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You could learn a lot about Molly from the person Will becomes when he’s with her.
He takes responsibility for caring for Molly and Walter, in a primal sort of way. He chops wood for the stove, and he fishes and hunts for their dinner. It’s not a holdover of masculine expectations, it’s just the care he knows how to provide.
It’s not an obligation. It’s the opposite of an obligation. It’s the most fulfilling work he has ever done. It makes him feel unspeakably tender, to know that his labor is for the people he loves.
That’s a reflection of her.
The newest dog rips a hole in Will’s sweater. It was one of the nicest pieces of clothing he owned, worn a lifetime ago to impress a man Will tries not to think about anymore. The sweater was expensive. Will was going to just toss it into the dogs' beds—Molly said, “don’t be ridiculous,” and found the sewing kit from the highest shelf in the pantry, where it was tucked next to the first aid box and Walter’s chewable vitamins.
She doesn’t fix the sweater as a favor to him. She does it because it genuinely pleases her, to mend this garment that smells like him, to be able to express her care for him with something tangible and soft.
That’s where Will gets it from, he thinks.
Molly also likes strays.
When Will started collecting dogs in Wolf Trap, it had been because of his loneliness, because he didn’t think he would ever have a human family again and he needed someone to come home to, someone to be there when he couldn’t sleep, someone to tell him he was loved.
With Molly, it’s less about that. It’s more about the strays themselves.
It’s more about how Will feels so fortunate to have a family now, to be surrounded with such warmth and kindness. He feels like he doesn’t deserve it. The dogs, though… they deserve a second chance, more than Will ever did, and it makes him happy to share with them the unconditional acceptance that he himself has become so grateful for.
Molly is the same way, with the dogs. She’s so patient with them, especially the ones who found Will in the woods, the ones without collars or chips who were half-starved, lonely and frightened. Molly gives them what they need to feel secure. She loves raising them, building trust, affection, and loyalty with the animals. She loves the warmth the dogs bring to their home. She loves the fur all over the sofa. She loves the chorus of barking when Walter comes home from school.
Will changes to reflect the best of her. For the first time in nearly a decade, Will Graham likes himself. He’s proud of the man he’s become.
Will burns the letters he receives from Hannibal. Molly burns letters, too. It’s only fair that he doesn’t ask about hers, since she doesn’t force him to talk about his. They’ve been married just a year, and by mutual agreement they don’t pick at old wounds.
That said, she probably knows more than she lets on. Will’s incarceration at the BSHCI was public record; she would have googled that before marrying him. But when Will wakes up from nightmares, sweating and trembling in their bed, she holds him. She never complains about losing sleep to his demons, and she never tries to fix him, to force him to talk to someone or get help. She presses kisses to his hairline. She says, “I’m here, if you’re ready. But if you’re not ready, I’m still here.”
He doesn’t want to think about Hannibal. He keeps burning letters. He never wants to be part of that world ever again.
In December, Will wakes up in the middle of the night to the crack of a shotgun blast. The bed is empty. Will nearly gets tangled up with Walter at the top of the stairs—the boy’s terrified face steals Will’s breath. He grabs Walter’s hand. They run downstairs together.
There’s a body in the snow, and blood, and probably brain matter and bone shards.
The shotgun is also in the snow.
On the porch, Molly kneels down to pull Walter into her arms. “It’s okay, it’s okay, everything’s okay,” she tells him. They’re both shaking. “It’s okay. You’re safe, baby. We’re safe.”
The body in the snow apparently belongs to Walter's father, which is a surprise, because Will had been under the impression he had died three years prior. But that’s the narrow difference between “he’s dead” and “he’s dead to me.” This time, he’s definitely dead.
“Graham,” Molly whispers over Walter’s shoulder. “Should I… call?”
Will looks at the corpse. “It was self-defense,” he mumbles.
“But should I call?” she asks, and what she means is, is it safe for you, for me to call this in?
Will shrugs. “I’ll take care of it,” he says.
Four miles away, there’s a steep bluff next to the road. At the bottom of it, the police will later find the man’s crashed car, as well as what’s left of his body, after the animals take their share.
The next night, Will dreams of picking the body up from the snow only to find that it’s familiar, the weight of it, the smell. It was Hannibal, well and truly dead, his brain scattered over the ice.
In the dream, Will’s shaking hands try to gather the slimy, bloody pieces of Hannibal to push them back into the cavity of his skull. Will wakes up hyperventilating in Molly’s arms, nonsensically begging her to find the first aid kit.
The noise leads Walter to their room. A flicker of shame lights in Will’s stomach when he hears the door open, a cynical voice reminding him that Walter will never be able to unsee this, he’ll always remember what Will sounded like when he was crying, and he’ll never feel comfortable relying on Will as a protector.
“Is Will okay?” Walter asks in a small voice.
“Bad dream,” Molly explains. Will mouths a breathless apology against her shoulder but she just squeezes him tighter.
She asks Walter, “Should we help make him feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think would help him feel better?” Will can hear the melancholic smile in her voice and God, he loves her, she is such a good mother, such a perfect friend, he loves everything she is, he wants this life, he wants this life. “What makes you feel better when you’re hurting, Wally?”
Then Will feels another set of arms around him, a small body pressed close to his back, and he laughs, wetly. “Thanks, Wally,” he chokes out, and he tries to wipe his face clean so he can face the boy. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be scared, Will,” Walter says. “Mom will protect you, too.”
In the morning, Will’s eyes are crusty with dry tears. Molly is sitting next to him on the bed, fondly brushing her fingers through his hair. When he sits up, he sees she’s already brought him a cup of water and a couple tablets of generic-brand ibuprofen. He swallows them.
“That was a bad one,” she says.
“Yeah.” His whole body feels sore, like how it used to feel waking up after an awful session with Chilton, flush with the aftermath of too much emotion. Wrung out and tired, aching. “I’m sorry.”
“In sickness and in health," she says. Tenderly, she presses a kiss to his fingers, to his wedding band. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you about Walter’s father. I knew he would come find me. But I had hoped he would see reason and just walk away.”
Will chews on the inside of his cheek. “You don’t feel any guilt for what happened.”
She studies the join of their hands. “He wasn’t a nice man,” she says. “I never loved him. I never wanted him.”
Will wants to ask, then how did Walter happen? but he answers his own question with the hardness of her gaze.
