One thing never changed about Molly over the years: once she had what she wanted, she never wanted it again. It was an unfortunate cycle, since Rick died, and in the relationships she'd had before him, too. It wasn't that her fickle nature manifested itself during the relationship; no, it was when it ended, an event that was always instigated by her own nagging desire for freedom, but more than that, the consuming need to reject before she was rejected. This thing with Carey was no different. She heard his tires crunch the driveway gravel viciously as he backed out, driving too fast, too angry to be sensible. She had won, yet she had never been quite so miserable at this particular moment than she was when faced with the knowledge that he would not be returning tonight, nor tomorrow, nor, possibly, ever again.
Carey had accused her of needing to sabotage her own happiness, and perhaps to an extent that was true, she recognized, but... well, what did it matter now? She succeeded. He was gone. Time to give up and move on. It never would have worked out anyway. She knew that. She could never have admitted what she had done to Irene and Ned, or to her own children, and he would have said it was because she didn't respect him enough, didn't value the relationship enough, didn't have the courage to stand up for what she wanted, and fuck the world if they didn't like it. She would have smiled at his youthful enthusiasm and said something patronizing about how he couldn't possibly understand what it was like for her, and then she would have gotten that dreadful wounded look again, and so forth, and so on. But he hadn't actually ever said any of those things. He had accepted her need to keep him a secret, never pushed, never complained. Since this thing had started, she had been seized by fear almost constantly, taking drastic measures to make sure they absolutely would not be discovered. And why? It was a question only she could answer, and she couldn't answer it.
He would have been willing to do or say anything to make her happy, and all she could do was push and struggle against perceved suffocation. It was an aspect of her personality that she really hated, particularly right now. Maybe he had been right. Maybe it was all about her own mental imbalance. But it didn't matter. It was over. She had struck out with her weapons, her words and her glances, and he had faced the monsters in her head willingly, martyring himself out of love for the insatiable demon he could have slayed. And he would not return to be killed again.
After a few hours of maudlin self-flagellation and introspection, she couldn't take it anymore. She filled up the bathtub and removed a razor blade from a brand-new package in the medicine cabinet, determined to put an end to the monster for once and for all, to martyr herself out of love for the poor, dead would-be monster slayer and those before him and those that would inevitably, unsuspectingly fall into the same trap down the line. But death seemed like an unsuitable punishment for a simple argument, for the same routine she'd played out dozens of times before this night, the same routine that would be played out dozens of times after this night. He was just another... boy? She had to laugh. Maybe he was right. Maybe she didn't give him enough respect. But she couldn't call him a man, exactly. Just another dead slayer, then. Just a boy. Thinking of him as inconsequential did help, though she knew it would be difficult to keep up the mental charade for very long, because clearly he wasn't inconsequential. Maybe not the great love of her life, but maybe... this line of thought was interrupted by a ringing telephone, a jarring sound in the middle of the night.
She hesitated to answer, but took the plunge by the third ring. "Hello?" she said cautiously.
And not since Rick died had she received such unwelcome information over the telephone, which was immediately thrown across the room in a desperate attempt to convince herself that all of this had to be a dream. But the phone smashed into the wall and broke into a convincing number of pieces on the floor. No time to cry. Just time to get dressed and go.
At the sound of the phone's collision with the wall, Jack awoke and rushed down the hall, pushing through the open door. "What's going on?"
"It's Fiona, and Clu. Something terrible has happened. Get dressed. I'm leaving in three minutes," she said, re-assuming the no-nonsense mother role, a mechanical comfort.