wish. A wet eyed, track marked embarrassment. I’ll humiliate you, I’ll ruin whatever’s left of you, if you die, I’ll hate you more than I ever have, if you die—

A flutter, a kick.

Shiv’s throat closes, her chest tight, glancing down at her swelling belly. Her skin crawls as she counts to ten.

An hour later, maybe more, and her cell buzzes on the table.

She doesn’t even have to look to know who it is, knows Tom will be in the office already, enjoying the relative privacy the early morning hours allow him before the day kicks off, so yeah. She doesn’t look, but Roman does, glancing up from where he’s been scribbling in a crossword in the crusty-paged magazine he’d turned up from the rack in the corner and promptly humming.

“A seven-letter word for offence or annoyance,” he says. “W-a-m-b-g-a-n-s.”

“That’s eight letters,” Shiv replies easily, turning her attention back to the ceiling as Roman clicks his thumb and finger. She’s been tracing around the tiles in her head, running races with herself to pass the time in between correcting Roman’s truly awful fucking spelling (“Maybe I have undiagnosed dyslexia,” he’d told her twenty minutes ago, and flipped her off when Shiv had replied “Sure, and maybe if you’d spent more time sexting instead of sending eggplant emojis and dick pics you’d know that phallic is spelt with a ph and not an f. Is this why you could never actually fuck Gerri? You couldn’t spell your room number?”)

“Darn,” Roman says now, tossing the pen down and reaching for her phone. She moves faster than she has in a week, swiping it off the table and lurching up to her feet. “You don’t want me to answer it? Talk to Tommee Tippee for you?”

“Oh, absolutely fucking not.”

Roman just laughs, the high pitched, nasal one that makes him sound like a cartoon character, and Shiv rolls her eyes, rejecting Tom’s call and wandering back over to the window. There’s not really much to look at. The building too few storeys to make for a view, and so she’s left looking at a few bare-branched trees and the concrete walls of the hospital’s second wing. It’s enough to make her drop her gaze to the road below, looking over the smattering of people gathered near the ambulance entrance, and then, further down, she sees Colin, square shouldered, puffing on a cigarette.

Did she tell him to stay? Go? She can’t remember. Thinks maybe someone should when Roman’s voice sounds behind her.

“We have movement.”

Shiv blinks, spinning on the spot to where a tall woman in a white coat is moving down the hallway towards them, visible through the glass panel on the door. Her dark hair is streaked grey and her skin lined, but her hands don’t shake when she opens the door towards them. This is real, Shiv thinks, heart thumping somewhere in her feet, her gaze darting to where Roman’s attention is fixed on the woman, and he must see it before she does, because it’s instant, the way the tension unwinds between his shoulders.

“Ms. and Mr. Roy? My name’s Doctor Lane. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that your brother’s stable.”

“Matter of opinion,” Roman replies, and Shiv doesn’t even have it in her to give him a look, the blood rushing through her ears, her chest loosening, her body aching, the start of a headache pounding between her eyes, and she hears Lane say something else, hears Roman reply, but all she can think is he’s okay. He’s okay he’s okay he’s okay. The relief is enough to make her sway, to catch her breath, to feel her way back into herself, but it’s short lived. The relief. Chased by something really fucking hot. Shiv swallows thick, blinks her eyes back open (when had she even closed them?) and stares at the pilled carpet.

“…not awake yet, but he’s breathing on his own, so we’ve been able to take him off ventilation. You can continue to wait here until he wakes up, but I can also take you to see him now if you’d like.”

The moment pulses, heavy as a heartbeat, and Shiv can’t think straight, can’t see her way through the moment, can’t untangle her thoughts, but then Roman’s nodding, and he finger guns the doctor before giving her a lacklustre thumbs up, and when he starts walking, all that’s left for Shiv to do is follow.  

Kendall’s room is nothing like Dad’s was, if only because walking into it feels like walking into an actual hospital room. The sort Shiv’s used to seeing on TV or in photo spreads in magazines about resource shortages and budget cuts. All white walls and sand-beige timber cabinets and plastic motorised blinds. It stinks too – that particular combination of sweat and bleach and talcum powder that reminds Shiv of being eleven and having her appendix out, that reminds her of being thirteen and sitting at the foot of Kendall’s bed the first time he did this.

The thought makes her look at him, still and sunken in the middle of the starched hospital sheets, his skin sallow and his lips bruised and swollen from where they would’ve been stretched around the breathing tube, and she’s glad at least that they took it out before they came and got them. He looks six and he looks sixty and nothing in between, and Shiv takes a breath, nods, as Roman slowly says:

“There he…is.”

“I’ll give you a minute with him and then we can have a chat about next steps,” Lane says, which Shiv knows means: psych assessment, rehab, NA, therapy, like he hasn’t learnt how to talk circles around all of them with a million half-truths, prince of bullshit that he is. Now though, Shiv raises her eyebrows, but nods, says yeah, sure, as Roman gives her eyes over Kendall’s bed, waiting for Lane to slip out of the room before he shuffles around the foot of Kendall’s bed. He grimaces, scratches at the back of his head, before glancing around the white walls.

“Should we get him a nicer room? A suite or something?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Seems like something he’d do for us.”

Shiv scoffs. Can’t help it, the sound torn from her throat before she can close her fist around it. That red hot feeling is back, soaking through the bones of her.

“For him to do it for us, we’d have to be playing drugstore cowboy at one am on a fucking Wednesday, so I think it’s probably a moot point. Besides, he won’t even be in here long, they always discharge junkies at the first possible opportunity.”

“Oh, sure, drains on the system,” Roman says. “Roll ‘em back into the gutter, couldn’t agree more, but Kendall’s not - - you know. A regular junkie, he’s a cool junkie, or no. Not cool, blegh. Rich. Could buy the hospital rich, and so are we, so he could stay longer. We could make him stay longer. Bury them in demands for tests.”

For a moment, Shiv just stares at him, forehead creased, curious.

“You want to keep him here?”

“No, I mean—” Roman cuts himself off, exhales a hoarse breath, glancing back at Kendall in the bed, before staring pointedly at the floor. “I don’t mean like, pull a Con’s-mom on him or whatever, but I like knowing he’s not having his bones pecked clean by seagulls somewhere, and I like it when someone who’s qualified to actually deal with him is the one looking after him. That way maybe we could like. Talk. Maybe.”

The monitor beeps rhythmically behind them, and Shiv watches Roman avoid her gaze, and she chews on the prospect. Keeping Kendall in here, or even not here. Pushing him back into rehab, doing the whole dog and pony show again as Kendall cycles through sobriety and, inevitably, the blame game of who did what when to make him guzzle speedballs in meth dungeons, before he inevitably relapses again and they end up right back here. She wets her lips, looks over at Kendall, and she can’t see his face properly from this angle, and it shouldn’t be, but it’s a relief more than anything.

“It’s not our problem,” she says slowly. “That he can’t look after himself.”

Roman huffs out a disbelieving laugh.

“Really? I mean, you kind of did kill him.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she bites, and Roman rolls his eyes, squares his shoulders

“Yeah, sure, fuck me, but you’re the one who voted no.”

Which - - Shiv glowers, gestures broadly at him, like Jesus fucking Christ.

“You’re the one who told him his kids didn’t count.”

“Please, he can’t even remember their names.”

He tosses it out like a joke, the way he would if Kendall were awake and ignoring him, but Kendall’s not awake, can’t bear the brunt of Roman’s stupid asshole comments, and Shiv’s just pissed off and tired and she doesn’t even know what she’s still doing here. She starts towards the window, then changes her mind, rounding the bed instead, and at the gleam of a silver clipboard clasp, she pulls a chart from the slot at the base of Kendall’s bed, pretends to read it if for no other reason than Roman read his last tox report, and he must know it, because Roman snorts, adopts a voice:

“What’s the verdict, Nurse Roy? Will he make it?”

“Fuck off,” she says, eyes skirting numbers that make no sense to her, then adds: “Can you go see where Con’s at?”

Roman snorts.

“What am I, your bitch boy? Do it yourself.”

“I left my cell in the waiting room so I wouldn’t have to deal with Tom’s calls, can you just - - do it?”

He rolls his eyes, then tilts at the hips in a quasi bow, casting one last uncomfortable look over at Kendall before he peels out of the room, and it’s a relief, then. To watch Roman disappear from view. Something else to pull her cell out of her pocket and take photos of each page of Kendall’s med report to send to someone qualified to read for her at some point in the not-too-distant future.

It’s only then, with the thrum and the beeps of the machines at his bedside, that Shiv’s able to slot the clipboard away and inch over to Kendall’s bedside. The weird thing is that it doesn’t feel weird at all, to see him like this. Bruised at the mouth and beneath the eyes, lashes longer than she ever remembers and wet like he’d been crying in his sleep, his chest sunk and his nostrils circled with the last few flecks of dried blood.

There’s a feeling creeping beneath her skin, and it feels - - not good, but not bad either. Something in her sated seeing him like this, alive but imploded. Something in her proven right. He never could’ve done it. He didn’t deserve it. Fucking asshole, fucking disaster. She feels saliva build behind her molars, the urge to tear, bite, scream only ever bested by this, and she spits at him, not at his face, but his neck, and then, just as instant, the hot flush of - - something. Not shame, not regret, because she doesn’t feel either of those things (she doesn’t), but whatever it is, it stings at her eyes, and she fumbles in her pockets for a tissue or handkerchief to wipe it off, but she can’t find one, so she does it with her fingers instead.

And maybe that was a mistake, because now she’s left with the delicate thrum of his pulse, a moth caught beneath the seal of her hand, some fluttering, fragile thing.

Kendall’s run cold since they were kids, that’s always been in him. Always needed extra blankets, thicker coats, gloves when they were little until Dad’s heavy hand circled his wrist to yank them off his fingers, telling him, them, everyone in hearing range that they made him look like a lily-livered pansy. He’s never felt this cold though, this clammy, sweating out whatever smack-laced concoction is dripping through his system.

The sticky seal of the door jamb sounds and Shiv leaps backwards, relieved to find it’s the nurse not Roman stepping back into the room. She swallows, suddenly embarrassed to have been touching her brother at all.

“Sorry if I startled you,” the nurse says, and Shiv stands a little taller. Doesn’t acknowledge it, just says:

“Uh, he’s - - um. He’s cold?”

“I swear they never get the heating right in this place. There are extra blankets in here,” the nurse tells her, moving towards one of the sandy-beige cabinets and pulling the doors open. It reveals a neat stack of sheets and blankets, extra pillows, towels, even a hot water bottle. “You’re welcome to grab them as you think he needs them.”