“I pitied him, but I don’t feel guilty for putting him down. He didn’t give me any other choice.” She pets Will’s arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you, though. I’m sorry for putting you in that situation, and bringing back up… whatever it brought up, for you.”
“Not your fault,” he says. “Not your… Molly…”
But she’s hugging him, now, tightly. He hugs back, breathing in the scent of her, the safety of their bed. She lets out a shaky sigh over his shoulder. “I love you,” she whispers. “I’ve been living with this hanging over my head for nearly a decade, and now it’s over, and I… I don’t know. I’m so relieved. I just love you. I love you.”
“I love you,” he whispers back, and he does. He does.
It’s just that there’s a gash opened up in his heart, and it’s impossible to ignore it now.
He receives another letter before Christmas. Molly finds him sitting on the floor of the upstairs bathroom staring at the closed envelope as if in a trance. He’s been drinking, a little, but not too much. Not enough. He doesn’t trust himself to drink heavily around Molly or Walter. He doesn’t want to be that person. He’s afraid of who that person might be.
Walter is at school—it’s the last day before winter break. Molly sits in the bathroom next to Will. She takes the bottle of whiskey from his hand. When she feels the heft of it, she pauses, and she looks at him with so much affection and pride that he could drown in it. She sets the bottle aside.
“Tell me,” she says.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know how.”
“Start at the beginning.”
So he does. He starts with the part that he never had an opportunity to tell anyone else about. He starts with the part that made everything fall into perfect clarity.
He tells her about Hannibal’s becoming. He tells her about what happened to Mischa.
“Oh God,” Molly says. This unlocks something inside of Will. When he first pieced together the story from Chiyoh, his heart had been so numb he hadn’t felt anything. Now, though, seeing Molly’s reaction, he finally feels what he should have felt then. Sympathetic pain, and pity, for the younger Hannibal of so many years ago.
But Hannibal became a monster, Will explains. He killed and ate people. He caused so much suffering.
“He framed me for murder,” Will says, laughing miserably. “And then I sent someone to kill him. Is it pathetic that this was the most intimate relationship I’d ever had with anyone?”
Molly laughs, a little bit. But she also wraps an arm around Will, and he tucks himself against her warmth.
“Over time I became like him. I started seeing other people as… as obstacles, minor annoyances, tools to be used then cast aside once they had served their purpose. Nothing else mattered to me but Hannibal, and even then, I didn’t know if I wanted revenge, or if I wanted to join him. The final time I tracked him down, I realized that he was in love with me.” He shakes his head. “What do you do with that? When someone like that is in love with you?”
Molly doesn’t answer for a while. Self-consciously, Will wonders if he’s said too much, if he’s shown too much of his darkest corners, but her fingers find his hair and he lets himself be soothed by that, by the reassurance that she’s not pushing him away, she’s just mulling over the question.
She reaches for the envelope—he flinches and almost holds tight to the letter. But he trusts Molly. He loves her. He lets go.
She looks at the return address. “Are you the one who put him in there? Did you turn him in?” Her tone is measured and non-judgemental. “Because if you were the one who put him in prison, I’d say that should be a clean break. We could have the post office block his letters. He’ll just need to move on, else you’ll wind up putting a bullet through his face.”
Will covers his face in shame. “I didn’t turn him in.”
“Yeah,” Molly says quietly. “That’s what I figured. So, then, how did he wind up in prison?”
“I rejected him. I told him to leave. So he went outside my house, and knelt in the grass, and let the cops take him. He said he wanted to be where I could always find him.”
Molly actually laughs at this, which makes Will bristle. “Sorry,” Molly says, “I just—wow. That’s dramatic. And you haven’t seen him in…?”
“Two years.”
“Woof.”
Will shifts uncomfortably. “He deserves this, though,” he starts to explain. “He deserves where he is. With all that he’s done, he deserves so much worse than this. But…”
“But it’s still hard for you to think of him in prison,” she reasons, “because you still love him.”
Will stiffens. He feels the floor dropping out from under him. He knows it’s too late, he knows he won’t have this anymore, this love that was always too good for him, this life that was too perfect for him to ever be a real part of it. “I love you,” he whispers, miserably. “Please, Molly, I—”
Whatever she sees in his eyes makes her face crumple into sympathy. “No, hold on, sweetheart—” (she holds him, she’s still here, the only good in his world, she’s still here and he breathes in her scent like it’s going to be the last time) “I didn’t mean it like that. I know you love me. It’s not a finite resource.”
“Oh,” he says.
“‘Oh’ is right,” she parrots, pressing a kiss into his hair. “It’s okay that you still have feelings for him. It’s okay if you still have feelings for lots of people, Graham. To be honest, from what you’ve told me about what it’s like inside your head, I wonder how you aren’t falling in love with everybody you meet.”
He pulls away to make a face at her. “What?”
“Well, the empathy. You see people for who they really are. Everywhere you look, you understand that person. How could that understanding not create some sort of bond, some sort of fondness?”
He laughs in disbelief. “This is why I married you,” he says. “You truly believe people are fundamentally good.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But I do think that everyone deserves to feel loved by someone. And you have this gift, where you have the capacity to love people who wouldn’t be able to find that kind of acceptance and understanding from anyone else in the world. So it doesn’t surprise me that this Hannibal would feel so attached to you that he would be willing to make grand, dramatic sacrifices just for the chance you might return to him.”
But then Molly frowns, brushing his hair from his forehead to get a closer look at his scar. “He gave you this?”
“He tried to cut my skull open so he could eat my brain,” Will says flatly.
“Oh, Christ.”
Will tilts his head to the side. “It was… his last-ditch effort to protect himself from his feelings for me.”
She nods, pursing her lips. “I hate that his motivations actually make sense to me.”
“Hah. Join the club.”
She flicks the envelope. “He writes to you twice a month, every month, for two years. Then this letter came early. Is that because of the holiday? Was he feeling festive?”
“Probably sentimental.”
Molly sighs, settling back against the wall next to him. “I knew whatever this was would be bad. But I’m both relieved and frightened by the fact that it’s this particular type of bad.”
“Relieved?” he repeats. “You feel relieved?”
She scratches her knee contemplatively. “If he was like Walter’s father… if he was angry, and he hated you, and he swore that one day he would kill you and your family… then I might spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. But Hannibal isn’t like that.”
“No,” Will agrees. “He isn’t like that. Not to me, at least.”
