Fic: Five Things for TSCC and Lie to Me
The other day I asked for drabble and five things prompts. Here are the first two (though I should try not to get quite so carried away with the others or I'll never finish...):
For chaila43: Five Times James Ellison Didn't Feel Like a Father
1.
James hadn't slept well for a week, and if he couldn't make himself concentrate well enough to study, he knew he would fail his midterms in both English and Calculus. Instead, the same scene kept looping through his head, over and over again. Sondra's eyes wide and nervous, her hands clutching his. "I think I might be pregnant," she whispered.
Neither of them had any idea what to do. His father was going to kill him, but only if Sondra's father didn't kill him first. He had just received his acceptance to the University of Georgia. Sondra was following every other woman in her family, going back four generations, to Spelman. They'd planned to break up at the end of the summer. James held her hand, trying to breathe evenly as he imagined their bright futures evaporating.
The phone rang while he was eating breakfast. Sondra's voice on the other end was all relief. "It's okay," she said, and in her half-giggle he could hear the tightness that had overtaken them both unwinding. "False alarm. It's all going to be okay."
2.
He'd maintained that it was possible to be a pro-choice Christian. He didn't like abortion, he thought there should be fewer of them, but when faced with the terrible choice between the rights of a living woman and the rights of a fetus, he came down on the side of the woman. It was not, however, an issue that occupied his thoughts very often. He tended to vote for pro-choice politicians because he agreed with the rest of their platforms. He'd had perhaps three or four conversations about abortion, ever. In the abstract, he supported a woman's right to choose, but it never felt like an issue relevant to his life.
That abstracted idea came crashing down in brutal reality as he tried to comprehend what his wife was telling him. Lila's "It was my decision" blurred into the words his father had taught him to live by: "your principles don't mean a damned thing if you don't put them into action, son."
He'd never remember leaving the house, Lila calling after him, or the drive that led him out of the city and up the coast until he found himself sitting on a rock, staring out at the ocean. He imagined a boy, half-him and half-Lila, a laughing infant, a child learning to throw a baseball, a teenager backing out of the driveway in James's car, a young man graduating from college. A whole impossible future that James had no power to retrieve.
3.
Every time he looked at John Henry.
4.
For the first few weeks after they ran, Savannah was cooperative: obedience borne of fear. She would crawl into his lap-never Sarah's-and burrow close. James stroked her hair and whispered lies, hoping that with enough repetition he might believe them himself: "it's okay; it's going to be okay."
He wasn't sure what instigated her first rebellion. Sarah had gone to follow a lead, and Savannah, for the first time, refused to do her math lesson. "You can't make me," she wailed. "You're not my daddy!"
He kept his distance until she stopped kicking and biting, and as her tantrum settled into quieter whimpers, she let him scoop her up. "I just want to go home," she sniffled into his neck. "I want things back the way they were before."
"Me too, sweetheart," he confessed. "Me too."
5.
Sarah had been dragging for weeks, and when James touched her, he could feel bone sharp beneath her skin. He finally broached the subject one evening after Savannah had gone to bed.
"You should see a doctor," he said, trying to sound casual. Even after three years of running with her and two years of sharing her bed, he could never predict how she'd react to unsolicited advice.
"I did," she answered, turning away so she wasn't looking him in the eye. "Two weeks ago."
"And?" he asked, fighting the sense of dread that suddenly overtook him.
"Ovarian cancer." Her voice sounded far away. "Stage 4, metastasized to the liver and lungs and…" She waved a hand to indicate "et cetera," and when she turned to look at him her eyes were dry. "There's nothing they can do."
He sank onto the couch, stunned, and she crossed back to him, let him pull her into his arms. "How long?" he murmured into her neck. Her hands on his arms were cold.
"Not long," she answered. "I'm making lists for you. I need you to keep fighting, after."
In the end, he sent Savannah to stay with Terissa Dyson, got his hands on a lot of morphine, and held vigil, trying his best to keep her comfortable. She mostly slept, but when she woke she surprised him with her strength and lucidity: plans, targets, contacts, save the world, help John. A mission bequeathed to James.
Eventually, lucidity faltered. Sometimes she recognized James; sometimes she thought he was Charley or Derek. Finally, she saw only Kyle. She grew upset when James tried to correct her, so he played along. He listened while she recounted stories of John: John's childhood, John's accomplishments, imagined tales of John's future acts of heroism. "Our son," she would whisper, smiling through the pain.
