Work Text:
i really
thought
i lost
you
— taylor swift, “the great war”
The honest truth is that Tom has never really known what to do with Shiv — not truly, not fully. When they met she was sixty-seven percent alcohol, and the rest of her was a tangle of rage and grief and hurt that made her tongue barbed and her mouth open and hot, greedy. Her hair was like a live flame and there were old, angry scars just below her hipbones, long and drawn with purpose, blood teased from her body like it would take the pain away with it. When she said Tom, it was like an arrow hooked into his heart, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.
Love her: that was the obvious answer, the one he’s not sure he even had much of a choice in. Fuck her on her impossibly soft sheets, surround her body with his, thrust so deep inside that he was all she knew, all she could think of, and her teeth left marks on his shoulders. Know her well enough to buy the toothpaste that wasn’t so aggressively minty that it made her wrinkle her nose when he kissed her goodbye in the morning, well enough to predict which words were matchsticks against the flint in her eyes, well enough reach over and zip up her dresses without her having to ask. Go to her when she called him and, even more importantly, when she stubbornly didn’t. Be sturdy and steadfast, hand pressed into her lower back, arm around her waist, kiss against her temple; be the person she could melt into so subtly that no one else would notice a thing. Watch her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth carefully, learning to read the language her face spoke, the way it voiced the things she’d never say. Tell her his tender dreams and looming fears, and pray they’d land safely in her hands, that she wouldn’t curl her fingers into her palms and pierce them with manicured nails.
But loving her has never seemed to be quite enough.
In the car, after the plane has landed and the world has been informed, Shiv says, “Tell me.” She’s not looking at Tom. Her hair is messy, wispy and windswept.
He sighs. He doesn’t want to. He is angry with Shiv, and with himself, and with the exhaustion he feels at the prospect of the coming days and weeks and months. He doesn’t know what he has now, corporately speaking, in Logan’s absence. He doesn’t know what he has lost now, maritally speaking, with Siobhan’s eyes trained on the window.
He doesn’t want to, but of course he does. He recounts the day for his estranged wife, the strange solid delicacy of Logan’s lifeless body, the incessant and futile chest compressions, the crew that had truly tried — though Tom could have told them, from the moment his weight finally broke the hinge of the bathroom door, that they’d never win the fight they were about to start, that there was no such thing as winning with Logan Roy.
“You should’ve called me,” Shiv whispers. “Right away.”
Tom stays silent. He did call her right away, about fifteen times. He got sent to voicemail like a pesky gnat she couldn’t be bothered with.
Siobhan Roy. Leave me a message.
(She never took his name. She’s a feminist, Tom told his mother. Shiv doesn’t belong to anyone, he said, jovially, all pride, as though Shiv had not always belonged to her father.
And what a mess of irritating paperwork, to change a surname, to get a new passport. Why do it for something, the sharp voice in Tom’s head demands snidely, that you never meant to keep?)
Shiv is crying, shoulders trembling with the effort to suppress sobs. Tom remembers back when she drank instead of eating, back when she tried to reject her body’s urges to stay alive. He remembers the sweaters she used to wear, sleeves longer than her arms. She used to laugh when she said my mother, though the accompanying stories were never funny, not even a little. Early in their relationship Tom saw her slap her brother and get slapped back, and she raced to him instead of the other way around, fingers a vice around his wrist; she got on her knees in the black car afterward and sucked him off and Tom knew it was a reward, an approval, that he’d done what she wanted by following her out of the room, but his wrist ached when he wrapped her hair around it and he felt like he’d failed a test.
“Sweetheart,” he says, on a sigh. She hates him, at least sometimes, and he has hated her back, sometimes, but that’s just where you fall when you stumble over the precipice of love.
He rests his hand on top of hers on the seat. She’s still wearing her wedding rings, and the stones are sharp against his palm, even though he was the one who gave them to her.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she says visciously.
So Tom doesn’t touch her. He pulls her body across the seat toward his, not entirely gentle, and holds her instead.
The car stops at the apartment that was once — and perhaps technically still is — theirs. Tom gets out, following after Shiv on autopilot, and she doesn’t snap at him to leave. There are faint lines of mascara on her cheeks, and her hairstyle has fallen apart completely. It feels like a repetition of an earlier time, a simpler time, Shiv spiky but not without softness, Tom in love with her so quickly that no matter how many times he traces back through his life, a roadmap of detours and false starts, he cannot find the moment to put a pin in it.
He does not protect Shiv. That has never been his role. He tethers her, and he knows that it’s a double-edged sword. When they met, he helped her feet find the ground, kept her from floating too high; it was only later that Shiv started to tug away, finding that rising and floating both required going upward.
He let go, when he fucked Shiv and her siblings over. He did some rising of his own. And then he wished, with immediacy that thoroughly pissed him off, that he was still holding her hand.
Now, he floats, unchained in the seas of Waystar Royco and of the Roy family. He has a legal document that binds him to Siobhan, he has the fact that he was breathing the same air as Logan Roy when his father-in-law stopped taking in oxygen, and he has whatever is happening now, as he hovers in the liminal space of his life and Shiv seems to sway on her feet.