She nods. “I’m relieved that he’s not an incomprehensible, unpredictable monster. I’m relieved because it’s a situation that you have control over.”
“I do?” he asks weakly. “It doesn’t feel like I do.”
“You do,” she promises. Then, “Do you think he’s capable of getting out of there, if he wanted to?”
“Molly,” he breathes, “I swear, I won’t let him hurt you—”
“You’ve already helped me get rid of a dead body, Graham, so stop worrying you’re going to scare me away.” She squeezes his hand. “I love you. Just answer the question. It’s okay.”
Will chokes on the words, but eventually he says, “Yes. Yes. I think he could get out if he wanted to. The only prison that could hold him is death, and even that, I have my doubts.”
“Then that means this isn’t over,” she concludes. “If you keep letting him fester in there, he’s going to become less stable, and then eventually… me and Walter will be his first targets.”
“No.”
“You know I’m right.”
“No. No.” For the first time in a long time, his resistance to the idea of Hannibal feels more than just perfunctory. “Molly. Molly. If you need me to—if you need me to,” he swallows, eyes watering, “If you need me to kill him, I will.”
He would have to do it quick or he would lose his nerve. A gun, a silencer, a bullet through his skull. To give Hannibal such a clinical death would be a betrayal on an order of magnitude far beyond anything else Will has done to hurt him, and Will feels wretched for even contemplating it, but he would do it for his family. He would do it.
“No, Will,” Molly says, horrified. “God, no. I think that would break you. It’d break me to watch you do that to yourself.”
“I would.”
“I know you would. But there are other options.” There’s determination in her face. “If you keep ignoring him, the pressure will grow and grow until he isn’t rational anymore. Assuming there aren’t any mental health professionals qualified to treat him—which I’m given to believe there aren’t—then this story ends with him trying to kill us. But… it doesn’t have to be like that. We can alleviate some of the pressure, on our own terms.”
Maybe Will should question Molly’s apparent grim familiarity with Hannibal’s likely thought processes, but his whole brain floods with a sense of shame and relief, instead. Relief, because he isn’t facing Hannibal alone anymore. But then there’s the shame, from his complicated feelings about his father—he feels so guilty for allowing Molly to take on any of this burden. Both as a man and as Walter’s surrogate father, he feels wretched for allowing her to step in and protect him like this.
But she is the expert on good. Where Will has been stumbling blindly through the forest of destiny towards his own ruination, Molly can give him a map to a future where things are better. She can see the path.
“I think we should go visit him,” she says.
Will hides his face in her body. “Okay,” he breathes.
…
Will Graham is a sensitive soul. That was what made her fall in love with him. It was one thing to go out to dinner with him, crack jokes and see the cute crinkles around his eyes, his kissable mouth forming a pretty smile. But she fell in love with him the first time he woke from a nightmare in her bed.
She fell in love with him the same way she would fall in love with a rescue dog, which in hindsight might not have been the most healthy basis for a relationship. But it worked for them. With his empathy, he must have sensed the nature of her feelings towards him from the beginning—the drive to befriend, to nurture, to become a steadfast companion. But he wanted it. He wanted her.
On the way back down to Baltimore, Will pulls over at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike. They take turns using the restroom while also holding their place in the interminable line at Burger King.
Wally has trouble deciding between a burger and a chicken sandwich; Will pats his shoulder and tells him to just get both, and Will will eat whatever he doesn’t finish. (Which is a lie, because Will eats like a baby bird on the best of days and this isn’t the best of days. But Molly knows that Will has a lot of baggage about fatherhood, and sometimes he feels a compulsion to adhere to some imaginary rules about how he ought to take care of Wally. She won’t call him on it. He’s clearly proud of all the ways he can manage to make Wally happy, and that’s more than okay.)
But the closer they get to Baltimore, the more she worries for Will’s stability. When they get back to the car, she takes the driver’s side. He doesn’t argue.
It’s late evening by the time Molly pulls into the driveway at her parents’ house. Despite the travel fatigue, Wally launches into an intense conversation with his Gramps about the few Christmas decorations saved for Wally to complete.
Will is usually great with Molly’s parents, but tonight, after carrying in the bags, he avoids eye contact and excuses himself to rest. “We’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning, in the city,” Molly explains softly to her mom. “It’s okay if we leave Wally here, right? We should be back by early afternoon.”
Then she kisses her son goodnight, and she excuses herself to bed as well. In the guest bedroom she finds Will curled up on his side over the duvet, holding that envelope again. It’s still sealed.
She sits next to him, the old mattress squeaking with each shift of weight. “I get why you didn’t want to open it,” she says, “but it’s going to be a moot point tomorrow. Why don’t you just rip off the band-aid now, in private, so you have time to process before meeting with him?”
“I’m… different when I’m with him,” he whispers. It sounds like a question.
“I know.”
“Sometimes it’s like… tuning into a radio frequency? Like when I interact with someone, I change channels to meet them, so we can talk to each other on the same wavelength. But with Hannibal, I got so caught up in him that it jammed the signal for everyone else. All my acquaintances back then were… complicated and selfish in their own ways, so it made sense that, when I mirrored them, it wasn’t enough to cleanse myself of him.
"So I've been reassuring myself that things won't be like that this time, because you're so different from all the people I knew back then.
“But then I remembered there was someone. Bev. Beverly Katz. She was always straight with me. She cared. And there were times, when I was talking with her, that she broke me out of it. She broke me out of thinking like him.”
“That’s good then,” Molly says, laying down beside him. “You won’t get stuck in that dark place.”
“But he killed her,” Will whispers. “He cut her in half and displayed her like a damn Body Worlds exhibit.”
Molly wavers, a phantom empathetic pain running up and down her middle as she pictures that. Part of her is screaming out that this plan is crazy, and she doesn’t want to trust a monster, she doesn’t want to put her life in the hands of an unstable, serial-killing cannibal. What had she been thinking?
But Will wouldn’t have unresolved feelings for a true psychopath. If her intuitions about Hannibal are correct, then this really will be the safest path forward, despite everything.
“Why?” Molly asks. “Why did he kill her?”
It takes time for Will to answer. The curve of his spine is so tense he’s trembling. “It was my fault. It happened when I was still locked up. I told Bev the truth about Hannibal because I was desperate for someone to nail him, because I was cut off from the world and I couldn't do anything about it myself. She went to his house. She must have gotten too close to the truth. He couldn’t let her live.”
