Chapter Text
“So, I suppose our position is, uh, basically. You know, if it ain’t broke? Ha, you see I think a few of the shareholders would rather not rock the boat more than we already have. Well, it’s a whole different boat now, I suppose. Newer, you know? Less likely to capsize but significantly more likely to crash into a reef, do serious damage. We need competent crew. Trusted crew, and I, uh, obviously I trust you. Logan did, too. I think it would be foolish of me to not even try and convince you to stay.”
“Who else are you looking at?” Gerri has a manicure booked. She’d like to go home and put on more comfortable clothes, wash the day off her. The week. The whole thing.
“Uh, a few names have come up,” Tom moves paper around on the desk he refuses to sit behind just yet, like he might find a Post-It detailing the measured, mechanical parts that can assemble to create a facsimile of Gerri Kellman, “Brad Santos, uh Finela White, you know. Harvard lot, your cohort, the usual.”
They are not her cohort. They are a decade younger than her at least, and still have that hunger, that pinprick of greed that a man like Logan Roy could stoke and swell until they’d hop over to his side and throw themselves onto the grenade for him. The gavel is yet to fall on Tom Wamsgans.
“Thank you for the offer,” she says, glancing out of the windows, the clouds collecting like suds around the financial district.
“And of course we’d compensate you, uh, generously. We’d reevaluate your salary to reflect how integral you are to the acquisition process, as well as to sweeten the tartness of all this, um…” he reaches for a word, smiles with his mouth but not his eyes, “Unpleasantness that you’ve had to deal with recently.”
Gerri nods. “Sure. Thank you.”
“I’d hate to lose a fighter like you over the prick of the previous progeny.” He laughs at his phrasing and she lets him squirm in her lack of reaction.
“Can I take some time to consider?”
“Oh, sure! Sure, of course. Things won’t settle for a couple of weeks anyway so, uh, yeah. Yeah, take your time.” He doesn’t look happy. He looks like he already has a laundry list for her. She moves towards the door.
“Just call me if you need any more info or, you know, a check-in?” His voice is that high-pitched soft thing he used to use on Logan, like he was already senile. An unpredictable yet stupid necessity. A bear with bald patches.
She takes a company car back to her apartment and thinks about Tom’s foetus, and Jeryd Mencken, and calling Roman Roy.
– -
He calls her first. She stares at her phone on the seat beside her. She’s on her way to her eldest’s to finally see her new place upstate. She lets it ring out.
He tries again during dinner. She puts her phone on silent.
Third time lucky, she thinks, picking up at last from the safety of her daughter’s guest room. It’s ten minutes past midnight. Early for him.
“Hello?”
She hears breathing down the line. Not heavy. More like he’s trying to convince her there’s no one there.
She hangs up and picks up her book again. He calls back six and a half minutes later.
“Yes, Roman?”
“Gerri?”
She frowns, brow twitching. “You called me. You know who it is. What do you want?”
“Oh, uh…” There’s moving around, the sound of something moderately heavy clunking a short distance to the ground. She prays that it isn’t his phone in the pocket of his pants. “I…”
She lets her shoulders drop. This man makes her want to bare her teeth. This man makes her want to bleach her eyes and purge her organs.
“Nothing, I just…couldn’t sleep.” He manages the words in a lilting, nasal voice that she hasn’t heard in weeks - months, actually - and it sets her teeth on edge.
“Well I was,” she lies, “So thanks for that. Is that all you have to say?”
He clears his throat. Sheets crinkle in the background like he’s sitting up, or lying down.
“Just wanted to check the reaper hadn’t come for you when no one was looking.”
It’s so patronizing, so dismissive, such blatant, pathetic posturing, that she lets him hear her exasperated sigh.
“Try harder. Start by switching your phone off.”
She hangs up on him, and doesn’t feel remotely guilty.
– -
Gerri dreams of San Francisco, which she hasn’t in years. A boat takes her out towards Alcatraz, but it’s just hours and hours of slow chugging through milky mist. There are only two other people on board: her high school boyfriend and her doctor. The latter follows her around, frantically trying to take her blood pressure. She peers over the edge into the slate gray water and can somehow see all the way to the bottom of it.
