Archive of Our Own

At first, Bradley mostly sleeps. Alex hovers the way she did when Lizzy was a baby, constantly on alert and no less on edge in the silence than when some small sound sends her running.

“She’s okay, Alex,” Chip says a few days in. They’d been pretending to watch a movie, but Alex hasn’t absorbed anything in at least twenty minutes and her neck cracks every time she cranes it towards the bedroom.

“Of course she’s not okay,” Alex snaps, rounding on him in an instant. “You heard what she said, what they did—”

“She’s safe,” Chip amends. “She’s home, and she’s safe, and she’s resting. That’s exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. That’s what you need to be doing.”

Alex deflates almost immediately, rubbing her forehead. “I know,” she admits. “I know, I just—I can’t. I feel so fucking useless, you know? Everything she’s been through...we got her home, but now?” She spreads her arms helplessly. “I didn’t really get that far.”

“Well,” Chip says, “there’s not exactly a playbook. She’s been cleared medically, she’s got her next appointment with Dr. Ramos on Thursday, and I know it’s gonna take time but she’s been holding up pretty well so far.” He shrugs, and it’s like he can feel Alex’s heart rate slowing, her slow acceptance of everything he’s saying. It’s a practice he’s perfected over the years, a skill more potent than anything he could ever put on a resume, and he’s only slightly resentful to be sharpening its dull edges. “So maybe we can just trust that things are gonna be okay, and get some rest while she—”

That’s when Bradley starts screaming.

—

It’s a maelstrom, everything too much, too close, thousand-count sheets on a mattress that felt like a cloud and now feels like something she’ll drown in.

It feels like a trick. She doesn’t belong here.

Here—the hotel? She reaches into the dark, the dark that’s all wrong, but finds soft, pliable fabric covering the headboard where there should be wood. Acacia, Cory told her once, and Bradley didn’t even know what that was but acted like she did. She did that a lot. Usually people believed her, but she doubts he did.

She doesn’t belong here, in this—dark, it’s dark, and quiet, which should be good. That was good, she remembers. She fell asleep here, in the dark and in the quiet, and she’d been too tired to really cry but she had anyway.

She can’t find the light. This isn’t her room.

Alex had been here, she thinks. And then the light is on, the dim one that doesn’t send her pulse pounding through her whole body, and Alex is here again.

“You’re okay,” she’s saying, pulling the tangled sheets away and climbing into the bed to hold Bradley close. Her heart beats hard against Bradley’s back and her fingers catch in the tangles of Bradley’s hair. “You’re okay, Bradley, you’re here, you’re home—”

“I thought,” Bradley rasps, the last few days at Alex’s starting to come back to her. “I thought I was back—”

“No, honey, you’re not back there.” It’s nice, Alex holding her like this—holding her tight—but it’s almost too much. Her arms itch, her breath comes a little faster. “You’re here with me.”

“Not there.” Bradley swallows, throat so dry it hurts. “Not—I was dreaming, I think. But then I woke up, and I thought I was at the Archer Gray.”

Alex’s fingers still against her scalp for just an instant, then pick right back up a little more gently. “We can go there, if you want,” she says after a moment. “Anywhere you want. You just tell me.”

Bradley shakes her head, burrowing deeper into Alex. “It doesn’t matter,” she breathes. Her chin trembles, and she’s so tired. “That wasn’t…” It wasn’t right, she thinks, wasn’t home anymore, but nowhere is, really, and in the end she just falls back asleep.

—

“Have you heard from Cory?”

Chip looks up at Alex from over the pan he’s holding just above the flame. “No,” he says, brow furrowing. “I mean, I let him know when Bradley got home. Just that she was okay and everything. But I never heard back. Figured he probably needed some space, you know?”

She doesn’t, particularly. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since the press conference, and if she’s honest, she’s barely spared him a thought. She knows, now, more about…well, more, and God knows he threw himself across the tracks for Bradley, so it's not like she's not grateful. She is. But that man walks into every room like he’s juggling grenades for the hell of it, and every time he drops one, the rest of them are stuck cleaning up the wreckage. It pisses her off.

That, and it’s like he has too many teeth. The soliloquies are bad enough without that broad, fixed smile that shows off every one of them, light bouncing off the white like an overapplied brightness filter.

So she doesn’t love Cory, or even like him very much. It’s—whatever, because it’s not like he’s ever liked her either. But the truth is she still misses Mitch like a limb, and she’s texted Paul three times so far this morning. So maybe, she concedes, she’s not in a position to judge Bradley for who she called out for in the moments before she woke up and realized she had to make do with Alex.

Alex sighs deeply, bracing both hands on the counter. “Yeah, well,” she says wearily, “I think we should probably find him.”

—

They can’t, is the thing.

He’s not at his hotel or at any of his properties, and by the time Chip tracks down Kyle, Cory's cut him loose. “Last I heard, he was in Atlanta,” Kyle tells him. “There was a producer there he’d had some conversations with, so I think he was chasing that.” So Chip makes some more calls, and then Alex does, with fuck all to show for it. By the time Bradley’s been back in New York for a week, he’s officially concerned.

Watching the press conference again doesn’t help.

Bradley knows, he thinks, the broad strokes. Her first days back in the country she’d been whisked away for assessments, treatments, all sorts of shit before she was released to them. As far as he knows, though, those initial debriefing was restricted to her experience in Minsk and not so much the investigation leading up to it. The Wolf River story is a living thing now, and Chip knows the FBI is scratching at the doors to speak with her; he and Alex have been questioned more than once, there’s a national movement for Claire Conway’s release, and he’s lost track of the lawsuits filed. Apart from the statement she gave to the agents in DC, though, Bradley’s been granted a little space before she'll have to face the investigators again.

She knows about Celine. She knows about Paul and the botched deal. She knows there was a whistleblower, and that Cory was involved in her release. She sure as shit doesn’t know much, though, because Alex gave her the bullet points but not the story, and Bradley hadn’t asked for it.

But then she does, and so he shows her.

