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𝐅𝐈𝐅𝐓𝐘-𝐒𝐈𝐗

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The elopement was on the steps of city hall, Cora clutching a limp bouquet and embarrassment over the fuss Olivia had made. "It'd be a shame not to get a photo!" She squealed before snapping a Polaroid of Cora ducking beneath the shield of Stewy's arm to escape the fistful of rice Greg was tossing. "Be thankful I talked him out of the doves," Stewy said. Cora registered the sentiment through the deep vibration of his chest. He smirked down at her and she forced herself to turn away, her cheeks blushing. It's just the hormones, she assured herself. The hormones and everything else.

Life had unknotted itself, only to twist into a new, altogether more confounded configuration. Three months. Three months since she'd left that bar. The deal had long finalized, relative to the New York minute.

She'd begun to show.

The last few weekends had been dedicated to being car sick on the side of the road to the croon of Sinatra streaming from the top down. Frank had insisted his company, mumbling about auctions and buyers insurance. She suspected that he thought that if he didn't intrude, she'd whittle her remaining sentence away in solitude, whittle herself away in the process, and that the assumption wouldn't have been wrong.

They stuck to the East Coast, trying to check the boxes. Cora didn't know what constituted 'good' per se, but she knew that she didn't care for the crust of her Rhode Island upbringing, that Philadelphia being in a different state felt uncomfortable, that she would be caught neither dead or alive in Jersey.

They turned to the arm of Long Island, results much the same, until a bad thunderstorm stopped them in a hamlet in Southampton, a favored area for fishing, at least according to Frank. Cora slept shallow, interrupted by intermittent thunder and the bluster of the wind.

She'd been haunted by the same two dreams ever since her self-imposed exile; one where Matsson was wearing a British judge's wig, hammering a gavel repeatedly while he sentenced her to prison; and another, of running in slow motion down a hallway in the Waystar Offices, as she watched Roman through the glass of his father's office, stepping off the edge of the building. Her mind combined the two, every step towards him causing Matsson to poke into view, like a ticket inspector, holding out an arrest warrant, grinning, his teeth made of sharpened biros.

Waking with a start, she heard the reverse of the car from the BnB driveway. The sky had cleared enough for Frank to indulge.

Early morning chill fogged her breath. Cora hugged a thick woolen cardigan to her chest as she circled the rim of the cul-de-sac. It was quiet and still, save for the odd jogger, and the rolling salt of the sea tangled her unbrushed hair. She followed the sound of the coastline and soon her sneakers were sinking against clean sand, crouching to watch the surly waves.

She'd sent the letter, too scared to say any of it, certain that seeing him in the flesh would break her resolve. Despite all that had conspired, little had changed from when she'd first written it, or at least, she'd been poor for any better words. The envelope still smelled faintly of the café by the sea. And though the letter had remained sealed since her departure from Italy, she still remembered every line. She closed her eyes.

I have been stupid in so many ways, ways I couldn't count. And even if I could, I'd be here for years, recounting those memories, chasing ghosts into the waves, knowing they'd roll back to my feet.

Someone had driven a stake with a 'For Sale' sign into the sand at the foot of a narrow wooden staircase. It led to the kind of house that came with the 'Estate' suffix. Cora liked that the fences were private but not so high to read as walls. In recent years, its rear wing had been modified to invite in the ocean, projecting the toss of the sea against its tall glass exterior.

She was settled, well and truly, by the time she felt something that was definitely not a kick. It was midday on a Tuesday, on the phone to Willa, but otherwise alone. In the ambulance, on the gurney, came the horrible reality of her isolation. She'd planned everything, aside from this.

Maybe that was why, when she woke up the following morning, and found Stewy reading the Times, a switch flipped.

"Oh, wh—"

"Relax, I was your emergency contact. And lie back down, would you? You're stressing me out."

She tried anyway to prop herself up, wincing from the pain. It needled her indescribably, like in parting with an infant, she'd earned a scalpel. She was met with a firm hand on the shoulder.

"Seriously, wouldn't be very husbandly to watch you tear the stitches." He said, setting down his newspaper. Front side down. She craned her head but he swept it to the pillow on his seat and stood.

He chuckled at the stunned heat of her cheeks. "You take me for a deadbeat?"

