Chapter Text
How's one to know?
I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones
In a faith forgotten land
In from the snow
Your touch brought forth an incandescent glow
Tarnished but so grand
And the old widow goes to the stone every day
But I don't, I just sit here and wait
Grieving for the living
Snow had a soft, indulgent quality. Whether collecting on a lawn of soft, dense clover or the rough, severe angles of a concrete jungle, winter blanketed the world like it was settling to bed. Tucked in, tight at the corners, sounds from the next room over muffled by thin walls and a heavy comforter.
Or perhaps that was a privileged point of view. Lena had been thinking about that lately.
She gazed on from her perch atop a stone bench that steadily stole any remnants of warmth away from her. Moonlight gleamed and sparkled in the reflection of snowfall, patchy under a naked canopy of trees, and she considered how the cold was so gentle here. Were she indoors, the incessant chatter of the news as it revolved through endless footage of a savage winter storm further south would echo between her ears for hours. The snow there was its own beast, one too huge and encompassing to bear the weight of. It froze people to the ground, buried entire communities too deep to breathe.
For Lena, the snow was only a cosmetic detail. She did her own burying.
Her eyes fell back to the plot of icy earth before her. Something always pulled her back here. He still had his own insatiable gravity, even from six feet under. Lena still had not decided whether she envied his easy magnetism or preferred it where it now lay, lifeless and innocuous.
Something shuffled beside her, snapping her back into her body, but she did not turn. She had found a perfect position on her frozen seat, legs asleep so they did not feel discomfort, skin numb to the cold, neck at a soft angle so she could relax her shoulders. She had not moved in years, despite only arriving an hour or so before. Sometimes she liked to imagine her feet planted in the ground, twining vines wrapping up and around them to keep her rooted there forever.
The thing continued to make noise, and Lena dully realized she might be in the presence of another person. The idea sparked unease, and she found her back straightening of its own accord. A beat to hold her breath, and then the silence was broken by a soft huff. Footsteps landed a few feet from her, crunching in the makeshift tundra.
The silence carried on, weighed down by the tension of a nearby stranger. Lena finally let herself glance over. Her eyes landed on well-worn boots, then traveled up to find soft, mismatched clothing, pulled together by nothing but the frigid demands of the season.
The newcomer met her gaze, nodded politely, and looked back at the ground ahead. Her voice was beautiful thunder. “I hate to bother you.”
If Lena were of a more poetic mind, she might have imagined the entire cemetery reeling in shock of the abrupt noise. Her chin dipped deeper into her scarf. She didn’t force any words in response.
“God knows I wish I didn’t have to.” Intoned with a flat delivery, but it could’ve been mistaken for a joke under different circumstances. Lena did not mistake it for one. The stranger shuffled on her feet, then cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, do you mind if I sit next to you? I won’t be long.”
Lena nodded stiffly without thought. The stranger huffed a sigh of relief and lowered herself carefully, keeping as much distance as possible on the narrow slab of stone.
Minutes passed. Snow continued to gather in a uniform layer across the ground, pillaring on crosses and lining the curves of italicized engravings. Lena studied one such cross drolly, letting her mind wander to the way the religious iconography had pitted and dulled against the tests of weather and time. She wondered if people aged in a similar way, slowly worn down until the snow rendered them unrecognizable. She wondered if her mother had once been as noble a display. She wondered if she herself had become similarly scarred.
Another noise broke her out of her contemplation. She felt annoyance flare up and be doused just as quickly, recognizing the disruption for the pitiful sound it was. The stranger hurriedly pulled out a handkerchief and tried to subtly clear her face. Lena finally studied her, noticing the way her long fingers trembled with cold and how her nose was red as a child’s holiday tale.
The stranger felt her gaze. “Look at me,” she said despondently, getting ahead of Lena before any disparaging words could reach the air first. “Promised you I’d stay quiet and here I go, making a ruckus.”
“I don’t mind.” Lena almost didn’t recognize the words as her own until the other woman’s eyes widened a small bit. The motion revealed eyes the color of the sky, glittering and shifting color like a precious stone. Lena looked away. “I don’t often meet anyone out here.”
The woman shrugged. “Not many who would want to risk being frozen to their seat, I imagine. I miss having the choice.” Her words were long and ponderous, like she was thinking them out as they left her chapped lips.