Shiv doesn’t move though, isn’t sure in the moment that she entirely remembers how, and when the nurse pulls one out – something big and knit and the same shade of baby blue as Kendall’s nanny-knit childhood blanket – Shiv briefly feels like she can’t breathe.

She clears her throat, slipping out of the room so she doesn’t have to watch the nurse tuck Kendall in like their mother never did.

She should go.

To the condo or to Waystar or to Nate’s or to a fucking bar where she can drink herself stupid and take home someone mean, and she’s going to, she thinks. She is, sniffing, doing the buttons up on her cardigan in preparation for the cold outside the hospital, but then she’s halfway down the hall and Roman’s walking back towards her, his face still intent on his cell, fingers working rapidly as he writes god knows what.

Before she can think better of it, she stops.

“You get through to Con?”

Roman glances up at her, quick as anything, before dropping his gaze back to his phone, forehead drawn and finger fed into his mouth. He frowns, and Shiv does too.

“Yeah, there’s a hold up at the airstrip,” he tells her, typing one handed now. “The PJ had an engine issue or something, so they’re waiting to see if they can use one of the others. If they can’t, they’re gonna need to fucking like, charter something, so I’m trying to get one of the shitkickers on that now, but New Jess isn’t answering.”

“You’re texting Ken’s assistant?”

“I fired mine last week.”

Figures.

“Isn’t it a five-hour flight to New Mexico?”

“Something like that.”

Shiv exhales, feels a little lightheaded suddenly, and she turns sideways, shuffling back until she can lean against the wall, the plaster of it cool against her shoulders. They have this section of the hospital to themselves at least, not quite a wing, but maybe a thumb. A short, fat section of corridor with a few empty rooms and a security guard stationed at the mouth of the elevator. She wonders if it’ll be the same when she has this thing, baby, whatever, but the thought just makes her feel vaguely nauseous again.

Her hand finds her thigh, flattens there, grips at a part of herself that still feels like hers, and she’s almost relieved when a soft thud sounds against the wall beside her. Roman, mirroring her pose. He makes a noise, like he’s debating whether or not to tell her something, and then finally just comes out with it.

“So I called mom too.”

And yeah, okay, maybe that figures as well.

She wets her lips, glancing up at the high ceiling of the corridor, the hospital fluorescents bright enough to make her eyes hurt. If she trained her ears enough, she thinks she could hear the scratch of the nurse’s pen and the blip of Kendall’s heart monitor.

“Yeah?” she asks after a second, flat. “We need to help her charter a jet too?”

A breath that could almost be a laugh sounds from her brother, an answer in and of itself, but he still says it.

“Peter’s got a thing, so.”

“Uh-huh. Sure,” she says, and she glances over at where Roman’s beside her, staring at the floor, his mouth curved down and his forehead furrowed, and it’s not like she wants to be here either, she thinks. Fuck, maybe there’s a version of her that isn’t. A Shiv that plays daughter, sister, mom like mom, a Shiv that wears family like a dress for special occasions but leaves it in the closet the rest of the year. Could slip it back on for Ken’s next manic wedding or Roman’s next lonely dinner party, could spend a New York winter in a Southern Hemisphere summer, fucking pool boys and learning croquet, could leave Tom in the office and the baby in boarding school, live a whole life removed.

She could be that Shiv right now, could walk out that door knowing her brother’s alive and who’d blame her?

(There’s a version of her too, maybe, she thinks, that never left her husband’s bed last night.

Who didn’t even come here at all.)

By 10, Roman’s driving her so insane that she gives him her assistant’s number to call instead of New Jess’, tells him to wrangle her to get them changes of clothes, get her to read the temperature on media pick up and talk to Karolina (off the record, if she can), whatever, anything that gets him out of her hair and into someone else’s. He balks, of course he balks, but she thinks a part of him likes it too for the way he calls her a bitch before he disappears to do just that. Likes being told what to do in the same way that Kendall likes his stupid little projects, and the thought of the latter makes her huff as she watches the nurse check Kendall’s blood pressure.

The band swells around his arm, making his fingers twitch, and the nurse takes the opportunity to reach for the latter, adjusting where the IV catheter is snaking between his knuckles to bruise the flat back of his hand. She turns it, runs her own hand back up his arm, frowning at something she sees there, and Shiv sits up a little straighter before she’s even realised she’s doing it. Gaze fixed on the nurse as she tugs off the blood pressure band and lifts his arm, checks his arm pit, then moves to the end of the bed, tugging up the sheets until Kendall’s pale, bony feet are exposed.

“Everything okay?” Shiv asks, and the nurse glances back, nods, like she’d forgotten Shiv was even there, before she seems to think better of it. She tilts her head, gesturing Shiv over.

It feels weird in the moment of it. To be summoned like a child, but she stands up anyway, walks over, and is left only to stare as the nurse spreads her brother’s toes and shows her the slashes of purple between them.

“His arms are actually pretty clean – no recent injection marks, and only one collapsed vein, but - - ” she nods down at his feet. “Some people are pretty good at finding places to hide it.”

Shiv stares at the bruises, the sprawling violet and the yellowing edges. His nails have been cut too low, one at an odd angle, exposing naked red flesh below, like it was broken before he cut it. Maybe a kicked table leg or a fall, she doesn’t know. His body isn’t familiar in the way it was in childhood, in the way it was during long summers at the beach or the winter they spent in the hot springs at Pamukkale. Now, he just feels foreign to her.

“Can you tell how old it is?” she asks, and the nurse tilts her head back and forth, pulling the blanket back down to cover Kendall’s feet.

“The bruise? Few days maybe. Could be an indication this was accidental though. Intentional overdoses aren’t usually hidden so well.”

“Maybe,” Shiv says, and there must be something in her voice because the nurse looks at her properly, face carefully sympathetic.

“He done something like this before?”

She thinks sure, she thinks everything’s an accident so long as you have plausible deniability, nothing ever happens if no one’s seen you do it. She thinks my brother’s a snake in the grass, a kicked dog, a lamb in wolf’s clothing, a rabbit-heart in a hollow chest, who knows what he is what he wants what he’s capable of. Who knows if he ever means anything at all.

She exhales, shrugs, says:

“Who knows, he’s not really an honest sort of guy, so.”

“Try not to take it personally, all addicts lie,” the nurse says, and Shiv blinks, twists to stare back at the nurse who opens her mouth like she might say something else, only her pager beeps. She nods apologetically, drops her clipboard back into the slot at the end of Kendall’s bed, and Shiv watches her go. Watches the other woman disappear down the hall, to another patient, another life, another something, and Shiv turns back, stares at her brother’s limp, unfamiliar body, and she remembers a hundred lies in what feels like seconds. Remembers every fib, every broken promise, every half-truth, every omission. She remembers him at seven, eight, telling her she wasn’t really their sister (that her real parents would come back for her one day), it’s why her hair was orange instead of brown, she remembers him telling her brussels sprouts cured chickenpox to make her eat his the winter she had it, she remembers him telling Nate she had crabs to stop him trying to fuck her the first time they met (not that it stopped either of them). She remembers lies about spilt milk and friends that he’d slept with and who’d puked in their mother’s hydrangeas, lies about where he was going, where he’d been, what he’d done, what he’d taken.

About boys he’d killed, head in hands, in the dustbowl behind their mother’s wedding.

The last one - - it still stings. Smarts.

Is enough to make her lips thin, because it had felt real, it had, his shoulder damp with sweat and his voice wobbly, and she turns. Fists her hips, something furious and aching stirring low in her, and she looks at the window, looks out of it, wonders how far away Roman is, if she should tell Colin to keep an eye out for him, and then - -

Shiv blinks.

Colin.

Something slides into place.

“Yeah,” she exhales, turning back to Kendall, her whole body suddenly thrumming. “Okay.”

Once she’s thought it, she can’t unthink it.

Like it’s a piece she was missing, a bridge discovered, a hole re-stitched, and she can still see the seams, can still see what lies beneath, the gap glaring back at her, but she thinks she can see her way over it too. Thinks maybe she can see her way back, can see this thing whole again, and it’s enough to move her feet. To get her back to the elevator, to get her down, get her out, ignoring the vague faces of recognition from those she passes, and she doesn’t care, doesn’t have it in her to take it, just feels this sudden and searing purpose ripe in her.

And she finds him.

Colin.

Right where she knew she would, still slipped away around the side of the hospital, puffing away on a cheap cigarette, his body hunched and his eyes glazed from lack of sleep, and she feels steadier, surer, than she has in weeks as she beelines towards him.

“Hey,” she says, catching his attention, grinning, sharkish, when he stands up a little straighter in reply. “Can I have one of those?”

Nodding down at the cigarette between his fingers, Shiv comes to a stop in front of him, the winter chill pinching the shells of her ears, her wrists, her hands, as the sound of flustered paramedics unloading patients from the backs of ambulances echoes behind them. Colin blinks at her, then glances down at her belly, but when she arches an eyebrow back at him, he pulls the box out easy, taps one out for her to take. She does, and he lights it, cupping his hand against the breeze for her, ever of service.

She takes a drag, resisting the urge to grimace at the taste. She’s had something similar before – back at Spence, when Angelina Bromley would steal them from her maid’s room to smoke with Dalton boys on the grass around the Jackie O Reservoir – but it’s been a while since she smoked anything cheaper than Salem’s. Still, that’s not really the point right now. She leans sideways, pressing her shoulder against the concrete wall of the hospital, looking up at Colin.

“You really were with Dad for everything, huh?” she tells him, flicking on the end of the cigarette, letting ash tumble off the end. “Just his number one shitkicker. Ratfucker Colin.”

If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it, and Shiv almost appreciates it. He’s not easy to read, but then neither is she. She takes another drag, holds it, exhales. Waits until the smoke is wavering between them before she speaks again.   

“Why did Kendall give you that money before he did this? Because see, I have a theory, I do, and I think it has something to do with that waiter at my wedding, and I think you know exactly what happened, because I think Dad got you to clean it up.”

And oh, she more than thinks it. Suddenly, she’s just so fucking sure, because the question is never if Kendall lied, it’s when he did, and this is the only way this year makes any fucking sense. The fallout of the bear hug and that wax-faced interview and the months and months of the sad sack dick sucking broken robot act. It’s his head against her shoulder in their father’s office, the look on his face when it was meant to be her, the shoplifting, the betrayal, the private meeting, the pool. It’s her brother, reckless and stupid and always so fucking guilty, but her brother.