Molly exhales. “He doesn’t have secrets to protect anymore. He gave them up for you.”
Will turns over to face her. It’s like looking into the eyes of one of the pups during a thunderstorm. “You don’t understand. What he did to Beverly was without personal malice. But you—he’ll think you’re keeping me away from him. He’ll want to hurt you. He’ll…” his voice breaks. “Molly I have to kill him.”
“You don’t.”
“If I kill him while he’s caged like this, it’ll be the cruelest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But what he would do to you is worse.”
She sits up and puts her hands around his face. “Will,” she says, “listen to me. Hannibal gave up his freedom and dignity for you. He has mailed you letters for two years with no reply. He has likely spent every day thinking of you, and privately bargaining with the universe for your return. Tomorrow, he’s going to finally see you again, and only because I pushed you to visit him.”
Understanding rolls through Will like a wave. “Oh.”
“I think that improves our chances of surviving him,” she says, running her thumb over the stubble on his cheek. “With hearts intact.”
Silence stretches out between them. Haltingly, he brings his hand up to brush his knuckles across her cheek. “Molly,” he whispers gravely, “if you ever suspect I might be a threat to you or Walter, you have to kill me.”
It’s not the first time he’s said this.
He said it while they were dating. He said it the night before their wedding. He says it sometimes when he wakes up from a nightmare, staring at her as if it’s a miracle to see her alive.
She knows his fears are unfounded. She knows Will Graham. The empathy lets him wear other people’s worldviews like ill-fitting suits, and he might have been easily manipulated before by a clever monster who knew how to twist him up inside, but she knows at the heart of him is a man who loves his dogs, loves fishing, loves working with his hands. He would never hurt her. He would never hurt Wally.
But she says “I promise,” because that’s what he needs to hear. Some of the tension melts out of him at the assurance. Like they’re in a Zombie film, and he feels comforted by the fact that he’ll be killed before he turns into one of them.
Not long after that, they open the letter. Or, he lets her open it. He’s afraid just the words on the page will be enough to trigger him, that he’ll turn possessive and defensive of Hannibal’s words like they’re something precious. Better to have Molly open it, he says, so he doesn’t have the chance to try to keep it from her when he’s less clear-headed.
She thinks he’s being hyperbolic, but as they read the letter together she does notice a change come over him. Just seeing the precise cursive makes him sit up a little straighter, and there’s disdain in his gaze that she’s never really seen from him before, except when he was looking down at the body of Walter’s father in the snow. But he doesn’t move to take the letter from her, and he doesn’t express any animosity towards her. It’s sort of like seeing a dog’s ears perk up at the sound of a far-away whistle, tense and primed to react.
The content of the letter itself must be unremarkable, though, because Will’s tension eventually fades. “This is what he’s like,” he says when he realizes she’s waiting for his reaction. “I forgot that you… you don’t know much about him. He’s very old school. Composing formal correspondence… that was like a normal thing for him; he wrote emails the same way.”
Neutrally, she asks, “Is there anything in here that contradicts my assumptions about his motivations?”
He frowns. “It’s embedded within the structure of a letter, but the bulk of what he’s saying reads more like a prayer to an absent god.” His fingers trace the margin. “The questions he chooses to ask—have I received his previous correspondence, would I do him the courtesy of returning a drawing he sent me… He just wants proof that I’m here. That he’s not speaking into the void.”
Molly nods. “He hasn’t turned the corner yet into resenting you for your absence, so that’s good. That was my main worry.”
Will glances at her briefly, and then back at the text. “The cracks are showing, though.” Suddenly, with a shiver as if shaking away a bad dream, Will begins folding the letter to tuck it back into the envelope.
Then he stops. He turns the paper around to look at the back.
“Wow,” says Molly, with a burst of admiration for the man on the other side of the pencil. “He’s talented.”
“This… is one of the places he goes to, when he retreats into himself. It’s this old chapel in Italy, in Palermo.” He traces the lovingly-rendered outline of a pew. “There’s a mosaic on the floor, you—you can’t see it, from this angle. It’s a skeleton, a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death.”
Molly hums. “Why do you think he hid it, in this sketch? Was he… promising not to kill you?”
Will chuckles, and then he actually does return the letter to the envelope. “He doesn’t need to promise that in a letter; he chose not to kill me when he turned himself in. The most likely explanation, then, is just that the BSHCI mailroom wouldn’t let him send a letter with a skull drawn on it.”
He’s still smiling when he sets the letter on the night table. Patting Will’s arm in solidarity, Molly gets up to shower before bed.
The lightness in Will still remains, even given time to process everything. She climbs into bed beside him and pulls the duvet over them both, and he kisses her hand when she wraps her arm around him.
“Do you still feel like yourself?” she asks him.
“Mmhmm,” he hums, and she kisses the corner of his jaw just below his ear. “Molly, have I mentioned to you that Hannibal Lecter is a stuffy, elitist, know-it-all prick?”
She snorts. “No, but I’ve started to pick that up from context clues.”
“I think I forgot that. Or, I was trying not to think about it? Like… any ounce of fondness I felt would be a sign I was backsliding into that mindset.”
“I don’t think you should suppress fondness for him. Having positive feelings about people is a nice thing, even if they’ve done evil. It’s only bad if it influences you to treat others poorly.”
He nods, his curls scratching against the pillowcase. “Maybe you won’t have trouble breaking me out of his mindset. Maybe he’ll have trouble poaching me from yours.” He grins in the dark. “Even when I was trapped in his orbit, there was still a lingering dissonance. Because even then I didn’t… I didn’t enjoy the violence. It never pleased me like it pleased him. For me it was only ever a means to an end.
“But with you… there’s no dissonance. You help me become myself.”
So there is Hannibal Lecter, in his prison cell made of plexiglass or something. He isn’t restrained or muzzled, he’s just wearing a jumpsuit. He’s lying down at the moment, on the cot pressed to the wall on the side of the cell. There’s no blanket or sheets.
The cell itself is surprisingly generous, although, for someone as resourceful as Hannibal, it was only to be expected that he would find a way to secure himself the nicest accommodations possible under these circumstances. There is a drafting table and a couple of stainless steel tables in the room, with small metal stools secured to the floor. The back of the cell has a full fireplace with a mantle and large bookshelves built into the wall—this must have been a bedroom or a study, back before the building was converted. They probably filled the fireplace with concrete so the patients wouldn’t be tempted, but it’s hard to make out the details through the limited resolution of the security feeds.
