September 17th, 2002
Edmund learned how to love with Anthony.
In many ways, he thinks it might be unfair to the rest of his children, the way his whole world opened up the second he met Anthony, the second Violet pressed the smallest, most beautiful person into his arms with a tired smile. He still remembers thinking that he would break his son by accident as he held him.
But he looked down at Anthony, and he knew his life would never be the same.
Now, his son is eighteen years old.
Now, his son is a grown man.
How did that happen? Edmund would like to think he pays good attention to his children (despite having seven of them. Seven! When Edmund and Violet picked their way through a high school pregnancy, he never anticipated having such a full house), but he cannot fathom how his son is turning eighteen years old today.
He cannot fathom letting his son leave this house, letting his son apply to those far flung colleges for people as talented as his eldest son.
No, Edmund will miss him far too much.
“And many more!” Eloise and Francesca crow, and Edmund snaps back to the present moment.
He lifts his new camera, and he points it at his son. Anthony gives him a bemused look, and Edmund cannot help but marvel at the teenager on the other side of the lens. He looks so much like Edmund that it makes Edmund so proud he thinks he might burst. Violet complains, sometimes, that she is just ‘a vessel for the Bridgerton family,’ but Edmund thinks she can have the other six.
Let him have their oldest.
“Well?” Edmund asks, grinning. “Too old to be making wishes now?”
“I’m just making sure you have enough for your b-roll,” he shoots back, proof that he pays attention when Edmund explains how photography and videography works. Benedict and Colin might be artsier than Anthony, but he pays attention.
That, in itself, is an important skill.
Anthony takes a deep breath—a dramatically deep breath, much to the sighs of disappointment from his sisters—and leans forward and—
Gregory starts wailing.
“Mama!” Eloise bellows. “The stupid baby’s trying to ruin Ant’s birthday.”
“We do not call the baby stupid,” Edmund says immediately, biting back his smile.
Violet sighs. “We do not call our siblings, especially the ones who cannot defend themselves, names.”
Benedict whispers something to Eloise.
Eloise’s face goes redder. “Mom! Benedict just called me stupid!”
“I thought she was old enough to defend herself,” Benedict says slyly.
Edmund tries to ignore the chaos imploding around them, and he lifts the camera again. That, and he needs to hide his smile from the rest of the family because he knows it will not be a good look. He needs to be stern.
Through the camera’s lens, he can see Anthony’s smile starting to flag.
“Mom,” Anthony says after a second. “It’s fine. Hand him over to me.”
“No, Anthony, it’s your birthday,” Violet says, trying in vain to get Gregory to stop shouting. She’s bouncing him on his hip, and while that usually soothes him, he seems dead set on screaming right now.
“Mom, I want you to say,” Anthony says.
And Edmund takes it all back.
He can understand how Anthony is eighteen-years-old because Edmund cannot imagine many eighteen-year-olds who would adore his family in this way. Who would be willing to take his little brother in his arms during his birthday and soothe him?
While Anthony might look like him, Edmund is a firm believer that Gregory looks like neither Edmund nor Violet but instead a carbon copy of Anthony. Their oldest son and their youngest son.
That’s a legacy.
“Do you want to make a wish too?” Anthony whispers to Gregory.
And if Edmund is allowed to have a selfish wish, he would wish that Anthony has the best eighteenth year. One day, he will have responsibilities of his own; he will have his own world to look after.
Right now, Edmund hopes Anthony has fun. He hopes Anthony looks around and sees just how much love surrounds him, and he hopes Anthony can look inside as well and see just how good of a man he has grown into.
No, he’s not worried about Anthony being an adult.
He’s just damn proud.
October 5th, 2002
“You know, that will stunt your growth.”
Anthony flinches, and he overpours the milk into his coffee. He glares down at the mug like it personally did him wrong, and Edmund resists the urge to laugh at his son. Instead, he watches as his son, solemnly, places the milk gallon back into the staff fridge.
Then, he turns to Edmund, and he gives him a look that is all Violet stubbornness right there. Violet might not think she’s stubborn, but Edmund knows her better than anyone else.
“I don’t know if I believe that,” Anthony says.
His petulance almost makes Edmund laugh out loud, but he bites it back. His son dressed up to come to the law firm; he always does. No matter how many times Edmund tells him that everyone loves him at the firm, that he would always be welcome there, Anthony wants to belong. So, these are the times he combs through his wild hair. These are the times he wears his polo shirt and his nicest jeans.
Edmund wishes he only drank coffee in an attempt to be grown up, but he knows his son keeps late hours. He takes hard classes, much harder classes than Edmund himself ever attempted. He makes time for his siblings. He has a social life that Edmund tries his best to ignore and pretend he knows nothing about.
Edmund clears his throat and focuses his mood back on the conversation. He raises his coffee mug. “I don’t either, but I know better than to argue with your mother.”
“Even though you’re right?” Anthony asks.
“I don’t know if she sees it that way.”
Besides, Violet has told Edmund in no uncertain terms that he needs to join the crusade against coffee. She doesn’t want Anthony to get addicted in high school. When he reaches college, he will be truly sunk.
“Did she send you to pull me away?” Edmund asks after a second.
“Something like that,” Anthony admits, sounding shockingly guilty, “but I didn’t want to distract you from your big case.”
No, Edmund thinks with a smile, he just wants the details of the big case.
It might be too early—no, it definitely is too early—but he knows his son will become a better lawyer than him one day. Edmund knows he’s good at what he does, and he wouldn’t trade it for any other career, but he didn’t have any real passion starting off. He just knew he was going to inherit the firm from his father, and he wanted to make sure the family’s business wouldn’t end up in a stranger’s hands.
Anthony actually likes law. He thinks like a lawyer, always ready to argue his case, always ready to go digging through other people’s evidence.
Still, Edmund should take the cue from Violet and head home soon. “No, your mother is right. Besides, I’d much rather be with my kids at home than here.”
Anthony makes a face immediately.
Edmund cannot contain his laughter this time. “You don’t agree? I didn’t realize we’d hired you as an intern yet.”
“Would you?” Anthony asks.
He shakes his head. “When the time comes, you’ll have a place here. You know that. I just want you to enjoy your childhood right now. You’ll be trapped into seven years of schooling soon enough anyway.”
“I don’t know if I’d say trapped.”
No, Edmund doesn’t know if he’d say trapped either. And, if he’s being honest, Edmund is a little too excited that Anthony will soon be old enough to intern at Bridgerton & Co. It means his son will be working with him.
Edmund can see it now. He’ll let Anthony have his friends, of course, and he’ll let Anthony make connections throughout the office, but Edmund will be able to take him for lunch, just the two of them. It will be good, especially since Anthony will be heading off to Yale or something crazy for undergrad.
Actually, speaking of that…
Edmund waits until Anthony takes a sip of his coffee—because, look, Edmund might be a grown adult, but he still enjoys a good prank—and then, he leans forward and asks, “So, have you decided where you want to go for college yet?”
Anthony chokes on his coffee.
October 31st, 2002
Francesca just needs to be brave.
She hears that word a lot at school. It was one of her spelling words, actually! B-R-A-V-E. It means doing things even though you’re scared, but Francesca thinks that’s a little silly (not stupid, Mommy tells them not to use the word stupid). Why do things that make you scared?
So, she hesitates outside Mommy and Daddy’s door before turning around and going across the hallway.
She can hear Anthony in his room; she likes the music always drifting under the door. It’s the scratch of his pencil—he writes so hard it looks like he writes it in pen! Francesca wishes she could do that—or the clicking of his calculator. Sometimes, he’ll hum or murmur something to himself.
Francesca tried to explain that to Eloise the other day. That there is music in every inch of the house.
Eloise stared at her, and she called Francesca crazy.
Eloise does not listen to Mommy when Mommy tells them not to use certain words.
Francesca takes a deep breath, and she knocks on the door. Then, she knocks again when it’s obvious that Anthony didn’t hear her over his music.
There is a pause where there is nothing but silence. Francesca almost runs away then; she’s really good at that. She can always win when they play tag, but she ends up hiding on the playground more often than not. She misses the days recess used to be with Eloise’s class, too. Then, Eloise would find her on the playground, and Francesca would sit with her and Penelope, even though Francesca is always too nervous (that’s a spelling word, too: N-E-R-V-O-U-S; it was in the feelings unit) to talk to Penelope.
Then, Anthony opens the door. “What, Benedict?”
His gaze slides down, though.
“Not Benedict,” Francesca says softly.
Anthony is grinning when he crouches down, getting on eye-level with her. He does that a lot. Francesca doesn’t quite get that either. If she was tall, she thinks she would just enjoy it. Mommy says that a lot of girls don’t want to be tall, but Daphne said she wanted to be tall, and if Daphne wants to be tall, Francesca thinks she does too.
Especially so Anthony doesn’t have to crouch down every time.
“What’s up, Fran?” he asks.
“I need help with my costume,” she blurts.
He blinks. Then, he looks at her, curious. “What’s your costume, Frannie? I don’t think I got a chance to see it before you went to school.”
“I don’t want to wear that one,” she says. “That one is silly.”
“Oh.”
“Doesn’t El have the good ones? The old ones?” she asks. She remembers Daddy saying something about the ‘other’ costumes, but Mommy insisted that Francesca looked so cute in her costume she wore to school.
And people told her she looked cute all day, so that wasn’t the problem.
No, the problem was how much everyone kept staring at her. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like how bright it was. She didn’t like how many girls and boys kept tugging on the peaco*ck feathers because they ‘wanted to see if they were real.’
“I think there are some in the attic,” Anthony says slowly. “Have you asked Mom?”
Francesca just stares at Anthony, pleading. She doesn’t know how to say it. She doesn’t want Mommy to be sad about it; she knows Mommy thinks it’s a good costume. But Eloise wore something ‘lame’ last year. Eloise was just telling her that.
She wouldn’t mind being lame.
“What costume would you want?” Anthony asks, still a little confused.
“Eloise’s,” she says.
“From last year? But that was just a black dress—” And he must figure something out because he says oh, very quietly. Then, he stands up and offers his hand to Francesca. “You didn’t like your other costume, did you?”
“Too bright,” she tells him. “But it was still good. And special.”
“I’m sure you looked amazing,” he says, “but I heard you wanted to wear Eloise’s old costume because you could match with Colin then.”
“No, I—”
But Anthony squeezes her hand, and when she looks up at him (because he really is tall), he winks at her. She knows that wink. He explained that wink to her. It means they’re keeping secrets together.
She smiles to herself. She likes having secrets with Anthony. It makes her feel special. The other Bridgertons might have secrets with him—how would she know? if they were really secrets, they wouldn’t be told to anyone else—but she knows she has secrets with him.
They are always secrets that make things more fun. That makes things better.
“Let’s go get you that Hermione costume,” Anthony says, “and you can match with Colin tonight. And it won’t be too bright.”
November 1st, 2002
Benedict likes their arrangement half of the time.
He knew Anthony got invited to the biggest parties of the year, but Benedict never really understood why. It’s not like Anthony is cool. No, his brother studies too much, and he nags too much, and he doesn’t even play any sports (unless you count Pall Mall, but Pall Mall is more of a bloodbath than a sport, so Benedict wouldn’t count it).
When Benedict started getting invites, he knew it was because he was Anthony’s little brother. Not because he was cool, which is fine because Benedict doesn’t study enough, and he wants to be an artist in a world full of people primed to take over their parents’ businesses, and he also doesn’t play sports.
Anthony and Benedict made a deal. They would alternate who drank every party; that way, someone could still drive them home. So, on the nights where Benedict is the designated driver, he has to suffer the humiliation of being mistaken for Gregory.
Gregory!
Who can barely walk!
“I’m,” Anthony slurs against Benedict’s neck as they make their way through the admittedly sleepy neighborhood, “not even that drunk. I didn’t even drink that much.”
Benedict rolls his eyes. “That’s not what the beer pong table said.”
“I’m a god at beer pong,” Anthony says without skipping a beat. “Nobody ever sees it coming.”
“I didn’t see it coming,” Benedict says, begrudgingly. He wants to stay in a bad mood—because he lost count of the times someone asked him if he was related to Anthony, or even just asked if he was Number Two or Number Three; Colin isn’t even in high school!—but beer pong was a shocking highlight.
He does think that was the moment Anthony tipped from tipsy to drunk, though. He had to drink for two, after all.
“Imma teach you,” Anthony says. “You’d be good at it.”
“I wasn’t good tonight.”
Anthony thinks about it. Then, he giggles against Benedict’s neck, and he slumps a little too much of his weight into Benedict.
Benedict yelps and tries to shake his brother. “If you make me drag you to the car, I’m never coming to a party with you again.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Anthony says, and he does make a valiant attempt of walking alongside Benedict. “But you wouldn’t be good at sports. You’re a… drawer-er.”
“A drawer-er,” Benedict repeats, a little amused despite himself.
“A drawer-er,” Anthony says again, like that will make it more of a real word. “People who are drawer-ers cannot be good at sports. It’s, like, a crime.”
“A crime?”
“Imma call the cops on you.”
Benedict snorts at that, and Anthony looks absurdly proud of himself for that.
“You don’t have to call the cops on me,” Benedict says, playing along, “if I suck at beer pong. I thought that was the arrangement.”
“Nope, I’d have to call because you’re a baby,” he says, grinning.
“I’m a baby? You’re not twenty-one either.”
“I could drink in London.” Anthony wrinkles his nose at that, and he looks up at the sky. “We should live in London.”
“Should we?”
“Yup,” he says, popping the P. “Because we’d be, like, so good there.”
“Why’d we be good?”
“We’d get to say the things like… like biscuits instead of cookies. Can you imagine that? Gregory chanting biscuits? Like, that’d be so… so… posh!” He laughs again, and he presses his face against Benedict’s collarbone this time.
Then, he looks up at Benedict under his messy hair. “When’d you get so tall?”
“I’m growing up—”
“No, you’re not allowed,” Anthony says immediately.
“I’m not allowed?” Benedict asks.
“No,” he says. “You’re going to be my little brother. Always. No growing up.”
Oh, there’s the reminder. Benedict can’t resist the scowl from that turn of phrase because he is so sick of only being Anthony’s little brother. He is his own person! He is more than Number Two out of seven (soon to be eight; that’s crazy; Mom and Dad, you have to stop f*cking).
Anthony tugs on Benedict’s arm, though, and he pouts. “Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Benedict says immediately. Benedict is actually very easygoing, thank you very much.
But Anthony makes a face at that. “Ben…”
“I thought we were talking about London,” Benedict says.
“Well, now we’re talking about whether you had fun tonight,” Anthony says with a shocking amount of composure. Of course he’d sober up to older brother at Benedict.
Benedict gently nudges Anthony into the passenger seat. “Let’s talk about this on the drive. We still have to sneak you home.”
November 28th, 2002
“Somehow,” Violet says with a laugh, “all of your siblings have found other things to do. I appreciate you helping out.”
Anthony looks over at her, apparently caught off guard by the compliment. How did Violet pull that one off? That her son thinks he should be in the kitchen with her, peeling potatoes which, frankly, Violet’s least favorite thing to do, rather than goofing around with the rest of his siblings?
“I could go track them down,” he offers. “I think the boys are watching football in the den.”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” she says affectionately. Every once and a while, a cheer will go up from the den, and she will know one team or another scored a touchdown. Some families might pick a team to support; the Bridgertons allow one another to support whoever they’d like to keep friendly competition alive. “I’m shocked you didn’t join them.”
He shrugs. “I’m not much of a football person.”
“That will change in college,” she promises. “I didn’t care for football, but something about being able to go to the games changes everything.”
That wins a smile out of her son. “Did you ever go with Dad?”
Violet laughs before she can help herself. He stares at her, wide-eyed, so she hurries to explain. “I did occasionally, but we went with our friends more often. You might not believe this about me, but I was too rowdy for your father.”
“You?”
Violet swats at him, but she cannot keep the memories from washing over her, all the things she misses from her days of being younger and being wild. Sure, they already had Anthony (and maybe even Benedict, depending on the timeline) in college, but Edmund’s parents were always generous enough to watch over the children. They insisted they should still get the best college experience ever.
So, Violet would go with the other girls she befriended, and they would act like fools. They would dress up in the skimpiest outfits—and man, does she miss being nineteen and bold enough to show off her midriff even with her stretch marks—and do wild makeup, and they would cheer like their lives depended on it.
The few times Edmund went with her, he commented she seemed like an entirely different person. He didn’t mind it, of course, but he didn’t understand how Violet could go so wild at the football games and then back down during the Bridgerton competitions. She didn’t know how to explain Mr. Bridgerton was a card shark and intimidated the hell out of Violet.
So, yes, Violet was wild in college.
“Come on, Mom,” Anthony says, though, grinning. “You didn’t seem like…”
“I used to sneak through the windows of the clubs,” Violet says, enjoying his shock and awe now. “If you go to the University of Chicago, you’ll see what I mean about White’s. It’s a good place to be.”
“Are you encouraging sneaking into clubs?” He gapes at her. “Mom, that’s illegal.”
“Please, like I don’t know what you boys get up to now.” And when Anthony pretends to be aghast, she rolls her eyes. “That’s a shockingly good poker face. You did not inherit that from your father or me, that’s for sure. My parents always knew what I was up to.”
Excluding, of course, Anthony himself.
When she announced her pregnancy, that was a shock.
“Grandma did?” he asks dubiously.
“She pretended she didn’t. It was easier for her.”
It sours the mood a little, thinking of Vivian Ledger and all the memories she missed out on. The last time Violet encountered her mother, it had been an argument in public, her mother insulting the size of Violet’s family, the way Violet never cared enough to ‘look back once her father had passed away.’
Violet doesn’t know how a mother can look at her children and not adore them to pieces.
She could never look at any of her children, including the newest Bridgerton, the unborn one who is only beginning to show, and not love them no matter what. They could be serial killers. They could be the worst people she ever met. But she would love them no matter what, and she thinks she would find a way to like them as serial killers.
Violet looks at her son, and a part of her is humbled every time she looks toward Anthony. She was eighteen when she gave birth to him. She didn’t know a thing about parenthood, and she was terrified most of the time. Sure, she was also embarrassingly in love, and she could never imagine a better life, but she was scared.
But look at him, helping her cook Thanksgiving dinner.
Surely, that means Violet and Edmund are doing something right.
December 8th, 2002
Edmund almost doesn’t want to wake them up. In fact, he almost wants to creep upstairs to his bedroom and grab the camera.
All of his children lie asleep in the living room, all cuddled up together. Benedict and Eloise claimed the couch early on—and good for them, truly, because it must be the most comfortable spot—and Benedict wrapped his arms around Eloise to keep her from falling off the couch, clutching her to his chest like a teddy bear. Her little hair is smashed against his chest, adorably.
Daphne sleeps in the arm chair, Gregory in her lap. Gregory is holding Beary—a disastrous old teddy bear that has seen every Bridgerton through life—and he is tucked into her arm. Daphne sits with her knees drawn up to her chest in an odd, almost birdlike posture, her head starting to drift and fall onto Gregory’s head before she shifts, even in sleep, to give Gregory more room.
And, in the middle of the floor, Anthony sleeps between Francesca and Colin. Francesca managed to worm against Anthony’s side, and she clutches his arm like a lifeline. Colin drools on his other shoulder, a leg thrown haphazardly across both Anthony and Francesca’s legs, guaranteeing he will have to be the first one to move and get up when the time comes.
