Chapter Text
To say that the flight home is uncomfortable would be an understatement. To say that it is cohesive, that everyone is able to get along, that everything from the way they board to the places where they all sit to the conversations they have are all pleasant and thought-provoking would be a lie.
In truth, Greg is feeling a little too good about himself probably, and with the pleasantries of the week in Italy behind him, he feels like he could float on up above those clouds, no airplane necessary. He’s had not one but two women courting him (they had initiated it, right? Of course they had!), has networked with some of the wealthiest and most successful people in international business, has been hearing from major networks about potential interviews both on and off the record, and has just agreed to go with Tom… somewhere. It doesn’t matter, really. Tom has all but guaranteed his success if they stick together, so he has no need to know the details. All will be revealed in due time .
Greg hasn’t heard from Tom since their last conversation in Italy. It had been a business trip more than pleasure, under the guise of a family wedding but with, as with everything, an ulterior motive. He could have stayed another day and left with the rest of them, because that was the plan at the beginning of the trip, but he’s heard that several of them have changed their minds. And what the hell - he has money now, enough to fly home first class, even if it’s almost impossible to find an open seat on outbound flights. His mind is filled with thoughts of the future, uncertain but promised, as he settles into a luxurious seat with a glass of rosé and a magazine. In fact, he can’t remember the last time he’s felt so relaxed and excited for the future.
And this will be the last time Greg Hirsch knows peace for a very long time.
…
When he lands at JFK and calls a company car to take him home, he feels a little like it might just be time for a change. He passes designer showrooms and the kinds of stores he’s never been in, and he thinks to himself, Wouldn’t it be something if I became the kind of person who shopped there? With Tom, he thinks he might have a chance. Sure, Tom can be flighty and unhinged at times, often let emotions get in the way of wiser decisions. But they’re friends - really friends - and anyway, Greg has done it now. He’s promised Tom that he’ll come along for the journey, whatever it is, and he’ll do what he needs to do to get to that all-important bottom of the top.
He can’t be any more excited for or more focused on his future as he is when he finds himself alone in the elevator of his building, heading up. He thinks about what it will be like moving out of the assistant title and into an executive title, having his very own Greg, having twenty of them. It could really be something, he realizes. He tries not to smile about it, but he can’t help it. He smiles so broadly it could be a beacon, a homing signal to boats approaching stormy shores.
Wheeling his luggage behind him, he exits the elevator and notices almost immediately some kind of commotion by the door to his apartment. He continues further to find that it’s Jess, Kendall’s trusted assistant, phone in hand, watching a man in a blue utility suit changing out the locks on his door.
“Jess?”
“Hi, Greg,” she greets him briefly, a vague look of discomfort in her eyes.
“Is there… some kind of - did someone try to break in or something?”
“No,” she says, straightening her back. “Kendall wanted new locks on the door.”
“On all the doors in the building? Is this a security thing?”
It’s obvious even to Greg that Jess is having a hard time finding a way to explain this. Whatever this is. She puts her phone down at her side and moves to the other side of the hall, so Greg follows. And when Jess starts to speak again, Greg begins to realize the gravity of the agreement he made in Italy just forty-eight hours before.
“He sends his apologies for the inconvenience,” Jess explains, “But at the time being, he’s no longer able to allow you to take up residence here for free.”
“Wh- so… he’s evicting me?”
“He says you can take a few hours to get the things you need out of there, but he wanted to remind you that all the furnishings and appliances have to stay.”
Greg can feel the incoming symptoms of a panic attack - rushed breathing, heart racing, lightheadedness. He feels cold and hot at the same time, in and out of reality at the same time, literally pinches himself to be sure he isn’t dreaming. “Jess… C’mon. No.”
“I’m so sorry, Greg,” she says. She even reaches a hand over and briefly touches it to his forearm. Something less than friendship, something more than just her job duty. “He wants me to be here while you pack.”
“What, to make sure I don’t steal anything?”
“He just needs to be sure his investment capital is as efficient as possible.”