James tried to answer appropriately-"I'm so proud of him" or some such platitude-but the words caught in his throat. He held Sarah's hand until she fell asleep again. "No," he replied with conviction, "you're the hero."
**
And for topaz_eyes, Five Times Zoe and Gillian Met (and Passed the Bechdel Test)
(Note: the second one will make more sense after I finish and post the other Gillian and Zoe and Emily story I'm working on. Bear with me!)
2000
Gillian had been working with Cal so much recently that inviting him and Zoe to dinner had seemed like a good idea: why shouldn't all four of them get to know one another? Almost immediately, she regretted the decision. Alec and Zoe, it turned out, were on opposite sides of some intricate brouhaha between State and Justice, and they spent much of the evening looking pained with their efforts not to snip at each other. Cal, who found the situation amusing, started trying to bait them, and when Gillian sent him a warning glance, she received one of her own from his wife.
At the earliest decent opportunity, she announced dessert and brought in the raspberry chocolate torte she'd spent the evening before slaving over.
Gillian breathed a sigh of relief as she watched Zoe's eyes close in rapture after the first bite.
"Oh my god, Gillian!" Zoe exclaimed. "This is amazing! You made this yourself?"
"Baking is a bit of a hobby," Gillian confessed. "I'm glad you like it."
"Like doesn't begin to cover it. Would you be willing to part with the recipe?"
"Of course. It's a bit involved but not difficult-and well worth the effort, I think," Gillian answered.
"Thank you!" Zoe said with a grin. "I've got a fabulous cheesecake recipe with white chocolate and raspberries, but I've been hunting the perfect chocolate raspberry torte."
"White chocolate raspberry cheesecake?" Gillian replied with interest. "Oh, do tell!"
2009
When the phone rang late one Friday evening, Gillian was surprised to see Zoe's number on the caller id. She fought a wave of dread-most of the scenarios she could imagine in which Zoe would call her were bad.
"Hello?" she answered with trepidation.
"Gillian, she's going over to the dark side. You've got to help me pull her back!"
"What? Zoe, what's-who? What are you talking about?"
"Emily. Basketball. Sorry, I wasn't very clear," Zoe apologized.
Gillian smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. She and Zoe, despite the various ups and downs of their acquaintance, had always shared a passion for basketball, and there were full years in which their only conversations-or at least their only civil conversations-had revolved around the sport. Emily, too, was an avid basketball fan, to the delight of both her mother and her father's partner.
"So what's Emily done?" Gillian asked, trying to imagine an offense dire enough to inspire this phone call.
"She's fallen under the spell of John Wall," Zoe said with resignation. "Which, okay, the kid can play, and I'm not going to pretend he can't. But it's one thing to admire his talent and it's another thing entirely to become a Kentucky fan. It's clear he's a one-and-done anyway. But no, suddenly she thinks she bleeds blue or some such bullshit."
"Come on, Zoe, she's old enough to know better! You can't be a fairweather Kentucky fan. You love them or you hate them, and god, their fans are crazy." Gillian paused. "It's probably just a phase."
"Part of her teenage rebellion or something," Zoe added. "The makings of an embarrassing story to tell her ten years down the road."
"Look on the bright side, Zoe: at least she hasn't suddenly decided to support Duke."
2016
Zoe and Gillian pushed through the sea of graduates and their families, attempting to follow Emily's vague directions. Zoe concluded that for the most part, the William and Mary graduation ceremony had gone off beautifully: perfect weather, an interesting and-more importantly-brief commencement speaker, and a happy daughter. Her only complaint was the inadequacy of the bathroom facilities.
"There," she heard Gillian say, and Zoe looked where Gillian pointed.
"Where?" Zoe asked. "You're not even pointing at a building."
"No, but that's no ordinary crowd of people there. Those are all women, and they're in a line. It's got to be nearby."
"Good god," Zoe sighed as she walked toward what was indeed a line of women.
Zoe wished it were less true that women tended to go to the bathroom in packs. Not only would the line be shorter, but she might have felt less inclined to go along when Gillian mentioned she needed to find the ladies' room. As it was, Zoe found herself stuck with Gillian for an indeterminate amount of time. She and Gillian had arrived at an unspoken truce of sorts by the time Cal and Gillian got married: they could leave the past in the past and focus on what they shared.