Edmund allows himself another minute or two, just taking in all his children. There is so much love in this room.
Then, he creeps across the room and grabs the blankets from the basket. He drapes the first over Daphne and Gregory. The second goes to Anthony, Francesca, and Colin. Then, he settles the last on Benedict and Eloise, and he sits on the only edge of the couch he can claim without disturbing them, doing the grunt work of rewinding VCR tape.
He watches Aladdin speed backwards, watching the prince go back to street rat go back to fake prince, when Anthony stirs in the middle of the carpet.
“Dad?” he asks, his voice muzzy.
“Go back to sleep, Ant,” Edmund murmurs.
Anthony yawns, and he shifts to get a better view of Edmund. “Too late. I think I’m up. We must’ve fallen asleep.”
Obviously, Edmund might have said in the morning when his children were ready to joke around.
Right now, he allows himself a soft smile. “It was ambitious to watch so many Disney movies, especially with how hard you have been working at school.”
“Oh, I haven’t been working that late.”
Edmund levels him with a disbelieving stare.
Anthony stares at the TV, almost long enough Edmund thinks he falls back asleep. Then, he shakes his head, just a little, not enough to wake Francesca. “I don’t mind working hard. School comes easier to me than it does for the others.”
Edmund knows he’ll never win this argument with Anthony; he thinks Anthony will give himself a stress ulcer any day now. He cannot imagine his son being anything less than a perfectionist. Whenever Edmund tries to broach the topic, gently nudge him into slowing down, Anthony flashes a smile and insists it doesn’t affect him.
So, he switches topics. “You’re good with them.”
Anthony makes a movement, which gets Colin clutching to him. Edmund presses his lips together, trying to keep the chuckle from escaping.
Anthony stares down at Colin, the fondness clear in his gaze. “They make it easy for me, especially when they’re asleep. They’re less devilish unconscious.”
“Don’t I know it,” Edmund laughs. “Still, thank you for taking them off our hands tonight. I know you probably had better things to do with a weekend night… then again, if you had too many better things to do, I’m glad we stopped you.”
“Dad,” Anthony groans.
Edmund puts up his hands in mock surrender. “I don’t have to like the parties. But, you know my spiel. If you are going to drink, drink responsibly. Call Mom or me to get a ride home. If you take Benedict, keep an eye on him—”
“I know, I know,” he says.
“I know you do,” Edmund says, and he means it. If Edmund had a younger brother, he doesn’t know if he would’ve been able to protect him as well as Anthony does his siblings. “Still. We’ll miss you when you’re out being a big shot on campus.”
“You’ll have Ben. He’s better with the kids than I am.”
“He’s good with them,” Edmund says honestly. “You’re great with them.”
December 24th, 2002
“Can you help me get Benedict back?” Eloise asks, trying her best to sound ‘ladylike.’ Mom keeps saying she needs to let some things go, that she needs to learn how to be patient, and she’s trying, but sometimes, she wants to tear her older brother’s head off.
Like right now.
Right after Benedict chucked a snowball at her.
Anthony immediately leans closer to her. He told everyone he didn’t want to play in the snow this year, which Eloise thought was stupid because he’s eighteen, he’s not ancient. Yet, there is a gleam in his eyes, and she can tell he hasn’t become completely lame.
“What are the teams right now?” he whispers to her.
She takes it back. Maybe he has gotten too old. “There aren’t teams, Anthony! He just—”
“Quieter, El,” Anthony says with a grin, “we don’t want them to hear.”
She grumbles, but she lowers her voice. She doesn’t want Daphne or Benedict to hear her plans, and she knows both of them are dirty cheaters. They cheat all the time during Pall Mall after all. There’s no way they’re just that good. “He just threw a snowball at me.”
Anthony nods, thinking about it.
He’s the only one who can really take on Benedict, and they all know it. Eloise knows the others don’t think she’s old enough to strategize (see! she knows the word strategize!), but she knows Anthony and Benedict are the same height. Besides, Colin and Daphne seem to be protecting Benedict, and Eloise loves Francesca, but Francesca is still too little.
Anthony leans closer in, and he lowers his voice even deeper. He almost sounds like Dad when he does that, Eloise realizes distantly. “I am going to football-tackle Benedict to the ground. You are going to kick snow in his face.”
Yes.
Eloise grins at that, and she nods.
Anthony gets up, and he starts making the slow walk over to Benedict. He picks his way across the snowy field, taking his sweet time, and Eloise wants to shout and get him to hurry along, but then, she sees the way panic starts unfolding on Benedict’s face.
Benedict pushes Daphne. “Daff, go get Francesca.”
“What? Why?”
“Daff—sh*t!”
Eloise wants to tell him that he’s not allowed to use that word, but Anthony starts sprinting, and Eloise charges after him. Eloise cannot stop her giggles, though. She loves winning more than she loves playing, and she knows they’re going to win with Anthony on their side. She just needs…
Yes!
Francesca lets out a loud wail, moving into Benedict’s path, and Benedict’s eyes go wide. He tries to stop and move around her, too afraid to knock her down because he’s underestimating her (see? more proof she knows strategy), and Anthony launches himself forward.
He collides with Benedict, and they both go tumbling down into the snow.
“You said no roughhousing!” Benedict says.
Anthony grins. “Did I? I don’t remember putting that in writing.”
“Of course you didn’t put it in writing, but—”
Eloise kicks snow directly in his face when he goes to say that. She cackles as Benedict splutters on the snow, trying to get it out of his already bright red face by twisting this way and that way. He tries to get an arm free, but Anthony manages to keep it pinned down, and that only gets Eloise laughing harder.
Take that, Benedict! That’s what he gets for the snowball! That’s what—
Daphne charges at them, and she sends both Anthony and Benedict sliding forward, and Benedict manages to swipe out Eloise’s legs. She cries out as soon as she hits the ground, but then, she’s scrambling upright to shove more snow into Benedict’s face. Anthony is busy dealing with Daphne, and she trusts him to do what he needs to do.
Colin joins them a minute later.
“Who are you even siding with?” Benedict asks after a second.
Anthony grunts as Colin shovels snow into his eyes. “Not mine.”
“I think,” Colin calls out, ignoring Daphne’s attempts to get him to the ground. “I think it’s time for a coup, and there are going to be three sides from here on out.”
“Who would pick your side?” Benedict asks.
Bad question.
Francesca would pick his side.
Eloise glances over at Anthony, trying to see where the tides of battle might turn, when she sees just how hard he’s laughing. Good. With hydras, you always take off the head (that’s right; she remembers Hercules.).
She launches herself forward, and she tangles herself with Anthony’s legs and sends them both into the snow bank.
December 25th, 2002
“You’re not supposed to be the first one up.”
Colin twists around, blinking up at his older brother. Then, he offers his most charming smile—and Colin knows which smile is his most charming; it’s the one that keeps the teachers from questioning why he did his homework late—and turns his attention back to the window. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Even El and Fran are still asleep,” Anthony says, but he plops down next to Colin on the staircase.
Colin scoots closer to his brother before he can think better of it. Then, he thinks why not, and he lays his head on his brother’s shoulder. Anthony stiffens, only for a moment, before he relaxes again.
The other day, one of the boys at school told Colin he was too ‘girly.’ He liked hugs too much. He was always talking about things in a ‘sappy, gross’ way. Colin simply grinned and went back to ignoring him because Colin was much, much more popular than him, but he thinks about that sometimes.
None of the men in his family hate hugs. Anthony would be the closest, Colin thinks, but Anthony never resists these moments.
“It’s a white Christmas,” Colin says after a moment. “It started snowing, like, an hour ago.”
“And why were you up an hour ago?” Anthony asks.
Colin shrugs. “I’m not like you and Benedict. I can’t sleep all day.”
“I don’t sleep all day,” Anthony says immediately.
“You do when you can,” Colin fires back. “And you’re done applying to universities.”
“Thank God for that,” Anthony says. “That was my Christmas wish actually. Or maybe that should be my Christmas wish. That I’ll get in somewhere good.”
I hope, Colin thinks, you get into the University of Chicago, and you go to the University of Chicago.
Then, he reminds himself that it would be unfair to say out loud because Colin wants to travel when he goes to university. Anthony hasn’t gone on many college visits, but Colin thinks he would make the entire year a tour of the various colleges he could get into. He would be on the West Coast, the East Coast, the rest of the Midwest… nowhere in America would be safe from him.
Maybe nowhere in Europe.
But Anthony isn’t someone he pictures traveling. The few times they take family vacations that require airports, Anthony is always so uppity Colin wonders if he’s secretly afraid of flying. He makes sure they all have their plane tickets every fifteen minutes. He helped Colin pack, even though Colin is actually pretty great at packing.
“You’ll get in somewhere good,” Colin says. “But you know what they say about hard work?”
“What do they say about hard work?” Anthony asks, already amused.
“The only reward for hard work is more hard work,” Colin says, knowing that will get a shove from his older brother, and he laughs quietly.
“Is that your excuse for not working hard?” Anthony asks.
Colin holds up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, Dad, I got up early. Isn’t that hard work?”
“No, hard work is trying to drag Benedict out of bed.”
“I leave that up to Eloise, actually,” Colin says with a grin. Eloise and Francesca tend to get everyone up on Christmas. Colin knows they haven’t been alive for his entire life, but he feels like he doesn’t know when Christmas starts until one of them comes bounding down the stairs.
He doesn’t like the idea that one day, they might be less excited about Christmas.
He doesn’t like the idea that one day, they might be heading off to college just like Anthony.
Neither of them say anything for a moment, just watching the snowflakes fall over their front lawn.
Colin already itches to get back outside. He wants to relive the best of their snowball fight yesterday, even though he’s ninety percent sure he lost (although he would never admit that!). Maybe they could even invite the Featheringtons, although he cannot imagine Prudence and Philipa roughing it with them.
Penelope Featherington, though…
They can hold their own.
“Anthony,” Colin says abruptly. “Would you move somewhere where it doesn’t snow?”
Anthony snorts. “That cannot be a factor in my college decisions.”
“The snow is beautiful, though,” Colin argues. “It feels like… it tells you it’s a new day ahead. It tells you that there’s a new world ahead, and everything is different after it snows.”
Anthony stares at him before scrunching up his nose. “That’s too close to poetry.”
“You don’t always have to be practical,” Colin says. “Sometimes, you can just enjoy the snow. You wouldn’t move away from the snow, would you?”
And maybe Anthony can read between the lines because Colin knows this isn’t the smoothest way of saying don’t move away from us, I wouldn’t want you to go.
Because Anthony slaps him on the shoulder. “I’m actually going to the University of Alaska.”
“Oh, ha, ha,” Colin drawls.
But he grins when Anthony grins at him.
December 31st, 2002
Maria Russo and Anthony Bridgerton were never made to last.
She thinks she always knew that, but there was always something so fun about being with Anthony. The first time they met, it was at a New Year’s party sophom*ore year. She, somehow, ended up sitting with her back against the sofa, his legs on either side of her. Both were determined not to be embarrassed by the situation, and then, Maria realized that wasn’t enough for her.
So, she started playing with the cuffs of his jeans. She traced her fingers along the seams, and when she looked back at him, she waited for him to say yes or no. Instead, he gave her a sly look, and he nodded toward the bathroom.
They ended up making out against the wall, both barely sixteen (or, at least, felt barely sixteen), both with hardly enough skill to have that much enthusiasm. She never would have thought Anthony Bridgerton, the one guaranteed to be valedictorian, the one knew to have a stick so far up his ass he couldn’t see most other things, to be so fun.
And it was a situation of opposites-attract, she thinks. Primarily, it was that. Maria never cared much about school. Sure, she was going to go to university, and she was going to mess around until she found a major she wanted, but she knew Anthony would consider that directionless.
Well, who cares about direction when she knows how to wink at him to get his tongue down her throat?
Still, she knows there is an expiration date on their relationship. She doesn’t even really know if she would consider them dating; she doesn’t know if she wants to be dating Anthony Bridgerton. No, that would involve meeting his parents, and she knows far too much about his family.
She knows they’re perfect.
She knows he loves them more than anything else.
She knows she has no interest in becoming a Bridgerton. She likes her independence far too much to suddenly have his little sisters adoring her (and Maria, by the way, is amazing with children, so she knows she would get either E or F to be her best friend by the end of the night. Hell, she might even get D).
And she knows she will never be higher on his priorities list. Whoever he ends up with will need to know he loves his siblings more than them. Maybe he’ll calm down in the end; maybe he’ll realize he can’t live his whole life for other people.
Or maybe he won’t. It’s not the worst flaw.
Speak of the devil.
Anthony, the drunkest he’s ever been, trips against the wall only a few inches away from her, and she stares down at him, amused. She gives him the smile, the smile that gets them into the nearest bathroom to mess around, and she reaches under his chin, tilting it up to meet his eyes.
His very drunk, nearly gone eyes. He’ll remember this tomorrow, but he won’t remember the specifics. No, it will come in snatches, and he’ll wonder how he ended up drinking that much.
Maria knows she’s wondering that.
“I thought you could hold your liquor better than that,” she says, trying to sound as sultry as possible. She doesn’t know if she wants to end up in the bathroom with him, not like this, but it is New Year’s Eve. She deserves a kiss at midnight to symbolize the year.
They’ll just both know the relationship won’t last the year. It could symbolize that they’re going to have fun in college, that neither of them will be going home alone at the end of their college dates.
Anthony offers her a sloppy grin, his eyes dark with desire, and she cannot help but feel drawn to him.
Then, he asks her what might be the worst question he could. “Do you know where my brother is?”
“You and your family, Ant,” she says, unable to help herself. Hell, what does it matter? He won’t remember this in the morning.
“What do you mean?” he asks, genuinely looking baffled.
She ignores his tone. She reminds herself he won’t remember specifics. “He’s in the bathroom.”
Anthony’s hand clumsily finds her wrist, and in different circ*mstances, she thinks she would find that sexy. “What do you mean?”
But she doesn’t know how to explain this to him.
She doesn’t want to share her kiss with him, knowing he’s thinking about finding his brother and getting him home instead. He should be thinking about the ways they could sneak around with each other tonight. He should be plotting and scheming, knowing the best ways to get under her skin.
At the end of the day, Maria would say that Anthony is very good with his tongue, with his hands, with all those things most teenage boys don’t quite know how to manage.
But he’s yet to figure out how to be a good boyfriend, so Maria whirls him around and directs him to the bathroom because at the very least, he could be a good brother.
January 1st, 2003
Edmund takes back all the good things he’s said about his sons. Every time he called them responsible, every time he said he didn’t have to worry about them, he takes it all back because getting both of them into the car, completely drunk, probably about to black out, might be his breaking point.
“Tomorrow,” Edmund grinds out, holding the steering wheel so tightly he thinks his knuckles might burst out of his skin, “when you have the mother of all hangovers, you will get a much worse lecture, but I doubt you can truck much of it right now, as is.”
“I called you,” Anthony says, sounding all of five years old right now. He sinks deeper into his seatbelt, and he fiddles with it. “We just… we got our wires crossed.”
Yeah, Edmund hopes something got crossed for both of them to be so drunk.
And he’ll have to drive out here in the morning with Violet to retrieve their car! Maybe he should ground them from being able to use the car. That seems like the fairest thing to do, and honestly, that sounds like someone he has the power to do.
“You shouldn’t be drinking this much,” Edmund emphasizes. He has been too lenient, he thinks. He let them get away with too much. “You shouldn’t be drinking so much that you vomit on our neighbor’s very nice lawn, and Benedict shouldn’t be so drunk he can barely speak. You’re supposed to be a good older brother, Anthony. You’re not supposed to be making things worse.”
Anthony doesn’t say anything.
They drive in silence, nothing but the sound of the turn signal every once and a while, and Edmund starts to regret what he just said. It might have been… fine, it was a bit too harsh. He can admit that.
Anthony is a good older brother, most of the time. He just didn’t handle this one well. Edmund knew they were drinking at parties, but he thought it would be worse if he tried to control them. Now, he thinks he should have stepped in a bit more.
“Is there anything we could do…?” Anthony starts, his voice sounding tight. He can’t quite decipher the tightness, though. Is he hurt over what Edmund just said? Is he about to throw up again? For the third time?
Edmund sighs. “What?”
“What?” Anthony parrots back, and Edmund thinks the tightness might just be because he’s drunk.
“Is there anything you could do…?” Edmund repeats.
“Oh, right,” Anthony says, and his voice gets a little smaller. “Is there anything we could do that would make you not love us?”
That one hits Edmund straight in the heart.
He only worried about that once. Violet and Edmund had gotten pregnant young, very young, and he remembered going to his parents to tell them they were going to be grandparents before they were even parents of a college graduate. He was so afraid he would be cut off, but, worse than that, he would be cut out of their life entirely.
Anthony doesn’t look at him.
He stares at his seatbelt, and Edmund can make out a tear track on his cheek, and he vows to himself that he will give his son a hug when they get out of the car.
“There is nothing you could do that would make me not love you,” Edmund promises. “I might be angry with you. Hell, I’m pissed with you right now, Anthony, but… I still love you. Nothing changes that.”
Anthony looks toward the backseat, where Benedict snores. “Can you… can you tell him that in the morning?”
Edmund takes a deep breath.
“Did something happen at that party, Anthony?”
“That…” Anthony doesn’t say anything at first, but Edmund can practically hear the negotiations. He wants to be a good brother to Benedict, no matter what, so maybe that means holding a secret.
Right now, Edmund cannot even fathom what the secret would be. They already broke so many rules tonight; what more could they be playing with fire about?
“That is for him to tell you,” Anthony says at last.
“I hope he does,” Edmund says, levelly, “but I will tell him the same thing. I will always love you and Benedict and all your siblings. No matter what, no matter what you do or no matter what happens to me, there is nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you. Understood?”
Now, he knows the tightness comes from tears.
“Understood,” Anthony says.
And Edmund hopes—he prays—if there is anything Anthony remembers in the morning, it will be this.
January 24th, 2003
Francesca thinks she might be able to stay in this room all day.
Her parents try their best, and she loves them for it, but she doesn’t think they would notice if she stayed up here, especially if she doesn’t make any noise. Right now, they’re trying to deal with Gregory’s birthday, and right now, she thinks everything is a little too loud for her to try and join them.
She likes it under her bed. It’s safe here. Calm here.
Then, the door creeps open, and she freezes.
“Now,” Anthony’s voice says, and she lets out the tiniest sigh of relief, “you’re not allowed to eat cake in your room, but since I’m the best brother you have, I thought I could bend the rules for you a little, Frannie. Especially since I trust you.”
She peeks out at him, still not willing to move from her hiding spot. He always knows how to find her, though. Even when they play hide-and-seek and all their other siblings have given up on finding her, Anthony knows how to find her and lure her back out and get her to play another round.
Anthony pauses, smiles, and places the cake on top of Daphne’s dresser. Then, he gets to the ground—really gets on the ground, on his stomach, not even on his hands and knees—and he looks to Francesca’s favorite hiding spot, right beneath her bed with her favorite stuffed bear clutched to her.
“If we’re hiding here,” Anthony whispers to her, “you’ll need to make some room for me. I don’t think we can both fit.”
Francesca rolls over immediately.
Sometimes, Eloise tries to join her under the bed. Actually, Eloise insists she should be under the bed, and then, she makes it all about her. She’ll complain about their other siblings or about the schoolyard bullies she hates, and Francesca doesn’t know how to tell her she needs to be quieter if she wants to hide out there. It’s supposed to be a sanctuary—that’s another word she learned, not from school but from Colin—and it’s supposed to be peaceful.
