A/N: Myka's horrible - and not-so-horrible - day continues. Some strong language and a flashback that has sexual content.
It had happened at a playground. Jemma liked to take Christina to parks for some unstructured play time - "I keep a sharp eye on her, mind you," she had told Myka and then, looking down and away, the fair complexion mottling, she had amended, "that is, I did until today." She didn't believe that Christina's "fancy dancy" preschool was hospitable to a point of view holding that she could learn the same social skills and good behaviors from romping on playground equipment with children who hadn't been previously vetted for her as she could from structured activities and playmates about whom everything was known, from their food allergies to their parents' annual incomes. Christina took to it like a duck to water, Jemma had averred, displaying a gift for gab and for instantly making friends that her grandfather would have delighted in - and tried to profit from, she had added sardonically. This morning had been no different, with Christina running from the swing set to the slide and back again with four or five other little boys and girls.
"Everything's so safe now," Jemma had said sadly, as if she were unsure the development was a wholly good one, "no sharp edges, no rusty metal, all the danger engineered away, or so they like you to think, but you know children, one moment they're hugging each other and the next, they're pulling each other's hair and giving out nasty pinches. A tussle broke out between Christina and one of the children at the top of the slide about who would get to go down first - she's sweet as sugar, but she can be a mite bossy - and he must've pushed her. I saw them arguing out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't think anything of it. It would blow over as quickly as it started. But the water fountain was put too close, and though it's not much of a drop, if you fall a certain way you can catch its base . . . ." She had glanced at the hospital bed; both Christina and Helena were asleep, Helena half-sitting in her chair, half-sprawled on the bed, an arm draped across her daughter's middle. "I thought for sure Helena would look murder at me and order me out of her sight, but she hasn't blamed me. In fact, she's hugged me more this one afternoon than she has her whole life."
"Everyone needs her mom at times, even Helena." Myka had wrapped her arm around Jemma's shoulders and given them a quick squeeze, although she wasn't much of a hugger herself. Her family hadn't been demonstrative, not when it came to affection. Her father, as yet another sign that he was no longer the Warren Bering she knew, would hug her of his own volition, which, when it didn't actually scare the hell of her (because he would swoop down on her from out of nowhere) tended to creep her out. As for her mother, she used lukewarm hugs and kisses, as well as lukewarm inquiries about Myka's job and friends, to passively express her resentment about the months that would pass between her daughter's visits.
"The big one and the little one over there, they need you, too. I'm glad you're here, Myka." Jemma's smile, combining impishness with affection, was one Myka frequently saw on Christina and, years ago, had basked in when Helena had turned it on her. Until now, she never would have thought to seek its origin in Jemma. "I think I'll take the opportunity to stretch my legs for a bit. You don't mind, do you?"
That had been almost an hour ago. It was going on six, and as her stomach cramped, Myka realized she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. Not of substance - she vaguely remembered sharing a bag of Gardetto's, or maybe it was Chex Mix, with Jemma earlier in the afternoon. She should go home and change, shower and change, she amended, and buy something for her and Helena and Jemma that could pass for dinner. Christina would be the recipient of a nutritionally balanced children's meal off the hospital's menu, which Myka thought deserved an off-menu, completely nutritionless dessert. She would add that to the list. Somewhere in there she would need to tell Pete that she had royally screwed up the insurance fraud investigation. She would need to tell Helena as well; if nothing else, it would take her mind off Christina for a little while. She smiled wryly at the thought.
"What's so amusing?" Helena asked quietly, pushing herself off the bed with care and then sinking bonelessly into the Mommy recliner, which had been dragged as close to the bed as she could get it. She was curled against the cushions as if she had drawn upon the last stores of her energy to shift the upper half of her body from bed to chair.
"Nothing." Myka pulled out her phone from the space between the cushion and arm of the visitor's chair she was in. Helena's Mommy recliner looked more comfortable; it was bigger, anyway. Catching a whiff of her own sweat, she prodded herself to go home. If she wouldn't do it for herself, she could spare Helena and Christina the odor. On the other hand, she could probably take a couple of hospital-issued Wet Wipes and wash her armpits in the bathroom. Gazing at Christina as she slept and then at Helena as she distractedly pushed her hair back from her face before doing the same, with a feather-light touch, for Christina, Myka knew she didn't want to go anywhere.
She looked at a string of texts from Sam and wearily scrubbed at her forehead. Tonight they were supposed to go out to dinner. He had said it was because he was tired of them eating each other's cold take-out. They would go to a nice place with linen tablecloths and an expensive wine list that suggested their meals might be actually be cooked instead of warmed in a microwave and dished into take-out containers. But Myka knew it was because of the crescents in his back marking where she had dug in her fingernails and the areas of irritated skin on his chest, which she had, not gently, worried between her teeth. They had convinced him that her ferocity in bed meant something about him, about the strength of her feelings for him. It did, to the extent that she had clutched at him all the harder, not from a wish that he were someone else, but from wishing that she were, someone who could get it right with him this time, someone who didn't ache to get it wrong all over again with someone like Helena Wells. His last text was asking her if they should meet at the restaurant or if she preferred him to play the gentleman and pick her up in half an hour.