He grabs her elbow. “Shower,” he says, and then after a beat of looking at her, the colour gone from her face beneath her smeared makeup, he amends, “Bed.” He steers her toward the bedroom, adds, “Wait, have you eaten?”
Shiv flattens her lips and shakes her head, breaking away from him.
“I can order — ”
“I’m not hungry,” she says. She kicks off her shoes, and walks into their — her — en suite bathroom, where she braces her hands against the countertop and takes long, slow breaths, paced out exactly the way Tom remembers breathing on train seats when he was hungover during his undergrad.
“Are you — uh — ” He crowds in closer to her again, places a hand on her hip. Her body has always felt like hallowed ground to him, hips breasts ass thighs filling his hands like a benediction. “Are you going to be sick?” he asks.
Shiv’s chin snaps up and her eyes clash against his in the mirror. They are wet, her eyes, and such a pretty blue: a cloudless sky, a calm sea, all the things she’s never been.
“No,” she says. She’s using her soft voice, the supple one, the one that doesn’t seem to allow her to finish words; even no sounds awkwardly abbreviated, like the second letter has been cleaved in two. It was once the voice she used to tell Tom secret things (the breath of old men on her neck, hands up her skirt in elevators corners, her teenage wrists threatening to snap from the pressure of her pushing back against their chests; the inpatient eating disorder treatment she lied her way through during college and the semester after when she ate nothing and took seven courses so she could graduate on time; the abortion and the blood on the floor of the hotel bathroom that she cleaned up herself, even scouring the grout).
Sometime after Tom gave her a ring he could hardly afford, it became the voice she used to lie to him.
He cannot define it now.
What he can do is what he knows Shiv used to do, on days that were far less fraught. He takes an excruciatingly soft cotton pad out of a glass container, and douses it with the solution she uses to remove her makeup. He sets to work removing the mascara trailed over her face. It feels like removing battle scars.
Shiv does not close her eyes. “You’re being nice to me,” she says, in that same voice, the one from low in her throat that she does not project.
Tom swipes the cotton over her chin. “You’re my wife.”
“Oh,” Shiv says, and her eyebrows do one of their complicated, inscrutable little dances. “Oh, fuck. Are husbands and wives supposed to be nice to each other?”
Her sarcasm makes him smile. He can’t hold it back anymore than he could hold down the sun in the morning, could hold Logan Roy to this mortal plane. “It’s something I’ve heard whispers about,” he murmurs, his attention focused on the sides of her jaw, the pinkish-yellow hue of her foundation lifting from her skin.
Shiv reaches up and takes his hand. He thinks she’s going to take the cotton round, continue removing her makeup herself. Instead, she wraps her fingers around his. She pulls his hand closer, kissing the knuckle of his middle finger. Her lips feel chapped, raw. Tom’s heart stutters about stupidly.
And then his finger is in her mouth, to the first joint, her tongue licking and swirling, and then deeper still. Shiv’s eyes are on his, because around sex she’s never been shy, never been hesitant. Her eyebrows raise and it’s easy for Tom to understand, a proposition he’s seen a thousand times.
He hesitates. Dead dad, he thinks. Divorce.
Shiv grabs at the collar of his shirt, exhausted, as ever, by what she’d called his bumfuck propriety. “Be nice to me, Tom,” she says, wheedling, mocking. And then her eyes change, dark as a storm, heavy as the beat of calm in the eye of a hurricane. “Or be mean to me,” she breathes. “I need — ”
Her mouth crashes into his. She tastes metallic, like blood. He wonders if he tastes metallic, too, like a box of titanium in the sky full of air stale with death. Tom presses his body flush to hers and revels in the way she yields to him, soft as silk. He is someone who needs to be needed.
Shiv takes off her pants and makes quick work of his too, button and fly, an impatient push of fabric to the floor. He works in tandem with her, getting them out of their blazers. He starts to slide his hands beneath her shirt but she swats at them, breathing, “Fuck me, fuck me.”
They’re not far from the bed, but Tom hooks his hands beneath Shiv’s thighs and eases her up onto the vanity counter. Her hand is on his cock and he bites back a groan and all the things he knows she doesn’t want to hear — Shiv I miss you I love you god help me I love you I’m sorry are you sorry but when I think it over I can’t help but believe we’d both do it all again except I’ve learned now and I’ve lived it the sadness of being without you is the worse kind of sadness are we really going to let this go let us go or is this —
He tugs her panties aside and she shifts her hips, guides him inside, and then he releases his groan as he buries himself to the hilt. He loves Shiv’s cunt, he loves the way her head falls back against the mirror and the gorgeous line of her throat. He nips the skin there as he begins to move in her, and her fingers tangle in her hair, tugging, just how he likes it.
“So good with you,” Tom says quietly, mouth pressed to the corner of his wife’s. “Shiv, it’s so fucking good with you, you’re everything.”
She is so slick for him, and her nails are scratching at his scalp. He palms her breast through her shirt and bra as he drops his mouth to her collarbone, and she keens in a way he wasn’t expecting, her back arching.
“Fuck,” she whispers. Her eyes are closed, still rimmed black from her makeup. “Tom, fuck, god.”
