13. Megan
— ? —
Megan
We are trying to be normal, and we are extremely bad at it.
It’s a Saturday, the kind I used to dream about out loud, and Gray has decided that normal people make elaborate breakfasts. So he is at the stove waging a private war against a pan of eggs.
He will not let me help. He has told me three times that he has a technique.
The technique appears to be panic.
“They’re sticking,” I offer from the island.
“They are not sticking. This is necessary to have crunchy sides.”
“Those aren’t eggs anymore, Gray.”
“Nice.”
Charlotte is at the kitchen table, gravely destroying a piece of toast in the name of art. She looks up at the sludge congealing in the pan with the calm of a small health inspector.
“Mama. The breakfast looks wrong.”
“I see that, bug.”
“Is that good?”
“Very good,” Gray says, scraping something the color of regret onto a plate.
Charlotte nods, satisfied, like the universe has confirmed an important rule, and goes back to her toast.
This is the dream. I want to be very clear with myself that this is exactly the dream, a Saturday with no war in it. Because there’s a part of me that’s started bracing again. And I want it on the record that I noticed how happy I was before whatever happens next.
“I made a cat,” Charlotte announces, holding up a piece of toast with a jam situation on it.
Gray abandons the crime scene at the stove and comes to study it with total seriousness, hands behind his back like a man at a gallery.
“Remarkable. Bold use of the medium.” He tilts his head. “Is that the cat’s tail, or is that what happened to the eggs?”
“Tail.”
“A relief. The eggs were tragedy enough for one morning.” He straightens. “Where does it go?”
“The fridge.”
She says this the way other people say the Louvre. Everything she makes goes on the fridge. The fridge is her gallery, her permanent collection, her legacy. Gray has learned to treat each acquisition with the curatorial gravity it deserves.
“Naturally the fridge.” He takes the toast like it’s on loan from a museum, then pauses. “Inside the fridge, though. Not on it. And eat it at night.”
Charlotte frowns. “Why?”
“Because if we leave jam toast on the outside, we get ants. And cockroaches.” He opens the fridge door with ceremony. “And nobody wants cockroaches critiquing your art.”
Charlotte considers this, then nods solemnly. “Inside.”
“Inside.” He places it on the top shelf with reverence, angling it just so. “There. Prime position. Eye level for the discerning visitor. The milk will be very impressed.”
Charlotte beams at him with her whole face. I have to look down at my coffee.
Watching the two of them interact with that easy back and forth, and seeing the way he treats her seriousness with actual respect instead of talking down to her, creates a tightness in my chest that I am simply not emotionally prepared to handle before nine in the morning.
“More coffee?” Gray is already reaching for my mug.
“I can get my own coffee.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to.” He fills it anyway, sets it down. Squeezes my shoulder once on the way past.
It’s such a small thing. The kindest small thing in the world.
And it’s the first pebble in the avalanche I don’t see coming yet.
The avalanche starts over shoes.
Charlotte has grown out of her purple sandals overnight, the way kids do, just to keep their parents humble. I mention it across the wreckage of breakfast, a note to myself, really. The running list every parent keeps in the back of the skull.
Gray doesn’t even look up from the eggs he’s pretending are food.
“There’s a card in the drawer by the door. The black one. Use it for whatever she needs.” He shrugs. “Been meaning to tell you to just take it.”
And there it is. The pebble.
It’s nothing, it’s lovely. It’s a man who loves my kid, offering to buy her shoes.
I say a light nothing. I’ve got it, thanks. Gray nods and goes back to the eggs. Charlotte tells us a very long story about a dog she may have invented. The morning rolls on, warm and ordinary and good.
But the pebble sits in my stomach and does not dissolve.
All morning, under the laughing and the toast art and the coffee I didn’t pour myself, I keep turning it over. Trying to understand why a kind man offering to buy my daughter shoes made the back of my neck go cold.
By the time the dishes are done, I understand it.
I am a bookkeeper. I take in work for the marina and two restaurants back in the harbor town, remote now, plus a few small clients here. It’s good work, honest work. Work I’m proud of.
On its own, it would cover a modest apartment and groceries and a child’s shoes in a town where the name Lawson means nothing.
It would not cover one week of this.
This apartment, the doorman, the cameras that kept my daughter safe. The car he drove me to my divorce in. The food in the fridge under the jam cat. The school I’ve been looking at. The coat he had sent over when mine wore through, that I never once asked for.
