John was, Mary decided, a Luddite. Instead of reading his news on the internet like a normal person, he took not one but three daily papers: one normal one, one big serious black-and-white one, and one trashy one with topless women and adulterous celebrities. All three arrived, with a loud thump, at her door at six every morning, inevitably waking her up.

She should just cancel them, Mary thought, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, since all she ever did with them was take them indoors and then throw them into the recycling in the evening. He probably had new subscriptions over there at his old flat, and it was just another John shaped hole in her life that she had to step around. Like his bicycle in the front hallway (she guessed he didn't need it, running around after criminals and having fun adventures all the time) or his empty dresser that she kept stubbing her toes on when she was sleepy.

Their bed was not one of the unfilled voids. Calton, who shared a low-grade mutual distaste with John, had happily occupied the left-hand side of the bed as soon as it was vacated. Now, seeing that Mary's eyes were open but she was neither petting nor feeding him, the cat started butting into her face and making low gurgling sounds that he probably meant to be purrs.

She was definitely awake, now. And to what can any cat owner aspire but to diligent, efficient service?

After throwing up and kibbling the cat, Mary stepped out the door, shivered (it was bloody freezing all of a sudden), and scooped up the damp newspapers. She tossed them on the kitchen table and sat down, somewhat at a loss. It was another lazy Saturday, and she felt the weight of inertia and couldn't quite motivate herself to do… really anything. Mary had always been frustrated by women who just sat there and let their lives happen to them without doing anything about it, but it was coming more and more naturally to her the more and more pregnant she got.

Idly, she paged through the papers. There was yet another revelation about how awful the Kennedy family had been, Katia on Celebrity Big Brother had gotten very obvious breast implants, the Russians and Americans were rowing over what to do in Syria, and... "Sleuth's Squeeze on Sheikh's Sexy Swinging Ship," which title had probably given some desk editor a massive cleverness erection, and was accompanied with a photograph of a very familiar woman. Albeit much more of that woman than Mary had ever expected to see. She was wearing a brief pair of bikini bottoms, and nothing on top but a very narrow black bar applied by the paper as a nod towards not outraging public morals.

"Gorblimey," Mary muttered, because sometimes swearing really didn't do justice to the situation. She considered, for a moment, then took her phone off the charger cord and dialed a number she hadn't dialed in months.

As soon as she'd done that, she heard a faint meeping from outside. Curious, she got up and opened the door, revealing a red-eyed Janine Hawkins digging her mobile out of her handbag.

Janine sniffled, and asked, "Can I come in?"

Ten minutes later they were sitting at the tiny table in Mary's kitchen. Mary had made a pot of tea, and poured a healthy slug of John's scotch into Janine's, six-in-the-morning be damned, because the younger woman was looking absolutely shattered. Janine tapped a manicured nail on the newsprint photograph of herself and began, "He wasn't a sheikh. I don't know how they came up with that but it's actually a bit racist. He was a… cousin of the Sultan of Brunei, not a first cousin, but a cousin."

"Okay," Mary replied.

"I was twenty-one, and I was riding a van with fifteen other girls two hours every day into Dublin to wait tables for a bunch of gobshites who kept pinching my ass and never heard of tipping. And this lawyer in a suit, one day, comes up to me and says that he knows a man who's looking for pretty girls to travel along with him through the Med on his yacht. And at first I obviously thought "yeah, sure, don't need to get murdered, thanks," but we kept talking and I thought "what the hell?""

Janine took a deep gulp of her spiked tea, and kept on. Mary tried a sip of her own, and set it down again, because it was still far too hot to drink.

"It wasn't as though I couldn't bear to leave my job behind or anything. So I just quit, and went off for a month. And really-" Janine hesitated, and made direct eye contact. She was going to try to justify herself.

"It was mostly just stuff I was doing every day for free anyway. Talking to him, acting interested in him, laughing at his jokes. And I'd never gone anywhere before and I got to see some new places like Rome and Barcelona and Alexandria. And it was a nice yacht, very fancy."

Then she averted her eyes again. Now she was going to tell the bad part.

"It was just with that one man. And really not all that much: there were four of us girls, and you know they can only manage it so often, even with viagra. That's not really- so bad, is it?"

"No, of course it's not," Mary assured her.

"For that one month, he paid me thirty thousand pounds. Plus he gave me this brooch, God, you should have seen it, it was the ugliest thing ever, shaped like a shamrock but it was emeralds set in platinum and I got twenty k more for that. It just… solved so many problems for me. I got to go to university. Hell, I got to get out of Ireland. For the first time in my whole life I didn't have to keep scratching for every cent I could get."

Janine sniffled. Mary prompted her to continue with, "But Magnussen found out about it."

"Yeah. Dunno how, but it's obviously something he's got a lot of practice with. He didn't tell me he knew until… what, March of this year? And then-"

The sniffles turned into full on tears, trailing mascara slowly down Janine's cheeks. Mary got up, walked to the bathroom, and pulled out the box of kleenex. She thought they might be needing it. Janine took one and dabbed at her eyes.

"It was awful. I'd been so happy with my job, before then. I was making contacts… I was going to be an editor. He made me-" Janine choked, and couldn't go on. Mary waited, patiently.

"It was awful," she concluded, "The day after Sherlock broke into the office I actually thought that he was going to kill me, he was so furious. And enough was enough."

She sighed, and blew her nose.

"My brother Charlie rang me up, just now, to call me a hoor," she said, dryly, and Mary was startled at how lovely the word "whore" sounded with an Irish accent. "He must have got up early to do it, and it's not as though I can spit in his eye and call him a liar, either."

"Please," Mary said, "You're not a whore. You're a retired professional girlfriend. An actual prostitute would have charged at least twice as much."