She leaves Tom on read. She finishes The Sopranos. She starts pilates and renovates her guest bathroom.
Roman Roy calls her again. It’s been nearly two months since they were last in the same place. She answers, but he hangs up before he says anything.
Shiv calls next. It’s unexpected. She’s been socializing exclusively outside of the Waystar death cult and so seeing the surname flash on her phone is a jumpscare.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Gerri. Um, how are you?”
“I’m well, Siobhan, thank you. And yourself?”
“Good, yeah, good. Tired. Bloated.”
Gerri remembers her first pregnancy, heavy and hot like a swollen blister, begging to burst. She was irritable all day and restless all night. She ate basically her own body weight in artichoke hearts and guindillas every day for two weeks. She wonders if Shiv would actually tell her if she was struggling. For a solitary second, she has a flash of panic that that is what the phone call is.
“Rest is important in the second trimester,” Gerri says uselessly, because she should probably offer some womanly advice, but she suspects that Shiv is practically on Tom’s shift patterns at the moment.
“Uh huh, sure is,” her voice is strained.
“How can I help you?” Gerri asks, as a loud, flat voice announces in her head: “Roman Roy has killed himself”.
“Well it was about the baby, actually,” Shiv says, and the relief Gerri feels infuriates her. “I wondered if you’d be her godmother?”
Gerri sits down at her window seat, tucking her feet up against the other wall so she’s facing the view sideways. “‘Her’?” Is what she starts with.
“Yeah.”
“How can you know? You’re not 14 weeks yet, are you?”
“No, but I just know,” Shiv says in that sharp, curt tone that rings so like her father, and the subject is closed.
“Ok, well traditionally, children’s godparents are their own parents’ contemporaries.”
“I don’t really, uh, have any of those. That I trust.” She caveats to save face, but it somehow comes out more vulnerable.
Gerri likes Shiv. People seem to think she doesn’t, but there is a sturdy rod of support that she feels obligated to uphold regarding Logan’s only daughter, and she has never been resentful of it. Shiv is spoiled, and jealous, and scheming. She is a colossal flirt, but probably doesn’t think of herself as such, and Gerri finds that distasteful as a woman moving in the same snapping circles, mostly because she is guilty of it herself. She is more cunning than clever. She is chronically duplicitous. Gerri isn’t sure if Shiv is ever being genuine with her emotions and she would wager that Shiv probably isn’t either. All of these things make for a less than ideal person to be around a lot, but Gerri is used to much worse, and she doesn’t blame Shiv for any of it. She was a passably sweet child. She is a passably amusing adult. It isn’t her fault that she was Logan’s only girl, impossibly precious and yet consistently lacking at the same time. It isn’t her fault that she wasn’t - isn’t - Gerri’s favorite. Gerri likes her fine. She doesn’t need Siobhan to suffer to make herself feel better.
“I’m flattered, Shiv. That’s a very nice offer.” People have been laying things at Gerri’s feet a lot recently. She wonders if it’s the dredges of dispersing guilt left in Logan’s wake: a lingering oh shit at the end of all this mess that reminded people that she’s hard won but even harder to lose.
“So…yeah? You interested?” She sounds like she’s sweetening a stock price.
“Wouldn’t I be the child’s grand-godmother?”
“Ha. I guess so. In a manner of speaking?”
“Not so traditional, then?”
“It’s for Tom, anyway,” Shiv says, and Gerri hears the ‘it’s for Dad’ loud and clear.
She doesn’t want any more ties to these ridiculous people, this family that has taken three decades of her life, her husband, her dignity and her morality. Never mind how many of those they gave her in the first place.
But Gerri’s not good at lost causes. She never has been. I never should have let Baird keep that stupid tortoise. There’s always a ‘what if’ in her email signature.
And I could maybe try harder with this one, the next one. Maybe it could be better? Maybe that’s how I redeem myself.
“Sure, I’d be honored,” Gerri says at last, and Shiv actually sighs. Fuck. These kids.
“Great, that’s, uh…that’s great, Gerri. Thanks.”
