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Robin woke to the wrong side of the bed being empty.
For half a second - one soft, stupid, blissful second - her sleep-fogged brain tried to tell her Nancy was in the shower, or downstairs, or in the kitchen swearing at the coffee machine. It was the silence that broke the lie first. No radio. No cabinet door thumping. No low voice drifting up the stairs.
The ceiling above her came into focus. The familiar water stain in the far corner. The little spiderweb crack Nancy always said they should call someone about and never did because something always got in the way or shifted their attention.
Robin rolled her head to the side.
Her pillow was a tangle, the blanket shoved half off her own body. Nancy’s side of the bed looked like a catalog photo. Pillow plumped. Duvet pulled smooth and precise, as if some stranger had come in and made it with hotel corners.
She’d made it that way herself three mornings ago, when she couldn’t stand looking at the dent where Nancy’s shoulder should be and had smoothed it flat with both palms until her fingers ached. Now it just sat there - perfect, empty, accusing.
Voices hummed from downstairs. The clink of plates. The low, careful murmur of people trying to be quiet and not managing it. Someone laughed once, very softly, as if they’d forgotten themselves and then swallowed it back down.
Robin lay still, staring at the straight line of the untouched blanket. Her chest felt hollowed out and packed tight all at once, like somebody had carved away everything important and filled the space with cold sand.
Today.
Right. Today.
The day they put Nancy in the ground.
The doorbell rang.
It cut through the murmur like a sharpened blade, three bright chimes that jolted her the way a gunshot used to in her nightmares. The voices below dipped, went muffled. Footsteps crossed the front hall, the scrape of the deadbolt, the heavy hush of the front door opening.
She pushed herself upright. Her muscles protested; she’d slept in yesterday’s T-shirt and sweatpants, twisted up in them. The room swayed for a moment, the familiar walls looking like a set painted too bright. On the dresser, the framed photo from City Hall caught a shaft of gray morning light: Nancy in her dress, Robin in her suit, both of them grinning like lunatics with their foreheads tipped together.
Robin looked away.
A knock came at the bedroom door, two soft raps.
“Robin?” Karen’s voice, muffled but unmistakable. “Honey, the detectives are here. They’d like to talk to you for a minute.”
The words slammed through her like a replayed car crash. Detectives. Here. Her stomach dropped, hand finding the mattress seam as if she needed something to hang on to.
For a heartbeat she wasn’t in her bedroom at all.
She was back at the front door two weeks ago, fingers slipping on the knob because her hands were covered in flour from the complicated paste with the pine nuts, apron still tied around her waist. She’d opened it to find two men on the porch, shirtsleeves rolled up, ties askew, their jackets nowhere in sight. There’d been brownish smears on one cuff, a darker halo at the collar of the older one’s shirt.
She hadn’t heard everything they’d said. She remembered the blood more than the words. Remembered one phrase - “We’re so sorry,” - and then the scream ripping out of her chest, so loud, the porch light rattled and six neighbors later said they’d heard it from their yards and living rooms. One had called 9-1-1 to report it, even.
Now, in the dim bedroom, she dragged in air that tasted like dust and old coffee and the faint ghost of Nancy’s perfume.
“Okay,” she croaked. Her own voice sounded wrong. Too thin. Vacant. “I’ll be down.”
She found her slippers by touch and shuffled into them, then the cardigan draped over the back of the chair. The cardigan smelled like stale fear and too many unwashed days now. She pulled it around herself anyway, tying the belt in a clumsy knot as she stepped out into the hallway.
The stairs seemed longer than usual. Family moved through the blur of the house below - Melissa’s blonde hair bobbing in the kitchen doorway, Steve’s frame bent over a stack of plates, Holly’s grown-up profile so very similar to Nancy’s in the living room as she arranged flowers into vases with shaky hands. They all blurred into smudges of black fabric and pale faces.
At the bottom of the stairs, the front door stood open a crack to let in gray spring light. The detectives waited just inside the entryway, hats in hand this time, jackets folded neatly over one arm.
Their shirts were clean. Pressed.
Robin stumbled to a stop on the last step, fingers tightening around the banister until the old wood bit into her palm. The older detective - O’Leary, she thought, though names felt slippery in her head - looked up and met her eyes.
Last time, his cuffs had been stiff with drying blood. Last time, she’d stared at a russet thumbprint blooming at his throat while he said Nancy’s name in the past tense.
Now his collar was buttoned straight. His tie was knotted properly, though a little crooked at the knot. His face looked worse. Deep lines cut down from his nose to his mouth. The skin around his eyes was swollen and red, like he’d rubbed it too many times in too many late nights.
“Ms. Buckley,” he said. His voice was careful, pitched low so it didn’t carry into the rest of the house. “I’m sorry to drop by this morning. We won’t keep you long.”
Robin’s mouth worked, dry. “It’s…okay,” she managed. It wasn’t. Nothing was. Nothing would ever be okay again. But they were the ones who’d been with Nancy when - She clamped down on that thought before it could finish and stepped off the last stair, closing the distance until she stood at the runner opposite them.
The younger detective shifted, clearing his throat. He had a small object in his hand, pinched between his fingers: a plain black USB stick, the kind you bought in bulk in any office supplies store. It looked absurdly small in his broad hand.
“We wanted to bring you this,” O’Leary said. He nodded toward his partner’s hand. “The recorder your wife had that night is part of the evidence file for the case, so we can’t release it yet. But we…we were able to make you a copy of the audio.” His gaze flicked to hers and away again in a way that told her he not only felt immense guilt for what happened to Nancy, but that this wasn’t strictly legal. “For when you’re ready.”
Audio.
For a moment, all Robin could hear was the radiator ticking in the hallway and the faint clatter of a pan in the kitchen. Then her own pulse rushed up into her ears, hot and loud.
“She-,” her voice broke. She swallowed, tried again. “It…it was on? The…the whole time?”
“She turned it on before she went in,” the younger detective said quietly. His name might have been Martinez. No - Morales. She remembered Nancy mentioning him once, laughing about how he’d nearly walked into a lamppost trying to read a text and file a report at the same time. Now he looked about ten years older than he had two weeks ago.
He held out the USB, his hand steady in a way Robin’s hand wasn’t when she reached for it.
“It captured…most everything,” he went on, eyes fixed on the little stick, not her face. “From the warehouse. The container. The drive. The gas station.” He hesitated, jaw tightening. “She knew it was running. She…she talked to you…a lot. We thought, well, we thought you should have that.”
The plastic was warm from his fingers when it touched her palm. It felt heavier than it should have, like someone had poured lead into it when she wasn’t looking.
Robin’s hand curled around it on instinct, closing so tightly her knuckles blanched. Her thumb found the smooth seam down its side. Just a piece of hardware. Just ones and zeroes.
Just Nancy’s last breaths.
“Thank you,” she heard herself say, though the word scraped out raw. It felt too small for what they were handing her and far too big for her throat.
O’Leary nodded once. “There’s no rush,” he said. His eyes were gentle and terrible. “You listen to it if and when you’re ready. Or not at all. That’s up to you.”
Behind Robin, the house breathed. Somewhere down the hallway someone opened the oven, a hot gust of air carrying the smell of lasagna and foil and burnt cheese. Steve laughed softly at something Melissa said and then fell abruptly quiet, like he remembered what day it was.
“Trial dates aren’t set yet,” Morales added. “We’ll keep you updated. Elena and her family are under protection until then. They…they wanted to be there today.” His throat bobbed. “We’ll make sure you have space, if you want to talk to them.”
Elena. The girl whose face had stared at Robin from the papers for weeks, months - all big eyes and terrible bangs. The girl Nancy had said she couldn’t stop thinking about, had to find.
Robin nodded. The motion felt like moving her head underwater. “Okay.”
The detectives shifted, a small, mutual decision. Hats were lifted. Murmured apologies offered again, useless and well-meant. O’Leary’s hand brushed the doorframe as he turned, the way people touched church doors on their way out. Morales squeezed Robin’s shoulder once, a brief, awkward pressure, then let go.
The front door closed behind them with a soft thump.
Silence rushed back in, thicker than before. The voices in the kitchen faded to a distant buzz. The smell of lasagna turned her stomach.
Robin looked down at the USB drive sitting in the cradle of her palm. It was nothing. Four centimeters of plastic. No weight at all. Her hand shook so hard the black rectangle jittered against her skin.
You don’t have to listen, she thought, and knew in the same breath that she would. It was Nancy’s voice. It was more Nancy than she’d had in sixteen days.
Careful, like it might shatter, she slipped the drive into the pocket of her cardigan. The fabric sagged against her hip with the imagined weight of it.
From the kitchen doorway, her mother called gently, “Robin? We’re starting the coffee. Do you want-,”
“In a minute,” Robin said, more sharply than she meant to. She closed her eyes, drew in a breath that scraped all the way down and barely came back up. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
She turned away from the front door, from the hall table with its neat row of sympathy cards and vases of flowers that already smelled too sweet. Her feet carried her back up the stairs. Past the photo of them on the porch swing Robin had built, coppery light flooding Nancy’s hair.
Down the hall, past the bathroom door, into the bedroom. Across from the bed with its too-perfect half, the closet doors waited. White-painted wood, one handle slightly crooked from the time Nancy had yanked it too hard in a rush.
Behind those doors, at the very back, two garment bags hung shoulder to shoulder. Her hand drifted toward the handle, then paused over it, fingers hovering. The USB in her pocket pressed against her thigh, a small, unforgiving point of pressure.
Robin stood there in the doorway, between the closet full of their life and the house full of other people’s kindness, and for a long moment she didn’t move at all.
Years before the garment bags and the closet and the USB, there had been a basement with bad linoleum and even worse beer.
It was the spring of 1988, and the party was technically at Emerson - though “party” oversold it. Someone's friend of a friend had a ground-floor apartment just off Boylston with a dubious fire escape and a landlord who was out of town. There were too many people for the space, a tangle of bodies and laughter, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the sticky-sweet smell of spilled beer and wine cooler.
A battered tape deck on the counter wheezed through a mix Robin recognized from every other weekend that semester: bits of The Cure and the Bangles and Talking Heads and Madonna and Blondie warring with the muffled thump of traffic outside. Someone had opened the tiny kitchen window for air; a cold Boston draft knifed in and made the flimsy curtains breathe.
Robin stood in the doorway between the living room and the hallway, plastic cup in hand, pretending not to be counting the minutes.
Nancy was late.
Of course she was - Emerson and Smith might only be a bus and a train apart on paper, but in practice, everything conspired to delay them. Snow. Rerouted lines. Professors who went over time on lectures. The universe itself, which had never been particularly kind, seemed to delight in making Robin wait.
She took a sip of whatever pale yellow liquid one of her friends had poured in her cup. It was mostly sugar and regret. Her head buzzed anyway.
“You look like you’re about to chew through the drywall,” Dean, one of Robin and Nancy’s mutual friends, muttered, appearing at her elbow. They smelled like whatever passed for beer tonight and too much hairspray.
“I am fine,” Robin said, dragging the word into something that masqueraded as bored. “This is my fine face. Observe it. Thrill.”
They gave her a look. “Girl, your fine face is staring at the door every twenty seconds.”
“I am cultivating a mysterious air,” she said. “Artists do that.”
“You’re not an artist, you're a linguistics major who yells at cassette tapes.”
“Semantics,” she said, and then the front doorknob rattled, and every molecule in her shifted.
The room was too crowded for her to see at first. A gust of night air came in, people turned, someone yelled, “Watch the cat!” and there she was - Nancy Wheeler, framed in the doorway with the hallway light behind her, cheeks pink from the cold, curls escaping the confines of her barrette.
She had on jeans and a navy coat with a missing button, scarf looped around her neck in a knot Robin recognized because she’d been the one to show her how to tie it that way. There was a newspaper half-sticking out of her bag, like she’d come straight from the student paper office and sprinted the last three blocks.
The rush in Robin’s chest was stupid and immediate and total. The party blurred down to a tunnel, everything else smeared at the edges.
Nancy spotted her within three seconds. Of course she did. Her face lit up, bright and private, even as other people reached to clap her shoulder, to say hi, to drag her into conversation.
Robin’s hand tightened around her cup.
“Girly,” Dean said under their breath in a singsong. “You’re staring again.”
“Shut up and go flirt with someone tragic,” she hissed, already moving.
She wove through the bodies like navigating vines, sidestepping a couple dancing badly and someone arguing about politics by the door. By the time she reached Nancy, a half-dozen other people had already claimed little pieces of her attention - someone from her journalism class, a girl with a camera around her neck, a boy insisting she had to read his latest script.
Nancy’s eyes found Robin anyway.
“There you are,” she said, relief in her tone like she’d been looking this whole time. “I thought I was going to have to fight my way in with this,” she hoisted the bag on her shoulder, the corner of the newspaper flapping.
“You’d lose,” Robin said, hearing the way her voice softened and trying not to be annoyed about it. “Artists are vicious. They have knives. Metaphorically. And sometimes not metaphorically.”
Nancy laughed, the sound bright as glass in the cramped room. “You saved me,” she said, stepping closer, the crowd adjusting around them like they had weight. “Should I be taking notes?”
“You should always be taking notes,” Robin said. “Isn’t that, like your whole thing? Intrepid reporter? Girl with a notebook and zero self-preservation instinct?”
Nancy’s mouth twitched. “Says the girl who wanted to interview the drunk guy on the T about his ‘philosophy of life.’”
“He had thoughts,” Robin said, indignant. “He compared Reagan to a gremlin. That’s art.”
“That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”
They were standing too close now. Robin could feel the heat off Nancy’s body in the thin space between them, could smell snow and cigarette smoke and the cinnamon gum Nancy always chewed when she was trying not to bite her nails. The sounds of the party seemed to come from down a long hallway - the music, the laughter, Dean loudly losing at some drinking game in the other room.
“Hi,” Nancy said again, softer this time, like the first greeting hadn’t counted. Her gaze flicked down Robin’s face and back up, brushing past her mouth like a match being lit.
“Hi,” Robin managed. Her heart was doing something deeply undignified against her ribs. “You made it.”
“Nothing short of the apocalypse was going to keep me from Northampton tonight,” Nancy said, then corrected herself with a little wince. “Okay, bad choice of words, but you know what I mean.”
Robin did. All too well.
There had been an apocalypse, once. More than once, if you were counting properly. Parallel worlds and monsters and blood and fear that lived in the bones long after the bruises faded. They almost never talked about it now - not in the rooms like this, with plastic cups and mixtapes and people who would never believe them - but it lived in the spaces between their words. In the way Nancy slept with the lamp on more nights than she’d admit. In the way Robin still flinched at fireworks she couldn’t see.
And yet here they were, in the same state, students alive, at a dumb party with bad beer. Miraculous.
“Come on,” Robin said, suddenly unable to bear the distance of a hallway and two rooms between them and somewhere quieter. “Before Dean decides to drag you into every drinking game within a ten-mile radius.”
“As if I can’t escape on my own,” Nancy said, but she let Robin take her hand.
Robin hadn’t meant to do that. Her fingers had just…closed. Around Nancy’s. Automatically. Their hands fit together like they’d been practicing for years.
Robin’s throat went dry.
Nancy’s eyebrows lifted a fraction, but she didn’t pull away. Her fingers curled back, a firm, warm answer.
They moved through the apartment tethered like that, Robin tugging gently, Nancy following. Nobody seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn’t say anything; the world had other things to worry about. Robin’s pulse was loud enough in her ears that the music might as well have cut out entirely.
The only truly quiet place was the bedroom, a small box of a room just off the hallway where the landlord’s lumpy mattress had been dressed up with a bright thrift-store quilt and a poster someone had blu-tacked crooked over a radiator. A lamp on the nightstand threw a golden pool over one half of the bed; the other half was eaten by shadows.
Robin shut the door with her heel, muffling the party to a thick buzz.
“Look at you, fancy,” she said, hoping the joke would disguise how she was suddenly hyperaware of every inch of space. “You made it to the VIP lounge. It has a bed and a chair. We spare no expense.”
Nancy dropped her bag by the chair and sat on the edge of the bed instead, fingers smoothing the quilt automatically. “This is nicer than my dorm,” she lied, letting out a breath she’d been holding. “At least this mattress doesn’t have a spring trying to murder you in your sleep.”
“You don’t know that,” Robin said. “Maybe it’s just shy.”
Nancy huffed a laugh. She tugged slightly at Robin’s wrist. “Sit with me,” she said, as simple as ordering coffee, and Robin’s heart lurched again. She sat.
It put them shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the bed, knees almost touching, their joined hands resting between them. Nancy hadn’t let go. Robin could feel each pulse of her heartbeat where their fingers met.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Robin studied the poster on the wall - a sun-faded print of some French film Dean had pretended to have seen and absolutely hadn’t. The words blurred. Her attention kept sliding sideways, snagging on the curl of Nancy’s hair, near her ear, the curve of her throat, the way her lips were slightly chapped from the wind.
“This is weird, right?” Nancy said suddenly.
Robin’s stomach dropped. “Wow,” she said, air rushing out with the word. “Okay, uh, which part? The, you know, end of days, college, capitalism, the fact that Dean calls that hat a fashion choice and not a cry for help-,”
“Us,” Nancy cut in, and the word landed like a pebble in still water. Little ripples, all outward. Her fingers tightened minutely where they held Robin’s. “This. Is this..weird?”
Robin turned her head. Nancy was already looking at her, eyes serious and wide and a little scared in a way Robin had only seen when things had been really, truly bad.
“Oh,” Robin said, very quietly.
There it was. The fork in the road. The moment where she could laugh it off and yank her hand away and say, Yeah, so weird, ha, we should never do this again, and go back to pretending she didn’t notice the way her world tilted around Nancy Wheeler.
She thought of the upside-down black sky over Hawkins. Of the way Nancy had looked with a shotgun in her hands, teeth set, eyes blazing. Of the months after, when they’d been too hollow to admit how much they needed someone who’d seen the same things.
The party hummed behind the door. Someone shouted over the music. It sounded like another planet.
“I mean,” Robin said, her voice sounding distant to her own ears, “it depends what you mean by weird.”
Nancy let out a breath that might have been a laugh and might have been a sob. “I keep thinking about you,” she said. “Like, all the time. In class. On the train. When I’m supposed to be writing. It’s…” She shook her head, frustrated with herself. “I thought maybe it was just…you know, brain rewiring itself after trauma, bonding with the only other person who remembers the same nightmares, but it’s not just that, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
Robin swallowed. Her hand had gone clammy in Nancy’s; she resisted the urge to pull away and wipe it on her jeans.
“You thought you were going crazy,” she said softly.
Nancy’s mouth quirked. “A little.”
“Me too,” Robin admitted. The words felt like stepping off something very high. “I mean, I’ve always been crazy, but this is…specific.”
A beat. Then, “specific how?” Nancy asked, and there was a tremor under the question like she already knew.
