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She disappears one month in, almost to the day.
In a way, really, Frank had seen it coming, foreseen something slipping in their tenuous balancing act of new parenthood and work and school and the shitstorm du jour involving Annalise. He’d thought they were making it work well enough, thought he was keeping her steady. He’d thought, at least, that they were scraping by; he hadn’t been expecting them to be some cliché, picture-perfect little nuclear family right from the start – or, well, ever.
He notices things about her, as the weeks tick by. Little things anyone else might miss; small ticks or flashes of emptiness in her eyes, almost like some form of disassociation every time she holds Christopher. Not happiness. Not even close. She isn’t happy, hasn’t been happy for so long; he’d be daft to fool himself into thinking she is, that having a baby is some sort of panacea that will make everything perfect and easy and idyllic from here on out. It isn’t.
It’s proved to be the opposite for her, really. And he can feel Laurel drifting like a ship slipping its moorings, further and further, and he doesn’t know how to reel her back to the shore, how to reach her. Most days he barely has time to breathe; they’re both swamped. They’re both hardly sleeping, too, Laurel especially; up one half of the night with a screaming infant and the other half studying.
There’s no big blow-up. No tearful fight full of theatrics whereafter she storms out. It’s a series of little things, little things which coalesce and snowball into something larger and far more sinister and ten times more dangerous – until finally, one day, she just disappears.
~
He works from home half the week, now. It reduces his overall effectiveness, and Annalise doesn’t particularly like it, but she acknowledges the necessity of it. He can’t exactly carry out B&E’s to plant evidence with a baby strapped to his chest, after all.
Well. He probably could make it work if he had to. But it wouldn’t be preferable, and that’s neither here nor there.
She finishes class at four; usually, she’s home by four-thirty, but Frank doesn’t bat an eye when five ticks by, just buries himself in paperwork and keeps the baby monitor close by his side, already falling into the rhythm of stay-at-home/working fatherhood. Six comes, still sans Laurel, but he resists the urge to text, to hover; they’re co-parenting, sure, but he’s not parenting her and he’s not her boyfriend, not someone who gets to check in on her, and he knows her well enough to know that she might bristle if he did.
Seven, though. By seven he starts to worry. At seven, he starts to call.
Her phone. He tries at least a dozen times, finds himself greeted by her eerily chipper voicemail message each one, and he doesn’t bother leaving messages, doesn’t want to waste time when he senses something is wrong here, very wrong. Annalise, next. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t with her, and he’s not sure why she would be; at best, their relationship has always been adversarial, evolving gradually into something along the lines of mutual respect. Connor and Oliver next, and neither of them know where she is. The next most likely candidate is Pratt, he figures, and so he presses her name in his contact list and holds the phone up to his ear, holding his breath despite himself, worry prickling beneath his skin like half-formed gooseflesh.
He wonders if this is how she’d felt when he’d left her; no note, no goodbye. No nothing.
There’s no word for it. Only helpless.
She picks up on the third ring, and, oddly enough, doesn’t sound confused as to why he’s calling. “Hello?”
“Hey,” he greets, voice strained. The balance of his world feels off without Laurel in it, everything inside out and upside down and nightmarishly surreal. “Hey, Pratt, you, uh… you seen Laurel recently? She shoulda been home hours ago, I-” His voice catches, betraying his panic. He supposes there’s no real reason to conceal it. “You know where she is?”
A pause. It’s longer than it should be, on her end, and it sounds almost as if she’s standing suddenly, hurrying into the next room because she can’t be heard answering him wherever she is. When she speaks, finally, her voice is hushed.
“She’s at my place. She just showed up out of nowhere. I… she told me not to tell you if you asked.”