“All done,” the maintenance man calls to Jess, rising from his knees with the old hardware in a bag in one hand, a pair of keys in the other. “Anything else?”
“No, thank you,” Jess tells him, her prim professionalism always in play. She smiles sweetly while she accepts the keys, and she pockets them while Greg looks at them with something like longing.
“Well…” Greg sighs. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“I can provide you with a list of hotels in the area where the family often stays,” she suggests. “And Kendall said you might have luck in the new builds over in Brighton Park.”
“Yeah, I think those might be a tad out of my budget,” he says. He leans his weight against the wall, soaking in the cold shock of it. “Can I talk to Ken? Like, can you call him?”
“He’s on the flight home,” she offers in response. “He probably won’t be in a position to talk.”
“Well, can you try? Can I try? Can I call him?”
For a moment, Jess drops the assistant facade. For a moment, she looks up at him with sincere pity in her eyes. She’s had to do a lot of uncomfortable things in her time with Kendall Roy, but this is up there with some of the worst. She’s always thought Greg to be a bit… odd, maybe. But he is a good man in her eyes, and she doesn’t know enough about this situation to know whether this is a good thing Kendall’s doing or if it is, like so many other decisions he’s made in the recent past, the action of a man teetering on the edge.
“I can call him,” she agrees. “But I think you should be prepared for him not to answer.”
“And I don’t get to stay at all? Like, I don’t get to leave in the morning?”
“I’ll call him again,” is all she’ll say. She brings the phone back up and dials, and she holds it to her ear while she walks into the apartment.
Greg follows after. Other than the locks, nothing appears to have been changed. His bag is still on the counter, a jacket on the back of a chair, the TV remote still on the couch. He had planned to fall into that couch and sleep off the jetlag with The Simpsons playing just loud enough to drown out the daylight. But that’s not an option now, and from the look on Jess’s face, he’s going to have no choice but to accept that.
“Yeah,” he hears her say as she approaches him again. “I’ll tell him… sure thing.”
She ends the call. Greg, wide-eyed with confusion and anticipation, asks what Kendall said.
“He suggested you ask Tom to put you up somewhere,” she says.
“Tom? Why Tom?”
But why is it ever Tom? He can call Tom and ask him if he has a place for him to stay, but is it really right to bring that up now? Tom’s dealing with business shit, some big, mysterious move in the company - or maybe somewhere else, even. Greg realizes he doesn’t actually know - and Tom specifically told Greg they’d be in touch when he got back to the homeland.
“He did offer a car to take you and your things anywhere you need to go,” Jess adds. She fails to add that she had asked Kendall for that herself, that she feels sympathy for Greg and worked to convince Kendall that it was his idea, not hers.
“Okay, well…” he looks around. “I mean… this might take a while.”
“Yeah. I know.” She moves to the couch and sits there, pulls her phone from her pocket again, and sits silently while Greg wonders what the fuck is going on.
…
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Greg sits in the car with his suitcases around him, three in the trunk and two by his sides. He had told the driver to circle around a while so he could figure out where they were going, but it had been nearly an hour of trying to reach Tom with no luck at all. He’s tried calling Kendall, too, but it’s clear the call was rejected. Shiv and Roman aren’t answering. And if this is some kind of business thing, he doesn’t think it would be prudent to call Logan and tell him about it.
He looks at the list of hotels Jess has given him. He knows most of them all from times he’d spent there with family at functions that needed to be on neutral ground or for strategic meetings too sensitive for the ears of the boardroom walls. He knows what they cost to stay at. He’s made enough reservations for Tom to know that none of these would be good long-term options, but he also knows that he doesn’t have a choice. At least not tonight. So he has the driver take him to the nearest one, and he checks in using his only credit card, and they only have suites available. If he has to stay more than two nights, he’ll charge it to the company card, he decides. With Tom’s promise in mind, he realizes by the time he’s walking his luggage up to the room that everything happening right now is probably to do with financial changes in the family. Those would have to be due to the company. Ergo, the company could pay for his hotel stay.