He wants his name in her mouth forever. He has since he first heard her say it, he has even when she’s said it with scorn. He tugs roughly at the neckline of her shirt, which doesn’t want to give way, until he can peel back the cup of her bra and get her nipple between his teeth. She makes a high, indistinct sound; her breast feels heavy in his hand as he flicks his tongue over her nipple, and her fingers get so tight in his hair that it burns.
Shiv comes just like that, quickly, and he follows, forehead pressing into her collarbone, breathing harshly against her skin. They’re still together for a moment, Shiv’s grasp on him loosening. Her breathing is shaky, erratic.
“Oh, honey,” Tom says, running a hand down her spine as he straightens up and pulls out.
She gives her head a small shake, readjusting her bra and shirt, bringing her thighs together. Her hair is a mess, haloed around her head. He wants to gather her in his arms and rock her and kiss her until he’s drinking her sadness from her mouth — the way he used to, once, when they’d get lost behind the curtains of her hair together and her surname felt like an afterthought.
Shiv shoves at him lightly, slips down off the counter. “I’m going to shower,” she says, and Tom knows when he’s been dismissed.
The apartment feels cold, empty, inhospitable. It feels alien, even though Tom had a hand in selecting all its furnishings and decor. There is very little in the fridge. Tom orders groceries so there will be something for Shiv to eat in the morning, shrugs out of his dress shirt, and opens a bottle of wine. He drinks and tries not to dwell on the sound of Logan’s ribs cracking or the fault line in Shiv’s small voice, Daddy.
She emerges fifteen minutes later with her face scrubbed clean, her hair wet and tangled, and his clothes on. They’re old items he didn’t pack, left orphaned in his dresser, a university tee and grey sweats. Her bare feet falter on the floor on the way to the kitchen when she sees him.
“You’re still here.”
Tom nods, standing. “I wouldn’t just leave you,” he says.
Shiv’s skin is shining, but there is no washing away the day. Her shoulders have an uncharacteristic slump, and she does not snap at him. She just says, “Yeah.”
Tom lifts the bottle of wine and moves to get her a glass, but she shakes her head and goes to the fridge instead. “Water.” She pauses, then rubs the back of one hand against one of her eyes. “Dehydrated, I think.”
He nods solemnly.
“Are you staying?” Her lips press together briefly. “Here?”
Tom feels his brows tilt up oh-so-slightly. “Is that what you want?” he asks, in his typical neutral tone.
Shiv waves an impatient hand at his undershirt and his wine glass. “You’ve certainly fucking made yourself at home.”
Tom shakes his head. There is no real ice in her words, and her brothers are apparently absorbed in grief elsewhere, and she just looks so goddamn sad. “Is that what you want?” he asks again.
When she meets his gaze, he is reminded of his embarrassment of a proposal, how Shiv side-stepped and talked fast and made eyebrows at him, but how she then, acting as though it was off-handed and careless, said yes. His emotion is often too earnest for her to meet head-on; she has to take a roundabout road to sincerity.
But she’s already travelled so far today, and she just says, “For tonight.”
In bed, they don’t touch much. After a couple moments of silence, punctured only by the faint sounds of the city, Shiv begins to weep. Tom reaches over and rubs her back in slow, steady circles, and eventually she sniffles her way to silence. Her big toe, freezing cold, pokes against his calf, and he hears her breathing settle into sleep.
He leaves forty minutes later, tiptoeing out of the room after grabbing his pants and socks and making sure her phone is charging.
He knows his wife. He knows the night does not include the morning.
He wakes up with the feeling that his chest is being weighed down against the bed. This is a familiar feeling, these days; when he sleeps, defenses down, no distractions, his body feels every one of the wounds from his failed marriage. Today, the feeling is accompanied by headache that pounds in time with his pulse. Everything he’d tried to carve out by himself, for himself, is slipping through his fingers, too.
A cup of espresso, a quick shower, a glance at the markets, at his emails, a fresh suit. Tom heads out the door to Logan’s apartment, stopping himself from fussing with the knot in his tie.
Shiv has done exactly what he expected her to do, fortified her walls, battened down the hatches, put snipers on the roof. She is impenetrable in dark layers, blazer buttoned, her hair smooth and straight again. She is ensconced with her brothers, an invisible wall around them, but he sees her eyes flit toward him, just for a second.
Tom eats enough fish tacos to feel nauseated, and has enough fruitless conversations to eat even more. The version of Shiv he finds on the stairs is the version of his wife he’s grown used to lately, dismissive and cruel, scoffing at the very idea of kindness.
But then Shiv says she thinks she and her brothers killed their dad, and she sinks down on the stairs, and Tom can hear the tears clogged in her throat.
“Siobhan,” he says softly. “Do you remember…”
Shiv listens to him with her lips pressed into a thin line, her eyes caught somewhere far away. Falling in love with Shiv always feels like it happened just yesterday, her silk shirts luxurious under his hands, delicate little buttons coming undone to reveal skin that was even more deliciously beautiful beneath. Rip it, she used to whisper with her teeth sharp on his earlobe, and Tom would, tearing her expensive clothes apart, feeling like the luckiest bastard on the earth.
“Uh-huh, well. That was a while ago, wasn’t it?” Shiv says without really meeting his eyes.