Hers.

She knows him.

She knows what he’s capable of, and suddenly – so fucking sure – she thinks she knows when he’s lying.

Opposite her now, Colin doesn’t say anything, just stares back at her, stone-faced. Shiv wets her lips, tastes the smoke on them, and she can feel it. This truth, wriggling its way back into her reach.

More than just the truth.

A big fucking win.

“He will never protect you like Dad did,” she says, her voice low and hard and really fucking honest, because this - - she knows this too. “He doesn’t have it in him. Can’t even, maybe, now that he’s out. But I can. I’m still in, I have connections, I’m a locked fucking box. I can keep all your dirty little secrets secret, and you know I can, because you’ve seen me keep mine, but to do that, you need to tell me exactly what happened. In detail.”

And he does.

Once she’s seen it, she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to unsee it.

That scar on his wrist, deeper than it should be. An image comes with it – Kendall bleeding through his soaked Tom Ford, shaking, crying, crawling back to a wedding reception she only vaguely remembers seeing him dancing at. She rubs her thumb over it, then digs her nail in, like she could re-open it if she cut deep enough.

“You are,” she breathes. “Supremely fucking stupid.”

She doesn’t know when Roman finds her again, but she knows that Kendall’s scar is pink against the hospital sheets, a crescent moon cut scraped down across the top, and he doesn’t see it either until she tells him how he got it.

(Roman though, he just laughs).

“Come on, like this,” Kendall says, 20 years old and tanned from the Barbados summer, his hands gentle as he guides Roman’s careless fingers around the joint. “You do this for the guys at St. Andrew’s, you’re gonna be like, fuckin’ everyone’s best friend. Prince of Pot. Sergeant Major of Skunk.”

Roman and Shiv both groan, sixteen and sweaty, the sand rough against her butt and against his kneeling knees, and it’s stupid. Kendall had made this whole thing about it – the summer he’d teach them how to roll their first joint, and she’d kept meaning to shut him down. Tell him she didn’t need him to teach her anything – after all, Suzy Katter’s older sister had taught her at a slumber party in her Freshman year at Spence – but every time she’d tried to say it, she’d stopped herself.

Was weirdly glad for it now, because after he’s finished with Roman’s fat, barely sealed one, he helps Shiv with hers. 

“Holy shit, look at that, you’re a natural,” Kendall had said, barking on a laugh, and Shiv had felt it. The way she’d glowed.

“Beginner’s luck,” Roman had grunted, giving her the finger, and Shiv had just preened, shared a look with Kendall as he’d rolled his own, giggled, despite herself, as he’d toasted his joint with hers and taken a long, easy draw, the weed high end and good, loosening up her head.

When she wakes up, stiff in the hospital chair, just – fuck.

She can still smell it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Roman move.

“Hey, fucking - - Dark Knight Rises over here. Heath Ledger without the looks, charm or talent.”

Jerking her gaze from one brother to the other, Shiv blinks rapidly as she sees Kendall leaning up in bed, gaunt and barely awake, his hospital gown dipping low enough to reveal the steep ledge of his collarbone, and he’s here, Shiv thinks, heart thumping in her throat. Back from the fucking dead, and he has been, she reminds herself, for at least four hours, has been since Lane told them he was stable, but still. Seeing his watery green eyes open makes something in her unlatch. She swallows a desperate, honest breath.

“Am I still here?” he asks, voice low and rough from the breathing tube, and Shiv’s so relieved she has to let her own eyes slip shut again, just for a second, has to find a way to hold onto these words, the new last ones he’s given her, the ones that aren’t Shiv, no, wait.

“Unfortunately, yeah, you cockteased the grim reaper for the eight billionth time. You do it again, he’s going to stop wanting to fuck you.”

Kendall doesn’t laugh or exhale or anything really, and Shiv thinks she should say something, anything, but no words come to her or taste right on her tongue. That pounding headache that’s been fighting for her attention is back in force, and she feels nauseous again, and suddenly all she wants is to be home, or not home. Wants to be back in her apartment in DC or her college dorm or even her bedroom in the Manhattan townhouse they grew up in. Wants to be far away and backwards, when her life felt like it made a modicum of fucking sense, and the thought has her pushing to her feet, ready to leave, when Kendall finally looks over and really sees her.

And it’s instant, that, the way his entire face hardens.

“You - - you can’t be here. I don’t want you in here.”

There’s an urgency to the way he says it, the wobbly, stupid way he’d throw a tantrum when they were kids: you can’t be here – in the treehouse at the party in the pool when my friends are here bothering Rava hanging out around the office – and she feels the match of it drag against the striker of her temper, any exhaustion giving way to the rush of that flame, and she smiles. Wide, ugly, and makes a show of sitting back down.

“Well,” she says, imbuing as much of a fuck you into her tone as physically possible. “You should’ve thought of that before you decided I was your only living emergency contact.”

An outraged splutter sounds from Roman’s mouth, and oh, right, she hadn’t told him that was why she was the one they called, but they both ignore him, her gaze fixed on Kendall’s as he blinks rapidly, a tear sneaking down from the corner of one of his eyes, whether from the harshness of the lights or the realisation he’s still alive and stuck here with them, she’s got no fucking clue.

“I just - - I hadn’t had a chance to change that yet, obviously, but you - - you should’ve fucking known, Shiv, that you wouldn’t be welcome here.”

Like she fucking wants to be here, she thinks, but still, she hears the opening and she takes it, playing coy, playing dumb.

“Uh-huh, oh, are you - - maybe are you saying that my name being on a piece of paper doesn’t mean anything? Huh.”

He gives her a dark look, or an attempt at a dark look, because Kendall’s never been good at looking like anything except a terminally ill basset hound, and beside him, Roman pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Can we not do this right now? Please?”

“Not do what?” Shiv asks, rounding on where Roman’s standing beside Kendall’s bed, gaze flitting briefly back when she sees Kendall start to pull off the tape covering the IV catheter in his hand. “I thought you wanted us to talk?”

“He was literally like, dying five minutes ago.”

“Oh, so you’d rather do it in what? Three hours? When they let him out and he ghosts us until the next time he tries to kill himself?”

“I didn’t try and kill myself.”

Shiv stares back at him, but he’s not looking at her, focused instead on yanking the IV out which promptly squirts blood all over the sheets. A red slash against the white, and Roman yelps, scrambling to find something to press to the new wound.

“Jesus, maybe don’t fucking do that, asshole?”

“Why’d you transfer Colin all that money?” she asks, folding her arms over her chest, and ignoring the way Roman suddenly looks at her, and right, she’d left that little detail out when she’d told Roman what Colin had told her too.

“Wait, what?”

“It was a - - a - - a signing bonus,” Kendall grits out, eyes clenched shut, as he reaches a bloody hand into his paper gown to start pulling off the sticky electrode sensors monitoring his heartrate. He flinches when one comes away with a chunk of chest hair.

“A signing bonus?”

“What, you transferred Colin money? Like your last fucking will and testament gesture was to Colin? Dude, you - - can you - - you’re literally getting blood everywhere.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Kendall insists, slapping Roman’s hand away (he’s found tissues from somewhere, Shiv’s got no idea where).

“It kind of sounds like it was like that,” Shiv counters, tilting her head as Kendall flushes to the roots of his hair, finally letting Roman grab his wrist to press a tissue to the wound on his hand. “You know you have kids, right? Rava, us. But you chose Colin.”

“Oh, I have you?” Kendall snarls, gesturing with the hand not occupied by Roman. “Fucking slit my throat in the boardroom, ruin everything, you you you—”

“I can like, totally handle you not writing a suicide note or whatever,” Roman says. “I wouldn’t read it anyway, your writing style is like a deranged robot ate a thesaurus from 1912, but if you’re going to do something as a final gesture, I feel like it should be me. Who gets it. Also, I think you’ve like, torn a vein or something? This is not stopping.”

“—you fucking bitch. Rome, it wasn’t a final gesture.”

And god, she feels like she’s on fire, that striker of her temper flaring, her chest hot and her throat red and she wants to kill him. Glad that he survived if only so she can take that IV cord and wrap it around his neck until he goes blue. He’s a gutless ungrateful fucking liar, sand between her fingers, a noose around her neck, a ghost enough when she’d needed him that she thought she’d taught herself how to live without him, and she hates how easily he can remind her that she hasn’t. That she couldn’t, that she can’t, and she sees him right now, bleeding and pallid and sullen, and she just - - she hates him, she hates him, she hates him.

“No, I think if there was any final gesture, it was probably injecting a fucking litre of smack between your jacked up little toes,” she snarls, and Kendall sets his jaw, but he doesn’t open his eyes, and he pulls his hand away from Roman again, ignores the way Roman plays chase, says:

“It wasn’t - - I didn’t - - ”

“Am I interrupting?”

“Thank fuck, yes, you are,” Roman says, and Shiv spins to see Lane standing in the doorway. “He pulled the thing out, can you like - - make it stop bleeding? It’s, I don’t. Love blood? I think?”

Lane smiles sympathetically, and Shiv shifts her weight, her temper still simmering as she watches the doctor grab a patch from the cabinet and a small vial of liquid, gesturing Roman out of the way so that she can get in beside Kendall.

“Glad to see you’re awake,” she says gently, and Shiv wets her lip.

“Yeah, we all are. Hi, again, you mentioned something earlier about a psych evaluation?”

Between them, Roman lets his eyes slip shut, holds a hand up in Shiv’s direction, like it might make her stop talking, and from the bed, Kendall just laughs.

“It’s protocol to do a psychiatric evaluation in the case of intentional overdoses, yes,” Lane says carefully, and Shiv nods.

“Great, it was intentional, so you know, do - - do as many tests as you think are appropriate to the situation.”

“Shiv,” Kendall says from the bed, but Shiv can’t stop now, the seals been broken, and she thinks of every accident that Dad washed away, every stupid, brainless thing Kendall’s ever done, that he’d punish her like this, for cutting him out like he’d cut her out.

“He tried to drown himself three months ago, if that’s relevant.”

“Rome, maybe take her out of here?”

“Oh, this was his idea,” Shiv interjects. “He’s just been so worried about you, I mean, two attempts in less than a half year, that’s pretty serious cries for help, right?”

“No, it’s not, actually, because they were - - they - - they were both unfortunate accidents.”

He says the last bit to Lane, trying to soften his features in that way he does when he wants to seem normal to women (Shiv’s forever amazed it’s worked on anyone), and Lane glances between them, focused still on cleaning up his hand.