Molly had been ready to just step right in as soon as the orderlies gave them their access passes, but Will pulled up short in the hallway outside the room. He was staring at the display mounted into the wall. This is what Hannibal looks like at rest, when he isn’t expecting company.
Molly squeezes Will’s arm. “You okay?”
“This is really happening.”
“Yeah,” she says, looking between him and the screen. “It is. Which part are you stuck on?”
“It’s ten thirty and he’s not out of bed.”
She frowns. “It’s Sunday. Maybe they don’t have any therapy scheduled for him today. And they said they wouldn’t tell him to expect you, so maybe he just decided to sleep in.”
“No, he—you don’t understand. Hannibal is meticulously organized. He keeps a schedule broken down into fifteen minute increments. He doesn’t just sleep in.” He gestures to the screen again but then lets his hand fall to his side. “This is… real.”
She nods, solemnly. “You did say the cracks were showing.”
He looks back up the hallway behind them, at the heavy security door that shuts Hannibal’s ward off from the rest of the hospital. He glances up at the security camera mounted above the door, and then he turns around to look at Molly, with his face turned away from the camera. He breathes, “It’s a zoo. He didn’t get this room for good behavior. This is a zoo exhibit. He’s here to be observed in some cardboard imitation of his natural environment. And he knows that.”
“That makes you angry.”
“It’s an insult,” he grits out.
She takes his hand. “Well, we’re going to help rectify that. Okay?”
He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, and exhales through his nose. Then he nods.
…
The thing is, Will trusts Molly more than he’s ever trusted anyone else in his life.
After Lithuania, after Italy, after the farm… Will woke up in his own bed, at his home in Wolf Trap. It still smelled like his dogs. The sense memory cut through to the core of him, past the outer layer of the man Hannibal had shaped him into. It made everything suddenly seem like a terrible dream, and Will just wanted to bury his face in Winston’s fur and soothe himself with the rhythm of friendly panting, but the dogs weren’t there. There was only Hannibal.
That was a wake-up call.
Will spent the following months trying to claw away the layers that Hannibal had shaped, trying to find the core of his own identity. When he finally met Molly, he had no more armor. He had no more skin. He was a raw wound, exposed nerves, pink and bloody. He didn’t know who he was.
He could see Molly, though. At the center of her was humility and compassion, the exact opposite of everything Hannibal had been. That was who Will wanted to be.
(And she was a mother, too. Maybe that spoke to a part of Will he’d believed was long dead.)
So, maybe it’s not the healthiest relationship. Maybe this isn't the best way to build up his independence again, maybe this isn’t the best way to ensure he’s strong enough alone to endure the influence of other people. But at some point, when the illness becomes too severe, you cut your losses and just start trying to preserve the patient’s quality of life, and Will thinks that Molly has given him the best quality of life he’s ever had. She’s the hospice care for his soul.
So when she tells him that it’s going to be okay, he believes her, because what else can he do?
The lock on the door to the visiting area makes a mechanical whirring sound as its tumblers creep into place. By the time they actually enter the room, Hannibal is already standing before the glass waiting patiently for them, as if he hadn’t just scrambled off the cot the moment the lock started turning. His posture is board-straight. He’s clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair that doesn’t flatter him nearly as much as the way he used to wear it.
“Will,” he says. At just that word, Will feels the slow agony of two years of growth peeling away from his back. He looks at Hannibal and the longing is a punch to the gut—God, Hannibal is the most tantalizing, terrifying thing Will has ever seen. Both the starving child feral with lust for righteous violence, and the wrathful predator who killed Abigail. Will looks into Hannibal’s eyes again and he can hear the ceaseless screaming, the void of feeling, the way Hannibal’s heart bashes itself pointlessly against the walls he constructs in his mind to cage it; that is the part of him that makes Will’s blood run hot. The honest part of him, primordial and spiteful. Will wants to lock him away and keep him a secret from the world so no one else can look at him, he wants to squeeze his fingers around Hannibal’s throat to make him struggle and choke and keen for oxygen.
In that moment, seeing the exaltation in Hannibal’s eyes, Will feels so powerful it makes him lightheaded.
And nauseous.
He feels Molly’s presence near him. He remembers why they’re here. He remembers that Hannibal’s love is selfish and all-consuming, and he would kill Molly, without blinking, for no other reason than that she would take Will’s attention away from him.
“Dr. Lecter,” Will greets him, in a tight voice.
Only then does Hannibal tear his eyes away to give Molly a compulsory once-over. “You allowed Jack to send a chaperone?”
Molly snorts. “Oh, no, I’m not—” She glances back at Will. “Do you think I could pass for a special agent?”
It takes Will a moment to catch up with what just happened, to process the reminder that Hannibal is not omniscient, despite all the bluster. It would only have been natural to assume that the strange woman accompanying Will would be an FBI agent—why would Will have brought his wife to visit the serial killer? “I mean,” Will offers Molly, “it would help if you had a badge.”
“Ah.” Something eases back in Hannibal, then, like the lowered shoulders of a cat ready to begin the hunt. “My apologies. You must be Molly Foster-Graham.”
“So you heard,” says Will, frowning. He wonders which genius on the hospital staff decided to use Will’s marriage to taunt Hannibal.
“Of course. I sent a letter to convey my congratulations, but unfortunately the postal service here is unreliable.” Hannibal’s eyes flash as he studies her again, turning to face her and grant her his full attention. In that special, bone-chilling tone, Hannibal says, “It is truly a pleasure to finally meet you, Mrs. Foster-Graham. I sincerely regret that I could not attend the ceremony in person.”
Will steps forward to insinuate himself in front of Molly, before his brain catches up with his body. “You won’t touch her,” he says coarsely. That beast is in his hands again, he wants to reach past the partition and shove Hannibal’s face into the damned hardwood floor for daring to even contemplate harming Molly, who is so much better than him, so far above him—
But it was just bait, of course. “Tell me, Will,” says Hannibal, with a prescient twinkle in his eyes, “When you dream of me, what precisely do you dream of me doing?”
Fuck, Will is out of practice.
“It really is good to meet you, Dr. Lecter,” Molly interjects. “If you would just excuse us for one moment…”
She pulls Will away from the partition, and, numbly, he follows.
The tingle of her fingers brushing against the stubble on his cheek sends electricity down his spine; it makes him actually look at her. He sees how unfazed she is by all of this. She’s unshakable.