He scowls, equal parts relieved and perplexed. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know. She’s not herself. She came over, said she needs to get away, that she’s not sleeping, that she can’t do this. Be a mom. I’ve never seen her like this, I-” Michaela cuts herself off, exhaling. “Look, just – I know it’s a lot to ask, but don’t come over. She needs space. She kept… talking about how she can’t breathe in that apartment anymore. I don’t know.” A pause. “I was premed. I know the symptoms of postpartum. I don’t think she’s okay, Frank.”
Something swells between his ribs, that useless muscled mass of a heart giving out inside him, cold and heavy and bloodless all at once. He’d known, deep down. Seen the signs. He hadn’t ignored them; he’d tried to get her to talk, but more and more each day she’d withdrawn – and now, finally, she’s gone.
Not gone, he reminds himself. Not gone gone. She’s still within the city limits. But she might as well be in another hemisphere, in another universe for all the luck he’s had trying to reach her.
A cry, in the next room. Sharp, insistent. Cutting through the air. The baby.
He heaves a sigh, lowers himself numbly onto the couch. “I… Fine, I won’t come over. I’ll let her be. But you gotta make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid, go anywhere else, okay?”
“I won’t,” Michaela promises, and he’s never particularly liked Pratt very much, but she seems willing to work with him on this. She seems to know he needs her for this. “I promise.” She pauses, seems to hear the screaming in the background, because she presses, “Are… you gonna be okay?”
No. Most likely not. Most certainly not. But he needs to be, at least for now, and so he swallows the ball of lead in his throat, makes himself nod mechanically.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine. Chris will be too. Tell her that.” He clenches his jaw, grinds his molars in a way he’s certain will leave him with one motherfucker of a headache in the not-so-distant future. “I know you can’t say it came from me. Just let her know that.”
“I will.”
Click. The line goes dead. It feels, in a way, like the severing of his last connection with Laurel, like cutting off his lifeline, cutting off the circulation in his body until he’s lightheaded and weak and as useless as he is helpless. Somehow he makes himself rise from the couch and pad his way into the bedroom anyway, where they’d erected the crib beside her bed, together. He remembers that day, remembers trying so desperately to inject a bit of normalcy into what was an otherwise turbulent and miserable pregnancy.
That day, for once, he’d felt like he’d succeeded, and she’d smiled and stood around and hadn’t really helped him at all, but she’d smiled, honest to God smiled while watching him try and fail to follow the shitty picture-only Ikea instructions, and that was all he’d needed. That was all that’d mattered: that smile.
He takes the baby into his arms with that firmly gentle touch he still finds himself perfecting day by day, holding him close. He’s had to learn over time not to be too tentative, too cautious, had to learn to be confident enough to support him – when most of the time he feels confident about precisely zero percent of this. Some days he still feels vaguely out of place; guilty, in a way, that he should be here when Wes isn’t, like somehow solely by virtue of being here he’s trying to take his place, erase him from existence, though he knows he isn’t. But he’s easing himself into it. He’s making it work. He’s never had any particularly strong opinions about kids, but he’s of the opinion Christopher is one hell of an awesome one, and the longer he’s around him, the more naturally it comes to Frank, like a language he’s slowly coming to understand.
It’s never come in a similar way to Laurel. It doesn’t come naturally to her at all; in fact, she seems decidedly unnatural at it, troubled by the ease with which fatherhood comes to him when it isn’t even really fatherhood – at least not in the technical sense, although he’s never been one to get hung up on technicalities.
“Hey,” he soothes, cooing in Christopher’s ear, cradling his head, soft as a broiled egg and so fragile, all of him so fragile, all of him so Laurel. “Hey, hey, you’re good, buddy. I’m here. I got you.”
He loves him. He can’t pinpoint the exact moment it’d happened, and perhaps there wasn’t one. From the moment he first saw him on the sonogram, when Laurel had invited him to go with her so she wouldn’t be alone and he’d held her hand and the world itself had seemed to tilt on its axis and start rotating in the opposite direction. The moment he’d first felt him kick, like a tiny earthquake beneath his palm, changing everything and nothing. The moment he’d been the second pair of arms to hold him in the hospital, after Laurel had insisted, and he’d felt the sheer physical reality of him for the first time, how jarring it was.