"Seriously?" Janine asked, momentarily distracted, "How d'you know that?"

"Read it in a blog. Belle de Jour," Mary replied, entirely truthfully. In a career spent in the underworld she had never actually gotten to know any escorts and she'd always sort of been sad about that.

"Christ. That'd have been a bit of all right," Janine mused, "Not that it matters. Everyone will think it of me from now on."

Mary snapped her fingers. "That's why you said all that stuff about Sherlock!"

Janine blinked at her, and Mary went on, "I had wondered. If all you'd wanted to do was make him look bad the truth would have done a lot better. Being known as sexually voracious and mildly kinky was never going to do much damage. He's a man."

"Oh," Janine smiled faintly, "Yeah, that. I'm in publishing, I knew what I could get paid for. And I thought maybe if I could get out ahead of it, get the 'slut' rep going on my own schedule, it wouldn't be so bad. It sort of worked, too… I'm getting loads of guest columnist gigs. But my parents haven't spoken to me since. By now they're probably burning my baby pictures."

Janine ran her hands through her hair and leaned back against the wall.

"But that's not even the worst of it. Mary, I swear if I'd known what Mr. Magnussen did I would never have let him into your life. I'm so, so sorry. You and John were so happy and now I've ruined it."

Mary hesitated. She hadn't told anyone that her marriage had collapsed, although her co-workers had probably figured something out. Janine saw her hesitation and snapped, "Oh, come on. It's obvious. He sneaks into the office of my professional blackmailer boss and then all of a sudden it's like he doesn't even exist to you. Do you know how irritating your Facebook used to be? Nothing but John John John all the time. And then there's the little fact that it's six thirty in the morning on a Saturday and he's not here."

"Okay, Sherlock, rein it in," Mary demurred, "We're- not talking. You're right. But I never blamed you for it."

"Still-" Janine reached across the table and took Mary's hand in hers, "What did he have on John?"

And Mary laughed out loud, despite herself, because that was Janine taking hold of the very wrong end of the stick.

"Oh, Lord. No, you've- John never did anything wrong. It was me. My secret. He found it out."

"Oh. Oh," Janine said. Then, hesitating, she asked, "Is it… like my secret?"

Now that was an interesting thought, Mary mused. What if she hadn't been a Company kid from a Company family? When she'd been twenty-one with no plans and no particular ambitions, what if she couldn't have picked up the phone and worked the family connection to get an analyst gig at the CIA? What would she have done instead? Where would she be if she'd, instead, spent a summer litehooking for some South Asian millionaire?

"Sadly," Mary said after consideration, "I was never pretty enough to be invited onto anyone's sex yacht. Mine's much worse. Darker."

If Janine had asked her, just then, Mary would have confessed it all. It would have felt so good to get it off her chest, and Janine deserved the truth. But her friend was ridiculously goodhearted and willing to see the best in everybody, and therefore put it behind her and never mentioned it again.

They sat in silence, holding hands, and sipping their tea.

"So are you guys... do you think you'll work it out? I mean, there is the baby, and everything," Janine said, eventually.

Mary shook her head, and finally said out loud what she'd been thinking for a while now.

"I don't think so. I wanted to, and I thought if I gave him some space maybe we could, but he's gone completely dark on me."

"Fucking men," Janine commented.

"Fucking. Men," Mary agreed, and they shared a smile. "It's all right. There's worse things than a failed starter marriage." There was prison, for example, a concrete cage six by eight that was starting to show up in her dreams and make her awaken feeling like she was suffocating.

"How about you?" Mary asked, letting go Janine's hand to take a sip of her tea, "You weren't really going to marry Sherlock, were you?"

"Um-" Janine flushed prettily.

"Holy-," Mary stared at her friend, "Seriously? You were actually going to? This is worse than I thought."

"Oh, shut up," Janine grumped, "I don't know. Maybe! I was feeling really romantic after the wedding. And he was so clever and sweet, and he's got a really nice penis-"

Mary pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Absolutely wish you hadn't told me that. Just FYI."

"The whole time I kept telling myself 'This must be what it's like to get swept off your feet.' And to be fair, I don't think the idea that a guy might be dating me in order to break into my office is something that I should realistically have been keeping in mind. That's fairly specialized shitheadedness, even by my standards."

"True," Mary agreed, "Still, though."

"I can't help it," Janine said ruefully, "I want to be in love."

"Gotta tell you it's a bit of a mixed bag."

"Seems like. Shit."

"Yep. Shit."

Mary got up, cracked her back, and turned the kettle back on. "You want another shot in your next one?"

"It's really early," Janine demurred.

"It's Saturday and our lives suck," Mary retorted, "This one can count as mine."

They had a companionable silence as Mary went through the little English ritual: warm the pot, spoon the leaves, pour the water. Once she had set two cups of tea -one spiked one not- on the table, Janine sighed and said, "So now what are we going to do?"

That was the hundred thousand dollar question, of course. And Mary knew the answer.

Five years ago, she'd rummaged through a drawerful of identities she'd accumulated over the years, just so she'd have them ready if she needed them. She'd picked Mary Morstan on entirely flimsy grounds: she liked the alliteration, England was a nice country to live in, she already had the accent in her collection. The first hazy concepts she'd had about Mary had felt good… colorful clothes, cheery temperament, sensible shoes.

She still had that drawerful of identities, and Aurelia was beginning to take shape in her mind.

"Oh, you know me," she said, "I'll muddle through. As for you, madam, your problem is that you think too small. The hell with writing columns, you need to write an autobiography."

Janine wrinkled her forehead, considering.

"Do you really think so?"

"I would read it," Mary replied. She would, too, even in a new life in a new continent. Time was running out for her, but at least for these last few weeks… she had a friend back.