Gerri thinks about the gaggle of similarly-aged women that flocked around her when she was pregnant: the wives of the men she worked with, the fertile, frenzied, thirty-somethings that crept out of the woodwork to coo and giggle and offer advice until the wine ran out. Everyone had babies at the same time in the 90s. It was circled on the agenda after ‘house in the Hamptons’, ‘extramarital affair’ and ‘secret Klonopin prescription’. Gerri did not lack contemporaries. Not that she really trusted any of them. Giving birth was as much of a competition as anything else. Gerri wonders how she ranked, and imagines it wasn’t particularly high.
Shiv doesn’t really like other women. She’s been trained not to; like misogynistic martial arts. She tolerates Gerri because she doesn’t see her as a threat: a widow past her prime with no royal name. Gerri is not desirable like Shiv. Gerri does not mean anything to the Roys. That’s what was all the more ironic about the one time, in a Milan lobby, when she maybe was, and she maybe did. Gerri remembers the curve of Shiv’s lips at the scent of blood.
Drunk on the memory, on the humiliation and vulgarity of it all, Gerri dares to ask: “How are you all doing? Have you heard from your brothers at all?”
Shiv makes a high-pitched thinking noise. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, Kendall’s back in LA, doing some detox shit. He’s alright. Con leaves to solidify himself as a pillar of European democracy any day now, while his wife paints my father’s study pink. Rome’s…”
Gerri chews on her thumbnail, looks out of the window at a silent disco winding its way down the street, a collective mass of arms flying like it’s a riot.
“Rome’s not great, but he’ll bounce back, like always. I think he’s just embarrassed by the whole tripping-over-his-dick on live television thing. And the near-miss-president isn’t taking his calls so he has no one to play with.” The sickly layers underneath Shiv’s words make Gerri wonder if she’s masking concern or relishing in Roman’s apparent malheur.
“I see,” Gerri says, and then nothing else, because nothing else is safe. Of all the people in the know, or at least in the room, Shiv was the one that seemed to correctly identify the most skeletons in Roman and Gerri’s briefly-communal closet.
“You guys are no-contact now, right? Just because I thought it might do him good to have some sense talked into him, and you seemed to be the best at that after Dad.”
Gerri sighs, and lets Shiv hear it. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. The last time I tried he fired me.”
“Well, he can’t do that again at least?”
“Ha. I’d rather not spend my weekends drafting any more labyrinthine NDAs, thanks.”
“Oh, yeah, have you thought any more about Tom’s offer?”
“Mn-hm. I have. I still am.”
“Edging my husband, Gerri?”
Gerri gives a half-hearted laugh at the vulgarity. Maybe Shiv thinks Roman was onto something, getting Gerri onside. If she starts flirting with me I’m going to move to the Ukon and acid-bath my phone.
“I’m taking everything into consideration, I don’t want anyone to regret the decision.”
“Got it.”
They talk for a few more flimsy minutes about Tom and Caroline and selling the yacht, and then Gerri is released, re-burdened with the role of godmother and lashed once more to this festering dynasty in the eyes of the Almighty.
– -
It is a coincidence, the first time after it all.
She meets three friends from training for a drink. Rab is nearly completely bald, now, and still happily married to Samantha. Chrissie’s cancer is back, but they’re not talking about it. Gerri drinks a martini and a half before she spots Roman.
The bar is busy, but not bustling. Haphazard movement draws her eye. The recognizable figure of the youngest Roy boy meanders towards the exit. Gerri feels a shiver of revulsion at the sight of him. At the door, he stumbles, catches himself against the valet, who looks bemused and more than a little concerned. That’s enough to propel Gerri from her chair, muttering an excuse to her table, and marching herself towards the street after him.
“Roman.” Her voice slices through the night and nearly makes her wince.
He’s halfway around the block, but he hears her, freezes, stays with his back to her. He’s close to the wall. He puts a hand out as if to steady himself, but it slips through empty air. He drags it through his hair instead.
She approaches, feeling distinctly like she’s about to cross-examine a defendant with ‘dangerous’ written in red on their file.
“Roman,” she says again, and he turns to face her, stallingly, reluctantly.
He looks dreadful. So dreadful that she nearly physically recoils, but decades of discretion does indeed an ice queen make, and she stays still.
“Wow, blast from the shitty past, Gerricakes. Smother any rape victims on your way here?”