I pay for none of it. I couldn’t come within a mile of it. Gray pays for everything, quietly, engineered so I never have to feel it.
And the reason I never have to feel it is that he’s also, technically, my biggest client. He hired the bookkeeper. My largest account is the man whose bed I woke up in this morning.
I have built my whole safety, my daughter’s whole safety, the roof and the locks and the future, on a single man.
Again.
I sit at the island after Charlotte goes off to play, and I make myself look at it straight. Because I’ve learned the hard way what happens to women who won’t.
I did this once already.
I married a man and let him become the house and the accounts and the entire architecture of my life. I called it love. And then one afternoon, I fled a city with one bag and a baby because everything I thought was mine turned out to be his.
I swore I would never be that woman again.
The harbor town. The bait-shop apartment with the window that stuck. The marina books. The small hard careful life. The entire point of all of it was that it was mine. It was small and it was mine down to the last dollar, and I was free in a way I never once was inside the Lawson fortune.
And now I’m back inside a fortune.
A kinder one and a safer one. Built by a far better man, with the cameras pointed out instead of in. But a fortune is a fortune.
And there’s a worse layer under it I can barely make myself touch.
I don’t just live on his money. I work for it too. He is my landlord and my employer and the man I want, all braided into one person. I can’t pull a single strand loose without the whole thing coming with it.
If this ended, I wouldn’t only lose the man. I’d lose the roof. The income. The safety my daughter sleeps inside every night. I’d be right back in that parking garage, unable to turn a key, except this time I’d have walked into it myself with my eyes wide open.
Having sworn on everything I own that I never would again.
It doesn’t even help that Gray is good.
Bradley wasn’t good and it ruined me. But Gray being good doesn’t make me less dependent. It just makes the cage more comfortable.
And a comfortable cage is still the thing that taught me the floor was never mine.
The television is murmuring in the next room. When I drift in to check on Charlotte, her cartoons have ended and the news has taken over. A name I used to wear is crawling across the bottom of the screen.
LAWSON HOLDINGS SHARES SLIDE AS BOYCOTT WIDENS.
I stand in the doorway and watch a serious man at a desk explain it in the flat voice they save for other people’s ruin.
Weeks of viral footage, he says. The recording of the family matriarch.
The public collapse of the company’s image.
Consumers have organized. Retailers are quietly pulling Lawson products.
Two partners have walked. The stock has slid a third straight week.
They’re using words like reputational freefall.
There’s a clip of the name being unscrewed from a storefront wall. Letter by letter.
I built the first domino of that on a ballroom floor with my own steady voice. I feel the strangest small grief.
Because every brick of that empire was somebody’s safety once. Eleanor built a fortune so no one could ever touch her, and it’s coming down anyway. The locks didn’t save her. The money didn’t save her.
And I am standing in another fortune telling myself the locks will save me this time.
They won’t.
There it is on the screen, in case I’d managed to miss it everywhere else. There is no fortune solid enough to stand on if it isn’t yours.
Eleanor’s is falling. Bradley’s is rubble. And mine is built entirely on a man who could, in theory, on some afternoon I cannot predict, move a ring.
“Mama?” Charlotte has materialized at my hip.
“You do a face.” She demonstrates, screwing up her small features into a frown of tremendous tragedy. “Like that. Don’t do the face.”
A laugh gets out of me despite everything. Because she’s right. And because two and a half years old is too young to already be managing your mother’s moods. And because I love her so much in that second it’s hard to breathe around.
“Sorry, bug. No more face.” I boop her nose. “Promise.”
Gray comes around the corner with a dish towel over his shoulder. He takes in the screen. Takes in my face. Reads both in a single pass.
“Hey.” Gentle. “Talk to me. What is it?”
And I look at him.
This man I love. This man I need. This man I cannot tell the difference about. Standing in his beautiful kitchen full of food I can’t pay for. The jam cat on the fridge behind him.
I open my mouth to tell him the enormous frightening thing that’s mine alone to carry.
“The eggs really were terrible,” I say.
He laughs, surprised. The moment passes.
He comes and puts an arm around both of us and the three of us stand there and watch the Lawson name come down off a wall together.
I let him hold me. I lean into the warm and the safe and the smell of him.
And I don’t say the thing.
The not-saying settles into my chest and stays there all evening. A door I haven’t decided yet whether to open. While the man I might be saving myself from and the man I might be in love with go right on being the same person.
Pouring me a coffee I am perfectly capable of pouring myself.