When Daddy finds her under the bed, he always tries to get her out. He doesn’t get it either, not really. He thinks she’s hiding because she’s scared, and she just needs to be a little braver. She doesn’t know how to explain that it’s not about being brave or scared, it’s about being loud or quiet.
And sometimes, that means thoughts too. Like today, she is hiding from her loud thoughts because she doesn’t like thinking about the baby getting all of Mommy and Daddy’s attention, and that’s before the newest baby comes.
“What are we hiding from?” Anthony asks when he gets under there with her.
She curls up closer to him, their shoulders brushing. She wonders if she’ll ever be as tall as him.
They don’t say anything, and Anthony doesn’t try to pressure her to speak, not like Eloise does or not like Daddy does.
So, maybe that’s why she’s willing to tell him.
“Did they notice?”
“Did who notice what?” he asks, still soft.
“Mama and Papa,” she admits, and she knows it makes her sound like a baby. “Did they notice I wasn’t there?”
The thoughts are too loud now, though, now that she let them be said out loud, so she twists around and buries her face in Anthony’s sleeve.
He holds her tight immediately, and he starts smoothing down her hair. It sits in a French braid, which isn’t Francesca’s favorite hairstyle because she thinks it pulls too much on her head, but Daphne wanted to do it this morning, and Francesca didn’t know how to say no.
“They noticed, Frannie,” he promises.
“It’s the baby’s birthday,” she tells him.
“I know,” Anthony says.
“They’re going to forget about me.”
“Frannie, nobody could forget about you. You add so much to the family.”
“Gregory’s the baby of the family now. And then, there’s going to be another baby. And who cares about me?”
Anthony doesn’t say anything at first, and she thinks that’s worse. That even Anthony has to think through her problem because he can usually solve any problem. She was looking at his math homework the other day, and it doesn’t even have numbers anymore. It’s all letters. So, the fact that this is stumping him…
That’s not good.
Then, Anthony lists his hand, and he starts listing off his points. “First of all…”
And he leans over, nudging her chin up, making her watch.
She pouts a little, but she does.
“I care about you,” he says for his first point. “Do I count?”
“Not really,” she says because nobody else wedges themselves under the bed with her. He’s special, so he can’t count.
Anthony laughs. “Fair enough. Second of all, how do you think I felt? There are seven of you after me. And do you think Mom and Dad have forgotten about me?”
“But you’re…” You’re Anthony. “But you’re louder than me.”
“Third of all,” he says, “you don’t have to be loud in your family, I promise. That’s the great part of a family. You know it’s comfortable; you know someone is always looking out for you.”
Francesca reaches up, grabs his hand, and holds it instead. No more points. No more reasons. “I take it back.”
“You take what back?”
“You count,” she says. “If Mama and Papa forget about me, you have to promise you won’t.”
He twists their hands around until he can snag her pinky with his. “They won’t, but if somehow, if the world caves in, if the moon crashes into the ocean, I will never forget about you, Frannie.”
February 14th, 2003
“I brought hot chocolate.”
Colin doesn’t turn to look at Anthony, not yet. Instead, he huddles deeper under his heaviest blanket and goes back to staring at the blizzard. Usually, the snow soothes him. Usually, it reminds him there will be a fresh day ahead, a chance to start over. It might be overly poetic, it might be overly romantic, but Colin likes the idea of new beginnings. You can always look back, realize you were wrong, and become better.
Not today, though.
Anthony clears his throat as he sits down on the bed, and the weight shifts enough that Colin groans. “Now, I’m not above drinking both of them, but I don’t think it would be as fun as it would be if you had one.”
“You don’t even like chocolate,” Colin reminds him.
Anthony takes the opportunity to pass over his mug, one from a matching set with a C on the side of it. “I guess it’s important, then, you don’t make me drink both, isn’t it?”
Colin huffs, but he takes the hot chocolate.
He sips it, letting it roll around in his mouth, and his brother says nothing but stares into the snowy abyss.
Fine.
Two can play at this game.
“Did you love Maria?” Colin asks, and even as he asks it, he doesn’t know if he genuinely wants to know.
Anthony snorts into his hot chocolate. “I think Maria and I both wanted someone by our side. I don’t think it particularly mattered who it was as long as it was a good friend.”
“So you broke up with her.”
“I think it was mutual,” Anthony responds immediately.
Colin hums, unimpressed with the I think. Anthony never advertised his relationship with Maria, not really. When Anthony stayed home for Valentine’s Day, Colin didn’t even think it meant anything. Then, Benedict told him Anthony was also ‘nursing a heartbreak,’ which makes no sense.
Colin looks at Anthony, and he doesn’t see someone who is heartbroken. Then again, he doesn’t know if Anthony actually believes in love—sure, they all know their parents are soulmates because they would have to be blind to think otherwise, but Anthony doesn’t seem to be looking for it. When he talks about the future, he always talks about being single.
Colin doesn’t want to be single forever.
“She cheated on me,” Colin tells Anthony.
It was a scandal, too. They were caught kissing underneath the bleachers, and Colin hadn’t even gotten a chance to kiss her. He was trying to be a gentleman about it. The moment had to be right for both of them to have their first kiss with each other.
Now, he is the loser who wasn’t kissed.
“I’m sorry,” Anthony says. “She shouldn’t have done that.”
“I loved her,” Colin tells him because he knows Anthony doesn’t understand how intense this situation was.
Anthony reaches over, patting his shoulder, which doesn’t actually convince him that his brother understands the problem. “I’m sorry. You’ll get through this, though.”
“If you say there are plenty of fish in the sea, I’ll knock over your hot chocolate.” Never mind that it’s Colin’s bed they sit on. Never mind that Anthony wouldn’t even be enjoying his hot chocolate. “That’s what Benedict told me.”
“You’ll find someone else,” Anthony says, which is the same message.
So Colin crosses his arms, and he announces, “I’ll die alone.”
Anthony somehow manages to keep from laughing, but Colin cannot help but cracking a smile of his own.
February 27th, 2003
Benedict cannot tell Anthony, but he will miss these moments the most.
He doesn’t need peace and quiet, not like Francesca needs it, but Benedict sometimes needs to escape from the rest of the family. He doesn’t want to be the second out of eight, so he certainly doesn’t want to be the first out of seven. And while he loves his younger siblings, they cannot provide these moments, the moments where they lounge on the floor of the treehouse, saying nothing, like Anthony does.
Anthony is Benedict’s best friend, period. They might have other friends; they might run in different social circles in school. But Benedict wouldn’t trade a single moment with Anthony for anything else.
It’s lame, Benedict thinks, to be sixteen and still enjoy his brother’s company.
Benedict yawns and rolls over, and his brother glances over, tracking the movement lazily.
“Do we still have that deck of cards up here?” Benedict says, searching the bottom shelves of the treehouse. He pulls out one of the drawers, peeking inside at what they keep stashed up here.
He pauses when he lifts out a NERF gun. “I think this needs to make a reappearance in the house.”
“Give it to Gregory,” Anthony says, shifting to get a better look at what he’s grabbing. “He’ll mow us all down.”
“Can you imagine Gregory with a NERF gun?” Benedict scoffs and shakes his head. And then, he thinks about it a little deeper, and he turns to look at Anthony. “Actually, I think we should do it, just to see what Eloise’s reaction would be.”
“Eloise would be a holy terror,” Anthony says, and he scoots closer to Benedict. He reaches into the drawer, and he offers one of the NERF bullets to Benedict, dangling it between his fingers.
“What is happening here?” Benedict asks, amused as he takes the bullet.
“I thought it might help,” Anthony says, somehow keeping a straight face, “considering your crippling cigarette addiction.”
“Oh, shut up,” Benedict says with a cackle, flicking the bullet back into Anthony’s face.
Anthony obediently shuts up, but he offers another NERF bullet like a cigarette toward Benedict. Benedict slaps that one out of his hand, and it goes flying toward the walls of the treehouse and lands with a soft thud.
Then, Anthony moves onto the next drawer, and he laughs. “Oh, so this is where the tape for Cinderella went.”
“Wait, seriously?” Benedict leans forward, and he pulls out the squishy VCR case. He pops it open, and he gapes down at it. “Seriously? We’ve been watching Beauty and the Beast when we could have been watching Cinderella?”
Anthony tilts his head at that, smirking. “Oh, maybe we hid it from you. I thought we hid it from Daff.”
“It’s the best Disney Princess movie!” Benedict protests, cradling the case against his chest, fully aware of how ridiculous he looks and fully milking it for all it’s worth. “Look, brother, I know you don’t have a romantic bone in your body, but Cinderella has it all. You should take notes.”
“I should take notes on Cinderella?” Anthony asks, lips twitching.
“Yes!” Benedict says—no, he shouts. “It’s going to come in handy one day. One day, you’re going to meet a girl for, like, three seconds, right? And she will be the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, and you will know, you’ll just know you want to be with her. Except! She will run away at midnight, and she will—”
“Get into a carriage? In the middle of Chicago?”
“Okay, so I feel like you’re not even trying to modernize it.” Benedict scrunches up his nose, and he shakes his head disapprovingly. “Are you sure you belong at any of the Ivies? You have no creativity.”
“Good thing I’m not trying to go into a creative field.”
“See, when you say things like that, you’ll never win Cinderella’s heart.”
“I thought Cinderella was won over by the whole prince thing.”
“Uh, no, did you even watch the movie?”
“She meets him for, like, two seconds.”
“And there was an instant connection! And Cinderella is a hardworking person, probably works harder than you actually, and the prince has to prove he also can work hard by trying to find her! She doesn’t want a trust fund baby!” Benedict’s argument is running out of steam, but he’s too busy laughing to care.
Then, with the sound of his brother’s laughter also in the air, he tosses the Cinderella VCR tape toward the door. “We’re reviewing this tonight.”
March 2nd, 2003
Daphne cannot sleep.
She knows she should try harder; it is a school night after all. She tried all of her usual tactics. She measured her breaths with Eloise’s, and then Francesca’s. She counted to five hundred. She laid there and tried to think of absolutely nothing.
But she cannot sleep, and she doesn’t even know why.
She might as well sneak downstairs to see if she can snag a sweet treat or something that might comfort her. Daphne twists her hair as she sneaks down the stairs, trying to remember which stairs squeak and which stairs are reliable for this kind of mission. When she reaches the kitchen, she sighs in relief, and she flips on the overhead light.
Then, she gasps.
Wait! She slaps her hand over her mouth, trying to mute the sound, but it’s too late.
Anthony, sprawled on the floor between the sink and the stove, looks up from his homework. Page after page with math—and Daphne hates math, if she’s being honest—are strewn around him, and he keeps a calculator in the crook of his elbow. There is a flashlight from a camping trip directed at him, offering the light, and he reaches over and flips it off.
“You scared me,” Daphne says, even though she knows that’s obvious.
Anthony stretches out and yawns, and he looks so much like a cat she almost laughs out loud, but her heart is still thundering a little too hard for that. “I don’t believe you’re supposed to be out of your bed. Isn’t your bedtime nine PM?”
“Isn’t it past yours?” she shoots back, but there’s no real fire in it. Besides, Anthony is doing homework. She cannot imagine her parents will be upset with him for doing homework at three AM.
He sweeps his notes into a pile, and he co*cks his head at her. “Can’t sleep?”
She nods, minutely, and goes to sit next to him.
He laughs and shakes his head. “We don’t have to be on the ground. Let’s go over to the couches if we’re both up anyway.”
“Oh.” She glances toward the freezer longingly. She thinks there might be ice cream in there. “I was hoping…”
Anthony grins at her as he staggers to his feet, still stretching. “If you give a mouse a cookie…”
“Do we have cookies?”
“‘Course we do.” Anthony reaches up, tugging one of the cabinets right above the fridge open, and Daphne scowls at that. She hadn’t realized they stored anything there because it’s pretty much impossible to reach.
He grabs out a pack of Chips Ahoy, and he moves on to grab milk glasses.
“Why are you up?” she asks, eying the cookie pack.
Anthony rolls his eyes, and he peels back the package.
She snatches up a cookie immediately.
“I have a test in the morning,” Anthony explains.
She gives him a long look, and then, she gives the clock on the stove a longer look. “So you have a test in five hours?”
“It felt like an all-nighter kind of night,” he says, grabbing out the milk.
Daphne reaches up and grabs one of the pots, and she turns the stove on. She makes a grabby hand for the milk, but he ignores her. God forbid he allows her to pour the milk into the saucepan. It would probably be yielding too much control to her.
Not that she thinks Anthony is a control freak. She thinks he just likes being in charge of himself. She gets that.
She doesn’t get the all-nighters, though. She hopes she never reaches that point. “Sometimes, I wonder how you function, Anthony.”
“You sound just like Mom,” he notes.
She makes a face at that. “Don’t say that.”
“Don’t want to sound like Mom?”
“I don’t want to be the buzzkill of the family.”
“Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that title goes to me.” He pours the milk in, and he readjusts the burner. She rolls her eyes with his back turned to her. “And I don’t mind, if I’m being honest. It gets me out of a lot of things.”
“You are hardly the buzzkill.” Their little siblings still flock around him. She cannot imagine Gregory not choosing Anthony first, every time, and Francesca seems to be going a similar direction. But she shrugs in the end. “You’re not the most fun in the family, but it’s hard to compete with B and C sometimes.”
“B and C are a different breed of human,” he says, so matter-of-fact that she has no choice but to laugh. “I would much rather be like us than them.”
“Us?” Daphne says.
She doesn’t think she’s like Anthony in a lot of ways. She doesn’t care about school, not the way he does. He doesn’t care about other people’s opinions as much as her. He doesn’t have as many close friends, and he isn’t as nice, and she isn’t as smart.
But at the same time…
Daphne smiles. “I like that. The buzzkills of the family against the overly excitable ones.”
March 7th, 2003
Colin is going to win graduation gifts.
He knows that it isn’t allowed to be an actual competition, and he’s sure he will end up going in with some of their other siblings to help sign a card Benedict drew. In fact, he can already envision a future where they all pile into Benedict’s car, and he drives them to Walmart to grab a massive poster board to give Anthony a congratulations card.
But Colin also wants to do something special.
He keeps trying to imagine himself somewhere else, somewhere far away from the rest of his family. He doesn’t mind the thought, not as much as he thought he would, but he still knows he would get homesick. Colin would venture to say Anthony will get more homesick. He’s so close with the little ones, which is incredible because sometimes, Colin thinks everyone younger than him is the most annoying person ever.
So, Anthony will want something to remember the family by.
And Colin thinks he’s winning this competition.
At the end of his birthday, he creeps into Edmund’s office to hook up the camera to see what photos he got. For his birthday, he made his dad promise he’d get a whole day with the fancy camera. Colin likes photography—a lot.
He likes capturing a moment to keep forever. He likes the idea you can look back on an image and do more than see. You can feel what the person felt on the other end of the camera. Maybe it is a breeze skipping off one of the Great Lakes. Maybe it is the shine of the sun, fresh on your skin, almost hot enough to retreat but not quite. You can hear the laughter of the younger children, hear the thudding of small feet down hallways.
If Colin had to pick a dream career, he would want to write some kind of book where he could slide his photography in as well. If he could present this book to someone and say here is a piece of my world, here is a piece of my life, can you feel it too?, he doesn’t know if he could ever picture a greater feeling.
Right now, he thinks he can assemble something smaller (a chapbook, one of his teachers told him) about the family for Anthony.
He watches as the photos pop up on the screen, and he beams at his work.
It’s weird, flipping through these photos. He tried to focus a lot on Anthony today. It might be Colin’s birthday, but he couldn’t picture a better way to spend it than getting ready for this present.
But his brother doesn’t smile as much as he thought he did.
He looks pensive a lot of the time.
He looks protective a lot of the time, eying the younger ones.
Colin knows his good brother to have a lot of good humor; he knows he can be fun in his own way, even if he still is pretty rigid of a person. But he plays around with the best of them, and he can crack jokes that get the whole family in stitches.
Colin guesses he never thought about the secret responsibility of being the oldest.
He could think more about it, of course. He’s not exactly not one of the oldest, but he considers himself a middle kid. He knows his little siblings will not come to him like they’ll go to Anthony and Benedict, and even Daphne in some ways because she’s the oldest sister.
Colin stares at a photo of Anthony holding Gregory, the pride clear on his face as Gregory tries to bat off the birthday hat on his head.
Huh.
Maybe his older brother isn’t as happy as he thought he was. Maybe, he’s more content. In any case, Colin knows he’ll be able to escape this soon; he’ll see a new university, brave new lands.
And now, Colin is confident it’s a good choice for Anthony. If he moves away from Chicago, Anthony will be happier, so how can Colin begrudge him that?
March 14th, 2003
Gregory will not remember this part.
Gregory will not remember this part, but Anthony will remember this part.
“Can you keep a secret?” he murmurs to his baby brother, who is already beginning to fall asleep.
Gregory has had a big day for a two-year-old. All of his siblings were home for once. Usually, it is just him and Mommy, whose stomach is growing too fast and is becoming a little scary, although he doesn’t know why it would be scary. Sometimes, she tries to explain that there’s a baby in there, but Gregory doesn’t get why a baby would be inside a stomach. Did Mommy eat it?
But his siblings were talking about spring break—something Gregory dutifully repeated: spring break, spring break—and he only cried a little when Benedict made fun of his lisp. Then, Benedict apologized and gave him a cookie from Anthony’s secret stash, and Gregory thinks it was all alright.
Gregory leans closer to Anthony, but he knows he’ll be asleep soon.
“I don’t think I’m going to the University of Chicago,” his older brother says, speaking nonsense words that Gregory doesn’t really care about. “I think I’m going—well, I just found out, today actually, that I got into Stanford.”
Gregory doesn’t know why Stanford is important, so he goes back to staring at the bright stars overhead. He wanted a bedtime story with the Pigeon driving a bus, but he guesses he can allow this.
“You don’t know what that means,” Anthony admits, but he reaches down and squeezes one of Gregory’s little feet, “and I think that’s the only reason I can tell you and not any of our siblings. You know them. They have such big mouths.”
He breaks into a wider smile at that, and Gregory smiles back because he likes when Anthony is smiling. He doesn’t like when it seems like Anthony is sad, or like Anthony is upset with something. If Gregory could, he’d have his brother stay home every day, and Gregory would make sure that he’s never sad.
“It’s very impressive, though,” Anthony says. “That I was good enough to get in.”
“Good enough,” Gregory mimics back, feeling how the words sound in his mouth. Anthony said it with such power that Gregory thinks they might mean something else. He doesn’t hear good enough a lot. He hears it when Benedict cooks the family dinner, and he doesn’t want to wait for the water to finish boiling, so he just dumps in the pasta with a hearty good enough.
Here, he thinks it means something else.
“Good enough. I was good enough.” Anthony settles back against the wall, almost misty-eyed.
Gregory moves closer and gives a command: “Don’t cry.”
“I won’t cry,” Anthony agrees. “I’m just… I’m just happy, Greggers. I’ll be sad to leave Chicago, of course, but… but it’ll wait for me, won’t it? And I’ll come home during the holidays, and I’ll marvel at how big you and everyone else has gotten. And one day, I’ll have enough schooling under my belt that Dad will let me work at Bridgerton & Co. and one day I’ll inherit Bridgerton & Co. and… and it’s a good thing, Greg. Dreams are coming true.”