He can’t stand still, swaying like a meth head in the street. Gerri wants to strap him into a carseat.
“What’s wrong, Roman?”
“Huh? Pfft.” He leans against the wall, collapses against it. “I’m breezy. I’m a fucking priest in a Boy Scouts’ hut. What’s wrong with you?”
“Have you been drinking?”
He gestures between his index and thumb just how little he’s been drinking. Gerri doesn’t believe him.
“Have you taken something.”
“Please fuck off, Geraldine.”
“Alright.”
She tightens her cardigan around her shoulders and turns to leave with a shrug. She hears him make a startled noise behind her, like someone has yanked on his testicles, like the first lash of many has landed. It’s a horrible sound. A pathetic one. She falters a little, glances back.
He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it, and then opens it again to vomit onto the street.
The mother in her jolts awake, and compels her forward, but the rest of her is stronger. She stands still, unable to go to him, unable to leave him, as he heaves up his guts onto the pavement. Without looking too closely, she’d say it’s mostly bile.
He’s bent double by the time it subsides, gasping in air, a hand slapped to his forehead as he retches. Gerri skirts around the puddle of it and helps him stand, one hand gripping his forearm, one pushing him back to lean against the wall.
“For Christ’s sake, Roman.”
“Sorry, mommy,” he slurs.
“How much have you had?”
Roman blinks at her through wet, red eyes. His cheeks are somehow flushed and pale at the same time. His face is gaunt, eyes hollow and haunted.
“Just one.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
He cocks his head on one side and with all the innocence of a pre-Raphaelite cherub, asks “Why?”
And then she does believe him. He catches his breath and his eyes slip closed. She’s still holding his arm. She doesn’t want to get any closer to him.
“What’s the matter?” She asks, softly this time, murmured privately to him.
He sniffs, shudders, looks at her miserably, but only for a second, like he can’t bear to leave his eyes there.
“Can’t sleep,” is all he says.
Gerri calls him a car. She avoids his eyes for the seven minutes it takes to arrive. She is unwilling to leave him, and attributes it to a sunk-cost fallacy.
When the car arrives, she peels him off the sidewalk and pushes him into it. She feels a hundred years old. He doesn’t let go of her sleeve.
“Stay. Please.” He says it like it costs him a lot. His eyes are huge, and wet, and familiar.
“No, Roman. Go home.”
“Gerri, please? Fucking please?!” His fingers dig into her forearm. She glances towards the restaurant, and rips herself away from him.
The sound he makes, forced back but not entirely, seals the evening for her if it wasn’t already.
“Wait,” she says, half to Roman, half to the driver.
She goes back inside, apologizes to Rab and Samantha and Chrissie, and picks up her bag and her coat. Something’s come up. Something’s crashed in, she doesn’t say. Something has returned to me.
She slides into the car next to Roman. He’s slumped against the window, breath fogging the glass. She touches his arm and he startles. He mutters something that could be thanks, but she’ll never know.
They go to her apartment. She didn’t even think. When was the last time she didn’t even think?
He aims for the car door handle twice and misses. Gerri watches him hoist himself onto the pavement.
“I appreciate the lift, Gerri,” he says, smarmy, impish. Then he realizes where they are. That wipes the smirk off his face.
“Come on” she says, and he stares at a spot to the side of her head for a few seconds before obeying.
He holds himself upright in the elevator. It's mirrored on both sides and so she has the unique pleasure of watching an infinite number of Roman Roys pretend they're not where they are; eyes to the ground, jaw tight, cheeks clenched, shoulders up.
She takes him into her apartment like it's nothing. He sways a little in the entryway, but she won't be deterred now she's set her mind to it. She won't allow herself to be scared of him.
“You should drink something,” Gerri says, because she doesn’t know what else to say, isn’t quite sure why he’s here, or how to help. He slumps onto her couch.
She brings him some water in a wine glass; the nearest clean receptacle she could find. He accepts it without looking at her, and raises it to his lips several times before actually drinking. When he does, the liquid spills down the sides of his mouth and stains his shirt.
“For fuck’s sake,” she says, as the damp patch pools on her couch.
"Sorry," he mutters, and it's a strange sound out of his mouth. His shirt is going see-through. He's thinner than the last time she saw him, and she gets a strange throb of worry that he might catch a cold.
