Chapter Text
Perhaps this isn’t the best way to deal with grief.
That’s what goes through Penelope's head every time she wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, with someone she doesn’t entirely remember from the night before snoring beside her. She gets up, quickly and quietly dresses, tip-toeing quietly from the room, shoes in hand until she’s in the hall.
It’s nearly become ritual with how often it happens anymore.
She barely even enjoys it, she thinks, maybe, she should just stop, it’s doing nothing, it’s not numbing, it’s not making her feel better. Maybe, like her mother had said, in that insincere way she does when she wishes to come off as loving, she should put her head down, and focus on healing with her husband.
But that would require him caring, and that’s precisely why she’s been, to quote her mother “acting out”.
In her defense though, she thinks anyone who miscarries so late in the pregnancy that they have to induce labor, and then loses their father(no matter how unfatherly he may have been) two weeks later, has the right to act out.
Especially given that her husband, sweet wonderful Alfie who everyone tells her she is so lucky to have, had decided only three weeks after she lost their baby (her baby really, if she’s being honest), and a week after her father got so coked he choked(she’d bet on the liver cancer taking him, more dignified in her opinion, but her family never has been such a thing, Prudence demanding the pot for her correct bet in front of their horrified, mourning grandmother confirmed as much) that he needed to go to South America to study some penguin or another.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime Penny,” he’d said squeezing her hands, she thought it was meant to be comforting, but it felt like a way to shackle her to him, “I know this is a shite time, butI applied for the grant ages ago, before we’d even started trying for the baby,” he didn’t notice her flinch, or he didn’t care, it’s always hard to know which one with him, “and I was going to pass it up, for the baby, but since that’s not in the cards anymore I think-”
He’d gone on for several more minutes, but gun to her head Penelope couldn’t tell you what all it was he said. While she was torn apart from grief, and guilt for not being able to do the one thing she was always expected to do, guilt from betting on her fathers demise(playing with fate, begging death to come and knock on their door), all he can think about is leaving. She guesses she agrees with him, because, eventually he’d kissed her on the head, and told her how happy he is that she understands.
Two weeks after that he’s gone, and it’s not until Eloise comes over threes days after that, bags of food in her arms(another new ritual, weekly El, or occasionally one of her sisters shows up and attempts to spend time with her, even when it’s just them sitting beside her whilst she’s near comatose) that she tells anyone what's happened. She’s not sure why she didn’t, she’s seen so many people in the two weeks between him dropping the news and him leaving, her mother, her therapist, an array of Bridgertons, her coworkers, and she had kept it to herself. It wasn’t intentional, but also, it wasn’t entirely unintentional. None of them really ask about Alfred, and really, how does one start such a topic? “The husband everyone thinks I’m so lucky to have finds my grief less important than the mating habits of the Humboldt penguin” isn’t exactly watercooler talk, or brunch conversation.
Eloise is fussing with take away(shes incredibly particular, while Penelope's plate can be a mess of food overlapping and mixing, El spends half her time making sure her plate is perfectly segmented in a way that keeps everything in its own zones) and complaining about Cressida's newest desire to completely redesign their bathroom when Penelope is unable to keep it in anymore.
“I swear it’s every two months she finds something new we have to change,” she was frowning at her plate as her noodles inch too close to her chicken, “First it was that the bedroom had ‘bad energy’ and needed to be entirely rearranged, and then I come home and my entire bloody kitchen has been gutted and put back together- I still haven’t found my melon baller, its been nearly a year. Does Alfred do this too, maybe it’s a blond thi-”
“Alfreds gone.”
Eloise dropped a spoonful of noodles directly over her chicken as she turned to look at Penelope, eyes big and mouth agape, as if she couldn’t truly believe she’d just heard what was said.
“What do you mean he’s gone. Like dead gone, and you’re making me deal with the body, or gone like, at his mothers and you’re upset because she’s still not apologized about the daffodil thing?”
“I think he’s in Peru?”
“You think? Why would he be in Peru? What the hell's going on Pen?”
It had been that that caused the whole thing to spill, about the grant, and how he’d decided since there wasn’t going to be a baby (despite the fact that there was a baby, she has their ashes in her closet), he didn’t need to be here, and that she had somehow ended up the supportive wife(and wasn’t she always?). The entire time Eloise frowned, the divot between her eyebrows becoming deeper the more Penelope explained, making her look more like Anthony than herself.
“I almost wish he was dead gone,” she’d said at the end, “Honestly Pen, what the fuck is wrong with him?”
“I think maybe he was supposed to be a penguin?”
Eloise didn’t laugh at her poor attempt at a joke.
“I think when he comes home you should leave him,” was her response instead, “He’s gone a year right? Spend that time finding a new place, move your shit, and when he gets back there should be papers waiting for him.”
The idea, as nice as it sounded, to use this distance to detangle her life from his without him there to make it more difficult, is terrifying. She’s thirty, almost thirty one and Alfred is the only man she's been with for five years, her second ever serious boyfriend, turned fiancé and then husband, she doesn’t think she can do much better, and her mother would agree(though, she supposes her mother doesn’t know she’d theoretically had another option but she’d snuffed that out, hadn’t even thought twice as she did so).
