She lived with the ghosts of him.
They shook her awake at night; they crept up on her in little moments, as she took off her make-up, as she waited in line for her coffee.
Sometimes they made her gaze glassy as her mind turned inwards, trying to catch the shrinking fragments of his face like leaves blowing in the wind…
"Mom… mom?" little voices would echo at the dinner table.
"Sorry honey, just distracted by a case I'm working on…" she would try, and Grace would nod, while Zach would shake his head.
When Zach got into NYU later that month, she knew that she couldn't take him to visit.
"I have a big meeting Zach," she lied. "I can't change it."
"So we'll go to the second visit day, two weeks later?" he smiled. Her heart ached for her son, but she couldn't. She couldn't go back. That had been their city, and she wasn't ready. His ghosts would be out in the streets.
"Your Dad will take you."
"I can't show up with Dad and his entourage, Mom, come on!"
"Zach, I…" She stared into his blue eyes, scrambling frantically for an excuse.
"Your Dad is going to take you," she said, slowly.
Zach opened his mouth to speak, but he saw his mother's eyes fill and he choked back his words.
"You know, I think I'd prefer Georgetown anyway," he said, hours later, at the table. "Would you pass the pasta?"
Alicia swallowed, and refilled her wine.
"You're not eating, mom?" Grace asked, with a sideward glance to her undisturbed plate.
"I... later. I had a big lunch. A work thing," she said with a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
Alicia's stomach felt like someone had wrapped a fist around it. This is the happiest I've ever been, she heard, and she felt the warmth of his skin on her skin and she remembered how he had tried to tell her that he loved her and she hadn't let him. She gulped down her wine and will they finish eating already?
"Mr Horcross did the same thing to me two years ago!" Zach laughed.
"We were freaking out after class!" Grace said. Alicia cursed herself for resenting the frivolous giggles of her children as they rattled through her. Another glass.
The kids skipped to the TV while she stiffly pushed back from the table. Her hands numbly cleared up, while in her mind she heard the silence around them on the balcony that night, remembered crying in his arms because she was afraid to leave that city where they could be together, shameless and brazen; afraid to come back here, afraid it would get too complicated.
"I'm going to go do homework, you need anything mom?" Grace called.
"No baby, thanks. I love you," she said and she meant it, and when her daughter's door clicked shut she furtively uncorked a second bottle of red and took it with her into her bedroom.
She was scared to turn out the lights. His ghosts lingered most of all in the dark, and talking about New York had summoned them from their hiding places. They had already stolen her appetite and made her throw back merlot like a potion that might keep them away…
Please not tonight, she thought.
She was scared of the dark and the ghosts, but mostly she was scared of the nightmares. It had been a while, actually, without one. This had been her longest spell since the… incident… without her waking up cold and sweating, terrified by the bullets that in real life she hadn't seen or heard, but that came fast and thunderous in her dreams.
Please not tonight, she thought, more firmly. "Goddamit," she whispered, finding the little bottle of pills in her drawer empty. She had gotten them a month after… it… happened. After four weeks with no sleep, four weeks through which she would lie awake, haunted and tortured by his ghosts and her guilt and her what-ifs. By the thousands of contingencies, the moments in which she could have done something to send history on a different path. They kept her awake, thoughts and chest racing, sometimes until the cold dawn light rammed through the shades, the grey of another day taunting her.
So she got the pills, and she swallowed them, so tired that she could hardly work, parent, live. They brought rest, but the rest brought the nightmares. The blood and the noise and the chaos and the terror that she hoped so desperately that he didn't have the time to feel…
They stayed for months. Once, she screamed and woke up Grace, who woke up Zach, and she was so ashamed that she couldn't look at them the next day. She didn't know whether they had kept quiet about it, or whether they had told Peter who was too bitter to bring it up.
Over time, the nightmares tapered, and mostly stopped. But she knew when his ghosts came during the evening, that she should expect the nightmares later, too.
When she spent too much time with Finn, she noticed, the ghosts and the nightmares came back. But she couldn't stop, because getting close to Finn made her feel close to… him… because he had had his blood on his hands, he had held him, had held the last of him. And she thought that at some point, Finn would remember something more about that day, surely he would, remember something about a phonecall Will stepped out to make, something that he said about it? If (or when, she had to believe) he did remember, Alicia wanted to be there to hear it. So she gambled, betting on the hope of some closure with the cost of the ghosts. The ghosts and the nightmares.
The ghosts and the nightmares trapped her and they robbed her of her joy and the happiness of her memories.
When she was alone at night, and needed some release, that was when she could see him, when she could feel, hear and taste him. She had her best access to him in her bed, with the door locked and the covers on top of her, with her hands and her mind wandering, her touch imitating his.
But when she let her thoughts run where they wanted – to Presidential Suites, to midday hotel rendezvouses, to the taste of his mouth – she would pay for it later, pay penance for her pleasure with the ravaged pain once she was asleep.
Tonight she felt powerless before the ghosts and the nightmares. Screw it, she thought, emptying her glass and crawling into bed. She reached for her phone, turned out the lights, and pressed a familiar sequence of buttons that she knew she would regret. She swallowed, hard, pulse racing as she waited for the voice at the other end.
"Alicia…" he said, and pain stabbed into her chest. "Ho- hold on your honor. I'll call you back."
As the dark washed over her, she pressed play over and over until hot tears rolled down her cheeks. With her silent sobs she implored: please not tonight, though she knew it was futile. The wine made her aching limbs heavy, and her eyes fell shut as she lay in wait for the ghosts. For the ghosts of him.