Gregory knows that’s a good thing.
He has watched enough Disney movies.
He doesn’t know what Anthony’s dreams are, though, so he settles deeper into his bed, into his pillows.
Gregory will not remember this—he’s far too little to hold onto this memory—but maybe, part of him will remember that he was the only one trusted with the knowledge of where Anthony might go. Part of him will always look at his brother and know there was a sacrifice made, even before he knows what a sacrifice is, even before he knows what exactly the hole in his life is.
And one day, Gregory will be the one to unearth Anthony’s old acceptance letter to Stanford in the treehouse, and he will ask his older brother how he chose the family anyway.
And Anthony will tell him he hasn’t regretted it. Not once.
March 15th, 2003
“And there it goes!” Colin narrates into his yellow mallet, unable to resist the biggest sh*t-eating smile. “Maybe it will never come back!”
Anthony turns around with a glare, but it’s clear his heart isn’t in it. Actually, for most of Pall Mall, it seems clear his heart wasn’t in it. “You’re not winning either.”
“It’s not about winning,” Colin says, but there is a part of his soul that actually dies by saying that. He already is plotting the best places to put the wickets next year to take down Daphne’s reign of terror. “It’s about making sure you lose.”
“Next time,” Anthony says, “the yellow mallet is going to mysteriously disappear.”
“Then, I’ll play with the red one.” Colin turns, and he gives his biggest smile toward Edmund. “You’ll let me play with yours next year, right?”
Edmund, who is clearly trying to hide a smile, only gives a half-hearted nod. “I thought yellow was your favorite color.”
“Yellow isn’t anyone’s favorite color!” Eloise snaps. She has been throwing out random, angry comments for the last half hour. It became very clear Eloise and Francesca do not have what it takes to keep up with the rest of the family when it comes to Pall Mall. Better siblings might have taken it easy on them…
Actually, when he thinks about it, Anthony and Daphne might be considered the best siblings, and since they chose not to take it easy on them, what could Colin have done? Shown up the better siblings?
“I thought it was Penelope Featherington’s,” Edmund says.
Eloise gives him a clearly unimpressed look.
“Back to the game,” Colin says, singsonging into his mallet. “Daphne continues to prove to be a bloodthirsty dictator who doesn’t have a heart.”
“Hey!”
“I agree,” Anthony says.
“Hey!” she says again, empathically. She crosses her arms over her chest, and she glares at them. Even though she has the bright pink mallet—she allowed Francesca the green earlier in the evening, specifically so she could hold it over her head, in Colin’s opinion—she still manages to look intimidating.
“You knocked my ball over the fence,” Anthony says.
Benedict hums, amused. “I feel like that should’ve been impossible, but you know Daff. She has a lot of hidden rage.”
“Hidden?” Anthony and Colin ask at the same time.
Daphne looks toward Edmund, huffing. “They’re ganging up on me, Dad.”
“I hate to say it, kiddo,” Edmund says in a way that makes it clear he does not hate to say it, “but I think you brought it on yourself. Who’s going to climb the fence?”
“You want us to climb the fence?” Anthony asks, genuinely surprised.
“I thought that wasn’t allowed,” Eloise says, loudly, as if Edmund isn’t the one who makes the rules in the family.
Benedict clears his throat. “While Anthony climbs the fence—”
“Why am I climbing the fence?”
“Because it’s your ball,” Daphne says. “Obviously.”
“I feel like the person who shotput the ball should get it back.”
“Well, that’s not very gentlemanly of you.”
“Nothing about you today has been ladylike.”
Colin clears his throat, practically prancing over to the fence. “I can go get the ball back, don’t worry.”
“Thank you, Colin,” Edmund says.
“But you have to give me an extra shot.”
Immediately, protests erupt, and Colin cackles, but he throws up his hands. “That’s my condition! You gotta let me hit my ball twice in a row!”
“That’s cheating!” Eloise says. “I didn’t get an extra turn when I messed up!”
“That’s because you f*cked up—” Benedict immediately goes red.
Edmund sighs. “Do I even need to tell you that we don’t use that language?”
Anthony slaps Benedict on the shoulder, almost hard enough to get Benedict to hit the ball and send it rocking forward. That had to be deliberate. “Benedict has forgotten how to talk without cussing. All the paint fumes, you know.”
“Anyway, while Anthony climbs the fence because he has to play where the ball lands,” Benedict says, “I’m going to take my turn.”
“I’m not climbing the fence,” Anthony says. “Daphne is.”
“I’m not.”
“I will, again, if you let me have an extra turn.”
Soon, their bickering breaks out, and Colin ignores the fact that Benedict has hit his ball through another wicket. Knowing Benedict, he’ll soon lose whatever ground he just made up because, frankly, Benedict is not the best at Pall Mall.
Colin, on the other hand, is great at Pall Mall. He’s amongst some of the greats in the sport. The fact that Daphne will win this round annoys him more than he’d like to admit, but it doesn’t mean she’ll win every round.
“Fine,” Edmund says at last. “I can get the—”
“I got the ball,” Francesca says.
All of them blink in unison.
She offers the black ball up to them, smiling sweetly. “I went through the gate.”
March 16th, 2003
“Your heart wasn’t in Pall Mall yesterday.”
Anthony stares up at his father, offering a half-hearted shrug. There is something distant in his gaze, something distant in the way he’s been acting since spring break started. He can pretend well, but sometimes, his thoughts must be slipping away to something interesting because Anthony always looks so…
It’s not sad. Sad wouldn’t be the right word to describe it. But there is something nostalgic in the way he has been looking at his siblings, like he knows this will be the end of an era.
Edmund, reluctantly, can admit this will be the end of an era. This upcoming summer will be the only summer where all eight children live under their roof. Then, Anthony will leave, and they will be down to only nine.
Somehow, even before baby H is born, Edmund knows the family was meant to be ten all along.
“I knew I was going to lose,” Anthony says after a moment, “and before you tell me that that attitude was why I lost, I think it might be because Daphne is simply better than everyone.”
Edmund hides his smile, instead choosing to raise an eyebrow. “I’ve never heard any of you admit to one of your siblings being better. I’ve only ever heard accusations of foul play. Now, I definitely think something might be wrong. What’s going on with you?”
“I’m too old to play Pall Mall?” Anthony tries.
Edmund thinks his children will be playing Pall Mall for years. They will be using walkers and canes before they admit they can’t play. “Try again. I played it yesterday, and I think it’s safe to say I’m several years older than you.”
Anthony doesn’t say anything for a second, even as Edmund sits down next to him.
He knocks their shoulders together. “I’m serious. Try again.”
Anthony stares straight ahead as he says the next part. “I think… I think I might not go to the University of Chicago.”
“You heard back from another school then?” Edmund asks. “I thought you were watching the mail a little too closely, and I didn’t buy the love letters from Maria excuse Benedict seems to have invented for you.”
“I didn’t ask him to do that,” Anthony says immediately.
“I know you didn’t,” Edmund says. He doubts Anthony would ever tell the family anything about Maria if he could help it. If she started sending love letters to Anthony—which would be especially odd, because Edmund is pretty sure they broke up sometime in January if they were ever together—Anthony would have fled from that relationship. But Edmund can’t admit to knowing all that about his son, so he knocks his knee against Anthony’s. “I mean this in the nicest way, but you have never been my most devious kid.”
Anthony nods. “That title goes to Colin, right?”
“Actually,” Edmund says with a fond smile, “I think Eloise might get that title when she gets a little older. I’ve seen how calculated she can be during Pall Mall. Pretending to trip yesterday so she could send Benedict’s ball down a hill? Genius.”
“She is—”
“But,” Edmund says, “you’re changing the subject, and I can tell. Is the school far away? Is that why your head is in the clouds?”
Anthony tilts his head, pretending to do the math, but Edmund knows Anthony. Anthony will know the exact distance between the school and their home, will know whether he will be able to catch a direct flight or if there will be a layover. “I think you could say something like that, yeah.”
“I figured.”
Edmund waits for a moment, giving Anthony the space to announce which school. He wishes his son let them in, just a little more, so he could even know what schools Anthony applied to the fall. Instead, he kept smiling at Violet and Edmund, insisting he wanted it to be a surprise.
Edmund thinks, although he cannot be sure, Anthony didn’t tell them because he was afraid he wouldn’t be good enough to get in. Edmund knew he would, but Anthony isn’t self-confident, not in the ways Edmund wishes he was.
Anthony is smart.
Anthony is good at what he does.
Anthony could do anything he’d want in life.
“Whatever choice you make,” Edmund says, “will be the right choice, as long as you follow your heart.”
“I’m not really that kind of person,” Anthony says. “I’m not as… romantic as you and Mom are.”
“Don’t I know that. I would like to meet whoever made you this practical because it certainly wasn’t either of us.” Edmund lets out a soft laugh. “Trust your heart, Anthony. That is the best advice I can give you. Trust your heart, and you will never be led astray.”
March 17th, 2003
Later, one by one, his siblings will ask, softly, what happened the morning of March 17th, 2003. Some will ask sooner than others. Some will ask because they genuinely want to know, some will ask because they think they can shoulder the burden with him, some will ask because they think it will heal something in them.
This will be the one subject Anthony does not share with them.
He will tell them about the days afterward.
He will tell them about the funeral if they do not remember the specifics.
He will answer the questions he can because he will never—never—direct them to Violet, not when it comes to this.
But he will not go into detail about the morning of March 17th, 2003.
It is only later—much later, when Anthony stands on the precipice of an important, life-altering choice with the love of his life—that he will whisper the story to her. It can only be told in a whisper; any louder, and it would wrench him in two.
“It was a bee,” Anthony will start, but he will need to stop right away.
The memories will have softened in some ways; he doesn’t remember the smell of the flowers in the Botanic Garden anymore. He can’t remember what his father was wearing. He can’t remember whether he was tired or not, whether or not this was a spontaneous choice or something he knew about the day before.
Kate Bridgerton-Sharma will rest her hand on his, and she will nod. “Take your time.”
They are people who race through life; they do not take things slowly. It does not make sense to take the scenic route in life if the quickest route will get them to the destination faster. People view them as blunt; people view them as cutthroat.
But as they sit down, together, reviewing the choice before them, they can only be described as soft. Loving. Intimate.
“His last words were that a bee stung him,” Anthony will whisper. “Just like that. ‘A bee stung me.’ It was not… nothing grand. Nothing life-changing. No advice for the future or no… it would be too easy, wouldn’t it? If everyone said I love you as their last words?”
Kate will hum, and she will squeeze his hand.
He will squeeze his eyes shut then, and the moment still lives in technicolor.
“A bee stung me.”
A choking sound.
His father’s hands clutching at his throat.
His father’s lips turning blue.
His father, crumpling to the ground right as Anthony runs to catch him.
Anthony screaming, screaming, screaming, trying to get anyone to pay attention to him, trying to get anyone to care about the greatest man he ever knew. Help! I need help! Please!
And someone found them, eventually, but it was too late.
“It was too late,” Anthony will whisper to her. “They told me I couldn’t have done anything, but I—it was too late. He was dead before we even called 911, and I just… held him. It was just me and him in the gardens, and I knew I should get up, I should start moving, I should call my mother, but I sat there, holding him, because I wasn’t… I wasn’t ready. I needed more time with him. I needed him.”
Kate will not know what to say.
And Anthony will begin to cry.
“When the ambulance finally came, they had to move my arms for me. And it was like… it was like waking up. And the world was different. And my father was gone. Forever.” He will crumble into Kate then.
She will catch him.
And she will hold him until he is ready to make the decision with her.
“What if we leave behind our children?” Anthony will cry. “What if we die on them? What if… Kate, we cannot promise them anything.”
And Kate will just listen to him, unsure what to say. She was orphaned, once. She watched her father die, once. It was slow, and it was painful, but part of her will still think she could take more of the pain. Let Kathani Bridgerton-Sharma shoulder the pain of everyone in her life. Let her protect her younger sister, her mother, and her two deceased parents.
Let her protect Anthony Bridgerton-Sharma, who she loves more than she ever thought she could.
Edmund learned how to love with Anthony, and he died in Anthony’s arms.
Kate learned how to love with Anthony, and she thinks her life began the moment she allowed herself to truly, truly love him.
March 18th, 2003
Daphne cannot sleep, but she does not go to the kitchen like she did all those days ago (a lifetime ago; she cannot believe her bout of insomnia earlier this year came from nothing; she cannot imagine she will ever sleep again).
No, she starts a habit that day, a habit she will not be able to shake through the rest of her childhood, one that will resurface any time she gets stressed as an adult.
She sits in her room, and she listens to Eloise and Francesca breathe. She watches their chests rise and fall. Daphne’s fingers tremble around the blanket she clutches to her chest, trying to get rid of that awful, barely breathing sensation rippling through her. But while Daphne thinks a big, deep breath would feel heavenly, she cannot help but think that will be the thing that wakes them all up.
So, she watches her younger sisters.
Everyone’s safe. You can keep everyone safe.
Daphne gets up then, creeping across the floor, whisper-soft, and she goes to the nursery next. She gets the door open, just enough, to see Gregory sprawled in his crib. He cried nonstop yesterday—it is around four AM now, so it has been a day, more than twenty-four hours since she last saw her father—but he didn’t understand it.
Everyone’s safe. You can keep everyone safe.
Then, she goes to Benedict and Colin’s room. She almost expects to hear them still awake, whispering to each other, but it is silent on the other side of the door. She presses her ear against the door, and she can hear their stuttered breaths. Benedict is sleeping, uneasily by the sound of the rustling of the blankets. Colin is crying, judging by the measured way he breathes in and out. He isn’t sleeping either.
Maybe, in a different lifetime, she would have gone inside to comfort him.
This time, she keeps her ear pressed against the door, and she counts their breaths.
Everyone’s safe. You can keep everyone safe.
The last room is Anthony’s.
His light is still on, and the closer she gets, the more she can hear seeping from underneath the door. He is crying, or he is having a panic attack, judging by the way his breath races and races.
He was alone in the Botanical Gardens with their father yesterday morning.
He was the last one to see him alone, the last one to hold him.
Daphne will never forget how he delivered the news to them. He gathered them all, his voice strange, his gaze hollowed out. Something had snuffed the spark in her brother, and she knew before he even spoke that something horrible had happened.
She doesn’t remember what he told her, exactly. What he told everyone. But she knew what it meant immediately, and Daphne was sobbing.
And Anthony tried his best to comfort them, and Daphne tried her best to comfort Eloise and Francesca while trying to comfort herself, but she kept looking up at Anthony, hoping that, somehow, that hollowness would fill up, and he would be her older brother again. If he was okay, she could be okay.
But he never got rid of the haunted expression.
And later in the day, she kept peeking at him, and it didn’t change. He didn’t fall apart, not in front of them, but she knew there was a part of him that had disappeared that day. There was a part of him that needed to cry, just like the rest of them, and he would never allow himself that.
Daphne sits on the other end of the door, and she thinks there is a chance Anthony is sitting on the other side right now.
She leans her head back, and she feels the heat of fresh tears come over her.
Everyone isn’t safe.
Their father is gone, and she never knew she needed to say goodbye. What was the last thing she said to him? Something insignificant? Unimportant? His funeral will come, and she will have to watch them lower his body into the grave, and she doesn’t—
She doesn’t know how she could do that.
And she doesn’t know how to help Anthony. She cannot keep him safe.
But she repeats the words, hoping that maybe something will change, something will get better.
Everyone’s safe. You can keep everyone safe.
Everyone’s safe. You can keep everyone safe.
Everyone’s safe. You can keep everyone safe.
March 19th, 2003
Benedict can’t let Anthony go.
Not alone.
He cannot stop repeating that image in his mind, painted in the most vibrant colors, seared into his mind so intensely it feels almost like a memory. Anthony, alone, at the Botanical Garden, cradling Edmund. Watching Edmund take his last breath.
And Anthony is unreachable right now. His older brother isn’t, sure. He is going through the motions, doing everything he thinks is expected of him, and he is comforting all of them (and Benedict is trying, too, trying to comfort them and make things better and easier), but the actual person he is… that is retreating behind the shell of older brother, oldest brother.
When Anthony offers to get McDonald’s, Benedict looks toward Violet, desperate, but his mother pretends not to see, or she doesn’t see, and it’s clear she will not be the one who keeps Anthony off the roads.
Benedict waits as long as he can; he doesn’t want to worry the others.
Then, he announces he’ll tag along, and he goes to the driveway where Anthony is fumbling with the key, not able to get it in the lock because his hands are trembling too hard. His brother looks so… small. Defeated. Broken.
Benedict swallows, and he pretends he doesn’t see. “Can I come with you?”
Anthony stares at him like he doesn’t recognize him.
Something twists in Benedict’s guts, and he grabs the keys out of his brother’s hands. “I’m coming with you.”
“I’m driving,” Anthony says after a second. He doesn’t move from his spot, his hand still gripping the air like he wields the keys. “You hate going through drive-throughs. I mean… have you… you haven’t even been through a drive-through, and I’m not going to force you to do that right now, and—
“Okay,” Benedict says, softly. “You can drive.”
He just can’t let Anthony go alone.
So, Benedict climbs into the passenger seat, and he knows he should look at the road, but he keeps staring at his brother instead. Anthony drives on autopilot. Benedict wonders if he even realizes what he’s doing. He takes the turns responsibly, he is on the speed limit exactly, and when he gets through the drive-through, he rattles off the order so fast the poor McDonald’s worker makes him repeat it five times.
Benedict thinks they will be getting too much food.
They had him pull into a parking spot, and Anthony parks the car, but he keeps his hand stomped on the brake, and he keeps his fingers stuck on the steering wheel.
Benedict thinks this could be his brother’s breaking point.
Anthony takes a breath, but something in it shatters. He stares straight ahead, but he’s blinking, rapidly, trying not to cry. “I shouldn’t have gotten Gregory anything. He’s too little to be having McDonald’s. I should’ve… we still have baby food in the cupboards. I should have fed him that. What if he chokes? What if he—you know how bad McDonald’s is for regular-sized people, and he’s so small, and what if this becomes a habit for him? I don’t want to be the reason he eats unhealthy when he grows up.”
This isn’t about the McDonalds, Benedict thinks. He knows. This is about the fact Edmund, their father, their lifeline, is gone, and Anthony knows there is a hole that needs to be filled, and there is no world where Anthony isn’t the one who fills it.
Anthony didn’t even hesitate.
He just stepped up, and there is something heartbreaking about it, but Benedict is…
He’s too selfish, fundamentally, to say anything because if he acknowledges that Anthony is letting the role of Oldest Brother swallow him alive, it means Benedict will have to step up, too, and he doesn’t know if he can…
Benedict is good for making people smile.
Benedict is good for seeing matters of the heart.
He isn’t good at the responsibilities and the obligations and the driving to get McDonalds as his heart breaks part.
“I don’t think Greg will be ruined by one trip to McDonald’s, Anthony,” Benedict says at last.
“What if it’s not just one trip to McDonald’s?” Anthony whispers. He closes his eyes, and his whole body trembles from the burden of keeping the tears in.
His breathing is picking up, faster and faster and faster, and Benedict realizes, distantly, that this is what a panic attack is. He heard about it from some of his friends, but he didn’t actually realize…
He never thought Anthony would be someone who has a panic attack where he couldn’t breathe, and the image of his brother holding his father comes swarming back to him, so sharp, so acute, Benedict thinks he might puke.
