Skin

by La Guera

She thought she could endure Don's grief for Jessica Angell, could ride it out until he remembered himself, but as weeks turn to months and Don seeks solace in a bottle, Rebecca's patience wears thin. Maybe love has limits, after all.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events in the NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis.

All characters in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: This fic contains SPOILERS, especially for "Pay Up" and 608, "Cuckoo's Nest". If you do not wish to be spoiled for a major plot arc, do not read.

Do you remember the way that you touched me before
All the trembling sweetness I loved and adored--"Skin", Natalie Merchant

She doesn't know what to think when she sees him standing woefully in the doorway with a midnight smudge on one eye and a fat lip. It's been an all-too-common occurrence of late to see him staggering through the door in rumpled clothes that stink of booze and stale sweat, a paper bag in one unsteady hand. She'd tried to talk to him at first, to persuade him to put down the bottle and come to her instead. She'd tried logic and reason, appealed to his love for the job. She'd even begged him to remember his love for her, to sacrifice the comfort proffered by the contents of his new best friend in the name of protecting her from the demons that drifted from his pungent breath like wraiths to insinuate themselves into her dreams. That, at least, had stopped him for a while, but he'd always returned to the cool, glass teat, peering at her with a foggy expression of sullen, regretful defiance as he took a long pull.

"Just for tonight," he'd say in his slurred, underwater voice. "I'll stop tomorrow. Promise." Another desperate pull, and then he'd wobble to her and press a soft kiss to the crown of her head that was awful in its tenderness.

"All right," she'd say, bile and sorrow warring in her throat, and retreat to the safety of her office, where the smell of the bogeyman couldn't reach. Sometimes, he stumbled to bed, and when he did, she'd lie beside him in the dark and listen to him snore and breathe through her mouth to avoid the brimstone stink of cheap whiskey, the phantom stink of her parents, come to haunt her twenty years after she'd left it behind in a filthy, hotbox house in Whiting's Glen, Florida. She'd curl on her side of the bed, oddly exposed without the comforting ridge of his back and shoulder and the familiar warmth of his skin to shield her from the cold and the bitter memories that lurked in the darkness beyond the bed. In the morning, she'd awaken to his wet retching in the bathroom and the sharp, yellow stink of unwashed body on the sheets. Sometimes, while the water burbled and splutted into the sink or gurgled throatily in the toilet, she'd turn her head and weep.

Most of the time, though, she'd awaken alone and emerge from the bedroom to find him a rumpled heap on the sofa, one hand sagging limply from the cushions as though reaching for the half-empty bottle of dimestore hooch that inevitably lolled there on the carpet. When that happened, she'd swallow her hurt and disgust and shake him until his guttural, droning snores stuttered to stop and he opened bleary, bloodshot eyes and blinked owlishly at her face.

"Mornin', doll," he'd slur cheerfully at her, and then he'd reach for her with drifting, fluttering hands. Hands from which she often retreated with a mewl of helpless disgust. "Wha'ss the matter?" he'd implore plaintively, and then the booze would twist his guts in greasy, poisonous fists, and he'd blunder for the bathroom with his stomach trapped precariously inside his bulging cheeks.

She had watched and waited and prayed for the storm to pass, sure that when the immediate hammerblow of Angell's death had faded to the niggling, nettling sting of past regret, he would stopper the bottle and begin the ruthless, necessary scut work of outliving a friend, but the wound of loss hadn't healed. It had grown infected instead, impervious to the slow, cleansing burn of the alcohol that Don drank in ever-increasing quantities. As days passed into weeks and then to months, the infection had spread, had stolen into his eyes in a glassy, red fog that clouded his lovely blue eyes and turned them inward. It had crept into his hands and feet and made him totter and lurch. More than once, she had been jerked from the miserable, gritty-eyed solace of grading papers by the sharp, dismayed yelp of broken glass and found him in the kitchen, standing unsteadily over the toothy remnants of a shattered glass. Once, she had found him crouched dumbly over the fragments of a broken plate with blood and ceramic dust smeared on his fingertips and pattering lazily onto the floor. The blood had been so startlingly bright against the pallor of his skin that she'd experienced a sudden wave of nausea. He'd looked up at the sound of her approach and tried to smile, but it hadn't reached his eyes, which had been unfocused and bloodshot and bleak. Her prince of Helios had lost his light, and the realization had hollowed her chest and belly.

Oh, love, she'd thought. Oh, my love.

"Brka plat," he'd informed her with his strange, thick tongue, and tried to pick up a shard in hands that wavered and dipped and pawed. His only reward had been a thin, weeping cut across the palm of his hand. He'd blinked in surprise at the sudden spark of pain. "Fuck," he'd said matter-of-factly, and it would've been funny if she hadn't been able to smell the Beam on his breath at five paces.

"I can see that," she'd said when she could trust herself to speak. "And it looks like it's had its revenge. Leave that alone. I'll clean it up." She had drawn his injured hand to her and kissed his bleeding fingers, and then she'd inspected the cut on his palm. "No need for stitches, thank God."

He'd smiled that awful, loose smile and looked at her with those vacant eyes. It had taken her twice as long as it should have to wash and mend his cuts because her own hands had been unsteady and suddenly too cold. She'd chivvied him off to bed and set about cleaning up the plate herself, and though she'd been stone cold sober as she'd fumbled with the slippery pieces of ceramic, she'd fared no better for the tears in her eyes. The cuts on her fingers had throbbed and burned in time with her heartbeat, and her blood had mixed with his on the linoleum floor.

Been here before,, she'd thought numbly as she'd wiped up the blood with a wadded dishcloth. Except the blood was on the bedsheets, and it was all mine. Blood and seed stippled on the bedclothes, signatures on a sacred covenant, as binding as law and Divine as God's word. I entered into that covenant joyfully, averred my devotion to it with every breathless, giddy, erratic thrust of my deflowered virgin's hips. I can claim no ignorance then. But oh, my God, what am I signing now? She hadn't known, but she'd gone on signing it just the same with every whorl and loop of her throbbing wrist and shoulder, the soap settling into her cuts like salt.

The infection had spread to his face, stained his chin with coarse stubble that rasped her cheek whenever he kissed her, and soured the smell that had wafted from his skin and clothes, the once-comforting, masculine scent that her heart called Don--Irish Spring and Right Guard, coffee and clean skin. He'd smelled yellow and stale, as though his innards festered with a necrotizing disease that rotted him from the inside out. On the weekends, he'd smelled pickled, brine and juniper and turpentine. His clothes had reeked of wood polish and cigarette smoke and sloshed Guinness, souvenirs from a sojourn at Sullivan' corruption had stirred her guts and pinched her gorge. It had been too familiar, the rotgut stink of her parents as they spoiled for a fight by the watery, black-and-white light of a cracked television set that had teetered inelegantly on the edge of a chipped kitchen countertop, the burnt-match promise of their hatred as the alcohol sharpened their teeth and tongues and coaxed them to a battle that would rage until the booze was spent and they were sprawled bonelessly in their respective corners, unconscious and unheeding of the small, bent child they so deeply regretted and so bitterly resented. It had been the smell of isolation and abandonment, the woodsmoke and paint thinner tang of loneliness and hunger and cold. It was a smell she had come to associate with monsters, and to smell it on Don inspired a nauseating, feral terror. She'd gathered his clothes and separated them from hers in an effort to keep the stink from spreading to her clothes, or the baby's. She'd washed his clothes twice and thrice and hung them on the clotheslines on the building's roof to let the sun cleanse the fabric of that pervasive taint. Sometimes, when she'd plucked his shirts from the line, she'd held them to her nose and drawn deep breaths in search of her husband. Sometimes she found him hiding at collar or sleeve, but more often than not, she found only the bilious, grease-fat kiss of whiskey and old vomit.

When she couldn't chase the ghosts of her parents from his clothes, she'd cleaned everything else, had mopped and vacuumed until the apartment reeked of orange-scented Febreze and scrubbed the toilet until the astringent reek of Comet had smothered the vinegar and bile hint of spent stomach. Foaming armies of Scrubbing Bubbles had marched on the walls of the bathtub, their popping, hissing bodies blanketing every surface until they smothered the piquant, fetid odor of sweat and too many late nights. She'd changed the linens of their bed obsessively, breathing through her mouth to avoid the scent of restless sleep and sweat-sour skin and reluctant to touch the sheets on Don's side of the bed. She'd opened the windows as far as she could and let the jungly, industrial odor of the city settle over everything like in organic pollen, the silt of concrete and the carcinogenous, black dust of asphalt and sloughed rubber. It had been obnoxious and noxious, but sweeter than the smell of frayed nerves and broken hearts and dying dreams that had hung over the apartment in a palpable, cloying pall.

Don had always kept a bottle of Jagermeister or bourbon in the cupboard and a few bottles of beer or Guinness in the refrigerator. They had been staples in the apartment for as long as she'd known him, had, in fact, predated her, and she'd never begrudged him because he'd never abused them. He'd kept the Jager on hand to blunt the worst of the horrors his job hurled at him. He'd drunk to wash away the memory of a dead child floating facedown in a filthy retention pond or of a young housewife with her panties around her ankles and her toddler screaming from his seat beside her drying brains, his pudgy hands patting her cooling face or tugging desperately at her blood-matted hair. The Guinness and beer had been for hockey games and the occasional card game with Danny and a handful of detectives from the precinct. They'd been an accent to his fun, not its nexus, and he'd never gotten falling-down drunk. Tipsy and amiable and wont to call her over for a kiss and a fond stroke of her hair, but always present in the moment and shrewd enough to call Messer's miserable attempts at bluffing.