“Hey,” she whispers, in a voice that makes him want to be anywhere but here so he could just hide himself in her arms, “he didn’t drag you back here. This was our choice to be here. You’re not trapped.”
“This isn’t going to accomplish anything,” he says. If they go back home now, maybe he can forget this, maybe he can forget how it felt to see Hannibal like some tiger left neglected in a tiny wire cage. Maybe when Hannibal inevitably comes for them, Will will have the fortitude to put him down for good, like he should have done years ago. Just a shotgun blast and blood in the snow. It would be quick.
“I’ve got this,” Molly promises. “Baby, I’ve got this. Trust me.”
The thing is, Will trusts Molly more than he’s ever trusted anyone else in his life.
There’s that moment in Exodus, when Aaron throws his staff down and it turns into a snake, and the snake faces off against the two snakes from Pharaoh's magicians. It’s the first direct test of the might of God against the might of the Pharaoh. And Will doesn’t believe the bible is history, but if it was, this would be how Aaron felt.
Maybe Will’s devotion to Molly—or to the fantasy of goodness triumphing over evil—is a sort of faith, imperfect and fragile.
“Okay,” he whispers.
…
Hannibal Lecter is handsome. Even in a jumpsuit he looks composed, like the master of his domain, and Molly sees hints of what he might have been like on the outside.
But there’s a desperation here, too. Molly wonders if Will can see that part. He might be the profiler, the empath, but he’s always been stepping into other people’s shoes. He’s never developed an intense parasocial attachment of his own, against which he could measure and predict Hannibal’s behavior towards him. Sensitive as he was growing up, he would have tried to avoid developing any attachments he couldn’t control—and that’s the key, here. The lack of control, and the predictable behaviors it portends.
Molly sees Hannibal in a way that might be impenetrable to Will.
She steps forward to the partition, crossing her arms in front of herself. She needs her feet planted firmly on the hardwood and her center of balance steady, if she wants to survive this conversation. “So,” she says, “it was my idea to come here, Dr. Lecter.”
“Was it?” For the first time since they entered the room he actually seems interested in what Molly is saying beyond the necessities of politeness, beyond the cold assessment of a new type of prey.
“Yeah. I kept seeing your letters in our mail."
“Ah.” He smiles. It seems like his canines are sharper than an average human's. “You are here to warn me off my attachment to your husband, of course.” He looks to Will, “Is she your mongoose?”
Will doesn’t say anything. Molly steps between them, interrupting Hannibal’s attempt at re-establishing his conversation with Will. “Actually, no, that’s not why we’re here.”
“No?”
She looks into his eyes. "Dr. Lecter, I’m here to politely ask you not to kill me,” she says. “Please.”
Hannibal Lecter blinks. Likewise, Molly feels Will’s heavy stare on her back.
With a bit of a rasp, Hannibal confesses, “I’m uncertain what you expect to gain from this? There is no reason to beg mercy from a man within a cage, Mrs. Foster-Graham.”
“You can call me Molly.”
“Well, Molly,” he says coaxingly, “do you have reason to believe the cage cannot hold me?”
“I’ve been told not to underestimate your resourcefulness.”
He preens at that, like it’s something he has been waiting to hear, a confirmation that everyone is in agreement on that one crucial fact: Hannibal is not caught. He is here of his own volition.
“Nevertheless,” Hannibal continues, “were I to simply promise not to hurt you, that would not help your dear husband sleep at night.”
“Dr. Lecter,” Molly says again, letting her arms fall to her sides. “I’m here to politely ask you not to kill me, please.” And leave my son alone, she doesn’t say, because she doesn’t know if he knows about Walter and she won’t risk bringing Walter to his attention. “Not because I think it will comfort Will, not because I think it will comfort me. Just, straight up, without any artifice: if you get the opportunity to kill me, I’m asking you to please… not do that.”
“Molly…” says Will.
Hannibal looks genuinely baffled. “Do you wish for a pinky promise?”
“No." She gives an apologetic smile, because she knows the situation is a bit ridiculous. “That’s alright. Just the acknowledgement is fine.”
“Well,” says Hannibal magnanimously. “Acknowledged.”
At this, she returns to Will’s side, unsurprised to find him glaring balefully at Hannibal. “Molly,” he murmurs without looking away from the partition, “please tell me that wasn’t your whole plan.”
She snorts. “The next part wouldn’t work, if he couldn’t hear me in the first place. Now he can hear me. I’ve, um, dialed into his frequency.”
“He doesn’t respect you,” Will counters. “You’re a novelty.”
“I'm just a magic, talking pig?” she jokes. It makes her husband flinch. She squeezes his hand tighter. “You’re alright,” she says.
“Are you?”
“Yeah. It’s going to be alright.”
She opens her posture so she can talk to both of them at once, without letting go of Will’s hand. “Dr. Lecter,” she says. Then she backtracks: “Actually, would you prefer Hannibal?”
“It would only be fair,” he replies demurely.
“But which would you prefer?”
He still seems bemused, but maybe there’s a part of him, buried deep in his subconscious, that is starting to catch on to the pattern. He looks between her and Will, and then he says, “You may call me Hannibal if you wish.”
Maybe he thinks granting her this permission will trick Will into referring to him verbally by his first name. To hear his name on Will’s lips would be another token of acknowledgment, another drop of water for a man who has just spent two years in the desert.
“Hannibal, then,” Molly says softly, with as much sincerity as she can muster. “It really is good to meet you. I know you don’t know me, so I want to kind of… just tell you where I’m approaching all of this from. I’m not like you. I’m not going to pretend to understand the violence. I’m not—” Abigail, she doesn’t say. The name Will whispers on the worst nights, when he’s sobbing into her shoulder and begging to just die already. Abigail, who was like us, and I wanted to protect her from him, and he killed her, made me think I killed her, she was—she didn’t deserve this, she deserved a real life, she—
“I don’t understand,” she resumes, “wanting to see people suffer. I hate to see people suffer, you know, even people who deserve it? I think there’s something about pain itself which is so awful that it will always feel unjust to me.”
With mild interest, Hannibal asks, “You have no taste for revenge against those who have wronged you or your loved ones?”
She and Will share a glance, about the body in the snow. “I’ll do whatever it takes to protect the people I love,” she hedges. “But I don’t believe in retribution.”
Hannibal hums, thoughtfully.