She didn’t tell Eloise this, she couldn’t really handle the backlash she’d receive from the other woman(well meaning and full of love as it is, it’s also exhausting), instead shrugged and gave a halfhearted maybe. It hadn’t made Eloise any less unhappy about the situation, but it had been enough to get her to drop the subject.
It’s a month later when it happens for the first time. She’s out with work friends, something she rarely did even before everything, but they’d basically forced her, Edwina(technically a Bridgerton friend) had all but cornered her the day before with Marina and Emma and told her if she wasn’t dressed and ready by eight the next night, she was going to drag her out in her sweats.
“No more rotting away your day off,” she’d told her, hands on her hips and trying desperately to make herself look intimidating(it doesn’t work, Penelope thinks she may have had more luck trying to guilt her), “You need to have fun, or at the very least try.”
“Ed, I just don’t feel ready-”
“You’re never going to feel ready, you’ve been through hell,” and wouldn’t Marina of all people know, after all the shit with George,“Which is why you’re going, even if you hate it, even if you spend the entire time wishing you’d never met us, you’re going to come out with us.”
“Guys I’m sorry I just-”
“Nope, no ‘I just’, no ‘buts’ you’re going,” Edwina said, “or Cressida's going to hear that you want a total home make-over, I’ve already got Eloise on stand-by.”
And well, she really didn’t want Cressida tearing apart her flat and hounding her with paint swatches and living room lay-outs.
She had fully intended to spend the entire time miserable, cling to the bar, or the club wall and pout, really make them feel bad for dragging her out when she wasn’t ready. And it had started out much that way, and Edwina at the very least had looked concerned while Marina had rolled her eyes and Emma told her to at least try because it’s ‘good for you’. But about two hours into the night, when she had been gearing up to sulk her way back to her lonely couch where she could cry and look at Alfred's weekly round up and pretend to care, a man, a rather handsome man with black curls and glasses that had seen better days sidled up beside her and flashed her a shy smile.
“You look to be having as bad a time here as I am,” he’d had to lean in close to murmur it in her ear, “But maybe we could be miserable together? Closer to the bar maybe?”
Penelope gave a little laugh at that, and she’d been flattered really, it’s not often she gets flirted with, but she’s married, and she told him as much.
Or, well she’d started too, but from the corner of her eye, she saw her left ring finger was bare. As it had been since early in her pregnancy, when her fingers had swollen up so much she couldn’t fit her ring, and somehow, inexplicably, she found herself agreeing. And then she found herself drinking and chatting with the man(Mitchel she thinks?)and then kissing him, and then, eventually, after a very handsy uber, she found herself in an apartment in an unfamiliar part of the city, trying to keep quiet so she didn’t wake his roommate(she thinks she does anyway based on the pounding on the wall).
She woke up in the morning, head pounding, and groaned head aching, freezing when she realized she’s not totally sure where she is. She saw the (no longer as) handsome man (Malcom maybe?), and instead of feeling any sort of guilt like maybe she should have, she felt this sliver of excitement.
Of all the things she’d expected from her forced reentrance into the world it hadn’t been this.
She’d been oddly happy and excited as she’d redressed quietly as not to wake her companion. Her good mood stayed with her all through her sneaking out of the apartment(she’d run into the roommate clearly getting ready for work and none too happy to see her), and even through the incredibly expensive uber ride home.
When she tells the girls at work how she’d had fun, they’re thrilled- though Marina gives her an odd look- and begin planning another night for the next weekend. And she doesn’t plan for it to become a common occurrence, but it happens that night with a bloke from up north that claims to be visiting his cousin and fucks her in his car, and then the next week it's with an American man who is so overly earnest in his interest she feels worse leaving him than she does about sleeping with him. It keeps happening, even on nights she plans to go home alone, and nights where she knows she has brunch with Eloise and her sisters the next morning, all hyper observant women that clock something being off with her even if they can’t pinpoint what.
She thinks, maybe, she should feel bad about it, but she really can’t, this is the best she’s felt since everything started.
And yes, cheating on your husband maybe isn't what a therapist would recommend after the loss of a baby and the loss of a parent. But, Penelope thinks, leaving your mourning wife who had to birth a baby that would never breathe, or smile, probably isn't either, and Alfred did that anyway.
So, she can’t really feel that bad about her actions.
And even as her excitement about her escapades disappeared, and it became less about how much she enjoyed it (and she did still enjoy it, sex that didn’t come with obligation and expectations, with people she never had to see again) and more about the fact that she could, she felt no guilt.
She likes the ritual of it, the challenge of trying to make herself look presentable. Even though her mother can tell something's wrong (“You’ve no reason to be unavailable every Friday night,” she says, one day over the phone after Penelope vetoed a dinner with her “It’s been months Penelope, you don’t get to act out forever just because you’re sad”), and Eloise keeps questioning why she’s almost never ready when she comes to pick her up anymore. It’s exciting, and Alfred’s talking about extending his trip, so really, what’s the harm? She doubts he’d care even if he walked in on her with another man if she's honest.
Penelope would have probably stayed in her belief that this couldn’t hurt anyone, if Colin hadn’t decided to pop back up.