Then Simon Cade had murdered Jessica Angell in a hail of bullets and shattered glass, and a forest of amber-tinted glass had sprouted behind the lone sentry in the cabinet above the sink. Soon, the forest had outgrown its particleboard borders and spilled into the cabinets beneath the sink. A legion of Guinness bottles had invaded the refrigerator. There were so many that they'd begun to crowd the rest of the occupants, phalanx them like a besieging force. She'd had to fumble among their ranks for Junior's applesauce and her lunches. They'd overrun the lettuce and subjugated the macaroni casserole. They'd even overwhelmed the box of baking soda that served as a freshener. It had toppled forlornly onto its back and stared stupidly into the refrigerator light, flecks of white powder ringing its ragged, dead cardboard lip like foam bubbling from the slack lips of a drowned sailor.

She'd tried to purge the apartment of alcohol, of course. She'd bought lawn and garden trash bags and stuffed them with cold, brown bottles, yanking them from their places in the cupboard like malignant tubers. She'd seized the scrawny, glass throats of the refrigerator sentries and tossed them headlong into the bulging, black bags, where they had settled and shifted like hastily-concealed bodies. She'd picked and tossed for hours, muscles straining and sizzling with the grim effort of unfamiliar movements, and filled bags until the plastic squeaked in muffled, mutinous protest and sweat beaded on her feverish, flushed skin. One bag, two bag, three bag, four, until she'd resembled an alcoholic Kris Kringle, surrounded by bags of beer and bourbon and watching her infant son clamber happily over the plastic dunes as if they were the salt-slick shoals of Rockaway Beach. She'd panted and sworn and cursed the smell of yeast and whiskey, and then she'd wrestled her chattering child onto her lap and dragged the bags to the garbage chute one by one, a bedraggled executioner disposing of her victims. Junior had laughed and clapped his hands at the merry, tinkling music of the bottles as they'd disappeared into the abyss, and she'd simultaneously blessed and envied his innocence.

None of it had made any difference. His clothes had gone right on stinking of beer and cigarettes and sour sweat and her mother's hot molasses breath, and the beer and bourbon had reappeared, carried inside underneath his arms or clutched in broad, strong hands. The forests and legions had gradually retaken the cupboards and refrigerator a bottle and a fifth at a time, and she could only watch helplessly as Don had arranged them neatly on the shelves with a murmured promise that they would be the last, that after they'd sacrificed themselves to his gullet, there would be no more. She'd watched and nodded and said nothing, and beneath her clothes, her shoulders and back had ached with the promise of another fruitless afternoon bent gracelessly to the task of culling, her overstuffed head thrust into the refrigerator as though it were a guillotine. Let it be the last time,, she would pray in silent desperation. The next evening, there would be another bottle on the kitchen counter or the hall table, waiting for her in its crumpled paper sack, a malevolent toadstool that had sprouted when her back was turned.

The infection had spread with every sip, every bottle she found in the sink or wedged into the couch cushions. Into his fingernails, which grew ragged and dirty and chewed to the raw, bloody quick. Into his belly, which had rumbled for want of food, but which had rejected everything but liquid solace. Into his prick, which had grown slumbrous and stupid and sleepily disinterested in the scant comfort to be found in her arms and between her accommodating thighs. He's tried to love her only twice since he came home with glassy, disbelieving eyes and Angell's blood smeared on his shirt in a gaudy splatter, and they'd been muddy, fumbling couplings born of need rather than love or passion. He'd stunk of despair and old rotgut as he'd moved against her, his usually expert lover's hands clumsy and rough and his lips bitter and cracked against her skin. He'd wept the first time, head buried in the crook of her neck as he'd thrust into her in stiff, jerky movements, his breath a plosive rasp against her goose-pimpled flesh as his groping fingers had pressed bruises into her ass and the bony spars of her hips. She'd endured rather than enjoyed. There had been no pain--her body had drawn upon sweeter memories to ensure that mercy at least--but when it was over and he'd rolled off her and into sleep, she'd closed her legs and swallowed a wave of shame. She'd loved him a thousand times, had even let him bind her with the steel tools of his trade and slip his greedy cock into her mouth or up her ass with a proprietary, atavistic grunt, but no matter how filthy dirty their lovemaking had been, how primitive or primal or inelegant, lovemaking was precisely what it had been. She'd never felt anything but venerated by the sweat and friction of love between the sheets, but that night, she'd felt used, as though she'd been not a willing partner in love's most sacrosanct dance, but a convenient and necessary amanuensis for an unspoken longing that her angular frame, spindly legs and mother's cunt simply couldn't fill. She'd waited until his snores had deepened and settled into a steady, monotonous rhythm, and then she'd slipped out of bed and crept into the bathroom to reclaim her battered dignity beneath a cleansing spray of hot water. She'd shuddered convulsively as the hot water had scoured and reddened her skin and the steam had shrouded her in a thick, Arthurian mist. She'd stayed huddled in her shower chair until the water had grown cold, and then she'd returned to bed and watched the dawn bleed into the cityscape from the comfortless, barren safety of a protective huddle on her side of the bed.

He'd come to her once more after that, as lost and unfamiliar as the last time, and she'd closed her eyes and pretended they were sometime else, in the early, heady days of their marriage, when fucking had carried no weight but that with which the magic of love had naturally invested it, and when Don's belly had been unmarred by the filthy, plastic claws of a cellphone and a plummeting Xerox machine. When she'd been sure that her childhood misery had paid for her present happiness and ensured their future comfort. When his eyes hadn't been filled with blood and dust and stinging, acrid cordite and her mouth hadn't been filled with copper and wormwood. She'd been glad when it was over, and deeply ashamed of that treacherous gladness. He hasn't tried to bed her since June. It's late September now, and though her belly and cunt twist with a constant, feverish hunger, she's glad he hasn't reached for her. Still glad, and still ashamed deep in her bones.

She'd surrendered in mid-August, beaten by the sultry summer heat of the city and the relentless tide of bottles. She'd stopped in mid-cleaning, had simply dropped the trash bag and put down the bottle she'd been wrestling from the refrigerator and sat in the middle of the kitchen with the bag slouched indolently at her feet, a fat, white cat waiting for its next kipper. She'd stayed there until the warning ache in her shoulders and the avid, too-hot twinge in the small of her back had retreated, and then she'd quietly closed the refrigerator door and left the room. She'd left the bag where it was, disgusted and indifferent to its contents. It had remained there until Don had straggled home, red-eyed and silent and moving as though his joints had pained him. He'd stared at it in silence for a long moment; his mouth had opened as though to speak, perhaps to offer yet another impotent apology or empty promise. In the end, he'd simply bent and retrieved the bag without a word, Sisyphus retrieving his inescapable burden. He'd replaced the bottles with persnickety care, arranging them in neat rows and turning the labels out. He'd neither spoken nor met her gaze, and when the last bottle had been restored to its pride of place, he'd plucked one from the refrigerator door and twisted off the cap with a flick of his wrist. She'd retreated to the safety of her office before he'd taken that first desperate, sensuous pull, but she'd seen it anyway, as an image etched into the blackness behind her eyelids--the gluttonous bob of his Adam's apple and the languorous peristalsis of his throat as he swallowed his golden mistress in gulping draughts. The ecstatic flutter of his lovely, dark eyelashes as she slipped deep inside him, to the dark and secret hollows in his belly and heart that once only she had been able to touch. She'd seen it all despite her willful, panicky blindness, and she'd hated him for it.

She'd washed her hands of him then. She'd stopped pleading and cajoling, stopped searching for her Prince Charming in the swollen, cloudy eyes of the stranger he'd become. She'd retreated behind the cold, impregnable walls of her fortress and slammed the doors. She'd cooked for Junior and cleaned his rooms, determined that the apartment and his rooms remain a place of sanctuary, but she'd stopped cooking Don's favorite meals and leaving them to languish behind the ranks of beer and Guinness bottles. She'd left his clothes in rumpled drifts where they lay and let the unopened mail and discarded newspapers and empty beer and takeout cartons accumulate on the counters and coffee table and kitchen table like dust and desert sand. Shot glasses piled in the sink and dotted the counter like amber moles, and she'd left them be. The apartment had begun to stink of wet ink and old yeast and moldering cardboard, and she'd closed her eyes and stiffened her neck and learned to live in the sordid rankness. When the air had grown too close and stifling in the squalid, dirty rooms, she'd taken Junior and her papers to the airy, green expanse of Central Park and graded papers while he toddled in the grass and bent to clutch clumps of cool, black dirt in his chubby fingers and crow with an explorer's delight at his discovery. She'd graded until white paper had bled to red beneath her slashing fingers and let Junior toddle and caw himself into happy exhaustion, and when the last paper had offered itself to her excoriating pen and her son's soft, pleasantly warm cheek had drooped heavily against the slender crook of her neck and his tiny fingers had sleepily worried at the chain of her necklace and the wisps of hair at her nape, she'd pressed a tremulous, dry-lipped kiss to the crown of his head and gathered him up and reluctantly returned to the quiet, fetid gloom of what had once been a place of happily ever after. And while he'd slept in a crib safeguarded from the pungent caress of the monster without the door to his nursery by protective wards and liberal applications of Febreze and Lysol, she'd lain in the darkness of her foundering, dying marriage bed and listened to the dragon breathe beside her.