What they shared, however, was basketball, baking, Emily, and Cal. Cal was off-limits as a topic of conversation, and over the course of the graduation weekend they had exhausted basketball, shared all their new recipes, and had the same non-conversation about Emily's future five or six times. ("I'm completely in favor of a humanities degree, but a BA in history isn't an end in itself; and if she has a career in mind, she hasn't mentioned it." "She's smart and still has plenty of time; she'll figure it out.")
"When I graduated from college, it was freezing," Zoe recalled, breaking the silence that was beginning to grow awkward. Gillian turned expectantly, so Zoe continued. "It was Northwestern, but even Chicago has predictably decent weather by this time of year. But there was a cold front. No rain, so they kept it outside in the stadium, and we all sat there in our spring dresses and sandals, shivering under the caps and gowns. I don't remember anything else about it."
"I did my undergrad at UCLA," Gillian said. "I don't remember the weather, really, but I assume it was beautiful, if hot. I just remember that I'd asked my father to stay sober for my graduation, and he did. He went off cold turkey at the last minute and ended up with withdrawal symptoms so severe that he missed the ceremony. It was probably a boring ceremony anyway; they usually are."
Zoe opened her mouth, unsure of how to respond-she felt like she'd just learned more about Gillian in the past five seconds than she had in the previous fifteen years-when suddenly Gillian seemed to realize what she'd said and to whom.
"Sorry," Gillian said quickly, with half a nervous laugh. "I didn't mean to put a damper on things. That was all a long time ago." The tone of her voice told Zoe not to pursue the subject, and Zoe was just as glad to leave it.
"I wonder what Emily will remember about this day when she thinks back on it in thirty years," Zoe mused.
Gillian's smile was relieved. "If she'd come with us, surely this neverending line for the bathroom would stand out. Because she didn't, hopefully she'll just remember that it was a beautiful day."
2024
Zoe brought another tray of hors d'oeuvres into the living room where Gillian was arranging the pink and yellow ribbon on the gift table.
"Emily just called," Gillian said. "She's on her way."
"Good," Zoe answered. "I was worried that everyone would get here before the guest of honor and then the grandmothers-to-be would have to open all the gifts ourselves."
Gillian smiled. "I suppose we'll have to exercise some restraint, then."
2047
Hospice had been in for two weeks-or so the nurse had reminded Zoe that morning. She didn't have a strong sense of time passing anymore, just the strange cycles of sleep, waking, and pain. She would sometimes think of something Cal said when he was dying, about time losing its linearity. She hadn't understood it at the time. Instead she'd seen only the bone-tired expression on Gillian's face that spoke of time dragging through hours watching Cal take too-shallow breaths, and Emily's panic that suggested even this slow death was happening too quickly. In her own slow death, however, Zoe felt past, present, and future collapsing in on each other in the space of Emily's spare bedroom that she now occupied.
Emily came in when the late afternoon sun warmed the room. "How are you feeling, Mom?"
"I thought I heard Gillian," Zoe said, more a commentary, she thought, on the past forty years than the present moment.
"Yeah," Emily replied. "She stopped by. I'm sorry if we woke you talking in the other room."
"She's here now? Tell her I'd like to see her." Zoe smiled softly at the surprise in her daughter's face. Even after everything, Zoe and Gillian had never been friends.
"Sure, Mom."
Gillian came in a moment later, and Zoe saw, at once, the familiar, 80-year-old Gillian; Gillian as Zoe had first met her, so many years ago at a Pentagon cocktail party; and all the Gillians in between, hovering at the periphery, but also somehow the center, of Zoe's life for more than half of it.
"Hello, Zoe," Gillian said, and Zoe had never been more grateful not to be addressed with the standard "how are you feeling?"
"They've told me I should say goodbye to my family," Zoe explained. "Emily and David and the kids have been spending time with me. My brother came last week. And Susan. You remember Susan, my best friend from law school?" Gillian smiled and nodded, but Zoe couldn't remember whether Susan and Gillian had met or not. Perhaps at Emily's wedding. "I've said goodbye to everyone who is left. Everyone but you."
Gillian reached out and took her hand. "I'm honored."
Zoe closed her fingers around Gillian's. "I confess I never did learn to like you very much-" Gillian's laugh interrupted "-but we have been family all these years whether we liked it or not."