He hates this. Like, so much.
The staff helps bring his luggage in, and it’s a lot. But all he can think about is all he had to leave behind. There was a lamp he loved, one he bought with his own money. And there was a lot of food in the fridge. Okay, not a lot of food. But there was some food in there that he couldn’t grab. Some of that good cheese that he’d discovered on an overseas trip last year, a case of beer, two bottles of that rosé he likes, some fruit slices that, now he comes to it, might not be good anymore. Okay, scratch that. But the booze would have been nice on a day like this. Logistically, though, it just wasn’t an option to bring those here.
He starts to set some things up. He fills the wardrobes and dressers with his clothes. He searches the suite for a place to charge his laptop and phone, and he does that, too. He employs the complimentary toiletries when he takes a shower, eager to wash off two days of travel and a day of betrayal and confusion from his skin. He’s exhausted, he’s jetlagged, he’s hungry. It’s going to be a long few days, maybe weeks, god-knows-how-long while he figures out what’s happening and what, if anything, he can do about it. He crawls into the bed and falls asleep before he can even get the covers around his body.
…
Tom looks at his phone the minute he’s alone, which has taken a long time. His travel back with Logan was less than comfortable, but it was filled with talks of strategies and the future, and Tom was grateful he didn’t have to spend it in silence. He had asked Shiv to accompany him so that he could give her one last shot at some version of redemption. I wouldn’t hang you out to dry. Come with me. We’ll figure something out. He won’t admit, not even to himself, how grateful he is that she turned him down. Now she’s somewhere between Tuscany and home, her brothers in tow, probably calling him every name in the book. And he knows he deserves each one.
So when he’s back on American soil and has been granted the mercy of independence, he glances down at his phone to see, to no surprise at all, that Greg has been panic-calling and texting him all day. Ignoring his phone is never easy, but ignoring Greg is exactly what he doesn’t want to do, not when Greg might be the only person in the world who’s on his side. He tries calling back, but there’s no answer. He tries again. Then a third time when he’s at his home. With nothing getting through, he imagines Greg must be avoiding him or angry with him or disapproving of everything he probably knows about by now. So what can he do but get on with his day?
Shiv is home before he is. He’s a bit surprised at this, but when he does the math, he supposes he should have expected her to make it here first. She’s sitting on the couch with a drink in her hand, her legs tucked underneath her, silk lounge pants and a camisole somewhere underneath the oversized cardigan wrapped around her body. She’s been crying. He knows by now that this is what she looks like when she’s been crying. But she’s still so beautiful. It hurts every cell of his being to see her like this.
“Hi,” he greets her quietly, setting his suitcase down and removing his coat.
She looks up at him, glares under naked lashes, no makeup to hide her contempt anymore.
“How was your flight?”
“Fuck you.”
He nods once firmly. “Okay. I guess I deserve that.”
“Why are you here?” she asks him. “I would think you’d be snuggling up with my dad somewhere swapping war stories about his kids?”
“There are limits as to how much of your dad I can take in a day.” He helps himself to a drink at their bar, swirls it around the glass for a minute, and takes a sip as he finds a seat beside Shiv. As soon as he sits, she stands, and she moves to the other side of the room and paces for several silent moments while the air between them only grows thicker.
“So why did you do it?” she asks.
He almost asks what she’s talking about, but she’s not stupid. She knows he’s behind it all. And if he’s being honest with himself, it doesn’t feel great to think about the betrayal. If there is anything to savor here, any victory at all, it’s in the fact that he has secured his own immediate future. Though he’s a fool if he thinks that it can be called a sure thing.
“I’m just… very aware of my standing in this family. I placed my bets and counted my losses and gains.”
“Talk to me like a human being. Talk to me like I’m your wife.”
He looks up at her, brows wrinkled in confusion.
“Why did you do this?” she asks again. “Why to me?”