(Tom remembers working his fingers inside of her, Shiv’s legs wide open for him, her nails scratching secrets on his back. Do you like this? She gave a couple short nods, gasping, grasping at him, his name in repetition on her lips with the cadence of a prayer. I like it all, Tom, oh fuck oh please, Tom — )
“Not that long,” Tom says, heart lodged in his throat. She tasted like chapstick and gin, back then.
“No,” Shiv says. She’s crying again, but trying not to. “It was a while back.”
She stands, abruptly, and walks away, leaving him crouched on the stairs.
It isn’t like it used to be. Tom doesn’t follow her, anymore.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she snaps when he tries to help her up, an echo of the night before, but this time with an audience. There is something about seeing her crumpled on the floor, even for just an instant, that makes Tom ache profoundly. He has pulled Shiv up off of floors before, and she held onto him like a lifeline. She used to touch him all the time, casually, a hand on his abdomen, her temple against his shoulder, her hand behind her back blindly reaching, knowing his would meet it. She used to like it when he called her honey and baby and love.
Stewy, chin tucked toward his chest, makes a face that says yikes. Tom doesn’t know if that sentiment is direction toward him, or Siobhan, or the mess of their marriage on public display. He frowns faintly and wanders away.
He gives it a few minutes, making pointless small talk, accepting condolences, before he goes to look for her. He checks Logan’s bedroom and Logan’s study first, but the first is empty and the second only contains Karolina, who glances at him, uninterested, before returning her attention to her laptop.
The room that has been named Shiv’s — even though she’s never actually lived here; decorated in a muted, dusky pink — is empty too, but Tom spies that the door to the attached bath is cracked open. He heads over, tapping his knuckles against it once, perfunctorily, before pushing it open.
The previous night is mirrored for him again: Shiv at the vanity, hands pressed against the marble countertop, bent slightly at the waist. When he walks in she tries to compose herself quickly, her body snapping into a straight line. As she realizes that it’s him, her shoulders round a bit, and her hands clutch at the hem of her blazer.
“Tom,” she says. Her voice is wet.
Now, he knows, she will accept kindness. He could be a dick, he could be vindictive, he could refuse to give it to her. But it’s all theoretical — that’s not why Tom has shown up here any more than it was why he blew some of his savings on a ticket to Charles de Gaulle six years ago. They both know that.
“Did you hurt yourself?” he asks.
Shiv reaches for her phone, which is sitting on the counter; he now sees that it’s open to what looks like a Google search. She locks it, the screen going black, and then crosses her arms before lifting one hand, fingertips pressing against her bottom lip.
“Do you think,” she says slowly, a tremor running beneath her words that he hadn't heard in a long time, before yesterday, “that if you fall while you’re pregnant, you need to see a doctor?”
Tom blinks. And blinks again. His brain feels fuzzy, like TV static. He tries briefly to puzzle out if this is some kind of metaphor, and then his eyes zero in on Shiv’s stomach. Her blazer is closed in front of it like a shield.
“What?” he asks lowly. “What?”
Shiv swallows. She presses her knuckles against her mouth now, wedding rings brushing over her cupid’s bow. She doesn’t waste words to respond, just looks at him.
Tom is about to regurgitate all his fish tacos, and he’s not the one who’s —
“You’re — ” He feels incandescent, suddenly, but it’s not anger, or at least, it’s more than that. His eyes prickle. “Siobhan.” He takes a step toward her. “What — what the hell, since fucking when, you’re — ”
“Tom,” she cuts in. Her voice is urgent, without any space for regret or wonder, hurt or disbelief, no space for the emotions Tom is trying to untangle, and for a moment he is so fucking pissed off, feels so fucking wronged and just ignited, burning inside out, because there is some part of him that allows this, that allows this trend in their relationship, but his fire is nothing but smoke when Shiv repeats her question: “Do you think I — the — it — ”
Her eyes fall shut for a beat, and she regroups. “My OB is out of office. Do I need to…be seen? By someone?”
The fuzz in Tom’s brain has been replaced by an overwhelming stream of thought. She has an OB, his stunned brain screams. Simultaneously, it supplies, on loop for an audience of one, a small film of Shiv’s fall. Amidst it, in full colour, is the memory of the last bathroom they were in together, how his mouth on Shiv’s breast pushed her into an orgasm, how she hadn’t let him touch her stomach.
He tries to shove it all aside, because Shiv is looking at him expectantly, for the first time in a long, long time. Her face is pale, and it makes his chest tight.
“Yes,” he says, though he has no fucking clue — it feels like the right answer, and the safest one, and Shiv is pregnant. He yanks his phone out of his pocket so fast that the lining comes out with it. “I’ll call a car.” He reaches for her. “Shiv — ”
She nods, side-stepping his touch but grabbing onto his sleeve on the way to the doorway, pulling him along at her side.
She doesn’t say anything in the car. She’s playing her cards, this ace she’s apparently had tucked up her sleeve for a while, so close to her chest, still. She is so stubborn, and Tom loves her.
“How long have you known about this?”
Shiv’s eyes drift briefly in his direction. “A while.”
“Right. Uh huh. No shit.” Tom glances toward the driver, keeping his words careful. “And you were planning on telling me about this, uh, acquisition…when, exactly?”
Shiv’s mouth goes thin. “When I thought you deserved it.”