"If you have somewhere you need to go, go," Helena said. "We'll be fine. The doctors said they think Christina can be released tomorrow, although I'm sure she'll be fighting the sling." She fondly looked down at her daughter, and when she looked back up, the fondness was still there. Myka checked an impulse to glance behind her. Jemma hadn't returned yet, the fondness was for her.
"Christina wants a sleepover. I'd hate to disappoint her," Myka said lightly, feeling, in the warmth of Helena's gaze, how natural it had been to let Helena fly into her arms and then, as Helena had clung to her, to start caressing that tensely arched back. Of the many things about their relationship that Myka had diligently put out of her mind over the past eight years was the satisfaction she had taken in being able to comfort her; it had been a rare occasion when Helena felt the need to lean on her. She had never wanted to appear as anything less than self-sufficient, a desire with which Myka was all too familiar, and at those odd moments when Helena would confess that she was overwhelmed and ask Myka to hold her, it was with the headiest mixture of love, possessiveness, and more than a little triumph that Myka did so. She had experienced the same rush of emotions when she had held Helena earlier, and Myka had had to ask herself as her hands automatically started drawing their old patterns on Helena's back if Helena hadn't known all those years ago exactly how and when to falter, understanding better than she did herself her desire to be the strong one.
"As you have a habit of telling me, she's four. She won't remember. And I can hardly abscond with her now, can I?" Helena drew her legs up into the chair and folded them to her chest. "Make no mistake, I want you to stay. But I'm trying, very hard I'll have you know, to play fair. I accept that the Neanderthal might take a dim view of you spending a Saturday night trying to jolly a child with a broken collarbone." Sometimes when Helena would draw up one or both of her knees, it was because she was relaxed; at other times, it was a defensive gesture, as if she thought making herself as small as possible would make her less of a target. Helena was tired, but she wasn't relaxed; she was wrapping her arms around her knees because she didn't want to hear about Sam.
For the sake of the investigation, for the sake of her job, Myka knew there were things she ought to have done hours ago, such as informing Pete that she had blown her and Helena's cover to Laura Jeffries. For the sake of her sanity, Myka knew that she ought to take the out Helena was offering her and tell her that she was leaving to meet Sam for dinner - and that she wouldn't be returning until tomorrow morning, about the time the doctors would be releasing Christina. To stay would be as good as admitting that there was no place she would rather be, no one she would rather be with. To stay would be as good as admitting that, despite Helena's taking shelter in her arms a few hours ago, she was the weak one.
One of the nurses entered, forestalling a response. He checked Christina's IV feed and the readings on the monitors clustered around the head of her bed, all of which were quietly clicking or blinking. Myka envisioned that, a century and more ago, a team of doctors would have stood in place of the monitors, going through their own clicking and blinking as they attempted, with their crude diagnostics, to determine how serious Christina's injuries were, whereas the nurse, a pudgy man in his 40s, said with a nonchalant confidence, "She's looking good, your little girl" to the both of them. Christina began to stir, whimpering, as the nurse left, and looked blearily at Myka. "You and Mommy have to get into 'jamas for our sleepover."
How else could she respond other than to say that she was going to leave right now to get their pajamas? Helena's smile was bright and she loosened the lock she had on her legs, allowing one to extend and point its foot, almost playfully, at Myka. She brushed aside Myka's idea of picking up something for dinner - they could order off the hospital menu for a fee - but she wasn't averse to her bringing back something sweet, cookies or cupcakes, anything really, so long as it wasn't Twizzlers. "We can talk about the Lynley event and DeWitt later," Helena added. "I haven't forgotten about it."
Myka jerked her head in something that could be taken for a nod but was more a reflexive gesture of her dismay that she couldn't go on not mentioning it. In the parking lot, she called Sam, making her voice more curt than necessary when he answered. He listened to her explanation, and she was embarrassed and defensive both that it didn't pretend to offer an apology or admit to disappointment. It was saying everything in its brevity and refusal to allow him an opening that she hadn't had the courage to say to him outright. He was silent after she finished and then he asked, "Did you even think to call Steve, to see if he would be willing to stay with her? As I recall, you both pull guard duty with her."
"This isn't a ruse, Sam. She's not going anywhere."
"You're not answering my question, so let me rephrase it. Are you willing to call him now?"
"It's unnecessary," she said flatly. She thought about telling him that she was the one with whom Christina had bonded, that having Steve show up in her hospital room was yet one more unexpected development in a day that had already turned out pretty crappy for a four-year-old, but they were just excuses, and he would know it.
"Okay," he said, his patience clearly strained. "Do you want me to try to change the reservation to tomorrow night or a night later next week?"