The mausoleum beyond Lena sat desolate and dark. She had always imagined it as a black hole in the center of the cemetery, sucking in light and laughter and utterly destroying it in a display defiant of nature. Perhaps that was par for the course here, like it had been all Lena’s life. Even as a child, she had imagined her own house a similar type of grim mausoleum, only housing the living rather than their ancestors.
“I’m Kara, by the way.”
Lena let a momentary pulse of surprise tip an eyebrow up on her face. Kara didn’t look at her expectantly, waiting for a return of introduction. Instead, she bundled her arms up across her chest, curving her spine forward. “It’s been twelve years and I still keep ending up in this old place. I hate it here.”
It would only be polite to return an inch of the olive branch Kara had extended. That was how normal people communicated. Lena finally shifted, uncrossing her legs at the knees only to set them under the bench, recrossed at the ankles. “Three. For me, I mean.”
And she still heard him criticizing her every breathing moment, but that was a bit more than Lena was ready to share.
Kara nodded, a twist of emotion pulling at her mouth. “I hope it gets easier for you.”
“Oh, it’s easy,” Lena responded, immediately regretting the words when Kara glanced over at her. “I mean, it’s complicated.” Lena sighed, bringing up a gloved hand to rub her forehead. Kara’s bright eyes watched her intently, open and curious without feeling insistent, and just the right combination to encourage Lena to open her mouth again. “He wasn’t someone I recognized when he died. The person I grew up with died long before the man in that mausoleum.”
“I never really got to know the man I’m here for,” Kara responded in kind. A booted toe kicked at the snow. “But losing a parent never gets easier, even the third time.” The silhouette of her didn’t change, but something in Lena’s heart broke at the admittance.
The moment didn’t last. Kara suddenly shook her head, like she was breaking a thousand-yard stare, and pushed to her feet. “I’ll leave you to your bench now. I apologize for the intrusion.” And even under the weight of grief, her smile was warm and genuine.
Footsteps crunched away, down a path hidden by snow, and Lena didn’t know what possessed her to call out, “My name is Lena.”
Kara turned, the smile returning to her face a little wider. “It was nice to meet you, Lena.” Not a spark of recognition tainting the words. Lena almost called after her, but she had done enough damage for one night.
She struggled to reassume her previous position of relative comfort, having been lost in the interruption. Her thoughts circled back around to the snow as she left marks in it, shuffling and switching positions, but it didn’t seem nearly as bright as it had before. What was snow but romanticized weather patterns? There was no real beauty in covering up and distracting from what lay underneath.
The bench felt a little colder, after all was said and done. Lena took that as her cue to leave.
_______________________________________________
Oh, goddamn
My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand
Taking mine, but it's been promised to another
Oh, I can't
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you
They met again in the death of winter, when most people would be shuffling toward the nearest flame with desperation in their shivering bones. Seeking out companionship was not something Lena was accustomed to, but when she saw the lone figure at her seat in the distance, her usual disdain for sharing air with another was absent.
The path, winding through fields of past loved ones, extended her arrival enough for her to practice her entrance, but there was no need. Kara beckoned her over without prompting, and Lena found herself in tenuous joint custody of a crumbling bench.
Bare branches rustled overhead. Kara didn’t break the silence, as Lena had perhaps expected. She held a glove crumpled in her bruising grip, which prevented nervous twisting and picking at her fingers. Was she anxious? Lena herself had the same habit, buried beneath years of training.
The wind picked up again, slicing through Lena’s designer coats as if they were never there. She grabbed her elbows and squeezed. No one in their right mind would sit here long.
She absently noted a scattering of undisturbed snow resting on Kara’s shoulders. Then she noticed the thin, frayed jacket covering those shoulders and frowned. Kara wasn’t even wearing a scarf, and the glove that still wrapped around one hand looked threadbare.
“Aren’t you cold?” Her words sounded muffled by the cemetery air, like it wished she wouldn’t speak in its presence.
Kara didn’t move. “I’m warm-natured.” She smiled ruefully. “Don’t have much for this weather anyway.”
Lena ruminated on her words, working out a backstory that made sense of them. Her brother’s mausoleum loomed in front of them like it could freeze them in its shadow.
Sensing Lena’s curiosity, Kara picked up her head. Still looking straight ahead, she continued, “I’m not from here. Don’t plan on staying longer than I have to, anyway, so it's not worth spending the money on twenty jackets.”
Lena knew for a fact the wind chill had been forecast as negative twelve today.
