Chapter Text
Gerri doesn’t take the job. She wants to; every part of her is screaming to take it, because it feels like the bond that tethers her to Waystar is too strong to break, because she’s not sure what she will be , without Waystar. It’s terrifying, almost paralysingly so, to imagine life without the company—and the family—that her life has revolved around since she was 24 years old. But she’s just so tired , and that tiredness coalesces into something even more paralysing than the fear of the unknown. As she fiddles with her phone, trying to make up her mind to call Tom and tell him she accepts, she feels a sudden, deep-seated conviction that it will literally kill her. Another year cleaning up Waystar mess, trying to keep the company afloat as Matsson and Tom probably fuck up again and again and President Jimenez drags the cruises scandal back up—it’s going to end up with her flat on the floor of her office, dead of a heart attack before she’s 65. Just like Baird.
She has to get out, she realises. And more than that, she has to get away. When’s the last time she took a vacation, a real vacation, not a work trip, not a yacht that’s a gilded cage?
So she closes up her brownstone, leaves Baird’s ancient tortoise with her younger daughter, and buys a one-way ticket to Europe. She starts in London, because London’s easy. She knows London, lived there for three years after all, cleaning up Waystar’s London office. Some of her old favourite restaurants and bars are still there, and a few old friends as well. She catches up with them, over martinis and little tea sandwiches, and they all tell her that they never thought she would retire. She never thought she would, either, and that creeping fear that had come over her as she contemplated calling Tom still hasn’t gone away. She never tells anyone about it, but she remains a hundred percent convinced that staying at Waystar would have killed her, that she would never have had a retirement. Just like Baird. They should make a plaque for us in the lobby of Waystar, she thinks one evening in London as she’s walking home from the theatre. All those who died on duty for Waystar.
Yes, London is nice, and it’s easy, everyone speaks English and she remembers her way around pretty well. But maybe it’s a little too familiar, and she starts to get a little bored. By the time she’s meeting the same friend for drinks for the third time since she arrived, she realises it’s time to go.
The next morning, she’s on the Eurostar to Paris. She’d actually forgotten how much she likes Paris, she realises when she arrives. The area around the Gare du Nord where the Eurostar comes in is grimy, sure, and there’s some truth in the cliches about people being a bit curt in cafes and shops, but Gerri’s a New Yorker. She can handle it, and she’s never really been the kind of person who needs or even wants to make small talk with her waiter. People are sitting outside at cafes even though it’s January, all bundled up in coats with warm blankets over their laps, and it’s kind of nice. The city feels very alive , and she likes it, thinks she might stay awhile.
She stays in a hotel the first couple of nights, overindulges in the rich foods that she normally wouldn’t let herself have, gets scoops of Berthillon ice cream in the afternoon that she eats standing out on a bridge over the Seine and treats herself to an Angelina hot chocolate with a mountain of whipped cream on top. She finds a little apartment out on the Ile Saint Louis, central yet calm, that she can rent for three weeks and she settles into a little bit of a routine. By the end of the first week, the baker on her street recognises her, as does the waiter at the cafe where she has her morning coffee every day. It’s nice. Gerri isn’t sure how long she can live a quiet life like this without getting bored, but for now, after the slow nightmare of her last few months at Waystar and especially the swift nightmare of her last week there, it’s nice.
She goes shopping and spends far too much money on a cashmere coat, and the stray thought occurs to her, as she’s sipping a glass of wine in a cafe sitting in her new coat, that in a way, Roman Roy’s dick pics paid for that coat.
She’s done her best, until then, not to think about him on her trip, but that one errant thought seems to have opened the floodgates, and as she walks back to her apartment that night along the banks of the river, he’s suddenly all that she can think about. She’s startled to realise, first of all, that while she’s still very angry with him—how dare he tell her that she wasn’t good at her job? How dare he use that bullshit excuse to fire her and then the very next day, try and smooth it all over, try and act like they could just go back to normal, like he didn’t even understand how badly he had hurt her?—but she’s surprised to realise that her anger has cooled more quickly than she would have expected, and that it coexists along with a deep-seated worry. He’d been so distraught, at the funeral, and then afterwards— it had broken her heart, a little, to see him hurt, and it had absolutely gutted her to see Kendall going after him, the worst echo of his father. Gerri honestly didn’t know if they would come back from that, he and Ken, and her heart ached a little at how hard it would be for Roman, if he’d lost his brother.
So she worries about him, the worry breaking through what’s left of her anger, and she wonders where he is, if he’s still in New York, if the cut on his forehead has healed, if it’s left a scar. She wonders how he’s doing, if he’s finally begun to allow himself to grieve properly. She wonders if he thinks about her, if he hates her for leaving without saying goodbye, if she had traded whatever affection he had for her for the eye-watering sums she received. She wonders if he knows that she never would have actually sued him.