He was pushing her now. She didn't want to have the conversation that this was turning out to be over the phone, and she didn't want to have it standing in a parking lot. "You should cancel the reservation, but I don't want to go into this over the phone." It was a crummy kind of honesty, but its inadequacy fit in with everything else she had done today.
"We need to talk, Myka. Plan on me dropping by your place tomorrow so we can discuss just what the hell is going on." He ended the call, no longer Sam, her ex-husband and current bed partner, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Martino, and she had a good idea of what tomorrow's conversation would be about. Her loss of objectivity, her apparent vulnerability to Helena's emotional manipulation, and, if he were angry enough or sufficiently worried about the continued viability of their plan to ensnare Burdette, her loyalty to the agency. She wondered what would upset him the most, a confession that she had slept with Helena or the threat such a confession would pose to their capturing Burdette. That it remained a question, how much he cared, was possibly more disappointing than the answer itself. They had known each other for more than ten years, she and Sam, almost as long as she had known Pete, and yet nothing had changed between them. She could still be the junior agent, hoping that her on-again-off-again relationship with a driven attorney in Justice might develop into something, yet utterly clueless about what she needed to do to make that happen. Of course, when she had dropped by Helena Wells's studio one Saturday afternoon, she discovered exactly what it was she and Sam had been lacking.
He was sitting at her apartment door, looking down at his phone, his thumb lightly rubbing the keypad. He tilted his head up as she approached, and though she saw relief in his face, she also saw anger. "It's almost nine o'clock. I've been here since six, pounding on your door, calling your phone, trying to get hold of your super."
Nervously she ran her hand through her hair, smelling herself and Helena on her fingers. Great. "I've been out," she said, realizing how sullen she sounded. Then she stood up a little taller in her coat, in the stretched-out pullover that was even more stretched out because of the countless times she, or Helena, had been yanking it off, in her jeans which smelled of Helena, too, because Helena, sounding drugged or drunk, but from exhaustion not alcohol, had said she was going to mark her, "because you're mine now," and then proceeded to rub herself all over the denim, which had led to their yanking off her jeans, more than once. "We didn't have plans this weekend. You told me some of your college buddies were visiting."
"They went home. I thought you might want to pick up something to eat." Sam pushed himself off the grimy carpet. "You look like you've been on a binge."
Of fucking, yes. She didn't want to say it like that, of course, but she needed to say something, because what had happened between her and Helena over the past two days, it changed everything. It wasn't an exaggeration to say that nothing had looked the same to her when she had emerged from Helena's loft, the subway station, the train, the street she lived on, familiar but somehow foreign too, like she had last taken the subway, last been to her apartment years ago, having moved somewhere else, to someplace else, without even being aware of it. The only reality that counted, she recognized, was the one that she and Helena had created. She couldn't tell him all that either, but whatever she managed to say, however awkward it was, it shouldn't be said out here, as though he were nothing more than a man she had dated once or twice, an acquaintance who had developed an inconvenient crush on her.
But being inside didn't make it much easier. She turned on the lights, asked if he wanted a glass of water or a beer (though she wasn't sure she had any), while he didn't move away from the door, hands now jammed deep into his jeans' pockets. She knew it was turning weirder, their being together this way, standing so uncomfortably in her apartment, the discomfort the only thing they were sharing. So, swallowing with effort and leaning against the counter, her own hands jammed deep into her jeans' pockets, Myka said, "I've been with someone this weekend." As he simply looked at her, not responding, she wincingly added, so there could be no mistake, "I mean, sleeping with someone. That's where I've been."
"Um, is this the first time, or has this been going on for a while?"
She wasn't sure why he wanted to know. They hadn't been exclusive, which had been one of Sam's few ground rules, not because he had other women lined up, he had explained with a self-deprecating laugh, he just wasn't ready to be tied down. "We hadn't . . . I mean . . . it was the first time," she finished in rush.
He worked his shoulders, as if he were physically trying to shrug something off, before moving away from the door into the kitchen. He was steadily meeting her eyes, which made her all the more eager to look away. "I know I haven't been around much for you. I've let the job take over, and this weekend, how I handled it was stupid. I should've asked you if you wanted to meet them, they wanted to meet you."
He thought it was about him. For a few hours, after she and Helena walked to her loft, arms slung around each other's waists and tongues out trying to catch the snowflakes that were falling, a poor substitute, they had laughed, for what they really wanted their tongues to be doing, she had thought it might be about him. It was easier to think that when she was wearing clothes, when Helena wasn't naked next to her, when they were sitting across from each other at Helena's enormous, trestle-like table, eating pizza and drinking wine. She would get up from that table, thank Helena for the great sex, and go home, but when she put her wine glass down, she didn't head toward the door. She went over to Helena's side of the table and straddled her, unbuttoning her paint-splattered workshirt and cupping breasts that were already being arched into her hands. And Helena had asked her, "Is this about us or is this about that neglectful boyfriend of yours?" She hissed as Myka sucked at a nipple.