“Are you sure?” Normally, she would be mortified at the concern bleeding from her voice, but the cemetery had always felt like a world separate from real life. No one here to scold her lack of propriety.
Kara stiffened almost imperceptibly. “I’ll be okay. Really.” Not defensive, not really, but guarded. Lena didn’t know why she was surprised.
They resumed their vigil without ceremony. Trauma was said to bond two people; perhaps its mere acknowledgement was capable of the same. Lena couldn’t think of another reason for the warmth beginning to unfurl in her chest. She was not normally one for small talk or easy back-and-forth, much less befriending a transient stranger.
She was still puzzled when her mouth opened to ask, “So why are you up here, then?”
Kara didn’t seem bothered by the question. Lena got the impression Kara was more of an outgoing personality than these scant hours in the cemetery would indicate. “My mom. She’s… well, she needed some help around the house for a few months, and my sister couldn’t afford to come up here that long. Her job isn’t the type you can just uproot and disappear from for so long.”
She stopped, leaving Lena to assume there were no other siblings available to shoulder the responsibility. “And you do?” she prompted, immediately berating herself for pushing for information not freely offered. “Have that type of job, I mean.”
Kara laughed harshly. “No, I didn’t.”
Lena took the cue and returned her attention to the struggling grass at her feet. She felt chastised, perhaps a result of the voice in the back of her head constantly criticizing her every breath. She almost apologized, but was loath to again break the comfortable silence between them.
Kara sighed. Her thick shoulders visibly sagged. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Just been a long few months, I guess.”
Lena glanced over again and choked on her words, arrested by the shocking blue of the eyes returning her gaze. They looked at each other for a long moment, content to study the other in minute detail, until Lena cleared her throat and glanced away. She felt like a child, tongue-tied and blushing.
“Do you know who I am?” Lena asked, unable to stop the words before they left her mouth. It had been squirming under her skin, that familiar twinge of shame and uncertainty that accompanied her everywhere.
Kara tilted her head, still gazing unabashedly. “Should I?”
Unwilling to take that as an answer, unable to let dead dogs lie, unaccustomed to letting herself luxuriate in kindness from anybody, let alone herself, Lena gestured at the mausoleum in front of them. “Do you know that name?”
Kara finally, cursedly moved her striking eyes off Lena to squint where she had been directed. “Luthor?”
And so Lena could add one more soul to the long, long list of people, potential friendships, in ashes before they could even bloom. It was reassuring, in a way, to know nothing had changed. “It’s not technically my name anymore,” she still said haltingly, as if that would do anything to change Kara’s opinion of her. “Nor is he my blood. But… still.”
This was when Kara’s kind countenance turned dark and twisted, or she simply stood and walked away without a word.
Instead, Kara nodded, taking in the information slowly. “Ah.”
Lena waited.
Kara did not move.
“What do you mean, ‘ah’?” Lena asked incredulously. “Aren’t you disgusted?”
“By your brother? I don’t know much detail, but enough to guess that mausoleum is there to keep people from spitting on his grave.” Kara leveled her with that devastatingly patient gaze. “Enough to know that you and he are not the same.”
Lena couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t breathe. She climbed to her feet, feeling the cold so piercingly her veins were surely freezing over. “It doesn’t matter. I knew him and I didn’t stop him. I could’ve--”
“You have done enough, I’m sure,” Kara interrupted. Even her interruptions were sickeningly soft, and for a fleeting moment Lena wanted to shout at her, hit her with something, just to dredge up the reservoir of true turbulent emotion she knew lay beneath, yet to be tapped.
But Kara smiled sunnily, and God, if Lena didn’t feel her knees grow weak at the sight. “Although if you want to do anything more, you could always sit here with me a little longer.”
Lena sat there with her a little longer, drowning in the distinct sensation of losing herself in the presence of someone so gentle.
___________________________________
I wish to know
The fatal flaw that makes you long to be
Magnificently cursed
He's in the room
Your opal eyes are all I wish to see
He wants what's only yours
A house can take many forms. Lena was only familiar with the one: stark, clean, labyrinthine and echoing. It was a matter of inevitability that the home she tried to fashion for herself as an adult was of the same blueprint.
Watching Kara wander that severe landscape, a flame picking through a dead and decaying house, was akin to watching an ant lost on its way home, following trails that end cold and circling the same terrain without end. She was so small amidst the historical dark wood, seating that cost more than her net worth and books so dense even Lena had not read them.