Robin stared at their joined hands. At the way Nancy’s thumb had started drawing little circles against her skin without seeming to notice.
“Specific like…” Robin searched for the joke and didn’t find one. She looked up, met Nancy’s eyes head-on. “Like every time I see you it feels like my lungs remember how to work. Like I get on a bus and the only destination I care about is whatever stop you’re at. Like I’m furious at the universe that we almost died before I got a chance to-,”
She cut herself off, too late.
Nancy’s breath hitched. “Before you got a chance to what?” she asked.
Robin’s heart was a drum against her ribs. “Kiss you,” she blurted, and then, because she was Robin and didn’t know how to stop once she started. “There, I said it, congratulations, you win, I am a queer disaster, I have no chill and I-,”
Nancy leaned in and kissed her.
It wasn’t a tentative brush or an accident. It was deliberate and sure, her free hand lifting to cup Robin’s jaw, fingers sliding into the hair at the nape of her neck. Her lips were warm and a little rough from the cold, tasting faintly of cinnamon gum and cheap wine cooler.
Robin made a small, undignified noise into her mouth. Her brain flared white, every neuron lighting up at once. The plastic cup she’d been holding had disappeared at some point; both her hands were on Nancy now, one clutching at the fabric of her coat, the other cradling the back of her head like something precious.
The kiss deepened, unhurried but intent, that kind of slow that felt like falling from a great height in perfect detail. The bed creaked as they tipped toward each other. The party on the other side of the door might as well have been on Mars.
When they finally parted, it was only far enough to breathe. Their foreheads rested together, noses brushing, sharing warm air between them.
“Oh,” Robin said, a little dazed. “Okay. That’s…new.”
Nancy laughed, breathy and wrecked in a way Robin wanted to bottle. “I’m pretty sure I’ve been wanting to do that since at least November,” she said.
“November?” Robin repeated, scandalized. “You mean I’ve been pining like some tragic Victorian orphan and you were sitting over there going, ‘hm, interesting’?”
“I never said I was good at feelings,” Nancy protested, but she was smiling, wide and honest. Her thumb traced along Robin’s cheekbone, reverent. “But I’m…trying. If you’ll let me.”
Robin looked at her. At the girl who’d stood between her and monsters, who’d shared nightmares and late-night diner coffee and long train rides and not this tiny, quiet room carved out of chaos.
“Yeah,” she said. Her chest hurt, but in a way that felt like it was making room for something bigger. “Yeah, Nance. I’ll let you.”
She kissed her again, because now she could, because now she knew she was allowed, and the universe narrowed down to the point where their mouths met. The past - the monsters, the blood, the almost-ending - fell away. The future - the years they thought they had, the promises they would make - stretched out in front of them, invisible and enormous.
Somewhere outside, a siren wailed down Boylston and a bus rumbled past, not knowing, not caring that the world had just tilted on its axis in a little bedroom above the street.
Decades later, in a different room with a suit hanging in a closet and a USB in her pocket, Robin thought of that moment and understood: this was the first time she’d really believed they were going to live long enough to grow old together.
The closet had never felt like a place you could stand inside.
It was just the bedroom closet. White-painted doors that stuck a little in the humidity, brass handles that were always a bit loose. It was where their clothes lived, where Nancy’s sensible heels lined up next to Robin’s scuffed boots, where the laundry basket went when company came over and they wanted the room to look less like two raccoons shared it.
Today it felt like a doorway to somewhere she didn’t want to go.
Robin’s hand hovered over the left handle, fingers trembling a little. On the other side of the wood was everything they’d ever worn in this house. Date night dresses. Work shirts. The sweater Nancy had stolen and never given back. The jacket Robin had once sworn she’d burn and never had.
And at the very back, hanging where they didn’t have to see them every day…
Robin swallowed.
Her fingertips brushed the cool curve of the handle. The little squeak the metal made against her skin sounded too loud in the quiet hall.
Behind her, down the corridor, someone laughed too brightly and then caught themselves, dipping into a caught sob. That happened frequently lately. Lots of shared memories, stories exchanged. Love, broken. A cabinet door shut in the kitchen. The house kept moving, orbiting around her like she was a stuck point in the middle.
“Just clothes,” she muttered under her breath. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone with sand in their throat. “It’s just clothes.”
She curled her fingers around the handle and pulled.
The door slid open with its usual reluctant scrape, sticking halfway before giving way all at once. A breath of air sighed out at her that smelled faintly of fabric softener, old perfume, and the lavender sachet Nancy had insisted on hanging from the rail because “it keeps the moths away and it smells nice, Robin, stop making that face.”
Robin stepped inside, the carpet brushing her bare toes. The closet was just deep enough that she could pull the other door shut behind her if she wanted to. Just deep enough to feel like a little room of its own, narrow walls hemming her in, clothes brushing her shoulders on either side.
Shirts and dresses hung in a dense, colorful forest. Nancy’s side bled into hers somewhere in the middle; they’d stopped pretending there was a clean division years ago. A row of hangers jutted out on the left: button-downs, blouses, a blazer that still had a little dry-cleaning tag looped around the hook.
On the floor, under the lowest hems, shoe boxes were stacked in uneven piles. Robin eased herself down onto them slowly, joints protesting like she was much older than she was, and folded one leg up, then the other, until she could hug her knees to her chest.
From this angle, sitting low in the half-lit space, all the hanging clothes made a kind of soft curtain in front of her. The crack of light from the open door painted a thin line across the carpet and part of the opposite wall. Dust motes drifted lazily in it, like they didn’t know better.
For a moment she just…breathed. In. Out. The smell of Nancy’s perfume clung stubbornly to a couple of jackets. It hit her harder than it had in the bedroom - concentrated, like the closet had trapped a little pocket of her and kept it safe.
It didn’t feel safe now.
Robin leaned her head back against the drywall, closing her eyes. Her throat hurt. Her chest felt too tight for the amount of air she was getting.
They had asked her what she would wear.
It had been a perfectly reasonable question. Funerals had dress codes, whether you wanted them or not. Karen had asked it gently, in that soft-edge voice she’d been using ever since she got off the plane. Her own mother had asked it more bluntly last night, standing by the sink with her hands in soapy water, like they were talking about a grocery list.
Have you thought about what you’re going to wear, honey?
Robin had nodded, like she had. Like there was anything in the world she wanted to put on today.
Her gaze drifted upward, past the familiar sleeves and hems, to the far back of the rail. To the two shapes that hung slightly apart from the others, plastic sheaths catching the weak light. Two garment bags. One black, one off-white, the kind the nicer dry cleaners gave you when they wanted you to feel like you had something worth protecting.
They were shoved all the way to the end, where hangers tended to get lost and forgotten. A little square of masking tape clung near the hanger of each, edges curled from time.
ROBIN - SUIT, one said, the letters tall and a little crooked in her own handwriting.
NANCY - DRESS, read the other, the ink smudge at the end where the pen must have dragged.
Robin stared at the labels until the words blurred.
The first time she’d written those names, her hands had been shaking for a very different reason. The night before their backyard ceremony, the two of them had stood in the same closet, younger and steadier on their feet, giddy and exhausted from stringing lights between the trees. Nancy had insisted on covering the clothes in plastic so nothing would happen to them overnight.
“It’s supposed to be good luck if the bride’s dress stays spotless until the aisle,” she’d said, teasing.
“And what about the…not bride?” Robin had asked, waving a vague hand at herself in the suit. “They…other one? The…husband, wife, person, entity?”
“You,” Nancy had said, tapping the end of Robin’s nose with the capped marker, “are the dingus I’m marrying either way. Now label the bags before you jinx us.”
Robin had written their names with a flourish, adding the little dash and the word SUIT like the garment needed its own surname. Nancy had laughed, had kissed her in the doorway with the closet light spilling over both of them.
Robin curled tighter in on herself now, pressing her forehead against the fabric of her knees. That version of the memory was too right to look at straight on.
She scrubbed her face with the heel of one hand, then reached out, fingers stretching toward the back of the rail. For a second she hovered there, not quite touching, like her hand was at the edge of a hot stove.
Her fingertips brushed the plastic.
It crackled softly under her touch. Cool. Smooth. Completely ordinary.
Her chest made a small, broken sound she didn’t recognize as her own until it was out.
She closed the rest of the distance and wrapped her hand around the neck of the garment bag, feeling the outline of the hanger beneath. She tugged it gently forward until the word ROBIN came fully into view.
The bag swung a little, bumping against its twin. The faintest whisper of lace rustled beneath the off-white plastic.
The suit.
She didn’t have to see it to know exactly what it looked like. She knew the weight of it on her shoulders, the way the fabric pulled just so at the seams when she shoved her hands into the pockets, the way the jacket always smelled faintly of starch and Nancy’s shampoo by the end of the night from where Nancy’s head had rested against it.
She’d worn it twice. Once under the string lights hung too low over a backyard, their backyard. Once under the harsh fluorescent tubes in City Hall. Both times, Nancy had been right there, eyes shining, fingers smoothing the lapel over her heart.
She sucked in a breath that felt like it scraped along her ribs on the way down.
“We were supposed to be old,” she whispered to the sleeves handing in the dark. “You were supposed to be…wrinkled and complaining about your joints and…yelling at kids to get off our lawn, even though you’d never do that.” she sniffled.
The clothes didn’t answer. The plastic rustled faintly when her hand shook.
They hadn’t taken the suit out in years. Weddings and anniversaries came and went; they’d worn other things. Comfortable things. The suit had hung here, sacred and unnecessary, like a relic of a promise they no longer needed to prove.
Now it was the only thing she could think of when she tried to imagine standing next to Nancy's casket.
Her stomach rolled in the word. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the first hot overflow of tears escape down her cheeks. They soaked into the knees of her sweatpants where her face pressed against them.
“It’s just fabric,” she told herself. “It’s just thread. It’s not…it’s not…”
Not Nancy. Not her smile or her laugh or her incessant note-taking. Not the way she’d leaned across the kitchen table just a couple weeks ago to steal a bite of Robin’s toast and left jam on the corner of a file.
But it was all wrapped up together. The first time she’d put the suit on, her hands had been trembling with the sheer, terrified joy of being allowed to love Nancy in front of other people. The second time, she’d walked down the echoing corridor of City Hall with Nancy’s arm linked through hers, feeling invincible.
Putting it on now felt like stepping into the shell of a person who still believed the universe would keep its bargains.
A muffled knock game at the bedroom door, distant as if it belonged to another house. Someone called her name, carefully. The sound barely reached her here in the closet. Robin pressed her forehead harder against her knees. Her fingers tightened on the garment bag until the plastic dug into her skin.
She didn’t unzip it.
She wasn’t ready to see the suit yet, not with her eyes. It was too much. The idea alone had her chest cinched tight, her throat raw.
But she also didn’t push it back to the far end of the rail.
She let it hang there, closer now, within arms’ reach instead of buried behind months and years of other clothes. The twin bag beside it shifted slightly, the faint outline of Nancy’s dress moving with it.
Two ghosts, side by side.
Another knock, a little more insistent. “Robin?” Steve this time, voice muffled through the walls. “We need to leave in, like, forty minutes. Do you want coffee?”
She dragged in a breath, shaky and uneven, and lifted her head. Her eyes burned. The closet light hummed softly overhead, throwing a harsh yellow over the labels with their smudged black ink.
“Yeah,” she called back, her voice cracking on the single syllable. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Yeah. I’ll be out in a, a minute.”
Silence answered. Footsteps retreated down the hall.
Robin let go of the suit, fingers uncurling slowly. The garment bag swayed faintly, then stilled. Her hand drifted to the pocket of her cardigan, to the little hard rectangle pressing against her hip. The USB sat there, mute, dense with words she wasn’t ready to hear.
Suit. Dress. USB. Closet. House full of people waiting to see what she would wear, what she would say, how she would hold herself together without the only anchor she’d ever had in this world, over the yawning emptiness where Nancy should have been.
She sucked in one more breath, pushed herself off the shoe boxes, and turned toward the bright strip of light at the closet door. The suit would still be there when she came back. So would the little drive in her pocket. Both of them waiting for the moment she was forced to open something she couldn’t close again.
In the end, the backyard looked exactly like Robin had seen it in her head.
Which, given her head, was saying something.
The grass was a little patchy in spots where last winter’s snow had lingered too long, but Melissa had insisted that gave it “character.” The maple trees along the fence line held strands of white Christmas light Robin and Nancy had spent an entire day wrestling into place, their arms scratched, their fingers raw from untangling cheap wire. The sky above was a hazy summer blue, softening toward evening. Somewhere in the neighboring yard, somebody’s radio played an oldies station too quietly to make out the words, just a wash of brass and warm voices.
Their house - a narrow, sensible, two-story on the edge of the city, the porch swing Robin had built swaying lazily in the faint breeze - watching over the proceedings like a proud older relative.
It wasn’t a church. It wasn’t City Hall. It was theirs.
Robin stood just inside the back door, pressing her palms down the front of the jacket for the thousandth time, trying to make the suit behave.
The tailor had done a good job. Better than she’d expected, considering she’d walked in with a cheap department-store suit and a sheepish expression and muttered, “can you make this…less tragic?” The shoulders bit her now; the waist nipped in where it was supposed to. The fabric still felt stiff, though. She tugged at the sleeves, then the knot of her tie, which suddenly seemed like a noose.
“You look very handsome,” Melissa said from behind her, sounding insufferably smug.
Robin jumped, then scowled at her mother’s reflection in the glass of the back door. Melissa lounged against the kitchen counter in a flowing, flowered dress that would have been at home at any protest in 1972 and did a little twirl with her wrist to indicate Robin’s entire person.
“You’re biased,” Robin said. Her voice came out sharper than she meant; nerves had polished everything to an edge. “You’d say that if I came out in a potato sack.”
“I would not,” Melissa said seriously. “I’d tell you that you look like a very determined potato and maybe suggest some accessories.”
“Great, that’s what I want to be on my wedding day. Russet chic.”
Melissa crossed the kitchen in two swishes of fabric and cupped her daughter’s face in both hands, forcing Robin to meet her eyes.
“Hey,” she said gently. The lines at the corners of her eyes deepened when she smiled. “Jokes are good. Jokes are your armor. But you can take some of it off for this. You’re allowed to just…be happy, kiddo.”
Robin’s chest did something uneven. Everywhere else in her life, the word “wedding” caught on people’s tongues around them, got swapped out at the last second for commitment ceremony or party or celebration, like it was too sharp to handle bare-handed. Melissa said it like it was the only possible word that fit.
“Yeah, well,” Robin muttered, but the fight had leaked out of it. “I’m trying.”
Melissa’s thumb brushed over a spot just below Robin’s jaw. “She’s going to lose her mind when she sees you,” she said. “ More than she already has.”
“She’s wearing a dress,” Robin said, helpless disgust and wonder blended in equal parts. Nancy wearing a dress wasn’t out of the ordinary. Nancy was wearing a wedding dress. To marry Robin. “Like a real dress. Like…lacy and everything. I don’t - have you seen her? Is she okay? Did the ruffles get her?”
“Your mother-in-law is sitting on the guest-room bed trying not to cry and your brother-in-law is inspecting the Christmas lights in the back yard because he doesn’t know what to do with his hands while your sister-in-law is teasing him,” Melissa reported. “Nancy is fine. She looks beautiful. She’s been asking for you every ten minutes.”
Robin’s heart flipped. “She’s not my-,” she started, then stopped. The word stuck to the roof of her mouth. Mother-in-law. Brother-in-law. Sister-in-law. Wife.
Melissa’s brows went up in a gentle dare. “Isn’t she?”
Robin glared at the toes of her shoes, which were currently the shiniest they’d ever been in their lives. “Not legally,” she muttered. “You know. The government-,”
The government is late to everything,” Melissa said briskly, smoothing Robin’s lapels with quick, efficient hands. “You and Nancy decided what you are a long time ago. The rest of the world can catch up or not. That’s their problem.”
She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a small white flower with a pin stuck through it. The petals shook slightly in her hand; whether from nerves or age, Robin couldn’t tell.
“Here,” Melissa said. “Hold still.”
Robin swallowed hard and did.
The flower - simple, nothing fussy, something they’d picked up in a bundle at the farmer’s market that morning - nestled against the dark fabric of the suit like it had been made for it. Melissa’s fingers were deft as she fastened the pin through the lapel and stem, securing it in place above Robin’s heart.
“There,” she said softly. “Now you look like you mean it.”
“I do mean it,” Robin said, and the words came out without humor, without armor. True and bare.
Melissa’s eyes shone. “I know,” she said. She kissed Robin’s forehead, smudging something - lipstick? Sage? - embracing her briefly in a cloud of incense and laundry soap. “Okay. Enough sappiness. If we don’t get you outside, your father is going to find a guitar to play the Bridal Chorus on and I don’t think any of us deserve that.”
“God, no,” Robin said fervently. “Move. Go. Save the people.”
Melissa laughed and shooed her toward the back door.
The hinges squeaked when Robin opened it. Warm air rolled in, carrying the smell of cut grass, citronella candles, and something savory on the grill where Richard was industriously turning skewers of chicken and vegetables.
The yard had been transformed, in the way only love and a shoestring budget could manage. Folding chairs borrowed from three different households lined up in uneven but heartfelt rows. A mismatched assortment of tablecloths - floral, checked, plain - turned card tables into something friendlier. Mason jars held wildflowers in riotous clumps.
And people. All the pieces of their lives, gathered in one place.
Robin’s parents fussed with a speaker someone had dragged onto the porch, arguing cheerfully about the volume. Nancy’s mother stood near the back row of chairs, talking quietly with Holly, her eyes flicking toward the house every few seconds like she was expecting Nancy to appear and needed to be ready.
Karen Wheeler looked…soft, Robin thought. Not exactly relaxed, but less brittle than she’d looked that first Thanksgiving in Boston, when Robin had been just “Nancy’s friend/roommate” and Ted had spent the whole dinner pretending Robin didn’t exist. The lines around her mouth were tighter now, her hair threaded with a few more silver strands, but she wore a dress in gentle blue and held a bouquet of flowers like she meant it.
Ted wasn’t there. The empty space where he should have been, next to Karen, was conspicuous and blessed.
On the other side of the yard, near the fence where the lights dipped the lowest, Steve stood adjusting his tie for the fifth time, squinting as if sheer will would make it sit right. Beside him, Jonathan was checking a camera that looked like it had seen better days, fiddling with the dials. Max, Lucas, Mike, Dustin and Will - no longer all elbows and home haircuts, but still unmistakably themselves - clustered together, arguing about whether they should be the ones to cue the music. Erica, nearly grown and somehow even more formidable, had appointed herself coordinator of chairs and was rearranging things to her liking.
Seeing them all there, in this yard, in this city, alive and dressed up and bickering about nothing more dangerous than sound levels, made something in Robin’s chest go so full it hurt.
This wasn’t supposed to be possible. And yet.
