Chapter Seventeen: Some building, some breaking.

A/N: If you're still reading/following this story, thank you so much for indulging me :) Hope you enjoy this chapter. XOXO

"Tolliver," she answers.

"Mom?"

"...Roman?"

"Hi, yeah. It's me."

"I — um — hi. This is a surprise." Nadine settles back into the couch and curls her legs under her. Her contact with her son has been sparse, but it has been there, and that's more than she can say about the decade that came before it. Ever since Myanmar she calls him about once every few months or less, and about seventy percent of the time he does either pick up or call her back. But this — this is maybe only the second time he's called her first.

The first time had been after that the dirty bomb had gone off in DC. The news had just broken where Roman was, and when he'd called he'd sounded scared. At least she'd managed to hold her tongue that time when he'd said, "I was worried."

That had been the night she'd permitted Matt to crash on her couch and snoop through her things. She would've offered him Roman's old room, except that all of Roman's things — the bed, the old furnishings — had been put in storage. She'd turned the space into a home office years ago. She'd retreated to her bedroom, shut the door, and managed to have a pleasant conversation with her son, the whole time wondering whether Matt was eavesdropping on her from the living room. She'd decided afterward that she ought to have more calls with her son that weren't precipitated by dangerous events occurring in her vicinity.

It turned out to be harder than it sounded.

"Is everything okay?" she asks Roman now, because she called him already this month. For him to be reaching out after so short a time is just plain odd.

"Of course. I just wanted to check in," he says, but he does sound a bit… not like himself. "How are you?"

"I'm well," she says carefully. "Work is work."

"Good, that's good." He sounds distracted.

"Roman, are you sure you're alright?"

There's a slight pause. She can't even begin to figure out whether or not to worry, so she forces herself to wait for him to speak first. "So actually, ah, Shindy's father passed away last night. He had a heart attack."

Nadine's heart sinks. "Oh. Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that," she says, and means it. "Give Shindy my sympathies." Shindy's mother, Nadine remembers, had died many years ago. Her father had been her only remaining family in the whole world.

"Thanks, mom. I will."

"Do you… does she need anything? Is there anything I can do?"

"No, there isn't. But thank you for offering... I'll tell her you're thinking about her. The funeral is later this afternoon. I just wanted… I just wanted to hear your voice. That's all."

It's scared him, Nadine realizes. These situations had a way of putting one's mortality into perspective. And that of one's family. "I see," she says quietly.

He's silent on the other end, and the pause goes on for so long that she begins to wonder if the signal has cut out. But then he speaks life back into it, his voice crackling through the line, and he says something that surprises her. "I know I haven't been the best at returning your calls all the time. But I did mean it when I said I wanted to try."

"I know. Life gets in the way sometimes; I know that better than anyone."

"I'll try to be better about it," he insists. "I don't want…" his voice crackles out.

"Roman?"

"...too late."

"The line cut out. What did you say?"

"I said, I don't want to put this off for so long that it becomes too late," he says. Between the lines, she understands that he's saying, I don't want you to drop dead of a heart attack and the last thing I ever said to you be, 'Unfortunately for you, you can't disown me twice'. Because that's what he'd said to her the last time they talked. She doesn't want that to be the last word between them, either.

Infinitely worse would be if he dropped dead of some freak accident first. She can't even let herself go there. The thought of outliving her only son is enough to make her physically nauseous.

"I won't let that happen," she promises, as much to herself as to him. "But it's trial and error. We're not going to get it perfect the first time around."

"You're right. I will try harder, though," he says again.

"I appreciate that."

There's a small lull before Roman starts talking again. "You know, back when you—" he clears his throat. "Back when you worked for that guy. Marsh."

"Yes?"

"That was… that was kind of a terrible scare. Hearing that his plane had crashed. That no one on it had survived."

Oh.

Nadine herself thought about this often, especially in the year following Vincent's death, and never realized that her son might have thought it, too. She could have been on that plane, easily. She remembers feeling put-out that Vincent had cancelled their weekend plans to fly down to the ranch. If she had pushed — and it wouldn't have even taken much — he would've taken her with him. It would have been so easy.

She used to do that a lot in general — pressure Vincent into taking her places. Vincent, in turn, used to guilt-trip her for trying to hijack so much of his time and attention. But then he submitted to her demands, and she submitted to his, and on and on the cycle went. They manipulated each other to pieces and called it love.

But Roman doesn't know about any of that. And he doesn't know just how close she'd come to being fish food at the bottom of the Atlantic and it's just as well. Children don't get to know all their parents' mistakes, and Roman has certainly already suffered enough from hers as it stands.

"I wanted to call, but I thought that you might have been on that plane. And if I called and you didn't pick up…" Roman trails off. He had been afraid.

Her voice is soft when she says, "So you just didn't."

At the time, she'd been so sick with grief and guilt and a whole host of other things that she'd barely even had the headspace to wonder why Roman didn't care enough to check on her, estrangement or no.

