Day 23, 40,238 Words: Too Much Plot? Could be a problem.

Plugging away here at the cottage, and realizing that all of the plot threads I have cast are a bit unwieldy as I try to move toward the end. Even just bringing all of my characters into one room is proving to be a dilemma. Here is Ethan, Jackie, and Annalise in a storage closet in Jackie's Place:

Ethan watched, looking from one to the other, his eyes growing large. They were talking around something, intentionally avoiding saying the words. Intentionally not talking about how much they loved each other then, how much they clearly loved each other still. Who were they protecting? Him? Did they think he could not hear, could not see? Or were they protecting themselves? And why did that seem to matter, in the face of the horrors Jack was describing? Ethan thought about his mother living through what Jack described and he couldn’t make the pieces fit. He would have to break his image of what and who his mother was in order to make any sense of it, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to.

Just then, a loud noise erupted in the room as several ceiling tiles collapsed and someone fell from the ceiling into the room.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh sshhhhhhhhiiiiiiiittttttttttt!” He yelled as he fell. The man rose to his feet, shaking dust from his blond hair, brushing the shoulders of his cape and rising to his full height, demonstrating surprising dignity.

Jackie looked at the man sardonically. “Luckily this room is soundproofed.” Gordon looked at him quizzically, as though he had just noticed him.

“I forgot my pencil,” he said, striding across the room, and, unlikely as it seemed, he retrieved a pencil from the shelf of the storage room.

“Gordon?” Annalise and Ethan said, identical looks of shock on their faces.

“Hello again,” he said in a friendly tone, as though this were the most normal thing in the world, as though this was just his way of dropping in on friends. His face turned serious as he turned back to Jackie.

“There is a man here looking for them,” Gordon said, nodding his head in Annalise and Ethan’s direction. “Says he’s their lawyer. They are on their way over, you’re out of time.” Jackie cursed quietly. There was so much more to say, so much more they needed to know. Then he paused, looked over at Annalise.

“You called a lawyer?” he asked.

“I had to think fast,” she replied defensively. “At the time I didn’t exactly know that my entire life was a giant government conspiracy,” she reminded him.

“Oh, it isn’t the government,” Gordon said. Jackie shot him a glare.

“I hadn’t exactly got to that yet,” he said and held his hand up to silence the questions that Ethan and Annalise were peppering him with.

“Not now!” he said in a low voice. Then he softened his tone. “We will get to that, I promise.” He turned back to Annalise.

“You have to go talk to this lawyer before they find us in here,” he said, ushering them toward the door. “Get him to buy you some time.”

“Or her,” Gordon corrected the sexist microaggression automatically. “Or them,” he added.

“Right, thank you,” Jackie said, turning his attention back to Annalise. “He or she or they should be able to buy you some time, if they’re any good. Who did you call?”

Annalise looked uncomfortable as she answered. “I called… Ethan’s father. He’s a lawyer- a good one.”

Jackie raised his eyebrows at her but said nothing for a moment. He processed the information, weighed it. Although it was unexpected, perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing. No, perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing at all.

“This could work. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

In the past... 

As she rose from the bed, she noticed that he had left his business card on her bedside table. So Kenny had a real name after all. “Brock Hartfield, attorney” it read, and listed some law firm she had never heard of and didn’t give a shit about. She was oddly touched by the gesture, and though she had no intention of calling him, she also didn’t throw it out.

In the days and weeks that followed, Annalise mourned the loss of Jack all over again. It felt like she was detoxing, getting him out of her system. She was both desperate to see him again and sick at the thought. She dragged herself into work, pale and miserable and intent to not fall any further behind. Her advisor looked at her with sympathy and sent her home to suffer. The academy was no place to heal from a heart break. She briefly thought about writing a song about that, but then wisely reconsidered. There was a reason no one had written a song about the pain of academia.

When she ran out of tears, and tissues, and patience, Annalise rose to her feet. She needed help. She went to see her mother. 

Her mother gives her some advice...

Annalise looked at her mother miserably. “Oh dear. I can see that this is worse than I had thought.” Catherine sighed and sat next to Annalise. “This pain will not kill you, although I know it feels like it will. It will make you stronger. It is like an inoculation- you get sicker to get stronger. And I know you will never, never find yourself in this place again. If you want to be the one in control then you have to be the one to control the narrative. You make them see what you want them to see. And you keep your own heart to yourself. It is yours to break and it is yours to mend.”

Annalise didn’t cry, although she wanted to. She missed Jack like she would miss losing an arm- she didn’t know where she ended and he began- he was a part of her. But if an arm is damaged enough, it needs to be amputated to save the rest of the body. She knew, had known for some time that in order to save her life he had to go. Yes, she missed him, but as she listened to her mother, she realized that she was mourning something else, as well. She was mourning for herself. She was mourning the feeling of sunlight on her face, of warmth on her skin, the feeling of seeing someone, of being seen. It had been something she hadn’t known she had missed until it was there. And now, as Catherine spoke, she knew that she would have to live without those feelings, perhaps forever. To survive this heartbreak, she would have to harden her heart. The arm had to go, and so did the softness she had allowed to grow inside of her heart.

She hugged her mother, and turned to go.

“Annalise,” her mother said. Annalise turned to face her mother. “Don’t see him again.” There was something beyond motherly advice in her tone, a note of warning. Annalise looked at her mother, wondering what she knew. But her mother’s face communicated nothing, showing only what her mother wanted Annalise to see.