“I don’t know if you have access to those records from Italy, but I can send you the details of the hospital,” Shiv says to Lane. “If it’d be useful to you.”

It’s enough to make Lane look up at her properly, her thumb pressed into the slowly reddening patch on Kendall’s hand, and it’s the first time Shiv’s felt a puncture of embarrassment. Feels the drip of humiliation like fire retardant, and she swallows, blinks rapidly, as Lane slowly, carefully speaks.

“I appreciate you being so forthcoming now with your brother’s history, I imagine it’s been a very painful few months for you, but I think I should probably talk to him alone first.”

Shiv can’t bring herself to look back at Kendall, can’t bring herself to do much of anything except leave, and she does, spinning on her heel and evacuating to the safety of the empty hallway. She sucks in a wet breath, paces, as she hears the door open behind her and Roman stumble out.

“Okay, what the fuck?” he says, and Shiv feels a bubble in her throat pop.

“What? You made it very clear that you didn’t want him out of here.”

“I mean, I made a suggestion, sure, but there are ways to do it, right? And he kind of did just almost die.”

The words make her blink, make her walk further down the hall, back towards the elevator, but the security guard’s watching, and that’s the last fucking thing she needs right now. She turns back, unsurprised when Roman meets her halfway.

“Like, seriously, Shiv, that was like - - violating a corpse just then. Full necrophilia. You’ve also actually already killed him once this month, so do you really want to do it again?”

“Stop saying that, I didn’t kill him. Voting no to him taking over was not killing him.”

Roman looks at her like he doesn’t agree, which only serves to make that pulsing between Shiv’s eyes beat all the harder. She’s tired, she doesn’t know why she’s still here, she has a husband – a husband who’s killed her twice over, and she didn’t start taking handfuls of pills about it. She sucks in a wet breath, holds a hand out back in the direction of Kendall’s room.

“Look at him in there, look at right now. You think I was wrong to vote no? You think he could’ve handled it? You’ve said it yourself, he self-destructs and now Dad’s not around to hide the bodies of everyone that gets caught in the explosion.”

Roman flinches at that, shakes his head, fists his hips. The air feels cooler out here, that first mean bite of autumn following them in here, teeth sunk deep.

“It’s not—” Roman starts, stops, shakes his head. “Sure. You know, yeah, but maybe it also could’ve fixed him.”

Shiv scoffs, the sound loud even to her own ears, but before she can say anything to it, Roman adds:

“And anyway, that’s not why you did it.”

He looks ratty in that way he does when he thinks he’s onto something, when he thinks he holds an ace, a flush, when he thinks he has a checkmate in sight, and Shiv sucks on her teeth, gaze darting from his bruised forehead to his too-bright eyes to the thin line of his mouth.

“You don’t know why I did it.”

“I think I do, Siobhan, so. Yeah. Don’t get too high and mighty when you’ve still got mud on your shoes, okay?”

It’s hard, the look she gives him, the sort that used to make him wither, but the last year’s made him tougher, and he doesn’t cave like she wants. Just stands there opposite her, shirt tight and looking his age for once, and she opens her mouth to say something else – to chew him up or spit him out or something, when her cell buzzes again, Tom’s number blearing up at her.

Roman snorts, the sound loud, says:

“What are you waiting for, Mrs. CEO?”

In a way that has her flipping him off and answering, if only to stop talking to one of her brothers for five fucking minutes. She turns as she does, striding away from Roman, who just laughs, like nothing she does surprises him at all.

“Hey,” Tom says when she answers, voice low and echoing in that way she knows means he’s found his way into one of the private rooms at Waystar. She sniffs, brushes her hair back from her temple, tries to ignore the way she can hear Roman pacing behind her, the way she knows if she listens hard enough she’ll hear Kendall spinning bullshit to the doctor, knows that the second he’s discharged, she’ll have to leave, go home to her apartment, back to Tom and to the boxes of her father’s things.

“Hey.”

“Are you alright? I’ve been trying to get through to you all morning.”

“Yeah, just had a family thing,” Shiv says with a sniff, glancing back down the hall at where Roman’s pacing back and forth, shoulders hunched, body shrunken, and Shiv sucks on her teeth, turns her gaze pointedly away.

“Is everyone okay?”

Tom’s voice is low, loaded, and for a minute, she thinks it’s real. She thinks he cares, that he’s felt the gravity of whatever this is and there’s a version of her that tells him everything. That lets him in, that wants him here, hand on the small of her back, shoulders broad and steady and firm in front of her, but that’s the syrup. That’s the chaser, where’s the shot?

It finds her, quick.

“If there’s something you need me to get in front of, I will, but I can’t do that if you won’t tell me what it is,” he adds, marshmallow soft, promising her what she promised Colin, what she thought she could promise Matsson. A parachute, a protector, a tether wrapped in a pledge, and does he know already?

Has he known all night where she was?

She rocks her jaw, feels - - doused, more than anything. The earth of her soaked through, and it’s too much. The roots of every thought, feeling, nerve ending clogged, her chest so full and her head so empty she’s not sure there’s any part of her that could answer him without cutting out his tongue.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she tells him, gentle as she can manage, and then she hangs up, throwing her phone down the hall, hearing it spin out against the linoleum floor, and suddenly she can’t breathe. She presses her back into the wall again, tries to feel for the cool plaster, tries to school her breath. She lets her eyes slip shut, feels the weight of this pressing her down, and she can never go back. DC is lost to her, Waystar is lost to her, her father is dead and her childhood a fog, and there’s a thing growing inside her that would swallow her, and Roman’s voice is in her ear.

“Hey, you’re kinda freaking me out, can you - - do you need me to get a doctor? We are conveniently in a hospital. Can you. Can you breathe?”

And Shiv’s trying to, she is, but her chest is aching and her bones hurt and she wants to die maybe, and she feels it through her legs when feet are pounding down the hallway, hears it like a shot when Kendall’s voice breaks through.

“What the fuck was that?” he says, and she glances up to see him at the end of the corridor, skinny legs sticking out the bottom of his ugly hospital gown, and the baby kicks, and Shiv laughs as she sinks to the floor, breathless and aching, and Kendall’s expression shifts almost as quickly as he’d appeared at all. “Shiv?”

“She’s like, properly losing it, I think? The ol’ crack up.”

Kendall ignores him, inching closer, and a million memories are flickering through her head – that old theatre of her suddenly re-opened – and it’s fucking girls in sororities she’d never join and boys in frats she would’ve if she could’ve, it’s college and interning at Boston Review and her first job in DC and the summer she spent in Paris and those brief and glorious months when Dad said it was her and meant it.

“Wh-what? Are you? Is she okay? Like, what is this? Is this a play?”

“Is it a play? What the fuck, man, how can it be a play, none of us have jobs anymore,” Roman says, and Shiv starts shaking her head. Slow first, then faster.

“I don’t want it.”

“You don’t want what?”

“Kendall? I know, unfortunately he lived.”

She sucks in a wet breath, needs to get this out, needs to say it:

“I need to get it out, I can’t. I don’t want this fucking baby, I do not want this, don’t make me, I want—”

And she can’t look at them, won’t, can’t open her eyes, hates that it’s them seeing her like this, but also she doesn’t know if there’s anyone else she could ever let see her like this, and she regrets it, but she won’t take it back, and it’s Kendall who breaks the silence.

“Rome, I don’t - - they haven’t given me back my phone yet, but if you - - there’s a place. Fuck, I can’t remember - - uh. If you text Stewy, he can tell you. It’s a place to. Y’know. To handle it.”

And that’s enough to make her eyes snap open, acid thick in her throat.

“I don’t want Stewy to fucking know,” she hisses, and Kendall blinks from where he’s crouched in front of her.

“He won’t,” Kendall insists at her, then to Roman: “Tell him it’s for—" he looks between her and Roman, which yeah, right, fucking classic, one shooting blanks the other can’t shoot at all, Stewy will know it’s for her in a heartbeat, and Shiv inhales, but Kendall shakes his head. “Tell him it’s for fucking Willa, too close to the wedding, don’t want people to get the wrong idea. We can tell her and Con later. It’s urgent. Tell him that, he’ll, no. Just give me your phone, I’ll call him.”

Roman does and Kendall dials, weirdly alert for someone who was just knocking on death’s door, and Shiv shudders, plants her head between her knees, tries to remember how to breathe.

“Look, you fixed him,” Roman says dryly. “Give him a job and he’ll stop trying to kill himself. The anti-midwife to your anti-baby. New career for him, abortion doula. If he can’t have kids, no one can.”

Shiv digs her fingers into her shins.

“Can you not?”

“Sure. What do you want to talk about instead?”

Nothing, really, she thinks, and so she says nothing and Roman must get the hint finally because he slides down the wall beside her, ass on the lino floor, and pushes his arm against hers, his thigh against hers too, and she resists the urge to tremble.

She doesn’t want to talk to him about anything, anyone about anything, but him especially. Can’t tell him that he’s fucked her worse than she’s fucked Kendall, that he took DC from her the second he convinced Dad to back Mencken and doubled down on election night. She’s poisonous now, a scorpion like Tom said, and thinking of him only makes her think of what’s growing inside of her and holding her still, an anchor in a shrinking sea.

Feet padding quick down the hall again, and Shiv glances up, wet cheeked and puffy to Kendall staring back at her, wild eyed and bruised mouthed.

“I got the number, I can call them now. You sure? You wanna do it now? I can get us there, Fikret’s on call, I can - - you’ll need to sign me out though. Just because of—”  

He gestures with Roman’s phone to the hospital walls, and Shiv knows he’s using this to get out, that he wants to slink back beneath the radar of doctors, and if she were better, she wouldn’t let him, she’d hold his hand to the stove, she’d make him sit down and face this, but she just - -

Fuck.

She just wants her body back.

So Shiv signs Kendall out against the doctor’s recommendation, while Roman calls Connor and Kendall calls Jess. Just to bring him some clothes, he says, and Shiv can hear him promise her a lump sum. He’s fired New Jess already apparently, says he doesn’t trust anyone else with this, and whether he means his OD or Shiv’s imminent abortion, she has no idea. Still, Jess delivers, shows up with jeans and a black sweater and more sympathy than Shiv thinks Kendall (maybe either of them) ever deserves, and then Kendall’s got Fikret outside, has sent Colin home, and then just like that, they’re gone.

She’s actually heard of the clinic before.