And yet, every time Kara turned to look back at her, her spark of innocent wonder made Lena’s heart swell with something for which she had no name.
Even so, she had no qualms holding Kara back from touching some particularly precious work of art or piece of history. She had no desire to face her husband’s ire today.
They ended up in the kitchen, an easy middle ground. Nothing to break, ruin, or otherwise babysit Kara over; filled with what counted for personality and spirit in this framework of a home. Lena was well-versed in the art of dining a guest, pouring perfectly calculated tea and cutting fruit at the summit of its season.
She made Kara a mug of hot cocoa. Kara’s cheeks dimpled in gratitude.
They began to make the inroads toward friendship, paths dusty and awkward for Lena. She stumbled through her half of the conversation, content to listen to Kara fill time with her stories and watch her mouth shape words in that curiously non-northern accent of hers. She lived in National City, Lena learned; she had been in Metropolis since the beginning of fall and anticipated returning home that spring. She learned Kara had a degree in journalism, that she had an altruistic undercurrent and a penchant for fried food Lena had never deigned to try. She was clumsy (all the more reason to stay out of the main sitting area) and delightful (all the more reason to ply her with hot chocolate and nod with wide eyes at all her stories) and tall (all the more reason to offer a heavy coat forgotten in the depths of her husband’s closet, and then insist on it on the way out the door; surely it would fit her square shoulders more aptly).
She learned Kara was as beautiful as she was handsome, and her eyes sparkled when she spoke of home, and her hands were large and strong.
She learned something interesting about herself.
Kara swirled the dregs of her hot cocoa, once again letting her eyes wander to all the appliances sitting shiny and unused on the countertops. Lena raised an eyebrow. “If you comment on how nice everything is one more time, I’ll be forced to lock you in the backyard until you learn to behave.”
Kara’s cheeks flushed. “It is not my fault the stuff in here costs more than the sum total of everything my family has ever owned. Let me look a little!”
Lena rolled her eyes, relishing the harmless bickering. “You’re like a child, you know.”
Kara grinned at her and took another little sip of her beverage.
Despite her better instincts, the question pressing at the back of Lena’s mind would only be evaded for so long. She cleared her throat, prompting Kara to turn her searing attention back onto her. Its weight almost dissuaded Lena from opening her mouth; was an off-handed question worth breaking their unspoken truce?
Lena had never been one to put off discomfort, unfortunately.
“You mentioned you’re from National City,” she began, struggling to maintain eye contact. Kara nodded encouragingly, lifting the empty cup to her lips and pouting when she noticed its pitiful contents. Again, the mere expression nearly put Lena off her question in favor of making more cocoa to solve Kara’s simple frown. When had Lena become so soft?
“Did you ever explain why you’re here?”
There was no physical reaction to the question, not that Lena could see, but sapphire eyes immediately flicked down to the ground. A war raged in three long seconds. Kara breathed in and out. “No, I didn’t.”
Ending her sentence there spoke volumes. Lena pressed her lips together. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.” She, of all people, shouldn’t be pushing for secrets.
Kara’s head shook slowly, even as her eyes stayed pinned to the tile. “It’s okay. Really. Honestly, it isn’t anything worth lying about, so if you want to know, that’s okay.”
Lena couldn’t decide whether this was a roundabout way of telling her to back off, or inviting her to inquire further. Mixed messages and half-truths were her family’s favored method of communication, but it felt different when there was no callous disregard for how it might affect the other. And Lena was nearly drowning in how much regard she held inside for Kara.
She took the plunge, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t sever what was only beginning to grow between them. “If you’re sure. I only… I would like to know more about you, if that’s okay.” Could she be any more obvious? That ever-present anxiety flared, waiting for Kara to sneer and back away like she should have in the cemetery.
Instead, Kara’s head lolled to the side a bit. She let her eyes fall somewhere past Lena’s shoulder, expression tight and resigned, like she already knew how this conversation was sure to end. A small breath lifted her shoulders, braced against something Lena couldn’t see. “My mom lives a little over an hour away from here, in Midvale.” The words tumbled through her lips, like a stopper had been tugged out, leaving what was pent behind it to crash out. A dam releasing pressure, a rope cut to allow free-fall, gravity increased until friction gave out. “She’s had cancer for a while. Chemotherapy, all that. I try to visit as often as I can, even though she insists it’s not worth flying all the way out here.” Kara’s lips pulled into a wan smile at the memory. It faded quickly.