“Anthony,” he says softly, his voice wobbling, and he reaches out to Anthony. When he sets his hand over top of Anthony's, Anthony flinches. “Anthony, you need to breathe.”
Anthony shakes his head, and his breath is still hitched, still strange. “I can’t do this again.”
It’s…
It’s a cry for help, Benedict thinks.
He cannot be the one who fills the hole left by Edmund, though. That can only be filled… well, it could be filled by Violet, but Benedict cannot stomach looking at their mother these days. Her grief is too loud, too present. It threatens to drown Benedict entirely.
Anthony is the only one who can fill the hole.
But maybe Benedict can try to help Anthony. He can comfort Anthony. He can be Anthony’s rock.
That is the best he can do.
That is what he vows to do.
“What do you mean by this?” he whispers to Anthony.
But Anthony doesn’t answer. Instead, he jerks back from Benedict and covers his face with his hands.
And when Anthony gets his breathing back under control, it’s not Benedict who helped him.
It was Anthony, doing it for himself.
March 20th, 2003
Anthony Bridgerton wouldn’t have asked her if he could have asked anyone else.
When she picks him up, she cannot help herself. Maria reaches over to him, her fingers trembling as she goes to touch his cheek. “Anthony, I am so, so sorry.”
He doesn’t flinch away from her, but it is a near thing. He just shifts away from her, leaning closer to the window, and the message there is clear enough, even if Maria tried to pretend otherwise.
“Thank you,” he says, his voice oddly stiff, oddly formal.
Maria supposes she cannot fault him for that.
“Of course,” Maria says back.
There are faces watching them in the window, all of Anthony’s siblings all at once. Maria realizes, distantly, she didn’t meet most of them. If she had, she would have been struck by just how similar they looked back then. They have the same bone structure; they have the same eyes.
Right now, they have the same grief.
Benedict is the one who makes eye contact with her (or, she supposes, Benedict is the one she allows to make eye contact with her; he is the only one she knows), and there is something pleading in his gaze. He doesn’t trust Maria, not with his brother, and she cannot fault him for that. She wouldn’t want anyone in her family out of her line of sight.
She actually went to her parents after hearing the news. She had cried in their arms because she couldn’t imagine either of them passing away. She clutched her father, and she tried to imagine how she would feel if she was in Anthony’s shoes.
She had texted him: let me know if I can help at all.
He texted her back.
He needed to pick up his father’s car from the parking lot of the Botanical Gardens. He had persuaded them to keep it for the past few days, but they told him they couldn’t drive it without the keys and, evidently, the keys had wound up at the hospital with… well, with… with Edmund Bridgerton.
“How are you?” Maria asks when they turn out of Anthony’s neighborhood. “Truly?”
“I’m fine,” Anthony says.
“Anthony,” Maria says, helplessly. She cannot make Anthony speak to her, and even if she persuaded him to speak to her, what would she be able to say? She cannot comfort him. They were never really together, and now, it seems so obvious why they could never have been together. She cannot be what he needs.
She hopes one of his siblings can be what he needs.
“Do you want me to follow you back to your house?” Maria asks after a moment. That seems like something he would be more comfortable with: the logistics of it all. He can hide behind them, let them shield him from the harder questions, the impossible questions.
Maria wonders how Violet Bridgerton is holding up. She wasn’t one of the faces in the doorway. She thinks Violet and Anthony could have driven to the Gardens to pick up the car, but Anthony chose to do it alone.
Well, he chose to do it with her, but for the first time, she knows he doesn’t see her at all. There is no part of him, no space in him, to offer her any thought.
She doesn’t blame him.
“No,” Anthony says. “Once I have the car, I know how to drive back home.”
Did you go to the Gardens often?, she almost asks, but she already knows what a foolish question it would be. Anthony Bridgerton is not the kind of man who would stroll around botanical gardens for fun. He would have only gone because his father asked him to go. Anthony, after all, had always adored Edmund Bridgerton.
Maria used to take that as a sign he was a good man. How could someone love his family so much and not be?
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“I’ll be fine,” Anthony says.
There is a whole unsaid conversation stretching between them. Maria is concerned, and she knows it is unfair. He is nothing to her but a friend, but she still cannot…
He is a shell of the Anthony she knows.
So, when she gets to the Gardens, she simply idles in the parking lot, waiting for him to climb in and dress away. She watches him hesitate outside the door. She watches him climb into the driver’s seat, and she thinks she can see a moment where his shoulders tremble and his forehead slumps down to the steering wheel.
Then, he is pulling out of the parking lot with shocking skill, and he is driving away from her without so much of an acknowledgement.
She doesn’t know if Anthony realizes she trails him the whole way back, but Maria doesn’t think she could live with herself if she had let Anthony just drive away.
March 21st, 2003
“Let me give it a go,” Colin tries, leaning against the banister of the staircase. “I’m good with kids, you know.”
Anthony barely lifts his head. The exhaustion is clear in his posture, in the way he slumps forward, in the way he hasn’t combed his hair in several days. Yet, when he glances toward Colin, it isn’t the exhaustion that strikes Colin most. It’s the undercurrent of grief; it’s ever-present, it’s inescapable, it’s changing every one of their relationships.
Colin cannot stop crying, and he knows he should. That a real man—a man like Anthony, a man like Benedict, a man like Edmund—would go first to the younger kids. He wouldn’t let his tears be so obvious. He wouldn’t cry at all, and if he did, it would only be in the privacy of his own company.
Just looking at Anthony brings Colin to the verge of tears.
He doesn’t recognize his brother, not anymore. Anthony has always been the one in control of every situation; he has always been more mature than the rest of them. Yet, he could mess around with them. He could play with them.
Now, Colin doesn’t know if Anthony will remember how to smile in the long run.
Now, Colin thinks there is only one person who could rescue Anthony, and it would have been Edmund.
“No bed,” Gregory proclaims, crossing his little arms. He sits on the opposite side of the couch, Beary clutched against his chest, and he twists to look back into the hallway.
It’s hard, Colin thinks, knowing why Gregory refuses to go to bed tonight.
He’s waiting.
He’s waiting for someone who will never come home again.
“I’ve got this,” Anthony says.
“I’m good with Gregory,” Colin says. He doesn’t even know if it’s a lie.
“Greg,” Anthony says without looking at either of them. “Who would you rather have?”
“Papa,” Gregory says.
Colin’s heart catches in his throat, but he begs himself not to crumble right now. He can be a real man. He can be the person Edmund would want him to be, even if it feels like everything is falling apart at the seams right now.
“Not Papa,” Anthony says, his voice even somehow. “Me or Col.”
“Papa,” Gregory says again.
Colin has to look away from both of them, and he can feel the heat gathering behind his eyes.
He wants to ask Anthony or Benedict if they think Gregory will remember any part of Edmund in the future. Will he know what their father’s laugh sounded like? Will he know what it felt to be held by Edmund? Edmund could spend time with them, and he would manage to make the rest of the world fall away. Colin tries his best to do that; he wants people to know he wants to be there, present in the moment, but…
But he is no Edmund.
And he doesn’t know how anyone could be like Edmund.
“You can go to bed,” Anthony tells him. “I can stay with Gregory. He has to fall asleep at some point.”
No, Colin wants to say. He doesn’t.
He can picture it right now. Colin will come down in the morning, and it will be Anthony passed out on the couch, his arm wrapped tight around Gregory, who must have fallen asleep late in the morning. Three AM. Four AM.
“I can try,” Colin says, but his conviction is starting to wobble.
Anthony looks at him, truly looks at him, and Colin thinks that’s worse than anything else he could have done.
“I don’t think Benedict likes sleeping alone,” Anthony says at last. “He’ll want someone to talk to.”
Usually, that would be true.
But Benedict and Colin haven’t been talking at night. Instead, both of them sit there in silence, the void between them too vast. Colin doesn’t know what he wants Benedict to do for him; Benedict doesn’t know he wants from Colin. They are both too young and too old at once. There can be no optimism left; there is only the hard truth of the situation.
Colin wants to run away. He wants to hop on his bike and just start going, if only to avoid the devastation on all his siblings’ faces.
Instead, he gives Anthony a tight nod, and he flees upstairs before he starts crying.
March 22nd, 2003
Here is what they remember from the funeral reception:
Gregory remembers nothing from the funeral. He will hear that he was oddly quiet. Gregory had never been the kind of child who screamed, who threw tantrums, who cried to get people’s attention, but he was never a quiet child. He would babble, he would whine, he would pull on the sleeves of other people.
But he was quiet during the funeral, and he spent most of the time pressed against Benedict’s legs, to hear Benedict tell the story.
Francesca remembers the anxiety of it. All at once, the place she considered her greatest sanctuary, the place she thought could always be hers was transformed into something unfamiliar. She couldn’t retreat to the piano because a stranger was sitting on the bench. She couldn’t go to her room because the staircase was clogged by all the neighborhood moms who scorned them for playing too rough in their lawn. She couldn’t hide anywhere because there were eyes everywhere.
At some point, though, she fled to Anthony, and she begged him to let her leave.
She remembers leaving, but she doesn’t remember leaving with Anthony.
Eloise remembers watching Anthony. She didn’t know what to do, how to be a good daughter anymore. Violet could barely look at her, and she knew—and she wasn’t sure how well she understood death, but she understood—her father would never come back. So, she looked to Anthony, and she tried her best to copy him. If he cried, she could cry. Since he didn’t, she made a point not to.
But when Benedict offered her an escape, Eloise didn’t think twice about saying yes.
Daphne remembers being caught between Colin and Anthony, caught between two people who needed her. Neither of them would say it out loud; neither knew how to ask for help. But she clutched Colin, hugged him tightly as he cried silently, and she looked to Anthony, desperately trying to think of a way to comfort him. He wasn’t crying, though. He was barely speaking, so she didn’t know how to reach him.
Anthony made his way over to the two of them, and he only looked at Colin and Daphne for a few seconds before giving them permission to leave.
And Daphne wanted to leave more than anything else.
But she didn’t know how to leave behind Anthony.
“This is meant to help all of us,” he said in the awful formal voice of his, the one that said I know who I have to be for you right now. “If you would feel better being alone, then do just that.”
And Daphne left.
And Colin remembers feeling so weak for letting his brother banish him upstairs. He couldn’t stop crying. He knew everyone thought he was the charmer of the Bridgerton family, that he was always ready with the right word or the right joke, but all of a sudden, he didn’t even know how to talk. People kept sending their best, their well wishes, to Colin, and Colin wanted to vanish.
He knew this was weak.
He knew Anthony and Benedict were so much stronger than him.
But when Daphne came behind him and hugged him, her heart thudding hard against the suit Anthony had to dig out of his closet, a suit that Colin knew was a little inappropriate because Anthony once wore it for homecoming, Colin couldn’t stop crying.
Benedict regrets leaving his brother to the wolves, afterwards.
He regrets it not even a minute later. The other five Bridgertons were gathered in his bedroom, and he was holding Gregory, who was crying, and he was watching over his siblings, who were crying, but he still thought…
It was not right.
It was not right that Anthony had to face the world. This was the easiest job, comforting their siblings and reminding them that the world would not end today. Benedict knew how to soothe them—or, at the very least, he was learning how to soothe them.
Anthony had to be the host of the reception.
He couldn’t wear his hurt so openly, not like the rest of them.
And Benedict regretted that he couldn’t figure out how to give his brother a safe space.
March 24th, 2003
Prudence Featherington knows the Bridgertons don’t like her.
Unlike her younger sister—Philipa—she does possess some self-awareness. She just doesn’t care what they think about her. If her mother thinks bagging one of them means she would never have to worry about money again, would never have to worry about having a job, then Prudence is willing to keep trying to seduce the Bridgertons. One of these times, she knows it will work.
However, she really only has three candidates, and one of them is practically a child. Colin Bridgerton is far too young for her. He’s only a year older than Philipa, and Philipa is a baby! A literal child! So, that leaves her with Anthony and Benedict Bridgerton.
And right now, she doesn’t think either of them is particularly attractive, but her mother told her to check in on the Bridgerton boys during the school day, and she happens to have the same lunch period as Anthony.
Benedict would probably be her first choice for an emotional conversation (because, frankly, Prudence has no interest in emotional conversations with men; men don’t know how to express themselves—just ask Archibald Featherington!), but Anthony is the easier one to go to right now.
Except for the fact he doesn’t eat in the lunchroom today.
She waits for him, impatiently, waiting for him to peek his head. At the very least, he would go to the cafeteria in order to get food, right? She cannot imagine Violet Bridgerton has been packing their lunches. When Prudence last saw Violet, Violet looked so unkept, so dirty, so un-Violet that Prudence couldn’t dare to approach her. She didn’t recognize the Bridgerton mother like this.
But Anthony never comes.
Ugh.
But she knows her mother. If she tells her she didn’t see Anthony, she’ll just get upset and say that Prudence should have tried harder, so Prudence decides she can check two other places. Then, she’ll be enjoying her half hour lunch block, thank you very much.
Prudence doesn’t know Anthony very well, though.
So, she isn’t really sure where to start.
In the end, she heads out to the parking lot because she knows the Bridgertons drive themselves to school. It takes a few minutes for her to figure out which car is his, but when she finds it, she takes a deep breath and strides over to it, trying to decide what her approach should be. Charming and suave? Charismatic enough she can slide into his passenger seat even though she is sure his car is disgusting? Or will she be sympathetic? She will pat his arm, gently, and she will look into his eyes, and she will tell him that it’s okay, he should just let it all out even though the idea of a crying Anthony Bridgerton leaves her a little unnerved.
Then, she sees him.
She’s still several cars back, so it’s not too obvious she’s stalking him, but…
But he is crying.
He has pillowed his face in his arms, propped up against the steering wheel, and his whole body is trembling from the weight of crying, and he looks so…
He doesn’t look like Anthony Bridgerton.
He looks far too young to be Anthony Bridgerton.
All at once, Prudence doesn’t want to try. At all.
All at once, Prudence can only think about her own father, and she doesn’t even get along with the man, but she cannot imagine him dying.
She almost wants to call him, but she knows Archibald Featherington would not care why Prudence called in the middle of the day. She could say I love you, she could say I’m glad you’re still here, and he would simply hum and return to his newspaper. He is not an attentive father, not like some of the other girls have.
Not like the Bridgertons have.
She remembers mocking Daphne Bridgerton with Philipa, both of them commenting on just how much of a daddy’s girl Daphne seemed to be. It was embarrassing, in Prudence’s opinion, to care that much about your father’s opinion.
But now, as she crouches behind another car to spy on Anthony crying, she thinks it’s not embarrassing at all.
Now, it is just sad.
Edmund Bridgerton was a good father, and he is dead now.
Prudence’s flirtation attempts can wait. If Portia asks, Prudence will just say she never found Anthony.
April 1st, 2003
Benedict opens the front door, and it’s a sh*t show.
To be fair, it has been sh*t show after sh*t show. Benedict thinks he’s good in the face of chaos or, at the very least, he’s good at pretending he doesn’t notice the chaos. He pretends to go to bed early, and he lets Colin believe nobody can hear him crying. He reads stories to Daphne, Eloise, and Francesca even though Daphne is too old, Eloise pretends she hates them, and Francesca just stares at him with those wide, haunted eyes. He pretends he hasn’t noticed that Violet doesn’t get out of bed anymore.
But he opens the front door, and someone launches herself at him, sobbing. Benedict’s arm falls to her back on instinct, drawing her closer, but he cannot even tell if it is Eloise or Francesca. It is all moving too fast, and—
Oh, it’s Eloise.
It’s Eloise because she is just bursting with words, all of them strung together and impossible to decipher from each other. “I wasn’t trying to make him mad, but he’s so mad, he’s so mad at me, and he hates me, and he’s being so mean, and he didn’t used to be mean, he used to be funny, but I can’t even be funny anymore, and—”
Benedict glances toward Anthony, who stands, trembling, in the hallway. His brother’s jaw is tight, and there is a vein clear on the side of his neck. Benedict cannot quite read the situation, though. Is Anthony mad? Or is Anthony some other emotion that Benedict doesn’t have the words for?
Benedict mouths ‘what’ at Anthony.
“Eloise,” Anthony starts, his voice tight, “thought it would be funny to waste a perfectly good salmon and put it in my bed.”
Benedict glances down at Eloise, only for a second, and he can’t help but think this all might be an overreaction. But he looks back at Anthony, and he nods, slowly, trying to think of the best way to defuse this situation.
“It’s April Fools’ Day, Ben,” Eloise sobs.
Benedict nods again, unsure what to say, so he just repeats the fact. “It’s April Fools’ Day.”
Because it’s more complicated than it used to be.
Last year, if Eloise would have put a fish in Anthony’s bed, they all would have been cackling, Edmund the loudest of them all. Edmund loved pranks; in fact, Benedict thinks there was a chance he would wake up with bleached hair if Edmund was still… if their father was still alive. Then, Violet would have huffed, pretending to be put out, and she would go to the store with Eloise to pick out a new fish.
Now, nobody is laughing.
He doesn’t even know where the other Bridgerton siblings are hiding, but he knows they must be hiding. This is all unfamiliar; nobody knows how to proceed.
And Violet will not go to the store to pick out a new fish. No, it will be Anthony, who also needs to be the one who washes his sheets, who will be the one who makes dinner, who will—
Benedict needs to take something off his plate.
“If you find it funny,” Anthony says, clearly on the verge of tears, “then you can figure out what everyone will be eating for dinner tonight.”
“Ant—”
But Anthony turns on his heel, and he stomps up the stairs, trying to mask the tears with his anger, billowing outward. Benedict wants to race after him; he wants to tell Anthony that he sees his brother. He understands why Anthony is upset, even if nobody else in the family does, even if everyone else thinks he’s overreacting.
But he can’t, because Eloise is still crying against him, and if he leaves Eloise, it will cause a different host of issues. If he doesn’t calm down Eloise, he knows Eloise will blow up the situation, making it worse and worse until neither Eloise nor Anthony can look at each other. And maybe the others will pick sides, and he cannot imagine a lot of them picking Anthony’s side because on the surface, Anthony is in the wrong for shouting at her.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs into Eloise’s hair. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be alright.”
April 4th, 2003
Make this easier on him, Daphne thinks to herself as she tugs the cart free. She offers her most charming smile—the one Colin has coached her on, the one that seems to let him get away with murder—before leaning against it, trying to decide on the best course of action.
She needs to be bolder, Daphne decides all at once. She needs to stop wobbling on how best to comfort Anthony, but she thinks there is nothing that can truly comfort him (no, that is untrue; he would feel better if their father was around, but since he cannot be around, she needs to find a new strategy).
Benedict agreed he could babysit, so Daphne can take her sweet time doing this.
So, she pushes the cart away from the party section, heading toward lawn care instead. And Anthony, too caught up in whatever he is thinking, too busy picking at his nails in a way that cannot be painless, follows along after her without a word. He doesn’t even realize she is stalling right now.
“I wanted a puppy,” Daphne says abruptly.
Anthony doesn’t say anything, still thinking.
So, she says it again. Louder. “I wanted a puppy.”
That gets his attention. He blinks, resettling into the moment, and he gives her a quizzical look. “What?”
“When I turned six,” she explains patiently, “I wanted a puppy for my birthday.”
“Francesca will not be getting a puppy,” Anthony says after a moment.