And, well, shit. He was there, but the heartbreak of it all had barely registered in the flush of their victory. This, now—all he can see is the shadow of Cory’s face as he hands the phone to Alex, the emptiness of him in high definition.

Bradley’s whole body lurches forward at the name Martha Ellison, and as Alex continues onscreen, Bradley turns white.

“She’s dead?” she says faintly. “What…what happened?”

It’s not the question Chip thought she would ask, and it’s sure as hell not a question he wants to answer. But Alex isn’t here—he’s pretty sure Bradley waited until she was gone, actually, to come looking for answers—and fuck it, he thinks, Bradley Jackson is asking the hard questions and that’s the first thing that’s felt normal in weeks.

So he tells her. Gently, as much as such an answer can be given.

And—yeah, they’ve been focused on Bradley, but something twists in his stomach as her face goes gray and slack. “Where is he?” she rasps, fists clenched in her lap. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Chip admits. “We’ve been looking these past couple of days, but he’s not—”

Bradley stands so quickly that she sways in place, lurching away from Chip before he can reach out and steady her. He follows her to Alex’s guest suite and finds her powering her phone up for the first time in days.

“Please,” she whispers, “please, please, please…”

The screen lights up with a lifetime’s worth of notifications, all ignored as she pulls up her location tracking app. Then she makes a soft noise, sagging against the bed.

—

“Chip!” Cory says, brushing dirt from his pants as he moves to open the fence separating the garden from the driveway. “Perfect timing. Hold this for a sec, would you?” He tosses a shovel in Chip’s general direction for no reason except the satisfaction that flares in his chest at the pained grunt that follows.

“The landscapers will be back on Tuesday,” he continues, gesturing broadly to the broken earth around them, “but no time like the present, right? I’ve never had much of a green thumb, but hey—” he flashes a sharp grin at Chip, who’s staring at him with that fucking hangdog expression he usually wears around Alex—“Nothing like nature to really get your head on straight. And gardening!” he exclaims, kneeling back down to yank again at the root system he’d been fighting when Chip first pulled up. “Who the hell came up with that? Well, God, I guess, depending—you know, apples and Adam and Eve, oh my—but just imagine!”

His fingers ache, muddy and scraped and white around the tangled remains of what was once something lovely. “You’re looking around,” he continues, eyes fixed on the ground, “at this pile of shit and worm food that you just dumped on top of your mom, or whoever, and it just clicks. More! Let’s cover Mom with azaleas, lilies, hydrangeas, more and more, make sure the worms have, you know, dessert options. Of course, all of that will die too, and then you're stuck with two graveyards.”

Cory feels his smile spreading like a disease, broad and wild across his face. He sucks in a painful breath, gets that out of the way, and looks up to meet Chip’s despairing gaze.

“But—and this is the genius of it, the Almighty was a fucking capitalist mastermind—you can bring them back!” He laughs delightedly. “Mom’s dead, Dad, the baby’s—” he makes a quick, sharp noise in the back of his throat— “cancer, overdose, a fucking papercut, whatever, they're dust, but hey, there's still a garden. So one day there’s a great-great-great-granddaughter rolling up to Lowe’s because someone who’s been dead a hundred years is still dead, and it's not like anyone actually cares anymore but you can’t let your second middle namesake be the one tomb in the yard covered in compost, you know? That's just disrespectful. So you drop three hundred dollars on the first thing you see, plant it, water it, the whole thing, and then immediately forget about it until whoops, sorry Aunt Gloria, it's been a few years, let me just make a quick run to Lowe's and fix that up for you!” Swiftly, he pulls his hands out of the earth and claps so loudly that Chip flinches. “The cycle of life, it's all a fucking scam. Genius. Do I need to fire Kyle?”

“Do you—what?”

Cory shakes his head, standing in a quick motion that cracks his aching knees. “Fuck the garden, actually. What do you say to some munchies?” The door to the kitchen is already open; inside, papers are strewn all across the counter and the table and every available surface. “I could do a cheese plate, some olives, or—heeeey!” He opens the fridge and pulls out half of a lasagna. “Take this, will you? I can’t eat anything else out of a casserole dish. I thought Kyle told you I was in Georgia. Plates are in there,” he adds, pointing.

“He did,” Chip says. He doesn’t take a plate, the bastard, so Cory gets one for him. “You aren’t, though.”

“Never could get anything past you,” Cory agrees jovially, looking for a clean serving spoon. There aren’t any, so he picks one from the overflowing sink and starts washing it. “I’d ask what you’re doing here, but you know what, I really don’t want to know.” He pauses for the briefest moment, the water scalding his skin. “In fact, I’d really fucking like for you to leave.”

“Yeah,” Chip says heavily from behind him. “I’m not gonna do that, man.”

Cory resumes scrubbing more furiously than before. Something’s growing in his throat, pounding behind his eyes, and he can’t swallow past it. “Well,” he says brightly, “do me a favor and do something with the casseroles while you’re here. Nothing but nice neighbors around here. They’re the worst.” He shudders theatrically, turning to hand Chip the clean-ish spoon on his way out of the kitchen.

Chip doesn’t follow him upstairs. He’s still there, though, when Cory wakes up a few hours later with an even worse headache and the itching need to crawl out of his own skin more intense than ever.

The first thing he notices downstairs is that the kitchen is clean. The sink is sparkling, the counters gleaming, and the door to the garden is closed against the heavy fog that’s rolled in. When he opens the fridge, there’s a haul of fresh groceries and no casserole dishes at all. The papers and boxes that had been scattered across every surface have been neatly grouped together in stacks that are much smaller than he would have expected. Next to those is a single card with his name on it in familiar handwriting.

Cory finds Chip in the living room, and something about it is so surreal that he almost doesn’t notice the headache anymore, almost doesn’t want to cry. Charlie fucking Black in his mother’s living room, typing something on his phone with one of his mother’s ugliest mugs on a coaster in front of him. Somehow he didn’t smell it in the kitchen, but he does now—something’s in the oven, and he didn’t put it there.

