"You know that I could stay longer. If you feel like you need it." Edith says, rolling up a pair of stockings and pressing them in between two folded dresses in the trunk.

Katherine finds that there's something quite enjoyable about being able to help Edith pack for school in way that she didn't get to do last time. Still, she sits with her back to the wall that Jack painted with hopeful green trees, leaning against it, hoping that if she can't see it then it isn't there at all.

"Thank you, Edith." She smiles, folding a skirt. "I'm so grateful for everything you've done, I don't know how we'd have got through without you. But I can walk about perfectly well on my own now and you do need to go back to school."

"I know." Edith groans, flopping back on the bed, the old mattress creaking ominously. "I'd just rather stay here."

"You can come and visit again at Easter, if you'd like."

"Really?" She sits back up, eyes wide.

"I know that this hasn't exactly been a… fun Christmas holiday." Katherine doesn't look her sister in the eyes as she says it, but she doesn't mean it any less for focusing on the shift she's folding. "But you're always welcome with Jack and I."

Edith gets up off the bed and comes to sit down next to Katherine. And then she does something that she hasn't done in a whole year. She hugs her. It's quick and embarrassed, but it's there. And then they go back to packing up the trunk like it never happened.

Jack gets home from work, they have dinner, they sit in the living room and read. Edith stretches out on the sofa with her book, feeling deliciously illicit in the fact that, unlike at home or at school, she's allowed to put her feet up on the furniture. Jack and Katherine sit in the armchair, Katherine quietly reading to him as she tucks herself into his chest. They're working their way through the collected works of H.G. Wells. It's become routine, this, over the past couple of weeks, the three of them. Edith knows that this quiet companionship is what she will miss the most.

Around ten pm, Katherine falls asleep on Jack, the book slipping from her fingers and falling with a thud to the floor. She's much better, but tires more easily now. One of Jack's arms is already around her shoulders, but he slides the other under her legs and carries her to bed. He's gone so long that Edith almost doesn't think he's going to come back and say goodnight. But then he walks back into the room and collapses back into the armchair, running a tired hand over his face.

"Is she still asleep?"

"Yeah." Jack sighs. "That corset's a damn nightmare to get off though, but she complains it's sore to sleep in."

"They are."

He stares into the fire a little while, then pulls her out of her book, asking: "D'you get an allowance, Edie? Like Kath used to?"

"No." She closes the book slowly, puts it down. Edith can hear a voice in the back of her head, a voice that has a suspiciously Hungarian accent, that asks whether Jack wants to steal from her. She dismisses it. Jack isn't like other poor people. He's always nice to her. He's not poor anymore. "We only get those once we've finished school. Father says they are not necessary before then."

"This is for you then." Jack nods, producing an envelope from his pocket and leaning forward in his seat to pass it to her.

Slowly, Edith leans forward, takes it. "What is it?"

"'S enough money for the train back from your school to New York." Jack coughs, leaning back, looking into the fire so that he doesn't have to look at her. "So's you can get to us, 'f you needs to."

Jack isn't good at saying thank you. He's best at saying it to Katherine, occasionally to Medda. But in general, he's not good at saying it. That doesn't mean that he doesn't feel it. He just isn't good at saying it. Saying thank you means that you're in somebody's debt, that you owe them something. You don't want to be in somebody's debt when you're on the street. So, Jack isn't good at saying thank you. But he hopes that Edith hears it.

"I really like you being part of my family."

It's so utterly unexpected that Jack doesn't quite know what to say. Edith is lot like he used to be, in a strange sort of way; she doesn't often express emotion. He credits Katherine for drawing that out of him, for letting him know that it is, in fact, okay for him to not be okay all the time. But Edith still has all these walls up. And she just pulled a brick out of one of those walls and peeked through.

So, he nods. "I really like you bein' a part o' mine too."

"Your family is slightly more… eclectic than mine." Edith laughs a little.

"Eclectic?"

"Varied. There's a lot of different kinds of people."

"It ain't 'bout blood." Jack shrugs. His family isn't normal. He knows this. It doesn't make it any less of a family. It makes it the most important kind of family, because his and Katherine's family have held them up through all of this, through the loss of Lucy, in a way that the Pulitzers (other than Edith, of course) never did. "'S 'bout who you let be important."