Daphne offers him another smile, pushing them deeper into the lawncare section. He still doesn’t seem to have noticed, even though it would be truly astonishing if they bought a lawnmower for either of the birthday girls tomorrow. “She better not. I would be so offended if she got a puppy when I didn’t. Of course, I didn’t need a puppy.”
“Of course?” Anthony says.
Usually, he’d be saying something a little more clever back, but Daphne can give him some grace here. She shrugs. “I didn’t need a puppy because I had Colin, and honestly, he did everything a puppy would.”
It almost gets a smile out of Anthony.
So, Daphne presses a little more. “He already ate all my food. Like, if I didn’t eat fast enough, suddenly, we were fencing, and I was trying to keep his fork back. Actually, what am I saying? None of that is in the past tense. Colin is the literal worst, and he needs to stop eating all my food.”
“Has he been doing it lately?” he asks, just a little too concerned.
Daphne gives him an unimpressed look. “It’s Colin.”
“I know, but—”
“It’s Colin,” Daphne repeats. “If you tried to stop him from eating other people’s food, he wouldn’t survive.”
For a second, she braces herself, realizing she went the wrong direction. She shouldn’t have brought up survival. She shouldn’t bring up any matters of life and death, not with Edmund’s death still looming so large in all of their lives.
But Anthony cracks the smallest smile, and he shakes his head. “Colin would find someone else to steal food from.”
“Like Philipa Featherington?” Daphne suggests.
“Does Philipa Featherington even like him?”
Daphne stops pushing the cart entirely, and she arches an eyebrow.
He holds up his hands, slowly. “Is it obvious?”
“Philipa Featherington may not like Colin,” Daphne says, “but Portia Featherington likes Colin. I’m pretty sure she has already written vows for Philipa to say.”
“Colin isn’t going to marry Philipa Featherington.”
“Colin probably isn’t going to marry anyone,” Daphne says. “He’s gross.”
Anthony snorts. “He’s your brother.”
“Which is why I know he’s gross,” Daphne explains. She wonders if she should pivot toward Anthony’s love life, but she decides better of it. She doesn’t understand the politics between Anthony and Maria, but she knows Maria drove him to get their dad’s car back the other day. Maybe it reignited something for them.
Or maybe it put something to bed.
Good riddance, Daphne thinks, because she never liked Maria for Anthony. She hasn’t decided what she wants for Anthony, if she wants someone to mellow him out or if she wants someone to compete with him or if she thinks it’s possible someone will give him both peace and war because she thinks her older brother would need both.
“Daphne?” Anthony says after a second.
Daphne perks up. “Yes?”
“I don’t think we’re going to find party decorations out here,” he says.
Daphne offers him a sheepish smile, but it’s more genuine than she wants it to be. “Oh! I must have gotten turned around.”
April 5th, 2003
Benedict explained it to Eloise—that Anthony wasn’t really that mad at her (but she should have known better than to put a fish in his bed) but he was more mad at life. Eloise didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know how someone could be mad at life in general because that would be a hard thing to fight.
When she said that to Benedict, he laughed, and he flickered her forehead. “You try to fight too many things.”
“I fight the right amount of things,” Eloise had said, crossing her arms. Honestly, in her opinion, she thinks Benedict could fight more things. Like, sometimes he should fight Anthony in her defense rather than pulling her aside and explaining that Anthony didn’t mean to be mean, that he was just mad.
Today, though, Eloise thinks Benedict might have been right.
They decorated the entire house in shades of blue and purple. It makes them look like they’re underwater, like they’re some kind of fish warriors. There are balloons on the ground, just begging for her to play with, and there are even tiny gift bags lined up on the entryway table, all of them with a neat initial of someone in the family.
Francesca gasps in front of her, pressing her hand against her mouth.
“And here I thought you would sleep through your birthday,” Anthony calls.
Eloise glances at Anthony because there is no way he has fought life yet. But he offers her a smile, and she takes off running. She sprints down the stairs, almost knocking Francesca down—which is her fault; she should have dodged—and she races straight for her oldest brother. She slams into him, knocking both of them against the front door, and she wraps her arms tight around him.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she chants to him.
He hugs her back, and she knows he’s forgiven her, so she guesses she can forgive him for the whole fish thing. She knows better now. If she puts a fish in anyone’s bed during April Fools’ Day, it will be Benedict anyway.
Eloise starts to say something, but Francesca chooses that moment to slip up next to them and hug the two of them tight as well.
‘Kiss up,’ she mouths at Francesca.
Francesca rolls her eyes.
She had told Eloise she was being too mean to Anthony even though there was absolutely no reason for Francesca to take Anthony’s side over Eloise’s. They were practically twins, and yet?
Click.
Part of Eloise thinks, for a moment, it might be Edmund, somehow. That he came with his camera to surprise them on their birthdays, and Eloise thinks that would be the absolute best present. Francesca and Anthony stiffen too, and she wonders if they are thinking that, if they are imagining a world where Dad is alive again.
But it’s only Colin, holding Dad’s camera with a wide smile on the other lens.
“Smile!” he says.
Eloise lets go of the dream that Dad might come back today.
And she holds tighter to Anthony. She squirms around until she is facing the camera, and Francesca still holds onto Anthony’s side as if he might bolt away at any given moment.
They smile for the camera.
Colin gives them a thumbs up.
Eloise gives Anthony one last squeeze before she slips away from him, hurrying over to the rest of the decorations and the presents. There are so many presents.
Eloise could be okay with this, she thinks.
As she races toward the rest of the celebration, Colin trailing behind them like the paparazzi, she thinks this is the best they could have done for them. Violet is still upstairs, lingering like a ghost—Eloise only sees her mom at night, and when she does see her mom, she looks like she has been crying.
Benedict has told Eloise to give her space, too.
Eloise thought her birthday might be…
Well, obviously her birthday is not the most important thing right now, but she thought it might have been forgotten. Eloise and Francesca would have to do something quietly, the two of them, careful not to disturb anyone.
She didn’t think they would celebrate it.
She didn’t think it would be this much fun.
After she gets done with exploring the changed house, she will thank Anthony so many times that he will go red because he doesn’t know how to accept a thank you to solve his life.
Because this…
This is still a good birthday.
April 11th, 2003
Benedict shouldn’t eavesdrop, but the second Anthony slips into their parents’—sorry, their mother’s—bedroom, he sits down outside the door, and he presses his ear against the door. If any of the other kids were around, maybe he would have tried to hide this. He would have pretended he didn’t care, that they were all giving Violet space and that was perfectly fine and Benedict didn’t feel weird about that at all.
But right now, when it’s just Benedict in the hallway, he can’t stop himself because he does feel weird about it. Anthony stepped up, so fast and so well, that Benedict feels like he doesn’t even know where Violet would be anymore. They lost both of their parents, and they replaced them with their older brother… and they’re losing Anthony through this bargain too.
Benedict stares down at the HAPPY BIRTHDAY card his siblings insisted he help them make. They all think he’s the best at art—and he doesn’t know if he’d go that far; he doesn’t think he’s really an artist, just someone who likes messing around—so they told him he needed to design the front of the card.
It was important to them.
He thinks he gets it, too. The family put aside their grief, and they celebrated Eloise and Francesca’s birthday. Now, they want to do the same for their mother. Even Colin and Daphne, who have been more mature than they should have had to be, think they can win her back if they just try a little harder.
They miss their mother.
Benedict… feels something too complicated to pin down about their mother right now. Because he looks at Anthony, and he knows Anthony is drowning, and he knows that Violet isn’t going to send him a lifeline.
But he sat down with the kids, and he made this birthday card with them. He drew the most elegant birthday cake he could. He dug out the glitter pens, and Eloise and Francesca made it look like the sprinkles were sparkling. When Daphne kept backseat-driving, insisting the flames needed to be more realistic, Benedict obliged.
He even made the whole thing purple even though he doesn’t know if Violet’s favorite color is violet just because her name is.
Then, they nominated him to give it to her.
Benedict doesn’t think he would nominate himself.
Then, despite the conversation being too low to hear before now, he hears Violet’s voice snap, “I don’t want them. Anthony. I do not want them.”
Anthony doesn’t say anything.
Benedict straightens up, and when he hears the footsteps retreating toward the door, he springs to his feet and he flattens himself against the other wall. He can pretend he wasn’t listening. He can pretend he just happened to get in the hallway right as this trainwreck of a conversation ended.
Anthony’s hand must be on the doorknob because it starts to twist.
Then, Violet makes a noise, loud enough that Benedict can hear it without being pressed against the door. He creeps forward, not pressing his ear against the wood but hovering there, hoping his brother is too distracted by Violet to realize someone is right there.
“Do you understand how unfair it is that I shall live, that I am living, to celebrate another birthday, and he is not here?” Violet croaks out, and Benedict almost runs away right then and there.
But Benedict is not someone who runs in the family, and neither is Anthony. No, those are their younger siblings. Anthony digs holes for himself; he digs his heels in too deep to even fathom trying to take a step away. Benedict just pretends everything rolls off his back, and if he tried to run away, it would prove that he was affected and Benedict? Benedict isn’t affected by any of this.
This isn’t weird.
It isn’t gut wrenching to hear his mother say that.
“Do you understand how it tears my heart apart?” Violet continues. “I was not meant to celebrate birthdays without him. I promised him the rest of my life. We were still meant to be together, and he is gone, Anthony.”
The doorknob jerks, and Benedict barely regains his senses fast enough to take a step back. Anthony darts out of the room, slamming the door behind him, and he leans against it as if he’s physically trying to keep their mother’s words in the room with her.
Benedict hopes he can forget them, one day.
Or, since he knows that will never happen, he hopes he will be able to look back one day and know that it’s all better now.
Anthony is holding a bouquet of flowers in his trembling hands—I do not want them makes a lot more sense all at once—and he doesn’t seem to notice Benedict.
Then, he definitely does because he swallows hard and tries to pretend he isn’t affected, even though Benedict is much, much better at that game. “Do you need anything, Ben?”
But Benedict can allow him this.
If they want to pretend, he can allow that.
He twists the card around so Anthony can see it, and he tries to think on his feet. “Is she awake? Can I… I got the others to sign it. I know it’s stupid, but I thought, maybe, she would like it.”
Benedict thinks they can both hear Violet sobbing behind the door.
“She is taking a nap right now,” Anthony lies. “If you give it to me, though, I will make sure she gets it when she wakes up.”
April 20th, 2003
Portia Featherington tells her children to be on their best behavior. She will not have them embarrass her today of all days.
For as long as Portia has lived in the neighborhood, Violet and Edmund (but mostly Violet) Bridgerton organized the Easter Egg Hunt. It did not matter that nobody in the neighborhood was especially pious. She knows the Bridgertons to be a major-holiday-only kind of churchgoers, and Portia gave up on religion long ago. Religion doesn’t pay the bills, and religion isn’t something she can sleep next to at night.
But the Easter Egg Hunt is a point of pride. It proves you are a leader of the neighborhood, and it proves that you are a good mother who thinks about other kids just as often as you think about your own. Why it is a good thing to obsess over other people’s kids is beyond Portia. She only has a responsibility to them: to love them, to make their lives easier, to guarantee their safety.
Right now, though, Portia thinks this show of social status might be a tad too much of a headache.
“Hey!” Eloise Bridgerton cries out, and God, can that girl get any louder? Where did she inherit that set of lungs from? “Penn found that egg, not you!”
Unsurprisingly, Penelope seems nonplussed by the apparent egg theft, so Portia tries to go back to reading her book.
“What was that?” Colin coos, and Portia thinks he might be a little too young for Prudence with that attitude. But Philipa…? Philipa could have a chance. “I couldn’t hear you over the sound of my victory.”
“Mrs. Featherington!” Eloise shouts.
Portia tries not to sigh as she sets down her book, offering her most genial smile to the child.
“Colin is cheating,” Eloise says, stamping her foot, her hand wrapped tight around Penelope’s. Portia hopes this loudness does not rub off on her youngest daughter. “And he said he wasn’t even going to play to begin with!”
“If Mr. Bridgerton wants to play,” Portia says in a great, level voice. See? She can be a neighborhood leader, “he can play. Everyone is welcome, regardless of age.”
“See? Take that.” Colin sticks out his tongue.
Then, he grabs Penelope’s chubby hand and drags her away from Eloise, getting Penelope to giggle. He murmurs something to her, and she absolutely lights up.
Ah.
Penelope has a crush then.
“Mrs. Featherington!”
But Portia can think about meddling in the future. She quickly buries her nose in the book, hoping that will dissuade Eloise from trying to stop future forms of cheating. Honestly, Eloise is old enough to know that cheaters do prosper. Portia tried to teach that to her girls early. As long as they don’t get caught, cheating is just fine in these kinds of games. Show off how many eggs you can get. Who cares if they are from other people’s baskets?
That does manage to scare Eloise away. That, or Daphne Bridgerton swooping in to guide her little sister elsewhere with a quiet whisper, which gets another whisper in return. Portia thinks the Bridgertons are far too competitive with one another, and every day, she is thankful her girls are not competitive… and they only number three.
To think Violet is about to have eight.
To think Violet is about to be a single mother with eight children.
Portia stares up at the Bridgerton house, wondering if she should try again to visit her friend. Every time she tries, it is almost always blocked by a certain Bridgerton.
Actually, speak of the devil.
“Anthony!” Gregory cries from the street, immediately wiggling away from one of the Smythe-Smith cousins. Those girls have been showering Gregory with love, so infatuated with the idea of having a toddler.
Portia wants to shake them.
Toddlers are a lot of work. Gregory might look cute right now with the little bunny ears and overalls, but he will not be cute forever. No, soon he will need a diaper changed or soon he will fall down and throw a tantrum.
Actually, Portia should stop that from happening.
She sighs, putting down her book, and she gets up to chase down the youngest Bridgerton. He isn’t quite running, so it doesn’t take long to snatch him up and position him on her hip.
God, she hates boys, though. Portia thanks God every day that she only got girls.
Anthony Bridgerton sits on the porch with the next oldest Bridgerton brother, Benedict, their heads tilted to each other in quiet conversation. They look shockingly similar like that, and if she didn’t know them better, she thinks she would get them confused. In fact, the usual distinguishers wouldn’t even work in a situation like that. Usually, Anthony looks more put together but today, it is Benedict.
“Mr. Bridgerton,” she says.
“Yes?” Anthony and Benedict say in unison.
Portia ignores that. Instead, she holds Gregory out to Anthony. “I was worried you would not be able to join us for the fun, but I told them to let you sleep.”
Actually, Benedict and Daphne were the ones who made that choice. When Portia asked where Anthony was, Benedict had said sleeping with such venom it was clear Portia would not be allowed in their house, and Daphne loudly announced that sleep was good and that they shouldn’t bother him.
There were too many bodyguards in the Bridgerton family.
That is her honest opinion.
Anthony reaches out to Gregory, who practically cheers. He immediately cozies up to his older brother, and he thrusts a hot pink egg in his brother’s face. “Look! Look!”
“I see, Greg,” Anthony says with the mastery of someone who has entertained many young children. Portia even let him babysit back in the day; she trusted him to keep Penelope out of trouble when she took Prudence and Philipa shopping.
Hell, she trusted him a lot more than Archibald, who never seemed to grasp the art of fatherhood.
Anthony looks up at Portia, and his expression softens even further. “Thank you for this.”
“It is no problem,” Portia says, and it is the absolute truth. Even if it wasn’t, she wouldn’t admit that it was more work than Violet ever let on. Speaking of Violet… “Your mother usually arranges the neighborhood egg hunt, and when she didn’t say anything to the rest of us, I thought, well. How hard can it be…?”
She waits for him to say anything in response to that.
When he doesn’t, she sighs and asks her next question. “Is your mother well?”
“Sick,” he says immediately.
Sick.
Portia has nothing but respect for Violet, and her heart goes out to Violet, truly. She cannot imagine how hard it would be to have the love of your life pass away.
But Portia has never placed much value in being a wife if she is being honest. She does not love Archibald, and she does not think he loves her. It was an accident, having the first child with him, but she wanted Prudence to have two parents, so when he gave her a lackluster proposal, she gave him a lackluster yes.
There was never a world where Portia wasn’t a mother.
There was never a world where Portia didn’t strive to be the best mother ever.
Right now, Portia thinks Violet may need a reminder of what it means to be the best mother ever.
“I wan’ more eggs,” Gregory says then, trying to stand up and drag his older brother with him.
Portia gives him a smile, covering up her frustration that she still has yet to make a house call to Violet. “I wonder if he’ll grow out of the lisp—”
“Anthony!” Benedict says abruptly, springing upward and taking his brothers with him. “Let’s go see if we can find more eggs than Colin and Daphne. I am positive they will absolutely hate that.”
Anthony offers Portia what he probably considers a sympathetic smile. “We can continue this later.”
The Bridgertons, Portia thinks again, have too many bodyguards in their family.
May 9th, 2003
Benedict shoves a piece of paper in front of his brother. If he tried this any other way, he knows Anthony would try to wiggle out of it. This way, he cannot evade it. “When were you going to tell us?”
“Tell you what?” Anthony says, purposefully not looking at the sheet of paper. Instead, he organizes the chicken nuggets on the baking sheet, concentrating like it is a math test or some sh*t.
Benedict wants to scream. “You committed to the University of Chicago.”
“I did,” Anthony says.
“You weren’t going to the University of Chicago before…” Benedict chokes on the next words, and he hates that he still can't say it outright. When they first had to go back to school, almost two months ago, he remembered telling Anthony nobody would ever look at him as Benedict anymore; they would see him as the boy with the dead father.
He has gotten used to thinking about it; he has adjusted to the idea Edmund will not be a part of his life anymore. But here he is, choking on what he needs to say.
“Before Dad’s death,” he gets out, “you weren’t going to go to the University of Chicago.”
“Where would I have gone?” Anthony asks.
Benedict can’t tell if he’s purposely being an idiot. “Didn’t you apply to, like, five schools? Weren’t you the one who told Mom about the importance of safety schools, and stretch schools, and dream schools? There was no way that the University of Chicago was your dream school.”
“Maybe it was.”
But Benedict knows he caught him. Maybe it was isn’t the response he would have if he actually, desperately wanted to go to the University of Chicago. No, Anthony would have said it is. He would have said Maybe not at first, but it grew on me.
He would have said something other than the defeated maybe it was.
“So it isn’t,” Benedict says.
“I already committed, Ben. I sent the money in and everything, and apparently, it’s on whatever piece of paper you have there…” Anthony’s voice trails off as he takes in the sheet for the first time.
It’s a mock-up of the graduation program. It has a list of schools all of his classmates will go to. A lot of them will end up at local schools. They will be at the University of Chicago, or the University of Illinois at Chicago, or DePaul, or one of the fifty million schools in the city. You can’t go two steps without tripping over someone’s higher education dreams.
But that’s not where Anthony’s dreams are.
“You didn’t want to go locally,” Benedict says. “I remember that much.”
“The last time we talked about it, things were very different,” Anthony says.
The stove dings then, telling them both it’s up to temperature. Anthony turns around fast, so fast it is a clear sign he doesn’t want to talk to Benedict about this.
But if he doesn’t talk to Benedict about this, who will? Who will talk to Anthony about this? Who could talk him out of it?
f*ck, can Benedict even talk him out of this?
“I don’t mind being in the city,” Anthony says, still not looking at him. “Besides, I’ll save a fortune since I won’t be living in the dorms.”
“You’re not living in the dorms,” Benedict repeats. “I thought you were excited to live in the dorms, Ant. You would have all sorts of wild parties.”
