Chapter 12: The Window, Part II


Before that night–and her life would forever be divided up into before and after that night–Laura had had a gift with children, a natural ease that had served her well: as the oldest of three daughters, as the best babysitter on the block, as the most popular teacher at Apollo Elementary.

Now, her smile stretching painfully across her face and her bright tone shrill even to her own ears, Laura felt like an actress who hadn't studied her lines: she could hear her cue, but she couldn't for the life of her remember what she was supposed to say.

They were there, in her living room, as promised, fixing the godsdamn window: Zak, a chubby dark-haired toddler, rifling through his father's toolbox, cheerfully making the whole process harder; Lee, an insistent little boy with wavy blonde hair and a thousand questions; Bill, irritable, taciturn, and, from what Laura could tell, doing all of the actual work.

"Who's the murderer in this one?" Lee asked, picking up yet another book off her desk.

Bill straightened up from the window pane. "Don't bother Ms. Roslin," he grunted.

They'd been there for barely half an hour, but Laura had been holding back tears since before they even stepped foot in the door, when she'd watched the three of them cross the driveway, two little hands grasped in Bill's big ones. Then Lee had proudly told her that his brother was four but he was six…and Laura had had to mumble something about coffee and flee to the kitchen, the inescapable calculation making her throat ache. Her baby would be six now.

Zak was camped out on the floor, his chubby fists clutching a hammer, his big brown eyes fixed adoringly on his father. That hurt. But it was Lee and his constant questions that stabbed at her heart: would her child be so talkative, she wondered? Would her son be that tall? Lee had his father's keen blue eyes–would her daughter have inherited her green ones?

Her smile felt like a grimace. "Please," she said. "Call me Laura."

(That sounded like something an adult would say to a child, didn't it?)

Lee was undeterred. "Who's the murderer in this one, Laura?"

Would her child be so curious about her work, she wondered? Except…she'd only written her first book after the accident, in those first months when days and nights and weeks had blurred together into one shadowy, pain-riddled fever dream, when creating her own world on paper, if only for a few hours, had been like clawing her way out of her own grave. If her baby had survived, would she have ever written a word?

"The butler," she managed through a dry throat.

"How?" Lee prompted.

"Poison," she heard herself answer.

"What's poison?" Zak asked.

"A bad idea," Bill replied, a warning in his eyes that might have been meant for Lee but felt like it was for her, instead.

Lee ignored him, holding up her third novel, Blood at the Black Market. "Did you like this one, Dad?"

Bill, bent over his toolbox, mumbled something unintelligible.

"Dad read all your books," Lee informed her.

Bill straightened under her curious gaze, a faint flush spreading across his pitted cheeks. "I like mysteries."

Laura took a sip of coffee, ignoring the flutter in her chest. It didn't matter if Bill liked her books, she reminded herself; he didn't like her, and thank the gods for it. She couldn't have withstood any kind of a relationship with him, couldn't possibly have survived family dinners and weekend picnics and little hands pulling at hers.

"I don't," she said at last. "I like knowing the answer."

They didn't speak again.


Late afternoon sun was slanting through the shiny new window when Zak hugged her goodbye on the porch, Laura hoping that her trembling–from too many cups of coffee, from too many peripheral flashes of a child that wasn't, of a life that hadn't–wasn't as obvious to him as it felt to her.

"Thank you again," she said, carefully extracting herself from Zak's chubby arms.

Bill nodded. "It was the least we could do."

In another life, Laura knew, she would have thanked him again; would have smiled at the boys, would have told them how impressed she was with their work. Maybe she would have invited them over for dinner, as a thank you; maybe Bill would have reciprocated; maybe, after the boys had been put to bed, they'd have cracked open a bottle of wine, and she'd have let Bill Adama tell her all about mysteries.

In this life, she nodded, and then she turned away, the door barely closing behind them before she was crumpling against it, her hand pressed to her mouth, her tears unseen by an empty house.