Joked about by Dad or the subject of table chatter at cocktail parties, Shiv can’t remember, but the place is some waspy Upper East Side affair with a private entrance and a lux day spa vibe. Not dissimilar to her OBGYN, if she’s honest, and maybe it’s just the contrast of it to the Presbyterian Hospital she’s just spent the last twelve hours in, or maybe it’s the promise of what it can do for her, but it almost feels like coming home.

It was a quick round of paperwork, a few awkward introductions, and the receptionist had led them to a new private waiting room, one with a leather sofa and a large tropical aquarium that cast the room in a hazy blue glow. Gentle indie music plays over the speaker, girls with annoying voices singing about heartbreak and dancing, and Shiv takes a breath, watching as Kendall gravitates towards the fish tank, his hands limp at his side, and she hears her other brother before she sees him. Roman coming to stand beside her.

“Did we do the wrong thing?” she asks. “Letting him come with us?”

“Probably. He did organise it though, so.”

Roman shrugs, shoulders loose and hands on his hips, and he looks weirdly relaxed, which - - surprises her? Mostly? She sucks on her teeth, her lips, before deciding to frown at him more pointedly, searching for a reaction.

“Surprised you’re still here.”

“Why? Thought you could vacuum my niece or nephew to oblivion and I wouldn’t be here to flip it off on the way out?”

“Thought you’d jack off to whatever fucked up little fantasy you could create out of it, sure, but come on, you’ve never liked hospitals.”

“Well, maybe today’s changed my mind, this is great. You and him make me look so fucking well-adjusted.”

It startles a laugh out of her, despite herself, one rough and loud enough for even Kendall to break his malaise and glance over, but Shiv ignores him in favour of leveling Roman an arched eyebrow and a real look. Roman imitates it straight back.

“Well-adjusted? You?”

“The fact that I have not been admitted to a hospital in the last twenty-four hours I think goes in my favour.”

“This isn’t a hospital,” Shiv tells him, then: “And how are your face stitches, by the way? Healing okay?”

“Hey, I picked that fight, you and him both just spread your pasty milk carton legs to beg life to fuck you on the daily.”

Shiv scoffs, but before she has the chance to reply that at least her and Ken fuck at all, Roman’s cell’s vibrating and the screen glows again with the image of Connor’s drooling face (taken as he dozed on the flight to Italy). He tilts it in her direction, and Shiv waves out a hand, telling him to take the call elsewhere, and Roman does, peeling off to a corner of the room to do it.

It’s almost nice, for the second of it, to be left on her own. To let herself take a breath, to close her eyes, to wonder about Tom and then - - no. Not wonder about Tom. Not think about him, not have any thought that might make her have to work out what this might mean for them. Instead, she blinks her eyes back open, looks up over the room again, her gaze finding Kendall, and she should just go lie on the sofa, she thinks, she should, but her feet are carrying her to her brother, and it’s just - - it’s too easy.

To find herself back beside him.

The thing about the fish tank is it really is a good one. Half the size of the room, it’s an instant feature, planted directly in the middle like it was dropped in from above. It’s beautiful, she thinks, watching the gentle undulation of the water plants as they’re nudged by the filter, the tails of flitting angel face and the open maw of a suckermouth catfish lipping its way against beige stones. She watches them, along with the hundreds of other fish she couldn’t hope to name, feeling weirdly calm, only to glance up and find Kendall looking at her through the glass.

“You should get some,” she tells him, voice a little rough, annoyed already that he’d apparently moved to the other side of the tank the second she’d gotten close, before she points to the ugliest fish in the tank. “You could finally have a kid that looks like you.”

He huffs out a breath at that, shaking his head, gaze dropping to look back at the fish, and Shiv thinks she should follow him, round it, stand next to him properly again, but then - - it’s almost easier like this. Looking at him through glass.

“Naomi told me once that Sophie did,” he says suddenly, and then, at Shiv’s disbelieving look, he adds: “Not in like - - she doesn’t look like me, obviously, I know that, but…but she holds herself like me or something.”

Here’s a memory:

A new one, too.

In the three months after Italy, when they were good, Rava had reached out to her and Rome. Ken wanted to see the kids, and Rava wanted that for all of them too, she did, but after the wedding…God, the way she’d sighed, voice hoarse, unfamiliar, earnest, in a way that had Shiv sending eyes at Rome, and Rome doing laps of the room. It’s not that she didn’t trust him with them, Rava had insisted, but that she didn’t trust him with himself, and well, Shiv had thought, no one could really argue with her on that.

So they’d done it, is all. Made sure to be around when Sophie and Iverson came out to LA, got to watch the stilted conversations and the uncomfortable silences, but the thing is she’d seen it too.

Sophie’s awkward hands and the curved in set to her shoulders, which should’ve been something inherited, not learnt, surely, but Shiv had spent a lifetime seeing exactly that posture in her brother and for maybe the first time thought oh fuck, Kendall’s somebody’s father.

Now though, she just wets her lips.

“I hadn’t realised they’d met,” she tells one of the fish, and across the tank, Kendall shrugs.

“They haven’t. Didn’t. I - - she saw her on TV. ATN ran a story back when I was out, and Dad was, y’know—” he stumbles with it. “Going through Rava’s fuckin’ trash.”

She glances up, and he shakes his head, staring down at the floor, at his feet, so Shiv can’t see his eyes, and she hates it. Hates that. When he can’t even bring himself to look at her. She works her mouth, shifts her weight, glances sideways at where Roman’s still in the corner on the phone to Con.

“He shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “Involving them in all of that was - - it was a new low.”

Kendall though just snorts, his mouth doing a weird thing she’s never been sure how to read, and then he just says it:

“Come on, Shiv, it was low, but not a new one. He always kept tabs, you know that.”

And sure, yeah, but to that extent? Shiv swallows, watches Kendall through the tank and she wonders not about him, but about DC. Wonders if Dad had had people going through her trash out there, bugging her phone, talking to her friends. If he saw what she was doing, if the freedom she’d felt out there wasn’t ever a freedom at all. The thought makes nausea swell in her gut, chest, throat again, so she takes a breath, tries to pull back to Rava which ultimately only makes her think of Ken.

Through the water, his skin has a blueish tinge, and it seems to emphasise his mouth, bruised and swollen from the breathing tube, and it staggers her back into memory again – of being thirteen and watching Kendall get his stomach pumped in the staff bathroom at the RECNY Ball.

It’s that thought, maybe, that makes her say it:

“Wasn’t totally unjustified with you though, was it?”

Kendall just stares at her, and it’s overwhelming suddenly. Not his attention, but the reality of today, of what he’s just done, of this accident colliding with every other so called accident in the pinball machine of her head – of dinner plate pupils at restaurants and seizures on Sundays, of ambulance lights and private medics and Stewy telling her he knew how to handle Kendall right before he proved he did-didn’t-did, of being nine and thirteen and twenty and thirty six like she is right now and wondering if her brother was going to steal himself from her life.

How many times has she been in that room?

She feels like she’s been waiting for the call her whole life.

Somewhere above her, a song ends, and for a moment, all she can hear is the whir of the heaters and the bubble of the aquarium filters. The vague, background noise of Roman telling Connor everything’s fine.

“Look,” she says. “Don’t make me regret signing you out.”

It’s enough to make Kendall roll his eyes, instantly annoyed, but she doesn’t care. Is glad even, maybe, that she can still piss him off in this room.

“Yeah, okay, Shiv, thanks for not leaving me with a bunch of fucking head shrinks in a fucking hospital that I - - I don’t even need to be in.”

“I’m serious. If you do this again, I’ll—” she stumbles with it, shakes her head. “I’ll burn your apartment down, I’ll rip out all the pages of your lame collectible comics, I’ll tell Sophie and Iverson that Roman’s their dad, I’ll give Rava everything you fought to keep in the divorce, I’ll - - I’ll make sure you don’t get buried with us.”

Through the tank, Kendall just stares at her, eyebrows raised in disbelief, and Shiv squares her shoulders.

“Yeah. I’ll put your spot in the family crypt on the table, silent auction style. We can do it at RECNY. Who knows who’ll get in there with us, maybe Marcia?”

“Fuck you,” Kendall says, and Shiv hums, gestures in imitation of thought.

“Oh wait, no, maybe Kerry? She was pretty in it in the end, huh?”

Kendall snorts, but then he rounds the tank, stops at the end, so she’s no longer looking through it at him. He makes a point of dropping his gaze to her belly, and Shiv knows what he’s going to say before he even says it.

“Maybe they could take my place.”

It’s so fucking stupid, so obvious, so Kendall, that she’s briefly speechless, left just to watch him, and she hates it, that she can see the moment her lack of reaction registers for him as a win.

“It probably belongs there,” he adds. “Yours is the real legacy, right?”

“Oh, fuck you,” she bites. “Since when have you ever listened to Roman?”

Kendall exhales an ugly little laugh, burying his hands in the pockets of his pants.

“Uh-huh, sure, bet you loved it when Dad and him started saying that shit.”

“Maybe I did,” Shiv tells him, and it’s there again too, that lick of flame. God, she doesn’t think anyone makes her as angry as him. “Bet you love this, huh? That I’m here? Now there’s gonna be no competition for you, which is the only way you’ve ever won, by the way.”

“Sure, Shiv. It’s gonna be a big day for you, so tell yourself whatever you need to.”

It’s offered simperingly, conciliatory, and Shiv inhales sharply, pushes off the aquarium to where Roman’s just hung up with Connor, and she just fucking hates him. Hates what he turns her into, what he makes her, and it’s not even about that. It’s not about what she’s doing, it’s about what he’s done, and his refusal to actually fucking own any of that, and god, yeah, okay, they should’ve left him there. In the hospital. Let him fucking rot.

In front of her, Roman squints, and Shiv fists her hips, paints on something like a smile, nods.

“Con alright?”

“Yeah, he’s on the jet, fucking finally, so should be here in a couple of hours.”

Shiv just nods again, harder this time, and Roman frowns.

“Great, the whole circus’ll be in town.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, great, Kendall’s just being a dick, so.”

Roman just snorts, looking sideways to wherever Kendall is, and Shiv can’t bring herself to follow his gaze. She knows what it’d be anyway, fucking sad sack looming over a few fish. She sniffs.

“He’s watching you,” Roman tells her, and that’s - - not what she wants, not what this is. She stares up at the ceiling, a million words and thoughts and feelings coagulating in her throat, and she needs to spit some of them out, she does, but then the door opens and there’s a woman there.

“Siobhan? The doctor’s ready for you. Your brothers can wait here or come in for a bit, it’s up to you.”

