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The Ithaca house is a restored Dutch colonial, exterior painted a crisp sky blue, tucked away on a small, densely wooded property near Cayuga Lake. The air outside is heavy with a certain springtime condensation; it smells like densely packed wet dirt and worms and tire tracks.
Shiv feels stone scrape against her heel as she steps up to the door, lukewarm heat kissing the sliver of skin between her bob and ironed collar. She glances back at her driver as the sleek black vehicle pulls out from the driveway. It might be a while, she told him, disappear for an hour. Shaking her head out, she presses the doorbell with a determined finger, holding the fleshy insides of her cheeks in between her teeth. Immediately, a dog barks from within.
It’s been over a year and a half since she last saw Tom. Four years since the divorce. Five years since everything fell apart.
On the ride over from the airstrip, she had tried to remember Tom’s face. Objectively, she knew what he looked like: she could scroll through an endless carousel of vacations, wedding photos, and corporate retreats at a moment's notice. But when she closed her eyes and tried to construct an image of him, details were slipping. There were his eyes (gray-blue, hooded, pink around the edges), nose (midwestern), and mouth (thin, upper lip curling upward as he spoke, a light scar - but on which side was it again?), but how they all fit on his face was becoming foggy.
Through the frosted glazing of the door, a vague human form approaches. Shiv swallows down a hitch in her breath.
The painted wooden door pulls open from the inside with the rubbery squeak of the gasket pulling apart. Greg leans out from behind it.
“Shiv.” He stammers, eyebrows dancing up his forehead. He must be in his mid-thirties now. His hand reflexively wanders up to his collar, nervously pulling on the fabric of the loose cable knit sweater hanging off of his oversized frame.
“Tom’s got you playing house husband?” Shiv asks, frowning down at Greg’s tartan slippers. If it had been another woman, this would be a lot easier.
“Actually, we had like, a repair guy come by earlier, ‘cause the other day the dishwasher was creating uh, a leaking situation all over the kitchen. I just, worked from home to supervise a little. The dogs get weird around strangers.” He says, running a hand through his overgrown hair. He invites her inside with an awkward hand wave.
A small, white-haired gremlin of a dog barks at Shiv’s feet. Greg scoops the animal up to show it off, murmuring at it to calm it down.
“This is Button.” He says. The animal looks back at Shiv with pathetic, leaking eyes. “He’s new. We got him in January. He’s my dog.”
He cradles Button by it’s bottom, carrying it as if it was a child, leaning against the front door to close it with his back.
“I mean, we share him, I guess? I got to pick Button’s name though” He muses, big blue eyes wandering up to the ceiling.
Shiv invites herself further inside, passing the reworked wooden stairwell and crossing into the living room, her shoes sinking uncomfortably into the rug.
The living room is quaint in a way that hits Shiv with a wave of pedestrian nausea, like being whisked off in between the pages of a Better Homes & Gardens issue: mix-and-match green couches, waning afternoon light streaming in through a pair of french patio doors leading out onto a wooden deck. The entire westward wall is covered in a builtin bookshelf: housing Tom’s novels, cookbooks, airport gift shop plastic mementos, and pitiful box set DVD collections. If Shiv was the sort of person who believed in these sorts of things, she might have thought it looked cozy - homey even - but she wasn’t that sort of person, and she wasn’t about to start being one now.
“Tom should be home soon.” Greg follows. “Mondale is wandering around somewhere, if you want to say hi. He’s old and deaf now, kind of like Tom!”
He chuckles to himself and lets Button down on one of the couches. The creature pads it’s way around a circle, kicking up white hairs before settling down on a sunny part of the couch.
Shiv wipes down the off the opposing seat with her palm, sits down and crosses her legs at the ankles. Greg looks down at his feet.
For a second, it’s entirely silent. Shiv sits in her ex-husband and his lover’s house, and thirty seconds pass like an hour.
(Right after the separation, not long after Tom submitted his strongly-worded resignation at Waystar and moved to a condo in Chelsea fit for a post-midlife crisis divorcee, she’d still see Greg weaving his way through the cubicles at work as newly appointed Head of Digital Somethingorother.
It was entirely below her to beg Logan to transfer him, to fire him, or to send him to Asia on unspecified business. It was weak, and Logan would see through it. She could handle this. She was Shiv Roy, goddamnit.
They rarely spoke. It wasn’t too much of a change from before.
But once, after Logan stormed out of a meeting and the rest followed him down the hall like lemmings, they found themselves in his office alone.
“How’s Tom?” She found herself asking, arms crossed tight over her power suit.