They sit together in silence a little longer before, on some unspoken word, both getting up and heading off to bed. Jack thinks that everything's going as well as it can be, given that they lost their child just a few weeks ago. Katherine is doing better, he's repressing things, they're doing fine. And then they aren't.

He wakes in the middle of the night to find that Katherine isn't in the bed with him. Even though they start off their nights apart, now, Jack waiting neat on his side of the bed for Katherine to initiate contact, terrified of hurting her, of pushing too far, she always does. They always end up sleeping entwined together. But she isn't here, and he feels it like an ache. The bed is still warm, from where her body was. But she isn't there. His heart jumps into his throat, blood pounding in his ears as he gets up and rushes down the stairs. He tries, as he does so, to tell himself that everything is fine. She's just gone to the bathroom. Or she needed a drink of water. She definitely isn't collapsed somewhere, bleeding again. Definitely not. He goes down the stairs two at a time.

He huffs out a breath when he sees that the light is on in the living room, a glow that spills out from beneath the door; slows his steps, his breathing, his heart, then pushes the door open. Katherine is curled up in the armchair, reading a book.

"Hope you ain't readin' ahead wi'out me." He says, stepping inside.

Katherine whips round, then relaxes. Rolling her eyes, she reaches out her free hand to him, twining it through his and setting the book aside. "You scared the life out of me."

"C'mere."

Jack tries for a smile as he picks her up, but doesn't quite manage it. He could, of course, ask her to get up so that they can get into their normal position curled together in the armchair, or, even simpler, just sit on the sofa. But he just nearly had a heart attack trying to find her in their own bloody house, he wants his hands on her, wants her in his arms so that he can make sure she's there. And Katherine must be able to tell, because she just leans her head against his shoulder and lets him arrange them in the armchair.

She nuzzles her nose into the side of his neck and closes her eyes. Katherine doesn't notice when he picks up the book that she was reading – some sort of household guide - and flips it open to the page she had been on. It takes him a minute or so to pick up the thread of it, but his heart cracks a little as he sorts the shapes on the page into something like meaning.

Expectant mothers must be careful to avoid all activities which may cause stillbirth or other issues with the pregnancy, such as overreaching to hang a picture, taking a warm bath, riding a bicycle, sleeping with the arms above the head, having a tooth extracted, being excessively happy, running a sewing machine by foot, lacing a corset too tightly, washing clothes, bathing in the ocean...

Bloody hell, is there any aspect of daily life that won't cause miscarriage? Jack sighs. "Kath, darlin'."

Katherine blinks her eyes open, sees that he's read it, flushes. "I didn't -" she blinks again, this time fighting tears, swallows, "I know. I know what Dr. Graceton said, I just… maybe if I had stopped working-"

"It ain't your fault." Jack says, laying the book aside and bringing his hand up to stroke her face. "You's got to let her rest."

"I don't want to forget about her. I know I wished her away at the start, but I didn't mean it-"

"Kath, I know you didn't mean it. You was scared, 's normal. An' I ain't askin' you to forget." Jack laughs a little, though there's little humour in it. "Hell, I ain't never goin' to forget her. We jus'… we's gotta not torture ourselves over it no more."

And the worst of it is that Katherine knows that reading these household guides that tell her that, once pregnant, a woman is nothing more than a walking incubator isn't going to do her any good. They just make her feel like a failure. She had one job, they say, she just had to let a baby grow inside for a few months and then push it out. No big deal. Except she couldn't even get that right. Katherine wonders how long it will take Jack to realise how useless she is.

But she knows that Jack feels the same, as much as he's trying to be strong for her. So, she reaches out, strokes his face like he did hers.

"You've been having more nightmares lately. Don't pretend that you aren't torturing yourself over it."

"My nightmares won't never go away." Jack tells her, his face open, eyes open, never looking away. "But I don' hafta make the daytime a nightmare for myself as well."

"What are they about? The nightmares?"