And you hated, Alice croons from astride her toadstool. Oh, how you hated. She's resplendent in her filthy, ragged pinafore, old ivory and rotted lace. She crouches atop the toadstool's malignant, spongy cap and smiles from behind a curtain of lank, matted hair, her teeth sharp and yellow inside her leering, thin-lipped mouth. A caterpillar leg dangles delicately from one blackened, pitted gum, and the breath that wafts from her mouth reeks of blood and putrid fat and chocolate gone rich and white with maggots. She rocks back on her haunches, and the soles of her Mary Janes squeeze a thick, yellow liquid from the cap of the toadstool with a viscous, glottal squelch. It reminds Rebecca of pus from an infected wound and carries the same high, sweet, pork-fat stink. Alice deepens her crouch and widens her smile, and her soot-smudge eyes glitter with gleeful malice inside her gaunt, jaundiced face.

Your hatred of Jessica Angell grew with every sip he took, and why shouldn't it have done? she lisps, and sucks the point of her index finger into her mouth in a coquettish gesture. He started drinking his way to perdition the day she had a side of lead with her frigid whore's turkey bacon, and he hasn't stopped yet. Not for you, and not for his son. He's chasing her across a sea of bourbon and beer, so single-minded in his purpose that everything--everyone--else has faded into insignificance. You and Junior no longer exist in his world. Her slack, pale face and bloody, bubbling guts are all he sees even when his eyes are open. He's willing to drown to escape those memories, and you curse his cowardice and Jessica Angell for having the power to command such bottomless grief. Such power should've been yours by right, one of the few rights not wrested from you by the demands of the job or presumed upon by oblivious, entitled fools who consider the sudden forfeiture of his life for theirs a luxury afforded by the payment of their taxes. If you could not have his time or his heart or the willing sacrifice of his life for yours, then at least you could draw a measure of bitter comfort from the knowledge that he would mourn your loss as no other. If your last meal was the bug-pocked grille of the crosstown express, then he would grieve for you for the rest of his days. His grief would hollow him, reduce him to a wraith that drifted from room to room and day to day in search of the heart that Fate had so cruelly stolen from him. He would yearn and long and ache and weep for the memory of you, and even when his grieving was done and he'd moved on, part of his lover's heart would count the days until he was reunited with you at the gates to eternity. What he'd denied you in life would be yours forever in death--his devotion and all the time in the universe with which to savor it.

Even that's gone now. There's nothing left for you. He flits and staggers from room to room with a bottle in his hand as though it were his mother's bracing fingers. It's as if Jessica Angell took the best of him with her when she went into the earth. He's carrying a lover's loss, and that's not right, not bloody fair, because he promised his heart and his love to you. And you've done your best to be worthy of such a wondrous gift. You've kept his house and his secrets and spread your legs and your arms for him. You've given him a son and abandoned your world and your friends, chosen not to make him choose between two worlds. You've been the good and faithful wife, and for six years, you've swallowed the indignity and shame of being the last in a line that numbers in the millions. You've asked so little, and he's asked so much, and now, he can't even give you the sorry satisfaction of knowing he'd miss you when you were gone.

Fool, Alice sneers, and rocks on her toadstool. It's a dirty, undulating shimmy that starts in her toes and slithers into her hips like a hand slipping between parted thighs. Her child's hips buck with a woman's knowledge, and her vicious, cracked-lip smile widens further still. He warned you, Snape did. He told you that love was poison, a dangerous weakness, but despite your pretensions to jaundiced Slytherin cynicism, you had a Gryffindor's stupid optimism. You wanted to believe in happily ever after despite all the evidence to the contrary. You wanted to believe that a beggar's soul in a badly-wrought body was worth the love of God and a handsome, good man. You wanted to believe that you could inspire hopeless love and insatiable desire, be the center of someone's world, and so when Don came along with declarations of love and proclamations of devotion unending, you cast aside all sense and warning and jumped in with both feet, a naive, starry-eyed, not-so-pretty maid.

Stupid, silly child. The position of princess was never yours to claim. You were ever meant to be the cinder girl, the spinster-in-waiting who watched the beautiful women with envy in her heart and ashes in her mouth. The slipper was meant for another, as evinced by the countless bloody cuts that start at one sole and end in another, fluttering behind your heartbeat like slivers of glass. You're just too stubborn to surrender the slipper and admit your mistake. You'd rather walk your feet to bloody stumps than go back to what you were, a lonely child of the shadows who knew neither light nor warmth, and whose only lover lived at the end of her palsied hands. You'd rather suffer together than die alone.

You actually believed him, that's the hurt that refuses to die. You took him at his word when he knelt at the altar of a stone-dead god and swore to forsake all others until death did you part, and when he held you in his arms at the top of those cathedral steps and whispered, I got you. You just go ahead and shine. It was an impossible blessing, more tenderness and love than you had ever imagined in your wildest fantasies and you drank deeply of faith's waters and followed him with steps that never wavered. Because he was your improbable Prince Charming, and he would never let you fall.

You should've seen it coming the day Angell became his partner. She was Snow White come to the cottage of the bent and loveless witch, apple-cheeked and rose-lipped, with deep brown eyes and a light to match his. But you never spared it a thought because he was your prince and this was your fairy tale, and your faith was absolute. If unease tickled your heart with a cold, prodding finger, you thought of that morning on the cathedral steps and the promise whispered into your ear, and it disappeared. This was Don, and he had no equal among men. So when he started coming home late and having more and more coffee dates with Angell, you chalked it up to his enthusiasm for a new partner and his inherent desire to protect "his people." It was just another example of his endearing Gryffindor's heart. You never thought to sniff his collars for the scent of foreign perfume or riffle the contents of his wallet in search of condoms, never thought to inspect his memo book or the backs of his business cards for hastily-scribbled phone numbers. The very idea appalled you, struck you as indecent, an insult to his unimpeachable character.

You never suspected a thing until he came home with blood on his shirt and nothing in his eyes, and even then, your first thought was for him. You thought the blood was his, that another scumbag had tried to finish what Lessing had started. You thought he'd been shot or stabbed, and you cried out when you saw the tacky redness at his belly. You rushed to him and plucked at him with frantic, scrabbling fingers, trying to find the source of the blood.

He let you tug at his shirt while the breath and terror whistled through your teeth, and then he reached out and circled your wrists with his hands. It's not mine, he said gently, and kissed your trembling knuckles. Rebecca, it's not mine, sweetheart. It's Jess'. It was the last time he saw you. Then his voice and his heart broke, and he stood over you with his head bowed and a strangled, animal keening wrenching from his throat. It was the first time you'd seen him cry in earnest, and the sound broke your pounding heart. You opened your arms to draw him in, but he was already disentangling from you, twisting away and tottering towards the bedroom, pulling off the bloodstained shirt as he went. He shed it with a grimace and garbled bark of disgust. He left it where it lay, left it for you to pick up while he waded into the closet for a fresh shirt. It was still there after he left, a swatch of bloody gauze left behind after a failed operation, and you hesitated to touch it, reluctant to feel the wet tack of drying blood on your fingertips or smell cold iron, but you were afraid of what might happen if it were still there when he came home, and so you picked it up and carried it to the trash chute.

He came home late the next afternoon, haggard and exhausted, the tang of cordite dusted over his wrinkled clothes like scorched pepper. He met your anxious, fluttering kiss with an absent, tepid brush of his lips and lurched unsteadily into the living room, where he blinked stupidly in the soft, white light of the table lamp.

We got that motherfucker, he croaked to no one in particular, and scrubbed his face with his palms. New York brined his tongue, and you would have found it sexy if he hadn't sounded so fragile, violin strings stretched past endurance, or looked so old and lost. The silver hairs that had come along with the scars from the bombing, Lessing's final, enduring gift, had suddenly stood in stark relief against his dark hair. Most times, that dusting of silver made him look distinguished, and you often delighted in carding your fingers through his hair and calling him your silver fox as you pulled him in for a kiss, but that afternoon, with blowback on his clothes and bleakness in his eyes, they'd made him look drained and used-up. Forty-five instead of thirty-one. You wanted to enfold him in the protective circle of your arms, shield him from the horrors that clearly gnawed his bones, but by the time you'd gathered your wits, he was already shuffling into the bedroom, shoulders hunched against an unseen blow.

You followed him, of course, found him kneeling at the feet of his porcelain god and retching endlessly into the cool basin. The wet, ratcheting burps prompted a rumble of sympathy from your own uneasy stomach, and you watched helplessly as his mouth yawped in an agonized scream over and over again, until nothing emerged but air and stringers of clear saliva. You reached for him, intending to brush your cold fingers over his burning nape, but he recoiled.

Don', he muttered thickly.

You withdrew, stung, and memories of another, crueler rejection stirred beneath your skin like turning larvae. Go entertain yourself for a while. You've done enough damage.

You curled your hand into a tight fist and made to leave, but his hand rested over yours, raw-knuckled and simmering with a slick, sticky heat, as though he were coming down with the flu.

I know you're just-you're just tryin' to look out for me. His voice resonated from the interior of the bowl. But I can't. I can't. I just need... He stopped as another wave wrenched his guts, and his fingers seized your wrist in time with the contraction. I just need...some time, doll, he panted, and surrendered to another spasm of nausea.

He didn't come out for the rest of the night, and the soup you warmed for him after you put Junior to bed went untouched. He simply curled in on himself beneath the sheets and stared at the far wall. When you climbed into bed, he shifted to let you in, but he never said a word, nor did he roll to tuck you against the contours of his body as he usually did. He simply lay there, wide-eyed and silent and walking the paths of his own mind. You listened to him breathe the humid summer air and watched his forgotten bowl of soup congeal on the nightstand. You willed his arm to curl possessively over your hip or his chin to tuck snugly into the crook of your neck, but neither did, and in the end, exhaustion pulled you under to the midnight murmur of the city that never sleeps.