The room is still a mess—it would take a lot longer than an afternoon to fix that—but it’s better. There are still piles everywhere, but Cory has a feeling they probably make more sense than they did before: photos, art, books, no longer interspersed with dirty dishes and bottles and the detritus of Cory’s existence here in this house. Even his mother's cardigan has been neatly draped across a chair, no longer crumpled in a corner of the couch among the throw pillows.

His chest twists. Resentment, mostly, but something else too.

Cory clears his throat. “So do you charge by the hour,” he asks, “or is it an all-night kind of arrangement?”

“Tell you what,” Chip says. “I think we can probably work out a deal.”

—

The deal is this: Chip leaves, and Cory stays. They eat dinner together first and watch something shitty on a channel he’s certain his mother never once clicked open. The landscapers are coming on Tuesday, Chip will come back on Wednesday, and Cory has said that he’ll still be here. He’s not sure yet if that’s true.

He’ll respond to texts from Chip, even if it’s just a fuck you emoji. That, he thinks he can do.

Chip, for his part, won’t mention Bradley. They didn’t agree to that, exactly, but it was understood in the one moment where it felt like he was about to, saw Cory’s face, and then didn’t.

Chip left him with two pieces of paper. One is the name of a therapist that his own therapist recommended. He’d laid out a persuasive argument: “I mean, what the fuck, right?” And hell, Cory thinks, maybe there’s something to that.

The other is the card still waiting in the kitchen, which Cory finally reads in the earliest hours of the morning.

I’m so sorry about your mom, she’s written. I’m really glad I got to meet her. I know she was complicated, but she did some amazing things with her life.

There’s a little blotch there after the last sentence, like she’d maybe held the pen there to start a new sentence but then decided against it. He’s grateful for that.

He wants a drink, or something else, but he goes out into the wreck of the garden instead. Sits there, in the fog and the starless dark, for a long time.

—

There are a lot of things that are complicated between Alex and Chip. Gossip has never been one of them.

Neither one of them has the whole story of Bradley-and-Cory, but between the two of them they piece together a house of cards that leaves her reeling and reaching for her third drink of the night.

Chip leans in. “Do you know if they ever…you know, before? Because I’ll be honest, I kind of assumed—”

“Oh God, absolutely,” Alex agrees. “I mean, now I don’t, but back when she first started? Of course I did. And then she and Laura got together and suddenly they couldn’t be in the same room, you remember?”

“Well, technically, none of us were in the same room for—” Alex kicks his shin, and he glares at her. “Ow.”

“All I mean,” she continues pointedly, “is that it wasn’t some big secret. Him, at least. Even before the whole thing came out, the investigation and all that, it was pretty clear it was, you know, whatever. Real. For him.” She shakes her head. “And fuck, the whole Hal thing? I just thought Bradley was kind of—I don’t know. Not that she didn’t care, but…”

“I mean, yeah,” Chip agrees, “I did too. But whatever happened this time—look, I was there.” Off Alex’s look, he rolls his eyes. “During the investigation. When we first thought he might be involved. They were already together, whatever that meant. She was really upset. And then afterwards—I know, I know she took all of this too far, but I just don’t think she…I don’t think it’s what Cory thinks.”

“It was maybe a little what Cory thinks,” Alex admits. “She didn’t tell me…well, she didn’t tell me much, we weren’t exactly getting along. But she called him, and I was here. I heard it. And I shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have.” She rubs her brow, leaning back in her bar stool. “She was just so focused on this story, and it didn’t seem serious at the time but now I think she was scared of blowing this thing with Cory up. Not just guilty, but really, actually scared.”

Chip tips his head back, chasing the last drops of his drink. “He asked me something a few weeks ago. A Cory question, not a real one. But he asked me which was worse—pretending to love someone to get information from them, or killing yourself in front of your kid.”

Alex recoils. “Jesus.”

“Yeah, no fucking kidding.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on the counter and his head in his hands.

They sit quietly together for a minute. In all their years together, all their countless hours, there’s been so little quiet between them. Everything was always loud and fast, their work and their conversations, and even the things that were unsaid and kept silent were loud between them, loud and big and heavy. But while the silence right now is heavy, it’s peaceful, too. Easy. She’s grateful for that. For Chip, here by her side after everything, despite everything. She should tell him that.

But things are peaceful and easy, and so instead she says, “He told me that he thinks he killed his mom.”

Chip lifts his head. Alex hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes until they’re wide and looking right at her. After a moment, he groans and drops his head back into his hands.

“Can you imagine,” he asks, voice muffled by his palms, “if we had actual jobs right now?”

It startles her, but in a good way. God, she thinks, everything is fucked, but she can’t help but laugh. It feels good. Easy.

And then, on a whim and a deep breath, she does it. She tells him. That feels good too.

—

Bradley’s world slowly starts to expand.

She writes to Hal first, and FaceTimes her niece. She talks to the investigators and sits through more hours of government debriefs than she can count. She talks to the FBI, and her lawyer seems to think that a new deal may be on the table—officially or not, she’s not sure, but the thought of moving forward without a knife at her throat is so tempting that she doesn’t let herself think about it.

Sophia Volk returns to the US to serve the government a feast of heads on silver platters. Celine Dumont goes into hiding in her stead, filling Bradley with a mean, sharp kind of satisfaction.

When she appears on The Morning Show a couple of weeks after returning to New York, she's a guest and not an anchor. Still, she sits right by Yanko, and against her lawyer’s advice she adds her voice to those calling for Claire’s release. It feels good, being there, but the lights are too bright, the noise overwhelming, and her chest still goes tight whenever she hears any kind of music.

She dyes her hair brown. She’s lost a lot of it anyway, first to lice and mats and but ever since she's been back she keeps finding strands on her pillow, handfuls clogging the shower drain; by the time she cuts it short, her roots already make up half of what’s left. She doesn’t look like she used to, exactly, but she doesn’t look like Bradley Jackson from TMS, either. She looks like someone different.

She stays at Alex’s. She isn’t ready to be alone again, and there’s only one place she’d want to go, anyway.

She buys Geraldine Ferraro’s autobiography and reads every line, tries to read what’s between them.