She's never actually asked. All this time, the two of them breathing through the aftermath on their mattress, and she's never asked. She can guess, of course. There are enough scars on his back to tell her most of it. Jack talks in his sleep sometimes, too, mostly incoherent mumbling but sometimes cries of pain or defiance. She can put the pieces together, it's her job, after all. But she's his wife. It's her job to let him know that he can talk about it too.

"The Refuge, mostly. Losin' you. You gettin' hurt or somethin'." Jack shrugs, staring down at the lace of her nightgown rather than at her, chewing his lip. "'S stupid."

"You're right, it is stupid." Katherine says, taking his face in her hands once again, forcing him to look at her. "You're never going back to the Refuge. And you're certainly never losing me."

…

"Edith!"

It takes her name being called a second time for her to realise that it's not some other person called Edith being summoned, but her instead. She hasn't been expecting it, see, because Jack walked her to the station on his way to work and she's been sitting in the café just across the street waiting for her train to start boarding ever since. She wheels around, searching for the source of the noise, only to see Henry waving to her from the corner of the building. Edith sets her trunk down in front of the porter and tells him which train she'll be on, then hurries over.

"Henry? What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to see you." He smiles, pushing off the stone wall of the station. "'Fore you went back to school."

"Oh." He wanted to see her. That's… odd. "Well, here I am."

"Yeah." Henry shifts his weight, his shoulders a little hunched, then asks her a question, staring determinedly at the flakes of mud clinging to his boots. "CanIkissyou?"

Edith blinks. Surely he hasn't just said what she thinks he said. "I beg your pardon?"

"Jack says you's gotta ask first." He replies, crooked teeth digging into his bottom lip, finally meeting her eyes. His eyes are green, she realises, and startlingly so. She has always wanted to have green eyes.

"Of course not." She sniffs. "We are in public and not engaged."

"Oh."

They're in public. It's completely inappropriate. But he looks so heartbreakingly disappointed, like she's ripped his dreams out his arms and stomped them into the floor.

She casts a quick look around. They are tucked away in an alcove of the station wall. She nods at him. "Go on then."

It's nothing like Edith is expecting, honestly. She's absolutely certain that if anybody was watching them that it wouldn't look like when Jack kisses Katherine. When Jack kisses Katherine (which is really all that she has as a point of reference, at this juncture, because it's not exactly like her mother and father go in for any sort of public affection), it's all hands, like he can't get enough of her, like the press of his lips on hers is altogether too much and not enough and he has to wind his hands through her hair or wrap his arms around her waist to make sure she doesn't disappear. When Katherine kisses him back, she cradles his face or fists her hands in his shirt like she can't bear to live without him. There's none of that here.

Henry doesn't touch her, not at all, just stoops down and brushes his lips across hers, nothing more than a peck. Edith wonders whether she ought to grab ahold of him like Katherine does with Jack, whether boys like that sort of thing. She decides against it. Too forward. And then it's done, just like that, and she feels a little bit underwhelmed, if she's being frank. She blinks, heat rising in her cheeks, Henry shifting from one foot to another in front of her.

"I could, um, write to you?" She offers. It doesn't feel quite right, somehow, just to get on her train and leave straightaway.

"I can't write. My readin' ain't too good, neither." Henry grimaces. When he looks up at her, there's resignation in his eyes. "I ain't a fool, Edith. I know this ain't what you want. There ain't many people like Kath an' Jack, who can make somethin' like this work."

She doesn't want it to be true, but it is. What was it that she had said to Katherine? Comfort over freedom? She had been right. As much as she adores the loving warmth of the Kelly house, she would prefer to live somewhere where the warmth is always guaranteed to come out of the radiators, rather than it being a guessing game as to the plumbing working or whether they have enough money to pay for it.

"They are rather special, aren't they?"

"Yeah. But, we'll be friends, right? When you comes to visit again?" He looks so terribly hopeful. Edith knows that it will be different when she comes back at Easter. Henry will probably have found some other girl to walk about with and kiss and explain the rules of baseball to. They won't be the same. She pretends anyway.

"I would like that."

"Okay. You travel safe, yeah?" He tips his cap to her. She nods.

"I will. Goodbye, Henry."