It’s like a punch to the throat. “Fuck you, Siobhan.”
“I’m the one who’s going somewhere,” she says, snappish, but it lacks some of her typical heat. “You’re welcome to get the fuck out of the car.”
“You’re not fucking going to the hospital alone,” Tom snaps back.
Shiv presses both hands to her face and then cards her fingers back through her hair. Her polish is fading again; sneaking through it there are slivers of the woman who used to wear his boxers around the house and let her hair collect snowflakes in the winter. “I didn’t mean it,” she says, to the window.
Tom sighs, sneaking a look at her midsection, as if Shiv’s body might take pity on him and give him a sign. “Yeah,” he says quietly, and then more generously, “You’re okay.”
Her lower lip trembles for a millisecond. She reaches across the car for his hand.
He takes it, and tells her again, “You’re okay.”
In the ER, Tom tells the triage nurse, “My — my wife is pregnant and she’s had a fall.” And then he’s tempted to ask for a shock blanket, or a paper bag to breathe in, because saying those words feels like walking through a hallucination. My wife is pregnant.
“How many weeks?” asks the nurse.
Tom looks at Shiv. There is something hot and angry, in his gut, that seethes at not knowing the answer to this question.
“Seventeen,” she says. “Uh, and two days.”
He looks at her stomach again. Seventeen weeks and two days is a long, long fucking time, and he knows that Shiv knows that from the way her shoulders shift beneath her blazer.
That’s Italy, Tom thinks. That’s the taste of perspiration on Shiv’s skin, that’s his teeth in her lip and her blood in his mouth, her cunt clenched around him, her heel digging into the small of his back. It wasn’t exactly making love but — it turns out it was making.
The nurse directs them to the labour and delivery unit, to see an obstetrician. Shiv’s hand bumps against his as they begin to walk, but she doesn’t hold on. Tom glances back over his shoulder, frowning.
“Should they have offered you a wheelchair?”
Shiv throws him a look.
“Well, I don’t fucking know,” Tom reminds her. “Seventeen weeks and two days. I know fuck all.” When her brows draw together, angry, he adds in an ugly voice, “Oh, did you want me to be nice to you, honey?”
“You’re the one who wanted a goddamn baby,” Shiv replies.
And he did. He thinks that, even now, he does. He’s wanted kids with Shiv for a long time, since they started dating exclusively. Eventually he amended the dream to kid, singular, when that seemed more realistic. Shiv wasn’t ready at first, and he understood that, understood the childhood trauma and the career aspirations of it all. He understood, too, because he knows her, that Shiv would not be in her element changing diapers or making puréed food from scratch, that there would be a nanny involved. But he could envision their Sunday mornings, reading the paper on the couch, Mondale at their feet and coffee in their hands, with a child sandwiched between them. He could imagine Shiv picking out baby clothes the way she picked out his slacks, reading long novels to a four-year-old. She’d raise a good kid, teach them values and passion and so much fucking strength — they would raise a good kid, together.
He wanted, wants, them to be a family. Not her family, looming large over them and insidiously involved in every piece of their lives and tearing them apart at the seams. Not his family, with love to give but a profound inability to understand who Tom has become, who Shiv has always been. Their family. Their own.
“Don’t say that,” he says. “Don’t say goddamn.”
Shiv stops, and turns to face him. She looks stricken, all of a sudden, and Tom feels like an ass. He is angry with her but she is also carrying his child inside her. The betrayal does not outweigh the gift.
“It was an accident,” she says. “When I fell, I — I lost my footing, I don’t know, these shoes are…” Her nose scrunches, just barely. “I’m taking a fucking prenatal vitamin.”
What she is saying to him is a quick stab to his heart. He wants to cry.
“Shiv,” he says softly, on a breath. “I know. Baby, I know. Come here.”
She steps into his embrace more readily than he expected, but he doesn’t push his luck. He says, “You’re okay,” once more, right by her ear, and then lets her go before she can pull away.
Shiv is given a paper gown in an examination room. She doesn’t ask Tom to leave, but she does turn away as she takes off her blazer and shirt. Tom is trying to politely look elsewhere, like at the IV pole or the blood pressure cuff, but he fails. He looks at Shiv’s body, and the breath vanishes from his lungs as he sees her abdomen, softly rounded, enough so that it won’t be long before her strategic thick shirts and jackets won’t be adequate to hide it. Her breasts are bigger, too; fuller. He doesn’t recognize the bra she’s wearing. She slides her arms into the sleeves of the gown, and Tom reaches for the strings at her back without thinking.
Shiv tenses at the feeling of his hands on her bare skin, and then she softens. Tom’s hands twitch with the desire to slide his hands under her gown, to cup the swell of her belly and feel the proof of this twist of fate he’s still trying to get his mind around. He contents himself with dropping a small, light kiss at the nape of her neck, and he might imagine it, but he thinks Shiv leans back into him, just for a heartbeat.
A nurse bustles in. “So you had a fall, hm?”
Stretching out on the hospital cot, hands in fists, Shiv describes what happened. She says it felt like she kneed herself in the stomach as she caught herself on her hands, and Tom winces. He doesn’t know if that’s bad, but it sure as fuck sounds bad. He resists the urge to hover and leans back against the wall instead.