“Robin!” Steve’s face split in a grin when he saw her. He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, rude and piercing. “Holy shit, look at you! Wheeler’s gonna pass out!”
“Language!” Karen called reflexively, then flushed when she realized where she was. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Robin said, dazed, lifting a hand in an awkward wave. People were turning now, heads pivoting, expressions brightening. A cheer went up from the little cluster of queers from Nancy’s newsroom crew, someone wolf-whistling before another elbowed them in the ribs.
Robin felt heat creep up the back of her neck. She had spent most of her lift trying to avoid this kind of attention Today, she was the center of it and there was nowhere to run. Her eyes searched the yard for the one person who made all of it survivable and didn’t find her.
“Where is she?” Robin asked as Melissa materialized at her elbow like a very supportive ghost.
“In the bedroom,” Melissa said. “Trying to figure out how to walk in heels on grass.”
“She could take them off,” Robin said. “She could get married in Converse. We have a brand.”
“She could,” Melissa agreed. “But she wants to do this her way. You get a suit. She gets shoes that will sink three inches into the earth. That’s equality.”
Robin huffed a laugh that came out mostly as breath. Her hands fidgeted at her sides, wanting to tug at her sleeves again, to do something.
The officiant - a friend from one of Robin’s ESL classes who’d gotten “ordained” as a joke once and then discovered she actually liked doing weddings - caught Robin’s eye from their spot under the maple tree. They lifted their eyebrows in a silent question.
Robin nodded, once. Ready as she’d ever be as she stepped up into place. Steve stood off to her side. He reached out and gave the back of her shoulder a joking shove, a silent Dingus.
The murmurs in the yard quieted, not because anyone told them to, but because a current passed through the small crowd. Heads turned toward the back door of the house. The air seemed to hold its breath.
The door opened.
Nancy stepped out and Robin forgot how to exist.
The dress wasn’t fussy. That was the first mercy. No cathedral train, no aggressive tulle. It was simple and clean, ivory against her skin, the skirt brushing her calves, the bodice fitted enough to show the lines of her but not enough to make her self-conscious. The neckline was modest and elegant, a hint of lace at her collarbones. Her hair fell in soft waves around her shoulders, the usual barrette replaced with a few small flowers woven into the waves of her hair.
She was barefoot.
Of course she was. The shoes dangled helplessly from her left hand, heels hooked over her fingers. Her other hand gripped the doorframe as she peered out, eyes wide, assessing the terrain like it was a battlefield and she wasn’t entirely convinced it wouldn’t collapse under her.
Karen made a tiny choked sound and pressed her hand to her mouth. Melissa beam-smiled so hard her cheeks wobbled. Somewhere near the middle, Max muttered, “Goddamn,” in a tone of reverent awe.
None of that reached Robin. The world had narrowed down to the rectangle of the doorway and the woman standing in it. Her entire world.
Nancy’s eyes scanned the yard once, flicking over the chairs, the lights, the faces, and then finally landed on Robin.
They lit up.
That was the thing that destroyed Robin every time. Not that Nancy looked beautiful - thought she did, she did, she looked like every good thing Robin had never let herself wish for out loud. It was that Nancy saw her and the whole expression on her face changed. Like the rest of it - yard, people, sky - was background noise and Robin was the point.
The ache in Robin’s chest sharpened into something almost unbearable and almost too big for her body to contain.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or sob or run forward and scoop Nancy up and carry her the rest of the way like some kind of deranged knight.
Instead, she stood there in the patchy grass, hands at her sides, suit scratchy against her skin, and watched as Nancy took a breath, squared her shoulders, and walked down the little makeshift aisle they’d made between the chairs.
The shoes stayed in her hand. Her bare feet sank into the earth with every step.
When she reached Robin, the world went quiet.
“Hi,” Nancy said, a little breathless. Up close, Robin could see the dampness at the corners of her eyes, the way her hands shook. She could also see the way Nancy’s gaze dragged down and back up, lingering over the suit, the flower at Robin’s lapel, her nervous fingers.
“You clean up nice,” Nancy whispered. “For a raccoon.”
Robin wanted to laugh. She wanted to grab Nancy by the shoulders and kiss her until both of them forgot there was anyone else there.
She settled for, “You’re bare-footing our wedding, Wheeler. I thought we talked about this.”
Nancy lifted the shoes and waggled them weakly. “We did. The ground and I are in negotiations. I’m winning.”
A ripple of chuckles moved through the front rows. It felt oddly distant, like they were broadcasting from another room.
The officiant cleared their throat gently. “Shall we?” they asked, eyes warm.
Robin and Nancy exchanged a look, and for a full heartbeat, the jokes fell away. No raccoons. No mattress springs. Just two people who had seen too much, standing on the far side of a war they’d never tell anyone the full truth about, about to make a promise that scared Robin more than any monster ever had.
She nodded.
They moved to stand under the maple tree, side by side, hands brushing. Nancy’s fingers found Robin’s without searching, slotting into the spaces like they’d been carved that way.
The officiant said some words about love and commitment and choosing each other every day. Robin heard them, but mostly as a hum around the edges of the moment. What anchored her were the small things: the way Nancy’s thumb stroked the back of her hand in tiny, unconscious arcs; the way Karen’s shoulders shook silently in the second row; the way Steve was already sniffling audibly beside Max, who elbowed him and rolled her eyes.
“And now,” the officiant said, smiling, “the couple have prepared their own vows.”
Prepared was generous. Robin had tried to write hers four times and ended up with three different drafts in three different notebooks, each more chaotic than the last. Last night, Nancy had found her at the kitchen table swearing quietly at a page and had taken the pen gently out of her hand.
“Just tell me the truth,” she’d said. “I don’t care if it’s messy. That’s sort of the point.”
Now, under the tree, with all the faces watching, the index card in Robin’s pocket felt like it weighed five pounds. She took it out with shaking fingers.
She looked at Nancy. The words on the cards blurred. The ones in her chest didn’t. She folded the card once, then again, and tucked it back into her pocket.
“Um,” she began, eloquent as ever. A little nervous laugh rippled through their friends. “Okay. So. Hi,” she cleared her throat. “Hi. I’m Robin, I talk too much, but today I’m going to try really hard not to, because if I say everything I want to say, you all will die of old age before we get to kiss.”
That got a real laugh, bigger, easier. It loosened something in her shoulders.
“I-,” she turned fully toward Nancy, letting the rest of the yard fade. The suit suddenly didn’t feel so much like armor and more like a skin she’d chosen. “When we met, I was pretty sure I was going to die before I turned eighteen.”
She heard, more than saw, the collective intake of breath. Nancy’s hand tightened on hers.
“I didn’t say it,” Robin went on. “Because, you know, that’s a real bummer at parties. But in my head, that was sort of…it. That was the story. Small town, small life, big monster. Credits roll.”
Her throat felt thick. She pushed through it.
“And then we didn’t die,” she said. “Somehow. We didn’t. We got out. And I ended up on an adventure to Boston with a terrible mixtape and this really annoying, brilliant girl who corrected my grammar and made fun of my sloppy handwriting and…and every day after that I got to wake up and realize I wasn’t dead felt like a bonus level I hadn’t earned.”
Nancy’s eyes shone, tears gathering but not falling yet.
“I didn’t think I was going to get…anything,” Robin said. “Not like this. Not-,” she waved an inarticulate hand between them. “You. A house. A yard with lights we hung ourselves, badly. Our friends alive in chairs, our families here. I didn’t think ‘grow old’ was on the table - let alone with a ‘together’.”
She swallowed.
“But you-,” she laughed a little, helplessly. “You just decided it was. You marched into my life with your notebook and your, uh, metaphorical shotgun and your moral outrage and you made this future happen through sheer force of will. You refused to accept that the story was over for any of us. And now… now I can’t picture a world where I don’t get to see you go gray and yell at the television.”
Tears slipped free down Nancy’s cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away.
“So my vow is…” Robin took a breath that felt like it filed her from the inside. “My vow is - I’m going to keep choosing that future with you. Every day. Even when it’s hard. Even when I’m scared. I promise to make coffee when you’re on deadline and forget how to do anything else. I promise to talk too much so you never have to sit alone with nightmares. I promise to be there when your knees start to complain and your back makes noises and you’re yelling at kids for stepping on the grass - even if it’s just because you think it’s funny.”
She squeezed Nancy’s hand. “I promise to grow old with you,” she said. “For as long as we get. However much the universe gives us, I’m going to spend it being stupidly, ridiculously, madly in love with you.”
The yard went blurry. Someone sniffled loudly - Steve again, probably. Melissa blew her nose into a handkerchief Richard handed her that looked like it had seen decades of service.
The officiant nodded toward Nancy. “Nancy?”
Nancy took a breath, then another. Her voice shook on the first word and steadied as she went.
“Okay,” she said. “So, I wrote mine down.” She patted the folded, strip of loose leaf wrapped in her hand around the bouquet of flowers she held in one hand. “Becuase of course I did. But when I tried to read them this morning, they sounded like…like an article. They had thesis statements. Nobody wants that.”
Someone in the back - Jonathan, by the timbre of the chuckle - laughed.
“So I’m just going to say this,” Nancy said, turning to face Robin fully. “You know me better than anyone. You know that once I grab hold of a story, I don’t let go. That once I see a thread, I pull it until everything comes undone. That once I decide something is wrong, I can’t sit still until we at least try to fix it.”
She drew in a shaky breath. Her knuckles were white around Robin’s fingers.
“Hawkins was…chaos,” she said. “Monsters and lies and people dying when they should have lived. It was everything being out of order. And then there was you. You made it make sense. Not in a neat, pretty way - God knows - but in a…you made me feel like there was a reason to keep going. Like there was something on the other side of all of that…that we could have. Together.”
She let out a breath that sounded like a laugh choked half to death.
“You are my favorite thing I have ever decided to investigate,” she said. “My favorite mystery. My favorite headline. My favorite…everything. And I’m stubborn. So I’m going to keep choosing you. Every day. When it’s busy. When it’s quiet. When it’s good. When it’s good. When it’s terrible.”
Her eyes were bright and fierce now, tears and all.
“I promise to keep pulling on your threads,” she said. “To keep asking you questions. To keep fighting beside you when the world is wrong. I promise to hold your hand when everything falls apart and when everything is boring. I promise to be there when your hair goes gray and you start complaining about the kids’ music. I promise to grow old with you. Not just…next to you. With you. As your partner, your wife, your very annoying fact-checker.”
The word wife landed between them like something sacred.
The officiant wiped at their own eyes, then cleared their throat. “Well,” they said. “It seems like you two have got the idea.”
Laughter, wet and soft.
They exchanged rings - simple bands they’d saved for and picked out in a shop where the clerk had smiled and them like they were just any other couple. The metal was warm from their palms, cool on their fingers.
The officiant laid out the official words but Robin only heard the tail end of it, “I now pronounce you…whatever you want to be pronounced. Wives. Soulmates. Partners. Dinguses. It’s your party.”
“Wives,” Nancy said, quietly but firmly, eyes on Robin.
“Complete Dinguses,” Robin added, because she couldn’t help herself.
“You may kiss your-,” the officiant began.
Robin didn’t wait for the end of the sentence. She leaned in and kissed Nancy under the strings of lights, under the maple tree, under the wide, watched Boston sky, with their friends and family around them and the smell of grilled vegetables and citronella and summer in the air. Nancy kissed her back like they were alone and had all the time in the world.
In that moment, it felt true. It felt like the truest thing Robin had ever known.
They walked back up the little aisle hand in hand, rings flashing, people reaching out to touch their shoulders, their arms, to wrap them in quick, fierce hugs. Under the hum of congratulations and laughter and the crackle of the old speaker as Melissa fiddled with the music, Robin’s heart beat one steady thought.
We did it. We made it through. We’re going to grow old together.
Years later, standing in the semi-dark closet with a garment bag pressed to her shaking hand and a USB drive in her pocket, she would remember that night - the heat of Nancy’s palm in hers, the way the suit had felt like a promise, the way the word ‘wives’ tasted on Nancy’s tongue - and feel that certainty shatter like billions of shards of glass.
The suit waited for her on the bed like an accusation.
After the closet, after the way her legs had gone weak just touching the garment bag, Robin had fled - there was no other word for it. She’d shut the closet door more carefully than she’d ever done in her life, like slamming it might wake something, and walked herself back down the hall on auto-pilot.
Now it was later. Time had become a strange, vicious thing, dripping past her in slow, uneven beads. Somehow in the middle of it all, she’d unzipped the garment bag, shaken the suit out, and laid it across the blankets on her side of the bed.
She couldn’t remember doing it. She just knew it was there.
Jacket, vest, shirt, slacks. Belt coiled neatly beside them. Tie draped across the pillow, a dark slash against the pale case. The flower for her lapel lay in a little dish on the nightstand, still damp from where Karen had trimmed the stem under the tap.
Robin stood at the foot of the bed, barefoot, hands dangling uselessly at her sides, and stared at the spread of black and white and small, tidy intention.
“You don’t have to,” Melissa had said, when Robin had floated the idea last night in a voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else in a far off land. “If it’s too much-,”
But the thing was, nothing about today wasn’t too much. Not the service. Not the speeches. Not the phones ringing off the hook because reporters wanted statements about the “brave investigative journalist gunned down while saving a young mother and her child.” Not the empty side of the bed. Not the voicemail on her phone. Not the USB in her pocket that felt like it had its own gravitational pull.
If she was going to drown, what did it matter which wave it was?
Her eyes burned. She blinked and the suit went watery at the edges.
She could put on something else. The black dress she’d worn to her grandmother Minerva’s funeral. The dark slacks and button-down combo she used when she had to meet donors and pretend to be respectable. Something generic. Appropriate. Neutral.
Something that hadn’t once been the flag they planted in the future and called it theirs.
Her fingers dragged through her hair, catching on a knot. She hissed and untangled it impatiently, then let her hand fall again.
“Nance,” she whispered, to the empty room.
There was no answer. Of course there wasn’t. Just the tick of the clock on the nightstand, the muffled swell of voices downstairs, the occasional faint honk of a car on the street outside.
She tried to imagine what Nancy would say if she were standing here. If this were some kind of nightmare where she could still talk and laugh and roll her eyes.
Probably something like, it’s a suit, Robs. Not an ancient curse. Put the pants on one leg at a time.
The thought hit her like a punch. Robin’s face crumpled briefly, her mouth twisting around a sound she swallowed back down by force.
“Okay,” she said out loud, because sometimes pretending helped. “Okay. Fine. One leg at a time.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under her weight, familiar and strange without Nancy’s warmth curled along one side. The slacks were cool and smooth under her fingers as she picked them up. The fabric whispered when she shook them out.
She stepped into them. The act felt absurdly intimate. This was what she’d worn to promise Nancy forever. Now she was putting it on to bury her. To permanently separate whatever was left of the shreds of her life from the only thing that ever mattered.
The waistband settled at her hips. She did up the button, threaded the belt through the loops with fingers that fumbled more than they should have, tugged it fast. Shirt next. White cotton, crisp from the dry-cleaner. The first brush of it against her arms made her shiver. She couldn’t tell if it was cold or nerves or muscle memory.
She slid her arms into the sleeves, pulled the tails around her. Buttoned, one by one, down the front. Her hands shook harder now, the little circles of plastic slipping against one another. She misaligned one halfway down, had to stop and start again. The frustration flared up out of nowhere - hot, bright, pointless.
She forced herself to stop, close her eyes, and breathe. In. Out. The air felt like gravel going down, but after a few cycles her fingers steadied enough to finish the last buttons. She tucked the shirt into the waistband of the slacks, smoothed it down, feeling the stiff lines of herself reassemble.
At the foot of the bed, the jacket waited. Robin picked up the tie first. It dangled from her hands like a question mark, limp and uncooperative.
Nancy had always been better with knots. Even when they were both learning, even when Robin had made a whole bit out of pretending to strangle herself with the tie, Nancy’s fingers had been more patient, more precise. How many mornings had they stood shoulder to shoulder in front of this very mirror, Nancy reaching over to tweak the knot at Robin’s throat, to straighten it with a little satisfied hum?
Robin looped the tie around her neck, the ends hanging uneven. She frowned, pulled, adjusted. The motion was muscle memory and still somehow all wrong. Over, under, around. Pull through. Tighten.
The knot came out crooked. She stared at it in the mirror on the dresser, at the way it leaned slightly to the left like it had given up halfway through standing at attention.
“Of course,” she told her reflection. Her voice sounded hoarse. “Of course.”
She tried again. Loosen, slide free, reset. Her fingers fumbled on the fabric. On the third try, it landed somewhere between acceptable and pathetic.
“Close enough,” she said. “It’s not like anyone’s going to be looking at my tie.”
The jacket was last. The black fabric had a weight to it that felt like history. She slipped one arm in, then the other, shrugging her shoulders to settle it properly.
For a moment it didn’t feel like it fit. The shoulders felt too narrow, the chest too tight. Then her body remembered, and the seams fell into the familiar lines they’d been tailored to. She smoothed the front with both hands, palms gliding down over lapels, buttons, the slight give where the shift pulled beneath.
Her heart hammered in her ears. She felt like she was putting on someone else’ life.
On the nightstand, in the little dish, the flower waited. It wasn’t the same kind they’d used in the backyard, but it was close enough that Robin’s breath hitched when she picked it up. Delicate petals. Green stem. The pin was cold in her fingers.
She turned toward the mirror fully.
The woman looking back at her wasn’t the twenty-something kid who’d grinned like she’d gotten away with something under fairy lights. This version had lines at the corners of her eyes, faint but earned. A little gray threaded through the sandy blond at her temples. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them bruised with lack of sleep.
The suit still suited her. That felt wrong.
She pinned the flower to her lapel with slow, careful movements. The stem pricked her finger once, a bright bead of blood welled up, then smeared against the great.
“Great,” she whispered. “Fantastic.”
She wiped it away on the back of her hand, pressing the pin flat so the little bloom sat right over her heart.
There. Ready. A widow in a wedding suit.
She couldn’t breathe.
Robin looked at herself for a long moment. At the clean lines, the straight shoulders, the ridiculous flower like hope didn’t know where else to go.
“You’d laugh about this,” she told Nancy’s absence. “You’d say it was efficient. One outfit, two events, no returns.”
Her smile in the mirror trembled, broke.
She dragged her gaze down, away from her own face, to the dresser surface. Her keys lay there, a couple of stray bobby pins scattered beside them. A small framed photo of Nancy sat propped against a stack of books - head bent over a notebook, pen between her teeth, eyes crinkled at something someone (Robin) had said behind the camera.
“Hey, Robs,” Nancy’s voice said in her head, the way it did sometimes now, unexpected and precise. “Breathe.”
Robin did, because that’s what you did when the dead asked nicely. In. Out. Hurt. Repeat. Die, little by little, breath by pointless breath.
Her hand drifted toward her pocket out of habit and found nothing. Oh right. The cardigan was on the chair now.