—

Cory stays where he is, which means that Chip ends up being the first to break the deal.

“So,” he says over the top of the box of books he’s taping shut. “Bradley.”

Cory raises his brows, not looking up from his own mangled roll of masking tape. “And that, my friend, is what they call finesse. How long did it take you to come up with that?”

“Did you see her on TMS the other day?”

“Of course not,” Cory lies. He yanks harder on the tape and cuts his finger on the serrated edge of the dispenser, biting back the hiss of pain that threatens. He stands up instead, clenching his bloody finger into his fist. “What kind of free time do you think I have these days? I made a whole roast chicken last night, Chip! Gotta feed that compost somehow.”

Chip ignores him. That feels more normal than most of the time they’ve spent together these last weeks—a lot of time, which didn’t feel normal at all but is starting to. “She’s doing okay,” he says. “She’s still staying with Alex, but she’s doing better than she was. It was pretty rough at first.”

“Right,” Cory says. “Stop talking, please.”

Chip carefully cuts his own strip of tape from the roll, folding a corner so that it won’t end up mangled and bloody on the floor like Cory’s. “She, uh, she’s still…catching up on everything, but she asked about you. She’s asking. She’s pretty worried, man.”

Cory laughs, loud and long. Chip looks even more concerned, and Cory can’t blame him. “Worried about me?” he asks, shaking his head. “Sounds like she’s still got some catching up to do!” He moves towards the kitchen in long, fast strides, kneeling to dig under the sink for a first-aid kit that isn’t there anymore. “Where the hell are the band-aids?”

“I think there are some in the upstairs bathroom,” Chip says from behind Cory. “Why, what’s—oh, shit!” Cory hears the sink running, a tearing sound, and then Chip is on the floor next to Cory and he’s holding out a wet paper towel.

Cory ignores it, sticking his finger in his mouth instead. It tastes dirty and metallic and makes him feel even more nauseous.

“Fuck’s sake, you’re worse than Alex,” Chip mutters. “Look, she hasn’t said much and I know that her name is like, radioactive, so I’ll just say this, okay? You don’t want to talk to her, fine. I mean, I think you do, but that’s your call. But I was there, man. I was there when we first thought you might…you know.”

Cory manages not to flinch, instead biting down on his injured finger until suddenly there’s more blood flooding his mouth.

“And for what it’s worth? We were still chasing Bethanne when you guys got together. It didn’t even occur to us that you might even know anything until…whatever happened between you two, how that started, that had nothing to do with any of this shit. I was there, and it just—got away, you know? But it fucked her up, what happened with you.”

Chip is being gentle now in a way that makes Cory’s skin feel too small, something he needs to escape. He swallows a final mouthful of blood and closes his hand into a fist again.

“And then when she got home,” Chip continues, “fuck, it was…it was bad. She slept for days and she kept having these nightmares, she’d wake up screaming, and Alex—Alex was losing her goddamn mind because she was hovering like a fucking, what do you call them? A fucking insect or something—I don’t know, something better than that. Don’t tell her I called her an insect.” He looks alarmed at the thought, off-track just long enough for Cory to press his fist to his mouth while he tries not to double over. “I just mean that she was there,” Chip says, focused now on what he’s been building up to, “but she wasn’t who Bradley wanted. And I’m pretty sure I’m not who you want sitting here with you, okay? So maybe just…think about it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cory says hoarsely. “I’ll think about it.”

He lurches forward, pulling himself up just in time to throw up in the kitchen sink. Silently, Chip hands him the damp paper towel.

—

For all the days Bradley feels almost like herself, there are also days like this: barely able to drag herself out of bed, eating cereal on the couch and breaking down when she realizes she’s finished the box.

That’s how Alex finds her late in the afternoon. Wrapped in blankets, sobbing over Lucky Charms.

“We’re out,” Bradley manages, as pathetic as she’s ever felt, but this isn’t the first breakdown Alex has witnessed and the way she laughs at Bradley makes Bradley laugh through the tears clogging her throat.

Alex settles next to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, honey,” she says, a smile in her voice even as she strokes Bradley’s hair. “We’ll get some more.”

“I’m not crying because of the cereal,” Bradley tells her, craning her neck so that her watery eyes meet Alex’s. Her lower lip trembles. “I mean, not entirely.”

“You know what?” Alex asks, leaning close like she’s going to share a secret. “I kind of figured.” It makes Bradley laugh again, choked and wet, and she rests her forehead on Alex’s shoulder. “You want to talk about it?”

She does, she realizes. She really does.

“I don’t know,” Bradley murmurs, not bothering to wipe away the new tears spilling out. “It’s like…ever since Hal, I’ve just been spiraling, you know? I kept trying to outrun it. Even before, maybe. I’ve been running for a long time.” She feels herself smile, a brittle and broken thing. “Cory—he told me once that I can’t just leave every time someone disappoints me. That it won’t keep me pure, or safe, or…whatever.”

“That’s awful,” Alex says, and when Bradley pulls back to stare at her, she gives a half-hearted shrug. “It just really pisses me off when he’s right. And he’s right more often than any man should be.”

She concedes it with a mighty sigh, and Bradley laughs again, just a little. “It’s the worst,” she agrees. “But that was when…that was a long time ago. And ever since the pandemic, and everything, it’s just like—I’m trying to outrun me. There’s no excuse anymore, you know? Hal confessed, my mom’s gone, you and Mia and everyone have just been doing your jobs, and I—I guess I just thought it would be different. I mean, I didn’t think I’d ever be back here. But it’s not here that’s the problem.”

Alex rubs her arms, a soft, strong touch that they’ve learned is just enough for Bradley when she’s curled in on herself like this. “You’re not a disappointment, Bradley,” she murmurs. “This wasn’t your fault. We’re the ones who let you down.”