The nurse asks about bleeding; Shiv says she hasn’t had any. The nurse asks about pain and Shiv says she’s just a little bit sore everywhere, nothing sharp. The nurse says they don’t want to “mess with” Shiv’s cervix at this point in her pregnancy, and Tom blinks five times in rapid succession. An hour ago he was angling for a fresh in at Waystar Royco, sidling up to Shiv’s siblings. Now there is a baby, now they’re talking about cervixes.
“You’re too early for us to hook you up to the monitors,” the nurse says, wheeling over a machine. “But let’s have a listen to baby’s heartbeat.”
Shiv’s cheeks draw in — Tom can tell she’s biting at the inside of her mouth. He pushes away from the wall, moving closer. Her lashes flutter, and he rests his hand very lightly against her upper arm. “S’okay,” he murmurs, watching as she pulls up her hospital gown to just beneath her breasts and wiggles both her pants and her underwear down low on her hips. He can see the scars on one of her hipbones, the ones she gave herself when she was fourteen and blistering with loneliness and contempt.
“It often takes me a minute, so don’t worry,” the nurse says, squirting gel on Shiv’s stomach and setting some sort of probe on her skin.
It does not take a minute.
The heartbeat is there right away, almost instantaneously, filling the entire small room, filling Tom’s ears, filling his throat until he cannot swallow. It is as fast as a horse’s gallop, whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh. He is speechless. All of his skin feels so tender, like he’d bruise at the barest touch.
Shiv releases a breath, long and slow. He looks at her, both of them wrapped in the circle of the thrum of their child’s heart. One corner of her mouth curls up, like a smile that was born sad, like an apology.
“There you are, little one,” the nurse says cheerfully, watching the small screen on her machine.
There you are, Tom thinks.
He feels Shiv’s pinkie finger hook into the pocket of his pants, and his eyes fill with tears. He’s every bit as tender as he suspected.
A doctor comes in, reviews the incident with Shiv again, and says he’s not typically concerned about a fall from standing. Tom files this away in his mind, wondering if it’s the sort of thing they should’ve read in a baby book. The doctor says the baby’s heartbeat is nice and strong, and Tom files that away in his heart.
“We’ll get you an ultrasound for peace of mind, Ms. Roy,” the doctor adds, and Tom recognizes immediately that this is rich people shit. If Shiv was some pleb off the street, she’d be on her way home by now, a hospital bill trailing after her. But she isn’t, she’s Shiv, and she just nods, her chin lifted and strong, imposing even though she’s still nearly flat on her back on the bed.
And then they’re alone.
“Stop crying,” Shiv says. Her voice isn’t mean, but soft, with a splintered quality. There is still gel on her stomach. Beneath the gel, beneath her skin, there is a baby that is theirs.
He wipes his eyes with a knuckle. “Do you… feel things? Kicks?”
She looks surprised by the question. “I — no. Not really. I feel…flips, sometimes, lately. At least I think that’s what it is.”
It’s taking all of his willpower not to trace the curve of her stomach with his fingers. “Flips,” he echoes. He has a child that flips. “Fuck, Shiv. Honestly. Fuck. When were you going to tell me?”
Shiv sits up a bit, shoving impatiently at the thin, papery pillow behind her until it’s giving her some back support. She shrugs, shaking her head. “I don’t know, Tom,” she says. It’s a flimsy answer, not even an answer at all. She sounds tired.
A strand of hair is falling into her face, against her cheek. He reaches out and takes it between two fingers, twisting it lightly before he tucks it back behind her ear. Shiv tips her chin up, like she used to when she wanted him to kiss her.
“Why not?” he asks.
Her eyes drop to her stomach. The look on her face doesn’t seem like it can possibly be that different from the one on Tom’s — it’s like she’s truly seeing how her body has started to change for the very first time in all of this. “I didn’t know how I felt. At first. I didn’t think — I thought I wouldn’t — want this. And then I did this blood test my doctor recommended and there were… some concerns. So I got an amnio.”
His head does a small spin. He wishes he had a chair. He imagines Shiv doing all of this by herself and he feels angry (again), but then he feels sad. He was the person who used to be in her corner when she didn’t want to be big bad Shiv Roy, when she wanted to slouch into being human, just for a few minutes.
“You should’ve — could’ve told me.”
“Could I have?” She’s got that calculating look on her face, the one that is simultaneously seductive and irritating as all hell. “We’re getting a fucking divorce, Tom. You consulted with every good lawyer in the damn city.”
“Oh,” he says, “we’re getting a divorce?”
“What do you — what are you, asking me?”
“Yeah,” he says, back straight, “I am. Because you had one of the worst days of your life yesterday and you took me home with you, and you begged me to fuck you — ”
“Okay, begged is a strong fucking word, your ego needs to — ”
“ — and we’re having a goddamn baby, apparently.”
Shiv’s mouth snaps shut. Tom’s not sure he’s ever made that happen before.
She glowers at him. “You told me not to say goddamn,” she says, almost petulant.
“Well, I meant it in fucking awe, okay?” Tom says, and he grabs her jaw and kisses her.