She wishes that she had said something to him, after the board meeting, that she’d said it’ll be okay or I’m sorry or it won’t always hurt this badly. The truth was, she hadn’t been sure that she would be able to speak to him without bursting into tears, not if she had to look at him like that, with his face all messed up, bandaged and bleeding. She wishes that she had said something, but she’s not ready to hear from him yet, still has his number blocked, and yet—
She gets an idea, buys a postcard of a cat curled up in front of the Eiffel Tower. He’d mentioned that he liked cats once, she remembers, and she hopes it might bring a smile to his face.
Hi Roman, she writes, wondering if he’ll recognise her handwriting. I still have your number blocked, so don’t feel any need to try to reply, but I just wanted to say, I’m doing okay and I hope you are, too. It was really hard, to see you hurting so badly. Things really will get better. I promise. She signs it just G. He’ll know it’s from her.
She feels lighter, after she sends it off, knowing that her little missive is on its way to him. She hopes he’s still in New York to receive it, but she figures he’ll be back there sooner or later even if he’s decided to travel some too.
It’s what she can offer him, for now. She knows it’s not everything he probably needs, but it’s what she can offer him, what the angry part of her brain will allow her to give to the worried part of her brain.
Sending the postcard made her feel a little better about how she’d left things between them, but it doesn’t help with the problem of how now she started thinking about him again, she can’t stop. She realises, one evening, her postcard probably already sitting in his mailbox, that she’s angry with herself , as well as with him. She knows, if she really is honest, that she messed some stuff up, that she had a hand in what came to pass. She knows that she could have explained the Laurie thing better. She knows that she had sent some mixed signals that didn’t exactly help him understand that she really, really wanted him to stop with the pictures, that it was too big a risk for them. And she knows that, maybe if she hadn’t been too scared, if she had made sure that he knew how much she had come to—care for him—he would have known how much it would hurt her, wouldn’t have been able to fire her and pass it off as a purely professional decision. She had, to some degree, brought that on herself, with her nothing has ever happened between us other than of a professional nature . She’d handed him the hilt of the knife, right then, given him the easy excuse to pretend that his father’s last orders were just good business and that it wouldn’t cut her to the core. Because that was the truth, it had hurt her because it was him. Logan had fired her countless times and she’d always been annoyed but she’d rolled her eyes and known he’d come back before long, and that she could probably finagle a raise out of it. But it had hurt because it was Roman , and because she’d actually really kind of cherished it when he’d said before that she was a real good job-doer, and realistically she knew that he hadn’t meant what he’d said in LA, but it still stung. Everything had gone wrong since she’d been named CEO, and she wished so badly that she could go back to the yacht, undo all the mistakes that both of them had made since then and all the hurtful things they’d done and said.
She wonders what would have happened, if they’d both been smarter, if she’d made it clear that Laurie was the one who was just business, just a get out of jail free card for cruises, and that the thing with Roman was personal. She wonders what would have happened if Roman hadn’t started sending those pictures, or had understood in time that she wanted him to stop. She wonders if there could have been a path to something real for them, thinks about how now that Logan’s dead and they’re both out of Waystar, the only real barrier to them being together is everything they had done to each other, everything that she was pretty sure they both regretted. She wonders if there’s still a path back to that, or something like it.
She’s not sure, but she buys another postcard the next morning. Interestingly, she doesn’t feel the need or the desire to rehash the past with him. Thinking too hard about the recent past would probably just make her wonder why she was even contacting him, and thinking too hard about the distant past could devastate her with what could have been and now might never be.
Instead, she writes about what she’s been filling her days with. It snowed a bit yesterday, she writes in neat script. Not too much, but it stuck a little while, and it really looked beautiful; I went on a long walk, ended up in the Place des Vosges, which is what’s on the front of this card. I decided that I’m going to stay here another week, at least, I’m not ready to go yet.
She sends a card showing the front of a church, next. I saw a really lovely organ concert here the other night . I always liked the organ a lot—when my parents took me to church when I was a little kid, I never really cared about the religious stuff but I always loved the music.
She doesn’t know why she’s telling him these things. Maybe because given the fact that it’s their only form of contact, it doesn’t really feel, sometimes, like she’s actually reaching him. She doesn’t know if she is, of course. He might be out in LA, or travelling around as well, or he might have sold that apartment in New York and bought another one, to which she doesn’t know the address. He might have thrown away the cards without reading them as soon as he recognised her handwriting. She was at least satisfied that nothing really bad had happened to him, figured she would have seen about it on the news.