She crossed the room and picked it up. The old, soft knit looked wrong with the suit. She dropped it back down. She didn’t want anything between her and the feeling of the jacket. It was awful, and it was all she had.
On the chair, folded carefully, lay the small black object she’d almost forgotten she’d taken out. The USB. Nancy’s final breaths.
She set it there when she changed earlier, tracing the outline with her thumb, telling herself she wasn’t going to carry it to the funeral, that it belonged to some other awful part of this timeline. Now, as she reached for her keys, her fingers brushed it. The contact sent a jolt up her arm.
She closed her hand around it before she could think better of it. For a second she just held it, pressing the corners into her palm hard enough to hurt. Then, with a small, decisive motion, she slipped it into the inner pocket of her jacket.
Right over the flower. Right over her heart. If she was going to carry Nancy's last words, last breaths anywhere, it might as well be there.
A voice floated up from downstairs - Steve again, this time not pretending not to panic. “Rob? We really have to go in ten! Traffic’s gonna be a nightmare!”
She could hear the strain under the forced cheer. They sent him as an emissary. Her loyal Dingus. It made something twist in her chest. She wasn’t the only one losing Nancy.
“Coming!” Robin called back, the word scraping out of a throat that didn’t feel like it belonged to someone who could still speak.
She scanned the room once more, as if she were leaving for just another workday and needed to check for her wallet, her notebook, her headphones. The habit was so ingrained it carried her along despite the surrealness of the moment.
Wallet on the dresser. She slipped it into her back pocket. Keys in her hand. Phone on the nightstand - she hesitated there, thumb hovering over the dark screen. The little icon for voicemail stared back at her, accusing and constant. Not now.
She pocketed it with fingers that tired to linger and forced her hand away. At the doorway, she paused. Turned back.
Her eyes landed on the photo on the dresser again. Nancy, half-smile, pen between her teeth. The memory of her voice the day they’d taken it - No, don’t you dare, I look ridiculous - overlaid itself so vividly that Robin had to grip the doorframe to stay upright.
“Okay,” she told the empty room, the empty air, the invisible space Nancy should have been occupying. “I’m wearing it. Are you happy?”
No answer. Just the faint, familiar creek of the house settling on its foundation. She let go of the doorframe and stepped out into the hallway.
The suit shifted around her with the movement. The flower brushed her chin when she looked down. The USB pressed a small, unyielding square into the skin over her ribs. Robin straightened her shoulders.
She walked toward the stairs, toward the voices and the waiting car and the church and the coffin and the version of herself on the other side of this day she couldn't yet imagine. Didn’t want to know.
The suit came with her, every step.
Boston City Hall looked like somebody had stacked a bunch of concrete shoeboxes and dared people to feel romantic about it.
Robin had said that the first time they walked past it as students, hand-in-hand under matching thrift-store coats, fresh from some protest or march or other. Nancy had rolled her eyes, tucked her cold nose into Robin’s neck, and said, “You’re such a snob,” in a way that meant I agree with you and kiss me anyway.
Now, decades later, the building hadn’t changed. The air around it had.
There were rainbow flags taped up in a few of the narrow windows. A handmade banner - “CONGRATULATIONS MASSACHUSETTS COUPLES!” - hung crookedly over one entrance, the exclamation point slightly faded by drizzle. The steps up to the main doors were crowded with people - couples in their Sunday best and their Tuesday worst, kids clutching flowers, old women with canes and sensible shoes, young men with nervous hands smoothing down ties that didn’t want to behave.
It had been five days since the ruling went into effect, and City Hall buzzed like a beehive. There were cameras clustered along one side of the plaza, long black lenses pointed toward the steps, reporters in neat coats doing their best to look composed while they spoke into microphones about “history” and “firsts” and “controversy.” On the opposite side, behind a cordoned-off patch of barricade, a line of protestors held up signs Robin refused to read.
She focused on Nancy’s hand in hers instead. The familiar, callused warmth of it. The way Nancy’s thumb traced small circles on the side of her index finger without seeming to notice.
“Hey,” Robin said quietly, leaning in so her breath brushed Nancy’s hair. “If we duck now, we can still make it to that diner with the good pie and tell everyone we were here, but, oops, the line was too long, what a shame, guess the government will never know we exist.”
Nancy’s mouth quirked. She was watching the people on the steps with a look that mixed amusement and something sharper - something Robin recognized from late nights at the newsroom, when Nancy would fix on a story like a dog on a bone.
“You want to bail?” Nancy asked. “We can bail. I won’t hold it against you. Much.”
“I mean, we already did the whole vows thing,” Robin said, gesturing vaguely toward the horizon. “Backyard. Lights. Bare feet. You crying in a very dignified way. This is just...you know,” she flapped her free hand helplessly. “Paperwork.”
Nine summers had passed since that night. Nine years of shared mortgage and grocery lists and holidays and fights over whether to throw out the melted spatula. (More than) nine years of waking up and rolling over and finding Nancy there, hair everywhere, face soft in sleep.
The suit felt different now than it had nine years ago.
Back then, she’d put it on in their tiny kitchen, heart pounding hard enough to rattle her ribs, staring at herself in the hallway mirror and thinking: This is it, this is the moment, I’m actually going to get away with this. The fabric had been stiff and slightly too big, like she was a kid in stolen grown-up clothes.
Today, it sat on her shoulders like it belonged there. The tailor had aged well, apparently. The jacket pulled a little across her back in places it hadn’t before, but in a way that said life more than mismatch. The white shirt beneath it was crisp, the tie was straight.
Nancy’s dress was the same one she’d worn under the maple tree. It still fit her like it had been tailored to her stubbornness. The ivory fabric skimmed her hips, the lace at the neckline delicate without being fussy. Her hair was a little shorter now, a little darker at the roots, threaded with a handful of silver strands that caught the gray light. There were faint wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, etched by laughing and squinting at screens and frowning over articles.
She was, objectively, the most beautiful person Robin had ever seen or known.
She was also standing in a concrete canyon about to ask the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to acknowledge what Robin had known since she’d watched the same woman wield a shotgun against a monster. This is my person.
“You’re sure?” Robin said, softer. “We don’t have to-,”
Nancy squeezed her hand. “Robs,” she said. “We are literally already married. This is just us telling the state to catch up. But I want to do it. With you. If you do.”
Robin huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You and your paperwork,” she said, because if she tried to say ‘yes, I do, with every cell in my body’ in any earnest tone, she might cry right there on the stairs.
“You love my paperwork,” Nancy said. “Where would our health insurance be without my forms?”
“Probably in a ditch somewhere,” Robin admitted.
“There you go.”
They stepped forward with the line, inching closer to the glass doors and the security guards who stood just inside, watching the flow with a mixture of endearment and mild bewilderment. As they drew level with the journalist cluster, one woman with a mic turned, saw them, and smiled.
“Congratulations,” she mouthed around whatever copy she was reading into the camera.
Robin blinked. “Did a stranger just congratulate us preemptively?” she muttered.
“Get used to it,” Nancy murmured back. “We’re history now.”
The word made Robin want to run and hide under the porch swing. It also made her stand a little taller.
Inside, City Hall was all hard edges and echo. The atrium swallowed the sound and tossed it back, slightly distorted - the high-pitched squeal of a child darting between benches, the low murmur of office printers spitting out certificates, the clack of shoes on tile.
A laminated sign taped to a pillar read: MARRIAGE LICENSES → with an arrow. Someone had drawn a little heart at the end of it in red marker.
“Adorable,” Robin said. “The bureaucracy has whimsy.”
“Don’t get used to that,” Nancy advised, eyeing the line at the clerk’s counter. “It’s a special occasion. Like Halley’s Comet.”
They joined the queue. Ahead of them, an older couple - two women in matching Nancy skirt suits - whispered to each other in a language Robin only vaguely recognized, hands entwined so tightly their knuckles were white. Behind them, a pair of twentysomething guys in jeans and flannel looked like they’d just rolled out of bed and into history by accident.
Nancy watched everyone with the same small, intent smile she wore in a newsroom when a story started to move.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Robin said.
“I’m cataloging,” Nancy said. “I didn’t bring my notebook on purpose and my brain is fighting that. So now it’s just…taking notes anyway.”
“Of course it is,” Robin said fondly.
When they reached the front, the clerk - a woman with a kind face and a bun that had given up halfway through the morning - took their IDs, their forms, their check.
“And how long have you two been together?” She asked, conversational, as she typed.
“Since ‘88,” Robin said, before she could stop herself. “Officially.”
The clerk’s eyebrows rose. “So this is…?”
“Paperwork,” Nancy said promptly. “But we’ll take it.”
The clerk smiled. “Well, I’m glad you held out for us,” she said. She stamped something with a satisfying finality. “All right. Step into Courtroom 2B when they call your name. Next couple!”
They moved aside, into the milling cluster of people by the corridor.
Robin smoothed her hand down her jacket again. Nancy caught her wrist midway and tugged her gently to the side, into a little alcove by a bulletin board plastered with community notices and outdated flyers.
“Hold still,” Nancy said.
“I am holding still,” Robin said, then realized that Nancy meant literally.
Nancy reached up and grasped the knot of Robin’s tie, tugging it slightly to one side, then down, then up, coaxing it into a neater line. Her fingers were deft and familiar, knuckles brushing Robin’s throat.
“You know the tie is going to crease in approximately five seconds,” Robin pointed out, because otherwise she might focus too hard on the way her pulse jumped under Nancy’s touch.
“I know,” Nancy said. “It still bugs me.”
She smoothed the lapel of the jacket, fingertips tracing the seam, then lingered at the little flower pinned there. It wasn’t the same kind from their backyard wedding, but it was close enough that, for a heartbeat, Robin could smell the citronella and grilled vegetables over the faint tang of cleaning solvent.
Nancy looked up at her, eyes sharp and soft all at once. “You clean up okay, Mrs. Wheeler,” She murmured.
Robin snorted, because she didn’t know how to do anything else when her heart was trying to crawl out of her chest. “You are also Mrs. Buckley, you know,” she said. “This is a two-way disaster.”
Nancy’s mouth curved. “I know,” she said. “I’m counting on it.”
A court officer poked her head out of a nearby door and called a name. Not theirs. The couple in jeans and flannel disappeared into the courtroom. A minute later, applause filtered out through the half-open door, thin but enthusiastic.
Robin’s stomach swooped. “We could still run,” she said. “We could make a break for it. I think I could take at least one security guard. You could weaponize your report glare.”
Nancy’s hand slid down from her lapel to tangle with Robin’s again.
“I’m not running,” Nancy said.
Robin swallowed. “Yeah,” she said. No. Me either.”
“Robs?”
“Yeah?”
“If this turns out to be a huge mistake,” Nancy said solemnly, “I want you to know I’m going to blame the Commonwealth in all my future op-eds.”
Robin laughed, the sound cutting through the nerves like sunlight. “Deal,” she said.
The court officer called their names.
The courtroom was smaller than Robin had imagined. No sweeping gallery, no towering judge’s bench. Just the raised platform with a modest podium, rows of wooden benches, a scattering of folding chairs along the walls. A cluster of other couples sat watching, some with friends and family, some alone, all of them wearing the same expression - a mixture of disbelief and something too big for their faces.
The justice of the peace looked like somebody’s grandfather, bald at the crown, glasses perched on the end of his nose. He smiled when Robin and Nancy stepped up to the marked spot on the floor.
“Afternoon,” he said. “Ready?”
Robin and Nancy exchanged a quick look.
“In for a penny,” Robin said.
“In for a lifetime,” Nancy countered.
The Justice chuckled. “My kind of couple,” he said, and started in on the words.
They were shorter than the ones under the maple tree. No stories. No jokes. No references to monster-fighting or raccoons or kids on the lawn. Just the bare bones of it:
Do you take her? Do you take her? Will you love, honor, cherish? Will you?
“I do,” Robin said, and the words felt less like a repetition and more like a second, deeper carving of the same truth.
“I do,” Nancy said, and Robin heard the echo of her voice from nine years earlier layered over it, the sense of doubling making her dizzy for a second.
They didn’t exchange new rings. They already wore theirs. They did hold hands, though, fingers interlocked so tightly Robin could feel each ridge of Nancy’s knuckles.
“By the authority vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” the justice said, “I now pronounce you married under the laws of this state.”
There was a smattering of applause from the benches. Someone whooped quietly at the back. The older woman in navy skirt suits dabbed at their eyes with matching handkerchiefs.
“You may kiss,” the Justice added, eyes crinkling.
Robin leaned in and kissed Nancy once, quick, because the setting felt too fluorescent for anything else, then decided she didn’t care and kissed her again, slower. The courtroom blurred into soft shapes and paper rustle.
When they parted, Nancy’s eyes were shiny.
“This is just paperwork,” Robin said, voice rough.
“Yes,” Nancy said. “And also, it’s not.”
They signed where they were told to sign. Their names - both of them - curled across the official document in black ink. Wife. Wife. Not “roommate,” not “friend,” not “no relation.”
On their way out of the courtroom, a couple waiting by the door clapped them on the shoulder. “Congratulations,” one of the guys in the flannel said, grinning. “You two look like you’ve been doing this awhile.”
“Since ‘95,” Robin said, and the words tasted sweet.
Outside, the air was brighter than it had any right to be on an overcast day. The cameras swung toward them as they emerged. Rudy, the local news guy called out a question about how it felt.
“How does it feel to be married today?” He asked, thrusting the mic forward.
Robin blinked at him. “Redundant,” she said.
Nancy squeezed her hand. “Really good,” she amended, more diplomatically. “We’ve been married for nine years. This just means the state finally noticed.”
The protestors on the far side of the plaza yelled something. The words dissolved in the wind, swallowed by cheering from the other couples spilling down the steps.
Robin tugged on Nancy’s hand. “Come on,” she said, low, for her alone. “Before someone tries to make us explain our feelings on television.”
They ducked away from the main flow, around one of the squat concrete pillars that supported the upper levels. In the shadow there, half-hidden from the cameras and the crowd, Robin pushed Nancy gently up against the cool stone and kissed her like they were back in that cramped Northampton bedroom, like they’d never learned to be careful about who saw.
Nancy laughed into her mouth, the sound wet and giddy. Her hands slid up under the edges of Robin’s jacket, fingers hooking into the waistband of her slacks and tugging her closer.
“Mrs. Buckley,” Robin murmured against her lips.
“Mrs. Buckley-Wheeler,” Nancy corrected, eyes bright. “We’re hyphenating. I’ve decided.”
“Of course we are,” Robin said. “Terrible for filing systems. Beautiful for us.”
They broke apart eventually, because they were grown-ups with places to be and reporters slowly swiveling in their direction. Robin rested her forehead against Nancy’s for a moment, breathing her in.
“Hey,” she said quietly. “We did it. Again.”
Nancy smiled, soft and fierce. “Yeah,” she said. “We did. They can’t pretend we’re a phase now.”
“They could,” Robin said. “It would just be an extremely long phase. Statistically absurd.”
“That’s us,” Nancy said. “Statistically absurd.”
They walked down the rest of the steps hand in hand, into the chatter and the camera flashes and the future.
The suit felt different now, again. Layered. It held the backyard vow under fairy lights. It held the echoing, “I do” of a courtroom that had seen cities worth of other promises. It held Nancy’s fingers straightening the knot at her throat and the press of her laugh against its lapel.
We outlasted everything, Robin thought, as they stepped out onto the sidewalk. Monsters. Parents. Small towns. Bigots. Time. We made it. We’re really going to grow old together.
Years later, in a kitchen lit by softer bulls, the same suit would be hanging in a closet and the same conviction would be a bruise instead of a benediction. On a morning that began like any other - coffee, radio, Nancy packing her bag - Robin would still believe in growing old together.
Right up until the moment the phone didn’t get answered and the coordinates pulled Nancy somewhere Robin couldn’t follow.
The last normal morning didn’t look special.
That was the worst part, later. There was no ominous music, no thunderclouds, no sudden sense that the universe was about to pull teeth. Just a Tuesday that behaved itself.
The light coming in through the kitchen window was soft and watery, the kind that made the mug rack gleam and turned the steam from the kettle into a little ghost. Outside, the street was waking up - buses sighing at the corner, a dog barking two houses down, someone scraping a shovel along their front steps out of sheer habit even though the snow had melted weeks ago.
Robin stood at the stove, coaxing scrambled eggs round a pan with a kind of lazy competence that came from years of not burning breakfast. Her hair was pulled back into a low, messy knot - she wore an old T-shirt from some long-ago protest and a pair of pajama pants dotted with tiny cartoon planets. Her glasses were sliding down from her nose. She nudged them back up with the back of her wrist as she stirred.
Behind her, the radio on the counter muttered the news in a calm, too-bright voice. She wasn’t really listening. It was just noise, something for the silence to bounce off.
“Is this a new method?” Nancy’s voice drifted in from the hallway. “Are we…slow-poaching the eggs now?”
“Ah,” Robin said gravely, “you’ve caught me. This is the newest trend in avant-garde breakfast technique - ignore the eggs until they threaten to unionize.”
She heard Nancy snort before she saw her. Then bare feet padded across the tile, and Robin felt that familiar little shift in the air that registered Nancy’s presence before her eyes did.
Nancy came into view on the other side of the kitchen island, hair still damp from the shower, dark hair pulled back into a low twist that left a few wisps loose around her face. She was already dressed - dark jeans, a gray blouse, rolled at the sleeves, the leather shoulder bag she carried to work slung diagonally across her body. Her press badge was clipped to the strap, photo side turned in.
There were faint lines on her forehead that hadn’t been there in ‘95, a slight tightness around her mouth. She’d slept badly - Robin could tell by the way shadows under her eyes had gone from smudges to fingerprints.
The file folder tucked under her arm was bulkier than usual. Robin did notice that. She noticed the way Nancy’s fingers flexed around it, restless, like a runner shifting weight before a race.
“Morning, Wheeler,” Robin said, forcing her voice into something light. “You’re up early. Did the story dragons whisper in your ear again?”
“They didn’t let me sleep,” Nancy said, setting the folder on the table with a soft thump. “I dreamed in red string.”
“Hot,” Robin said. “Our therapist will have a field day with that.”
Nancy’s mouth curved, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. She crossed to the coffee maker and poured herself a mug, adding a splash of the creamer she claimed she didn’t need. The spoon clinked against ceramic as she stirred.
Robin watched her out of the corner of her eye as she plated the eggs. Nancy’s movements were efficient, less distracted than…sharpened. Taut.
“You’re sure you don’t want toast?” Robin asked, more to buy a second of normal conversation than because she thought the answer had changed in a decade.
“I’m good,” Nancy said, taking a careful sip. “I’ll grab something later.”
“Journalist later or actual later?” Robin said. “Because one of those involves you eating and one of those involves you forgetting and then yelling at the vending machine at three o’clock.”