“People do not have wild parties in dorms because they would get in trouble with the school,” he rattles off like he’s a tour guide for the school, like he is getting paid to pretend people don’t drink underage.
Anthony is supposed to be excited about graduating high school.
He’s supposed to be thrilled to go to college.
Instead, he looks like he’s facing the firing squad as he prepares chicken nuggets and mac and cheese for nine people, one of whom will let the food sit in her master bedroom and get cold before she picks at it.
God, why isn’t it Violet right now, trying to talk him out of it?
“Is it too late?” Benedict asks. “To change your mind?”
Anthony busies himself with the cooking.
Benedict takes a step forward, reaching for his brother, but he can’t bring himself to actually touch him. He doesn’t want to see Anthony flinch away from him. “Ant.”
Anthony only offers a harsh nod.
f*ck.
Does this help, asking him to change his mind? Or does it just remind him of all the sacrifices he already made? Nobody asked Anthony to make this choice! Nobody asked him to sacrifice all of this!
And, guiltily, Benedict cannot help but think he doesn’t know many of their other siblings would have made this sacrifice.
“Your dream school,” Benedict says after far too much time has passed. “Do you know if you got in?”
Anthony freezes.
And Benedict knows, no matter what Anthony says, that he did get into his dream school. That his brother thought he was bound for one of the coasts just two months ago, that he probably was picking out his dorm and his roommates.
And Benedict knows that now, Anthony is giving up his dreams to take care of the family.
May 10th, 2003
“If I don’t get a hug, Anthony Bridgerton,” Maria says dramatically, stalking up the aisles to find him the second they have dismissed them from standing at attention. He still hasn’t moved, just staring at the sea of hats thrown and tossed aside to be picked up later, the smallest smile on his face. When he turns to see her, though, it gets just a little bit bigger, so she grins bigger too, “I think I will have to revoke your diploma.”
“I don’t think you have the power to do that,” Anthony says fondly.
It’s like no time has passed between them.
She has given him space; she knew there was no room for her in his life right now. She tried to help in small ways, though, because she couldn’t… she wasn’t content, not like the others, just to move on. Of course he couldn’t spend time with them at parties anymore. Of course he couldn’t be the most dedicated friend.
She crushes him into a hug.
Anthony laughs softly, but he hugs her back. “I’m sorry I—”
“If you apologize,” Maria says immediately, “I might have to revoke your diploma.”
“Maria.”
“I don’t care what you want to say,” she says, and she lets him go from the hug, choosing to cross her arms instead. “Here’s what you are going to tell your first college girlfriend.”
“Oh, you’re telling me what to say?”
“Sometimes,” Maria says with a sharp smile, “you need coaching, and I won’t be there to whisper in your ear.”
No, Maria has her own plans, plans to take her outside of Chicago and see the world. Her plane ticket will take her far, far away next week, actually. If they were closer, he might have known that.
She doesn’t regret their lack of closeness.
“First off, any woman you meet after me will have to be drop dead gorgeous,” Maria tells him.
“Nobody can be as gorgeous as you,” he says.
She rolls her eyes. “Flatterer.”
She can tell he says it more out of habit than anything else. It isn’t passionate anymore; it isn’t the kind of thing he says because he wants them in the backseat of his car later in the night. Instead, it is almost… like a friend complimenting her.
She supposes it’s the only thing that makes sense. They’ve both changed too much to having spontaneous car sex. Instead, they’re civilized adults.
Gag.
“Second off, you’re going to tell them we had to cut things off because you are far too nice of a brother,” Maria says. “But if you need a letter of reference, I’m happy to provide.”
“I don’t know how often I will be sending girls your way,” Anthony says with a smile.
Maria rolls her eyes.
Then, she gives him one last hug, knowing this will be the last time. She kisses him on the cheek, and when she pulls away, she knows it’s the end of an era.
Maria will look forward to seeing him for their high school reunions. He will be doing something impressive. Lawyer-y.
Hell, maybe they’ll reconnect then.
Until then, though…
“Maria!”
Maria pauses on the steps, turning to look over at the voice calling her.
She knows without asking that this is a Bridgerton sister. It would be the oldest one, too, the one whose name starts with D. Once, Maria thinks she studied the list of names to make sure she could hold her own in conversation with Anthony. Right now, she cannot figure out what it could be. Daisy? Dylan?
“Hi,” Maria settles on. Besides, whatever D wants to tell her cannot be too much of a threat. Even if she wants to give her some kind of shovel talk, it’s too late for that. Maria fully expects this to be the last time she sees Anthony.
D comes up to her, though, and only then does she hesitate. “You are Maria, right? Maria Russo?”
“The Maria who dated your brother?” Maria asks with a quirk of her lips. There’s no point in hiding that.
And maybe date is the wrong word, but she thinks about that hug she just shared with Anthony, and she thinks it is fair to say that they dated, that a part of her heart will always go toward the boy who loved his family so much more than he loved himself. She hopes she will keep a piece of his heart, too, the first girl who saw him as something more than a Bridgerton, who hopefully reminded him that the Anthony part of his name mattered, too.
D reaches forward, taking one of Maria’s hands. “Thank you.”
“For what?” Maria asks, and if she didn’t see that gleam in D’s eyes, she would’ve cracked a crude joke that would have had her needling Anthony with that information for the rest of his life.
“Thank you for taking care of him,” D says.
Maria smiles at his sister. “He did that himself.”
“But you…” And D hesitates there.
But Maria squeezes her hand. “He did it himself, but I’ll take it. I loved him, too.”
May 29th, 2003
This will not be a story Anthony tells often.
If he could get away with it, he wouldn’t tell the story at all.
Yet, in fourteen years, he will be pacing back and forth, back and forth, in his best friend’s living room.
Then, Simon Bassett—not just his best friend, but his brother—will sigh and kick the armchair Anthony usually chooses. “Will you just tell me what this is about? I really don’t have the brainpower for guessing games anymore.”
Anthony won’t stop his pacing, not at first. Instead, he will stall in front of the window, and he will stare at it like some magical answer might appear. Not for the first time, Simon will consider calling his wife (but she was at a Mommy and Me yoga class and Daphne so seldomly liked interruptions during those). Not for the first time, Simon will consider calling Anthony’s wife.
Then, the story will come out.
“My mother almost died giving birth to Hyacinth,” he will say, plain and simple.
Simon will think there’s nothing quite that simple.
Because they have talked about something like this before. When Daphne was pregnant with their first child—after Simon had finished freaking out about what it might mean to be a father—Simon had pulled Anthony aside, hoping his oldest friend might be able to calm him down.
His mother died in childbirth.
Daphne had said Hyacinth’s birth had been hard. Even though Anthony was notoriously tight-lipped about it, Violet had told Daphne it was difficult and that there were complications and all at once, all Daphne could see were warning signs.
“It was my choice,” Anthony will confess.
Simon will tilt his head, confused. “What? What was your choice?”
“She made me her medical proxy.” He will still be standing, still staring out the window with his hands trembling at his side. He will shove them into his pockets to try and hide them. “She had never told me that. I never would have known, but… but the doctor told me I had to make a choice.”
“What was the choice?” Simon will suspect it already—he would have to be a fool not to suspect the choice—but he will need it said out loud.
He will think Anthony needs it said out loud, too.
“Hyacinth or my mother,” Anthony will say, flatly. It will be as if his friend is not even present in his body. As if something from beyond forces him to tell his story to Simon but if he could have made the choice, he never would have made this one.
“Anthony,” Simon will say because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“I said… I couldn’t…” Anthony will let out a shaky breath, running his hands through his hair. “I can’t make that choice, Simon. If it’s between Kate or our son, I can’t… I don’t know… how will…?”
“It’s an impossible choice,” Simon will say immediately, something churning in his own stomach. He didn’t want to be a father; he never imagined being a father. But after he held baby Amelia in his arms, cradling her and her little heartbeat to him, he knew he had been foolish.
He cannot imagine ever choosing between Daphne and Amelia.
“I have to be prepared to make it,” Anthony will say.
Simon will shake his head. “You do not, Bridgerton.”
“Nobody else will be able to make the choice. I—”
“Have you talked to Kate about this?” Simon will interrupt, hoping to cut off his friend’s spiraling because he knows where this conversation will go.
And Anthony will go back to staring out the window.
And Simon will know that Anthony has been hiding from Kate, trying to prepare himself for making the most difficult choice of his life. He has been preparing to lose her, yes, but in two distinct ways. Anthony has been bracing for the moment Kate dies, and Anthony has been bracing for the moment Kate resents him for letting their firstborn son die.
Simon will wonder if that was the outcome from before. Yes, both Violet and Hyacinth had lived, but had Anthony lived with Violet’s quiet resentment?
But that doesn’t sound like Violet.
Simon will wonder if Anthony lived with his own quiet self-loathing for that moment, even if he never realized it until Kate got close to giving birth.
May 30th, 2003
Mary Sharma will not remember this conversation, not really. She will have a vague impression of a patient’s son she once treated, so when she meets Anthony Bridgerton for the first time and he freezes, eyes wide like a deer in headlights, she will wonder if it was him. But she will not remember enough details.
But Mary Sharma—and it is Mary Sharma going down to the hospital’s chapel, not Dr. Sharma—goes to find a boy who needs a mother right now.
The boy sits there, head bowed, not in prayer but in defeat. His mother was shouting at him in the hospital room, talking about his father, and Mary knew it meant his father had passed away. Why else would they say his name with such love, such reverence, if the man was gone for any other reason?
The boy cannot be more eighteen. In so many ways, he reminds her of her beloved Kate, who is sixteen, going on seventeen, and carrying more grief than any child ought to. He does not have anyone else to turn to. She thinks he might come from a big family, but she thinks he is mostly alone.
And Mary hopes—she prays, even if this chapel is not necessarily set up for the gods she worships—someone would reach out to Kate if something like this would occur. Kate would put on a brave face; she always does, Mary’s Kathani. Mary can never tell what Kate wants out of life, what she needs from Mary.
Mary thinks she is failing, but she strives to do better by Kate and Edwina every time. Arjan reassures her, promising that Kate views her as a mother, that Kate isn’t wanting for anything, but Mary doesn’t think that is fair. No, it would never be fair to say Kate isn’t wanting for her mother.
It is bitterly—bitterly—unfair that Rekha Sharma will never see her beloved daughter grow up. She will never see the woman Kate is becoming. If Kate isn’t aware of that—well, she would have to be another person’s daughter because Mary can see all the ways Rekha would have been there for Kate.
This boy’s father—he would never see him making those choices. There was real bravery to stand in the room while his mother wailed at him. It is unfair to judge his mother; it is a scary situation, and if she was used to having her husband by her side, then this would be unfathomable. But her son was brave.
Mary will whisper that to her in the morning.
He was brave, and he was kind, and he tried his best, and Mary is proud of him, even if she does not know him.
“Do you mind if I join you?” Mary asks as she walks up the aisle of the hospital’s chapel, her fingers grazing the tops of the benches.
He jolts upright, and she watches him try to rearrange his face, his posture, every part of him to cover up the tears so obvious on his face. He puts up a wall, but it is a flimsy one, one she is confident she could smash through.
Then, he scoots over on the pew, and he swallows hard. When he speaks, it comes out almost like an adult’s. “Of course.”
But he is not an adult, Mary thinks sadly. There is something so sad about that, watching this boy of maybe eighteen trying to be the man his mother wants to be. There is no world where he could live up to that expectation.
But he tried.
“I’m Dr. Sharma,” Mary says. She can tell—well, she would like to think she can tell—that he would respond better to authority. “It’s okay if you do not remember; it is a very stressful situation, especially for someone so young.”
The boy flinches back.
Mary wonders which word is the one that scared him. Stressful? Young? She wonders which memory she evoked, even by accident.
Maybe she was wrong about the authority part.
“I’m Mary,” she tells him, “and I thought you might want a friend.”
The boy doesn’t even try for a smile. He lifts his head and stares at one of the candles flickering, soft and low, before he offers the smallest of a shrug. “I’m not much company right now.”
“That is alright,” Mary says.
She wants to ask if there is anyone she could call for him, but it is three AM. She thinks if there was someone for him, they would have been there already. She thinks if he wanted someone, he would have called them. And, if he’s anything like Kate, she doesn’t know if the comfort of having someone else shoulder the burden would be worth it, not if it meant actually sharing the burden.
He is still crying, but it is quieter now.
She doesn’t know if that is a good sign or not.
“You’re very brave,” she tells him.
The boy laughs—it is a hollow thing. “I do not know if I would say that.”
“I would,” she says, and she reaches out by instinct. She wants to be a touchstone; she wants to ground them both into this moment. But she is not his mother, so she folds her hands together instead. “This is an impossible situation to put anyone in. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for you, knowing… I am sorry for the loss of your father.”
“Thank you,” he says. It’s a muscle memory; she can tell.
“I know that sounds hollow,” Mary says, thinking of the way the fire disappears in Arjan’s eyes every time he has to thank someone for their sympathies, “but I mean it. My daughter… I guess you could call her my stepdaughter, but she is my daughter. She lost her mother when she was young, and it—”
“Did she recover?” the boy blurts out.
It’s the most passion she has heard in his voice the whole conversation.
It’s the most passion he has had, ever, even in the hospital room.
She looks at him, and she offers a smile. “Yes. She is one of the best people I know. She recovered.”
It is more than that, though. It is more complicated than that.
But it’s the truth.
Kate is one of the best people Mary knows.
“You will recover,” she tells the boy. “I can already tell how strong you are.”
“But your daughter… she wasn’t…” He searches for the right words.
“She recovered,” Mary reassures him, “and she was still surrounded by love, even if she did not have a parent.”
The boy doesn’t have a response to that.
She follows his gaze back to the candles, and she hopes that, one day, he will look back and know he was surrounded by love.
She hopes that, one day, he will look back and know he surrounded that baby upstairs with love and that while she was left wanting, she was still surrounded by love.
That can make wanting a lot easier.
May 31st, 2003
Daphne takes baby Hyacinth’s tiny arm—she is so small, she doesn’t remember Gregory ever being this tiny, but surely, he must have been—and she lets her wave at their older brother.
Anthony, who is pretending that he is not falling asleep on the couch after several hard days at the hospital, gives them a muzzy smile before going back to staring blankly at the wall, his eyelids drooping.
“You’re right,” Daphne whispers down to Hyacinth. “I do think we need to fix that.”
Hyacinth murmurs; she is a chatty baby, even if she keeps her eyes closed so often Daphne thinks she must always be asleep. Then again, she cries much more than the other babies did. She only seems to stop when she gets to rest in someone’s arms.
Luckily, she has many older siblings clamoring to hold her. Benedict and Daphne made the executive decision that both Eloise and Francesca could hold Hyacinth, but they had to be sitting down on the couch, and they had to be scooted back as far as possible. Gregory somehow looked upset he wasn’t allowed to hold the baby.
Daphne thinks he’d probably try to throw her like a football.
Daphne clears her throat, getting Anthony’s lazy gaze back on her. “Hyacinth and I have made a decision.”
“You and…” He blinks slowly at that, narrowing his eyes. “You and Hyacinth? Isn’t it too early to be conspiring against me?”
“We’ve already decided how to make your life as difficult as possible,” Daphne says, grinning.
“Why does that not surprise me?” he murmurs.
Daphne rolls her eyes. She thinks she is a very good sister; she could cause so many more problems. Any day now, Daphne intends to go through a teenage rebellion. Of course, she is only ten, so some may argue she will have some time before she needs to do that.
Daphne stands up, listening to Hyacinth’s whispers.
Then, she walks straight over to Anthony, and she gives her best impression of Violet. “I think it’s time for you to go to bed.”
Anthony snorts at that. “Daff, it’s seven PM.”
“You’re falling asleep,” she says, “so Hyacinth and I are going to escort you to your bed.”
Daphne actually cleaned his room this morning, too. Anthony had asked them—he was practically begging—to wait at home for him to drive Violet home rather than trying to pile all seven people into the car to go to the hospital. The second he left, she went and made his bed, trying to feel like she was being helpful, too.
Then, she just… kept going.
Anthony hated when his room got messy. Daphne remembers some random dinner where Edmund joked that when Anthony’s room was messy, he got concerned and when Benedict’s room was clean, he got concerned.
So, Daphne picked up all the trash, and she ran it to the garage.
She organized all the papers scattered about. Some of them, he didn’t need to keep. Why keep a failed math test except to make yourself feel worse? No, that went straight into the recycling bin.
She’s excited for him to see his room, and she thinks that is just a little embarrassing for her.
“Come on,” Daphne says.
No.
Daphne commands.
Anthony rolls his eyes, but he gets up. He leans down the second he does, though, brushing a kiss against Hyacinth’s hairline, and Hyacinth reaches up her tiny arm to grab toward Anthony’s face. Daphne thinks part of her melts right then and there.
“Remember this,” Anthony whispers to her. “Your oldest sister is the bossy one.”
Daphne swats at him.
Anthony gives her a fond smile. “She’s also the violent one if she doesn’t get her way.”
“Hyacinth will be more violent than me,” Daphne says. “Complaining about me—your most perfect sister—jinxed you.”
Anthony only smiles at her, but he follows her upstairs.
June 5th, 2003
For the record, Francesca thinks this is unfair.
She crosses her arms over her chest, and she tries to send that entire argument to Eloise. They have twin telepathy (or, at least, that’s what Eloise started telling people. Eloise later told her it was because she just wanted people to stop asking about their dead father, and people would rather hear about the telepathy).
The telepathy, however, seems to stop working whenever Eloise wants it to stop working. Which is so unfair.
Eloise co*cks her head toward the door again.
Francesca gives her a dirty look.
Eloise knocks and retreats backward, shoving Francesca closer to the door.
“You’re a coward,” she hisses at Eloise.
“Yes?” Anthony calls on the other side of the door.
“He never gets mad at you!” Eloise hisses back.
“That’s because I never do anything wrong!”
“That’s not true!”
“It so is true!”
They go back to glaring at each other, waiting for the other one to step up to the door and lure Anthony out.
“Do you want to come in?” Anthony asks, his voice sounding… happy? Is he happy?
“He wants you to come in,” Francesca tells Eloise.
“No, he wants you to come in.”
“You’re older!”
“You’re the baby! He can’t say no to you!”
“By one year! There’s a literal baby in this house!”
Eloise shoves her toward the door again.
Francesca glares at her, but she twists the doorknob, slowly, and she gathers up all her courage. However, the second the crack is big enough for a body to fit through, Eloise shoves her forward.
Anthony is sitting on the other side of the desk (Francesca thinks but doesn’t say out loud, she thinks it as softly as she can so she barely knows: that desk was Daddy’s), and he smiles at her. He takes in her outfit—a nice dress she stole from Daphne’s old pile and a cornflower blue ribbon twisted at the bottom of her hair because blue matches her eyes—and he smiles a little wider. “You look very nice, Frannie.”
Francesca smiles at him, savoring the compliment.
Then, she tries to focus on the mission, but he looks busy. People don’t sit at desks unless they’re busy.
“Hurry up,” Eloise hisses.
Francesca wants to kick her.
“Do you…” Francesca starts, but she thinks he’s busy. She scoots forward, subtly, so she can look toward the computer screen. If she sees any numbers, she’ll abandon the mission. Numbers mean that he’s doing something very important and something that nobody else could do because the one time she asked Benedict to help her with her math homework, he completely messed it up.