And it’s not her fault that it’s the exact wrong thing to say, not her fault that the sweet acceptance of as long as it’s not just me and I will do my very best has played louder in her head louder than the music in her cell did, but Bradley pulls her knees to her chest and starts sobbing anyway. These aren’t the tears she sheds over empty cereal boxes, or loud music, or even the dreams that wake her up screaming; they’re not for what she doesn’t know, or even what she does, about who put her in jail and why, who left her there and who got her home. These are older tears, tears she’s been holding back since long before she boarded a plane to Belarus. Real, true, wracking sobs from somewhere deep inside her that’s been locked away for a very long time.

“I just want to stay,” she gasps, twisting her fingers in the blanket she's clutching. “I just want to stop breaking everything, I want to stop hurting everyone.”

Alex lets her cry. She doesn’t try to tell her it’s okay or that she’s where she belongs or any of the other things that sound pretty but don’t sound right. She just sits there, pulling Bradley’s hand free and holding it tight, occasionally stroking a strand of hair back behind Bradley’s ear until Bradley pulls in a shuddering inhale and finally collapses back into the sofa, spent.

They’re both quiet for a little while. Eventually Alex gets up, brings back a glass of water that Bradley accepts gratefully, and as she sits back down she lets out a sigh.

“I saw Paul the other night.”

Bradley blinks, grimacing at the sticky peel of her lids. “You did?”

Alex’s lips quirk. “I did.”

There’s something in the way that she says it, and Bradley knows. “Alex!” she sputters, a fluttering feeling in her chest like something opening. “When did that start?”

“That was the first time…” she trails off. “I mean, when you were gone—” (that’s what they say, gone) — “he helped, you know? Well, even before that,” she corrects herself. “I saw him, and it was just like…I don’t know.”

She pulls back a little, looking Bradley right in the eye, and that’s when Bradley knows she’s going somewhere with this that isn’t just a distraction. “I was married for a long time,” Alex says, “to a really good guy. He wasn’t perfect, but he was good. We were good. And even when we weren’t, even at our worst, we didn’t hurt each other nearly as much as Paul and I did.

“And then there was Chip,” she continues, looking a little wistfully around the room like she’s half-expecting him to be there. “He loved me for a really, really long time. And I thought about it, kind of. For a minute. Not seriously, but…he’s good. He would’ve been safe. It wouldn’t have been fair to him, but God knows that's never stopped me.” Alex is tearing up now, and Bradley squeezes her hand this time, listening.

“We’re around shitty men all the time, and then there are these guys—these good guys—and I just…” She flaps her free hand in front of her face, visibly trying to hold it together. “I wanted to, I should, but I never loved them half as much as I loved Mitch or Paul.” She shrugs weakly, and it’s like a confession when she admits, “I still do. It would be so much easier if I didn’t, but I do.”

Bradley takes that in, running her fingers through her too-short hair. “I don’t know how to feel about that,” she says at last, and then, seeing Alex’s face, immediately continues— “Not…I just mean, I don’t know how I feel being the shitty man in this metaphor.” She pauses. “That’s what you were going for, right?”

“Well,” Alex says delicately, reaching for her glass of water on the coffee table. “When you say it like that, I wish I’d picked a different one.”

They stare at each other for a moment, and suddenly they’re laughing. Helpless and weak and aching, laughing.

“I should come to you for pep talks more,” Bradley says when she can speak again, wiping tears from under her eye. “That was great. Next you can tell me about how much I remind you of Bro Hartman.”

Alex’s face does something funny at that, and Jesus fucking Christ—

“All I meant,” Alex finally manages, once they’ve calmed down again, “is that people hurt each other. That’s life, honey. And sure, sometimes there’s no coming back from it. But for better or worse, there are people that you just can’t—there are people that you can’t get away from, you know? So maybe you just have to put the hurt aside, or figure out how to deal with it, because it hurts more to…not.”

Bradley’s eyes sting again. She’s getting really fucking sick of it. “I want to,” she says thinly, and feels her face crumple. “The whole time I was gone, I was so scared I wouldn’t ever see him again. That we’d leave it like that. And now I’m back, and I’m getting better, but I’m still—” Her voice cracks, and she lets Alex pull her close. “I just want to see him,” she whispers, again and again, her whole body aching with it.

—

This isn't the worst idea Alex has had, but that’s not exactly the bar Chip aspires to live by these days.

Still. Getting Cory out of his mother’s house feels like a good idea, and neither of them are flush with options at the moment. Maine’s as good a place as any.

And fuck him, but it works.

“I could write a book,” Cory muses, practically bouncing around the open span of the cabin’s living area. “This is where she wrote hers, right? The hallowed ground that birthed The Gospel of Alex, Volume One?” He bobs his head, more enthused than Chip’s seen in weeks. “I could give that a whirl—not the New Testament, obviously, more of an Are You There God, It’s Me, Cory approach. I’d probably need a pen name, though, so we'll workshop the title. People haven’t exactly been, you know…”

He makes a grabby-machine gesture.

“I wrote a book once,” Chip says, unpacking the bag of takeout on the coffee table in front of the frankly excessive TV screen. “Back in college. I wrote it in like three weeks and submitted it to a bunch of publishers. None of them bit.”

Cory swivels to face him, face bright with something like real interest. “I’d bite,” he says immediately, then— “Hey, there’s an idea! Fuck making movies, I could publish books. Dying market, sure, but there’ll always be fuck-ups looking to un-fuck with a book deal, right? Cheap as hell, too. Someone else can fluff up the Hollywood execs while we rake in the sweet 'based on the book' credits—”

“Actually,” Chip cuts in, “that’s not a bad idea. Writing one, I mean.” He wonders for a second if he should say what he’s been thinking for awhile now, but hell, they’re six hours from the city and Cory can’t exactly kick him out. “You've got all your mom’s papers, right? I know you haven't gone through them yet, but it looked like she was thinking about some kind of memoir. Maybe you could turn them into something. You know, tell her story.”

Cory flinches, either unable or not bothering to hide it. His jaw works like he’s chewing on words he can’t get out; in the end, he manages a grim smile and a tilt of his head that doesn’t really say much, but also doesn’t read as a no.