He isn’t his son. He doesn’t ever forget that, and yet sometimes it feels like he does, in a way, in the sense that the fact simply doesn’t seem important now, after everything they’d been through. Somehow, perhaps stupidly, he’d assumed there’d be an inevitable disconnect between him and Chris, a missing blood bond, that perhaps he’d never be able to love him fully, totally, hopelessly – but there isn’t. There never has been. He loves him because he loves Laurel. Because how could he not love any and every piece of Laurel.
And she isn’t here. She’s gone. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if she never comes back. He may not be his son but he’d never dream of leaving him, giving him up to the same system that’d chewed up and spit out his father. He’d rather die.
He holds him close, squeezes him as tight as he dares. Breathes him in and holds him in his lungs. He smells like Laurel, in a way he can’t describe.
She’s here with him, still. Even if she’s not.
The baby is inconsolable, inexplicably – or perhaps explicably. He doesn’t need to feed, doesn’t need to be changed, and still he’s hysterical, carrying on for what must be ages until he’s hiccupping and hoarse. Maybe he senses the emptiness, the hole in the world that feels damn near ready to swallow Frank up, swallow them both up. He thinks he can tell that something is missing.
Something is missing. Not just something. Everything.
And to be perfectly fucking honest, Frank feels like crying right about now too.
“I know you miss her. I do too,” he mutters, sinking down into the rocking chair beneath the window where the moonlight gathers in silver pools, letting it wash over them. Somewhere, perhaps she’s looking at the same moon, and he clings to the thought with abnormal desperation. It’s all he has to cling to. “I miss her too, kid.”
~
She’s only gone two days. It might as well be two centuries.
He calls off work, and understanding isn’t an adjective he’d ever use to describe Annalise in even the loosest of senses, but she almost, almost sounds understanding. Bonnie stops by and brings him groceries, and frets over him until he convinces her to go home. He feels like he’s in some state of suspended animation, sitting and waiting for something to happen, for Laurel to return or for Pratt to call, tell him she’s gone, tell him she’s hurt herself, tell him she’s done worse. Perhaps thankfully, there are no major developments of that sort, and so he spends his days talking to Christopher, carrying on elaborate, animated, one-sided conversations that make him feel like he’s most definitely losing it, crazy-cat-lady style.
Quite possibly he never had it. Whatever it is.
Two days. Two nights. The longest of his life.
Finally, on the third, she returns.
He’s half dozing on the couch in the living room with Christopher sprawled out on his chest, drifting in and out of that grey, liminal state just between slumber and consciousness but making a concentrated effort to keep himself up, check on the baby now and then, on the off chance he’s positioned his head in a way that might inhibit his breathing. The creak of the front door is what rouses him, and he opens his eyes just in time to see Laurel step inside, clad in the clothes she was wearing the day she left, hanging back in the doorway, bathed in the soft white light of the afternoon.
At first he’s sure he’s dreaming. But he doesn’t have to pinch himself to know that he isn’t; the sudden, violent clenching of his chest at the sight of her suffices.
She’s tense, guarded. Afraid. She seems unsure whether or not he’s asleep at first, but when Frank opens his eyes fully and holds up a finger to his mouth to signal that Christopher is out, she finally bites her lip and approaches, sinking down beside the couch, footsteps as light as air. She seems to walk on air itself; to float, defy gravity altogether, untethered by any worldly force. He’s so relieved to see her it floods through his veins like morphine, but there’s a weariness about her that troubles him. A look in her eyes he’s never seen before.
“Hey,” she mouths, not wanting to disturb the baby, and he smiles, dazed, amazed.
He reaches out, beckoning for her to give him her hand, and Laurel hesitates, but eventually she does, giving it a squeeze, relaxing into his touch.