"I'd talked to Aunt Cecilia. She'd told me you were okay, but I know I should have called you instead. So I'm sorry for that."

"Nothing to be sorry for," she says, because it's the only thing to say. They're mending fences now and that's what matters. In an attempt to switch the subject, she tells him, "You know Celia used to keep tabs on you for me. All those years… you wouldn't take my calls, but sometimes you'd take hers."

"Yeah, well, she was never quite as judgmental as you could be."

Nadine can't help but laugh. "You're right." She thinks of all the times she'd confided in her sister — about Roman, his father, her often ill-conceived love life, her work, anything. Cecilia was frequently kinder than Nadine probably deserved. "She's always been good about that."

There's a muffled noise in the background, and Roman says, "Mom, I gotta go. Shindy's awake, I think."

"Of course. Take care of her today, alright?"

"I will, Mom. Talk soon."

"What do you want, Mike?"

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Nadine appraises him for a moment, then opens her door wider. She steps aside in silent invitation and Mike steps over the threshold, moving into the kitchen as she shuts the door. She knows this had to happen sooner or later; she just isn't sure where she's going to find the energy for it.

She hasn't seen hide nor tail of this man for nearly a week; ever since their little spat in her office, he's been avoiding her like the plague. It's just as well. She suspects he needed the time to screw up the courage; she needed the time to lick her wounds in peace.

By now, it's been long enough that she no longer feels hotly furious when she thinks of his outburst. But she has resigned herself into accepting that he'd meant it. Perhaps not the anger, but he'd certainly meant the words, and it's too late for him to take them back.

You should be used to playing the mistress.

What hurts and disappoints her most is the knowledge that, even after all this time, he doesn't think very highly of her, not really. He couldn't, not if he could say something like that to her face.

"I'm sorry," he says again.

"For what?"

"I'm sorry for what I said to you. It was a nasty thing to say, and you didn't deserve it. I didn't mean—"

"Yes you did," she says quietly. "You meant it."

He closes his mouth. Opens it again. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he tries instead. And that's the truth of it, she knows. They never mean to hurt each other, but they always do.

"That's the only thing we've ever been good at," she tells him. "Hurting one another."

He shakes his head. "No, that's not fair."

"A lot of things that aren't fair are still true. What you said to me? It wasn't fair. But it was true."

"No. I shouldn't have said—"

"And the thing is, you like to hit me there because you know it'll land. Don't deny it," she says over him when he tries to protest it. "But I've made my mistakes and I've paid for them, Mike. I've paid over and over again, so you don't get to use my choices against me anymore. You don't get to pass judgment. You don't have the right."

"I don't," he murmurs. "I know that. I… I can be an asshole sometimes."

"Yeah."

She'd dared to think, at one point, that they could get it right this time around — or at least get it different — but it's all just been more of the same. There's too much bad blood between them. It doesn't scrub clean.

"I do care about you, you know," he tries. "Maybe it… it doesn't always show, but I do. I always have."

"I know," she says softly. "I care about you, too." She suspects that some part of her will always care about Mike, despite everything.

She clears her throat. "You know... you'd told me once, a long time ago, that you thought… you thought you were falling in love with me. Do you remember that?"

"Of course I do. You shut me down."

"Yeah. I was trying to protect your career." She could laugh at the irony.

Mike does. "That's new. Remind me again — how did that work out?"

She tilts her head. "Well, I lost you your job, and then you ended up divorcing your wife anyway, and then your entire career trajectory swung wildly off-course… and then you landed right back in Washington."

"And right back in your bed," he adds.

"Yeah, well, we didn't learn our lesson the first time around."

"Seems like it would've all been a whole lot easier if you had just loved me back in the first place."

"I highly doubt that," she says dryly.

"It would've hurt me less."

"I'd always thought your feelings were more a result of the state of your marriage than anything actually having to do with me," she admits.

"They had everything to do with you."

"And then this time around, I assumed this whole exercise was just about you getting back something that you used to have."

"It wasn't."

"Yeah. I get that now."

"Is that what it was for you?"

"No," she says. "I thought it would be different, but it wasn't, really. I wish it had been." Her mouth twists into a rueful smile. "But we've never been very good at showing each other that we care."

He inclines his head in agreement. "Nadine," he begins carefully, "you know that I have always..." He trails off, seeming to lose his nerve.

"...Always what?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

And then the silence stretches out between them, filling up with all of the words they'll never say to each other.

When Mike finally speaks up again, his next words are regretful. "It was never going to work between us, was it?"

She thinks she saw this coming since the morning after election night, when he'd caressed her face and asked in so many words if she wanted to give them another shot. At the time, she'd known it wasn't a good idea, but eventually she'd given into him anyway because she has never been great at listening to herself.

"No," she murmurs. "It probably wasn't."

He nods, and the muscles around his mouth tighten. "I should go." He lets her walk him back to the front door, and as she holds it open, he turns to face her. He looks at her for a long time. "Take care of yourself, alright?" he says finally.

"You too, Mike."