That part is a bit more… complicated. That part is the part he never wanted to get into, with her or without her. For years now they had been doing their own thing together. She did this, he did that, and they did it in close proximity, and that was how they justified it. We can have separate lives if we don’t keep them secret from each other. Couldn’t this just be another one of those things? Or did all of that only apply when it came to bullshit like love, like sleeping with anyone you want at any time, like only practicing honesty when you could use it as a tool against one another?
“If we’re asking questions,” he starts, “I have a few.”
“I asked you one question. One very important goddamn question, Tom, and I think I deserve a fucking answer.”
He looks down at the ground as if considering it for counsel.
“Why did you go behind my back and ruin everything, Tom?”
He looks back up at her, and he knows there are tears in his eyes. He’s overtired, he’s feeling hurt, and he’s even feeling guilty, a bit, about what he’s done. He breathes deeply to fight the feeling, and when he knows his voice is steady enough, he answers.
“You would have done it to me,” he answers. “Tit for tat, quid pro quo, eye for an eye. All things being equal, we’re all just fending for ourselves out there, aren’t we? And that’s what I was doing. I was fending for myself. I still am.”
“But I’m your wife,” she pleads, her voice broken and angry. “Did you ever consider that, Tom?”
He can’t help but smile a little at the irony. “Of course I did. I considered everything. The fact that you’re my wife was a very big part of that consideration.”
She doesn’t need him to say more. She knows what she did, she knows what he’s done. She never expected it to come to this, but here it is. Here it’s all been.
They talk for a while like this. She pleads for him to be reasonable and he insists that that’s exactly what he’s being, maybe for the first time ever. She insists that he’s fucked her and he makes a crack about that, too, because he never knows when to say things and when not to. She pounds her fist on the table and shakily, breathily calls him names she’d only ever thought but never vocalized. He shows her how this is only proving his point that much more. She tells him she wants him out of her house tonight. This is her house, god-fucking-dammit , and he needs to get the hell out of it. He can come back and get his shit tomorrow, can start looking for a new place, but he’s not coming back into this house, not into any of her houses, the houses she bought with her money that she earned because she never had to have her daddy hand her everything. Goodnight and go fuck yourself .
Tom leaves with only the suitcase he’d brought with him. He calls a car, fights the urge to cry on the curb like he might have done if this were happening to him, say, a year ago. Six months ago, even. And it’s half past midnight by the time the car arrives, but he tries Greg one more time, just to see.
…
Greg wakes to the incessant buzzing and recognizes it as his phone. Without regard for his unfamiliar surroundings, he leaps from the bed and rushes to the next room. Someone is making contact. Someone will give him answers. He sees Tom’s name and swipes to answer just in time.
“Tom? Tom?”
“Well there you are, Greg. You sound different.”
“Oh my god, dude, I’ve been calling you all day.”
“I see that. I tried calling you before, but–”
“No, no, yeah, I was sleeping. Man, I’m so fucking… I’m tired, and everything’s fucked.”
And if that doesn’t sum it all up nicely, nothing will.
“Listen, Greg, can I come over? We obviously have some things to discuss.”
“Well, no, man,” Greg starts, and he falls into the chair beside the table. “I mean, I’m not there.”
“You’re not where?”
“I’m not at home,” he explains. “Ken kicked me out.”
“Kendall?” And then he remembers. The apartment was Kendall’s, the deal between them has soured, and Greg is homeless now because he’s hitched his wagon to a stagnant caravan. “Have you talked to him?”
“No, he, uh…” Greg is trying to think about how it all happened. Between taking a too-long mid-evening nap, still having his mind in European time zones, the lack of sleep, and the morning’s commotion, he isn’t sure anymore what’s real and what’s not. “Jess was there,” he remembers. “She had the locks changed and told me Ken needed me out.”
“Did she say why?”
He can’t remember. “I don’t think so. I remember he had told me the place was mine until the markets moved, but I figured I still had some time.”
Tom considers his options. “Where are you, then?”