You awoke in the night to the sound of weeping, and your ever-fretful mother's brain prodded you to consciousness with the specter of a wet-diapered Junior lying in a broken, paralyzed heap on the nursery floor. You were still groping for the edge of the coverlet when you realized it wasn't Junior. It was too deep and too close, a throttled, furtive huffing interspersed with the gurgling slosh of liquid. The hand wrangling with the coverlet drifted to Don's side of the bed and found it empty. The sheets were cool to the touch, and your heart thudded painfully inside your chest.

It was the summer of Paddy Mc-AK all over again, when the ghost of a dead Irish drug runner had driven Don from your bed and hounded him to the fire escapes and the basement and the rooftop, where he'd jumped rope until the soles of his feet had bruised and his shins had screamed for respite from the jarring impact. Sometimes you had followed him to the roof, the wheels of your chair scraping the risers of the staircases like runners over thin ice as the Levitating Charm defied the established rules of bodily law, and found him crouched on the rooftop like a gargoyle, bare skin white as polished ivory in the silvery half-light of the moon. Most of the time, he'd be well back from the ledge, flat-footed and pensive as he had gazed at the city below, but a few times, he was so close to the edge that his toes had hung over the gritty stone ledge, and you'd been afraid to call out, lest he startle and topple headlong into the abyss. Part of you had been terrified that he'd topple anyway, that he'd turn that bottomless gaze on you and smile farewell before he tilted forward and joined his dead baby sister at the bottom of the stairs. On those nights, your cheeks ached with suppressed terror and the maddening impulse to pray, and your skin was cold despite the heat that wafted from the rooftop like the Devil's breath. You were never sure if you were going to be able to coax him inside, afraid that the charms of love had finally reached their limits. He always came, but you couldn't shake the feeling that you hadn't brought all of him back. To this day, you wonder how much of him is still on that roof, baked into the asphalt by the passage of sweltering summer, how much of his skin remains on the pavement to be trod upon by unknowing feet. How much of his soul still hovers and flutters above the city, clinging to a gargoyle's indifferent wings.

You scrubbed the sleep from your eyes with the back of your palm and squinted into the darkness. He was a slumped shadow on the opposite wall, seated on the floor with his knees drawn up and the glint of a bottle braced against his quadriceps. You watched the vague glint drift upward, a fairy child rising through the night, and heard the sea-foam gurgle of liquid. A hitching breath, another slosh, and the fairy child plummeted gracelessly behind the forbidding peaks of his knees again.

Don? You struggled to your elbows, fighting the persistent clutch of the bedsheets and the obdurate stiffness of spastic muscles rudely pulled from the temporary release of sleep. Honey, what is it? You fumbled fruitlessly for the touch lamp on your side of the bed, eyes fixed on the formless, unmoving bulk of your husband.

Don', he lowed, and his mouth was full of cotton. Don'. Then, quite clearly amid the determined rustling of sheets, You can' lift me up, doll. Not this tim'. The rough, conspiratorial rasp of metal on glass, and then the indistinct loam of your husband was rising unsteadily in the darkness, the peaks of his knees unfolding into the more familiar geography of his long legs. The fairy child hung dispiritedly from one hand, a swan with a broken neck, and as he stumbled closer, you realized it was the bottle of Jagermeister from above the sink. Half a bottle had become quarter-bottle, and Don rode its stupefying tides with slaloming, vertiginous grace as his face loomed on the cusp of bedroom midnight. His free hand reached out and pulled the disheveled covers to your throat, smoothed them with meticulous care. Then he caressed your forehead and cupped your cheek, drew his thumb over the thin spar of bone. G'sleep, he hissed, and pressed a reverent kiss to your forehead. There were fresh tears on his face, and his eyes were cloudy and swollen.

It was those tears that stirred the embers of suspicion inside your heart. The tears that had fallen from his eyes from the moment he'd staggered home with the news of Angell's death in his mouth like a scalding stone. You hadn't been surprised to see them in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, when her blood had been a tacky, maroon smear on his shirt; she was his partner and his sister in blue, and a strike against her was a strike against everything for which he stood--honor and decency and fairness, the pure justice that found life only in dreams and the gaudy brightness of Superman comics. He'd cried for Aiden the day Hawkes had identified her charred remains, had come home with smoke and burning fat on his clothes and skin and told you that the woman who'd helped you into your wedding gown on your wedding day had been murdered by a piece of human garbage that Mac had failed to catch the first time around. His voice had broken and he'd rested his head on your knees as if it had been too heavy to hold up, and he'd wept into the folds of your skirt while you stroked his crown and pulsing temples with numb fingers. He'd cried hard and ugly, but the storm had been brief, a fierce squall that had spent itself in ten minutes, and when he was done, he was done for good. He'd shared his sorrow with a bottle of Jager at the kitchen table, had blunted the jagged edge of her loss with a solid drunk, but his eyes had been dry, and when he was drunk enough, he'd put the bottle in the cupboard and left it there. He'd come to bed and let you offer what comfort you could with kisses and caresses and the living warmth of your cunt, and in the morning, the bottle had stayed in the cupboard.

But those dreadful, day-after tears were different, symptom of a deeper wound. You recognized them because you had cried them yourself for eight days in May of 2006, when Don had danced precariously on the gossamer tightrope stretched between the shores of the river Styx and you had been faced with the possibility of losing him forever. They were the tears of impending widowhood, wept in muffled terror at the prospect of living the rest of your long life without him. They were the tears of love long lost, of heartbreak, pure and simple. Your love had glimpsed his Angell-less future and found it wanting in spite of you. The tears in his eyes washed the scales from yours, and the strength ran from your bones. A heart breaks, not with an ostentatious snap, but with a tear and a single, ragged breath. You sank onto the pillows, dazed, and furious that they would neither bear you up nor shield you from the pickled despair that emanated from your fallen prince's pores like cologne. Don mistook your collapse for groggy tranquility and hummed in satisfaction.

'S my girl, he murmured, and smoothed your sheets with exaggerated care. He pressed a kiss to your lips, and you tried to taste him--toothpaste and coffee and the cut-paper woodiness of toothpick--but there was only the Jager, sticky and sweet, like scorched molasses. He righted himself with stilted precision, and then he slipped through the bedroom door and closed it behind him, left you alone in the dark.

And the darkness became your canvas. With secondhand whiskey on your lips, your broken heart painted the shadows with images of what was and what might have been. Memories of rosy twilight strolls with Don through Central Park shared the night with those of Don and Angell entangled in the sheets of an anonymous hotel bed, moving in a sweaty, sensuous dance without name. The gentle, grand first dance of your wedding reception waltzed alongside the sight of Don and Angell kissing in the rain while raindrops beaded in their hair like diamonds in a diadem. Your prince had found a more fitting princess, and with his lovely consort, he had shared a secret, beloved kingdom. The bloody joy of Junior's birth contested with Don and Jessica Angell laughing over a plate of mussels in the flickering candlelight of Salvatore's. She had taken your place at the table, and she was lovelier than you had ever been, straight and graceful and fluid as she slurped the mussels between her lips in sly, salacious invitation. The homey comfort of watching television with Don's head pillowed on your lap warred with the voyeuristic vision of Don fucking his prized consort in her living room, her lithe legs wrapped around his hips with a surety your tortured, unfinished muscles could never achieve.

One after another, these visions danced before your eyes in a flickering, ever-changing tapestry. Each was a new and terrible treachery, a grain of salt dropped into a fresh wound by the malicious hand of your imagination, a hand steadier and far colder than the sad specimens that spasmed and twitched at the ends of your wrists. On and on with the beat of your heart, until your pulse pounded inside your temples and your hands wrung the hapless bedclothes like an unprotected throat. A howl massed inside your heaving chest and bubbled into your constricted throat like phlegm, but you never loosed it, no matter how insistent its press on the roof of your mouth and the backs of your gums. You swallowed it like the bitterest medicine, swallowed it in great, slurping gulps and let it take root in the fertile soil of your heart and belly. You took your medicine and watched the phantoms writhe on the night air, and when night lightened to dawn and revealed the empty expanse of your deserted marriage bed, the medicine settled deep within the soil and woke the cold rage that slept there.

You resisted a while longer; the Gryffindor child had grown strong after years of marriage and sloe-eyed security, and you longed to believe her when she insisted it was naught but shock that had turned your love's heart to brittle shale inside his chest, but though I had grown complacent, stupid with happiness, I have never gone to sleep, not really. Roused from my torpor by the galling heat of a medicine no sugar could sweeten, I ignored the naive witterings of your witless, desperate heart, narrowed my pitiless eyes, and watched. And as I have ever done, your faithful watcher in the night saw the truth. And because I am a survivor, I would not let you turn from it.

Don was still hollow and distant by the morning of Angell's funeral, slumped and silent in the pew beside you, his head bowed and his white-gloved hands clamped around the smooth, polished wood of the pew in front of him. He wept anew each time he looked at Angell's casket, and as he mourned her in the suit in which he'd married you, there could be no doubt. The seedling anger nestled within your belly like a cherished fetus blossomed into sudden, vengeful flower, a strangling wisteria that silenced the simpering platitudes of the Gryffindor child with a single, contemptuous twist of its vine. The Slytherin woman in your marrow remembered herself at the last, and she rose to the surface in the somnolent silence of the church. Your hands itched with the need to strike and claw and etch bloody weals into Don's haggard face, but you forced them to be still, buried them within the folds of your proper mourning clothes. Angell might have been a harlot, but she was also a sister and a daughter, and her brothers and father deserved to grieve in peace, to cling to their beloved illusions. Besides, vengeance is best served, not in haste, but well-prepared and cold as the heart that fashioned it. So you sat in your chair and kept a stiff upper lip, and while the rest of the congregation prayed for the soul of Jessica Angell, fallen hero, you closed your eyes and called for me.