Nancy made a face, caught, but didn’t argue. She carried her coffee to the kitchen table, where her laptop sat half-closed on top of a stack of printouts. As she passed behind Robin, she brushed a hand along the small of Robin’s back in that unconscious way she had, like she was making a tall - here, here, you’re here.
Robin tilted the pan, slid the eggs onto two plates, and joined her at the table.
Up close, the lines around Nancy’s mouth were more obvious. So were the smudges under her eyes.
“You didn’t sleep,” Robin confirmed.
Nancy shrugged, poking at the eggs with her fork. “Not much,” she admitted.
“The claimant rests,” Robin said. “On what, specifically?”
Nancy huffed. “Don’t start cross-examining me before I’ve finished my coffee.”
Robin studied her for a moment. “I will start at any time,” she said. “It is my sacred duty as your wife and your resident anxiety translator.” She nudged her foot against Nancy’s under the table. “Talk to me, Wheeler. You’ve had that haunted ‘I’m pulling a thread and it’s tied to a bomb’ look for three days.”
Nancy’s fingers tightened around her fork. She stared down at the eggs, then set the fork aside as if she’d forgotten what to do with it.
“Elena,” Said said. “The girl. “The missing girl.”
“Yeah,” Robin said gently. If she closed her eyes, she could see the photo that had been taped above Nancy’s desk for months - a teen girl who had been missing for almost an entire year at this point, with big eyes and bangs she’d probably regret in five years if she got them. When she got them. When, Robin corrected herself sternly.
“They’re going to pull the story if we don’t have something more concrete soon,” Nancy said. “Management’s starting to talk about ‘emotional fatigue.’ Like people can only care about a missing kid for so long before they get bored.” Her jaw tightened on the last word.
Robin’s hand slid across the table, covering Nancy’s. “People might,” she said. “You won’t.”
“No,” Nancy said. “I won’t.”
Her gaze flicked to the folder, then back. “I’ve got a meeting this afternoon,” She said. “A source. He’s…skittish. I think he’s connected to whoever took her somehow. The way he talks about them - it’s like he’s trying to warn me without admitting he knows anything. He gave me something last night, and then he disappeared before I could press.”
Robin felt a small, cold drop of unease lang in the middle of her chest. “Gave you what?” she asked.
“A note. Coordinates.” Nancy’s mouth twisted. “He said…’time’s running out.’”
The cold drop spread, a thin sheet of ice under her ribs.
“And the detectives?” Robin asked, keeping her voice level. “You’re looping them in.”
“Yes,” Nancy said immediately. “Of course. I’m not stupid, Robin.”
“I know you’re not stupid,” Robin said. “I know you’re brilliant and brave and deeply, deeply annoying. I also know you, and I know that if you get it in your head that you can shave five minutes off the rescue by going in first-,”
“I won’t,” Nancy said. Too fast. Then, “I won’t,” again, slower, like she was convincing herself as much as Robin. She pulled her hand free and rubbed her forehead. “I’m not going to kick down any doors by myself. I’ll send the coordinates. I’ll wait for them to catch up. I promise.”
She looked up, meeting Robin’s eyes across the table. That stubborn, familiar fire burned there. It had dragged them both out of Hawkins alive. It had also gotten Nancy into trouble more times than Robin could count.
Robin let out a long breath, feeling it rasp on the way out.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this properly, then.”
Nancy’s brows drew together. “Properly?”
“You know the rules,” Robin said.
There it was - the thin thread of ritual they’d been weaving between them for years, ever since Boston got its own brand of late-night emergencies. It had started as a joke after one of Nancy’s particularly hair-raising exposés - that time she’d gone undercover with a hidden mic in a landlords’ meeting and came back vibrating with adrenaline and outrage.
Now it surfaced like a script.
“Robs-,”
“What’re the rules?” Robin pressed, softer than a scold, firmer than a tease.
Nancy exhaled through her nose, then gave up and leaned back in her chair. She hooked one ankle over the other under the table, heel bouncing.
“Rule number one,” she recited, eyes on Robin. “I don’t go in alone.”
“Mm-hmm,” Robin said, nodding. “And?”
“Rule number two,” Nancy said. “I call it in. I wait for backup. I do not play the hero.”
“And rule three?” Robin asked - the most important rule.
Nancy’s mouth crooked. “I come home to you.”
The last one wasn’t said as often. It didn’t need to be. It was in the way Nancy always texted when she was going to be late, in the way she left her shoes by the door so Robin would trip over them and sweat and then smile. Still, hearing it out loud made something in Robin’s chest ease.
She reached across the table again, palm up. “Shake on it,” she said.
Nancy rolled her eyes, but she put her hand in Robin’s. They shook, absurdly formal, the way they had a hundred times before after late-night arguments or big decisions or stupid dares. Nancy’s grip was firm and warm - her thumb stroked over Robin’s knuckles once, almost unconsciously.
“I’m serious,” Robin said quietly. “Be careful. Come back safe.”
“I will,” Nancy said. I promise.”
“You say that now,” Robin muttered, softer, because the alternative was letting the fear show in her voice, “and then some informant bats their eyelashes at you and you forget your own name.”
“I don’t forget my own name,” Nancy said, affronted. “I sometimes…reorder my priorities.”
“Reorder them with me at the top,” Robin said. “Or at least in the top three. Above coffee.”
Nancy hesitated, then looked at her over the rim of her mug. “Youre above coffee,” she said. “Don’t make me prove it by giving up caffeine. That’s not good for anyone.”
“God, no,” Robin said. “The last thing the world needs is a decaffeinated Nancy Wheeler. People would start disappearing just from the sheer force of your disapproval.”
Nancy laughed, for real this time. It crinkled the corners of her eyes, putting color in her cheeks. Some of the tightness around her mouth eased.
She picked up her fork again, finally taking a bite of the eggs. “These are good,” she said around it.
“I know,” Robin said. “Tell all your friends.”
The rest of breakfast was almost ordinary. They ate. They traded small updates - Robin talked about the adult ESL class she’d be teaching that afternoon, the one with the retired machinist who insisted on calling her “Professora,” and the young woman who was secretly writing poems in three languages. Nancy complained about her editor. Robin complained about a microphone that had started hissing without provocation at the studio.
The coordinates sat in the center of Nancy’s folder like a live wire. They did not mention them again.
Eventually, Nancy checked her watch and made a face. “I’ve got to go,” she said, standing, gathering plate and mug.
“I’ve got to pretend to be a responsible adult,” Robin agreed. “It’s very disappointing. I was promised a future full of games and cartoons, not…lesson plans and tax paperwork.”
“You can still have cartoons,” Nancy said. “We have a DVR. We are modern.”
“Hot,” Robin said, rising to take her own dishes to the sink. She bumped Nancy’s hip with her own. “You say the sexiest things.”
In the narrow space between the counter and the table, Nancy caught her arm and pulled her in, just enough to close the distance.
They kissed like they always did on mornings that weren’t rushed or irritated or frazzled - a slow, familiar press that fit their mouths together the way their hands fit, years of practice smoothing the edges. Nancy’s finger slid up into her hair at the back of Robin’s head, not to hold her in place, but to touch, to reassure.
“I’ll be home for dinner,” Nancy murmured against her mouth. “We can do that pasta you like. The stupidly complicated one with the pine nuts.”
“Stupidly complicated pine nuts is my middle name,” Robin said, eyes closed. “My passport is very confusing.”
Nancy huffed. “Be serious,” she said, but there was no heat to it.
“I’m always serious about carbs,” Robin said. Then, softer, as she rested her forehead against Nancy’s for a beat, “I’ll have it ready. Come back safe.”
“I will,” Nancy said again. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Robin said.
They parted, because time still moved even when you were happy and the world had not yet cracked open. Nancy grabbed her bag and the folder, checked for her keys, her wallet, her phone in the crisp, practiced pat-down of someone who had left too many things behind over the years.
“Okay,” she said, at the threshold between the kitchen and the hall. “Okay. I’m really going.”
“Go nail them to the wall, Wheeler,” Robin said. “Figuratively. Legally. Do not get arrested.”
“No promises,” Nancy said over her shoulder, that quick flash of mischief in her eyes. Then she was out of the kitchen, down the hall, the front door opening with a familiar creak.
It clicked shut.
The house sighed into a different shape around Robin - emptied in that subtle, almost imperceptible way that meant Nancy’s energy wasn’t in it.
Robin turned back to the sink, ran the water, and started rinsing plates. The radio droned. A bus signed outside. The ordinary sounds of an ordinary morning.She was stacking dishes in the rack when she saw it.
Nancy’s pen.
It sat on the edge of the kitchen table, right next to the open laptop, exactly where Nancy had dropped it when she’d sat down earlier. The fancy report pen, the one she liked, the one she swore wrote straighter lines than any other.
“Of course,” Robin said to the empty room.
She dried her hands on a dish towel, crossed the kitchen, and scooped it up, twirling it between her fingers. She could already hear the sweat from here.
As if summoned, muffled through the front door and the thin old wood of the house, Nancy’s voice floated back.
“Shit!”
Robin’s mouth curved.
She moved to the archway where the hallway met the kitchen just as the front door flew open again. Nancy rushed back in, cheeks pink from the cool air, hair frizzing slightly at the edges where the humidity got them every time. She was halfway through the doorway when she looked up and saw Robin standing there, pen held aloft between two fingers.
“Looking for this, Mrs. Buckley-Wheeler?” Robin asked, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe, trying for casual and landing somewhere in the vicinity of smug.
“You are impossible,” Nancy said but the relief in her voice was disproportionate to the object. She crossed the hall in quick strides, snatched the pen, then held it against her chest with her folder like it was a lifeline. “Thank you. I would have had to break into my own desk drawer at work like a criminal.”
“Scandal in the newsroom,” Robin said. “Renowned investigative journalist finally taken down by lack of pen.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. From this close, Robin could see the little flecks of green in the blue of them, the faint crease between her brows that never quite went away anymore.
Impulse moved faster than fear.
“I love you madly, Nance,” Robin said.
She meant to toss it off like a joke, to make Nancy roll her eyes again and say something snarky. Instead, the words came out steady and simple, a clear line of truth laid between them.
Nancy stopped.
For a heartbeat, the hallway narrowed down to the space between them. The draft from the open door tugged at the hem of Nancy’s blouse. The light from the kitchen window haloed her hair.
She turned back fully, folder and pen forgotten against her chest. Something softened and sharpened all at once in her face. “Oh,” she said, very quietly.
Then, she reached out, hooked two fingers in the front of Robin’s T-shirt, and tugged her in.
The kiss started soft and sank deeper, slow enough that Robin could feel every beat of it. No hurry. No panic. No haste. Just the kind of deliberate, savoring kiss that bled the edges of the day into something golden.
Nancy’s hand slid up into her hair again, thumb brushing the hinge of her jaw. Robin’s hands found Nancy’s waist, fingers memorizing the line of her even though she’d touched this body a thousand times. The open door let in a cool gust that licked at their ankles, but everywhere they met was warm.
The house around them faded into shadow and background. There were no monsters here, no headlines, no coordinates. Just the taste of Nancy’s coffee on her tongue and the press of her smile against Robin’s mouth.
When they finally drew back, it wasn’t far. Just enough to breathe.
Both of them were a little breathless. Nancy’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. Robin felt like the world had been nudged a fraction of an inch into better alignment. She swallowed the urge to request they both play hooky for the day and go crawl in bed together.
Nancy rested her forehead against Robin’s, noses nearly touching.
“I love you more, Robs,” she said, the words low and sure. No joke. No dodge.
It landed in Robin’s chest like a seal. She wanted to say something back - something poetic, something stupid, something about growing old and fighting over crossword puzzles in matching track suits. There wasn’t time. Life never gave you a warning label.
Nancy smiled, soft and crooked. “Okay,” she said, more to herself than to Robin. “Okay. Now I really have to go.”
She kissed her once more - quick and firm, punctuation on the sentence - then pulled away.
Robin let her fingers slide along Nancy’s wrist as she stepped back, holding on for one second longer than necessary. Then she let go.
Nancy pivoted in the doorway, adjusting the strap of her bag, patting absently at the folder, the pen. She glanced back over her shoulder with that little half-smile that had once made Robin almost fall down a staircase at Emerson.
“Same me some pasta,” She said.
“All of it,” Robin said. “Come home and fight me for it.”
“That’s the plan,” Nancy said.
The front door swung open. Cold air rushed in. For a second, Nancy was framed in the morning light, her hair catching the brightness, shoulders straight, file tucked under one arm like a shield.
Then she stepped out onto the porch. The door closed behind her with a solid, ordinary click.
Robin stood in the hallway for a moment, staring at the space she’d left, listening to the fading rhythm of her footsteps on the sidewalk. Then she shook herself, huffed a breath, and went back into the kitchen.
The radio shifted to another song. Somewhere down the street, somebody’s car alarm chirped. The house settled back around her, the same as it had been fifteen minutes before. The same as it had been every morning they’d lived here.
Robin picked up her mug, took a sip of coffee, and made a face. It had gone lukewarm.
Later, when she tried to find the moment where everything bent she would rewind to this one. The casual kiss in the hallway. The light joke. The line of I love you madly, Nance, and the way Nancy had answered it without flinching.
She would come back here, to the click of the door and the sign of the house, and tell herself that if she’d held Nancy’s wrist one second longer, just one second, or two - but in that moment, it was just Tuesday.
By the time the coordinates made sense, the sun was already low.
Nancy sat at her desk in the newsroom, the world around her reduced to the tight circle of lamplight on the scratched surface and the scribbled sheet of paper pinned beneath her fingertips. Phones ran in the distance. Someone’s radio murmured last hour’s headlines from a neighboring cubicle. The air smelled like burnt coffee and old printer toner.
Her eyes tracked the numbers again, lips moving slightly.
It wasn’t an address. Not exactly. Not in any way you could plug into MapQuest and get directions properly. But when she’d laid a street map over the scribbled rows and traced them with her pen, a point had emerged on the far side of the city - old industrial land, the sort of place zoning committees forgot about as they fell into rust and ruin.
The source’s voice still clung to the back of her ear.
Time’s running out.
He hadn’t explained the why of it. Truthfully, Nancy didn’t need him to. Elean Morales had just turned fifteen when she’d gone missing. Her 16th birthday had passed three weeks ago. Nancy hadn’t known about her disappearance until she’d been gone for three months. The news had cycled through it on a blip and nothing more, until something had come across Nancy’s desk. A clipping with a scribbled note. The thread. Nancy had begun pulling and never stopped, long after the news cycle had lost interest. But Nancy hadn’t. Elena’s parents hadn’t, her siblings hadn’t. Nancy never would. Not until Elena was returned to her family.
Her fingers tightened around the pen until it dug into her palm.
She’d done the things you were supposed to do. She’d called her detective contact personally, had him on speaker while she walked him through the coordinates, the rough description, the source had been shaking - had provided him the audio files of her conversation with the source, as brief as it had been.
“We’re working on the red tape to get units dispatched,” O’Leary said. “We’ll get there.”
“Text me when you’re close,” she’d replied.
“Do not go in alone, Wheeler,” he’d added, the familiar exasperation threaded through the concern. “You hear me?”
She’d rolled her eyes at the empty room. “I know the rules,” she’d said, her mind shifting to her conversation with Robin this morning.
She knew the rules. She did. She’d just…never been very good at obeying them when someone’s life was on the other end.
Now, as the office emptied around her and the light changed, she checked her phone for what felt like the thousandth time. No new messages. No updates. No emails. The numbers on the page glared up at her. Somewhere in the city, a girl who had once smiled awkwardly at a school photo was living inside those numbers, or not.
Nancy pictured the photo pinned above her desk: ELENA MORALES, 15 16. Soft, dark hair. Shy smile. The caption they’d run under her picture, over a year ago: Last seen leaving her after-school job. If you have any information…
“Time’s running out,” Nancy whispered.
She pushed back from the desk.
Once she was moving, it was easier. Motion let her outrun the second-guessing for a few steps at a time. She grabbed her bag, slid the folder of printouts inside, and double-checked the contents by touch - notebook, pen, digital recorder, phone, wallet, keys. The familiar shapes reassured her in the same way her own hands did.
At her cubicle wall, she hesitated just long enough to tap Elena’s photo once with two fingers, a small, superstitious salute.
“Hang on,” she murmured. “I’m coming.”
Her eyes landed after one last pass on a photo of her and Robin next to her monitor, easy sightline. It was from their wedding. The first one in ‘95. The sun had set and they were under the badly strung Christmas lights in the back yard of their first house. They weren’t posed. They were dancing, pressed closed, eyes on each other, foreheads just about to touch, brilliant smiles on their faces.
“I love you madly, Nance.”
She heard Robin’s voice, clear as anything in her head. Thought about her promise to come home and fight Robin for the stupidly complicated pasta with the pine nuts. Come home and fight me for it.
“I love you more, Robs,” she whispered her apology into the air, her eyes lingering one last moment before her feet moved again. Time’s running out.
In the parking garage, the concrete chilled the heat of the day. Her car sat in its usual spot, bearing the battle scars of city living: a scuffed bummer here, a dinged door there. She slid into the driver’s seat, tossed her bag into the passenger side, and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.
Rule number one: I don’t go in alone.
Rule number two: I call it in. I wait for backup. I do not play the hero.
Rule number three: I come home to you.
She could hear Robin’s voice in her head, hear the way it softened when she’d said that last one this morning.
“I’m not going in,” Nancy told the empty car. “Not in. I’m just…getting there. Being eyes. If I’m wrong, I’ll turn around. If I’m right, I’ll…I’ll wait.”
She didn’t entirely believe herself. She turned the key anyway. The engine caught with a low growl. She pulled out into the street, merging with the late-afternoon traffic. The city slid by her windows in a blue of brick and glass and graffiti - kids on bikes, a woman dragging a grocery cart up a set of steps, a man smoking on a stoop.
At the first red light, she thumbed Robin’s number.
It went to voicemail on the second ring, Robin’s voice bright in her ear.
“Hey, this is Robin, leave your secrets after the-,”
Beep.
“Hey, Robs, it’s me,” Nancy said. She kept her voice light, the way she always did when she knew Robin would worry if she didn’t. “I’m going to be late for dinner tonight.
The light turned green. She put the car in motion, phone still pressed between shoulder and ear.
“I promise I’ll be home as soon as I can,” she said. “Save me some pasta, okay? I love you.”
She hung up before the quaver in her chest could reach her throat.
The city thinned as she headed toward the coordinates, warehouse blocks replacing brownstones, the streets growing wider and emptier. Her phone buzzed once - she checked it too fast, hear lurching - but it was just a spam text, some unknown number offering nothing of use.
She tossed the phone back onto the passenger seat with more force than necessary and forced herself to focus on the road.
By the time she turned down the final street, the sky had gone from gold to the flat, gray-blue that never looked like anything on film. The warehouse district lay around her like a forgotten stage set - chain-link fences, sagging, tagged walls, windows long since spidered and boarded.