"Yes," answered Gillian. "Yes, we have been."
For chaila43: Five Times James Ellison Didn't Feel Like a Father
1.
James hadn't slept well for a week, and if he couldn't make himself concentrate well enough to study, he knew he would fail his midterms in both English and Calculus. Instead, the same scene kept looping through his head, over and over again. Sondra's eyes wide and nervous, her hands clutching his. "I think I might be pregnant," she whispered.
Neither of them had any idea what to do. His father was going to kill him, but only if Sondra's father didn't kill him first. He had just received his acceptance to the University of Georgia. Sondra was following every other woman in her family, going back four generations, to Spelman. They'd planned to break up at the end of the summer. James held her hand, trying to breathe evenly as he imagined their bright futures evaporating.
The phone rang while he was eating breakfast. Sondra's voice on the other end was all relief. "It's okay," she said, and in her half-giggle he could hear the tightness that had overtaken them both unwinding. "False alarm. It's all going to be okay."
2.
He'd maintained that it was possible to be a pro-choice Christian. He didn't like abortion, he thought there should be fewer of them, but when faced with the terrible choice between the rights of a living woman and the rights of a fetus, he came down on the side of the woman. It was not, however, an issue that occupied his thoughts very often. He tended to vote for pro-choice politicians because he agreed with the rest of their platforms. He'd had perhaps three or four conversations about abortion, ever. In the abstract, he supported a woman's right to choose, but it never felt like an issue relevant to his life.
That abstracted idea came crashing down in brutal reality as he tried to comprehend what his wife was telling him. Lila's "It was my decision" blurred into the words his father had taught him to live by: "your principles don't mean a damned thing if you don't put them into action, son."
He'd never remember leaving the house, Lila calling after him, or the drive that led him out of the city and up the coast until he found himself sitting on a rock, staring out at the ocean. He imagined a boy, half-him and half-Lila, a laughing infant, a child learning to throw a baseball, a teenager backing out of the driveway in James's car, a young man graduating from college. A whole impossible future that James had no power to retrieve.
3.
Every time he looked at John Henry.
4.
For the first few weeks after they ran, Savannah was cooperative: obedience borne of fear. She would crawl into his lap-never Sarah's-and burrow close. James stroked her hair and whispered lies, hoping that with enough repetition he might believe them himself: "it's okay; it's going to be okay."
He wasn't sure what instigated her first rebellion. Sarah had gone to follow a lead, and Savannah, for the first time, refused to do her math lesson. "You can't make me," she wailed. "You're not my daddy!"
He kept his distance until she stopped kicking and biting, and as her tantrum settled into quieter whimpers, she let him scoop her up. "I just want to go home," she sniffled into his neck. "I want things back the way they were before."
"Me too, sweetheart," he confessed. "Me too."
5.
Sarah had been dragging for weeks, and when James touched her, he could feel bone sharp beneath her skin. He finally broached the subject one evening after Savannah had gone to bed.
"You should see a doctor," he said, trying to sound casual. Even after three years of running with her and two years of sharing her bed, he could never predict how she'd react to unsolicited advice.
"I did," she answered, turning away so she wasn't looking him in the eye. "Two weeks ago."
"And?" he asked, fighting the sense of dread that suddenly overtook him.
"Ovarian cancer." Her voice sounded far away. "Stage 4, metastasized to the liver and lungs and…" She waved a hand to indicate "et cetera," and when she turned to look at him her eyes were dry. "There's nothing they can do."
He sank onto the couch, stunned, and she crossed back to him, let him pull her into his arms. "How long?" he murmured into her neck. Her hands on his arms were cold.
"Not long," she answered. "I'm making lists for you. I need you to keep fighting, after."
In the end, he sent Savannah to stay with Terissa Dyson, got his hands on a lot of morphine, and held vigil, trying his best to keep her comfortable. She mostly slept, but when she woke she surprised him with her strength and lucidity: plans, targets, contacts, save the world, help John. A mission bequeathed to James.
Eventually, lucidity faltered. Sometimes she recognized James; sometimes she thought he was Charley or Derek. Finally, she saw only Kyle. She grew upset when James tried to correct her, so he played along. He listened while she recounted stories of John: John's childhood, John's accomplishments, imagined tales of John's future acts of heroism. "Our son," she would whisper, smiling through the pain.