And right, she thinks.

Right.

Because that’s all - - happening. The whole messy, messed up part of her fucking life is about to get a whole much less and more so, and she thinks this is it, she thinks this is what she wants – the relief in the promise of it already loosening something in her she hadn’t realised was so tight – and she start forwards only to realise Roman’s not following.

She blinks, throat closing.

“You’re not gonna—” she starts, cuts herself off when she sees Roman’s awkward look. “Thought you wanted to flip the kid off?”

“Like, metaphorically,” Roman allows.

And right, she thinks.

Right.

What the fuck did she expect? That Roman was going to come in with her? Hold her fucking hand? Ground her through this? God, she’s stupid. She sniffs, nods, shrugs, and vaguely she can feel Kendall watching them, but she won’t look at him, can’t, not when he’ll just say something to make her feel like - -

Make her feel really fucking young.

Because she’s not, even if she feels it right now.

“Yeah, fine, whatever, I’ll do it myself,” she says, looking back at the nurse who gives her an awkward smile as she holds the door open a little wider, and Shiv tries not to think about anything at all as she’s shown through alone.

“You look like you’re around the halfway point,” Doctor Cameron tells her, cleaning the transductor and handing Shiv a wet wipe for her belly. Shiv accepts it, making uneasy work of cutting through the gel left on her skin from the ultrasound. “Maybe 20, 21 weeks, so we’ll be needing to do a D&E. Do you know what that is?”

Thing is, she has been here before. Not this far along, and not with Tom, but she’s swallowed pills before to end pregnancies, to cut the cords of the things that would grow inside her if she let them. This is new though. D&E is new. She swallows, gives a half shrug as she focuses on cleaning herself up, legs limp and shirt tucked up beneath her bra.

“It stands for dilation and evacuation, and as a procedure it’s done in two parts,” Cameron says, like she’d seen straight through Shiv’s non-response. “The first part is basically preparing you for the abortion. We’ll dilate your cervix using Dilapan, which looks like…”

Cameron rolls her stool over to one of the drawers against the side of the room, pulling out a thin stick that looks a little like pencil lead with a thread on the end.

“This. We’ll insert it, it’ll take about 15 hours to expand, and will be helped by misoprostol – that’s just a tablet you’ll swallow – to soften your uterus in preparation for the abortion tomorrow. You can go home in between, and when you’re back tomorrow we’ll put you under anaesthetic, and we’ll remove the fetus and placenta and the uterine lining. It won’t take very long, about half an hour, and then it’ll be done. How does that sound?”

“Yeah, good, great,” Shiv says, nodding, throat tight as she stares at the Dilapan stick in the doctor’s hand, lip curled.

“It won’t be this one,” Cameron says with a grin. “Don’t worry, I’ll get a fresh one. Can grab it now, if you think you’re ready.”

Shiv exhales, aims for a half smile, and she thinks this is it, and then she sees it, another her, a maybe Shiv, holding a son, a daughter, Tom beside her soft-eyed, a big hand at her back, some approximation of love spilling out of him, and she can feel it. The way he’d hold the baby. The way she could give this to him like a gift, but then she feels the other part too. The moment they would become the family, and she’d be a witch, a ghost, a wailing woman. The memory of something in loose skin, she’d be gone, she’d be lost, she’d be the shadow of herself, she’d be - -

She’d be - -

Behind them, there’s a knock, the rubber seal of the door pulling open, and there’s the receptionist again.

“Ms. Roy, I have one of your brother’s here…”

“I - - can we put a sheet up or something?” Kendall says over her shoulder. “If I’m in here?”

Shiv blinks, staring up at him from her position on the doctor’s chair, and she can feel that too. The surprise on her own face as Kendall just gives her a weird, dumb look back, he shrugs, and then Shiv shrugs too, and Cameron glances between them and finally nods. Says we can do that, if Siobhan would like, and Shiv should say no, means to, wants to. Doesn’t want her brother in the room while a doctor’s putting shit up her cunt, but then something in her can’t bear the prospect of him leaving her here alone either, so she nods, and the doctor stands up, pushes her roller stool to be near Shiv’s head, gesturing for Kendall to sit on it as she goes and pulls up a cover.

He wastes no time slipping in, dropping heavily into the seat and scooting it closer to her, and then he’s just there, awkward, and it’s so stupid, the memory – Kendall at sixteen, red faced and shrunken as he’d gotten his highschool girlfriend to show her, twelve and embarrassed and maybe a little scared too, how to use tampons because nobody else fucking would.

Shiv exhales a wobbly breath as the doctor eases her legs apart behind the sheet.

“Thought Roman was the only one scared of vaginas,” she says, her voice a little thick, and Kendall huffs out something that could almost be a laugh, but he doesn’t say anything. He just reaches over and entwines his fingers with hers and his hand is clammy, but it’s warm now, and God, it’s all so fucking stupid, she thinks, twisting her neck away so Kendall won’t see how wet her eyes are, but oh, fuck, it just - -

It matters.

Tom got her father, but he won’t get her brothers, and she wasn’t sure if there was ever a part of her that knew she was worried about that, but suddenly she knows it was there. The fear that Tom would get what he wanted, take her place in her own family, but Kendall and Rome are here, and Con’s on his way, and Kendall’s hand’s in hers, and suddenly she just knows that they’ll always fuck her over, but they’ll always be here too. That there’s this tiny, stupid, fucked up little space in this tiny, stupid, fucked up little life which is theirs, and she could make Tom a family, but it wouldn’t be the same.

It wouldn’t be them. It wouldn’t be hers.

“We ready?” Cameron asks, and Shiv sucks in a wet breath, and stops herself from squeezing Kendall’s hand back, not quite ready to give him that, and she says:

“Yeah.”

She says:

“We’re ready.”

“Hmm,” Shiv hums. “Big Patrick Bateman vibes, I’ve gotta say.”

“We should check for nail guns and dead hookers,” Kendall agrees, and Roman flips them both off as he pulls off his coat, tossing it over the back of the couch.

“Funny. You guys make a real double act these days, huh? Suicide Watch and Impulse Abortion. Your supervillain names, by the way, it can be a Kalispatron spin-off. I texted the maid to put all the knives and coathangers away though, so you’ll have to find a new bit.”

And yeah, despite herself, Shiv just grins.

They’ve ended up back at Roman’s mostly due to the lack of options. Tom’ll be at Shiv’s tonight, and Kendall’s got a clean-up crew in his that he vaguely mentions might take a while (and Shiv and Rome swap a look at that, but silently agree to ask questions later), and any hotel runs the fresh risk of a leak. No, Roman’s was the right choice, she thinks, and it’s been a while since she’s been here and maybe even longer since they’ve all been here together. It’s lost the softer touches from the brief period Tabs was living here, and gained a few unsorted piles of Dad’s shit that he must’ve picked up from Connor at some point over the last few weeks. The rest of the place though feels mostly like a display home – clean and clean cut, but with nothing particularly personal.

“Oh, fucking finally,” Roman says suddenly, and Shiv glances back at him to see him hold up a message from Con reading LANDED where am I going? and she gives him a vague gesture as he answers. “Hey, so yeah, we’re back at my place, but also just for the record, this is why you should stay in New York.”

He scurries off, presumably to give Connor more information that either she or Ken want him to have, but Shiv doesn’t really feel like she has a leg to stand on in that department as she watches Roman disappear into a room down the hall, before turning her attention back to Kendall. He’s already awkward in the place, dressed only in jeans and a black sweater that somehow makes him look thinner than it should, and he doesn’t even look at her before he beelines for the bar cart.

Shiv wets her lips, thinks about telling him to give his liver a break, but then the doctor told her not to drink tonight and she wants one too, so she figures: fuck it.

“Pour me one?” she asks, and Kendall glances back at her, doesn’t reply, but he does pull out a second glass, fixing two drinks. He passes it to her on his way to the couch.

She doesn’t drink scotch often these days, but it’s seared in her somewhere. Remembers it most as her father’s drink of choice, but also remembers the first time he’d offered it to her when she was twelve, remembers pretending she and Rome weren’t already familiar with the taste of communion wine or stolen champagne from the tables of events, that the help at Mom’s place in Herefordshire hadn’t introduced them to shandies before they hit double digits. Remembers every time after that he gave it to her – celebration or commiseration or just for the shared moment of it. Vaguely, she wonders if he’d give it to her now, if he were here, if he knew what she’d done.

The thought churns at something in her, and she shifts her weight, fingers awkward round the glass as she looks back at Kendall.

He's leaning back into Roman’s couch now, his own glass held to his knee, head back over the top, eyes closed. He could almost be sleeping, he could almost be dead, and the second thought makes her blink. Makes her see him in that hospital bed, only hours before, and she swallows thick. Moves to sit beside him, before she can stop herself, closer, maybe, than she means.

The couch sighs beneath her weight, but Ken doesn’t look at her, and Shiv just feels - - really fucking tired all of a sudden. Not sure if it’s the scotch or the day or the drugs Cameron fed her before she left the clinic, but it’s easy to let her head fall to Kendall’s shoulder. Easy enough, maybe, that he doesn’t shrug her off. Doesn’t move away, or even flinch, and so she lets her eyes slip shut, feels him solid beneath her cheekbone, wonders briefly if she could sleep here, on her big brother’s arm, like they did when they were children, when Kendall finally speaks.

“I don’t forgive you.”

The words are clear, clean, uninterrupted by Kendall’s stammer, and Shiv frowns, but she doesn’t open her eyes, doesn’t lift her head. If anything, she puts more weight into it, digs her face a little harder into the line of his bony shoulder.

“Yeah, well, I don’t forgive you either.”

“You’re a backstabbing cunt, you - - you betrayed the family.”

“Uh-huh, sure,” she says, opening her eyes just to roll them. “And you’re a spineless junkie who couldn’t even shoot straight when Dad was pulling your strings like you were a marionette.”

Kendall shudders out a laugh and she feels it through her skull. The ache in the gesture, his body suddenly tense beneath hers.

“It’s a good thing,” he says, voice low and shooting lower. “That you’re getting rid of it. It would fucking hate you.”

And right, she thinks, lifting her head, sniffing. She swipes at her nose, hears the distant thrum of traffic, the treble of Roman’s voice down the phone, and it hurts in a place she won’t – can’t – acknowledge.

“Yeah, and you know that from first-hand experience, huh?”