Lena wished she could melt through the floor, or at least eject herself through a window for dredging up such painful information, regardless of how simply it was delivered. She eyed Kara’s hands fidgeting in her lap, picking at plundered nail beds. This was clearly, obviously a sore subject; why had Kara let her even ask? Lena should have stopped while she was ahead, before she could find new and worse ways to test their fledgling friendship. A familiar pattern, holding flame to desert brush and acting surprised when it erupted in flame.
“She was in an accident a couple weeks ago. Everything is gonna be okay, but the doctors said it would be best if someone was home to help take care of her for a while: enforce weight-bearing precautions, help with groceries, all that. Mom hates it.” Kara traced myriad lines in the countertop. The pads of her fingers pushed invisible hieroglyphs into the cold material. “I try to help where I can, but she’s stubborn. Alex couldn’t come out, even though she has the PTO saved up. She said it’s already planned for something later this year, and it ‘just made more sense’ for me to be the one to come up instead.”
Lena knew it was a tactless question, but she asked it anyway: “And your dad?”
Kara shrugged haplessly. A strangled noise fought out of her throat. “I spend a lot of time at the cemetery when I’m around.”
Lena digested this information, trying to give Kara the time to pull herself into a shape more easily managed. Instead, Kara continued with approximate bitterness coloring her tone. Not quite there, but sharpening her words nonetheless. “I was drowning in work, and Alex and I kept arguing back and forth, and Mom was telling me not to bother coming at all… so I quit. Packed two bags and got on the next plane.
“So you’ve been hanging out all day with an unemployed 28-year-old living with her mom again,” Kara finished, chuckling self-defeatedly. She wrapped her arms around herself solidly. Lena remembered seeing the same in the cemetery not so long ago, huddled against a lethal northeastern winter in clothes meant for a far more balmy climate. A figure sculpted in bronze, magnificent, yet inhabiting little space; too stubborn to admit that the wind bit through her, too chivalrous to insist that her sister share the responsibility. Too kind to rebuff a stranger in a graveyard.
Suddenly, Kara took on dimension. Her mold gained detail. A gentle giant, dependable to a fault, accepting every weight thrown onto her shoulders until the only thing that budged to make room was herself. Willing to give and give until no one expected anything else, becoming a shadow easily overlooked in favor of louder problems. Discerning enough to see to the core of a woman sharing her bench, while buried beneath her own immense grief.
“I can leave if you’d like me to,” Kara said, almost too softly to be heard.
Lena looked up in surprise, but Kara rounded her shoulders over her cup like a wounded animal. “What?” Lena asked, too shocked to form any other arguments.
Kara gestured at the kitchen around them, gleaming in monochrome steel and shining marble. “I don’t belong in your world. I’m sure you could tell as soon as I walked through the front door.”
Try as soon as I saw your coat , Lena didn’t say out loud. She watched Kara vanish into reticent, self-inflicted shame. Her broad shoulders drooped like she could turn invisible if she tried hard enough. “So I can go.”
She got so far as to step one foot flat on the floor and begin to put her weight on it before Lena finally broke into action, thrusting herself forward until she was nearly bent double on her stool. Her hand stopped inches from Kara’s, but Kara stumbled to a halt all the same.
“I didn’t ask you to leave.” Lena was breathless. Her fingers flexed and dropped back to her side. “If you would feel more comfortable somewhere else, that’s fine too, but don’t assume I won’t go with you.” In a flash of sincerity she instantly regretted, she added, “I would probably feel more comfortable wherever you are, anyway.”
The air immediately changed with her confession, growing thick with something she could not identify beyond an ill-advised, lingering ache that took root between every rib. It terrified her almost as deeply as the conflicted scrunch she couldn’t interpret between Kara’s eyebrows.
Kara eventually, slowly, sat again. One open hand laid out against the counter between them, close enough to be purposeful. It cut through whatever anxious haze blanketed Lena’s mind, letting a ray of hope pierce through.
“I would like that,” Kara breathed, the beginnings of a relieved smile splitting her face.
Weight lifted from Lena’s chest, leaving something so pure and bright her head nearly spun. So intoxicated was she by this unexpected twist into fantasy that she couldn’t repress the emotion spilling onto her face, joy unbridled as a child’s.