And I came. Of course I did. We are of a piece, you and I. I am Alice, and you are the Queen of Hearts. Neither can exist without the other. I am your fire and your hatred, unbreakable and eternal and inexorable as the passing of days. I run when you cannot, breathe for you when your mouth is full of blood and your fickle, feeble heart has turned to lead inside your puny chest. I am spirit unbowed. The world calls me ugly, uncouth, savage. Wicked. But you recognize me for who I am. I am the brutish, grunting survivor who stands astride the bones when all others have fallen and the earth is red and wet with blood and slick with the offal of simpering optimists. I am what lives beneath the skin, and I have saved you times uncounted. I have lusted and hated and cursed and driven you beyond mortal endurance, but I have never lied to you, never made a promise I couldn't keep. I've never left you when the shit got thick. I'm the will to live without its civilized makeup, and you knew that when all the promises of (light)polite society failed, I wouldn't.

So I took you in, shepherded you behind the steadfast walls of your fortress, and its frigid, grey walls insulated you from the nettling, suppurating hurt of Don's abandonment. From behind the safety of its walls, you could watch him stumble around the living room and feel nothing but distant contempt. You could awaken in the night to the dull moonscape of your half-empty bed and feel only blessed numbness. I cannot heal your wounds; such gifts are for kinder natures than mine, but I could grant you the gift of all-consuming anger, that devouring, white-hot tide of rage that devours everything in its path. It is a paradox of human nature that such vicious, unreasoning fury can leave you so serene, so focused on the matter of your own survival. My gift has burnt away the soporific fog of love and attachment and left nothing in its place but the hard, flinty ore of necessity. You know now what you must do, and because of me, you will have the strength to do it, though it leave your hands bloody and your son's heart broken. Because of me, you will survive.

You could leave now if it weren't for the baby, the cherubic, toddling consequence of your folly. You've been setting money by since the day after Angell's funeral, tucking spare money into a Gringotts account beyond the wall. Between that and the funds that have been collecting dust and interest from your Hogwarts days, when Social Security deposited your monthly stipend into what it thought was a Muggle checking account, you could be comfortable, perhaps even wealthy. You can certainly afford a small brownstone on the Hudson and a house elf or two to help with your squalling progeny. It wouldn't take much to contact Hogwarts and prevail upon that tartan do-gooder, McGonagall, to return Dinks. He is, yours, after all, and would gladly return to the blue, archless feet of his mistress. A well-appointed life awaits you beyond the wall if you would but embrace it.

Yet you linger here, a queen deposed by the sainted memory of a murdered whore, bound to these overthrown walls by twenty pounds of baby boy. Junior has not forgotten his love for his father. In his child's eyes, the prince has not fallen, but is a king. He shrieks with glee at the sight of his father and holds out his chubby arms, heedless of the pungent aroma of bourbon and barrel-aged whiskey and unfettered by remembrance of bleary-eyed phantoms who tottered and reeled and meted out justice on the end of a hairbrush. Daddy still scoops him up and holds him tight and swings him above his head in a giddy, weightless orbit that makes him squeal with delight, and if that wondrous, breathless arc wavers and teeters as Daddy wrestles the drink in his veins for gravitational dominance, so much the better. Daddy is still warmth and light and every good thing to your son, whose love is born, not of oaths of fidelity sworn before an altar of glossy wood, but of blood and bone and raw instinct, and you cannot bear to break his heart, too. So, you sit and bleed and recede deeper into the blessed numbness behind your walls.

The Professor was right. Love is a killing weakness. If it weren't, you wouldn't be curled within yourself and puling for the warmth of his hand like every spineless milksop you publicly derided and privately envied from the cold shelter of your squalid spinster's bed.

Now he's standing in the doorway of their apartment with last night's sins on his face and gazing at her with a desperate intensity that sends a ripple of unease through her despite the numbness and her thick fortress walls. She pauses in her sorting of the mound of papers and crumpled wrappers strewn over the coffee table and surveys him in dispassionate silence. She considers asking how he got the bruises and the fat lip and the speckling of blood that kisses his temple and fades into his crown, then decides it doesn't matter. She's too tired to hear another lie from those lovely lips. She turns back to the drifts of paper at her fingertips and waits to hear the sound of his footfalls on the kitchen linoleum as he makes his beeline for the bourbon above the sink.

Instead, she hears his tread on the carpet, soft as a whisper, as though he were walking in socked feet. She glances up from her perusal, an overdue phone bill in one hand, and is startled to see him standing over her, swaying delicately. He's looking at her with feverish hope.

"I really don't care where you've been," she says dully. "Your preferred wet nurse is over there." She jerks her head in the direction of the kitchen.

"Rebecca," he croaks.

"What?" Impatient as she returns her attention to the bill and calculates how badly his lack of give a shit has torpedoed their budget.

Then he's eye-to-eye with her, on his knees in front of her chair. He reaches out to cup her face, and his hands are steady and deliciously warm. It's been a long time since he's been so gentle, and she lets the bill sink to her lap, momentarily forgotten. "Rebecca," he repeats, and his voice cracks. "Doll, please."

"What?" she repeats, and is surprised at how hoarse and brittle she sounds, how old. Twenty-nine, she thinks wearily. I'm only twenty-nine.

He shifts on his knees and swallows with an audible click, and when he meets her gaze, his eyes are wet. He takes a deep breath, and his mouth works. "I've spent-," he begins, and grinds to a halt. A huff, Another swallow. "I've spent most of the day tryin' to think of what to say..." He trails off again, drops his head, and draws a deep, shuddering breath, as though the effort of speech is too great. The balls of his thumbs draw slow, reverent circles over her cheekbones, the pads roughened by handcuff steel and gun butt plastic and the ceaseless grit thrown up by his beloved city. "I know I don't have much right to ask you for this after...after these...after everything," he says hesitantly.

She closes her eyes to savor the warm press of his palms against her cheeks, and her mouth opens in an involuntary sigh of pleasure. It would be so easy to surrender now, to lean forward and burrow into him, to bury her face in the crook of his neck and inhale the scent of his wool cardigan and his shampoo and the lingering traces of Irish Spring. She thinks she could find it if she breathed deeply enough. She could fall into him and let him lift her aching, frozen body from this chair and carry her to the snug nest of their bed, where once upon a time, he'd coaxed life into her a thrust at a time. She could let him apologize with his full, eager mouth and his broad, deliciously-kneading hands and pretend that done was done. She's done it before, after all; when he'd spent four months swanning among the city's empty-headed glitterati with Devon Maddox on his arm like so much costume jewelry, she'd bowed her head and accepted her exile to California and the harried, congenial neglect of Charlie Eppes with the briefest of complaints, and when he'd beckoned her home again, she'd returned to his bed and assured him that the hurt was done even as it had bubbled in her griping belly and slick throat like lye. She had done it when he'd left her in the hospital, her belly high and swollen with Junior, to chase another bogeyman. She could close her eyes to the hurt that swells behind her breastbone like an abscess again, grant him absolution with a caress and the eldritch power of a murmured, "I love you," could store it with all the others in the secret room at the cold, lightless bottom of her soul and let it rot while life went on and time and secret sorrow threaded her hair with garlands of silver and white.

The idealistic Gryffindor child who had gone so joyfully to the altar and the marriage bed wants to do just that. She wants to preserve the Eden she'd once imagined beneath a veil of lace, the Eden to which she'd sacrificed her freedom and her maidenhead. It would be easiest, she counsels, and prudent, the act of a good policeman's wife. You knew the price his job would require of you, knew that it would demand more than he could give, she whispers. You knelt before Father Carmichael with your hands in his and swore that you could and would bear that burden for the rest of your life, no matter how much blood or how many tears it wrung from you. You have no right to protest now, to stomp your feet like a petulant child and howl at him for trusting your word. You bought and paid for this with your name and the ring on the third finger of your left hand, bought it along with the joy of his kisses and the peaceful security of his embrace at night. You cannot pick and choose. It's all or nothing. Keep your silence and cherish the fleeting slivers of happiness it buys, summer mist on your upturned face, and when the city releases what's left of him from its dusty, concrete grasp, then you can reap your reward, spend your twilight years shuffling through the streets his youth made safe or sunning your wrinkled, parchment skin on a beach in Key West while he peddles garlic-and-lime-crusted shrimp to soft-bellied tourists with rumbling stomachs and money to burn. Good things come to those who wait.

It's the voice of reason, the voice of her grandfather and McGonagall, and of twinkling, scarlet-robed headmasters. It's the voice of the hardshell Southern Baptist she'd been in a small Florida backwater a lifetime ago, and of the Roman Catholic woman she'd become in order to marry Don at St. Patrick's. It's the quiet, patient voice of forebearance, the voice to which she has listened for eight turbulent years. The voice to which she knows she should pay heed.

But Rebecca is tired, and the voice is strained. Alice has found her room of secret hurts and gorged upon them like tart currants. She's grown strong upon her toadstool, sustained by the resentments Rebecca has buried, ignored, or denied, and so, when Rebecca opens her mouth, it's Alice who speaks.

"What? Hm? What? I've done everything you've ever asked of me. I've swallowed my pride and turned my head while you swanned around the city with a prissy debutante cunt on your arm and pissed on our marriage for a fistful of jewelery and a useless, paper 'atta boy' in your personnel file. I've supported whatever lie you've had to tell for the sake of your sworn duty, no matter how painful or humiliating, no matter how many scores it leaves on my soul. I've come when you called and left when I was no longer convenient. I've kissed the mouth that told me I'd done enough damage; I've held your hand through three IAB hearings in two years. I've surrendered my job, my independence, and my entire world so that you could be someone else's hero. And for four months, I've watched you mourn your dead whore in our home and never said a goddamn word. So what could you possibly ask of me now?"

