"Rachel is not my biological daughter. My wife, Alicia, gave birth to her three years before I met her, that is true". She remembers how it felt to read those words in the Chicago Tribune like it was yesterday. That's what this campaign has been about her from the moment she read them, in her dorm at college, the destruction of everything she thought was true about her life to that point.
Now, standing at the party to celebrate the culmination of all of it, she realises that she doesn't like it here. She rarely does these days, not when Peter's around – especially when he's feeling oh so victorious. Rachel would never admit it to her mother, it would break her heart to hear it, but she's still a little – okay, more than a little – bitter. She's angry that Peter ever thought it was okay to cheat. She's pissed that he hurt her mother. She's bitter because, somehow, she was the one who was tossed under the bus in the process of saving his reputation and has had to suffer all manner of humiliation as a consequence. Most of all, she thinks, she might be angry with her mother for taking him back. Alicia Florrick (nee Cavanaugh), she supposed, would always be the good wife, the one who stayed, the perfect one.
Perhaps the worst of it is that she knows something, something that could make this whole thing even worse. Rachel knows that Amber Madison wasn't the first or even the only woman Peter has slept with outside the bounds of his marriage. She knows that he slept with Kalinda while she worked in the State's Attorney's office. There's a part of her that doesn't want to tell her mom. She's seemed so happy of late. Kalinda is the first friend she's seen her mother have who doesn't appear to have some kind of secret ulterior motive for their friendship. Or, at least, she didn't seem to.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her mother storm off, out of the apartment and briefly she wonders what could be going on. Peter re-enters the room with that winners' smile of his – the one that, when graced with it, can make you feel like the only person in the room. Rachel knows that smile, she sees through it. She tries to think it all through. There are any number of reasons why her mother could storm off out of the room like that. there are any number of reasons why her mother could storm off out of the room like that. Something could have gone wrong with a case or Peter could have simply said something stupid. Maybe it's something small and the stress entailed in a campaign has hit fever pitch in her head – it wouldn't be the first time. Rachel doesn't have time to think it all through though as she's approached by Eli Gold.
She likes Eli. He's so see-through in his intentions, it actually makes her life easier. She's sick of having to figure out what everyone wants from her. It isn't so bad at Georgetown. Outside of Chicago, Peter's not exactly known for much other than the scandal. Even those who are aware of him know that he doesn't have much to give. But she's the daughter of Saint Alicia and, for some reason, that carries more weight and meaning than you'd expect. It's there, whirring in the brains of just about everyone she talks to, it's in their eyes, barely disguised in the recesses of their brains. They want to know someone linked to somebody somewhat famous. It's difficult not to care. Eli, on the other hand, well he might be the only person who's ever bothered to be straight with her when it comes to Peter – or anything. Even her mother is cagey these days.
Rachel is broken from her internal reverie as Eli asks where Alicia went. Rachel shrugs, it's hardly her job to know her mother's every movement. Even if she did know, she's not sure she'd tell him. She watches, almost wistfully, as Peter hugs Zach and Grace – his biological children – for what feels like the billionth time tonight. Never has the difference between Rachel and her siblings been more on show or keenly felt than right now. "Think you could bring yourself to take just one photo with Peter?" Eli asks and all she can do is shake her head and smirk. After everything that's happened, they still need her.
"You know what Eli? I don't think I will," she sighs, breathing deep "The campaign's over. I'm not going to be Peter's pawn anymore. I just won't. I know it would make it a hell of a lot easier for you but, until the next campaign, I'm not going to do it. Even then, I'm not sure I will. I won't be the one you two trot out just because the candidate wants to look good. I won't be the one who smiles and waves and acts like everything's okay, because it's not. I can't bring myself to do that any longer. I can't just hold my tongue, not tonight anyway." As soon as she says it, Rachel feels free. She could leave – even if it's just for a few hours. It's like a weight has been lifted off her chest and she can breathe. How long has she felt like this? How long has that weight been there? Too long. There isn't much left keeping her at this damn party. Her mother left and she was only staying to save face for her. She's been getting the distinct impression all night that Peter only wants her here for the optics of it anyway. Eli might try and put a nice façade on it, but she knows, she knows what this is really about. No one would blame her for leaving. Everyone knows this campaign has been hardest on her. "Look Eli, I'm just going to go," she says, allowing a hint of resignation to seep into her tones, before turning around and leaving through the open door. She doesn't even bother to listen out for Eli's vehement protests.
It's only once she'd outside and the noise of the party is only an echo heard through thin walls that she realises she has nowhere to go. Everyone she'd normally go to is either in that party or in another city. Once, she'd have gone to see Kalinda. Right now, she's too pissed off for that. No, she needs somewhere else, somewhere she can think of something else for a while. She knows that there's another option but it's wild and insane and probably worth a shot.