Stewy stuck around and she was grateful beyond words. Cora, heavy with post-partum, felt useless. She couldn't even face the list of names and switched invariably between 'it' and 'the girl'. The girl cried whenever Cora was nearby, the girl threw up in her hair, the girl knew her true nature, the rotten insides, nested besides for 9 months, and now rioting in disgust. Stewy had a miraculous presence and held her silent with her tiny chin perched against the silk of his jacket. But the second he strayed away, the tears fell.

Looking out at the familiar blue, he took to the space beside her. What he meant initially was a joke, "Caribbean Blue, huh?" but it affixed itself in Cora's brain. At least briefly, she breathed easy. The pattern was set, the road ahead pock marked, and the girl hadn't yet spoken a word.

I remember feeling unsettled the first time I learned what veins were. The nanny called them highways of the body. I'd seen few highways my mother hadn't swerved down. Somehow, my brain made the equation and solved it, all in one.

Stewy was a good husband. He showed up to every hearing, pushed the pram through Central, shielded her from the cameras, crawled into her bed. But he didn't love her. Of course, she enabled the situation. She'd had a go with most men who'd had the misfortune to cross her path, why bother stopping now? And she was lonely, and he was devastating, ineffably kind, holding her close, then at arm's length, the scales tipping between 'why not' then 'no, why?'.

Meanwhile, Matsson had thought it all over and decided now was not the time to retire from being a full-time bastard, and the circus had followed. He pleaded to the news cameras, on Twitter, on the Piers Morgan show, like the father of a missing child, Cora watching it all in the dead of night, her eyes aching from the endless scrolling. She held the lie; the girl was not his. She'd had an affair. She'd had twelve affairs. In the end, only one mattered. The rightful father was on the birth documents. No one, certainly not the state of New York, was going to make her piss into a cup.

She ferried between Long Island and New York, dressed like a Kennedy, delicate, feeling like a bug trapped in the thick walls of a mason jar, all the while seeing the headlines not through her own eyes, but those of the Roys, who she knew were watching, hoped, dreaded.

I can't remember when I learned cruelty, but I remember learning it over and over.

Late one night, in the thick of the case, the girl fussing in the backseat, her hands on the wheel, when the maid called her in a panic. A strange man had jumped the fence, or at least tried to, gotten one foot caught on a plank, jiggled it loose, somehow downed the whole thing, rolled onto the lawn, then stumbled headfirst into the pool, narrowly avoiding the hot tub. His lucky day, since instead of a crack in the skull, he'd earned himself the pool house.

"What does he look like?"

"W-well he has sunglasses on."

Even 16 months later, hallmarked by the obtuse formatting of her pediatrician, Kendall was unchanged since she'd last laid eyes on him. A return of his alcoholism and a string of poor investments with his share of the will (he later explained this burning of money to have been deliberate, his heart was "no longer in it anymore") had landed him the unshakeable reputation of a chump, good for the money that fell out of him if you split the pinata, and not much else.

After Cora arrived home, having not called the cops on pure intuition, he had a moment of clarity. Sopping wet, he confessed the loss and sorrow that followed him, dogged as a bloodhound, that he'd been "living Requiem for a Dream but irl" and that he'd stolen her address from Roman's pocketbook. Then he lit up a wet joint, handed her an invoice for the consortium of taxis he'd taken to get there, splashed water at Olenska, hissing from the doorway, and threw up in the rose bushes.

Without either of them acknowledging his arrival further, Kendall took to the pool house, rising past midday, clad in sunglasses with a beer in one hand, and a joint in the other. In those first weeks, Cora only saw him intermittently, sometimes with a wash basket under his arm, and wearing nothing but board shorts and the look of a man who's just about to ask you how to work the machine. After the initial wave of relief, at not having to be alone, and the benefits of the odd contact high, she began to get annoyed.

With Kendall around, Stewy spoke to her like an acquaintance. He was always "just on the way out"; disappearing into the pool house. On the occasion that the three of them were in the same room together, it was like old times. Cora hated it. She hated Kendall. 

But then he volunteered to perjure himself.

Kendall arrived in court looking much as he always did, and declared, in no uncertain terms, that he'd orchestrated the affair as potential blackmail for the Waystar deal. It erupted a media firestorm, delaying the court several more months. Meanwhile, the girl learned her first word, "yai" or "why", depending on who you asked.