But she finds herself hoping that she is getting through to him, and hoping that the little messages are a source of joy for him and not a bitter reminder of the past. That fear starts to gnaw at her, and in the next card, she writes I’m going to unblock your number. If you don’t want to get any more cards from me, it’s okay, you just have to tell me and I’ll stop. She realises the irony, at some level, that she’s been sending him unsolicited items, though of a far more innocuous nature, she hopes. She understands a little more, suddenly, why he sent her all those pictures, understands the way that sending off a little precious piece of yourself out into the world could get addictive. She doesn’t forgive him for it, yet, but she understands, a little. But if you do want to get more cards, and you want to talk, I have a rule that I need to ask you to follow. For each card you receive, you can send me one text. But if you send me anything inappropriate, anything at all, I will permanently block you and that will be the end of that. If you understand and accept these terms, then text me when you receive this. G.
She had chosen a card with a photograph of the river at sunset, and only after she sends it off does she think about how the Pont des Arts was prominently featured in the picture, how people tended to think of it as one of the most romantic spots in the city, had hung up so many locks on it and thrown the key into the Seine that the locks had actually compromised the bridge’s structural integrity and the city had had to take measures to stop the tradition.
Oh well, Gerri thinks, Roman won’t take it as a grand romantic gesture, not when she’s only ready to allow him one text in response to each of her cards.
She waits a bit nervously over the next few days, not sure how long it actually takes for a postcard to get from Paris to New York. After six days, she thinks that surely it should be there by then, and she’s surprised by how…disappointed she is that she still hasn’t received a message from him. That could mean anything, she reminds herself. It could mean that the card’s stuck in the mail still, or lost. It could mean that he’s not in New York. Or it could mean that he genuinely doesn’t want to talk to her, and why, when Gerri’s the one who went no contact first, talking about how he could only talk to her if Frank and Karl were present, does that bother her as much as it does, itching at her and making her heart feel a funny little flutter that she thinks is sadness?
She knows why, at some level. He’d gotten under her skin, made her take risks again and again, and now just enough time has passed that she’s starting to think less about how he’d proved her right that those risks were not worth taking, and more about how he’d defended her on the yacht, how he’d used to look at her like she hung the moon and the stars, how he’d told her that she was his Everest .
She doesn’t really, she realises, want them to give up on each other, not if they can help it, not if there’s a way that she can dip one toe at a time back into this water without getting scalded.
She’s feeling a little sorry for herself and her empty message box, and she books herself a seven-course tasting menu with free-flowing champagne, and good food and good wine can’t cure all ills but it certainly has always helped her perk up, and she doesn’t check her phone during the dinner and it’s only once she gets out onto the street, shivering slightly at the shock of the chill winter air, that she sees there’s a message. From Roman.
She almost drops her phone opening it up, her fingers are actually trembling, and she lets out a long, slow breath when she reads “just got your card!! Gerri, I have to be honest, I bawled like a baby when I got your first card. Kind of thought I was never going to hear from you again, so yeah, of course, any terms you want to set are more than fine. Just, please don’t stop sending them.”
A slow smile breaks over her face, and she’s feeling generous she’s so relieved, and she types back, “that’s very good to hear,” and then, “that doesn’t have to count as your text for this time, if there’s something else you want to say.”
He types for a long minute, and then, “there’s a million things I want to say but some of them I’m still hoping that someday I might get to say to you in person. The only thing that really matters, I guess, is how fucking sorry I am. Like, I’m the sorriest man in New York, maybe in the world,” and Gerri chuckled at the hyperbole. “And that if there’s any way to fix things, I want to try it. No matter how hard it is or how long it takes.”
“Thank you, Roman,” she writes back simply. It would have been easy, to want to continue talking to him, but she’d put in place the rules she had for a reason. She needed time, needed time away from him, needed to not spend every minute thinking about him and their…situation and the thrills and the pain that it had brought her. So she closes out of the messaging app, and in the morning, she buys a new card, this time a drawing of the street she’d been staying on. It was safe, to do that now, because she would have left the city by the time Roman received the card. She wanted to believe that he wouldn’t try and come looking for her, but it was hard, to rebuild the trust she’d once had in him. Trust, but verify.
This is where I’ve been staying for the last four weeks, she admits. This little island is fascinating; it’s right in the heart of the city yet feels like a little village. I’m going to miss it—especially because everyone has gotten to know me. The baker, the waiter who gets me my coffee every morning, the little chocolate shop where I treat myself sometimes. I never had that, in New York. Probably because I never had time to sit at cafes and go get fresh bread. I don’t like how it ended, but I think it’s good that we got out, Roman. Take care of yourself. Speak soon.