The coordinates led her to a building that looked like every other - brick, two stories, metal loading dock doors sitting sullenly at the back. The signage had peeled away years ago, leaving only the ghost of a company name no one remembered.
Her stomach clenched.
This was a terrible idea.
Her foot stayed on the gas long enough to pull her into the cracked asphalt lot. She parked a little away from the main doors, nose pointed at the exit, the way the detectives had taught her.
Backup is on their way. You called it in. You don’t have to-
She killed the engine. The sudden quiet rang in her ears.
Time’s running out.
It meant that Elena was alive, but for how much longer? Nancy reached across, grabbed her bag, and dug for the digital recorder by feel. The small device fit her hand as naturally as a pen, with her almost as often as a pen in fact. She clicked it on and watched the little red light blink to life.
“Wheeler, Nancy,” she said, voice low, out of habit more than anything. “On-site at,” - She rattled off the street names and coordinates - “at approximately nineteen thirty-two. Following up on a lead regarding missing juvenile, Elena Morales.”
Her own voice sounded strange in the enclosed car. She swallowed.
“If this is nothing,” she muttered, “it’s going to make a very embarrassing outtake.”
She slid the recorder into the chest pocket of her jacket until the plastic edge pressed against her sternum. Then she popped the trunk. The tire iron was where it always was, wedged next to the jack. She hefted it in her hand, feeling the weight. It was a terrible weapon and better than nothing.
“Not going in,” she told the air. “Just looking.”
The warehouse door complained when she opened it, metal scraping against concrete. The sound echoed down the empty loading bay like a warning.
Inside, the air was cooler, stale. It smelled of dust, rust, and something sour underneath that made her throat want to close.
She stepped in anyway.
Row upon row of old shelving loomed in the dimness, casting long, broken shadows. Somewhere in the distance, water dripped at irregular intervals. Pigeons had claimed part of the rafters, their wings fluttered occasionally, soft thuds against tin.
“Nancy Buckley-Wheeler,” she breathed, keeping her footsteps as quiet as she could. “You are going to owe Robin so many apologies for this…This is a bad idea, Nance. Robin’s going to murder you. ”
Her voice was barely more than a whisper, but she knew the recorder would catch it. Part of her wanted it to. A breadcrumb trail for whoever found this if - Don’t think about if.
She moved deeper into the warehouse, eyes scanning for signs of recent use. Footprints in the dust, fresh scuff marks, anything that broke the pattern of disuse.
She found them near the center aisle - a path of clearer concrete, as if something heavy had been dragged repeatedly. A faint line of wheel tracks. The shadows of crates and pallets thing ahead - a corrugated metal wall rose from the floor halfway to the ceiling with a heavy steel door inset like a vault.
Her pulse ticked up.
The air on this side of the wall felt warmer. Close. The smell shifted too - less dust, more human. She stood there for a moment, listening. At first, there was only the drip, the rustle of pigeon wings far overhead. Then, very faintly, like it was coming from the bottom of a well:
“,,,hello?” Please - hello?!”
Nancy’s heart slammed against her ribs. Alive. She’s alive!
“Elena?” she called softly, stepping closer. “Elena, is that you?”
The voice sharpened, climbing into panic. “Is someone there? Please - PLEASE! - My baby-,”
The last word shattered Nancy. The tire iron felt hot in her hand. She moved to the door, fingers finding the padlock with fumbling urgency. It was new. Shiny where everything else was dull. Of course it was.
Time’s running out. Baby. There was a baby. Elena had been missing for over a year. That meant…
“Okay,” Nancy said, more to herself than anyone else. “Okay. Hey - Elena? It’s Nancy - My name is Nancy Wheeler. I’m a reporter. I’m here to get you out, okay? Do you hear me?”
There was a sob from the other side of the door. “Please,” Elena cried. “Please. They said they were coming back. They said - my baby-,”
“They’re not going to touch you,” Nancy said, voice going flat and gold in a way that would have scared her if she’d heard it from someone else. “I promise you that. Just - stay back from the door, okay?” Cover the baby if you can. I’m going to break the lock. It’s going to be loud.”
That part was unfortunate, but couldn’t be helped. She didn’t wait for an answer from Elena. If she thought too long, she’d hear Robin’s voice again, reminding her of all the rules she had broken. She drew back the tire iron and brought it down hard on the padlock.
The impact jarred up her arm, numbing her hand. The lock rattled but held. She hit it again. And again. Metal clanged in the confined space, echoing off the high ceilings. Each blow felt like it should pull attention from every corner of the city.
“Come on,” she grunted, sweat prickling at her hairline. “Come on, you bastard-,”
On the fourth strike, the lock’s shackle snapped. It clattered to the floor, bouncing once. She kicked the hasp free and yanked the door open.
The smell hit her first. Sweat, blood, fear, old urine and body fluids. It was a crowded odor, heavy, clinging.
Inside the container, the light was dim and orange from a single bare bulb. A thin mattress lay on the floor, stained. A girl huddled there, thin arms curved protectively around the tiny bundle at her chest.
Elena looked smaller than she did in the photo, somehow. Hollow-cheeked. Her eyes were too big in her face, frantic and disbelieving. Her dark hair hung lank around her shoulders, stuck to dried tears on her cheeks.
The baby - God, the baby was so small - squirmed weakly in the crook of her arm, emitting thin, exhausted cries.
Nancy’s heart shattered. She was just a baby - Elena - even at sixteen. Her mind flashed - To Barb, to Max, Eleven, to Holly. To the small, tear-laden tears that filled Robin’s face when Nancy had announced herself as the bait for the Mind Flayer in the abyss, the instant regret Robin had felt as she’d realized the gravity of the ask. They’d survived that. Nancy would survive this - Elena would survive this, the baby would. Nancy would make sure of it.
“Nancy?” Elena whispered. “A-Are you real?”
“Unfortunately,” Nancy said, almost to herself. Her voice came out gentler than she felt. “We have to move. Right now.”
She stepped inside, the metal floor flexing faintly under her weight, and knelt. “How long ago?” she asked, eyes flicking over the blood-streaked blanket, the improvised nest of towels and torn fabric.
“A-a few days,” Elena said. Her voice shook. “I don’t - I think? I don’t know, they just-,”
“Okay,” Nancy said quickly. No time. There would be time later - for doctors, for questions, for stories. If she got them out.
She slid the tire iron through her belt loop, freeing both hands, and reached for Elena. “I’m going to help you up,” she said. “We’re going to my car. The police are on their way. You’re going to be okay.”
Elena’s whole body flinched at the word police, but she nodded, clutching the baby closer. When she tried to stand on her own, her legs buckled immediately. Nancy took as much of her weight as she could, lopping Elena’s free arm over her own shoulders.
“You have to take the baby,” Elena gasped. Please, please - you have to-,”
“I’ve got her,” Nancy said.
She took the tiny bundle carefully, cradling the fragile weight in the crook of her arm. The baby’s face scrunched, mouth opening in protest, a little fist flailing. Warmth seeped into Nancy’s arms, astonishing, electric.
“Hi,” she whispered, rocking gently without meaning to. “Hey. You’re okay. We’re going.”
The warehouse seemed farther from the car on the way back out. The air felt thicker. Every step sounded too loud. They had just cleared the shadow of the door when a voice snapped from somewhere to her right.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Nancy whipped her head around.
One of the men stood between the shelving rows, half in shadow. She recognized the outline of his shoulders, the cheap leather jacket, from a grainy surveillance photo she’d practically memorized on her living room floor a little over a week ago.
He had a gun pointed at her. Of course he did. Behind him, another shape moved - another man, heavier, limping on an already injured leg.
You should have waited for backup. Rule number two: I call it in. I wait for backup. I do not play the hero.
The baby squirmed, letting out a confused, hiccuping sound against her chest. Nancy didn’t think. She moved.
“Elena,” she hissed, already turning, already pivoting her body to shield them. “Take her. Now!”
She shoved the back back into Elena’s arms, making sure Elena’s grip was solid before she let go. The teen’s eyes went wide, but her hands clenched around the tiny body with white-knuckled determination.
“Hold her tight,” Nancy ordered, voice low and fierce. “No matter what.”
They had seconds before the men would be close enough to use the gun effectively in the dim warehouse. Elena made a sound like a trapped animal, trying to shrink behind Nancy even though there was nowhere to go.
Nancy’s body moved before her brain caught up. She twisted again, using her own frame as a barrier as she shoved Elena and the baby behind a stack of pallets with more strength than she knew she had.
“Run,” she hissed, half-turning, keeping herself between them and the gun as long as possible. “That way- Hide! Do not stop! Do not make a sound - Go, go!”
Elena’s fingers clutched at her sleeve, then let go. Nancy didn’t look to see exactly where she went, just trusted she’d listened. She couldn’t afford to split her attention.
The man with the gun stepped closer. His eyes were flat, mean. “I know you. You’re that reporter,” he said. “I’ve seen your work - seen you on TV. Think you’re some kind of hero?”
“I think you’re about to have a really bad day,” Nancy said.
Her right hand went to the tire iron at her hip, wrenching it free.
The first shot rang out before she could swing. The sound cracked through the warehouse, deafening. Pain seared past her, hot and shocking, along her upper arm, a graze. The baby shrieked from somewhere behind the pallets, overwhelmed.
Nancy didn’t register anything beyond the imperative: move.
She dropped low and surged forward, swinging the tire iron with everything she had at the nearer man’s knee. There was a sickening crack. He howled, collapsing sideways.
The second man lunged. She swung up, blindly, catching him across the jaw. His head snapped back. The gun went off again, wild, the bullet whining into the shelving.
Adrenaline burned away fear. For a few heartbeats, there was only motion. Swing. Duck. shove. Somewhere behind her, the baby wailed, high and thin, muffled against Elena’s chest.
“Run!” She screamed again, not sure if she was yelling at Elena or herself.
She didn’t see which shot hit her.
Later, people would ask: How many times? Where? Did it hurt?
She would never be able to answer the sequence. Only this: there was a moment when she was running, half-dragging Elena toward the gap in the shelves, heartbeat pounding in her ears like drums, Elena clutching the baby so tightly, the kid’s cries came out in hiccuping bursts against her shoulder.
Then there was a moment when the world punched her in the side hard enough to steal her breath.
For a split second, she thought one of the shelves had fallen into her. The pain bloomed under her ribs, white-hot, spreading out in jagged rays. Her knees almost buckled. Her hand flew to her side, coming away hot and slick.
“Keep going,” she gasped, shoving Elena ahead of her with her free hand. “Door. Now!”
Elena stumbled, almost fell, then straightened. The loading bay door glowed ahead like a square of salvation, the baby’s cries sawed into short, panicked gulps against her chest.
They burst out into the open air together, the sudden cool shocking against Nancy’s sweat-damp skin. The lot yawned wide around them, empty. Her car waited where she’d left it.
“Keys,” she croaked. Her fingers were clumsy on the fob. Blood slicked her palm. She didn’t know when that had started.
The engine roared to life on the first try. Elena yanked open the back door and tumbled into the back seat with the baby still welded to her, curling protectively around her daughter as she fumbled for the belt.
Nancy threw herself into the driver’s seat, every motion leaving a smear of red on vinyl and cloth.
Behind them, the warehouse door banged open. A figure staggered out, weapon raised.
Nancy floored the gas. “Get down!”
The car leapt forward. Shots cracked against metal, one shattering the back window in an explosion of glass. Elena screamed, curling instinctively tighter around the baby, shielding her from the spray.
Nancy kept going. Tires squealed. The steering wheel vibrated under her hands. Her side burned, each breath a knife.
“Hold on,” she rasped. “We’re okay. We’re okay. Are you okay? Is she okay?”
In the rearview mirror, she could see Elena hunched over the tiny bundle, hands shaking but still holding.
“We’re okay!” Elena sobbed. “You’re - there’s - you’re bleeding-,”
“I’m fine,” Nancy lied. The road blurred for a moment. She blinked hard. There were two of everything for a heartbeat, then one again. “We’re heading…gas station. People. Lights.”
She drove like she hadn’t driven since she’d been racing to intercept monsters in the Upside Down, the way that had once made her mother threaten to take the car keys forever. The needle on the speedometer climbed. The buildings thinned even more. Then, blessedly, a splash of fluorescent color appeared ahead.
A gas station, its sign flickering, pumps standing sentinel in a pool of light. A convenience store glowed behind them, windows plastered with posters for lottery tickets and cheap coffee. Nancy aimed for it like it was the only solid thing in the world.
Her vision tunneled. Her hands felt wrong on the wheel, distant. The car lurched as she swung into the lot too fast, clipping a rack of windshield washer fluid bottles. They exploded in a fountain of blue across the asphalt and cement.
She got the car into park mostly by muscle memory. The engine rattled, then idled.
“Elena,” she said. Her tongue thick in her mouth. “Take the baby, go inside. Scream. Don’t…don’t stop screaming…until someone calls 911.”
“I can’t leave you,” Elena said, eyes huge, already wet.
“You can and you will,” Nancy said. She didn’t recognize her own voice - hoarse, fraying, that hard edge softened by urgency. “Time’s running out…for her.” she nodded wobbly toward the baby, whose cries had dwindled to exhausted hiccups. “Go.”
Elena hesitated one second longer. Then she clutched the baby to her chest, fumbled the door open, and stumbled out onto the wet blue slick where the washer fluid had burst. She almost fell, caught herself, and then she was running toward the store, screaming as loud as her lungs allowed.
The glass doors swung open. A clerk stared, then jolted into motion. The world outside Nancy’s car became a flurry of shapes and frantic gestures.
Inside the car, everything narrowed. Noise dulled. The edges of the dashboard blurred. For the first time since she’d felt the impact, Nancy looked down.
“No…” it was soft, full of fear as the adrenaline ebbed. “No…no, no, no…”
Her shirt was soaked on the right side, dark and spreading. It didn’t even look like blood, not the way she’d seen it in photographs and on crime scenes. It looked like someone had spilled ink and it was crawling across the fabric, greedy.
“Oh,” she breathed.
Her hands felt numb. From somewhere, distant but growing, sirens wailed.
Footsteps pounded across the lot. Voice tangled outside the car. The passenger door yanked open. A man in plainclothes leaned in - Detective Morales, one of the ones she’d been working with on the case. His tie was askew, his eyes wild.
“Wheeler?” He barked. “Jesus Christ-,”
“I told you,” she tried to say, but it came out as a wet cough. Pain lanced her side so sharply she saw white light in her vision.
Hands were on her then, more of them, pulling her, gently, not gently, out of the driver’s seat as she cried out unable to hold the pain in, laying her down on the asphalt. The coolness of it seeped through her jacket and shirt - the wet from the broken fluid bottles seeped too, absurdly cold against the heat in her side.
“Stay with us, Wheeler,” Morales ordered, pressing something hard and unrelenting against the wound. She arched involuntarily, a ragged sound escaping her. “I need pressure here - Garcia, hold that - Mason, get the med kit-,”
Faces loomed over her in fragments. Streetlights turned halos around their heads. The sirens grew louder, the sound warping at the edges like a tape pulled too tight.
Rule number three: I come home to you.
“Robin,” she gasped.
Morales leaned closer. “We’re gonna get you to the hospital,” he said. His voice had taken on that brisk, authoritative cadence she’d heard him use on witnesses and terrified rookies over the years she’d known him. “Ambulance is almost here. You’re going to be fine.”
He was lying. Not because he wanted to - he probably didn’t even realize - but because he didn’t see what she already saw. Felt. Knew.
Her vision had gone strange, the edges darkening. Sound game in waves now - loud, then muffled, then loud again. Her fingers felt like someone else’s. Every breath fought through syrup.
They were losing her.
“Call Robin,” she managed, clutching at his sleeve with fumbling fingers. “Please - c-call…call Robs-,”
“We will,” he said. “We will. As soon as we’ve got you stabilized-,”
Too late, she thought. We are past stabilization.
Something hard dug into her chest as she shifted. Her hands scrabbled for purchase, struggled against them. For a second, her brain couldn’t place it. Then, she realized…recorder. The little device in her pocket, still tucked there against her sternum where she’d shoved it at the warehouse door.
Red light’s on. Of course it was. She hadn’t turned it off.
They’d get this tape eventually. They’d pull it from her body as evidence. They’d listen to her voice mapping out the coordinates, her grunts as she broke the lock, Elena’s please, the baby’s wails, the gunshots.
And if she could talk now - if she could string words together through the gurgling wet in her chest - they’d hear those too.
“Robin,” she whispered again, but differently this time. Not to Morales. To the red blinking light above the record button she couldn’t see but she knew it was there. “Hey. H-Hey, Robs…can you hear me?”
Her bloody hand flailed weakly against the front of her jacket, as if she could press the recorder closer to her heart by sheer will.
“She’s talking to someone,” a voice said above her. “Who’s Robin? Is that-,”
“Focus on the wound,” Morales snapped. “Pressure, more pressure - Wheeler, stay with us-,”
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said. The words tore at her lungs. Blood bubbled at the corners of her mouth. She tasted copper and something thicker underneath. “I’m so…I’m so s-sorry, baby. I…I broke the r-rules.”
She was crying, she realized dimly. Hot wetness tracked down the sides of her face into her hairline, indistinguishable from the sweat.
“You were right,” she coughed, the words hitching on a jag of pain. Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake. “She’s…s-she’s alive, Robs. She’s alive…”
“The girl’s stable,” someone said nearby. “EMT’s are with her - she’s asking about the reporter-,”
“There’s a baby,” Nancy forced out, still talking to the recorder, to Robin. She had to make her understand. Had to let her know. “S-so…so little…”
Her lungs spasmed. Coughs ripped up through her, wet and ragged. I’m not ready, her brain screamed. Time’s running out. Each cough felt like it tore more of her away. She could feel liquid in her chest now, sloshing where it shouldn’t be.
Hands bore down harder on her side. Someone pressed something over her mouth briefly, then pulled it away.
“Breathe,” a void said. Morales. “C’mon Wheeler. You keep breathing.”
“I love you,” she said.
The words were easier, somehow, even as everything else felt impossible. Three syllables that had worn a groove in her over the years. They found their way out now almost on their own.
“I love you, Robin,” she said. “I…l-love you. I love you…”
The space between the words stretched. Her chest didn’t seem to want to rise anymore. Heavy. It was too heavy.
“Stay with us,” Morales demanded, his voice forceful and angry. “Ambulance is right there - you hear that? That’s them. I’m going to chew your ass out about procedure at the hospital you little shit, okay - because you’re gonna hang on and stay with us. That’s an order, Wheeler!”
Her eyes fluttered. The siren’s wail grew louder, then softer, then louder, as if it couldn’t decide how close it was.
“Tell her,” Nancy whispered, lips barely moving, unsure who she was speaking to now - the detectives, the recorder, the empty air. “Tell her I…I tried. I…I had to-,”
Her tongue felt heavy. The taste of blood thickened, sticky and copper.