To his surprise, she doesn’t shove him away. She yields to him, mouth soft and open. When they pull apart she says, hotly, “Okay.” She runs her tongue over her bottom lip. “Everything came back low risk,” she says. “From the amniocentesis, it’s — the baby’s okay.”
Tom nods. He searches her face, trying to decipher what’s going on in her shining eyes. “We’re having a goddamn baby,” he says again. He hears her breath catch, and then they’re interrupted by the sonographer’s arrival.
The baby they made, before Tom neatly severed the thin threads tieing what was left of their relationship together, is a girl.
Her heart is beating one hundred and forty-seven times per minute. She is growing just as she should be. There are no concerns with the placenta, the amniotic fluid. Inside of his wife, Tom’s daughter kicks and squirms in black and white.
Shiv wipes the gel off her stomach; Tom wipes the tears off his face. He holds the picture the sonographer printed for them very delicately, touching only its white edges. He knows he is soft-hearted, especially compared to the company he keeps, too gentle and too easy — but he’s never fallen in love this quickly before.
He cannot imagine Logan Roy marvelling at an ultrasound capture of Shiv in fetus form. But maybe he did, or maybe it at least made him smile, for a moment. But Tom cannot fathom how you can feel this way about a person, and then spend her whole life wrenching her apart, even after you’re gone.
“She’s beautiful,” he says.
“Oh, Tom,” Shiv sighs, swinging her legs down over the side of the bed, like she does whenever she thinks he’s being too midwestern, too Hallmark movie special.
He doesn’t care. He holds the picture out to her. “This is a good thing, Shiv. Isn’t it?”
Her hands move slowly, accepting the image from him. She doesn’t tell him that there is no way to balance the good and bad in the world, like she did when her father was sick and he was down on one knee. This is not about Logan. This does not belong to him.
“I don’t know,” she says, voice just above a whisper. “I don’t know if I — if I’m a person who can do this. You’ve met my mom.” Her mouth twists to the side, and the pain in that tiny movement is red-hot and raw. “That’s my model. How am I supposed to be someone’s mother?”
“Not someone’s mother,” Tom says, waving an arm as if to dismiss all the other babies in the world. He touches the tip of his index finger to the picture. “Hers.” He puts his other hand on Shiv’s cheek, then her shoulder. “You were worried about her today,” he points out, voice low, like he’s trying not to spook her. “You got all those tests. You didn’t have the glass of wine I offered you last night. You’re taking — what was it, fucking prenatal vitamins?”
Shiv’s throat works as she swallows, and she shrugs her shoulder under his hand, posturing, as if she doesn’t even care about this conversation. “Vitamin, singular. Just one.”
Tom almost smiles. “You love her, Siobhan,” he says. “Don’t you think?”
Tears swim across her eyes, and she blinks before any can fall. “I don’t know what the fuck love counts for,” she says.
He remembers Shiv on their wedding night, breaking his heart; she was the most beautiful, painful thing he’d ever seen, until now. She said love was twenty-eight different things and he agreed that it was bullshit.
But he loved her, and he told her so. She said it back, and when her mouth crashed into his he could feel it, how much she meant it.
“It’s not much,” he agrees, rubbing his thumb over her collarbone. “But I think, also, it’s just about everything.”
Shiv exhales heavily. She shifts her legs apart a little, and Tom steps between them. She tilts forward, into him, head against his chest.
Mouth on his heart, she says, “Yeah.”
Tom calls a car to collect them. Shiv’s eyebrows do a halfhearted ripple upward.
“Let me see you home,” he says.
On their way, Shiv pulls out her phone and scrolls through her emails. “Fucking Rome,” she murmurs, deleting something. She squints at the next message. “We’re leaving for Norway in the morning.”
“Ah,” Tom says. He is holding the ultrasound photo again, like it’s made of spun glass. It feels wrong to fold it into his wallet or let it get crumpled in his pocket. “Nothing like the fun of a corporate retreat.”
“Mmhm.”
Tom has the fleeting instinct to tell Shiv that she can stay home, lie down, eat something nutritious. But he knows better — this is family and this is business, and this is probably part of the reason no one on god’s green earth besides Tom himself knows about the baby. Even if she’s not running the company, it’s in her bloodstream.
“Well,” he says, “okay.” And then stupidly, suddenly, before his brain has really processed the thought, he says, “I don’t really want to get back on that plane.”
Shiv looks at him. The streetlights ripple over her face. He feels immediately contrite.
“Honey,” he says. “I — ”
But then Shiv is unbuckling her seatbelt, something else Tom resists the urge to comment on, and sliding into the middle seat, next to him. Her thigh presses against his, and she rests her head on his shoulder.
Tom stops talking and closes his eyes.
He escorts her upstairs, hand on her back.
“I didn’t invite you in,” she points out.
Tom says, “Well, I’m not a vampire.”
He pours her a tall glass of water. “You should eat something.”
“I ate at the — ” She waves a hand. “The thing. I’m fine. Half of it comes back up anyway.”
Tom gives a small, sympathetic grimace, watching as she hangs her blazer neatly on the back of a chair. He sets the ultrasound image down on the counter. It seems like it should go on the fridge, but there are no magnets on the stainless steel; nothing would stick.
“Shiv, can I — ” He approaches her, hands tentatively outstretched.