Frank started taking the girl on weekends. Cora met her husband at the Hilton. She started seeing black sedans around every corner. The maid brought her a letter that opened to an ominously typed ":)" and the words "sooner or later". She set it down and tore into the invoice from the lawyers.

Bergdorfs, and finally able to look in a mirror again, Cora stepped out of the dressing room and ran directly into Shiv. Neither said a word. End scene.

The retelling leaves her over brunch with Violet and finds its way to Willa, still hungry for the sequel. Waystar had developed problems beyond the paternal. Severe overreach on planned facilities for the elderly, an attempt at refurbishing Parks by plagiarizing Disneyland Japan (a representative was quoted as saying "I didn't know they knew about us over there") and the death of a senator after he was trapped in a sauna, the body left unattended for a gruesome period, sentenced Waystar's stocks into a tailspin. Willa had turned to docutainments. And there was a real demand, for the next generation: one kid with a questionable lineage and the other standing to inherit it all. Cora skirted the edge of the proposal and instead offered to host summer in the Hamptons.

In the end, it was Connor who managed to convince Shiv. There is no Tom. Their daughter, because of course it's a daughter, is already solidly built, with all of Shiv's squinting frustration and Tom's ill ease with words. The girls pull each other's hair and one throws the other into the pool. Cora watched through the smoke of the grill.

I suppose I get why Regan did her best to rearrange me. But I think the worst of it is never having known her. That despite everything she gave me, included who she was. I get her like you get a person from biography. There are so many lines between us.

Shiv was tired. Shiv was over it. Shiv liked white wine and the day spa and rotting and press conferences. Shiv was skeptical of love. And Shiv didn't see a better paddle. Wherever she was, she had a rusty anchor and had gotten accustomed to the view.

Connor overdid the steaks. The kids went down early, and Kendall brought out the weed. He said he remembered a night like this. By the tone of his voice, they all knew it was not the same. Cora waved them off the next day, albeit to some grumbling about she hadn't let them land the plane on the beach. "He's getting on," Willa said lightly, with a look that told her not to ask. Shiv hesitated when the time came, before pulling Cora in for a half-hug.

Her lawyers were starting to get concerned. Stewy stayed further away. On occasion, Kendall's wallowing and resistance to sobriety amounted to episodes where he loudly professed to being "ready to give fatherhood another shot". She was not delicate when alluding to his track record, before demanding to know what he'd do different. It's enough for him to fly off the handle and stomp down the side path, yelling that she was a lot more charming on the coke.

"With who exactly on it? You or me?"

"Oh, you know!"

She didn't. But when he returned five minutes later, not with a proper answer, but the fact that a man had gotten out of a car, parked two houses up, and handed him a business card for an attorney. The house was being watched. She let him sleep in the guest bedroom from then on.

The girl's third birthday arrived. She'd grown to be impolite, curious, always grabbing things by the fistful (sand, makeup samples, Lego, hair). Her favorite activity was running down the couch as though it would never end. Cora loved her. Her relief, that she was not fragile like she herself had been, was palpable. If only she didn't keep asking "who's daddy?"

Cora could half tell her that that was up to a judge. Their last court date some how devolved into Matsson's best impression of McConaughey in Lincoln Lawyer; his representation was just as horrified. It was obvious that the whole ordeal was weighing on everyone.

It hit her in the lawyer's office. The girl had slid under the table and split open a briefcase, tossing paper in the air. Cora cursed herself for not thinking about it sooner. She dialed Matsson's number.

It was eerie to be back at Waystar. The girl sensed Cora's anticipation and became uncharacteristically quiet. As they waited in reception to be ushered in, she rifled in her purse, ignoring the look of a pair of suits who'd cut silent at the sight of her. She smoothed the girl's dark bangs and adjusted the white collar of her shirt. "Hold out your hands."

She let the girl, with her tongue blue, loose and settled down in Matsson's office. A puff piece in Fortune recently wrote that he'd spent the entirety of that year bandying by private jet across the Atlantic, loosely overseeing the restructuring of Waystar's subsidiaries (she could read between the lines) and spending time with his newly pregnant girlfriend. She'd felt a stab of jealousy, looking through the glossy spread of the 25-year-old Italian supermodel, bronzed from head to toe. But sitting before Matsson, she felt that fade, and with it, much of the animosity she'd constructed in place of him, shining the light under the bed.