“My point is, I don’t understand the violence. But this—” She gestures wildly between Hannibal Lecter and her husband, and then herself—that triangle of tangled obligations and loyalties. “This, I completely understand.”
“Molly,” says Will, in that breathy voice, like a question. “This was a mistake.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s not going to work. Whatever you’re trying to do, this isn’t going to—”
She kisses him. It’s rare for them to actually kiss on the lips like this. So much of their shared affection is nonsexual codependence: kisses on his shoulder, his hands, his cheek, his temple, the crown of his head. But sometimes it’s like this. She tastes his mouth. His tongue. His stubble is uneven on one side. He’s shaking and she loves him, she loves him like sun-warmed grass and the joyful play of free animals.
Then she pulls away. When she looks at Hannibal, she sees the look in his eyes that she saw in the mirror twenty years ago, in the bathroom of her high school, ready to hurt herself or hurt others just to get what she wanted. She feels almost nostalgic for the messiness of it all, the parts of herself she’d unwrapped with all the ugliness of her envy and desperation.
She turns back to Will. She kisses the bridge of his nose and he exhales. “What’s the harm in trying?” she asks. “I can't make things any worse than they were.”
He nods, running his tongue over his lips with his eyes closed, conceding the point defeatedly. “I think you’ve turned me into an optimist," he says. "Or a nihilist.”
“A nihilistic optimist,” she replies blithely. “That has to be the worst kind of optimist there is. I think I’m a bad influence on you, babe. Sorry if I get us killed.”
He smiles despite himself, and she kisses his cheek again.
Then she steps away from Will, finding the wall of the tiger’s cage. To cut through the tension in the room, she turns her back on the plexiglass, and leans against it, to the side. She isn’t between Hannibal and Will. She isn’t separating Hannibal from any part of the room. She’s just… standing near him, and displaying trust, casual posture and familiarity.
“Ma’am,” says a voice over the intercom, “Please don’t touch the barrier.”
Molly rolls her eyes. “Y’all are recording this, aren’t you? Take this as verbal consent—if anything bad happens to me from leaning against the glass, I waive my right to sue the BSHCI.”
“Your funeral,” mumbles the voice before the intercom shuts off.
Molly crosses her arms and tilts her head back against the plastic, not looking at Hannibal Lecter.
“So,” she says conversationally, “You know how teenagers are, right? When I was a teenager, I was that sort of teenager.”
After a beat of silence she looks over at Hannibal, which seems to startle him, like he hadn’t thought she was still addressing him. Politely, he offers, “I can’t imagine you were anything but a friendly and hardworking youth, Molly.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Some of the time. But what I meant is… when you’re a teenager, everything is so important, so much bigger than it really is. And there was this boy. I was in love with him.”
Will, who hasn’t heard this story before, quirks a smile. “Should I be jealous?” he asks, as if they’re just chatting over dinner, and not standing in a room with Hannibal.
Molly smiles, and shakes her head. “It was multiple lifetimes ago. But, at the time, I thought I would never love anyone as deeply and intensely as I loved him. Of course, we were seventeen, and seventeen-year-old boys are never worth that kind of devotion, but I was young, and I didn’t know any better.”
She pauses, and looks over at Hannibal. “Did you ever have a lovesick teenager phase?”
He smiles. Instead of answering, he says, “I’ve never met a seventeen year old boy who was not unpleasant.”
“Hah! Well, clearly you don’t understand. This was love.” She shakes her head fondly. “He started dating a girl. And I… I didn’t handle it well.”
Will frowns.
For a moment Molly hesitates, thinking about what she wants him to see when he looks at her. But after every awful thing that Will has admitted to her, she can also stand to show him the parts of herself she’s ashamed of.
“The truth is,” she says grimly, “I stalked them. This was over the course of three or four months. During the day, I would look for him. I knew his schedule, and between class periods I went out of my way to cross paths with him. Sometimes I’d be satisfied with glaring at him from afar. Other times I argued with him in public. I left threatening notes in his locker. I acted the part of a jilted lover when he’d never really dated me to begin with.”
She frowns, and adds, “I think I hit him, once? Like, I genuinely—I hit him, in public. And I dared him to hit me back. I was just so…. so angry. I felt so impotent. It was this hurricane of self-pity and rage that would spiral in my head—I wanted to hurt his girlfriend, I wanted to hurt myself just to spite the both of them. I wanted to hurt him most of all.
“Even so, there was a part of me… I thought, well, he could still have her. He could still have her if he would just take me, too. If he would just acknowledge me, if he would just touch me, I could settle for less than a relationship. I could compromise. Why couldn’t he see that I would compromise? Because, clearly he was the one being unreasonable,” she laughs, dully.
“That’s,” says Will, staring at her. Then he blinks, and shakes his head. “Wow.”
She swallows the part of herself that wants to be assured that he still loves her. Instead, she smiles, sadly. “Babe, I wasn’t that far outside the bell curve, all-in-all. Was I, doctor?”
After a beat too long, Hannibal finally says, “I did not specialize in adolescent development.”
“Fair enough. But surely you can corroborate that heartbroken teenagers with self-destructive tendencies are more common than, say, cannibal serial killers? On a strictly per capita basis?”
“Yes,” says Hannibal with a smirk, “in my professional opinion, I believe you are correct.”
“So,” Molly continues, but then she loses her voice. She swallows, and crosses her arms tighter, shutting her eyes. This is the part that matters, and she needs to be as real as possible. She needs to be honest. “So, I’ll admit I’m a little… fatalistic, about all of this,” she says. “About you, Hannibal, and your relationship with my husband.”
Because the truth of the matter is that seventeen-year-old Molly had never been capable of causing serious harm. Friends and loved ones had recognized the problem. Her therapist and psychiatrist had coached her through the shame, the loneliness, the depression, the anger, the grief for a life she had arrogantly believed she was entitled to.
She healed. She grew up. She learned humility.
But Hannibal Lecter is a different kind of animal. Not only is he capable of far more severe destruction than Molly ever was, but he has had decades of practice. He is willing and able to commit unspeakable horrors to get whatever he wants.
And there is no one in the world qualified to coach him through letting go of Will.
So what else can she do but capitulate?
She opens her eyes and looks vaguely at the wall. “Maybe, if I’d built my whole identity around this marriage, I’d feel differently, Maybe I’d feel entitled to Will, just like when I was a teenager.