“Let me guess,” he says a moment later, his face unnaturally bright again. “I'm setting the scene: you, twenty years old with—don't tell me—a goatee? No, a soul patch! You and your soul patch, cramped in a dark room drafting a masterpiece the world wasn’t ready for then but that, with the help of a genius slash purveyor of hidden gems, could change the landscape of literature forever…ah!” He taps his temple. “Did you lose your virginity on your mother’s grave, by any chance?”

“I’m flattered,” Chip says dryly, “but this was no Frankenstein.”

Cory grins, the brightness real now. “I didn’t say anything about Frankenstein,” he says. “I asked if you—”

“It was a romance,” Chip interrupts him. “I mean, a full-on, incredibly detailed historical bodice-ripper, except instead of bodices, they were gladiators. I totally get why bodice-rippers are a thing, though. Turns out, armor?” He shakes his head. “Super inconvenient to remove quickly when your two guys are trying to sneak in a quickie between, you know, lions and tigers and bears. Anyway, they were supposed to kill each other but instead they escaped and started a farm together. I was taking a class on the Roman empire,” he adds after a moment.

Cory stares at him for a good long while before breaking out into the most honest laughter Chip’s ever heard from him.

“Chip fucking Black,” he wheezes, grasping Chip’s shoulder. “You’re gonna run your own empire one day, you know that? Fuck the mother of science fiction, fuck…fucking Rome, right, who gives a fuck about aqueducts anyway? Well, apart from that whole TikTok whatever, but fuck TikTok, too—I’m seeing the future, man. The Age of Chip! We should be so lucky.”

There’s something in his voice there, right at the end, that catches and warms Chip right through. It’s as close, he thinks, that Cory can come to expressing appreciation right now, here with distance between him and all he’s lost. It’s something like thank you, and Chip does him another kindness by not acknowledging it beyond a slight dip of his head.

The moment passes quickly.

“No,” Chip groans when he comes back a few minutes later carrying plates and silverware to see Gladiator pulled up on the TV and another shit-eating grin on Cory’s face. “No.”

“Oh, come on—”

“You’re not as funny as you think you are.”

“Aren’t I, though?” Cory asks. “Just a little?”

Chip puts the dishes on the table and tries to take the remote. “Look,” he says, “fine, whatever, we can watch it, but I’m warning you now that if I make a move on you, it’s got nothing to do with you, okay? This was formative shit, so you’re going to have to be the responsible one here—”

“What, it wouldn’t be about me even a little? Come onnnnn, I’d be a hot gladiator.”

“Cory,” Chip says exasperatedly, “I love you like a brother, I do, but believe it or not, I don’t want to fuck you on Alex’s couch!”

“I’m sorry, what?” Alex asks from behind them.

—

It’s not the worst idea she’s ever had. She really hopes this isn’t the worst idea she’s ever had.

“What?” Chip asks, then: “What?”

“What the hell did I just walk in on?” Alex demands, taking in the scene. Cory’s face is still lit with laughter even as he turns to face her, and the knot in her stomach tightens in a sick sort of way both with gladness—she hasn’t seen this in awhile, and that has to be a good thing—and the anxiety she’s been determinedly ignoring for the last several hours on the drive up here.

“Alex!” Cory stands up, gesturing broadly in welcome. It’s my own house, dickwad, she thinks despite herself. “Well. This is a surprise, but hey, quick question—do you think I’d make a hot gladiator?”

“Alex, what the fuck.” Chip’s face, in contrast, is gray, which means two things: one, he knows what’s going on, and two, he thinks it’s a really bad idea.

Okay, she concedes. This might just be the worst idea she’s ever had.

“Just for the record,” Cory continues over Alex’s rising panic, “you might have missed this part, but we weren’t about to have sex on your couch. I think we’re all learning something new about Chip here—” he shoots a fucking finger gun at Chip, who’s holding a hand to his mouth with his eyes closed, “but speaking for myself, I’d—oh.”

He staggers forward the tiniest bit.

“Alex?” Bradley asks hoarsely from behind her. “Alex, what…?”

It’s a bit like watching someone be sick, what happens next.

For a moment Cory seems more startled than anything, staring at Bradley for an endless instant as his brows rise and then furrow in confusion. And then it happens all at once: a breath that turns into a gasp and then a choking sort of noise until he’s crumbling right in front of them, curling forward so deeply that his face is gone and all she can see are his heaving shoulders and all she can hear are the awful sounds he’s making, the cracking, guttural sounds of someone being split open, someone trying and failing to keep their messy insides from spilling out.

It’s horrific.

She stays just long enough to see Bradley rush to him, and to see Cory fall into her like there are no bones left to hold him up.

Her stinging eyes meet Chip's, and she tilts her head towards the door.

—

“I’m sorry,” Bradley whispers, again and again and again. She says it into his hair, against his shoulder, anywhere she can reach. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He still sounds like he’s choking, and she pulls back just enough to get a look at him. He can’t look at her but his hand spasms at her back, twists in her shirt, and it feels enough like stay that she moves back in and tries to resituate them. He’s all locked up, knees on the hard floor between the couch and the coffee table; the best she can manage without letting go is his head in her lap and her at an angle, draped across his back with her face pressed between his shoulders, holding tight.

She holds him like that for awhile, the dark fabric of his shirt growing darker and wet against her cheek. She tries to breathe, her chest against his back, slow and deep so that he might start to do the same. He doesn’t. Even when the worst of the sobbing stops, when he’s trembling more than wrenching apart in her arms, his breath comes in hot, wet gasps she feels against her stomach.

“Hey,” she says shakily, “hey, come—come here. Come here, Cory, you need to breathe, okay?”

He fights her when she moves, so weakly that she has to hold back another sob of her own. Finally she settles them with her back against the couch and his face buried in her neck. “Is this okay?” she finally dares to ask, her stomach hollow even as he grips her with bruising force. “Is it—is it okay that I’m here? I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know what Alex was doing, I’d never have…”

He makes a noise in his throat, something harsh, but she doesn’t know what it means. She pulls back slightly, sick with the not knowing. “I don’t…”

He makes another noise, deeper and desperate, and this time she can just about make it out. “Stay,” he rasps, pressing deeper into her. His forehead slips against her collarbone, hot and damp. “Please.”