She maneuvers the man-child out of his shirt, because she can see he has a vest on underneath. She tells him to take off his shoes and belt, and he does. All the while he has this vacant look, this uncrossable distance, that makes her fume and ache in equal measure.
“Gee, Gerri, I had no idea-”
“Shut up.”
He does. His jaw nearly makes an audible click.
“Drink.”
He finishes his glass. She goes to take her shoes off and read the recommended grocery list from her housekeeper. When she comes back into the living room, Roman is staring out of her floor-to-ceiling windows like he’s in A Clockwork Orange.
“Are you going to be sick again?” She asks, angry.
No response. He doesn’t even seem to have registered she’s there. Worry like weed killer dampens her system.
“Roman?”
She has to crouch in front of him, knees complaining, but she won’t sit beside him because that’s too close to touching him. She snaps her fingers.
“Roman!”
His pupils flick to her at last. He blinks and it seems to take an eternity.
“When was the last time you slept?” She asks.
“Uh,” he looks out of the window, then down at his own lap, and then across the room to the entrance hall to her apartment, like he’s only just processing where he is, “Nearly two days? I don’t know, I think. I don’t…think I know.”
He looks like he hasn’t slept in two days. She has no idea what to do with him.
“Why not?”
“I’m-” his head drops forward like a puppet with its strings cut. Before she can reach him, he snaps back to attention, head up again, blinking rapidly, morse code for get me the fuck out of here.
“I’m not doing too good,” is what he settles for.
“I can see that.”
“They gave me some pills, but it made it hard to get out, you know?” He murmurs, and Gerri has no idea what to say. “Made it hard to be awake.”
“Have you taken some tonight?”
“No.”
“Ok.” She wants to call him a cab, but she won’t. She thinks about Baird’s tortoise, and Shiv’s baby. “I’m putting you in the guest room.”
“You hate me,” he mutters bitterly.
“Yep.”
“Then I don’t want to be here.”
“You don’t?” She’s reached her threshold of patience, lets her resentment simmer and bubble over. “You’ve been cold calling me for months. It seems like maybe you do want to be here, you’re just too chickenshit to say it outright.”
“I…” He loses his train of thought, slips in between conscious and unconscious like sliding under a sheet, “I didn’t think you’d ever answer.”
She swallows. She needs him horizontal. She needs him out of her sight but not out of her orbit.
“C’mon.”
She hoists him up. He can barely walk. She steers him into her guest room and deposits him on the bed.
“Stay or leave, sleep or don’t, but don’t make a mess, yeah?” She says, and shuts the door behind her.
The next morning, the guest bed is empty and unmade. He has left his socks, but not accidentally. They are folded up neatly on the nightstand. She asks the cleaner to wash the sheets.
- -
It’s another week before he calls. She’s aware that she’s running out of time to tell Tom ‘no’, and also getting increasingly antsy with all this time to spare. There’s only so many off-Broadway shows she can attend with her daughters. An old colleague at Wybrooks offered her a very senior position essentially over coffee a few days previously, and she’s been turning it around in her head like a rotisserie chicken she isn’t sure is crisped quite right. There is sizeable appeal at breaking off from Waystar, a right royal fuck you to the Roys and every way they’ve dismissed, patronized or mistreated her over the past thirty years. But Gerri has a natural compulsion to invest; always has. She invested in a good husband, invested in children to take care of her when she's old, invested her money and her time in things that would one day flourish, even briefly invested her interests in the runt of the Roy litter for a chance at securing herself to the top of the tower. All required patience, perhaps even faith. Most of which she didn’t even want particularly badly at the time, but all paid off eventually. Is thirty years of service worth tossing into the garbage chute over something as petty as her pride?
Roman calls, and she’s in the bath. It’s 11 pm and she’s drowsy. She ignores him for a few seconds, before remembering him bent double, shaking, spewing on the pavement. The way he was white as a ghost, like someone had attached a hose to his ass and sucked all of his organs out.
“Yes?”
“Oh. Hi. Fancy seeing you uh…here…”
“What do you want, Roman? I’m busy.”