Myka leaned back, her fingertips taking the place of her tongue. "Mmmm, I thought you said I belonged to you, and now you're saying it's all right if I'm doing this to get back at him."
Helena smiled, but the look she gave Myka was less confident. "I'm prone to bold talk; it's genetic, you know. But none of this has to mean anything, especially if you love him."
Then Myka said the three things she knew, in that moment, were true. "I don't love him. I don't know if I'm falling in love with you instead, but I do know I want to be here, with you, and nowhere else."
"Get up." The words had sounded so compressed, so hard, that Myka feared that everything she knew was true was also everything that it had been a mistake to say. She, not nimbly, not gracefully, slid off Helena, and stood, silent, not breathing, as Helena rose from the bench. But she didn't escort Myka to the door, she pulled her shirt over her head and stepped out of her jeans, and she began pushing their dishes and half-eaten pizza to the other end of the table. Myka was no longer holding her breath, but she wasn't breathing any more easily, and when Helena sat, legs parted, on the end of the table and then slowly leaned back, Myka could hear her breath coming in short, uneven bursts, like she was panting. She was panting. "Show me how much you want me," Helena commanded, but her voice was trembling. "Show me that no one's wanted me as much as you do."
Jesus Christ, she could come, in front of Sam, just thinking about it. Myka squeezed her eyes shut then rapidly blinked them open, trying to drive out the memory for the time it took to get Sam out of her apartment. Then she would relive what she and Helena did on that big table of hers over and over. "It doesn't matter now," she said quietly. "I can't see you anymore, Sam. What happened, it's different, and I can't see you anymore," she helplessly repeated.
"What? You're all of a sudden in love with this guy?" Sam seemed more surprised than angry.
She wasn't going to correct him, but she wasn't going to tell him more. The rest of it was hers and Helena's, and she wasn't going to share it. "I don't know, I just know that I can't see you."
She could have called Pete once she returned to her apartment, but she lost sight of the necessity of it among the other necessities on the list she had drawn up in her mind, necessities like collecting an assortment of light cotton lounge pants and tops that might serve as pajamas for her and Helena, reveling for a few extra minutes in a hot shower and pretending that the water sluicing over her head and back was also carrying away all the problems she had managed to create for herself over the course of the day, and gulping down a hastily microwaved meal because she was never going to make it back to the hospital before its kitchens closed for the evening or before Christina would have fallen asleep waiting for her sleepover to begin. She would talk to Pete tomorrow when she had to step back into time, when the enormity of her mistakes in saying what she had to Laura Jeffries, in holding Helena as she had, in giving Sam cause, more than cause, to believe that her loyalty was compromised would be no less enormous but more manageable, seemingly, because her fuck-ups had happened yesterday, and everything looked a little better, a little more human-sized the next morning. Even Helena's betrayal had assumed more normal dimensions, although it had taken only some 2,900 mornings for it to happen.
Myka was unused to procrastinating, and having decided to commit to it, she forlornly wished that she were enjoying it more, but she left her apartment, showered and carrying an overnight bag packed with "pajamas" that she and Helena probably wouldn't wear, without talking herself into searching her shoulder bag for her phone so she could call Pete. She made better time than she expected, even taking into account her stopping at a grocery store for chocolate chip cookies and mini cupcakes, but as she neared Christina's room, feeling an unexpected - and wholly inappropriate - surge of happiness, she saw Helena standing outside it, her face taut with anger, arguing with two men. One looked like Ben Winslow, and Myka stiffened, feeling her happiness turn into something familiarly grim and unyielding, and she knew the day's grievous errors weren't over.
Although the opinion she had formed about Ben Winslow was based on little more than his ongoing battle to wrest custody of Christina away from Jemma and his not unrelated tendency to treat her as a spoil of war, enjoyed only to be subsequently forgotten, or so Jemma grumbled, Myka didn't find it improving as he crowded Helena against the wall. In what would have been melodramatic excess had he been someone other than a Winslow, he was threatening her that she would never see their daughter again. The other man had put a restraining hand on Winslow's arm, but he wasn't actively trying to restrain him; his billable hours for a week probably equaled Myka's salary, but he was, in the end, only another Winslow lackey. Dropping her bags and wishing she were wearing something that shouted "formidable federal agent" rather than faded jeans and an ancient linen shirt, Myka clamped her hand on Winslow's shoulder and pushed him away from Helena as she interposed herself between them.
"Step back," she said coolly but implacably. As he raised his arm to brush hers away, she squeezed his shoulder harder, noting with satisfaction that it was narrower than her own. "I said, step back."
With Myka as the new focus of Winslow's anger and contempt, the other man suddenly became more assertive about pulling Winslow towards him. "This is a private conversation, Ms. -"
"Agent," Myka said, "Agent Bering."
Winslow demanded, "I thought you were supposed to keep her away from Christina. Where the hell were you? How could you let her and her screwy mother hurt my kid?" He shook free of the other man's grip and thrust his chest at her, trying to press her against Helena.