They sat like that, grinning like fools, until a familiar scrape at the door sent a jolt up Lena’s spine. She shot out of her seat, ignorant of how Kara’s face immediately fell in confusion or how her hand swept up to take hold of Lena’s wrist.
Lena flinched at the motion, her seat careening behind her like a theme park ride, and Kara froze. They stood motionless, staring and dry-mouthed, animals stranded on a highway as twin lights grew on the horizon.
A man blustered into the sitting room through the kitchen’s doorway, muttering in a way meant to carry through the house, and tossed his coat on a plush couch. “Lena!” the man barked, before turning and finally taking notice of the statues in the kitchen.
He was still. That was never a good thing. Lena mentally cursed and spun to glide to the kitchen’s threshold, leaning her shoulder against it and letting her slender frame take up most of its space. Her hip curved out in a dual attempt to distract and obstruct. “Yes, dear?”
He was unimpressed. “I was unaware we were to have guests this evening.” His words were clipped and growled. Lena felt the countdown begin in the back of her mind, simultaneously winding her up tight and cutting through his self control.
“She’s only a friend of mine,” Lena rushed to assure him. “She was just about to leave, actually; we lost track of time.” She felt Kara’s warmth suddenly closer to her back and prayed to whatever was listening that she would remain silent.
He looked between them suspiciously. “You have friends now?”
Lena felt desperate as the image she strove to paint of herself for Kara summarily fell apart under her husband’s callous, inattentive hand. He cared too little to stay longer than painfully necessary, citing work to be done in his study, and Lena felt her backbone sweep out with him. She was too ashamed to face the kitchen and the rejection building within the weight of that solemn look, too terrified to determine whether it was pity or disgust that spoiled it.
Instead, Kara’s knuckles brushed against hers, and without a word their fingers intertwined. Hers were calloused, like a journalist’s shouldn’t be, and warm and comforting.
Oh. Lena’s chest simultaneously expanded and twisted into a knot. Goddamn .
She learned something more about herself.
______________________________________
Oh, goddamn
My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand
Taking mine, but it's been promised to another
Oh, I can't
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered
Once upon a time, Lena dreamed of a knight in shining armor. He would ride in atop a horse twenty hands tall and swing her into the saddle as if she were made of porcelain. He would be dashing and strong and the pinnacle of everything she was expected to marry, minus the characteristics that would make him unbearable to speak to. Those that would gain him the approval of Lena’s mother, a man she might throw on a blind date with her daughter for the afternoon instead of signing a field trip form.
Then Lena grew up and wanted autonomy. She wanted rebellion, she wanted strife and victory and evolution. She dreamed of taking the reins of her family’s business and changing the world with it, spitting in her mother’s face with her brother at her side, before he became a shadow of himself. She would encounter a man unafraid of her status and adamant perseverance, and she would not have to box herself in for him, and together they would champion her many schemes to address the world’s faults.
Then Lena grew up. She wanted peace, to live without interruption, to visit her brother’s graveside without being trailed and pelted with words sharpened to a razor edge. She dreamed of a quiet existence, alone with her grief and her projects, where her mother’s bitter influence was not so easily tasted. She would move out of the city, take a job in some private lab where no one knew her name, and find the right combination of pills and folklore remedies to sleep through the night.
Today, sitting at a familiar dining table, repeatedly redirecting her focus back from a smile so bright it was infecting her every thought, Lena felt growing pains.
Her husband, ever the business mogul, was droning on about figures and numbers that Lena could understand if she gave a singular damn about them. Her mother ate politely at the head of the table, eyes flicking between the pair. Lena knew she was not being subtle; she found she had not a singular damn to give about that, either.
Her husband laughed, a sniveling thing interrupted by snuffling snorts, and it concentrated Lena enough to feel a wave of revulsion. “They’d be idiots to not take it,” he was saying, lips shiny with spittle. “But then, only a board of idiots could find themselves in this kind of position in the first place. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.” His smile was predatory as he ripped into a piece of meat. Juice ran down his chin and he dabbed at it delicately with a cloth.
Lillian, despite having handpicked this man from Lena’s crowd of suitors four years ago, looked at him a second too long. Lena recognized the flash of disgust in her eyes. “Good.” Monosyllabic and cryptic, her preferred manner of communication.