“I love you,” she said again, or thought he did. The sound barely left her throat. IT was more breath than voice, a shredded whisper.
“I love you…”
The last word frayed apart halfway through. Her chest spasmed once more, then…quieted, in a way that felt like a trapdoor swinging open under her. Like she was falling through the mindscape, flailing her limbs, scrambling for purchase without any way to find solid ground.
Somewhere far above her, voice spiked in pitch.
“Wheelere? Nancy! Hey! Hey-,”
“CPR - get the bag - Fuck! Come on-,”
The sirens wailed. The world tilted. Nancy’s gaze fixed on a point of sky beyond the station canopy - a rectangle of cloud-streaked blue.
Robs, she thought, with a flicker of a smile no one saw. I love you more, Robs.
Then the light narrowed to a pinprick, and everything went very, very still.
Sixteen days later, a detective who wouldn’t quite look Robin in the eye for long periods would hand her a small, unmarked USB drive on a threshold that felt too small for the pain it held.
The church smelled like old wood and flowers. Not the bright, alive kind they’d had in the backyard or at City Hall - these were heavy, hothouse blooms, their sweetness layered over candle wax and dust and the faint, persistent scene of hymnals handled by a thousand hands. She could have done without the church. Karen had insisted. Robin didn’t have any fight left. It didn’t matter. The monsters got them in the end regardless.
Robin stood just inside the double doors, her hand still on the cool brass handle, and tried to remember how to move.
People streamed around her in a soft, dark flow. Voices folded over each other in hushed murmurs. Somewhere toward the front, an organist tested a few chords that landed in Robin’s chest like dropped stones.
“You okay?” Steve murmured at her elbow.
It was a stupid question and also the only possible one.
Robin glanced at him. He’d put on a suit for the occasion, a real one, not his usual work suits. His hair had calmed down over the years, but a stubborn cowlick still stood up in the back, impossible to tame. His eyes were red. She wasn’t sure when he’d started crying - on the flight, in the rental car, the second he saw her standing in the doorway of their house and she’d folded into his arms with only a cracked sob.
Now he watched her like she was a piece of glass someone had balanced on the edge of a table. He didn’t realize she’d already shattered and all that was left of her were the dust and glittery shards. Irreversibly damaged beyond all repair.
“Yeah,” Robin lied, because anything else might crack the glass all over again. “I mean. No. But…yeah.”
He didn’t push. He just nudged her shoulder gently with his. “We’ll go slow,” he said. “We’ve got time.”
They didn’t, not really. The program Melissa had printed said the service would start in thirteen minutes. The organist was already sliding into something that sounded like a prelude to sadness.
But the world had already ended for Robin sixteen days ago. Schedules felt theoretical.
She stepped forward. The wedding suit moved with her, familiar and foreign all at once. The fabric had softened a little over the years, losing some of its crisp stiffness. It still sat on her shoulders like it had been cut for her, because it had. Tailored. It still framed the flower on her lapel, today a white rose.
Underneath, in the inner pocket, the USB pressed against her ribs, a small, unyielding square. Every time she breathed, she could feel it.
She focused on the sensory trivia because the big facts were too much to look at directly. The way the red runner down the aisle had a frayed edge in the middle. The faint clack of heels on tile. The way the stained glass above the altar threw fractured light over the front pews, splintering everything into shards of blue and gold.
At the end of the aisle, on a low platform, the coffin waited.
She saw it without letting herself see it. It was a shape, nothing more. Wood, polished to a shine. A spray of flowers draped over the top. A framed photo set beside it on an easel - Nancy at Forty-two, hair a little shorter than Robin liked, eyes direct and bright, the photo they’d used in half a dozen bylines.
She wanted to walk up the aisle and flip the frame down so she didn’t have to see that version of Nancy permanently smiling, unaware of what was coming.
She wanted to run until the suit split at the seams and her heart stopped so stubbornly trying to keep her alive.
Instead, she moved sideways, into the relative shelter of a pew halfway back. Melissa slid in on her other side as if they’d rehearsed it. Richard filled the spot next to his wife, knees pressed together, hands white-knuckled on his own program. His tie was crooked. Out of habit, Robin’s fingers itched to fix it. She didn’t.
On the opposite side of the aisle, the Wheeler row was already occupied.
Karen sat ramrod straight, hands folded over a neatly pressed black skirt. Her hair was pulled back in a low chignon, more gray than color at this point, precision-placed. Her eyes were swollen but dry in this moment, her gaze fixed on some point just above the altar candles.
Next to her, Ted had made the effort to appear, for once. His suit looked like it had been taken out of a closet where it had been waiting alongside a dozen excuses. He stared at the hymnbook in his lap, jaw tight.
Mike, taller than either of his parents now, sat at Karen’s other side. His hair was starting to thin. The lines at the corners of his mouth made him look older than he was. Beside him, Jane - El, still to Robin’s brain - rested a hand over his knee, thumb rubbing small circles.
Holly had turned into a woman while Robin wasn’t looking. She sat at the far end of the row, her niece and nephew sandwiched between her and Mike, a tissue crumpled in her fist, eyes red and curious. She looks so much like Nancy, Robin thought she might combust if she lingered too long.
They all looked up as Robin slid into her seat. For a heartbeat, the space between the two families hung taut with thirty years of history - Thanksgivings, fights, the long thaw of acceptance.
Karen met Robin’s eyes and, very slowly, nodded once.
Robin nodded back. Her throat felt tight enough to cut.
Beyond the Wheelers, the front rows had filled with other life chapters. Nancy’s colleagues from the paper sat in a cluster, notebooks tucked away for once, dark clothes cut in professional lines. A few of them had brought their families - small children swung their legs restlessly, sensing the weight in the room but not understanding it.
A row of uniformed officers and detectives sat together near the center. Robin recognized more faces than she wanted to. Morales was there, a fresh, neat bandage at his temple from some altercation last week. He looked older than she remembered, shoulders slumped in a way she’d never seen on him before. Regret.
She dragged her gaze further, toward the side aisle.
They’d made space there, not in the front, but not all the way in the back either.
Elena Morales - no relation to the detective, though the shared surname had made for a moment of confusion in the early coverage - sat in a borrowed wheelchair. The hospital bracelet still circled her wrist, the plastic white stark against the black of her dress. Her hair had been combed and braided by someone careful. It hung over her shoulder like a rope. She looked impossibly young.
In her arms, cradled against a dark shawl, the baby slept. Someone had found a tiny black dress too, a little cardigan over the top. A knitted hat covered the fine, dark fuzz of her hair. Her fist was curled near her mouth, pink and impossibly small.
There was a name pinned discreetly to the back of Elena’s chair, a compromise between privacy and the well-wishers insisting on knowing: ELENA MORALES & NANCY HOPE.
Elena’s parents flanked her chair, their faces lined with exhaustion and a kind of stunned gratitude. Her mother kept one hand on Elena’s shoulder, thumb moving idly, as if reassuring herself that she was solid.
Every so often, Elena’s eyes flicked toward Robin and then away, guilt and awe and something bone-deep an unnameable warring on her face.
Robin couldn’t look at her for more than a second at a time. Every time she tried, she saw two overlapping images - the girl from the missing poster, and the girl being whisked out of the ambulance and into the hospital, asking about her baby as they rushed her inside.
She looked down at her folded hands instead.
Steve slid in on her other side, on the aisle seat, effectively forming a human buffer between Robin and the rest of the church. Behind them, she could hear Max’s voice in a fierce whisper, wrangling Lucas and Erica into the pew.
“Sit. If you faint, I am not catching you, Sinclair,” Max muttered to her husband. Mercifully, the kids were back in Hawkins with Lucas’ parents. Robin wasn’t sure she’d have survived more nieces and nephews than the ones present for their aunt’s funeral.
“You’re the one who cries at dog food commercials,” Lucas whispered back.
“Shut up, both of you,” Erica hissed. “They’re starting.”
They hadn’t, quite. The minister - someone neutral, someone none of them had baggage with - stepped up to the podium and shuffled papers, giving people permission to keep weeping quietly for another minute.
Robin’s gaze drifted up, to the framed photo by the coffin.
Nancy’s eyes laughed at her from it.
The suit’s collar suddenly felt too tight. She slid her thumb under the knot in her tie, tugged uselessly.
You clean up okay Mrs. Wheeler.
“Breathe,” Melissa whispered at her side, like she had in the kitchen when Robin had frozen in front of the coffee maker. Her hand folded over Robin’s where they sat clenched in her lap, warm and solid.
Robin inhaled.
The service began.
There were prayers. They slid past her, words worn smooth by centuries of repetition, catching only a few phrases that made her stomach knot - dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the brevity of life.
There were readings. Karen’s voice trembled slightly as she stood at the lectern and read a psalm Nancy had liked as a child. Mike stepped up afterwards with a passage from some novel Nancy had loved in college - he’d written a mini-eulogy into his introduction, about a sister who had once bossed him around mercilessly and then grown into someone he was proud to be mistaken for at airport gates, despite their gross disparity in height.
Robin listened, and also didn’t.
The words washed over her and pooled in stranger corners. Sometimes she found herself fixated on the way the minister’s hand trembled when he turned a page. Sometimes she drifted, caught in the undertow of her own head.
Under it all, the USB in her pocket was a weight. A metronome. At some point - Robin wasn’t sure when, exactly - the minister invited those who wanted to share memories to come forward.
Melissa went first.
She spoke about a girl who lit up like the sun whenever Robin looked at her - long before any of them had known the girls were dating. About late-night talks at the Buckley kitchen table when both girls had been - poorly - pretending they weren’t in love yet. About the way Nancy always seemed to know when someone in the room felt left out and how she’d quietly fold them in. Her voice broke once, when she said the words, “my daughter-in-law,” but she pushed through, chin lifted.
Jonathan went next, on behalf of the Byerses. He told a story about Nancy showing up at their - Jon and Will’s - doorstep in college with three suitcases, a determination to help them move, and a six-page checklist broken into color-coded sections. “She terrified my landlord into fixing the wiring in the whole building,” he said, a soft smile on his face. “I’ve never seen a man fold so fast. She was…she could be scary when she wanted to be. In all the right ways.”
There was a ripple of laughter through the crowd. Robin felt it like a ghost of warmth on her skin. She felt the bitter taste of it, swallowed on her tongue. A world without Nancy Wheeler was not a world where laughter existed, not freely.
Steve didn’t go up. She could feel the way his leg bounced beside hers, the way his fingers drummed silently on his own knee, and knew that if he tried, he might not make it through a sentence. Instead, when the minister looked their way with a gentle, tacit question, he shook his head minutely.
Robin didn’t go up either. Her words were all tangled, caught in the same net as the audio she hadn’t let herself listen to yet. If she opened her mouth now, she wasn’t sure she could keep anything in.
Morales did. He walked up to the lectern with the unsteady care of someone carrying something heavier than a speech.
“I’m not much for public speaking,” he said, clearing his throat. “Which is funny, because I’ve spent half my career giving statements I didn’t want to give.”
A quiet, knowing murmur. The city had seen him on the news more than once.
“I worked with Nancy, unofficially, on more cases than I can count,” he went on. “And I fought with her on most of them.” A small sad smile ghosted his face. “She was…relentless,” he said. “That’s the nice word. Pain in my ass is the other one.”
There was a low chuckle from the cluster of officers. Someone sniffled loudly.
“She has this way,” he said, looking briefly down at his hands, “of making you see what you were trying not to. The patterns you’d missed. The parts of the story that weren’t convenient. She never let go. Not when it mattered.”
He swallowed.
“The night she…” He paused. Took a breath. “The night she saved Ms. Morales and her baby, my team and I were on our way to the coordinates she’d uncovered. We were coming. She knew that.”
His eyes lifted, finding Robin in the pew. For a moment, it felt like there were only the two of them in the room. Robin felt the sharp sting of his every word sinking between each one of her ribs. She wondered when her body would finally give in and grant her peace from this unrelenting ache.
“She went in anyway,” Morales said quietly. “And because of that, there are two people alive today who wouldn’t be. It’s my job to be angry about the risk she took. And I am. But I’m also…proud. To have known her. To have watched her fight the way she did.”
He looked away, gaze snagging on the side aisle. “Ms. Morales wanted to say something,” he added. “She asked me to read this for her.”
He unfolded a smaller piece of paper. His hands shook. Robin felt every muscle, every fiber of her being clench and tense.
“Dear Ms. Wheeler’s family,” he read from the paper. “I don’t know how to thank you for who your wife, your daughter, your sister was. She came into a place where no one else came. She broke a lock that felt like it had always been there. She held my baby like she was made out of something holy. She told me we were going to be okay, and I believed her. I still don’t understand why she had to die for us to live. I don’t think I ever will. But I want you to know that we wake up every day because of her. My daughter will grow up knowing her name - sharing her name. So we never forget.”
His voice wavered on that last part. He cleared his throat.
“I am sorry for your pain,” he finished, “And I promise I will try to live in a way that honors what she did for us. Love, Elena.”
The church was quiet when he stepped down but for the watery sounds of tears and sniffles. Not the fragile kind of quiet, but something heavier, a shared holding-of-breath.
Robin stared at her own hands. Her nails dug crescents into her palms. Under her thumb, just visible through the fabric of her suit, a faint smear of dried blood marked the edge of the lapel where she’d pricked herself with the flower pin earlier.
You cleaned this suit after she died, a stray distant thought observed. You let Steve take it to the cleaners and pick it up and let him hang it back in the closet, like it was any other piece of clothing. And now you’re wearing it to lay her in the ground forever.
Her stomach flipped. She sucked in a breath sharply enough that Steve’s head snapped toward her.
“You want to step out?” He whispered. “We can step out.”
She shook her head, swallowing hard. “No,” she managed. Nancy would have never left her. Nancy would have been standing with the coffin, her hand resting on it from beginning to end, until it was no longer possible, grounding her until they laid her in the ground. Robin was weak. But she wouldn’t leave. “If I move right now, I’m going to run. And then they’ll have to send a search party.”
He half-smiled, eyes wet. “I’ll run with you,” he said quietly. “You know that, right? If you say the word, we are gone. They can mail us the paperwork.”
The image flashed, absurd and flickering - a younger version of herself and Nancy sprinting down City Hall steps, laughing breathless. We’ve been married for nine years, this is just paperwork.
Paperwork, she thought now, with a bitter twist. Nancy had always loved it. Contracts. Forms. Wills. Insurance. Details.
They had filled those out together once, two women in their thirties sitting at a cheap dining table, Robin cracking jokes about morbid hypotheticals while Nancy carefully spelled out their wishes. What happened with the house. Medical decisions. All those neat little lines making room for catastrophe.
They’d done it so they wouldn’t have to think about it. As if planning might keep it politely theoretical.
“Rob?” Melissa whispered.
She realized the minister was speaking again, something about committal, about moving to the graveside. People were rustling, standing, the way congregations had stood for centuries at the right lines.
Robin’s legs felt like they belonged to someone else when she pushed herself up.
The procession to the cemetery was short - the churchyard rolled out green and deceptively gentle around the back of the building. The air outside was cooler, a faint breeze plucking at the edges of Robin’s suit jacket, making the flower at her lapel tremble.
They gathered in a ragged semicircle around the open grave. Robin found herself at the front without quite registering how - some combination of being Nancy’s legal wife now, of instinct, of everyone else stepping behind her.
The coffin sat on the lowering device, a grotesque parody of a stage. The spray of flowers on top had shifted in the breeze, a few petals fallen onto the polished wood.
The minister said more words. Robin only heard bits - earth, sky, return, rest. At some point, someone pressed a handful of rose petals into her palm. They felt damp and insubstantial, like excuses.
She stepped forward when everyone else did.
Up close, the coffin was worse. It was too small for the amount of life Nancy had held. The polished surface reflected a distorted version of Robin’s face, the suit, the white flower. For a second, it looked like there were two of her - one standing, one trapped in the dark, matching her.
Her hand shook when she opened it. The petals stuck to her skin for a second, reluctant to fall. Then they drifted down, soft and soundless, onto the wood.
“I was supposed to grow old with you,” she whispered, words barely moving her lips. “That was the deal.”
The USB pressed against her ribs, radioactive plastic and promise. You never got to hear her last words, she imagined the world would say, as if that were the tragedy and not that Nancy had said her last words. Breathed her last breaths.
Robin knew better. She was the one who had them in her pocket, waiting. She was the one holding the sharpest blade of all and choosing, for now, not to pick it up and ram it through her heart.
“Ms. Buckley?” a hesitant voice spoke her name…or half of it at least.
Robin turned.
Elena sat there, hospital-pale, dark eyes too old for sixteen. Both her hands rested on the wheelchair armrests now. Nancy Hope had been transferred into her grandmother’s arms for the walk outside. The baby slept, cheek pillowed on a soft shoulder.
Up close, the resemblance between them - between Elena and the girl from the container, between Nancy Hope and a photo of Nancy at six months old that Karent kept on her mantel - was startling considering no relation between them. It wasn’t the physical, it was the essence, perhaps. Robin’s breath caught.
“Can I-,” Elena swallowed. Her fingers flexed, gripping the armrests tight, as if she were fighting the urge to stand up and fling herself at Robin. “I just want to say…I’m sorry. For…for everything. I know it’s my fault she was there and if I hadn’t-,”
“It’s not,” Robin said, sharper than she meant to. The words came out like they’d been waiting behind her teeth.
Elena flinched.
Robin forced herself to soften her tone. “It’s not your fault,” she repeated. “It’s theirs. The men who took you. The people who looked the other way. The system that let it get that far. Not yours. Nancy…” She swallowed, tried to steady her voice. “Nancy would haunt me if I let you think otherwise.”
Elena’s eyes filled. “She saved us,” she whispered. “Me and…and her,” she nodded toward the baby. “I don’t know how to live with that. That she…she died so we could be here.”
“Me either,” Robin said honestly.
They stood (and sat) in the soft, cold sunlight for a moment, the grave between them and everything else.
“We named her, my baby, we named her after her,” Elena said, as if Robin hadn’t heard Morales read the letter. “Nancy Hope.”
Robin’s gaze slid to the baby. Tiny lashes, tiny nose. Impossibly small. A little knitted hat with a crooked pom-pom.
“She’ll know,” Elena said. “My little girl. I’ll tell her about Nancy. About what she did. About who she was. I’ll make sure…you’re not the only one who remembers.”
The idea that there would be strangers in the world who knew Nancy’s laugh, her stubbornness, her way of rolling her eyes when she loved you - that it would ripple outward into lives Robin would never see - hit her like a fresh wave. Tears welled in her eyes. It almost felt more natural to live with the constant blurred vision, the burn in the bridge of her nose. A small, constant reminder of the all encompassing agony that lived permanently in her chest now, where her soul used to reside.
“Thank you,” she said, because anything else felt too small. “For being here.”
Elena nodded. Her hands twisted the fabric of her dress. “I didn’t know if I should come,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to…make it worse. For you.”