“But I built this life on my own. I had a family, without a husband, and I was happy. I didn’t need to rely on someone else in order to feel complete within myself. So, I… I didn’t expect you, Will,” she hears his breath catch, and she can’t stand to see her own heartbreak written on his face. “Every moment with you has been… a blessing that I never thought to ask for.”
“Molly…?”
“Sorry, sorry,” she laughs and waves her hands. She feels a tear run down her cheek. “I didn’t mean for that to sound like I’m breaking up with you, fuck. You’re stuck with me until the bitter end, Graham, till death do us part. But I’m… I’m just trying to say that… I’m not going to clutch onto you like I’m afraid of losing you or something. I’m not going to be jealous or possessive, I’m not going to act like I own you. I don’t own you. You’re just this wonderful man who I want to share my life with.”
She opens her eyes again. Will looks stricken.
“I know I’m important to you,” she says. “And I know he’s important to you, too.”
She doesn’t miss the twitch from Hannibal, the way his chin lifts, the fire in his eyes.
“And that’s okay,” she concludes. “That just means he’s important to me, too.”
A sharp exhale, then, from Hannibal. She glances over at him, and when he looks at her, he seems poised on the knife-edge somewhere between fragility and cynical disbelief. His eyes are wide, unblinking.
She turns to face Hannibal fully. “At the end of the day, I want Will to feel safe, and happy. I know you’ve hurt him before, you’ve made him feel unsafe, you’ve made him feel like he can’t trust himself. Obviously, if you tried to do that to him again, we would have a problem.”
“Shit,” Will whispers, like he’s finally seen her plan and he thinks it’s pointless. Like it’s hurting him just to watch her try.
But she feels more confident about this than he does. She probably feels more confident about it than she should.
She meets the monster’s eyes again. “If you tried to do that to him again, we’d have a problem,” she repeats, as quietly as she can manage, aware of the listening ears. “But… that doesn’t mean I’ll try to keep him away from you. You’re important to him, you matter to him. So you matter to me, too. It’s as simple as that.” She places her hand on the glass. “There’s already a space in this life for you, Hannibal. You don’t have to hurt anyone to make room.”
With excruciating intensity, Hannibal says, “I don’t understand what you are offering.”
Molly thinks, belatedly, about plausible deniability. “Well, letters, I guess,” she says. “Phone calls. Obviously, we’ll have to work within the… limitations of what you’re allowed to have at the hospital.”
She winks at him.
From the flash of raw hunger in his eyes, it’s clear he got the message. His gaze flicks over to Will, calculating.
Will snarls, and steps forward. “She is a good person,” he whispers tightly. “She is being far kinder to you than you deserve and you know that. Do. not. ruin. this.”
“Do you feel the same, Will?” Hannibal volleys back, just as quietly. “Is she kinder to you than you deserve?”
“Yes,” Will says. “And I do my best to honor that.”
So Hannibal looks back and forth between the two of them. For a long moment, Molly wonders if he’ll laugh at her and throw it all back in her face. Any other kind of monster would do that.
Not this one.
“Acknowledged,” says Hannibal. Stiffly, he steps away from the glass.
It seems like a dismissal, which is a surprise considering how long Hannibal has waited for this visit. But this is a lot to take in. Even if he’s not sure whether he’ll accept these terms yet, at least he must be reasonably certain that this won’t be the last time he’ll see Will. That’s good, at least. That’s breathing room, that’s a pressure release valve.
She and Will make it to the door before Hannibal says, “Will.”
Will turns around, his posture still stiff, his eyes hard when he meets Hannibal’s gaze.
“Was it good to see me?”
(To ask for that kind of reassurance is itself an admission of vulnerability, but given the situation, it’s just one more added to the pile.)
Will glances at Molly. Are you sure? he mouths. She squeezes his hand encouragingly.
To Hannibal, Will says with the feigned gruffness of rejection, “If I never have to walk through these doors again, it will be too soon.”
Then, facing away from the camera, he shows Hannibal his teeth, and Hannibal smirks back.
…
“It used to be different,” Will explains, on Christmas Eve. “Mirroring him. It used to make me feel so much larger than the world around me. My own identity was just a… a wire mesh that helped form the face I showed to other people. But inside, I felt formless and infinite. I never felt fear, I never felt shame, I never felt pain or distress. Other people were… idle curiosities. Even the enemies who most reviled me were charmingly inept.”
She nods, thoughtfully. His sweater—seasonally merry—is slightly scratchy against her cheek. “That’s where I expected you to go,” she admits. “In the car afterwards… that’s where I thought you went. I thought you were going to look at me coldly. But it didn’t seem like that’s what happened…”
“No, it—it was different. He was different. This incarceration distorted everything—or maybe it was somehow twisted up with my own memories of being trapped there.” He sighs. “I feel like I just paid a conjugal visit to hell.”
Her hand finds his stomach, still coiled tight with tension. But she can feel his diaphragm expand with his breath, and she knows that while maybe he’s unable to fully relax right now, at least he isn’t trapped in his own angst. He’s still breathing deeply.
“It was different,” he reiterates after a little while. “I could especially feel it while we were passing all the staff on the way out—they weren’t sheep anymore. They were something grotesque—ugly, selfish, gluttonous creatures, like demons had infected the flock, and they were taunting me.”
“What do you think that means?” Molly asks, “In practical terms?”
“Practical terms?”
“You know, something concrete? He used to find strangers charming and harmless, now he feels threatened or mocked by them?”
“He doesn’t feel mocked by them,” Will corrects. “Not directly. It’s more like… feeling mocked by the apathy of a universe that allowed these dumb animals to have so much material power over him. The more grotesque their behavior, the deeper the insult cuts.”
She lifts her head to peer up at Will. “That’s how you felt before we even entered his ward.”
“Hmm?”
“You said it was a zoo exhibit. You said it was insulting.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
She nods, resolutely, and shuts her eyes again. “It was an insult for the BSHCI to lock him up, but that doesn’t mean it’s better for him to just go free.”
“A little late for a change of heart.”
“No, I mean—I expect he’s going to get out, and he’s going to find us,” she whispers so quietly it’s practically just a breath of air. “But when he does, we can’t just let him keep killing people.”
Will shakes his head with a wan smile. “Yeah, the serial killing would throw a big wrench in the harboring-a-serial-killer plan.”
"Baby," she says carefully, "I need you to check if the bunker exists on any public maps of our property."
Will tilts his chin down to look at her with wide eyes. "Oh, shit."