Her icy gaze swept back onto Lena, calculating and stern. “Lena, dear, you don’t seem very interested in what Morgan has to say.” As if on cue, her husband remembered she was sitting at his side and turned to face her, assuming the correct disappointment at her mother’s accusation. He also took a large swig of his glass, leaving a red stain above his upper lip.
Lena tipped her chin up. “My apologies,” she said, as was expected of her. “I did not sleep well last night.”
Her husband scoffed. “All that time you’re spending with women off the street is not helping, I’m sure.”
Lillian leaned forward, intrigue sparked. Her disappointment was poised overhead like a guillotine prepared to fall on Lena’s bare neck at the slightest provocation. She felt it sharply, ever sensitive to the whims of the only parent she had, ever aware of the standards she would never reach. Their originator, after all, was too dead to give her any tips.
“What is this?”
Her husband’s eyes glinted with the prospect of information his benefactor did not yet know, even if it was at the cost of his beloved, til death do they part. “Oh, haven’t you heard? I found her entertaining some pauper in the kitchen the other day. She assures me it was a singular occurrence, but I have noticed her absence at the house keenly since they began these little outings.” He stuck out his bottom lip in a display of forlorn acceptance, lacking in any of the finer points of a convincing performance.
Lillian settled back once again, spine straight as the carved wooden seat supporting it. “I see.” With two words, the world reversed on its axis until Lillian towered above a shivering eight-year-old girl once again. Their never-ending pattern: disappointed, yet unsurprised. Lena’s chest tightened, caught in wire being slowly tightened by Lillian’s silence.
She does not deserve an explanation, Lena told herself. I do not have to explain my actions. “She’s only an acquaintance.” I am a grown woman who is allowed to have her own friends. “I ran into her at the cemetery, and she was cold, so I offered her some tea to help warm up. She’s not from here.”
“Didn’t smell like tea,” her husband muttered.
Lillian tutted, picked up her glass and swirled the dark liquid inside. “You still visit the cemetery? I thought you were done with that ages ago. The past is the past, dear. Move on.” The frigid way that familiar, empty pet name fell from her lips made Lena achingly empty inside. Never mind that Lex had been Lillian’s pride and joy for decades; she was a businesswoman, and businesswomen did not let something pesky like family or grief come between them and success.
Lena supposed that was the figure she had never quite cut. Maybe Lillian had seen it in her all those years ago: that she would rather be caught sharing hot chocolate in her kitchen with a stray picked out of the snow than promise her soul to the corporate devil.
But then, Kara was no stray dog.
“I find it calming.”
“You should find it useless,” Lillian corrected. “There is nothing for you there but a reminder of your failures. I expect to see you taking a larger part in Morgan’s operations from here on, Lena. How can I trust you to take over this business one day if you can’t even help him pilot his own?”
“Hey, I don’t need her help with my business,” her husband protested.
Lena finally looked back at her mother, returning her gaze and feeling the steel drain out of her at the familiar downturn of red-lined lips. After a moment, her eyes dropped back to the plate of flawless food set before her, halfway picked at and ignored. “Yes, Mother.” Like an animal with its belly exposed.
After a pause, Lillian fired a final parting shot. “And find more appropriate friends. We have an image to uphold.”
Her husband, ill-equipped to take part in a conversation that did not revolve around him, steered the topic back to safer waters already treaded and recaptured Lillian’s reluctant attention. For all his business acumen, he was not a stellar socialite, and Lena hoped it caused Lillian as much despair to engage with him as it did his resigned wife.
She picked up a fork, aware that it was intended for salad only, and pushed at steak that made her stomach turn. If she were with Kara, they would probably be in some rundown diner where the food was fried and coffee was six dollars a pound. She had never before wished so fervently for something so mundane. In her mind’s eye, she took a small bite of greasy pizza and pretended to grimace at its texture while Kara laughed from across the table and shoveled three slices into her mouth just to prove it could fit.
Find more appropriate friends . Lena had done her time in the shark-infested waters Lillian was referring to, and she felt no desire to wade back into that syrupy concoction of desperate compliments and thinly-veiled threats. Kara was the first thing she had ever known to be genuine at first pass.
She was the only thing Lena had ever known to cause the fluttering squeeze in her chest when they exchanged a look or brushed hands on the sidewalk.
Perhaps it was not meant to last. Perhaps it would melt at the first signs of heat, like the intricate patterns of a snowflake caught on a mitten, but Lena could not find it in herself to pull away first.