Chapter Text
When his wife tells him that her mother has asked her to come and stay, just until Lucy gets back on her feet with the baby, Jack pretends to take it at face value. He carries her suitcases down to the taxi, three bulging bags that surely hold all the clothes she'll need for a year.
He won't argue with her.
They never argue. There are too many unsayable things that might accidentally be said.
Claire was never afraid to fight with him, even when it got messy and ugly and they hurt each other and it seemed like there was no going back. Sometimes there wasn't, but there was always going forward – until that night when there was no more going forward, when the future became somewhere she'd never go and somewhere he didn't want to be.
But she's not Claire, and they never argue.
Jack calls her, every day, because that's what husbands are supposed to do. After a while, she's always out when he calls.
After a while, he stops calling.
Two weeks later Liz Olivet turns up at his office. Jack knows why she's there – he couldn't get out of the bar association dinner and the rumor mill started the second he walked in the door alone.
He doesn't want to talk about it. Not to Adam. Certainly not to Liz.
She comes back a week later, and the week after that, and it's around then he realizes she's scheduled him in.
Liz is someone he can fight with, if only because there's nothing at stake, and Jack doesn't hesitate to give her a piece of his mind. After all, it was her advice that got him into this. Move on. Accept that she's gone. Stop looking for her in the women you meet. She won't be there, and you won't see what is. Which is what he did, and look where it got him.
Liz lets him rant.
She lets him rant until he asks her if she thinks he's stupid enough to still be waiting for what's gone, forever gone. And then she tells him, no, she's quite sure he's stopped waiting, that he's decided to settle for what he can get. When he asks her what the fuck she means by that, Liz's voice becomes unbearably gentle. She could have been anyone, Jack, and you wouldn't have cared, she says.
She tells him to remember that there's a difference between moving on and giving up and he snaps back that he's never given up on anything in his life.
Liz shakes her head. She doesn't need to say a word.