Myka could hear Christina crying fretfully to Jemma, "Where's Mommy? Where's My-ka?" Then the cries became tearful in earnest. "I hurt, Nonni. Where's Mommy?" While her weeping had Helena restlessly gesturing toward the room and pleading, "Ben, can we put this aside for now? I need to go to her," it further enraged him. The color in his face deepened to the choleric red of the put-upon fathers and bosses in the Sunday comics, which Myka would have found amusing if she didn't think Winslow's next move would be to lunge at the both of them. He was sweating, though the hospital's air conditioning kept the temperature only a degree or two above that of a meat locker, and his hands were trembling as he worked his fingers, as if he were unsure whether he wanted to clench them into fists or select one to shake in their faces.
"Helena, why don't you go comfort Christina while I talk to her father?"
"Myka," she protested.
"Go." Myka spoke just as coolly and implacably to Helena as she had to Winslow. He was on the verge of erupting, and if she couldn't persuade him to exercise some self-control, she wanted Helena a safe distance away. While the corridor was virtually deserted, a nurse pushing a cart out of a nearby room was eyeing the four of them with a trepidation that told Myka a call to the hospital's security staff was only moments away. "All we're doing right now is agitating Christina. If she sees Helena, she'll calm down, and I think we can all agree that we don't want her feeling any more miserable than she already does." Myka tried to express a patience and a reasonableness she didn't particularly feel, but the look she fixed on him was hard. As Helena brushed against her back, Myka felt her hand gently rub her spine; Winslow watched them, but he didn't object to Helena's leaving.
Christina's crying, which had begun to crescendo, trailed off to whimpers and Myka heard her saying with the vexation that only a child could fully give vent to, "Mommy, I called and called for you." A part of Myka wanted to grin at Christina's continuing chastisement of her mother, but there was no telling how Winslow would interpret it. It would be her luck that he would take her grin as additional provocation, and the last thing she needed to have happen was to be ejected from the hospital. Winslow was matching her stare, but his hands had stopped twitching, although the tremors had reappeared around his mouth.
As flushed and sweaty and unprepossessing as he was at this moment, the tic at the corner of his lips undermining the sneer he was attempting to curl them into, Myka couldn't deny that he was Christina's father. She had her mother's hair, her mother's eyes and nose, her grandmother's smile, but the pointed chin that gave her such an appealingly elfin look was Ben Winslow's, the slight peak to her ears - which only enhanced the suggestion that she was a sprite - and how closely they were set to her head, that was from Winslow, too. The line of Christina's eyebrows, the slightness of her frame (though she had her mother's deceptive solidity), those were her father's as well. Myka had marked the resemblance before in the picture of Winslow and his wife with Christina that Sam had used to goad Helena during their prison visit, but it was a different experience to see the features they shared working in concert. It didn't just make the resemblance stronger, it emphasized that Christina belonged to Winslow and Helena, no matter how much they despised each other; they were the unit that she and Helena and Christina pretended to be on Sunday afternoons.
What she resented with an intensity that unsettled her wasn't the fact that, biologically, she and Helena could never share Christina - that fact was inescapable no matter how many children they might have raised together in that alternate, parallel life she could see and hear but never inhabit - but that Christina wasn't their choice, her and Helena's together. They hadn't thought about her, dreamed of what she would be like before she was conceived; they hadn't joked about who would be the disciplinarian and who would be the pushover, who would learn how to cook her favorite foods (cook, period) and who would drive her to her appointments. Winslow and Helena might have conceived Christina in a spontaneous coupling that each almost immediately regretted, but that brief union had happened without Myka knowing about it or consenting to it, and, as absurdly retroactive as her resentment was, she resented it. Not just because she didn't like Winslow and didn't want him to have any claim to Helena or Christina, but because she didn't want anyone to have a claim to them. Helena and Christina should have always been hers, as they would have been had everything happened differently . . . .
Winslow's voice was growing louder. He had been talking to, no, shouting at her, and she had let her own anger block him out. "And my attorney is going to roust that goddamn family court judge from his dinner party or poker night and have him grant full custody of Christina to me, as he should've done in the first place. Christ knows why he thought that senile old woman could provide her with 'needed stability.' She's the reason my daughter's here now. How the hell is that giving Christina stability?" The withering contempt would have been more persuasive if Winslow didn't have spittle collecting at the corners of his mouth like so much froth. Yes, if only the family court judge could see what an exemplar of stability he was. Winslow looked over his shoulder at his attorney. "Howard, you've got Judge Miller's number. Call him, I'm not waiting any longer."
Howard rubbed his chin meditatively and tried to reason with his client. "Ben, I don't think this is a good time to get Judge Miller on the line. There's nothing he's going to do until Monday. Look, Christina is getting the care she needs, and Helena's back on a leash. Go home, take care of your wife and son."