The color drains from his face, and his brows knit in wounded confusion. His mouth works. "Rebecca, I don't under-,"

"Don't LIE to me!" she hisses through gritted teeth, and recoils from the seductive cup of his palms. "Don't you dare lie to me, Donald Flack. You've spent every cent of credit you ever fucking had, so don't you dare kneel there and tell me you don't understand. You've been a bastard more than once, but you've never been an imbecile."

He's shaking his head, and his eyes are full of anguish. "Rebecca, sweetheart, I don't know what you're talking about."

And Alice roars. "DON'T! Don't fucking patronize me. My love for you hasn't made me such a blind simpleton that I can't see what's right in front of me. Would God that it had. It would've been a mercy. "

Her eyes sting and needle with tears, and rage is spicy and sweet on her tongue, cumin and clove honey. Anger burns in her belly, and the flare of warmth is exhilarating, almost erotic in its intensity. It's life, primal and unapologetic, possessed of an intoxicating clarity, and she opens her soul and drinks it in. Heat floods her veins, and her nerve endings sizzle with a nascent power. Magic pools in her fingertips and dances over her skin like electric charge. She could release it if she wished, could expel it in a single, explosive contraction that shattered windows for three floors or sent him crashing into the opposite wall in a tangle of limbs and plywood and plaster dust. She could hurt him, exact her revenge in a furious instant and send him to his precious whore,rotting beneath the earth in a Bronx cemetery. She is not powerless, after all. The knowledge soothes her.

Love might have ensnared you, made you impotent, but I will set you free, Alice lisps, and chuckles, a mud-choked drain in high summer.

"You think I haven't noticed you licking your wounds one drop at a time, mooning after your dearly departed piece of ass like an emo poster child? You think I don't hear you crying for her in the middle of the night, cradling your bottle like a dead whore's tit? You think I don't know why you spend the night on the couch? I suppose even your drunkard's conscience knows it would be impolitic to pine for your rotting trollop in the bed you share with your wife. Or hell, maybe you're not sleeping at all. Maybe you're beating off, easing the ache in your heart with the one between your legs and reliving all the illicit rendezvous you enjoyed in squad cars and precinct bathroom stalls while I was here, wiping Junior's ass and parenting for two."

"Rebecca, stop, please," he pleads. His eyes are wide, shocked. He drops his hands and encircles her wrists. "Please. I know-I know I haven't been there for you and Junior like I should have." His voice catches, and he blinks back tears. "Just give me a chance to explain, sweetheart." He presses a kiss to her knuckles.

Her lips curl in a sneer. "What's to explain? 'Angell made me feel ten yards long and didn't curse my job for every lost minute, so I spread her from New York to L.A. every chance I got.'?" Tears stream down her face and dangle from her chin like beads of condensation, but her voice is low and steady.

"I didn't-,"

"Oh, please. Of course you did. Of course. Why else wouldn't you let me go to the wake with you? Wouldn't want to embarrass the grieving father of your mistress by having your charmless, homely, misbegotten, inconvenient wife in the parlor with her bereaved mother, making awkward small talk over stale crudites." Each poisonous adjective fans the flames of her repressed fury, and heady intoxication sours to cancerous misery in her bones.

Silly little girl, playing princess while wallowing in cold ashes. An inarticulate animal whine emerges from her throat, and she growls in disgust and swipes irritably at her traitorous, weeping eyes.

A flicker of comprehension behind the haze of wounded bewilderment. He closes the meager distance between them; his thighs graze her knees, intimate and oddly tender. She can smell him, too, and though there is the all-too-familiar hint of old booze on his breath, there is also the scent of soap and shampoo. Not Irish Spring, no; it's not sharp enough, not crisp, pine and cut paper. It's waxy, tallow and beeswax. Ivory, perhaps.

He's still in there, your love, whispers a small, quiet voice. Listen. The Gryffindor child cowers beneath the mold-blackened cap of Alice's diseased toadstool, hidden from her adversary by its tumescent shadow. She's vulnerable and frail, all hard, gangly angles as she curls beneath the toadstool, knees pulled to her chest and arms folded over the peaks of her knees. Her cheeks are thin and tear-stained, and her eyes are heavy-lidded, but there is a quiet resolve in them, a steel-spined determination. Fight, she hisses urgently. Stand and fight. If you let her win, she will devour everything. Above her, Alice rocks gleefully on her heels, mouth stretched in a vulpine grin and one hand buried beneath her greasy yellow pinafore.

"Sweetheart, that wasn't what you think," he says. "Christ, I never thought about how that must've looked to you, but sweetheart, I was so fucked up then that I wasn't thinkin' much of anythin'. I just wanted to-,"

But before he can finish, Junior barrels from his nursery, arms outstretched and chubby infant's legs toddling with wobbly enthusiasm. He's been fussing for his father for hours, crowing and chirping and occasionally abandoning his play to wander out and gaze expectantly at the front door, as though he could will his daddy through it by force of will and plaintive calls of, "Daaayeee!" Don's voice has drawn him out, and he clambers onto him, oblivious to the tension between his parents. He wraps his fingers around the sleeves of Don's cashmere pullover and tugs.

"Dayeee!" he crows exultantly, and tugs again.

Don hesitates a moment, clearly desperate to reach her, but when Junior begins to whine, he relents and releases her hands.

"Hey, buddy." He enfolds his son and kisses the downy crown of his head.

The sudden loss of contact stings, fresh salt cast upon a festering wound, and the Gryffindor child disappears from view, swallowed by the image of Don's exposed throat as Angell sucks his cock in a precinct stairwell. "Go on," she says brusquely, and disentangles herself with a sharp backward roll of her wheels.

"Rebecca."

"Go on," she repeats. "He's been waiting for you all day, and besides, I've got to clean up this mess."

"Rebecca," he says softly. "We can talk after he goes to bed. Anything you want to know." It's as much question as promise.

"And what if I don't want to know anything?" she croaks. "What if I just want you to shut the fuck up and go away because I can't find the strength to give a damn anymore?"

If that were true, Miss Stanhope, then surely the pain would not cut so deep? murmurs a soft, sage voice inside her head, and in her mind's eye, she sees a flash of scarlet robe and white beard and twinkling, blue eyes behind half-moon spectacles.

I should have known you'd turn up, Headmaster. You never could resist meddling in others' affairs, particularly in matters of love and conscience. I'm only surprised you didn't turn up sooner to chastise me for ingratitude, she muses wryly. You seldom missed a chance to bludgeon a man with his shortcomings. In fact, you made quite the sport of it with the Professor, preyed upon his considerable faults like the canny old vulture you are and turned his guilt to your own ends. Did it with Harry, too, like as not. All while ignoring the beams lodged magnificently in your own eyes. Tidy gambit, that. One from which you carved your bloody sainted legacy. I suppose you've come to peddle your tiresome brand of selfless Gryffindor piety and nobility in the hopes of converting me at the last.

It's rotten thing for both of us, then, that I'm still Slytherin to the marrow and too damn jaded to listen to your optimistic piffle. Now leave me be.

Don's breath catches, and he closes his eyes, and the tears that have threatened since he appeared in their doorway spill down his cheeks. He clears his throat, swallows and clears his throat again. "I promised you that day I married you that I'd give you anything you wanted, and I will. Even that."

He rises to his feet with the creak and pop of tendons and joints, Junior cradled snugly in the crook of his arm. The baby croons contentedly when Don's broad, protective hand splays over his small back to keep him from tumbling to the floor with the sudden, fluid motion. Don kisses the shell of his ear and whispers precious secrets there, and then he carries Junior into the nursery. He spares her a last, beseeching look and closes the door with the soft, metallic snick of tumbler meeting jamb, and then she is alone in the living room, surrounded by the close, meaty funk of old Chinese food, the musty, iron piquancy of old newspapers, and the bitter, ozone tang of her anger. For a moment, she is afraid; the emptiness feels too complete, too final, a churchyard in which no new souls will ever rest. Then she blinks and squares her shoulders, and there is only the dirty living room and her need to set it right.

She works in the silence, insulated from the ever-nattering voices by the banked-ember burn of exertion in her shoulders and lower back. It's pleasant now, but if she works long enough, pleasure will become pain, a simmering, thunderous tension that poisons her muscles and makes them cramped and hot beneath her skin. If she ignores the warning twinges that settle into her back and neck like serrated claws and septic teeth, she will make her penance writhing on the bathroom floor to the rhythm of the iron-fingered spasms that force bile from her throat and tears from her eyes and rich, fecund shame from her helplessly clenching buttocks. She will scream and plead for mercy from the indifferent, idiot gaze of the television and drum a frantic tattoo on the carpet with her heels and flexing, fisting fingers, and when she is spent and her confessor has wrung her dry and left her to lick her wounds, she will loll bonelessly on the floor and drift on the gentle, rolling tides of oblivion. It would be humiliating for Don to find her lying insensate in her own effluvium, logy and weak and pitiful, but still, she could escape for a time, and maybe when she came to, her sorrow would be diminished, expelled with the vomit and the urine and the excrement. Maybe she would be clean again. There is no greater purifier than pain, after all. Pain tempers and strengthens. If its embrace doesn't smother you, pain makes you whole.