“Uh, he’s good.” Greg said, eyesight fixed on the pile of leftover sweets delivered as a peace offering by a GoJo competitor. “We finally unpacked the last box. It’s been busy with Tom’s new job and uh, my new job.”
His fingers flutter above an assortment of madeleines, looking for just the right one.
“So you’ve shacked up.”
Greg guiltily shoves a madeleine into his mouth.
“Uh. I hope you’re not still mad. I mean, I get it if you are. I did participate in what you could confidently call a moral gray area?” He says, pupils bouncing around the room in every direction.
“Mad? I’m almost impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you.” Shiv lied. It came out as too flippant, too callous, too defensive.)
“Uh, Shiv? Do you want a coffee or like - a latte? Tom got us a latte machine and I’ve been practicing -” Greg says.
Us.
“Coffee is fine.” Shiv says, even though she doesn't drink coffee without milk.
Greg turns and crosses into the kitchen through a wood-framed arch, bowing his head to avoid the tips of an overgrown pothos hanging in the doorway. Shiv watches him rummage around in the cupboards for a mug.
She checks her phone - Almost six-thirty.
She reaches for a book on the coffee table, something or other about the Austro-Hungarian empire - Tom’s no doubt. She flips it open at the bookmarked page. The bookmark is a polaroid, beaten and curling around the edges, of Tom and Greg embracing in front of a view of Mt. Fuji - last year’s vacation, according to Instagram. Their grinning faces are squished together cheek to cheek, Greg holding Tom from behind, their fingers tangled together at Tom’s chest.
Shiv slides a manicured hand over the photo, covering Greg’s face. Tom’s smile is massive, apples of his cheeks flushed and crow’s feet articulated. It’s a different smile than the one she’d always known during their marriage. Tom had always smiled like a stock photo, something she’d credited to his midwestern, middle class upbringing - a posed “Say Cheese!” mouth with a glass-eyed look beneath. Unconsciously, she runs her thumb against Tom’s cheek, Greg peeking out from beneath her other fingers, until the coffeemaker whirs loudly from the other room and she snaps the book shut.
In front of her, Button stirs on the couch, sniffing up at the air. The front door creaks open with a jangle of keys, and the animal bounds off the couch and yelps.
If she wanted to, Shiv could lean forward slightly and peek into the foyer. But she keeps her back straight, and watches Tom’s movements warp in the polished wooden floor instead.
Greg shuffles through the living room, eyeing Shiv as if afraid she’s going to follow after him.
“Hey, honey.” She hears Tom say through the rustling of plastic bags. His voice is relaxed, coming from a place deep in his throat. A chill runs up Shiv’s spine - not a good one.
“I got scallops for dinner - does that sound nice?” Tom says, voice muffled, as if speaking into Greg’s sweater.
Shiv peers forward just a bit, enough to catch just a glimpse of Tom: his thick fingers prying under the hem of Greg’s sweater as they embrace, revealing a sliver of pale back.
“Missed you at work today." Tom continues. Then the sound of light kisses.
“Tommy. Uh, Shiv is here.” Greg says.
“What? Here? Why?”
Tom enters the room - ah, that’s what his face looks like. He’s almost fully gray now, the wrinkles on his face lengthened and deepened - perhaps if they had stayed together, if they had loved each other as they should have, maybe she might not have even noticed as the years passed by.
“Shiv! Hi!” Tom bleats, voice dipping into an unnatural cheery effect.
“Tom.” She replies, and he leans down to give her a hug and a brusque kiss on the cheek. It’s professional even, like a visit from the Queen. Greg disappears into the kitchen with the groceries.
“To what do we owe the surprise?” Tom asks, adjusting his suit as he sits down across from her. It’s a nice suit - the nicest you can get away with as an associate dean and professor of business in a borderline nowhere-place in upstate New York.
And Oh, - there’s that we again.
“I need you to sign these to relinquish rights over the winery.” Shiv says, fishing a stack of documents out of her purse and handing them out, making sure that her back stays straight against the couch, so that Tom has to reach over the length of the table.
“Oh.” Tom muses, scanning over the documents briefly. “I thought you got rid of it some time ago.”
His brow scrunches up as he flips through the documents. Shiv had always warned him it would give him wrinkles. And it did.
“Nice setup you have here. Little house on the prairie.” Shiv says.
“Well, it’s no Park Avenue. But it’s home” Tom replies nonchalantly, flipping through the pages.
Greg shuffles back into the room, handing Tom a latte with one hand, and Shiv a black coffee with the other. The hand that touches her ex-husband briefly touches hers.