“Hey,” he mouths back, voice just a few decibels short of a whisper. He glances down at Christopher, who makes an odd, snuffling sound in his slumber. “Glad you’re back.”
Laurel doesn’t say anything. Laurel looks like she wants to break down and cry until she’s sick, really, but she holds herself together and instead gives him a watery smile, tiny and unsure and laced with guilt, withered like a dying rose. They need to talk, he knows.
But surely they can enjoy this moment, first.
There’s a distinct sense of wholeness that settles over him, at the sight of her. Completeness. He hesitates to think of them as a family, sometimes, but there’s no other word for this, for what they are.
“He been sleeping good?” she whispers, and Frank nods, something like pride knotting inside him.
“He’s good at everything. Gets that from you.”
Laurel wilts, all at once, and after a moment of silence, she sighs. “We need to talk.”
Frank grins, chin brushing the baby’s downy head. “Hate to wake ‘im.”
“I know. But… I don’t think this can wait.”
Frank nods and props himself up, ever so slightly, jostling the baby awake as gently as he can manage, and even then he can’t deny the stone that settles into his gut at the soft, displeased sound of surprise Christopher makes; he hates waking him more than anything, tearing him from his dreams. Really, he just wants to give him everything he wants every single day.
Add that to the list of fingers he’s wrapped around, he supposes.
He puts him down in the next room, and when he reemerges Laurel is standing where he left her, fidgeting and pacing awkwardly, as if in a stranger’s home, a home that’s no longer hers at all; a home she gave up the deed to the instant she ran for the hills. She doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping, if the dark circles under her bloodshot eyes are any indication, though he supposes his are comparatively no better; he’s always slept better with her beside him. She looks standoffish, like an animal backed into a corner assessing potential escape routes.
He wants to reach out to her. Hold her. But he has the sense that he needs to refrain, at least for now.
“I, um…” she speaks first, the half-formed words rushing forth in a burst, before she folds her arms and lowers her eyes, drifting off. “I’m sorry. Sorry I left. I didn’t go far. I was just at Michaela’s, I-”
“I know,” he interrupts gently, not angrily. He’s not angry with her. He’s never been angry with her before in his life. “She told me.”
Laurel blinks. “I told her not to.”
“Don’t be mad at her. I called. She knew how bad I was freakin’ out.”
Something seems to fracture, deep inside her, her breastbone splitting clean in half, all her other bones crumbling to bits with it until she’s all loose, limp sinew and muscle and tendons. Her shoulders slump; really, her whole body slumps, exhausted, defeated, so sad he wants to hold her close and kiss it all away, make it better somehow – though he knows he can’t. Postpartum, Michaela had said, and the word echoes around the insides of his skull like a scream. That’s not something he can fix.
He’d been blind to it. Perhaps willfully so.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, swallowing thickly. “You should’ve called CPS. Reported me for child abandonment.”
He takes a step closer to her, brow furrowed, voice low, even. “Why would I do that?”
“He’s not your responsibility. You didn’t have to stay with him, I-”
“Hey,” he says, more firmly this time. “We been over this a hundred times, Laurel. I wanna stay. I’d never leave him. You know that.”
Laurel seems bewildered. “You’re not… mad?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m just… glad you’re home.”
Home. Just as there’s no other word for what they are except family, there’s no other word for this place except home. And he’s always found the concepts of home and family to be cliché as hell, idealistic abstractions that exist only in fiction and are continually mangled and torn to bits in practice, but now, in this new, softer life he leads, he understands them. He knows they’re real.
Laurel looks jittery, on edge, almost like she’s had too much caffeine and her skin is vibrating, buzzing, trying to tear itself off her bones and go running once more. “You should be. You should… you should be mad at me. You should be yelling at me – w-what do I have to do to get you to yell at me?”