Shiv frowns. He can practically see her bite back an automatic no. But then maybe she thinks about the seventeen weeks and two days that Tom has had no idea about this, because she shrugs and says, “Uh, yeah. Whatever.”
He puts both hands on the curve of her stomach. Her skin is warm, through her sweater. It feels like holding a dream.
Shiv puts her hand on the back of his neck and tangles her fingers in the hair at its nape; an old, old habit of hers. She tugs, just a little. “If you say the word daddy right now, I will stab you.”
Tom grins faintly. “Oh, Siobhan,” he says, hushed, reverent.
Her hand moves, sliding down the side of his neck, over his chest. It hovers in the air for a long moment, then settles on top of one of his. The bands of her rings are cold.
“Norway,” she reminds him, “in the morning.”
“Yeah, you sleep,” he says. “And you call me. For anything you need.”
“I won’t need anything.”
“Yeah,” he repeats. This is the crux of their relationship, a conversation rehearsed and performed six thousand times over. “But you can.”
She kisses the corner of his mouth before he goes, and he imagines her slipping back into his shirt and sweats, wrapping herself in a version of him she doesn’t have to ask for.
Tom goes back to his apartment, rubs Mondale’s head, and downloads a pregnancy tracking app. He calculates Shiv’s due date, and reads through every fetal development update, from weeks four through seventeen.
His daughter is the size of a pomegranate. In a week, she’ll start hearing, and he feels grateful for that. For now, she has no idea of the way her parents have been talking to each other.
On the plane, Shiv sits with her brothers and ignores him. Tom doesn’t try to talk to her, knows better than to upset the status quo.
He does text her, I brought protein bars, because he doesn’t want her to get airsick or lightheaded, doesn’t want her to fall again. A moment after he sends the message, Shiv leans forward in her seat, far enough to see him and give him an exasperated look.
Tom shrugs and smiles. She gives her eye a roll that’s not totally damning, that might even be affectionate, and sits back out of his line of sight again.
Shiv carries around a glass of whiskey in Norway but never seems to bring it to her lips. Tom tracks her through the gathering, feeling attuned to her presence in his peripheral vision.
He sidles up to her table and drops into the empty chair next to hers. There is a mist hanging in the air, and her hair has developed the slightest frizz that he knows must be driving her crazy. He sets his glass down right next to hers and asks, casually, “How’s it going?”
She offers him a slow shrug, her gaze on the mountains. “Could be better, I think,” she says. “Ken is…” She trails off, not attempting to finish the sentence.
Tom plucks her glass up off the table instead of his own and takes a long drink. “Is it fucked?”
“Nah,” Shiv says. Her voice is smooth and easy, and he can tell gears are turning in her mind. “Halfway, maybe.” She smirks at him, watching as he polishes off more of her whiskey, ice cubes rattling. “You know, just the tip.”
“Huh,” Tom says, swallowing hard. “So it’s, uh. Not too late to pull out?”
“I mean.” Shiv tips her head. “I wouldn’t give you that responsibility, Wambsgans.”
Tom snorts into the glass. He has no witty reply for that, just, “Yeah. Well. Yeah.” He looks toward Shiv’s belly, entirely hidden beneath her coat.
Beneath the table, she kicks him. He frowns and gives her a chiding look; a two-second glance isn’t going to give anything away. Shiv rolls her eyes, then widens them at him and kicks him again.
Tom gets it, that time. His heart leaps at the thought of a tiny little foot nudging at Shiv, of their baby making herself known, and he half-whispers, “Really?!”
She narrows her eyes at his enthusiasm and murmurs, “Think so.” Then at a normal volume, “I need to sidebar with Gerri.” She stands, and takes the glass he’s mostly emptied for her from the table.
“Good luck with the — ” Tom makes some vague hand motions in the air. “Deal chastity belt, or whatever.”
Shiv flicks him in the back of the neck. It hurts, and he can’t stop himself from smiling.
He doesn’t quite know what Shiv’s doing when she kicks dirt at his shoes — lashing out in frustration, genuinely annoyed by his footwear, flirting? He does know that she was at Matsson’s cabin late last night, and that he brooded about it in his own room, and he does know what he would have done in response in the past: said the most cutting thing he could think of, and walk away, throwing one last glance at her over his shoulder.
But things are different now. The ground beneath their feet is different, tectonic plates have shifted.
Tom flicks her ear.
Shiv can’t disguise her shock, exclaiming “Ow! and looking at him like he’s been possessed. Tom feels bad — or at least almost, but then, not really.
Shiv leans into her back foot, regarding him like she wants to eat him for dinner.
“You’re like a fucking spelunker,” she says, eyes raking up and down his body. She pulls at the sides of her blazer as she walks away from him, and hip-checks him so lightly that it’s the ghost of a touch.
Tom stares down at his shoes and rubs his wedding ring with his thumb.
Tom is packing his bag when there’s a knock on the door of his room. He opens it to find Shiv on the other side, her hair pulled into a small, messy bun. She’s wearing a cardigan, now, and the sleeves are too long.
“Our kid is going to have my barnacle ears, you know,” she says, tartly. “Where are those fucking protein bars?”
He opens the door wider and steps aside, so she can come in.