So she ignores the twinges and the bright-hot sparks of discomfort that sizzle along her spine and dance along her nerve endings like ill-kept secrets escaped from their prison of dentin and bone. She bends to gather dirty shirts and old socks and ties that loll from the back of the sofa like raggedly severed tongues. She bends and swings her arms to drive the fluttering pages of old newspapers into a garbage bag, and she stretches to reach unopened mail that has fallen from the coffee table. She stretches until her fingers splay and tremble and expose her first knuckles, the ivory throats of maidens offered to the sacrificial knife. She entices the poison to her muscles and the claws to her throat with every motion, and though her arms and shoulders ache and needle with the promise of pain and her back burns and thrums with dull dissatisfaction, there comes no iron vise around her chest or clamped viciously around the small of her back. She will suffer tonight, but there will be no sweet, stupid release from the misery, no purgative spasms to set her free. She laughs through her nose as she works, breathless and bitter, and hates the world.

Astride her toadstool, Alice throws back her head and laughs, and beneath her soiled pinafore, her dirty-nailed hands continues its, sinuous, feverish dance of triumph.

It's half-past seven by the time she concedes defeat and looks up from her work. The fingers of her right hand ache with the effort of clutching the armrest to anchor herself to the chair. Her palm is red and raw from the scrape of the foam grip, and her shoulder throbs from the strain. Her hair hangs in her face in disheveled profusion, and her face is blotchy and hot from the repeated rush of blood. Her legs tremble with exhaustion tremors. Her toes curl and splay inside her shoes by turns. She feels fragile and ill-made, a child's stick figure on the verge of collapse. She would cry if there were tears or energy left, but her tears are spent and she is hollow, and so she merely wipes the sweat and dust from her overheated face with the back of an unsteady hand and rolls toward the nursery. She turns the doorknob and nudges the door open with her footplates.

The door swings wide to reveal Don standing in the middle of the room with Junior on his hip. Don has shed most of his clothes since he slipped into the nursery, and Junior sags heavily against one bare shoulder, one chubby arm around his father's neck and the thumb of the other hand lodged snugly in his mouth. Don rocks softly from foot to foot and hip to hip, murmuring soft endearments to their son. It's a lovely, soothingly hypnotic motion, a paternal waltz in which she would gladly revel if she weren't so tired and angry. She opens her mouth to ask why Don is rocking in nothing but his boxers and a pair of socks, but then he turns, and the question lies fallow on her usually-fertile tongue. She sees his belly and the ugly mottle of bruises from hip to sternum, and remembers.

In this room, Alice cannot speak. Beneath the toadstool, the Gryffindor child stirs.

She reaches him in a single, forward snap of her arms, the wheels of her chair crossing the smooth floor with the hissing, fretful rumble of muffled voices. "What happened?" she demands brusquely. It's a ragged croak, and the tears she had thought spent cloud her vision.

Why is it always the belly? howls the Gryffindor child inside her head. It's like they know, the fuckers. The rotten fuckers. It's an irrational, animal thought, but she understands it, nonetheless. Two years ago, she'd spent eight days bargaining with God for his life because Lessing had blown up an apartment building and lain open his guts with a Xerox machine, and three months after that smearing his mended belly with iodine and antibiotic creams to keep infection at bay. She's caressed the scars the explosion left behind most nights since, cupped them beneath the protective dome of her hand and promised to keep him safe, keep him whole.

And as part of that bargain with God, you swore that if He let Don live, if He gave you more time, you'd never forget to cherish it, to make the most of it. You wouldn't waste it on anger and bitterness and petty vengeance. Yet here you are just a few years later, drowning in bitterness at all the time you've lost to his job and damning him because he's too weak to best his demons. As if you're so much better on that score. If you were, Alice wouldn't be so powerful. How much time with him have you lost to her and your unceasing anger? The Gryffindor child emerges from the overripe shelter of the toadstool's blighted canopy. She's weak-kneed and pale and streaked with mud the color of bootblack from toe to knee, but she's on her feet, and her voice is strong and buoyed by a quiet dignity.

I'm not the one who cheated, Rebecca protests. I'm not the one who pissed on our marriage to please the PD brass and the Tiffany and Cartier crowd.

You don't know that he did cheat, the child counters with maddening implacability, and for a befuddled moment, Rebecca wonders if the Headmaster and the Professor had created a child in their own images, equal parts guile and velvet-handed frankness. If you were certain, you wouldn't be here, son or no. As to the rest of it, that hurt is as old as its wound. Are you really going to seek payment for it now, a year after you took him to your bed and told him that you understood?

Her hands drift to the bruises, cautious and solicitous. Now that her work is done, they've begun to cool, and she expects him to twist from her touch, but he doesn't. He closes his eyes and presses himself against her palms. The bruises are hot and swollen beneath her skin, ripe with blood. She winces and gingerly peels back the waistband of his boxers in search of further discoloration, but the flesh of his groin is unmarred, pink and healthy above a coarse thicket of black curls. She slowly releases the elastic and resumes her probing. Her fingers graze the wattled flesh of his scar, and she pauses to rest her hand there.

"I got mugged in the subway last night." His voice is quiet, little more than a rumble in his chest. "I was drunk, and two guys jumped me. It would've been a whole lot worse in Terrance hadn't turned up. I spent the mornin' at his place, soberin' up and gettin' myself together. I didn't want to face you lookin' like a bum." Shame, now.

"Bit late to be worrying about that, isn't it?" she asks, and immediately regrets it when he flinches and retreats.

He turns away from her and bounces Junior on his hip. "Let's get you ready for bed, buddy." He carries the baby to the changing table and lays him on it.

Junior grizzles and fusses and squawks irritably, squirming impatiently on the pad. He catches sight of her and stretches out his chubby hands. Drool dangles from one thumb in a gossamer strand. "Mumm!" he commands imperiously, and begins to cry.

She rolls to the changing table and grips one small foot. It disappears into her palm, fleshy and warm, and she rubs the sole with the ball of her thumb. "Ssssh, my boy. Mmmm Mmmm. Mama's here." She clucks and tsks and hums until he settles into wet-eyed silence, and then she rolls to the other side of the changing table and strokes his soft, downy hair. "Sssh, poppet. Mommy and Daddy are here, and soon, you're going to be snug in your crib, hmm?"

"Hmg," comes Junior's skeptical retort, and she snorts in amusement. "There's my chip off the old block," she says ruefully.

Don avoids her gaze and busies himself with worrying the baby wipes and picking at the tape on Junior's Huggies. He picks up the baby powder and puts it down again and reaches beneath the changing table to retrieve a diaper. He pulls one out, but makes no move to use it. He simply holds it in his hands, kneads it between his fingers like unleavened dough. He clears his throat and studies the wall. His Adam's apple bobs, a pigeon snapping up breadcrumbs, and she smothers the impulse to rest a soothing hand on the small of his back, to stretch her inflexible arms and cup his nape.

Sober enough to hurt now, she thinks, and oh, baby, don't I know a thing or two about that? "What was Terrance doing on the same subway train?" she asks.

Don doesn't look at her, but his throat ceases its terrible spasming, and his hands still. He shrugs and sets the battered diaper on the edge of the table. "Don't know," he answers as he tugs at the fasteners at Junior's hips. "Damn lucky he was, though. The felonious Frick and Frack were about a breath away from knifin' me for my wallet." He lifts up Junior's wriggling feet over a grunt of protest and removes a wet diaper. "Thought so," he murmurs.

"A knife?" she croaks stupidly. "One of them had a knife?" Almost lost you again, and I never would've had a chance to say goodbye. The horror overwhelms her, and she gropes for the soiled diaper with numb, clumsy fingers. Her fingertips find wet warmth, and she blinks as she realizes that's she's dipped them into her son's urine, a penitent dipping fingers into a holy font in search of absolution. She grimaces in disgust, seizes the diaper, and feeds it into the salaciously puckered mouth of the Diaper Genie, which accepts it with gluttonous fervor. She absently wipes her fingers on the leg of her sweatpants.

If he notices her discomfiture he gives no sign. He plucks a baby wipe from the nearby container and cleans Junior's wriggling buttocks and damp groin. He stops for a moment to inspect the crease of one thigh. "Hand me the Desitin?"

She gropes for it amid the various nostrums stored inside an old Tupperware bowl. "Here," she says. The tube is almost empty, a wad of chewed gum between her fingers.

He frowns at it. "I'll pick up more on the way home from work tomorrow." He unscrews the cap, squeezes a measure onto his fingertips, and dabs it onto the baby's chafed thigh. He works quietly, gently. He's no stranger to this, the unglamorous work of parenthood. For all his shortcomings as a husband, he's never begrudged Junior a single moment. He's been involved since the day Junior was born, changing diapers and burping and soothing colic with endless circuits around the apartment at three in the morning. When Junior had discovered his feet, it had been Don who'd shown him how to use them, who'd placed his tiny feet atop his own and walked him around the living room while Junior had squealed with a delight she understood and envied, for not so long ago, her feet had rested there, bound by Velcro as he'd waltzed her across a wooden, reception hall floor. It had been a lesson only he could teach, and she'd sat on the couch with her heart in her throat, torn between gratitude and despair.

"He needs you," she says softly.

Don pauses in his application of baby powder to Junior's freshly-washed backside. "What's that supposed to mean?" Wary, a wounded mouse peering from its burrow.

"You're a good father."

"Just a shit husband." Bitter and sharp with hurt.

He doesn't speak again until he's buttoning their drowsy child into his sleeper. He pauses in mid-button, hands hovering over the tiny, metal snap like an angel's wings. He speaks to her, but studies Junior's face. "I know I didn't have much to offer you when I slid that velvet box across the table, and I've delivered even less, but I love you. I never expected it to be this hard. Most cops go their whole careers without getting hurt in the field or having to blow some scumbag to hell or bein' accused of killin' a kid in their custody or bein' asked to be someone they're not or havin' to bury a partner and then look their father and brothers in the eye and admit you couldn't save 'em. I never thought it would happen like this, and I wish it was different. I wish none of it had happened, that you never had to carry any of that."

