Chapter Text
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hurting as one
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That night, Nathan finally put to bed, she finds Scola on the couch in the living room, leafing through old photo albums his mom left after her last visit.
And it catches her by surprise, how he pauses at every page, smiles at the pictures even, immersed in every memory they bring back.
A pang of something rips through her chest.
For a time in the 80s her dad’s thing was home videos, which she’d never be able to watch knowing how he’d abandon the family years later.
Likewise Stuart never looked through old albums on his own; when he did it was with Nathan on his lap, telling stories of his Uncle Doug, of the blanket forts they used to build in the living room, of their tree house at the back of the garden of their Park Ave home.
More recently, to talk to their son about 9/11, about why he’d never met his Uncle Doug.
She opposed the idea initially, he was only four after all, and they’d had one marathon night of fighting, arguing, maturely discussing, each going back to their own corner before she could see Scola’s underlying meaning.
Their instincts as parents might be to protect Nathan from every ugly thing in the world, but that didn’t mean they had to shield him from the world entire.
And telling Nathan, in words toothy enough for a 4-year old, turned out to be the right decision.
In some way it made him understand exactly why his daddy fought bad guys for a living.
Looking at him now, through their son’s eyes, her heart skips a beat again because of it— sitting there wasn’t just Special Agent Stuart Scola, not just her partner, not just Doug’s brother.
But Nathan’s dad.
Ever since Stuart started sharing stories of Doug with Nathan, ever since Nathan got old enough to really understand them, a calm had come over him the likes she’d never seen in him before.
Or an anger had ebbed away, in any case.
When he told the stories, of secret pirate treasure hidden in the garden, of Doug cheering him on from the sidelines at soccer practice, that decades-old sadness no longer hid behind eyes.
“This is helping you somehow,” she says as she sits down next to him, but the words leave a bitter taste behind in her mouth. It sounded too much like Scola using their son to heal some part of him, rather than that calm coming from somewhere wholly unexpected.
Talking about Doug to Nathan never took the pain away, not for Stuart or her mother-in-law.
But Stuart catches her meaning.
“Talking about Doug like this...”—He nods, and smiles sadly, but there’s an undeniable spark in his eyes—“with Nathan’s...”
She nods.
She gets it.
With Nathan’s childlike wonder, that special lens children saw the world through, how that made Doug more than the stories Stuart had in him. It kept Doug alive, his memory, his spirit.
She settles her head on his shoulder, and draws a finger over a picture of a toothless baby Scola, held tight by his big brother Doug.
Scola kisses her temple. “It hurts less.”