He made her wait in silence for five minutes before looking up. Age had creased the purple shadows under his eyes and made them shallow gulleys. Her guard dropped further. He almost appeared forlorn. Maybe he really did care.

"So where is it?" He said, breaking the spell.

There was a crash somewhere deep in the office, the undeniable sound of Tom's whiny yelp. 'It' had run a trail of toilet paper and used it to teepee several of the desks, then 'it' had smashed a large crystal paper weight in the coffee room and now 'it' was scaling a filing cabinet, wavering like the leaning tower of Pisa, unphased by all the yelling, since 'it' had developed a complete ambivalence to the authority of men.

They found 'it' clinging to Greg's necktie.

"She had a lot of energy. And usually needs to be disciplined in Persian," she said, winking.

"Salam!"

Matsson dropped the case, announcing it in front of a sea of microphones. Cora ordered an extra box of tissues from room service, waiting with half of a roll of toilet paper balled in her fist. She'd never wanted to admit it, but the fear had been stifling. That she'd never get used to being a mother. That she'd always feel this way.

She stepped onto the balcony, looking down at the traffic, the blare of the tv speakers distorting against the horns, the wind, the noise. Cora took a deep breath and closed her eyes. It was over, and yet her life had just begun.

All the time that passed since leaving your dorm room was like dying in slow motion. And then when I came to, I was in the middle of a maze. I could have walked forward. I could have stood still. But I did neither. I burned. And I found you in the ashes every time.

Stewy called it a reverse honeymoon, but Cora preferred a wake. She'd known this time would come, but anticipating how she would feel never crossed her mind. He emailed her the plane tickets.

Neither mentioned the inevitable, not on the ride to JFK after dropping the girl at Frank's, not on the plane, not alone in the dark. The silence was comforting. Somehow she held the end and the beginning in perfect balance. They drank sake, tearing through her tolerance, ate raw and entertained his business partners, spilled half the water in a private onsen. Her path diverged from his for a few days, taking the train to Kyoto, where she walked the gardens, wandering wherever her feet took her, and she could have sworn she found the quietest place on earth, so quiet she hear her own circulation. Hear her own thoughts. For some reason, this filled her with panic, and she immediately rushed out, not stopping until she found the bustle.

"Maybe." Stewy paused, gently setting a shiny piece of salmon on his tongue, and did the very Stewy thing of groaning while waving his chopsticks like he was trying to smite the cook for the sin of perfection. "Maybe you thought 'what now'?"

Cora groaned. Why did he always have to be right?

"Answer it if you hate me so much."

"Can't I have a month or two off? I've been going and going. I just want to stop for a bit."

He snorted. "No can do, sister, it's not just you anymore. Besides, that's life. Get used to it." Stewy reached over and grabbed the back of her head, planting a firm, noisy kiss on the side of her head.

"Like you can speak, Mr Forever Bachelor."

"It's what I've chosen. You have too, but what you picked doesn't look like this."

She sighed dramatically. "Are you gay, Stewy? Is that it?"

"On my good days. But not tonight."

I feel it still. But I'm not scared of the pain anymore. Everywhere I look, there's a horizon. That I'm searching. For something, something.

Cora finds it, finally. The girl had grown into some of her old clothes, dug out of the boxes from Rhode Island. It was her first day of kindergarten, and panicked, from the feeling of being left behind. In her sorry state, she'd accepted a joint from Kendall. He was looking chipper these days, having started a cryptocurrency called the KenPenny, its value inflated in his favor thanks to some influencer marketing and Greg's reckless abandon for the FTC.

"Doesn't get any easier." He said from the pool float.

"How are the kids?"

"Don't ask me shit like that, Cora, just take the advice."

She was still stoned when the girl came home with a rip in her dress. Maybe because she was high, emotional, or because the inanimate object had called to her, but she stumbled into the upstairs office and sat at the nanny's sewing machine to rest her legs. Her foot slipped to the pedal and the machine whirred to action. Without pulling back, she watched the stitch form, like a rope, in front of her eyes.

It would've been easy to half-ass it, but something stopped her. She wanted, for once in her life, to do things right. While the girl was at school, and late in the night, she learned. Then invested. Badgered her withered network to get her into the right rooms. Eventually the vacant apartment in New York became a studio, became 'the Atelier', Olivia was once more on her payroll, and before she knew it, Cora had become a New Yorker once more.