"'Had to carry' it? You never let me try. You just shoved me aside the second the shit got thick, like I was a liability you didn't need, and called me back when it was over. 'Good dog, Rebecca, good dog. Come for your doggie treat.'"

"You're my clean, well-lighted place." Plaintive.

"I want to be your partner. Maybe I can't be the center of your universe, but why can't I be that?"

"Dammit, Rebecca, you are." He finally turns his gaze on her, and his eyes are wet and raw and anguished. "You are my partner. You're my partner, my queen, the fucking reason I breathe. Every joy in my world springs from you."

"Then why-?"

"Because I need you to be safe, to be fuckin' clean!" he snaps, and the sudden shout startles a dozing Junior, who begins to scream. "Shit," Don says dully, and he scoops the howling baby from the changing table and begins to sway. "Sssh. I'm sorry, buddy. Sssh." Then, quietly. "I need one place in this world that isn't jaded and broken and hip-deep in blood and bullshit. I need you to keep believin' in magic."

Oh, love, if you only knew, she thinks, and Lessing's screaming, fleshless face and the blood-slick floor of the Shrieking shack fill her mind. "I don't think he's going to need Goodnight, Moon tonight." She nods at Junior, who continues to hiccough and whimper and splutter despite his ministrations.

"No, but I think you do," he says. He lays Junior on the changing table again and is rewarded with renewed squalling. Then he turns and holds out his hands. "Let me help you into the rocker?"

If you accept, you accept more than an invitation to rock,, warns a voice inside her head. It's an invitation to resume the walk you started when you wobbled down the steps of St. Patrick's. If you accept it, you accept everything that comes with it, and there's no turning back.

She surveys him in silence. She is older now, and wiser, no longer cocooned by innocence and the naive optimism of youth. She knows what awaits her if she should take his proffered hands. There will be more nights alone and more canceled vacations, more postponed dinners and more aborted massages, more kisses stolen as he rushes out the door with his Superman cape tucked beneath his Kevlar vest. More chances for fate to snatch him from her.

His outstretched hands waver. "It'll get better, doll. It has to. Just trust me like you did when we got married."

It's all right, doll; I got you. You just go ahead and shine. Lace on her skin and rice in her hair and one delicate, white-slippered foot poised delicately between one riser and the next, naught between her and disaster except absolute faith and Don's encircling arm.

She hold out her hands. They're immediately swallowed in Don's, and then she's on her feet and enfolded in his arms. They're as warm and strong as she remembers them, and she surrenders to his embrace, weak-kneed and relieved and ashamed of her need. She presses her face to his chest and breathes him in, lets the sparse, coarse hairs tickle her cheek. She can feel his heartbeat beneath his skin, steady and strong, and it comforts her. It's the sound of home and the sea, the ebb and flow of life and the promise of love.

I'm weak, she thinks. Weak and foolish and too damn human, and I don't know when it happened, when I went soft in the center and fragile as dust and porcelain at the edges. I do know that I can't go back to who I was, that hard, hateful child who shunned the light and needed no one. Once tasted, love can never be untasted. It's the deepest, grubbiest, most lethal addiction there is, and I cannot surrender it. God help me, I don't want to.

"I love you," she whispers, her breath a warm puff that stirs the hairs of his chest. "As God is my witness, I love you so. I just...I don't know what to do." Beside her, Junior howls, desperate for sleep and the attention of his parents.

"Look at me," Don says, and when she does, he leans down and presses his lips to hers. They're warm and soft and sweetly hesitant. For a moment, he only lingers there and breathes against her mouth, and then he parts her lips with a brush of his tongue. His tongue caresses hers and fills her with a glorious, liquid heat that makes her heart stutter. There's nothing lascivious in it; it's simple solace, two hearts speaking without voice. She shudders and closes her eyes and remembers another kiss on a chilly night in March, when he'd captured her heart in the cup of his hand and claimed it as his own.

A grace note, she thinks as she gropes for the smoothness of his nape. This is a grace note. Please God that I should cherish it well.

His hands slip to her hips, and he pivots her towards the rocking chair. He breaks the kiss reluctantly, with a final, proprietary nip of her bottom lip, and then he eases her into the chair, one socked foot wedged beneath the runner to keep it from tipping her onto the floor. She settles with a grimace as her right hip sings its displeasure at the renewed contracture. Early-onset arthritis if she's lucky; osteoporosis if she isn't. Yet another consequence of life lived at waist-level. When the low, ground-glass throb subside, she wriggles further back into the chair, until her spine feels the bony press of wooden slats through her blouse. She sighs and flexes her feet, watches impassively as they judder and twitch while cramped muscles unfurl and realign. Her feet are cold, and her calves ache with unseen bruises, She wonders how many there will be come morning, when she's fighting her feet for the right to touch the floor and shaking the blood into her extremities. She rolls her neck and shoulders, opens and closes her hands, and then she reaches for her caterwauling son.

"Here, now, poppet," she soothes as she struggles to lift him onto her lap. He's so much bigger now, and it's not as easy as it was when he was small and helpless and possessed of no inclination to exert his will. He reaches for her and pedals his feet as if to propel himself to the safety of her lap, and his body bows with the effort. She almost loses her fierce, spastic grip, but Don braces him with a hand beneath his bottom, and she heaves him onto her lap, where he stands with his feet pressed to her thighs. "Mmmm!" he grunts triumphantly, and flops gracelessly onto his buttocks. He squirms and fusses and butt-bumps until his rump is tucked snugly against her lower belly. He grins up at her, his chin wet with saliva, and curls one chubby fist in her long, blonde hair in a possessive clench.

"Mummm," he declares, and tugs sleepily on the golden strands.

"Yes, and Mommy loves you." She tucks him closer still and begins to rock. The creak and groan of the rocker is a companionable noise, and she relaxes by degrees, lulled by the rhythm and the disgruntled murmur of the wood.

She expects Don to leave now that she's comfortable, to retreat to the living room and watch ESPN until she emerges, but he doesn't. He sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the rocker and rests his head on her knees and wraps his arms around her spindly legs. His nape is exposed, pale and fragile in the soft light of the nursery. He's vulnerable now, prostrate and submissive before he. She could hurt him if she wanted, could bring her fisted hand down on him or claw the flesh until blood stippled on his raw skin and beaded under her nails. Instead, she strokes his nape with sore fingers and delights in the fresh-shaven cleanness. It's been too long since she's been afforded this simplest of intimate pleasures. For months, she's found nothing but intrusive hairs whenever she's managed to steal a caress as he sprawls on the couch with a bottled cradled to his chest. She moves to his head and cards her splayed fingers through his hair, which is soft and clean and freshly-trimmed.

He's trying, the Gryffindor child whispers urgently. He's fighting. You've no reason not to.

"There's something I have to tell you," he tells the valley between her knees, and begins to massage her calves, as though he sees the bruises she can't.

Her throat constricts, and her heart begins to pound. She tightens her one-armed grip on Junior, who lolls bonelessly against her, one thumb lodged inside his mouth like a cork. "I don't want to know what happened between you and Angell. Never. I can't. I don't want my nose rubbed in my wifely shortcomings. If I know, I won't have any choice, and I don't want to leave you."

He looks at her, eyes red and tired and damp. "I swear on Junior and on my sister's soul that nothing happened between me and Angell. It wasn't like that. I think she wanted it to be, and it could've been if I wasn't married, but I was, and I am, and I want to be. She was my friend and my professional partner, and that's the end of it."

She wants to believe him, but though Alice be without voice here, she is not without power. She crouches atop her toadstool in malevolent majesty, and Rebecca's mind fills with images of her love en flagrante with Angell, all sweat and languid heat,and the guttural, primitive joy of release.

"If you never fucked her, then why in God's name have you spent the last four months trying to drink yourself anywhere else?"

"Because something happened, and I never thought it would, and I don't understand what it means about who I am. Who I thought I was. I don't know what it makes me."

"You just said you never slept with Angell."

"And I didn't." A note of exasperation now, perhaps even anger. "There are worse sins in the world than sex." Junior stirs restively on her lap and whimpers in his sleep, and Don closes his eyes and rubs her calves in slow, soothing strokes . "It happened after...after she died," he continues more quietly. "It was quick, and it was ugly, and I don't even fuckin' know how to even get my head around it because I never thought I'd be that fuckin' guy, that fuckin-,"

He stops, and his breathing is rapid and ragged. His formerly massaging hands are clamped convulsively around the backs of her knees, and it's an effort not to betray the pain. She strokes his cheek with the back of her fingers. "Love, what is it? What's broken your heart?"

He swallows and shakes his head. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. There's a good chance that you'll hate my guts, and I want to be your Prince Charmin' for one more night." He captures her stroking hand and kisses it. "I know I'm all out of favors with you, Rebecca, but please. Just love me for one more night."

She wants to weep, to tell him that she will love him forever, that her love for him is as jealous and pitiless and unyielding as the grave, but it's a weakness her pride will not abide, not yet, not with her anger so near, and so she simply nods once. "All right," she says, "all right. One more night."

"Mmm," he manages, and gives a jerky nod of acknowledgment. Then his forehead returns to her knees, and the only sound is the creak and shush of the rocker.

She sits in the nursery with her son heavy and slack on her lap and her husband spent and wracked at her knees, and the Gryffindor child closes her eyes and sends out a small, quiet prayer.