XTGWX
Lockhart Gardner's offices are weird this late at night. It's around eleven and almost everyone has left for the day. She's never been her this late before. Everything is quiet. She's used to a continuous hum – the buzzing of computers and the click clack of high heels; the thwap of files landing on desks and the tapping of keys on keyboards. She likes those sounds, the hive of activity. Normally, when she's here, she's filing or highlighting for someone – usually her mother. Diane was kind enough to give her an office job when she asked. At the time, Peter was in prison and the family needed extra funds around the house. Chicago isn't exactly a cheap place to live. When she came back on breaks from college, the job is always there for her to pick up. Diane doesn't exactly have a soft spot for Alicia, so Rachel has always just assumed that the teacher she put down as a reference gave her one heck of a good recommendation. So now, when she's in Chicago, she takes the train to the heart of the city and gets to work.
She's losing her nerve now, wondering if he's even still here. The lights are on so someone is. It's entirely possible that he's left, gone on a date with Tammy (was that her name? Rachel can't remember). It's odd, knowing exactly who her father is, that he works just down the hall from her, that he is both her boss and her mother's.
She didn't even know about all this when she started working there. Peter had come along when she was three – before she can remember – and because she remembered him always being there, she'd just assumed that he was her father. It wasn't as if there was any evidence to the contrary. It wasn't until Peter made his little ploy to make her mother seem less saint-like in order to make himself look better after the whole Amber Madison thing that she even discovered he wasn't her father. There wasn't even enough time for her to ask questions. The article had come as a shock to both women. Now that she's looking back on those few moments, the argument with her mother, the screaming tantrum she'd forced Peter to listen to, she wonders how it wasn't figured out earlier. How was it that some intrepid reporter never dug up her birth certificate and discovered no father was listed? Maybe they had. Maybe a roadblock had been put in the way of publication. Maybe the journalist was sympathetic and buried the story. Maybe their editor didn't want to make an enemy of the State's Attorney. Maybe's she's just lucky that she looks almost exactly like her mother.
It had been her grandmother, Grandma Veronica, who had told her who her father was. Alicia had only mentioned that it wasn't Peter. Rachel finds herself thankful for that drunken little slip. She wonders if she ever would have known otherwise. She's never been annoyed at her mother in the weeks that have passed. She knows Alicia was just trying to protect her and it's a horrid secret to have to keep for twenty years.
Is it even worth it? Is it even worth telling Will? Does he even want a daughter? She's twenty now, an adult. Does she even need some new father figure? Maybe she should just leave it. And that's what she does, she leaves it – like so many other things in her life. She doesn't have the heart to leave the building though. She sits at the makeshift desk set up in her mother's office and starts reading through the files, highlighting what she needs to and putting post-it notes in the right spaces. It'd be tedious work were it not for the fact that the reading is as interesting as it is.
XTGWX
There's a hand gently shaking her shoulder, trying to wake her, uttering her name. How did she fall asleep? She blinks a few times, trying to get her bearings as she brushes sleep from her eyes. "Rachel?" the voice say, and she turns around slightly. There he is, the man who is – as it turns out – her biological father: Will Gardner. "Hey, your mom's worried about you, wondering where you are," he says in hushed tones. Rachel takes a minute, bewildered as he starts talking into his cell phone. She runs her hand through her hair, hearing him say "Yeah, she's here." There's a moment where she wonders whether he knows but she ignores it, suddenly beginning to question a bunch of other things like whether she has pen on her face.
What time is it? She looks down at the delicate watch she got as a sixteenth birthday present, 1AM. Great, by the time she gets down to the train station, she'll have missed the last train home. Damn it! She wonders why she never heard her phone ring but then she realises that she couldn't have heard her phone. She left the damn thing – along with everything else – at the apartment. She could use the office phone to call a cab except for the fact that it'd be pointless because she has no cash. She's just starting to remember that she walked here. She could walk back, it's not too far.
"I-I have to go," she stammers, standing up from the chair and quickly closing the file she fell asleep on. She starts marching towards the elevator. Why is she being so quick about it? What is she trying to escape? She has a perfect moment to explain everything and she's wasting it!
"Rachel!" she hears him call after her and she whips her head round, creating a fan of dark brown hair she's so quick, "Why don't I drop you off? It's cold out and I'm pretty sure your mom would kill me if I let you walk home in heels at this time of night."
She wants to refuse. She wants to act independent – like the kind of person who can legally vote and is attending one of the country's most prestigious colleges, but he's right. She glances down at her feet. It's Chicago and past midnight on a Friday night. Any number of bad things could happen. Taking the ride is the sensible option. Before she even knows what she's doing, she nods.