That’s one thing he’s never done: yelled at her. Even during their worst fights he’s never yelled. He isn’t somehow who does that, no matter how she provokes him, what she says to him. He looks at her now, and he feels no anger, though maybe he should, though maybe any sane human would. He feels only overwhelming relief.
“I’m not gonna yell at you.” He pauses, licks his lips. “But we need to talk, you-” He cuts himself off, taking a breath. “You left. I wasn’t sure you were ever comin’ back. And he needs you, Laurel, you can’t… you can’t just do that. I need you.”
A crooked, terrible smile makes its way onto her lips. She hugs her arms close to her chest. “He doesn’t need me. You’re better with him. You’re so good at it all, and-” She gives something of a laugh, though it’s humorless, sour. “I’m not. I don’t know how to do any of it.”
He melts. “Laurel-”
“And it’s not just that.” There’re tears in her voice, now, though they aren’t falling from her eyes; they’re stuck there stubbornly, gleaming like reflecting pools. “I don’t… I don’t love him the way you do. And he’s mine. I should. I just keep waiting for that moment. It didn’t happen the whole time I was pregnant. I thought… when he was born, it finally would. That I’d see him and hold him a-and everything would be perfect. But it didn’t. And by now I don’t think it ever will.” She lowers her eyes, seeming almost to shrink, cheeks burning with shame. “Sometimes I look at him and… it doesn’t even feel like he’s mine.”
“He-”
“And I already fucked up. Left him. I ran away like my mother.” She chokes out another strangled, half-laugh. “This was all a mistake. Having him. It was all… a terrible mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” he soothes, voice low. He takes a step toward her but doesn’t reach out, simply stands there, offering her the meager comfort of his presence, if nothing else. “He wasn’t a mistake. I know you know that.”
His words strike a chord, and Laurel gulps, shifting her weight from leg to leg, unable to stand still. She isn’t crying outright; her tears are silent, her pain silent, silent and restrained and bitten back like he’s gotten used to. She’s holding herself together, by some miracle.
It doesn’t matter that she left. None of it matters. All that matters is that she’s here, now.
“You’re right,” she murmurs, sagging under the weight of the words. “I didn’t mean that, I just…”
He holds out his hand to her, suddenly. “C’mere.”
Laurel blinks. “Huh?”
“C’mere,” he repeats, nodding back toward the bedroom. “Come see him with me.”
She stiffens. “Frank-”
“C’mon. I know he’s missed you.” He pauses, voice rasping deep in his throat. “Just lemme show you somethin’, okay?”
She hesitates a moment longer, but finally relents and slips her hand into his, letting him guide her into the next room, over to the crib. He scoops Chris up and passes him over to her without allowing her time to object, and she handles him a bit awkwardly; it still seems as if she’s never fully gotten the hang of it, just holding him, something every work of fiction and baby book has told her over and over a mother should be able to do instinctively, without so much as thinking about it. She’s convinced she’s terrible at this, he knows. Convinced she can’t do it.
She can. He knows she can. And maybe he’s dumb. Maybe he’s always been an idiot. Maybe he doesn’t know a lot of things, but he does know that.
He knows it as sure as he’s breathing.
They settle down onto the bed together, and Frank tucks himself in at her side, watching as she adjusts the baby in her arms, clad in a pastel blue onesie, still only half-awake and drowsy, but content, peering up at Laurel with wide-eyed wonder, the purest sort of adoration. She’s tense at first, but eases into it slowly, reacquainting herself with his diminutive fingers, the silk of his skin, his rosy lips, all of him so fresh and brand new and perfect. She coos to him gently, voice warm and sweet as honey, yet he can still sense her uncertainty; her fear, buried however deep it may be. She’s still scared, racked with guilt, steadfast in the belief that she’s already fucked up and done him some irreparable harm by leaving.
He needs her to know what he knows. He doesn’t think the right words exist to articulate it. But he tries anyway.