“Yeah, with what?” Hackles up already, she puts her wine glass down silently. “You working again? I thought they’d already shipped you off to the retirement home.”
She’s not in the mood. “Goodnight, Roman.”
“No! No, wait, sorry. Fuck...” there’s the sound of him handling something, his breathing closer to the speaker, like he’s jammed his phone between his ear and his shoulder. He used to sound like that when he was about to masturbate, but his voice isn’t breathy or delighted. It is defeated, instead. She withdraws her hand from where it has been dripping onto her phone screen, and slips it back into the water.
“Sorry,” he takes a deep breath, sounds clearer, “Sorry, I didn’t call to piss you off.”
“That makes a change.”
“I wanted to say thanks for looking after me the other night.”
Gerri counts the days: exactly a week. She wonders if he restrained himself for the previous seven days, like a week was a reasonable time to leave it. He is so transparent. He is so transparent to her.
“You were a mess.”
“Yeah, ha, still am. Uh…” His voice shakes a bit. She feels, in spite of herself, for the first time in many many months, a twinge of genuine pity. Somewhere near her gallbladder. Not yet at her heart.
“What’s wrong, Roman? Don’t you have a shrink you can talk to?”
“He doesn’t get it,” Unbelievable. These children playing in the sandpit think they’re gods. “No one gets it.”
“I’m sure,” she drawls, sarcastic.
“You get it,” he mutters, “Got it.”
“Well, you’re not my responsibility anymore, so.” You never were, a voice in her head reminds her, sounding unconvincing. Even now she’s perturbed by her need to nurture and her need to break, so consistently tangled together when it comes to Roman.
“Can you just…” he’s whining, voice all nasal and breathy the way that she hates, the way that makes him sound like a fool, the way that she chases and chases when she’s half-awake and indulgent, “Can you just tell me what a piece of shit I am? For old time’s sake?”
Gerri flips the idea over and examines its underside. “No,” she says, and does not elaborate.
He whines again, openly, like he’s biting down on something. “Please? I haven’t slept in like…fucking days. I just wanna release the tension, see if that works. Throwing semen at a wall and seeing who gets pregnant, et cetera.”
“And you’re incapable of doing that on your own? You have to bother me?” Her tone snaps into disdain like muscle memory. She fights to keep it neutral, won’t be goaded into giving him what he wants.
“Yeah,” he admits, and it’s a surprise, “Can’t fucking…whatever…”
“Well forgive me if I don’t want to revisit the road very much taken. I’ve learnt my lesson, you should too.”
She shifts to take a sip of her wine. His desperation goes well with a Côtes du Rhône.
He must hear the water lapping. Suddenly he sounds more alert. “Are you in the bath?”
“I’m working, Roman,” she lies.
“From the bath? It’ll take more than a claw-foot full of bubbles to wash you clean, Mrs Robinson.”
“Have you been keeping yourself clean?”
“What? Yeah, I fucking shower.” That isn’t what she meant, but she doesn’t want to seem like she cares too much.
“Can you Facetime me? I need to check you’re actually Gerri Kellman and not a very advanced voice-replicating sexbot AI. For cyber security reasons.”
“No, Roman. Good night.”
“You’re like… naked, right? Like right now? Gerri, I am going to die.”
“I hope you rest in peace. I’ll make sure to bar Frank from your funeral.”
She hangs up before he can croak out another obscenity, and sinks down into the water. Mildly irritated, she realizes she does feel a trifle more relaxed.
- -
She tells Tom no the next day. He splutters through a higher offer, which she also declines. It is worth the impending boredom, the ski-crash feeling of failure - I haven’t failed, I have won - and the future fight with her goddaughter to hear the panic in Tom’s voice as he realizes she’s slipping out of the net.
She goes on holiday, just for ten days, on her own. The Seychelles open up to welcome her and then close over her head afterwards. She leaves her phone on silent, on a table downstairs in her villa, and pretends she’s relieved at the distance. She drinks and eats and swims and thinks. She reads; when was the last time she read for pleasure? Retirement is looking increasingly appealing, and yet as it draws to a close, she’s already twitching to get back to New York. Maybe she understands Kendall better than she always thought she did.
She comes back well-rested, four pounds heavier, and feeling significantly more forgiving.