XTGWX
The car ride back to the apartment is awkward, more awkward than she'd like. Silence is only punctuated by Rachel's voice, telling him when to turn about 500 metres before he needs to do so. Soon enough, they're there, outside the apartment she barely knows but still calls home. She's not sure how long her mother and siblings will stay there. Peter wants to find a house in Highland Park, like they used to have. If he ever gets his way, they'll all move back into the place they used to have. How on earth they'll afford it, she doesn't know. He'll probably want her mother to stop working soon too. He wants everything to go back to the way it was before, before Amber Madison, before prison, before Rachel found out the truth.
There's a moment where she can't seem to figure out how to open the door. "You alright?" Will asks and she smiles weakly. She has to think: Is she okay?
She shakes her head. "It's nothing, really," she says, and she automatically thinks of the obvious lie she's just told. "I just –" she pauses. What is she going to say? 'I just think you should know that you're my biological father'? Yeah, that'll go down well. So, she goes with a half-truth instead. "I just really don't feel like dealing with. . ." she trails off, unsure what to call Peter. For years, he's been 'Dad', it would be strange to call him anything but. At the same time, she doesn't actually want to call him 'Dad' because he isn't her father. A father wouldn't have thrown her under the bus the way he did, he certainly wouldn't have tossed her for the wolfish reporters to feed on.
"Peter?" he says, and it's like he's read her mind. She supposes it's obvious, given what's happened.
"Ugh. . . I'll be fine. Thank you for, you know, this." It sounds so awkward and she really wants to tell the truth. She wants to tell him that she came to the office tonight to tell him the truth, but she lost her nerve almost as quickly as it came to her. She wants to tell him how much she's come to hate Peter. She wants to tell him about her grades and that she's attending Georgetown, just like he did, just like her mom did. She wants to tell him that she got a full ride, that she's pre-law. She wants to have the kind of conversations you have with a father, but she can't seem to get up the nerve to tell him that that's what he is. She smiles softly as she clambers out of the front passenger seat of the car and onto the pavement. She waves before she turns to enter the apartment and she notes that he cares about her – or maybe he cares about her mother – enough to make sure that he stays until she's safely in the building.
When she arrives back at the apartment, she notes that the party is over. The place is surprisingly Peter-less and only her mother remains, sitting on the couch – clearly Zach and Grace have headed off to bed. Alicia only stays sitting for a few moments before she stands up and hugs her, patting down, checking for cuts and bruises or some sign of harm. "I'm fine Mom," Rachel says by way of reassurance, hoping that it'll work.
She knows why this is. Once, when she was eight, Peter was meant to be watching her while they were at the mall – Zach and Grace had been running riot through the food court and Rachel, needing to find some semblance of quiet, had wandered off into a nearby bookstore. He didn't notice for an hour. Mall security were called, police were called and when they found her, huddled over the new Harry Potter book, she was severely yelled at by Peter. Alicia, after finding out, had been overprotective of her eldest daughter ever since.
"Rachel Elizabeth Cavanaugh, where the hell have you been?" her mom asks, her face contorts through a few emotions – anger, pain, and joy, there may be more – in a few seconds. She doesn't know when her mother started referring to her as a Cavanaugh. She's been a Florrick for so long that it's odd to the ears, and yet something about it seems right.
She thinks. How does she answer that? "I-I – Will dropped me home," she blurts out for no real reason. She's pretty certain that her mother knows where she was, it's the why that matters. She could have said that she couldn't stand being at Peter's victory party, that she'd gone to the office, that work had seemed a heck of a lot more tolerable than photos with the candidate and politely schmoozing with politicos who all thought Peter was the perfect candidate now that the scandal had blown over.
"Oh, did you –"
She doesn't let her mother finish, shaking her head. "I wanted to, but I couldn't. I just –" she stops. "Would you want me to?" Her mother's face is blank. "I just. . . you guys are good friends right now, and he gave you a job. You – you seem happy for the first time in forever and I. . . I don't want to ruin that for you," Rachel explains, and she realises that her mother is blinking back tears. "Mom, please don't cry," she begs. This isn't what she wanted. She really didn't want to make her cry.
"When did you turn into me?" Alicia finally asks, chuckling tearfully.
Rachel laughs lightly, replying with "Grandma says it was right around the day I was born."
"God, don't call her Grandma, she's still trying to convince everyone that she's under forty," her mother responds with a laugh and it's infectious. Soon, the two of them are laughing as though there's no argument to be had. Rachel knows that it'll change in the morning but, for now, she still has things she still has things to get off her chest.
"I want to tell him Mom. We were sat in his car and I wanted to tell him everything. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I wanted to tell him the moment I got to Lockhart Gardner tonight and each time I got an opportunity, I just kept losing my nerve and. . ." she trails off, swiping at the tears that have sprung to her eyes. "I should go to bed," she says. She's unsure as to whether it's because she fears that she's divulged too much or whether it's because she's genuinely tired. It's probably a mix of both, she thinks as she wanders off to her room.