"I didn't ask for your opinion, Howard. I told you to do something, and if Judge Miller doesn't like getting a call from a Winslow on a Saturday night, ask him how much he'll like facing a Winslow in a Congressional hearing about family court practices when it comes to granting custody to the mother of a fucking felon." Winslow had turned his head around and glared at Myka as he dressed down his attorney. Apparently Howard didn't merit even a look from his client as he was being scolded, but if Howard felt the insult, his expression didn't reveal it. All Myka saw were patience and concern . . . and anxiety. It wasn't Winslow's ridiculous threats against the continuation of Miller's career that had the attorney's restraining hand hovering near Winslow's elbow again. "She didn't even have the guts to tell me . . . I had to hear it from one of you, some agent in a suit." He took a step forward. "I hadn't the faintest fucking idea . . . but you know what? It doesn't matter because I'm going to screw her just like she screwed me. By the time I'm through with Helena Wells, she'll be begging me -" He had kept advancing until he stood mere inches away from her, his sweating so profuse that his forehead gleamed under the light.
She stepped into him, pitching her voice just loudly enough so that his attorney couldn't mistake a word she said. "You're not going to do anything tonight, Mr. Winslow, except go home." She smiled a thinly curved, unfriendly smile. "You drove here, didn't you?"
"Don't answer that, Ben," his attorney warned. "Let's go home, just like she suggested."
"I was out on my boat, with friends. And I get Jemma's call. Hours, hours, after my daughter's been hurt. We get back to the marina, and I drive here as fast as I fucking can. You going to give me a speeding ticket?" He smiled back at her, trying to suggest equal menace, and the thought flashed across Myka's mind that she was facing only another version of her father, a man who believed his anger made him bigger, stronger.
"No, I'm going to open your glove compartment and look under your seat. How many grams will I find, Mr. Winslow? Then we can call Judge Miller together, and we can ask him how he feels about granting full custody to an addict." They were standing so closely to one another that she knew he felt her breath on his face; she could smell his sweat. She contemptuously flicked her glance away from him and stared at his attorney. "Get him out of here, or I'll have his car searched. What's the likelihood that he'll be arrested for possession of a controlled substance?"
Howard yanked Winslow away from her. "Ben, we're going . . . now." He was still a lackey, but he was the lackey in charge at the moment, and Winslow didn't resist the command in his voice. Still muttering threats about custody and "changing everything on Monday," Winslow followed him, and Myka didn't pick up the bag she had dropped and abandon the corridor for Christina's room until she was certain they were gone.
Jemma and Helena and Christina were playing a card game, although Jemma was having to play both her and Christina's hands. "Go fish, Mommy," Christina was saying. She brightened upon seeing Myka. "I'm winning, My-ka, I'm winning."
Helena didn't stop mid-motion, but she slowed her lean toward the draw pile. "Is he gone?"
"Yes."
"For now, you mean." She picked a card and turned it over. "Aces, pumpkin, I've nabbed a three. Do you have a five?" As Christina and Jemma consulted, she glanced at the bag Myka was carrying. "Did you bring pajamas?" The smile she flashed conveyed more fatigue than wickedness. "Do you need help changing into them?"
There were several more games of Go Fish after Myka and Helena changed into pajamas. Helena pulled on the drawstring of the pants Myka had selected for her as much as she could, but they still drooped rather endearingly, and she folded over the ends of the legs so they wouldn't drag the floor. Christina grandly excused her grandmother from changing into pajamas since she wasn't staying over, but she had to eat both a cookie and a cupcake and she had to promise not to leave until everyone else had "gone to bed." After badgering Myka into her own promise that sometime soon she would tell another story about The Princess Who Lost Her Hair, Christina began to wind down, drowsily suffering another visit from one of the nurses. She fell asleep soon after, and Jemma stiffly rose from the visitor's chair, claiming that she would be back as soon as she could in the morning.
Sitting at the foot of the bed in a pair of pale blue cotton pants and a scoop-necked top that almost matched, Myka surveyed the cookie and cupcake crumbs that decorated the sheets and blanket and the dab of frosting that was like a beauty mark just above Christina's upper lip. On one of her visits home, her nephew had been recuperating from the flu and she remembered venturing into his bedroom for an occasional two-minute visit but spending most of her time at her sister and brother-in-law's house in their family room, watching football with Kevin. She would run up glasses of cranberry juice and medicine and anything else that Tracy called down for, but it was always with the awareness that she bore a tangential relationship at best to this other Bering family; her nephew was only that and her sister seemed less her sister than her nephew's mother. Even the distance that had always existed between her and Kevin - six years of marriage hadn't resulted in her feeling she knew Kevin much better now than before they had married - had a different feel to it. He wasn't just incidentally Tracy's husband and their child's father, he belonged here in this room with its theater-seating and giant TV; she was the one who was incidental, unnecessary, a temporary add-on to the Clausen (not Bering) family. This with Christina was different. She wasn't an interloper. She had a part, a role; she was integral. With a casual authority she didn't bother to consider that Jemma (or Helena) might find presumptuous, she said, "I'll be here tomorrow morning, Jemma. Why don't you stay home and get things ready for her?"