Robin almost laughed. The sound stuck in her throat.
“It’s all worse,” she said, gently. “You being here…it’s a reminder of why she went in. Of who she was. That’s…something. I don’t know what yet. But something.”
Behind them, the minister’s voice rose again, inviting people to take handfuls of earth if they wished. People began to move, murmurs swelling. Melissa’s hand appeared on Robin’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze. Steve hovered just behind, a solid presence in her periphery.
“I should…” Elena gestured weakly back toward her parents. “They…they want to go. The baby…”
“Go,” Robin said. “Take care of her.”
Elena hesitated, then leaned forward slightly in the chair. “She loved you,” she said quietly. “Ms. Wheeler. She wanted them to call you, I…I heard her trying to talk to you. She loved you so much,” Elena’s eyes watered.
Robin’s hand went to her chest reflexively, pressing over the USB and her heart at the same time.
“Yeah,” She breathed, her voice barely audible. I love you more, Robs. “I know.”
Elena nodded once, sharply, and let her parents wheel her away. The mourners trickled off in slow currents toward the reception hall, toward cars, toward whatever came next in lives that still had forward momentum.
Robin stayed by the grave until the light shifted, until the air grew colder and the groundskeepers moved quietly around the edges, waiting. Until her knees ached half as much as her heart did.
Eventually, Steve stepped up beside her, hands in his pockets.
“If you stay here any longer, your mom is going to climb into that hole just to drag you out,” he said gently.
Robin huffed a breath that, for the briefest second, almost sounded like a laugh but, in reality, was a strangled sob. “She’d do it, too,” she said, flatly. How did they expect her to move? How did they expect her to walk away from what was left of her wife? How, how, how. And why. And what was the point?
“Absolutely,” Steve agreed. “Terrifying woman. Love her.”
Robin looked down at the polished wood one last time. “Okay,” she said, to Nancy, to herself, to the hole in the ground as if she had any say in the matter. “Okay.”
She turned away. The suit moved with her as she walked back toward the cars. The flower at her lapel brushed her jaw. The USB sat warm against her ribs.
They would go home. People would sit in their living room and tell stories and eat food that tasted like cardboard, because grief numbed taste buds as efficiently as anything.
Eventually, the house would empty. The quiet would fall. Eventually, Robin would stand in front of the computer, fingers hovering over the USB port, and decide that no amount of waiting would make pressing play hurt less.
But for now, she walked, each step heavy and inevitable, the wedding suit a dark, perfect echo of every promise they’d ever made.
They had said they would grow old together.
She was still here.
That, she knew, was going to be the hardest promise to keep.
The house felt wrong without the crowd. It had also felt wrong with them.
It had taken hours to get everyone out. People had meant well. They always did. They brought casseroles and deli trays and cookies in plastic clamshells, as if grief could be padded with carbs. They told stories in clumps in the living room, cupping mugs of coffee like talismans. They touched Robin’s arm every time they passed her, said things like if you need anything and she was so proud of you, and she nodded because she’d forgotten how to say other words. Or any words.
Now it was just her.
The dishes were stacked neatly on the kitchen counter, rinsed but not washed. The couch had an indent where Steve had sat for most of the afternoon, a quiet, solid presence at her side. The coffee table was a battlefield of abandoned paper plates and crumpled napkins, a half-finished glass of wine leaving a ring.
The sun had been up when the service started. It was gone now. The windows were dark, reflecting the inside of the house back at her like a stage set.
Robin stood into the middle of the living room and listened to the quiet.
It wasn’t actually quiet. The refrigerator hummed faintly. The radiator ticked. Somewhere in the walls, old pipes muttered. A car passed outside, tires rolling along asphalt.
But there was a certain absence under it all, a frequency that should have been Nancy - Nancy shuffling papers at the table, Nancy muttering at the evening news, Nancy humming under her breath as she moved through the kitchen - that simply wasn’t there. Would never be there again. An eternity of silence.
The suit had started to itch hours ago. The shirt collar felt like it was made of sandpaper. At some point, she’d taken off the jacket and draped it over the back of one of the dining chairs. The white shirt and black slacks looked like a bat costume without it.
She didn’t take them off. It felt wrong to change. Like she might step out of them and discover there was nothing under her skin.
The USB in her inner pocket had moved with the jacket. It sat there now, small and incongruous against the worn wood of the chair. She could see its outline through the fabric, a dark, stubborn rectangle.
She turned away from it and went into the kitchen. Habit had her fill the kettle and set it on the stove. Habit had her reach for the teabags. Halfway through tearing one open, she stopped and stared at her own hands.
She didn’t want tea.
She didn’t want food. The sandwiches, the salads, the carefully labeled items meant to make sure Robin fed herself still lined up on the counter like offerings to a god that wasn’t home. As if Robin cared whether she ever ate again, whether she survived this. Robin knew she wouldn’t survive this. She didn’t want to survive it.
What she wanted - at least in the moment…absurdly, viscerally - was noise. Something to drown out the shape of the silence.
Her hand moved almost of its own accord, reaching for the little kitchen radio sitting by the window. The same beat-up thing they’d had since the late nineties, paint splattered along one edge from some long-ago DIY project.
She flicked it on.
Static hissed at her for a moment, then resolved into a song mid-verse. A man’s voice, worn and aching, sang about promises. About a kitchen, about laughter that used to live in these spaces, about plans to grow old together that had been spoken like they were as certain as gravity.
Robin froze.
She knew the song. Of course she did. Nancy had found it first, playing it off her laptop one evening a while back, cheeks streaked with tears she’d wiped away quickly when Robin came in.
“It’s manipulative,” Nancy had said gruffly, sniffling. “It’s engineered to make people cry. I hate it.”
She’d played it three more times that week.
Now, the chorus rose, the line about saying you’d grow old together cresting over the tiny kitchen like a wave.
Robin reached for the dial, intending to turn it off.
Her hand missed.
Instead, she leaned back against the edge of the counter and let the song hit her like a truck.
The lyrics traced a story that looked too much like hers - the empty spaces, the unmade plans, the way a single person’s absence could tear a hole in the timeline. The melody dragged its feet in all the places her grief had been pacing for sixteen days.
Tears pricked at her eyes so fast it felt like a reflex.
“Of course,” she whispered, to no one. “Of course it’s this one.”
The chorus swelled again. You said you’d grow old with me - not in words she’d ever write down, but in every note.
Her chest hurt.
She pushed herself away from the counter with more force than strictly necessary, the radio still playing, and walked back into the dining room. The jacket looked up at her from the chair, innocuous.
The USB bulged faintly against the inside of the pocket.
For sixteen days, Robin had nothing but silence, the absence of the only thing in this universe that held her together, that anchored her to this world, the only soul who mattered more than the oxygen her body insisted she continued breathing.
“The recorder your wife had that night is part of the evidence file for the case, so we can’t release it yet. But we…we were able to make you a copy of the audio.”
She’s slipped it into her pocket without thinking, fingers going numb around it. At the church, at the graveside, through the reception, it sat there. A tiny, silent bomb.
She’d told herself she wasn’t going to listen. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She already knew what happened. She’d pieced it together from reports, from Morales’ exhausted admissions, from the way Elena had said Nancy was trying to talk to her.
She was gone. Nothing would bring her back. Nothing would make it right. Nothing would ever be right again. Nothing mattered. Nothing would ever matter again. What good would it do to hear it in her own voice?
Now, though, with the song bleeding through the doorway - we were supposed to be old together, I was supposed to be gray with you in every line - the idea of not knowing felt suddenly unbearable.
If Nancy had spent her last moments talking to her, even if it was into a recorder, what did it mean to refuse to listen?
“You really want to do this?” She asked the empty room.
No one answered. The kettle in the kitchen began to whistle, shrill and ignored, underscoring the singer’s voice.
She crossed to the chair, fingers sinking into the familiar fabric of the jacket as she lifted it. The USB thunked lightly against the buttons from inside the inner pocket. She slipped her hand in and closed her fingers around it.
For a moment, she just stood there, clutching it like a talisman. The edges dug into her palm, grounding and unreal at once.
“Okay,” she said, to the suit, to the house, to the beat of her own frantic heart. “Okay. Fine.”
Her laptop sat on the dining table where she’d left it last week, still half-buried under condolence cards and a plate someone had insisted on leaving behind. She cleared a space with one hand, dragging envelopes and napkins aside, and flipped the computer open.
The screen woke reluctantly, casting bluish light over her face. Her reflection floated faintly in it - suit rumpled now, tie slightly askew, eyes swollen.
She plugged the USB in.
The system recognized it with a small, obscene chime. A window popped up, showing a single audio file with a generic timestamp for a name.
She hovered the cursor over it.
Her finger trembled.
In the kitchen, she slid into its bridge, the singer’s voice cracking on a line about standing alone in a house full of memory.
Robin clicked.
For a second, there was nothing. Just a hiss, like a breath. Then Nancy’s voice filled the little speakers.
“Wheeler, Nancy,” she heard, steady and professional, layered over a faint background hum. “On-site at…” The sound of her rattling off the street names and coordinates. “Following up on a lead regarding missing juvenile, Elena Morales.”
Robin’s heart lurched.
She’d hear this cadence a thousand times in their life together - Nancy talking into recorders, into mics, into phones, mapping out stories, facts, observations. She’d always had a particular crispness when she was working, a sharp edge on purpose.
Hearing it now, knowing where it was leading, felt like watching a home video of someone walking blindly toward a cliff.
The audio crackled faintly as the environment changed. A door’s metallic scrape. The echo of footsteps on concrete.
“Nancy Buckley-Wheeler. You are going to owe Robin so many apologies for this…She’s going to murder you. ”
Robin’s breath hitched.
“Yeah,” she whispered hoarsely. “Yeah. I am.”
She gripped the edge of the table so hard her knuckles went white.
On the recording, Nancy called out Elena’s name. Elena’s answering sob came through muffled, distorted by the container walls and the recorder’s position against Nancy’s chest. The baby’s cry - thin, reedy, furious at the world - cut through the tinny speakers and went straight into Robin’s bones.
Her vision wavered. She blinked, but the blur didn’t go away.
The sounds on the file tumbled over each other: the clang of the tire iron on the padlock, Nancy’s breath getting shorter as she swung and cursed, the scraped of the container door, the rush of air, Elena’s broken, ‘are you real?’, Nancy’s voice going deceptively calm as she said:
“We have to move. Right now.”
Each phrase was familiar now, in a way that made Robin’s stomach twist. She’d heard them secondhand, from reports, from clipped descriptions. She’d filled in the blanks in her head, because she knew how Nancy talked when she was scared but determined. Hearing the actual thing was like having her head and heart ripped open.
Gunshots cracked across the waveform. Even compressed, even flattened, they were sharp enough to make her flinch away from the speakers.
“Run!” Nancy’s voice shouted, distorted by the recorder's proximity. “Keep going. Door. Now!”
There was the slam of the warehouse door, the slam of the car door, the engine’s roaring protest. The chaos overlapping sounds - Elena sobbing, the baby screaming, tires squealing, metal groaning, more gunshots, glass shattering - collapsed into a relative quiet as the car sped away.
Robin realized she’d stopped breathing.
She made herself inhale, slow and shaky.
On the audio, the noise shifted again - the hiss of the car’s engine dying, the distant jangle of the gas station’s door chime, voices rising in confused alarm as Elena ran inside. Nancy’s quiet, self-evaluation No…no, no, no - her palpable fear. Then the frantic staccato of footsteps, the rustle of clothes as people bent over Nancy, the barked commands of Morales and his team.
“Wheeler? Jesus Christ-,”
Robin heard the thud of Nancy’s body hitting the asphalt, the involuntary cry of pain she couldn’t swallow down. The detectives’ muttered curses. The wet sound of fabric being pressed hard against flesh.
She pressed a hand to her own side, as if she could stop the bleeding through the audio file, across space and time.
Then Nancy’s voice - smaller now, thinner, but still hers, laced with fear, desperation.
“Call Robin. Please - c-call…call Robs-,”
“We will,” Morales said. “We will. As soon as we’ve got you stabilized-,”
There was a pause. A shift in the sound quality, like the recorder had been jostled closer to her mouth.
When Nancy spoke again, her words came in ragged bursts, threaded with wet, shuddering breaths.
“Robin,” she whispered. “Hey. H-Hey, Robs…can you hear me?”
Robin’s throat closed.
Her hand flew to her mouth, as if she could answer and have it somehow travel back through time.
“I’m here,” she choked. I’m here, Nance
The recording didn’t care. Time was a one-way street. Nancy kept going, unaware that her voice was reaching a future where Robin stood in their dining room in the suit they’d once joked about and tried not to collapse into oblivion.
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said. “I’m so…I'm so s-sory, baby. I…I broke our rules.”
Her words were punctuated by coughs that sounded wrong, thick. Each one tore through the audio and through Robin in tandem, shredding every last remaining piece of her soul into tatters.
“You were right,” Nancy gasped. “She’s…she’s alive, Robs. She’s alive…”
In the kitchen, the radio bled into other songs, background murmurs Robin couldn’t place. Notes that poked at the back of her brain while she struggled to breathe.
“There’s a baby,” Nancy added, softer now. “S-so…so little…”
The sounds of the scene swelled around her - shoutings, sirens wailing, someone yelling for more gauze, for anything. It all fell away when Nancy said the next words.
“I love you…I love you, Robin…” she said.
Robin swallowed a sob so hard it burned.
On the file, Nancy kept going, the phrase slipping out again and again like a mantra, like a rope she was trying to throw forward across time.
“I…l-love you. I love you…”
Robin’s vision blurred completely. Tears spilled over, hot tracks down her cheeks. They dripped onto the laptops’ trackpad, onto the wood of the table.
“Tell her…Tell her I…I tried. I…I had to-,”
“I love you too,” she whispered hoarsely, the words shaking. “I love you, Nance, I love you, I love you-,”
She wasn’t sure when she sank into the chair. One moment she was standing, leaning over the table. The next she was sitting, shoulders hunched, one hand clamped over her mouth like she could keep the sound of her own keening inside.
“I love you…” Nancy whispered. “...I love you…”
On the recording, the last “I love you” barely registered as a sound. It was more breath than anything, a tattered syllable that the detectives and medics on the scene might not have caught. Nancy’s last breaths.
The recorder did.
It captured the whisper, the hitch, the way the word fell apart at the edges.
Then there was a burst of motion - voices shouting, orders being barked, the indistinct chaos of CPR starting. The siren’s wail peaked, then faded as the ambulance doors slammed.
The file went on for a while after that - muffled movement, the occasional scrape of equipment, the accidental capture of the doctor officially signing off on Nancy’s time of death. The recorder was just a device. It didn’t know when the important part had ended.
Robin did.
Her finger hovered over the trackpad.
She pressed pause.
The sudden absence of Nancy’s voice was like having all the air sucked out of the room.
Silence settled over the house.
Robin sat in it, shaking. Her cheeks were wet, her nose running. She didn’t bother to wipe any of it away. Her hand stayed clamped over her mouth, as if she was afraid of what would come out if she let go.
Nancy had died sixteen days ago.
Robin had been told, in flat tones of procedure and aftermath. She’d seen the body at the hospital, gray under too-bright lights. She’d signed forms with hands that didn’t feel like they belonged to her.
She’d known, in the way you know a fact that lives in your head but refused to sink into your bones.
Hearing her like that - alive, afraid, still trying to breathe as the world cut into her - made it real in a way nothing else had.
These were her last words. Not some neatly scripted bedside speech in a movie. Not a tidy moral. Just apologies she didn’t owe, reassurances about a girl and a baby, and I love you thrown over and over toward a wife she had already kissed for the last time that morning, a wife who she would never see again.
Robin let her hand fall away from her mouth. Her lungs stuttered, then dragged in a huge, shuddering breath that turned into a sob halfway through. It ripped out of her like something breaking free.
She folded in on herself, sinking to the floor, arms wrapping around her middle as if she could hold herself together by sheer pressure.
“I love you too,” she gasped, over and over, a cracked chorus to Nancy’s recorded one. “I love you too, I love you, I love you-,”
The laptop screen dimmed slightly, a quiet system reminder that the world still measured time in minutes and seconds.
On the table, next to the trackpad, a single tear had fallen onto the program from the funeral, smudging Nancy’s printed name.
After a while - she had no idea how long - Robin’s sobs softened into ragged hiccups. Her shoulders ached. Her throat burned. Her head throbbed dully.
The USB sat in its port, ridiculous and small.
She stared at it through the blur.
She could take it out. Destroy it. Drop it into a glass of water, snap it in half, throw it into the river. No one had to hear this but her. No one had to know that Nancy had spent her last breath saying I love you into the empty air in the hopes that it might get to Robin someday.
But the thought of erasing Nancy’s voice from the world, even if it was only this tiny, brutal sliver of it, made her stomach twist violently.
She reached for it and closed the laptop gently instead.
The room seemed too big with the screen dark.
The radio in the kitchen, forgotten, clicked softly as the station shifted into some DJ’s voice talking about traffic and weather, cheerful and oblivious.
Robin dragged herself to her feet, pulling and pushing between the chair and the table. Her legs felt unsteady, like she’d run a great distance without moving. She picked up the jacket and slipped it back on, needing the weight of it across her shoulder, the anchor of the flower against her chest.
Her hand went to her inner pocket, pressing fingers into her heart, since the USB was plugged into the laptop and no longer in the pocket. And then, lower, to the place where Nancy’s last words seemed to have etched themselves into her ribs.
“You said we’d grow old together,” she whispered, the line of the song and the promise they’d made under backyard lights uncurling inside her like barbed wire. “You said-,”
Her voice broke.
In the doorway to the hall, she stopped and looked back once.
The dining table. The closed laptop. The little USB. The scattered funeral programs and plates. Evidence of a life that had contained both joy and this.
Robin didn’t know how she was supposed to keep going. How you were meant to stand up after this and do things like taxes and lesson plans or laundry. How you were supposed to keep breathing when the person whose breath had been synced to yours for half your life had just…stopped.
All she knew, in that moment, was this: Nancy had walked into a nightmare and torn it open so a girl and a baby could step out into the light. Two people were alive who wouldn’t have been,
Somewhere across town, a tiny girl named Nancy Hope was sleeping in a borrowed crib, heartbeat steady under her palm-sized ribcage.
Nancy had thrown her last, “I love you” forward in time like a rope.
Robin closed her eyes.
“I heard you,” she whispered, to the empty house. “I hear you.”
It didn’t fix anything. Nothing could fix this.
But it sat there, next to the ache, something sharp and bright and unbearably precious…the knowledge that at the end, when everything else fell away, the thing Nancy had reached for - through fear, through pain, through blood in her lungs - had been her.
Robin turned off the stove. She flicked off the radio, turned off the kitchen light on her way to the stairs.
The radio’s tiny red dot glowed for a second longer, then winked out, leaving the house in darkness.