She won’t look at him right now, not because she can’t but because she doesn’t want to. Kendall’s never played this game as well as he thinks he does, has a tendency to get wet eyed and start stammering. It’s easier with Roman, who just gets really fucking mean, easier with Connor, who pretends to shrug it off and leaves. Kendall will stay till you push him off the ledge, no matter how much he’s already bleeding.

“It was never going to be you,” he says, changing the subject, and at least that’s predictable even if she feels it hit a nerve. “I know you think Dad promised it to you, but—”

“Do you hear yourself right now?” she bites, suddenly mad enough to turn sideways on the couch again so that she can look at him. “You sound delusional. Again. It was never going to be you either. Dad was going to string us both along until he died, which he did, and then it was always going to go to the highest bidder, which it has. Done. We’re both fucked, and we’re both richer than we were two weeks ago, so that’s just what it is.”

Her jaw feels firm, her shoulders square, enough fight in her right now to toe this line with him, and Kendall’s not looking at her. Kendall’s staring at his hands, pulling at his own fingers, before he turns one to pick at the patch Lane had laid across his bleeding hand. Like he thinks that might be anymore subtle, fucking avoider, fucking—

“It was though,” Kendall says suddenly. “He - - maybe you were right. At the wake. Maybe he crossed my name out, but he still - - for him to cross it out, he still had to write it. At one point, he still had to write it.”

It’s only then that he actually looks at her, his eyes dark and his mouth open, and she knows him well enough to know that he doesn’t actually believe it. No, he looks at her like he wants her to make him believe it. That Dad having his name typed before he crossed it out (or underlined it) meant something. Like convincing her isn’t as important as convincing himself. Briefly, she just feels sick. She wets her lips, and there are a million things on the tip of her tongue: who cares, he never meant it, yes, okay, if it was ever going to be any of us, it was going to be you, no, you embarrassed him, you were never the heir, he’d never risk Rava’s kids inheriting, everyone says he loved me most, but it was you, I think he loved you the most, there were never photos of you in his office, what did it feel like when he would squeeze your shoulder, did DC impress him, do you think he ever actually thought it was me?

Was I ever the promising daughter of a brilliant man?

But what comes out is:

“I know you were in the car with the waiter.”

Kendall doesn’t even flinch.

Shiv wets her lips.

“I know you were in the water,” she adds. “When he died.”

There’s a beat, maybe two, where Kendall just stares at her, and she can’t see his scar here, not with his sweater sleeves pulled down over it, but she lets her gaze flick to it anyway, and it’s worth it. For the way it makes him flinch.

“I mean, you don’t know.”

Shiv’s look flicks back up.

“I do.”

“You don’t though.”

She could tell him now. About what Colin told her, about how it came to her and she sought him out to unpick his new-stitched lie, words that will pin him to the board and hold him still. Leave him vulnerable and open to her inspection, but she finds she doesn’t want to. Thinks there’s something more, something better, something that might just last longer if he thinks he can never truly lie to her.

Shuffling back, Shiv leans against the arm of the couch, kicking her legs up into the space she’s just freed between them, having another sip of her scotch. It burns as it goes down, and maybe there’s something centring in that too.

“Maybe you could’ve taken it then, Waystar. Maybe, with the bearhug,” she says, and Kendall’s staring at her, so fucking there. “Maybe Dad would’ve meant it if you’d seen that through, but you never would’ve, because this is what you do, it’s who you are, and Dad knew it. You’re always in cars you can’t fucking drive, you’re always on a - - a collision course for something. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath when the phone rings since I was nine years old.”

And oh, too much, she thinks, not for the way Kendall averts his gaze, but for the wound she feels ripped open in her. The opening she’s given him, the weakness of her own worry. She swallows, shakes herself out of it, reaches over, reaches for him, for his bruised hand, the one he had the catheter in, and she pulls the patch he’s half-picked off the rest of the way. Stares at the scab only half formed there, and without even thinking, she digs her thumb into it, just to watch his fingers spasm.

It feels good, feels right, and maybe it does for him too, because he doesn’t pull away, but he says:

“He snatched the wheel, I didn’t - - I - - I - - there was a deer on the road.”

And oh, fuck, there’s the relief again.

“I know,” she says, and Kendall’s wet eyed and she pushes her thumb right between the bones of his hand, and it must hurt. Has to, but Kendall lets her do it. Watches her do it even, his gaze lowering to fix on their hands, and she can’t help it, she just - - she says it again.

“I know,” she repeats, and she moves her hand, slides it to push his sleeve up his arm until she finds the scar again, and Kendall inhales a wet breath, chokes out a sob. “I know.”

He’s shaking, and he curls forwards, towards her on the couch, spine like the rim of a shell, and it’s his head that finds her shoulder this time. Forehead heavy against her, and she moves a hand to touch the back of his head, to lose herself briefly in the weight of him there against her, and he’s her brother, and that’s what matters. He’s her brother, and that sometimes feels like the only thing that matters.

They don’t stay like that for long, and he leans back, swiping at his face, looking anywhere but at her, and still somehow she’s not expecting it when he says:

“You - - you tell Tom you’re doing this?”

Shiv blinks, watches him awkwardly try and pull himself together, and she exhales, gestures limply.

“What do you think?”

Kendall doesn’t say anything to that, and he still won’t look at her either, still picking up the pieces of himself, like always, and she doesn’t know why it annoys her, but suddenly it does. She knows what he was like – is like with Rava – she knows who the fuck he is. She rolls her shoulders back.

“You gonna tell me he’s the father, he has a right to know?”

“I don’t think Tom has a right to fucking anything.”

It’s said so quickly, so frankly, that it startles a laugh out of her, which does make him look up. An almost smile tugging at his bruised mouth, and any annoyance she has drains as quickly as it had poured in.

“You were always too good for him anyway,” Kendall tells her, and Shiv arches an eyebrow.

“Thought I was a backstabbing cunt.”

“You’re that too, but Tom’s a fucking - - fucking sheep fucker selling Mary Kay out the back of his Ford Model T. He’s not a real person.”

“You think I am?”

She’s only half asking really, but the words sound real out of her mouth, feel like - - something, maybe, and Kendall pauses, looks at her, wets his lips, before suddenly, slowly, nodding.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think you’re a real person.”

And oh, it matters, but also, oh, god, it’s just so fucking stupid, it is, and she hopes he feels it when she throws an arm out over the back of the sofa, when say says, in a too-earnest, put upon affect:

“That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t, but she knows he exhales something that’s almost a laugh. That he looks bashful, briefly, before any grace collapses in on itself and he just looks really fucking sad. Shiv leans sideways into the couch, feels her stomach wobble, even before he says it:

“I don’t think I am. I don’t think I’m a real person.”

Thing is, the words are like the pull of an anchor. Not a new one slung, but one you always knew was there. Something that has been dragged around but never dropped, and she looks at him and she sees him at seven at fourteen at twenty-three at thirty, just - - right now, whittled away and shrunk down and just so fucking exhausting. Every ounce of grief in her suddenly replaced by the urge to roll her eyes, and she just thinks fuck you, she thinks you’re mine, my brother, my competition, my almost friend, the weight around my neck, the stone in my shoe, the cold, clammy hand grasping mine, how fucking dare you say you’re not real, how dare you try to take that from me.

She swallows, and before she can think better of it, she shoves a finger in his eye.

“Fuck, Shiv.”

“Funny, you feel like a real person,” she says, and she rises up onto her knees on the couch, pulls his hair, shoves his shoulder, sticks a finger up his nose then wipes it on his shirt, and he’s limp until he’s not, until he’s scrambling to smack her hands away, to yank her hair back, to dig a thumb into her armpit, and it’s exhilarating to feel him spring to life again beneath her, her shit-fuck brother, her heel, one of the two (three) loves of her dull, stupid little life, which holy shit, that’s depressing.

“I really fucking hate you,” she tells him, slapping him, and he freezes underneath her, and she thinks no, he’s not supposed to do that, it was just a stupid joke, he’s got to know, surely he knows, but then Kendall’s saying:

“You’re - - fuck, Shiv, you’re like - - ”

He’s red eared and flush cheeked, gesturing down, and she follows his gaze to between her legs where a few red spots are starting to soak through her sweats. She inhales, feels - - light, suddenly, as she stares back down at Kendall. A leonine smile sprawls across her face.

“What?” she asks. “Afraid of a little blood?”

He looks up at her again, eyebrows drawn, gaze searching, and he opens his mouth to say something, but what it is she doesn’t hear, because suddenly Roman’s voice sounds behind them.

“Great, so Con’s here, if you both want to stop doing whatever this is - - oh, fuck, are you - - right, okay. Um, I’ll - - do you want to borrow some, like. Pants?”

Beside him, Connor just laughs, apparently totally unperturbed, and Shiv sits back on her heels, letting Kendall squirm out from underneath her and watching as their eldest brother steps into the apartment, looking a little tired but otherwise just happy to be there, like he usually is.

“All alive then? Well, except - - you know,” Connor says, gesturing vaguely to Shiv’s belly as she flips him off and Roman grabs the pamphlets he’d picked up from both clinics – the one on OD’ing and the one on abortion – off the dining room table and shoves them in his face. Connor just hums, glancing between the two.

“Which one do I read first?”

“Which one do you love more?” Roman asks, and Connor stares him down, making a point of flipping them both open at the same time.

And it’s kind of like magic, the way one of Roman’s maids materialises with a pair of clean sweats, underwear and a towel for Shiv, gesturing her up towards the bathroom before anything more can be said, and Shiv’s grateful for the promise of it mostly. Feeling not better but maybe looser, with all of them in the room together, and she pauses on her way to let Connor pull her in for a quick hug.

“You okay, baby?”

And no, but also - -

Yeah.

Maybe, she’s okay.

She kicks off her sweats, peels her underwear down to her knees, drops her ass to the toilet, and then she just sits there. Gives herself a minute, two, to just stare at those little spots of blood. Ink drops or paint flecks, the start of some great big ugly work that won’t be finished, and it happens fast – a million fragments of a never-realised life. Some little boy who looks just like her, a little girl who looks just like Tom, bright eyed, tight fisted, sharp tongued, limp wristed. Some maybe brilliant maybe awful maybe gentle maybe brutal thing that would’ve held her to all of this. Would’ve lived a life a knife to her throat, would’ve kept her a footnote to her father’s presence, an accessory to her husband’s, an afterthought, a forgotten promise, a tick nestled beneath the arm of a beast.

So she thinks:

Goodbye, little nothing.

She thinks:

Goodbye, little life.