James tried to answer appropriately-"I'm so proud of him" or some such platitude-but the words caught in his throat. He held Sarah's hand until she fell asleep again. "No," he replied with conviction, "you're the hero."
**
And for topaz_eyes, Five Times Zoe and Gillian Met (and Passed the Bechdel Test)
(Note: the second one will make more sense after I finish and post the other Gillian and Zoe and Emily story I'm working on. Bear with me!)
2000
Gillian had been working with Cal so much recently that inviting him and Zoe to dinner had seemed like a good idea: why shouldn't all four of them get to know one another? Almost immediately, she regretted the decision. Alec and Zoe, it turned out, were on opposite sides of some intricate brouhaha between State and Justice, and they spent much of the evening looking pained with their efforts not to snip at each other. Cal, who found the situation amusing, started trying to bait them, and when Gillian sent him a warning glance, she received one of her own from his wife.
At the earliest decent opportunity, she announced dessert and brought in the raspberry chocolate torte she'd spent the evening before slaving over.
Gillian breathed a sigh of relief as she watched Zoe's eyes close in rapture after the first bite.
"Oh my god, Gillian!" Zoe exclaimed. "This is amazing! You made this yourself?"
"Baking is a bit of a hobby," Gillian confessed. "I'm glad you like it."
"Like doesn't begin to cover it. Would you be willing to part with the recipe?"
"Of course. It's a bit involved but not difficult-and well worth the effort, I think," Gillian answered.
"Thank you!" Zoe said with a grin. "I've got a fabulous cheesecake recipe with white chocolate and raspberries, but I've been hunting the perfect chocolate raspberry torte."
"White chocolate raspberry cheesecake?" Gillian replied with interest. "Oh, do tell!"
2009
When the phone rang late one Friday evening, Gillian was surprised to see Zoe's number on the caller id. She fought a wave of dread-most of the scenarios she could imagine in which Zoe would call her were bad.
"Hello?" she answered with trepidation.
"Gillian, she's going over to the dark side. You've got to help me pull her back!"
"What? Zoe, what's-who? What are you talking about?"
"Emily. Basketball. Sorry, I wasn't very clear," Zoe apologized.
Gillian smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. She and Zoe, despite the various ups and downs of their acquaintance, had always shared a passion for basketball, and there were full years in which their only conversations-or at least their only civil conversations-had revolved around the sport. Emily, too, was an avid basketball fan, to the delight of both her mother and her father's partner.
"So what's Emily done?" Gillian asked, trying to imagine an offense dire enough to inspire this phone call.
"She's fallen under the spell of John Wall," Zoe said with resignation. "Which, okay, the kid can play, and I'm not going to pretend he can't. But it's one thing to admire his talent and it's another thing entirely to become a Kentucky fan. It's clear he's a one-and-done anyway. But no, suddenly she thinks she bleeds blue or some such bullshit."
"Come on, Zoe, she's old enough to know better! You can't be a fairweather Kentucky fan. You love them or you hate them, and god, their fans are crazy." Gillian paused. "It's probably just a phase."
"Part of her teenage rebellion or something," Zoe added. "The makings of an embarrassing story to tell her ten years down the road."
"Look on the bright side, Zoe: at least she hasn't suddenly decided to support Duke."
2016
Zoe and Gillian pushed through the sea of graduates and their families, attempting to follow Emily's vague directions. Zoe concluded that for the most part, the William and Mary graduation ceremony had gone off beautifully: perfect weather, an interesting and-more importantly-brief commencement speaker, and a happy daughter. Her only complaint was the inadequacy of the bathroom facilities.
"There," she heard Gillian say, and Zoe looked where Gillian pointed.
"Where?" Zoe asked. "You're not even pointing at a building."
"No, but that's no ordinary crowd of people there. Those are all women, and they're in a line. It's got to be nearby."
"Good god," Zoe sighed as she walked toward what was indeed a line of women.
Zoe wished it were less true that women tended to go to the bathroom in packs. Not only would the line be shorter, but she might have felt less inclined to go along when Gillian mentioned she needed to find the ladies' room. As it was, Zoe found herself stuck with Gillian for an indeterminate amount of time. She and Gillian had arrived at an unspoken truce of sorts by the time Cal and Gillian got married: they could leave the past in the past and focus on what they shared.