She nods against him, fingers in his hair. “Yeah, I’m gonna stay,” she says, tears dripping from her skin to his. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’m gonna stay right here.”

And she does, for a long time.

—

It’s a long drive back to the city, and a quiet one. Mostly.

They’d argued, of course. What was she thinking, how wrong it could have gone, how wrong it could be going right then. Maybe one of them should go check, but also, what if they interrupted, but also, what might they end up interrupting? “All my shit’s still in there,” Chip said at one point, “Alex, we can’t just leave—”

They argued about how long to wait, and then they argued while waiting, argued until finally the sky started to turn pink and they both seemed to realize that enough time had passed that if this was going to end horribly, it probably would have by now.

“You’re fucking insane,” Chip says for the fourth or fifth time, looking at Alex from the passenger seat. “You know that, right?”

“I get it already, Chip!”

“I’m just saying, this could have gone so badly.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Alex glares at him for a second before turning back to the road. They’re taking her car back—another argument he’d lost. “But for fuck’s sake, something had to give already.”

“I just don’t want you to think that because this didn’t blow up spectacularly that you can pull shit like this in the future.”

There’s something in his voice that makes her look at him again. He’s looking at his phone, and holds it up so that she can see what he’s reading. It’s a text.

“Is that from—?”

Chip’s trying to hold back a grin as she glances between him and the road, relief flooding through her so powerfully she feels lightheaded. “Like I said,” he replies, “just because this hasn’t blown up yet…”

“Oh, just read it to me, asshole!”

“Well, I was going to, but—Jesus, Alex, watch the fucking road!”

—

“I’m only saying this once,” Chip tells her a little later, once they’ve made it back to her place in one piece and they each have a drink in hand. “You did good.”

Alex smiles at him, happier than she’s been in longer than she can remember. “You too,” she says, setting her glass down and pulling him into an impulsive hug. He squeezes her back tightly. It feels good; it is good.

“And now,” he says as they break apart, “I’m going home. To my apartment. If I can remember where it is.”

“With all the love in my heart,” Alex says, “get the hell out, and don’t come back for at least six months."

She pours herself another glass of wine after he’s gone, and for a moment she considers calling Paul. This is the first night she’s had to herself in weeks. Maybe…

But this is the first night she’s had to herself in weeks, and that’s exactly how she’s going to enjoy it.

—

When he’s empty—when his insides have been scraped clean and what’s left of his soul feels almost light compared to the lead of his bones—he untangles himself from the mess he and Bradley have made of each other and escapes to the bathroom without a word.

The emptiness doesn’t feel good, exactly; physically, he feels worse than ever. Throbbing head and sore ribs, stomach cramping and snot coating his throat despite his best efforts to swallow it away. He looks like shit, too, no surprise there—broken blood vessels around his eyes, blotchy and red everywhere, everything too swollen to even squint against the harsh overhead.

He hisses at the first splash of cold water on his face, the hot clammy wreck of it, so he fills the sink until he can submerge it entirely. He stays there until his skin feels numb and his lungs burn worse than his eyes. He is risen, he thinks dully, catching a glimpse in the mirror as he wipes his face dry.

He takes his time in the guest room, unpacking and refolding the few days worth of clothes he’d brought. He drapes the damp, wrinkled clothes he’d been wearing over a chair by the guest bed and changes into his new favorite sweats. He left his old favorites at Celine’s, the soft ones worn thin over the years.

He’s okay with that. He left a lot of things with Celine that he’s okay to live without. She gave him so much during those few weeks, kindness and escape, her skin the only real warmth in the world. She was fire and shelter when the apocalypse came, and he’d meant it; he wouldn’t have survived without her.

But his own existence isn’t worth much these days, to him or anyone else. And of all the things she offered, everything that he tried to believe was enough, there was only ever one thing she could give him that really mattered.

It was the one thing she wouldn’t. He had to take it, in the end, and it destroyed them both.

He thinks they probably deserved it.

He is risen. It feels more true now than it did when he said it to Stella a lifetime ago, when he made her the first casualty of all this. He’d felt like a titan then, a messiah, like the fucking king of the world back on top where he belonged and there was no cost too high, no cross too heavy.

This, now—he thinks of cockroaches. Of phoenixes, of ashes. He thinks about knocking on his mom’s door as a kid, again and again, no matter how many times she pretended not to hear him. He thinks of the first kid who decided to shut him up by knocking out a tooth and how he learned to talk through a mouthful of blood, to talk his way through and out of anything. He thinks of Bradley saying I didn’t think I’d see you again, and how he’d said Here we are.

That had been the start of something. The first step he takes back towards the living room feels like the start of something, too.

He thinks about how in order to rise, you have to fall, and he’s never stopped falling for her. He thinks about how she was right there on the ground waiting for him when he fell to his knees. How he fell into her open arms, not at her feet.

—

It takes her awhile to stop shaking. When Cory disappeared without a word she’d dug a lorazepam out of her purse and pulled up a meditation app on her phone, but it took her three tries to be able to complete the breathing exercise without breaking into another round of the harsh, panicked sobs that she’d managed to hold back right up until the moment he left. Even when her pulse has slowed and her breath comes fast but steady, she can’t quite stop shaking.

She waits. She doesn’t know what else to do.

But the only thing he’s said to her in weeks is stay, and so she does even as the room grows dark around her and she tries not to break apart with how much hope she wants to attach to that one word.

He’s quiet when he returns, his bare feet nearly soundless on the wood floor where he stops just inside her periphery. She wraps the blanket she’d grabbed from the back of the couch more tightly around her as the trembling starts back up.

“I, uh…” Cory looks at her, then up at the ceiling like he can’t hold her gaze for long. “I really don’t want to talk.” His voice is tight and raspy, like it hurts to speak.

Bradley nods automatically, shrinking further into her corner of the couch. “Of course,” she agrees, swallowing hard. “I—Chip texted a little while ago. They, um, they left, but he left his car. I can—”

“I didn’t say I want you to go.”