Tom takes a sip.
“Oooh.” He sings. “The foam is top of the line. We’ll have you working your way up to Starbucks employee of the year in no time at all, Greg.”
It should be a cruel shot at Greg’s lack of skill and general mediocrity as a person, or the fact that he may as well be working at a coffee shop about to push forty. But it isn’t. Greg smiles, lashed fluttering like a baby calf’s.
‘Maybe I can get promoted to manager?” He jokes.
(Shiv had always found his mannerisms irritating, even when they were children. At the odd family function, before Logan and Ewan truly fell out, she had always found him irritating. He’d trail after her after being bullied out of the boy’s group, pulling on her dress and insisting on explaining something or other about his Gameboy.
She remembers one particular Easter at nine or ten years old, maybe. Her mother Caroline leaning over to her to point out how Greg was always growing out of his clothes, ankles perpetually exposed.
“Poor Cousin Greg.” She had said. “He’s dressed like an orphan.”
Annoying little Cousin Greg, crawling over her at Easter and getting his sticky hands all over her dress as he reached for the candy bowl. Greg the Egg.
And then he showed up at Waystar, begging to be taken in like a wet mutt on the Roy’s doorstep during a storm.)
“Would you get Shiv a little milk, hon?” Tom says to him.
‘Yeah, okay.” Greg mumbles and brings back some milk in a tiny silver pitcher, like on a diner on TV and gently pushes it across the table before settling down next to Tom. Button lays down between them.
“How’s the family?” Tom asks, both hands cupping the warm ceramic.
“You know.” Shiv shrugs. “The usual.”
Mondale lumbers in the room from the kitchen - the dog is old and lumpy now.
“Mondale!” Greg coos, patting his side. The dog barely seems to acknowledge Shiv’s presence, and beelines towards his owner, where he lays his head on Tom’s thigh. Two boys and their dogs - it may as well be a family portrait.
“Sorry to hear about your mother, Greg.” Shiv says, immediately regretting it.
“Are you now? We didn’t run into any Roys at the funeral.” Tom says.
“Uh, thanks.” Greg says, hoisting Button onto his lap “There are worse ways to go, I guess. At least she didn’t suffer long.”
“Do you have a bathroom, or should I look for an outhouse in the backyard?” She asks.
“Powder room’s right off the kitchen.” Tom replies.
“Sign this by the time I’m back.” Shiv snaps, gesturing at the stack of paperwork. “I’m a very busy person. I don’t have all day.”
The kitchen is a mishmash of vintage and modern elements that she could care less for but Tom had always loved. There is a smattering of Christmas cards fixed to the stainless steel fridge with magnets: One from Tom’s parents, a few from people and families she doesn’t recognize. A photo of Greg sipping on a mimosa at brunch with Willa and three other beautiful women. Greg with Tom’s father triumphantly holding up a fish, bundled up on a frozen lake. Tom in a light blue bowling jersey among a group of middle aged men, smiling with teeth bared, digitally captioned in a pseudo-airbrushed font: Ithaca Gay Men’s Intramural Bowling Leauge.
Under that, a grocery list in Tom’s neat handwriting (fusilli, white wine, pesto, lemon, shrimp, Greg’s cereal) - wasn’t it odd that the way someone's pen moves on the paper could last in your memory forever? She could have recognized it if she saw it blowing down the street on a receipt in Manhattan. (Could she have recognized it before the divorce, or did she look at it for the first time as Tom signed all nine letters of his last name on the dotted line which finally ended their marriage?)
Shiv hesitates at the door to the power room, and instead follows along the wainscoting, back into the foyer and up the stairs, hand trailing along the wooden banister.
Tom and Greg’s voices waft in from upstairs, gaining a tinny quality as they echo through the house’s vents.
“-you mean the scallops with the lemon pasta?”
“Uh-uh”
“Yeah, that’d be nice.”
“You have to help make the salad, though. Make yourself a little useful.”
The floorboards in the upstairs hallway reflect the last of the golden hour sunlight, casing the house in amber. Shiv peeks into the home office (which seemed to double as Greg’s playroom, apparently; a half-finished puzzle of a landscape on the hardwood floor). She walks past the bathroom, towards what she guesses to be the master bedroom. The door is open, but the curtains are closed. Only a sliver of light comes through, casting a line extending from the eastmost facing window across a corner of the unmade bed, and into the hallway.
The marital bed was plush on one side, rumpled on the other - clearly remains of Greg’s midday nap. Shiv steps over a pair of pajamas left on the floor, and opens both drawers on the nightstand. Searching in the dark, unsure as to what exactly she was looking for - some horrible secret, a weird sex toy, something to justify how her lip keeps trembling in disgust.