What they shared, however, was basketball, baking, Emily, and Cal. Cal was off-limits as a topic of conversation, and over the course of the graduation weekend they had exhausted basketball, shared all their new recipes, and had the same non-conversation about Emily's future five or six times. ("I'm completely in favor of a humanities degree, but a BA in history isn't an end in itself; and if she has a career in mind, she hasn't mentioned it." "She's smart and still has plenty of time; she'll figure it out.")
"When I graduated from college, it was freezing," Zoe recalled, breaking the silence that was beginning to grow awkward. Gillian turned expectantly, so Zoe continued. "It was Northwestern, but even Chicago has predictably decent weather by this time of year. But there was a cold front. No rain, so they kept it outside in the stadium, and we all sat there in our spring dresses and sandals, shivering under the caps and gowns. I don't remember anything else about it."
"I did my undergrad at UCLA," Gillian said. "I don't remember the weather, really, but I assume it was beautiful, if hot. I just remember that I'd asked my father to stay sober for my graduation, and he did. He went off cold turkey at the last minute and ended up with withdrawal symptoms so severe that he missed the ceremony. It was probably a boring ceremony anyway; they usually are."
Zoe opened her mouth, unsure of how to respond-she felt like she'd just learned more about Gillian in the past five seconds than she had in the previous fifteen years-when suddenly Gillian seemed to realize what she'd said and to whom.
"Sorry," Gillian said quickly, with half a nervous laugh. "I didn't mean to put a damper on things. That was all a long time ago." The tone of her voice told Zoe not to pursue the subject, and Zoe was just as glad to leave it.
"I wonder what Emily will remember about this day when she thinks back on it in thirty years," Zoe mused.
Gillian's smile was relieved. "If she'd come with us, surely this neverending line for the bathroom would stand out. Because she didn't, hopefully she'll just remember that it was a beautiful day."
2024
Zoe brought another tray of hors d'oeuvres into the living room where Gillian was arranging the pink and yellow ribbon on the gift table.
"Emily just called," Gillian said. "She's on her way."
"Good," Zoe answered. "I was worried that everyone would get here before the guest of honor and then the grandmothers-to-be would have to open all the gifts ourselves."
Gillian smiled. "I suppose we'll have to exercise some restraint, then."
2047
Hospice had been in for two weeks-or so the nurse had reminded Zoe that morning. She didn't have a strong sense of time passing anymore, just the strange cycles of sleep, waking, and pain. She would sometimes think of something Cal said when he was dying, about time losing its linearity. She hadn't understood it at the time. Instead she'd seen only the bone-tired expression on Gillian's face that spoke of time dragging through hours watching Cal take too-shallow breaths, and Emily's panic that suggested even this slow death was happening too quickly. In her own slow death, however, Zoe felt past, present, and future collapsing in on each other in the space of Emily's spare bedroom that she now occupied.
Emily came in when the late afternoon sun warmed the room. "How are you feeling, Mom?"
"I thought I heard Gillian," Zoe said, more a commentary, she thought, on the past forty years than the present moment.
"Yeah," Emily replied. "She stopped by. I'm sorry if we woke you talking in the other room."
"She's here now? Tell her I'd like to see her." Zoe smiled softly at the surprise in her daughter's face. Even after everything, Zoe and Gillian had never been friends.
"Sure, Mom."
Gillian came in a moment later, and Zoe saw, at once, the familiar, 80-year-old Gillian; Gillian as Zoe had first met her, so many years ago at a Pentagon cocktail party; and all the Gillians in between, hovering at the periphery, but also somehow the center, of Zoe's life for more than half of it.
"Hello, Zoe," Gillian said, and Zoe had never been more grateful not to be addressed with the standard "how are you feeling?"
"They've told me I should say goodbye to my family," Zoe explained. "Emily and David and the kids have been spending time with me. My brother came last week. And Susan. You remember Susan, my best friend from law school?" Gillian smiled and nodded, but Zoe couldn't remember whether Susan and Gillian had met or not. Perhaps at Emily's wedding. "I've said goodbye to everyone who is left. Everyone but you."
Gillian reached out and took her hand. "I'm honored."
Zoe closed her fingers around Gillian's. "I confess I never did learn to like you very much-" Gillian's laugh interrupted "-but we have been family all these years whether we liked it or not."
"Yes," answered Gillian. "Yes, we have been."