Jemma seemed neither surprised nor put out, and Helena had only smiled as if she were aware of yet another secret whose existence Myka was only belatedly discovering. Myka accompanied Jemma to the parking lot, unembarrassed that she was wearing pants so worn that the color of her underwear practically showed through them and a top that had seen better days. She was humoring a sick child and that took precedence over considerations about how frowzily she was dressed. She worked the car seat from the backseat of Jemma's car, prepared to lug it through acres of hospital parking lot to her own car.
"I had to call him, Myka. Mainly I did it because it's part of the custody arrangement, not because I thought he deserved to know. He's her father only when he wants to be, usually when he thinks it will irritate Helena the most."
"How did he find out that Christina is his?"
Jemma shrugged. "Not from me and not from Helena. She only told me after I asked her, point-blank, if the baby was Nate's. I didn't see her for over two years after that art gallery heist." Her head was turned in her direction, but it was too dark for Myka to tell whether Jemma was looking at her. "When you came to question me, I honestly didn't know if she had been involved. I had suspected something was going on with her, but she made it a rule never to tell me what she and her father were cooking up. I didn't see her again until after her father died, and she looked horrible. Too thin, pasty skin, and she couldn't look you straight in the face. I'll always give Helena that, she'll look you straight in the face when she lies to you. But not then. I was back living in London, but she took off again after a few days. Another year passed, and she called me to tell me she was pregnant. She wanted me to move to New York, help teach her how to be a mother to her baby." Jemma's laugh was humorless. "She needed a better teacher, but I was all she had." Myka could feel the eyes she couldn't see boring into her. "The only man she had ever been with for any length of time had been Nate, so I asked her if Nate was the father. She choked so hard at the thought, I feared she might pass out. She said it wasn't Nate, but I had to pry it out of her. Eventually she said she had slept with the owner of the gallery that was showing Jim's paintings. She said it had been a mistake but that she was keeping the baby." She paused before saying more slowly, as if to make sure that Myka wouldn't miss a word, "When I saw her after Jim died, she reminded me of you, you had the same hollowed-out look when you came to my apartment. It wasn't Jim's dying that did it to her, it was what she had done to you. I told her more than once when the two of you were together that if she were running a con on you, she'd regret it. She'd always ask me why, and I'd always say, 'Because it'll hurt you just as much as it'll hurt her.' She'd always tell me right back, 'I know.' She'd never say so, but I thought her keeping Christina was her way of trying to make things up to you, to prove that she could put someone above herself." Jemma laughed again, and this time it was full and rich and the amusement was unalloyed. "Of course, I wasn't seeing the whole picture, I usually don't when it comes to Helena."
"What did you miss?" Myka's grip on the car seat had tightened. She felt that her knuckles were about to break through her skin.
"She always has her eyes on the long game. Have you never wondered why she returned to New York? Why she stayed when your agency, the whole alphabet soup of you people, were still looking for the ones behind the heist? Why she let herself be arrested for that stupid little Ponzi scheme her friend had thought up? Now actual prison time probably wasn't part of her plan, but the rest of it, it was all for you, Myka. She was showing you that she was back, that she had changed, and that she was waiting for you. And if you think that's the silliest thing you ever heard, just look where you are now. You're in your jammies holding a car seat, ready to spend the night in a chair watching over a little girl and her mother."
When Jemma drove away, Myka was still standing, still holding the car seat. Jemma might attribute God-like powers of omniscience to her daughter - it wasn't as though she could brag about Helena's skill in forging paintings or in duping victims to her friends - but Helena couldn't have and wouldn't have designed the play of events that led them to this moment, this night. That said, there was something about Helena's decision to make a home here and her own refusal to leave, even when her disenchantment with both her job and Sam had been prodding her on an almost daily basis to make a change, that suggested they had been waiting, however unknowingly, on the other. And as if a 25 cent, gimcrack confirmation were all she had needed to confirm her belief that the universe was managed by someone or something with a Pete Lattimer-like sense of humor, she was able to get the car seat locked into her backseat on the first try.
Helena had draped a blanket over her and molded a pillow to her head in the bed she had made for herself in the Mommy recliner, but she was awake when Myka re-entered the room. She had placed a visitor's chair next to her, although she had also tried to squeeze herself into the recesses of the recliner. With a pat of her hand on the cushion, she invited Myka to share it with her. Her mouth curved in a soundless laugh when Myka took the visitor's chair. The lights in the room were off, but the glow from the various monitors was strong enough that Myka had little difficulty in reading the worry that overtook Helena's expression.
"How did you chase Ben away?"
"By threatening to arrest him for possession of a controlled substance. It was close enough to the truth that his attorney dragged him to the elevators."