Looking at the silky sheets, the indented pillows, the lived-in home, she’s struck with the mental image of Greg’s gangly form under her Tom, gripped between his pale white hips, spider-like fingers combing through his hair (over the gray spots, down his neck, pawing at his chest), bodies tangled and sweaty in the sheets like a pair of high schoolers on prom night, hairy ankle against hairy ankle. Cousin Greg’s tongue running over the teeth in his mouth, wet snake curling under that prized chipped molar from Tom’s last eighth grade hockey game -
She shakes the thought away, but the taste of Tom’s spit still wells in her mouth.
All she finds on Tom’s side is a half-spent bottle of lube.
-
Five years ago, she found out because of something Roman said.
She’d rushed into Tom’s office after hours, with the intention of confronting him or at least turning the situation to her advantage.
The office was empty, save for Greg sprawled out on the leather sofa with his size thirteen oxfords laid up on the armrest. He was scrolling through his phone, with his jacket tossed off and tie undone, nibbling on one of the granola bars Tom kept in his desk.
“Where’s Tom?” She asked, snapping her head down.
“Uh, Hi. He’s picking us up some food.” Greg said, shuffling into a sitting position.
“He’s picking it up.”
Something snapped into place.
“I’m not really his assistant anymore, so -” Greg began.
Suddenly, she found herself chucking a paperweight at Greg’s head. Then a stapler off the desk. Then one of Tom’s stupid decorative succulents.
Greg yelled Tom’s name as if he were just around the corner, waiting to come to his rescue.
Tom pushed the door open, already unpacking takeout containers and smelling of sweet-and-sour chicken.
“They didn't have General Tso’s, but -” Tom trailed off, taking in the scene before him. His eyebrows knotted as Greg ducked back out from behind his desk. Shiv watched their eyes meet and exercise some internal communication she wasn’t privy to.
“We’ll talk at home.” She said sternly, turned on her heel, and left.
She had always been the composed one of the Roy siblings. She could get into catfights with her brothers, but she’d never been outwardly mad at an outsider. She was Shiv Roy. She didn’t fly off the handle.
When Shiv came home that night, everything was bathed in a deep blue. All the lights were off, except for the lamp in the living room. Tom was sitting on the couch, waiting for her, awkwardly chewing on his thumb.
“I thought we said no one real.” She said, placing her purse on the countertop. “Did you want me to bring in a third - a guy? Is this what this is all about? Cause I’m fine with that. It’s fine to be a little gay, Tom. Whichever way you want to do it.”
“Shiv-” He sighed.
“I thought we said no one real.” She repeated, her throat closing with rage. “My cousin? Who you work with? You don’t think , Tom.”
“Shiv.” Tom pleaded, his lower lip turning in on itself.
“We can work this out.” She said, pacing around the condo. “We’ll transfer Greg to a different department. NDA, the works. He can head some Parks division upstate-”
“Shiv.” Tom said again. “I love you. But I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what?” Shiv said. She crossed her arms over her chest, pulling in on herself.
Her chest felt gripped with anxiety. She didn’t feel like Shiv Roy, daughter of the most powerful media mogul in the United States. She felt like a small girl in a large and cold and sterile condo building about to get broken up with.
“I don’t want to work this out.” Tom said, head in his hands.
“Everything you have is because of me.” She spat at him.
She always thought she’d be the one to end it.
-
She picks up a framed photo from Tom and Greg’s commitment ceremony from the dresser. They never married - something about Tom’s conservative belief that getting married twice wasn’t right (even if the woman you married shoehorned you into an open marriage on your wedding night, and you spent nine months fondling her tallest, stupidest cousin behind her back - even then) but Greg didn’t seem to mind.
He waves a newly ringed hand at the cameraman, as joyful and excited as a kid on Christmas. And Tom- oh, poor stupid, backstabbing Tom - his arm is looped around Greg’s waist, looking up with adoring eyes.
Shiv had been invited but politely declined to attend.
Even before they were engaged, when the relationship was still objectively good, Shiv and Tom often slept back-to-back, barely touching. Despite Tom’s poking and prodding, she’d never been able to comfortably sleep in the same bed as another person, at least not in the way you were supposed to. She was never going to drape herself over a man, or fall asleep with her head tucked into Tom’s shoulder.
She thinks - I bet Greg lets Tom spoons him until they fall asleep. Or better yet, Greg spoons Tom.
“I thought I might find you here.” Tom says, leaning in the doorway.