“The MayFair,” he answers. “I got a suite because that’s all they had.”
“I’ll be there in five. What room?”
Greg tells him the room number, and Tom directs his driver there as he tries to concoct something close to a plan, even if only for the night. He still hasn’t come up with one when they find the building, when he makes his way up the elevator to the suite. When Greg opens the door looking like he’s still asleep, looking like no amount of sleep at all will ever be able to wipe the tired off him.
“What the fuck is happening?” Greg says.
Tom steps past him into the room.
“I mean, everything seemed so good over there, you know? You were making deals and going places, and I was right there, like, right with you for it. Ready to go. And then I get home and I don’t have anywhere to live, and no one’s answering their phones, and I’m kinda going crazy here, man.”
Tom walks around the sitting space of the suite, the adjoining kitchenette. He eyes the light fixtures, the texture of the ceilings, the wallpaper, the view.
“Dude, is that your luggage? Did you come here straight from the airport? What the hell took you so long to get back?”
“No, I’ve been back for a while,” he answers absently, meandering into the bedroom, surveying that room in much the same fashion as he had the rest of the suite. “Bathroom?”
Greg gestures toward it. “Wait, so you’ve been back? Well, where the hell were you, man, I coulda used you around here a few hours ago.”
“I was getting some things straightened out,” he says. He runs the shower, checks the pressure. He does the same with the sink.
“Well, maybe I coulda stayed at your place, then. Because I don’t really wanna be here.”
“I don’t blame you,” Tom says, and he’s apparently concluded his tour. “This place is a dump.”
“Dump?” Greg asks, dumbfounded. “Tom, this place is costing me five hundo a night.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, okay. I get it.” Greg finds a seat on the edge of the bed and rests his hands on his knees. “You’re used to better. And that’s fine, man, but it’s more than I can afford right now. I mean, if this is gonna be long-term, like, more than a week? I won’t be able to afford this.”
“Well, I think I’ll have to crash here with you tonight. I’ll take the bed obviously.”
Greg watches as Tom removes his jacket. “Wait… what?”
“It looks like the couch in there is a pull-out. So you can take that.”
“No, Tom, what? Why are you staying here?”
“Because my marriage is over and everything that’s mine is going to go to her in the divorce, and I’m awfully tired, Greg, so if you don’t mind, I’ll be taking the bed tonight.”
There are no less than a dozen questions in Greg’s mind. Why is the marriage over? What happened? Why is Shiv getting it all? How soon is the divorce going to happen? Had it already been happening? How long ago did this start? Weren’t they happy? Why is Tom getting the bed? Greg’s the one paying for this room, after all.
“Well, I’m not really tired right now anyways,” Greg shrugs. He leaves the bed and stands in the bedroom doorway. “Kind of slept a bit before you got here.”
“I can tell,” Tom mutters. “And I’m sure we have plenty to discuss, but can we hold off on it until tomorrow?”
Greg considers Tom, the slump of his shoulders, the posture of a sad, broken man just trying to keep it all together. He watches Tom heave the suitcase onto the bench at the end of the bed and unpack clothes, most of which he recognizes from their week past. He realizes that somehow it’s all tied together - the deal he made with Tom, the fact that he’s homeless, the fact that Tom is, too, everyone ignoring his calls. Had he done something so horrible that all of this could happen to him, to both of them, so quickly? Was it the biggest mistake of his life saying yes to Tom? Saying, “Of course.” Of course I’ll go with you. I’ll always go with you.
Maybe. But for tonight, Greg decides, he won’t dwell on that.
“Let’s get our sleep tonight, Greg,” Tom tells him softly. “In the morning, we’ll be fresh-faced as Sunday morning. And I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”
Tom might have lured Greg into a snare for which neither of them were prepared. Tom might have sold them both out for pennies on the dollar. Tom might be broke - more than Greg, even - and have nothing better to offer. Tom might be a lot of things. But one thing Greg knows about Tom, knows more surely than he knows his own name - is that Tom always, always keeps his promises.