"It won't matter if he's using again. His father will protect him. He always does." Helena drew the blanket up to her chin. She turned to look at Christina and then shook her head as she looked back at Myka. "It's taken me longer to get money from an ATM than it did to conceive her with him. We stared at each other in horror and then we were both jumping up and zipping our pants. I hadn't been on birth control. I hadn't had sex in ages, and I certainly hadn't been anticipating having it with him. I told myself that I should get the morning-after pill, just in case, but it slipped my mind, and then it had been so quick, I convinced myself that I couldn't possibly have gotten pregnant." The blanket rippled as she spread her hands underneath it. "I was wrong."
"Do you know how he found out?"
"I've always thought it was his father. The good senator has his minions clean up after Ben. They persuade the district attorneys not to press charges, the papers not to publish stories. When I was arrested, some of the old stories about the Marston Gallery began to circulate. He would have had his people look into them and make sure there was nothing that could hurt his precious son. Someone would have found out about Christina and could have done the math. Figured it was possible since Ben and I had been business associates around the same time. Then came the court order for the DNA test. You would think the opposite would have happened, that the senator would have paid to have the results destroyed. But I hear he's quite fond of his grandchildren. They're too young to be disappointments."
As though she had written them on index cards, Myka skimmed through her recent collection of Winslow's rants and snarls, finding the one that had him complaining that he had learned of Christina's existence from "an agent in a suit." Not likely that it would have been through his father's auspices, but she already had a good idea about who was responsible for informing Ben Winslow that he was the proud father of a little girl. Like Jemma, she hadn't been allowed to see the whole picture, but Helena wasn't the one to blame. Trying to find a more comfortable position in the chair, she hooked her legs over the opposite arm and felt her head slide across the cushion of the headrest until the cushion gave out at the juncture of the headrest and the frame.
"Ben can't take Christina from me, but his father can. You won't be able to scare him off, Myka." Helena's tone changed, allowing that fondness that did such treacherous things to Myka to sweeten it, lighten it. "Thank you, though, for coming to my rescue the way you did. You have no idea how sexy you were. I suppose a good mother wouldn't have entertained such a thought, she would have been concentrating solely on her child, but I'm not a good mother and you were very, very sexy."
"I blew the case today, Helena. Parker had called about your monitor going off . . . . I told Laura Jeffries that we were on to DeWitt and her husband. I gave her 48 hours to come in and try to make a deal with us." How sexy does that make me now?
Helena was silent for a long time. "It's not how I envisioned you telling me that you still loved me, but beggars can't be choosers, I suppose." As Myka gaped at her, Helena said swiftly, fiercely, but in a voice hardly above a whisper, "Don't you deny it. You were rattled, you panicked. You forgot ten years' worth of training. Don't tell me that I don't mean anything to you. You care, you've always cared, you will always care." She held up a finger from beneath the blanket. "Don't me that it's the job that makes you care." She leveled the finger at Myka. "It's never been about the job or the Neanderthal or Nate or anything else, it's always been about us." She fell silent again. "The other part, about blowing the case." A blanket-covered shoulder was lifted and dropped. "It's not irreparable, but we'll have a lot to do tomorrow. Plus you'll have to come up with another installment in that execrable fairy tale of yours, she'll be expecting it. So I suggest you get some sleep."
Myka wasn't sure what woke her. Maybe Christina had whimpered in pain or the nurse's shoes had squeaked on the floor when he or she had come in for yet another status check. Her neck was stiff, but she was warm. Strangely so. Helena murmured and backed her butt into her. Myka realized she was in the Mommy recliner, her head lolling against the backrest, one leg flung over the chair's arm and the other pinned to the inside by the weight of Helena's legs. Her arm was clamped over Helena's stomach, held in position by Helena's arms. "In the interests of full disclosure," Helena whispered, "I probably should tell you that I've heard from Nate. He wants to talk about the Bowdoin works. It won't be tomorrow or next week, it might not be for a month or two. It depends on how long he wants to keep me waiting, but he won't forget."
She shouldn't have gone to sleep after hearing that. She definitely shouldn't have gone to sleep in the Mommy recliner with Helena snuggled against her. But since there were so many disasters looming in front of them and she couldn't choose which one she should worry about more, it was easier to worry about none of them. It was also easier to slide down the chair and extinguish what little space existed between her and Helena than to crawl out and return to her own chair. It was easy to pull Helena closer to her, and Helena, not really asleep but pretending, obliging by crushing herself against her. Myka may have let her nose part Helena's hair, and she may have kissed Helena's scalp more than once, possibly several times. She may have heard Helena sigh very audibly and contentedly as she did so, and she may have wondered at the wisdom of what she was doing, but since she had shown very little wisdom the entire day, she may have felt that acting unwisely, yet again, had consistency going for it, if nothing else. There was a saying about something, evil, troubles, foolishness - Myka might have buried a yawn against Helena's neck and Helena might have shivered and held Myka's arm tighter across her - being sufficient unto the day thereof and tomorrow taking care of itself. They had met their disaster quota for the day, they had the night to sleep and forget what was awaiting them.