And she feels some part of her grow back. Feels her edges green and her languid plants flourish, feels herself breathe deep, true, just herself. Her future a mystery, but her body reclaimed, her body - -

Her body.

Shiv swallows.

Shiv lets go.

The first thing she sees when she leaves the bathroom – freshly showered and changed – is Connor crouched in front of Kendall, a hand on each of his knees, and his voice low enough that she can’t hear a word he’s saying. Not that she wants to hear it, obviously, but there’s something to it. Kendall plucking at the end of the re-laid bandage on his hand (and who stuck that back on?), looking like a kid being reprimanded after class. She huffs out a breath, amused more than anything, as she leans back against the kitchen counter beside Roman, plucking his scotch from his hands to take a drink.

“Cool, glad I could keep that warm for you,” he tells her, dry, and Shiv grins at him as she downs the last mouthful. He rolls his eyes, but moves back around the counter, grabbing another glass and gesturing back for hers so he can top them back up. Shiv passes it over, casting one last look at Kendall and Con, before she turns her attention back to Roman.

“They okay?”

Roman makes a vague noise of affirmation, pouring their drinks, before he says:

“Are you?”

There’s a weight to it that doesn’t feel as flippant as it normally would, but it doesn’t go so far the other way as to feel pointed either. It’s just cautious more than anything, and Shiv glances at him, then down at her hands, shrugs, awkward, but still.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she says, and Roman looks up at her, his gaze darting over her, like he’s checking for the lie, and she thinks all she can deal is in right now and right now, she is, and he seems to see that too. He relaxes, snorts, passes Shiv her drink before turning his attention back to where Kendall’s visibly trying to ignore Con, where Con’s visibly not letting himself be ignored. She swallows a grin. Oldest boy, her ass, she thinks, taking another drink.

“You told Tom?”

She glances back at Roman, who’s watching Con and Kendall too, and she wets her lips.

“No.”

Roman makes an amused noise, then says:

“Can I be there when you do?”

She flips him off, and he just laughs.

“You think he—”

“What?”

Roman laughs a little harder, a little louder, shrugs.

“I don’t know.”

And well, that kinda fucking sums it up, doesn’t it? She has another drink, swallowing the vague dread she feels at Tom finding out about this, and instead she bumps her hip with Roman’s.

“What about you? You okay?”

“Me? Yeah, I’m great. New golden child here, now that Mom’s the only parent.”

Which - -

Well.

Isn’t exactly so far from the truth.

Still, Shiv snorts, pressing her back into the counter, looking over at Roman. He really does look better, looks himself, which isn’t what Shiv feels she looks like herself right now. He’s the brother seared into her memory, but also something better too, and vaguely she thinks that - - yeah. Okay. He’s just been here today. Through Kendall’s dance with death and her own fresh one, between two different medical facilities, not hospitals (hers was not a hospital), thank you, and that’s - -

Something.

She glances down at the floor, says:

“And what a parent,” because it feels easier than any alternative, and Roman pulls an uncomfortable face, his own attention darting briefly back to Kendall and she wonders where that will land for him. The knowledge that she didn’t bother coming when they thought Ken might’ve died.

Not an occasion, she thinks, for the family dress.

But then - - god. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.

Shiv downs the last of her scotch.

Lets her attention fall back on Ken and Con as the latter suddenly claps his hands on Kendall’s knees, pushing to his feet and spinning just enough to grab the remote off the coffee table and flop back onto the couch beside Kendall. He flips the TV on, and Kendall stretches past him to cast a vaguely pleading look at her and Rome, which doesn’t entirely make sense until he changes the channel and Shiv hears a vaguely familiar theme music start up.

“Oh, no,” Roman says, eyes dancing. “Is Con a secret Real Housewives fan? Did he cashflow BravoCon?”

“No, come on, if anything Con’s a Duck Dynasty guy, surely.”

“Is that even still on TV?”

“Is Connor even still on TV?”

Roman laughs, gives her a look like touché, and Shiv can’t help but grin as she gestures towards the bar cart for a refill before pushing off the counter towards the couch.

“Okay, I want your honest opinions, guys,” Connor says as he throws an arm up to gesture her against him, and Shiv gives him a disdainful look as she does just that, letting him pull her closer as he does the same to Kendall.

“I could be dead right now,” Ken says morosely, and Connor huffs, tugging him a little closer as Shiv just laughs. She holds her arm up for Roman to top her off as he rounds the couch, shoving Kendall over to squeeze in beside him.

“Not funny,” Connor grouses as a long haired woman pretends to put her hair up in a ponytail and starts spinning it like helicopter propellors. When Kendall just exhales, Connor leans into Shiv’s head, planting a kiss to her crown, before awkwardly gesturing with the hand at Kendall’s shoulder to the screen. “What I was just saying to Kenny is me and Willa have been talking about something like this. She got me hooked on the New York one, and I think we could make a pitch for her on the show, y’know?”

Kendall’s eyes are closed, forehead pressed into Connor’s chest, and from over his shoulder, Roman just has his eyes and mouth open wide and it’s all just so fucking stupid, she can’t help but laugh. A full-bodied thing that erupts from her belly and catches in her throat, and when she starts, she just can’t stop. What the fuck is today?

She just - -

She laughs and she laughs and she laughs until she aches, and vaguely she can hear Roman say:

“Look, you broke her.”

Then Kendall say:

“You wanna watch something else, Shivvy?” half genuine, half totally fucking self-interested, and she knows that already even before he adds: “We could put on PGM or - - y’know, Cartoon Network plays some pretty sweet like, throwback ‘toons, this time of night, if you want something like that,” and oh, she loves them, she thinks. She really, really fucking loves them.

This time, she doesn’t dream of DC and she doesn’t dream of her brothers, no, this time she dreams of Tom.

Dreams of him in steady hands and soft touches, in looks she can’t read and a tone that grates and teeth hooked in the flesh of her forearm. Dreams of him kinder than she deserves and crueller than she could imagine, and all the ways he’s real and all the ways he’s not. She wonders if she broke him.

She wonders if he broke her.

No.

For that, at least, he’ll never get the credit.

Still, there’s something. His presence in the dark. His weight to balance her boat in the sea of this. That real, tiny, gasping thing between them that she wishes wasn’t there, but is still. Maybe will always be. It’s his breath on the back of her neck.

Whatever you need, he used to say to her.

It’s his hands, inching towards hers on the edge of a box.  

This time, she chooses to go in alone.

Leaves all three of them in the waiting room, let’s the nurse take her in by herself, explain the procedure all over again, tells her she’ll be out for an hour, that when she wakes up, it’ll all be done. They make her as comfortable as she can be in a thin-mattressed hospital bed, and she glances up at the ceiling – fissured again (why is every fucking ceiling fissured) – and she thinks this is goodbye, that it’s hello, that life is waiting for her, maybe, on the other side of this.

She touches a hand to her swollen belly, and she lets them pull her under.

There’s a light somewhere above her head.

One that glows faint, then bright, brighter still. Tugs at the corners of her eyelids, peels up her consciousness, and she’s barely managed to open them to the ceiling of her clinic room before Roman’s face blocks it.

“They wouldn’t let me keep it,” he tells her, and Shiv blinks heavy lids. “I asked, I tried, thought we could keep it at Connor’s ranch, make it a figurehead or an unborn prophet or something, but there are, apparently, things money can’t buy. I know, I’m as disappointed as you.”

“My aborted fetus will not be anymore involved in your new cult any more than my living child would’ve been,” Shiv mumbles, groggy mostly, but lucid enough apparently to deal with Rome (she blames sharing a womb with him). She works her mouth, tastes it mothy and kind of bad, her skin dry as she pulls up on the cushions. Connor’s hand finds her, beneath her arm, gently helping her up.

“Wait, what cult?” he asks, and Rome waves him off, says to Shiv:

“Cult’s on the backburner. Con changed his mind about selling the ranch.”

Which - -

Okay.

Shiv blinks, turning around in the bed to where Connor’s now offering her a glass of water, his hand still on her shoulder.

“We shouldn’t talk about it now, but yeah. I don’t think I’m gonna go to Slo.”

“You’re ditching Mencken?” Shiv asks, still a little groggy, rolling her eyes when Con feeds the water glass to her mouth.

“I think even the announcement of the offer achieved what I wanted, y’know?” Con says, and Roman laughs as Shiv hears an extra exhale across the room. Something in her pulses, and she leans up enough to see Kendall in a seat by the door, a Gatorade no doubt coaxed into his re-bandaged hand by Con settled against his hip. She grins, despite herself, leaning back down into the bed.

“It was legitimising,” he continues. “I’m not gonna say it wasn’t, but in some ways there’s even more legitimacy in turning down his offer. Our politics aren’t exactly aligned after all, and Willa and me, we were talking and there’s such a groundswell with the Conheads. A real audience we can tap to get word out.”

“Uh-huh, sure,” Shiv says, pulling the glass from Con’s hand to take a drink herself. “Word about what exactly?”

“Oh, Shivvy, where to start? Chemtrails, cloud seeding, climate change, we’re currently looking at a world today that’s a hell of a lot different from when all of us grew up.”

“Well for starters there’s about fifty three years between you and us,” Roman says, and Shiv glances back at him with a grin as Connor shakes his head.

“You laugh, but this is what people are talking about.”

“Right, so Willa being on Real Housewives will be a part of this advocacy campaign?”

“It’ll be a multipronged strategy,” Connor says, and Shiv just laughs, looks back at Kendall across the room, and he looks at her. He’s coming down and it shows, and she mouths you okay and he shrugs, and then after a moment, he pushes a hand out in her direction, a non-verbal are you? And she shrugs back.

Kendall huffs, looks down, and she thinks of everything they’ve lost, of the messy, uncertain future ahead of them, she thinks of the fact that everything they ever thought was theirs is gone, she thinks about all the great big messy shifting ephemeral things in their future and she doesn’t know what any of it is or what it means or if they’ll ever be able to navigate it, but she looks at him and she thinks he almost died yesterday and maybe she did too. She thinks life didn’t and doesn’t stop with each other, but maybe for too long it stopped with Dad, and Kendall will never forgive her, but she’ll never forgive him either, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe they don’t have to, maybe they’re all they’ve got.

In the car on the way back to Roman’s, Kendall leans across the middle seat, says:

“Guess we’re both killers now,” and Shiv laughs.

Shiv reaches for his hand.

“You are,” she says, holding his hand just enough to cut four easy crescent moon cuts into it. To hold him steady in her grip, to hurt him, just a little. “The dumbest guy alive.”