“Oh.” That stops her short.

Cory inhales what sounds like a painful breath, scrubbing his hand across his face. Besides the couch, there are a number of chairs and loungers spread across the living room. He looks at an armchair close to where Bradley’s sitting, curled into the far end of the couch, and seems to make a decision.

She feels weak with relief when he crosses the room in long familiar strides, settling on the other end of the couch and mirroring her with his knees to his chest.

He stares fixedly at the two couch cushions between them, chewing his bottom lip. “Sorry about…you know,” he finally says, gesturing at his face and then between them. “All of that.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says immediately, the words spilling out even faster than her heart is racing. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve cried all over Alex these last few weeks? I think I owe her a new wardrobe.” She manages a small smile. “Probably a lot more than that, really. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m gonna kill her,” she adds, clearing the tears out of her throat and tilting her head towards the room at large, “this was…completely insane, and not fair, and I would never have—”

“I know,” Cory says tightly, cutting her off but then softening almost immediately. “Hey, I got your card. Thanks for that. You didn’t have to.”

Bradley offers a tiny shrug. “I know,” she echoes. “I wanted to…um…” She sucks in a breath and rests her chin on her knee. “I just know what it’s like. And I couldn’t, you know…not that there’s anything anyone can do, but I couldn’t…” She trails off again, helplessly.

And for a long, unexpected moment, she’s angry. She hasn’t been, really, up until now, but suddenly she’s furious that she doesn’t know what to say to the person who knows her best, right at the moment it matters most. She has so much to say and she doesn’t know if she has the right to, because he’s not telling her.

He hasn’t spoken to her in months.

It opens a floodgate. She remembers how alone she was when her mom died, the way Laura kept trying to help but just made it all worse. She remembers hoping that maybe the one person who could understand how complicated her grief was might find a way to get over himself and let her know, at the very least, that he was thinking about her. She remembers how fucking disappointed she was in him.

She’s spent plenty of time being furious at herself—she’s a long way from working through that—but it's a good kind of hurt, like pressing on a bruise, to be pissed at him for a second. She fucked up, yeah. She got scared and carried away and then she doubled down, all of her worst instincts sharp and expertly wielded, and she was sorry, she’s still so fucking sorry, but he should have known. She’d warned him.

She could have been there for him if he’d just let her, instead of him spending the weeks she’d spent in a cell with the woman who put her there.

That pisses her the fuck off.

And as they stare at each other across the two cushions between them, it might as well be the distance of oceans and countries and endless months alone.

“This isn’t working,” Cory finally says. “This is pretty awful, actually.”

She nods, pressing her trembling fingers to her trembling lips in an effort not to cry as the anger collapses back into grief. It wasn’t anger I was feeling, she recalls saying to him once. It’s just what I know what to do with. She wonders if he remembers that.

It hurt because it was you.

She thinks he probably does.

“I know,” she whispers. “I just don’t know what to do. I wish I did.”

She remembers Alex laughing about how annoying it is, the way Cory is always right. It’s not funny now, because this isn’t working. Nothing that works hurts this much.

Then she remembers what Alex said next.

Maybe you just have to put the hurt aside, or figure out how to deal with it, because it hurts more to not.

-

Cory leans back, digging his palms into his eyes then running his hands through his hair.

It’s hard to look at Bradley for long, partly because she also looks like shit. The skin under her eyes looks bruised, her whole face raw and red with creases and tear tracks. Her cheekbones look sharper than they did the last time he saw her, the shadows darker. There are stories there that he’s terrified to hear.

She’s the most beautiful goddamn thing he’s ever seen. And Cory might not know what to do, but he knows what he wants.

He wants the space between them to disappear. For her to hold him again, not like she did when everything came spilling out of him earlier but like she did before that. The way she did at the beginning, when they were learning each other and all the ways they fit. He wants the hands in his hair to be hers, wants the fingers wrapped around her wrist to be his, wants to lose himself in her the way he lost himself after her. He wants to fuck her right here on this couch until neither one of them remembers any of the ways they’ve hurt each other, and when they’re done he wants to leave once and for all, almost as much as he wants to stay there with her forever.

But mostly, he wants to find a safe place to land, and he wants to stay there. He's been falling for too long.

“Maybe we don’t do anything,” he says in the end. “Not tonight.” He shifts, angling towards her as he settles deeper into the couch. “Maybe we figure that out tomorrow.”

Bradley blinks, a couple of tears spilling free that she wipes away impatiently. “Yeah?” Her voice cracks on the word, high and heartbreakingly hopeful.

A small grin flickers across his face, quick but true. “I don’t know about you,” he says dryly, “but I don’t really have anywhere to be these days. I was thinking I might hang around for a little while. Add some hair dye to Alex’s shampoo or something, you know.”

Bradley’s smile is bigger, despite what he can tell is an attempt to contain it. “Maybe break something expensive,” she agrees. “I, um—yeah. That sounds good. That sounds perfect.” She hesitates, and Cory braces himself. “And we can talk? Not tonight, I know, but…it’s just, um, I was…you know, gone. For a little while. And there were just things I kept thinking about that I hadn’t said to people.” She bites the inside of her cheek. “Mostly you," she admits. "And if we have a little time, I was just hoping that maybe I can say some of them.” Her voice trembles on the last few words.

Cory doesn’t look at her while he nods, but he hears the sigh, the relief, that follows. “We have time,” he says around the lump in his throat, and it’s hard, it hurts, but he meets her gaze and holds it. He takes her in: the dark hair and dark circles and her bright eyes looking back at him, everything she’s never said written so plainly across the raw swollen mess of her face that the ache in his chest changes into another kind of ache altogether. There are still two cushions between them and the distance is still too much, but she’s smiling at him from across it and he could close it, right now, if he wanted to. He thinks he might.

He has things he wants to tell her too, but mostly he wants to hear what she has to say. Tomorrow, and after that, too, because of the few truths he knows, one of them is that there’s no one he loves listening to more.

“Bradley Jackson,” he says, “I think we have all the time in the world.”