“See? There’s nothin’ you could ever do wrong in his eyes. He don’t see the bad. Only the good. You’re his whole universe,” he undertones, pressing a kiss to her shoulder, staring down into the baby’s face, all chubby, dimpled cheeks and tawny skin. “An’ I know that look. That’s the look of love, right there. I know… ‘cause I feel it too.” Laurel glances sideways at him, and he smiles, taking her hand. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”
She sniffs, glancing down at him mournfully. “He deserves better. Better than me. You both do.”
“There ain’t nobody better than you,” Frank chuckles, trying desperately to lighten the mood, to make her see. Make her understand. “You’re as good as it gets. You got both the men in your life totally smitten with you.”
The baby makes a sound as if to echo the sentiment, something gleeful, almost like a laugh, and that finally coaxes a smile out of Laurel, unspools the tension in her muscles. He knows the instant she sees it, the moment she knows. He can feel it.
He never knew he could love anyone as much as he loves her now.
“I never get it, y’know,” she states, suddenly, drawing him out of his reverie. She takes the baby’s hand in hers, playing idly with his fingers, unsure once more, fretful. “You always stay. You say you don’t care that he’s not yours. I still don’t get it. You love him, and… you never had to try. You just do.” Laurel swipes the tears off her cheeks hastily, as if he hasn’t already seen them. “Wes hated you. You know he did.”
“I don't care about that. He’s yours too,” he says, simply, lowly. “And whenever I’m with him, holdin’ him…” He drifts off, meeting her eyes. “I’m close to you.”
That’s his reason. It’s always been his reason: her. She’s his reason for this. She’s every single one of his reasons for everything.
Laurel looks at him in a way he’s never seen, right then. Her expression morphs from shock to softness, her body melting, eyes widening, lips parting as if to reply, but she seems to be speechless, caught off guard by the sincerity of his words, utterly pole-axed. Her whole demeanor changes at once, and finally she lowers her eyes, rubbing her lips together, something like shame rising up and sinking its claws into her once more.
“I talked to Michaela. She mentioned… postpartum. I know my mom had it.” She looks back to him, sucking in a breath, like the words are barbed on her tongue, drawing blood as she speaks them. Like she’s damning herself by saying this aloud, speaking it into existence. “I think I have it too.”
“We’ll get through it,” he declares, suddenly passionate, his hand anchored firmly in hers. “You ‘n me and him. It’s no match for all three of us. There’s nothin’ that could ever change the way I feel about you. And you love him. I know you do, even if you think you don’t.” He pauses, thinking for a moment, but he doesn’t search for the right words to say; he simply lets them come to him, flow in and out like water. “I knew all along you loved me. No matter what you said. What you did. I could see it. And I see it now too. So does he. He’s got your smarts. He knows.” He feels his throat tighten, inexplicably. He presses his fingers to her arm, gesturing to her. “I know you do too.”
He believes in her, in the goodness in her, in her strength, in every part of her; he believes with such unwavering certainty and he always has. She’s all he believes in, all he’s ever found worth believing in. His true north. His compass. He believes so steadfastly that it makes her perk up ever so slightly, right then; so steadfastly it almost, almost maybe makes her believe in herself, his confidence flowing into her as if through osmosis. It’s not much, maybe. But it’s a step forward.
Baby steps. He has a feeling they’ll be taking a lot of those, in both the literal and figurative senses. Once maybe the thought would’ve made him impatient, restless, yearning for some form of superficial, ultimately meaningless excitement, instant gratification. He feels no sense of restlessness now. No need for more. What more is there to life than this, than her, than her little mismatched family. More isn’t a fathomable concept.
He takes her hand, holds it tight. Clutches it in his as if to keep her from slipping away, dare the world and God and the Devil and the fates to try to take her from him, take either one of them. There’s no more that exists, anymore. Not for him.
There’s only this. She rests her head on his shoulder, and he holds her, burying his face into her hair. Only this. Only her.