“Sorry. I’m snooping.” Shiv says without looking up. The bed dips as Tom sits down. .
“Greg should have given you the big tour. He's not house-trained yet.” Tom laughs.
“I wish you would have come.” Tom says, gesturing to the photo in her hands.
“Are you happy, Tom?” Shiv asks and sits down next to him. He shuffles on the bed, the beam of light clipping over his ear.
“I am.” Tom says quietly, looking down at his feet, as if he’s afraid he’ll hurt her if he says it too loud.
“I loved you a lot. You know that.” He puts an arm around her shoulder. Shiv feels her shoulders tense but she lets it happen.
“I loved you too.” She replies. It’s true.
“I know.” Tom sighs.
“I wish you hadn’t found out like that. Or, I don’t know. I don’t know if I would have had it in me to leave Waystar and the Roys and that whole world without a push.” Tom squeezes her shoulder. “I wasn’t bred for that, Shiv. Maybe all I need to be happy - like, real happy, not PJ and gold-champagne happy - is a nice vacation twice a year and a nice kitchen countertop. You know?”
Shiv doesn’t know. She was bred for that world. There’s not a thing in the world that could make her happy. Not like Tom was - sweet, simple Tom.
She tries to imagine herself in Greg’s place, living in a small cozy house in a small city, spending the day on video conference calls until Tom comes home each night. Eating dinner together and looking over bills at the kitchen table.
The Tom with his arm around her was a different Tom; A Tom who does his own grocery shopping. A Tom who cooks scallops for dinner and plays on a bowling league with Ithaca townies and tenured Cornell professors. Tom fully realized - Greg’s Tom.
It makes her feel sick.
“My father was right. You’re weren’t good enough for me, anyways.” She hears herself say.
Tom takes his hand off her shoulder.
She hopes to see Tom’s eyes swimming with that characteristic sadness, that desperate need for approval. But instead, there’s a glimmer of something awful in his eyes - pity.
“I signed your documents, Siobhan.” He says.
-
The last time Shiv saw Tom was almost a year and a half ago. The Chelsea Divorce condo was a two-bedroom apartment Tom and Greg had shared for the past few years, until finally, they decided to leave the city.
She’d still viciously hated them both, only dropping by with Roman for a spiteful, surprise goodbye. But in a way she’d understood: Tom was a man, he needed Greg to feel in control because she was stronger than him, and she’d never let him be in charge in their relationship. Greg was easy to push around, to berate - if it manifested itself sexually than so be it.
All the doors were open, movers filtering in and out with boxes and lamps in hand. The windows were open, and despite the condo’s placement on the tenth floor, it smelled like spring.
Shiv watched their silhouettes stand together through the doorway of their shared bedroom, looking out the window into the city.
“Are you ready to go? You sure?” Greg said, putting an arm around Tom and pulling him in tight.
Tom looked small. She’d always thought of him as such; weak-willed, easy to influence, brittle. But in Greg’s arms he just looked small, and cared for.
“Yeah. Goodbye, New York City.” Tom breathed, tilting his head up to reach for a kiss, Greg’s long hands cradling his face.
Then Roman said something about Bert and Ernie buying a house in the suburbs, and they broke apart.
-
When they go back downstairs, they find Greg laying on the couch typing out something on his phone, with huge slippered feet hanging off the edge. Both dogs are on the couch curled up with him.
Tom laughs out loud and snaps a photo on his phone.
“Oh, look at you…that’s new phone background material.” He chuckles. Greg rolls his eyes.
“Did you want to stay for dinner?” Tom asks while scrolling through the settings of his device.
“It’s late. I have to meet with my father tonight.” Shiv says, pretending not to see Greg making a face at Tom from the corner of her eye.
She grabs her purse off the couch and accepts the signed documents from Tom.
“Take care of yourself, Shiv.” Tom says, walking her through his cozy home and up to the door. “Let me know if you need anything.”
As if there was anything he could offer.
-
The driver starts the car as soon as the backseat door clicks closed.
“Just a moment.” Shiv tells him.
The light flickers on in the kitchen, a warm orange glow against the dusk. It’s a still picture of tacit domesticity, the couple’s shadows softly dancing against the walls and curving in the cabinet paneling as they prep for dinner.
Shiv watches her cousin kiss her ex-husband on the cheek and bury his face in Tom’s shoulder. Tom laughs, eyes closed, at whatever Greg is mumbling into his starched white shirt, and leaves the herbs on the cutting board, turning to embrace him.
It looks like love in there.
“Okay.” Shiv says. “We can go.”