But there are no numbers. There is nothing on the computer screen. Maybe he isn’t super busy right now. Or maybe he just finished what made him so busy.
“Do you want to have a tea party with me and Eloise?” she asks. “We need a guest.”
“Francesca,” Eloise says.
“We have guests,” Francesca corrects, “but I want a real guest.”
Eloise groans, loudly, louder than an elephant probably, before stomping into the office. “You don’t have to if you’re busy.”
Francesca looks at her, betrayed.
“I am doing nothing right now, actually,” Anthony says, standing up.
Eloise eyes him. “You’re doing nothing?”
“Nothing important,” he says. He steps around the desk and offers his hand, and Francesca rushes forward before Eloise can steal her glory. She pulls him out of the office. “Nothing so important I cannot attend a tea party on the arms of Miss Bridgerton and Miss Bridgerton.”
Francesca giggles, pulling at his sleeve. “You’re my guest.”
“He’s our guest,” Eloise says, and she grabs Anthony’s hand. Drat. Francesca forgot she could do that. “You can’t invite any of the other boys, though. No boys are allowed.”
“Besides you,” Francesca hurries to add.
Eloise glares at her. “Obviously, Anthony does not count. He’s our guest of honor.”
“I will not invite any of the others,” Anthony promises.
“Not even Gregory,” Eloise says.
Actually, Francesca thinks she’s right for that one. Somehow, inviting Anthony means inviting one of the babies these days.
“Not even Gregory,” he pledges.
So, they bring him to their tea party. They managed to convince Daphne to give them a tablecloth with flowers from the closet, and they stretched it over their tea party table. Their tea kit sits in the middle of the table, a teacup for each of their guests.
“Thank you for coming,” Francesca says before Anthony can sit down.
“Thank you for coming!” Eloise says, louder, but it’s too late because Francesca said it first, so she wins even if she was quieter.
Anthony grins. “The pleasure, Misses Bridgerton, was all mine.”
June 13th, 2003
What just happened?
Benedict stares at the glass of water Anthony poured for him, still trembling from when his brother slammed it down, and he stumbles into the seat Anthony just vacated, slumping into it. He can barely feel his legs, but he thinks he bangs the chair around too loudly, and he looks toward the stairs, waiting for his brother to emerge again to yell at him.
Why was Benedict yelling? He’s not someone who yells. No, people think he’s always calm and collected; Henry was saying that at the party tonight, right before he stuck his tongue down Benedict’s—
That’s not the point. He doesn’t think that’s the point. Well, he thinks he might need to return that mental image tonight, and he knows he needs to send a text in the morning, but he doesn’t need to think about Henry right now. He needs to think about how the situation just fell apart, and Benedict doesn’t really get why.
He came home, and he was a little too defensive. But Anthony was sitting at the counter, looking so…
So much like Edmund.
That was the only thought in Benedict’s head, and it just kept echoing, louder and louder, and Benedict thinks if he drank a little less, he could’ve shut off that thought. Instead, he was facing a ghost of his father, and not his older brother at all, but it’s not like Benedict has really had his older brother lately.
Benedict gets that Anthony needs to be a replacement dad to the little ones. Gregory won’t even remember Dad, and Hyacinth sure as hell can’t, but Benedict… Benedict was sixteen when Dad died. He doesn’t need someone to replace Dad because he still misses Dad, still wants Dad back.
He wishes it was Dad sitting at the kitchen counter, judging Benedict for drinking too much.
Instead, it was Anthony, who was supposed to laugh it off with him. Who was supposed to want to go to parties with him. But at the party, people talked about Anthony like he…
Benedict stares at the water, deflating a little more.
Like he died with Edmund. He stopped going to parties, stopped responding to invites. It makes sense why he did. He couldn’t go and get drunk anymore because who would get up if Gregory started crying? He couldn’t play beer pong because who would make sure Eloise didn’t have a nightmare? He couldn’t come with Benedict anywhere.
Benedict thinks he ruined the whole situation. It’s not that he doesn’t want Anthony to be his dad—but he doesn’t.
It’s just that he doesn’t want Anthony to stop being his brother.
He runs his finger along the rim of the glass, and he lowers his forehead to the counter.
He misses Anthony. He wants to say something that gets Anthony to smile again. Instead, Anthony looks at him like Benedict hasn’t ever had a thought in his head. He can only imagine what he would say if Benedict said he wanted to be an artist. No, Anthony would tell him he needs to be more responsible and needs to think beyond himself and that’s not Anthony’s job.
He’s supposed to be playing beer pong with Benedict.
Instead, he’s trying to parent Benedict.
Benedict should apologize.
Well, first…
He chugs the water, and he goes to the fridge, and he chugs another full glass. He doesn’t remember exactly how much he drank at the party, but he knows it was a decent amount. People kept commenting on how impressive it was, that Benedict could drink them all under the table.
And for a second, Benedict wasn’t one of the sad Bridgerton boys.
He wasn’t someone with a dead dad.
No, he was just a teenager doing stupid teenage things.
He just didn’t think the stupid teenage sh*t would extend to offending his older brother, who has been trying so hard and is still slipping away from Benedict. In two months, will Benedict even recognize the person he becomes? In two years? In twenty?
Or will this be the moment he loses Anthony forever?
And the worst part, Benedict thinks as he stares at the one water droplet trace the inside of the cup, is the only person he could go to for advice would be Anthony because he knows better than to try and get any of his other siblings involved with Anthony’s life.
June 16th, 2003
Daphne doesn’t panic, not when she asks Anthony to drive her to the cemetery even though she stood outside his door for at least fifteen minutes summoning the courage. She doesn’t panic the entire car ride, listening to Gregory babble nonsensically, her little brother just excited to be included even though he cannot understand the grief heavy in the air. She doesn’t panic as Anthony slides into a parking spot.
But she panics when she sees that lone tombstone. There are no flowers atop it; there are no decorations because Anthony had chosen the ‘standard package’ for the tombstone, and Daphne didn’t even realize there were different packages for tombstones. It looks… lonely. It looks unloved.
She grabs Anthony’s sleeve, instinctually, and she hunches herself closer to him. “We should have gotten him flowers.”
“Daphne—”
“No,” she says, the words building up in her throat, so dense she thinks she might start choking on them, “we should have gotten him flowers. If we were better kids, we would have gotten him flowers. We—”
“Daphne,” Anthony says, cutting her off before she can keep spiraling. He squeezes her arm, and he looks her in the eye. “He will forgive us for forgetting the flowers.”
“Who?” Gregory chirps next to them.
They both flinch at that.
They should have brought flowers, or they should have brought something he loved. Maybe she should have let Anthony wake up Benedict and Colin to see if they would want to come along, but Daphne…
Daphne doesn’t know what she wanted out of this morning, but she didn’t want all of her siblings there. It felt like too much to ask; it felt cruel to ask them all to face their grief again. It feels like the last time she saw his father was years ago, but it actually… it was only… it was only a matter of months.
But her father is gone. It will only get longer.
And it is a hollow comfort to know Daphne and Anthony will bring flowers next year. Maybe they won’t bring Gregory and Hyacinth, or maybe they will bring someone else.
“Go, Daff,” Anthony says, nudging her forward. “He’s listening.”
Daphne takes a deep breath, and she takes a step forward. That’s all it is. One step. Then the next. And the next. And when she is right in front of the tombstone, she kneels there in the dirt.
The dirt isn’t soft anymore.
The dirt is solid.
“Hi, Dad,” she whispers to the tombstone. “Happy Father’s Day.”
And something splits wide open in her, and she starts telling him all the things she has wanted to tell him.
She tells him the basic things: that she misses him, she misses him more than words can say, and that she loves him and she will never stop loving him. She tells him about the end of the school year; she tells him about her life, even if it feels silly and frivolous and like nobody should care.
He always cared about her silly stories, even if they didn’t have a clear reason to be told. He always laughed when she recycled jokes from the school day.
She tells him about baby Hyacinth, about how much he would have loved her. And she tells him about the rest of her siblings, one by one, and she only lowers her voice once.
It’s when she tells him about Anthony.
She glances over her shoulder, and her brother pretends not to be listening. Instead, he has taken Hyacinth out of the baby carrier, and instead, he is cradling her against his chest, looking surprisingly teary-eyed.
She looks away because if he cries, she is guaranteed to cry.
“Anthony drove me here today, Dad,” Daphne whispers. “He’s a good older brother. He’s… he’s doing his best with the family.”
She thinks about all the little things he does for them now.
And she reaches over, placing her hand over the tombstone. “Anthony is taking care of us. You should be proud. And you… you don’t have to worry about us. Any of us. Anthony has the family. And if Anthony cannot have the family, I will have the family. We will keep everyone safe. We will protect everyone.”
And she speaks the next part in her mind because she has to think Edmund can hear that part too.
And I will protect Anthony, Daphne promises.
Nobody in the family will go unprotected or unwatched.
And, of course, there will always be Edmund, watching over all of them. She hopes he is proud of everyone. She hopes he is listening to her. She hopes he knows that she will always love him, and she will always miss him, but they are getting better. They are recovering.
June 17th, 2003
Violet is failing him.
She is failing all of them.
She doesn’t know when the weight on her chest shifted. For so long, it felt like everything was so hard. Sleeping was hard; she had to sleep in a bed without Edmund, and she would wake up with her arm outstretched to his pillow, waiting for him to return to her. Eating was hard; everything found a way to remind her of him, and she would chew her food, knowing she would never go to his favorite restaurants again, knowing she would never get to go on a date with him again. Breathing was hard; how could she keep going on without Edmund there for her, for her entire family?
But, somehow, the grief that was drowning her started to shift slightly. She started to sleep through the night, no longer gripped with anxiety every two hours that she was going to wake up to a phone call from Anthony again, her baby boy hysterically telling her that he was going to the hospital because something happened to Edmund. She started to eat more, her appetite coming back and reminding her that yes, she should eat and yes, she should live. Breathing no longer felt like a chore.
The doctors told her some women got depressed after having a child. It was clear what they were implying—that Violet would get depressed after having Hyacinth, even if she had never been affected that way before. And when she stared at baby Hyacinth, she thought that was true, that she was looking at her baby like she didn’t even recognize her.
The first week back from the hospital, Violet could only think about the decision the doctor had asked Anthony to make. He asked him to choose between Violet and Hyacinth, and Violet couldn’t help but mourn that she had not perished when she had the chance.
And now… now she regrets that thought, bitterly. Because she will catch a glimpse of her children around the house, and her heart—her sad, sunken heart—will start to beat again because her family is not gone. Edmund is gone, but her family is not gone.
Violet needs to be better. Whether that is because she recognizes she needs to be better or because they need her to be better, it does not matter. Something needs to change because she once took pride in being a good mother, one of the best mothers she had ever known, actually. And now, she is failing them all.
Especially Anthony.
She appreciates Anthony more than words could describe, even though she thinks he has only seen her at her worst recently, even though she had to actively stop associating him with the phone call delivering the news. He stepped up, and she isn’t sure if she would have predicted such a thing. Her son stepped up, and he has been taking care of everyone.
And right now, he sleeps in the living room, clutching baby Hyacinth, and she wonders when the last time he got a good night’s sleep was. There are bags beneath his eyes that look more like bruises, and something in her aches to see that. Edmund and Violet used to take turns checking in on him, making sure that he was not staying up too late doing his schoolwork.
He doesn’t even have a blanket to cover himself in the living room. Hyacinth is swaddled up in a fluffy pink one, but Anthony is sprawled with nothing to cover him but Hyacinth. He is almost falling off the couch.
Violet moves, cautiously, and she extracts the sleeping baby from her eldest son’s arms. He makes a sound of protest in his sleep, but he doesn’t open his eyes, and Violet clutches Hyacinth against her chest, wide-eyed.
Then, she promises herself she will return to Anthony after she puts Hyacinth down in her crib. She will wake him up, and she will convince him to go to his bed which will be far more comfortable.
And she promises herself that she will be better to Anthony. She cannot keep hiding from her family, and she cannot keep expecting him to watch over the rest of the family. No, Violet needs to step up again.
She has let this grief define her, but she cannot let it define her forever.
July 4th, 2003
“Thank you.”
Anthony glances over at Colin, giving him a confused look. “You know, I didn’t actually get the grill going for your hotdogs. If it was up to me, I think you probably would have starved to death tonight.”
“Oh, I think I probably would have,” Colin says with an easy smile. Then, he leans forward and knocks their shoulders together. They sit on the sidewalk right now, letting the little kids use the folding chairs to gaze up at the night sky, waiting for the next round of fireworks. “But that’s not what I’m thanking you for.”
“Do I have to guess?” Anthony drawls.
“Thank you for everything this year,” Colin says.
Anthony blinks, taken aback.
So, Colin presses the point, just a little more. “I don’t think it would’ve been as… easy without you. And I know I haven’t been that helpful—”
“You’ve been helpful,” Anthony says, immediately.
Colin laughs at that, and he shakes his head. “I’ve never clocked so many hours on my bike this year.”
And there is a question in Anthony’s eyes right after that, a silent inquiry about why Colin has been on his bike so much lately. And Colin doesn’t know how to describe it, doesn't know how to explain that there is just an itch in him to run away and get away and he flees to the far reaches of Chicago to feel better about everything happening.
And Colin is not stupid. He knows how lucky he is to be the third son because if he was in Anthony’s shoes…
Well, he would be living a very different life. And maybe one day, he will be able to complain about how much Anthony tries to coddle him (but in a strange, aggressive way like he doesn’t actually know how to coddle people), but right now, he just appreciates that he didn’t have to be Anthony.
“You made it easy to come home,” Colin says at last, “after spending so many hours on my bike.”
“I’m glad you come back,” Anthony says.
And Colin knows, without asking, that Anthony worries about him when he disappears for hours on end. Colin doesn’t know how to tell Anthony that he is safe, that he knows how to bike around Chicago without getting into trouble, without sounding like a petulant child promising that he is a real adult.
He knows he wouldn’t worry about Benedict as much, but Colin already can sense how unfair it is to compare himself to Benedict.
A firework explodes in the sky overhead, and Gregory lets out a delighted shriek while Hyacinth just starts crying.
Anthony moves immediately, going to grab her and take her inside, but he freezes.
Colin looks over, and he cannot help but smile.
“Not all babies can be as good with fireworks as Gregory,” Violet says softly, holding Hyacinth against her chest. She brushes a kiss against the top of Gregory’s head, and she nods toward the house. “I think it’s time for me to go back inside anyway. It’s been a long day.”
“Do you need any help?” Colin asks before Anthony can. “I don’t mind missing out on the fireworks.”
“You do,” Violet says with a fond smile. “You were just like Gregory. Do you remember that, Anthony?”
Anthony tenses, just a little, but he manages to shake it off before anyone can comment on it. Instead, he offers an easy smile and a shrug. “Colin just had a short attention span. I’m not sure anything has changed.”
“Hey now,” Colin says with a laugh. Then, he sobers up. “I’m serious, Mom. If you—”
“I will be fine,” Violet says, but her gaze is no longer on Colin. Instead, it is solely focused on Anthony, and there is a silent conversation passing between the two of them.
Except Anthony looks away before the conversation can fully finish.
Violet doesn’t say anything. Instead, she just nods, once, and she wishes the rest of them a good night.
Colin doesn’t say anything about the exchange to Anthony; he just scoots a little closer, and he rests his head on his older brother’s shoulder, hoping that will bring him any comfort.
July 23rd, 2003
Francesca does not like the zoo gift shop; she feels like all of the adults either coo at her (because she’s so small! and so cute! and Francesca thinks maybe it’s time for them to move on; she’s six, it’s not like she’s Hyacinth-sized) or eye her like she is going to steal something (like she would steal a technicolor penguin).
But Anthony gives them all ten dollars.
Hands it to them, which Eloise keeps crowing about. She likes being able to hold money herself, but Francesca isn’t really sure why it’s that big of a deal. Francesca doesn’t really understand how debit cards work—she isn’t sure if Anthony has a debit card or a credit card or if those two things are secretly the same thing and people just call them different things—but she understands it works for money.
Eloise grabs Benedict’s hand and drags him with her to look at cool shirts (because Eloise, at the great age of seven, is too old for stuffed animals, and Francesca hopes she is never too old for stuffed animals). Daphne goes off with Hyacinth, insisting on buying her something good. Colin and Gregory end up at the stuffed animals, Anthony hovering behind them because he needs to grab a stuffed zebra because they accidentally destroyed Gregory’s last one, and nobody has told him yet.
Francesca knows she should make a big fuss about not being supervised in the gift shop.
But the gift shop isn’t that big, and Francesca doesn’t know what she wants to get.
She walks around the shop, sizing it up, trying to decide what she might want. Because while she likes stuffed animals, she likes certain stuffed animals. She knows all of her stuffed animals’ names and families. To introduce a new person to the mix—well, she thinks that would be crazy because they all know each other so well right now.
And Francesca doesn’t want any new clothes. She just doesn’t care that much about clothes, especially ones that have to have animals on it, because Francesca likes her clothes plainer than that. She doesn’t need to stand out in a crowd. She knows what she’s wearing, and she knows she’s comfortable.
And all of the little things—the glass animals or the snowglobes—all cost more than ten dollars. She thinks she could whittle Anthony down to buy something else, but right now, she just thinks—
Wait.
Is Anthony buying himself something?
And Francesca knows without asking her brother wouldn’t. He gave them all ten bucks—including Benedict, which Francesca thinks is unfair because Benedict is just as old and just as big as Anthony these days—but he didn’t pull out one last ten for himself.
So, she toughens up, and she goes to the boring section.
Keychains.
Anthony drives a lot these days, and while she is never sure if he actually likes driving, he is always behind the wheel. He could get something good on his keyring, something that makes it a little more exciting for him. She doesn’t want to go too big. Anthony wouldn’t want it that flashy.
But she could get two. And he could swap them out!
Oh, Francesca knows what she’s going to do now.
First, she spins the keychains with people’s names around and around, finding everyone she can in the family. Colin is the easiest to find. After that, she finds a Gregory, a Daphne, a Francesca, and an Eloise. She doesn’t find a Benedict (unsurprisingly, since he always comments on it), and she doesn’t even bother looking for a Hyacinth.
There is an Anthony, though.
For the other one, she looks through the animals that could dangle off the keys. It cannot be anything too big—she already decided that. In the end, she decides on a shark. Daddy used to call him a shark; he said he had the smile of shark, and that all lawyers are supposed to have shark smiles.
Francesca doesn’t believe him because he never had a shark smile, but Mommy used to promise her that Daddy did, he just didn’t use them on the kids.
With that, she goes and pays for them. The moment the cashier starts giving the change back, Anthony finds her, slipping up behind her and placing a hand on her shoulder.
“What did you end up getting?” he asks.
Francesca waits for the cashier to hand her the little bag.
Then, she thrusts it at Anthony’s chest. “For your keys.”
“For—what?”
“For your keys,” Francesca repeats, and before Anthony can say anything—like she should have gotten something for herself or she didn’t need to—Francesca makes a beeline for Eloise.
July 31st, 2003
Daphne explodes out of the water, and she tries to throw back her hair just as Ariel did in The Little Mermaid. They watched it the other night—despite Benedict’s not so subtle vying for them to watch Cinderella again—and every time, she cannot help but be fascinated by the redheaded princess. Daphne wants to be that in love with the world, that in love with a prince, that in love with everything.
And, honestly, life as a mermaid would be nice, she thinks. It would be like a pool day every day. She would be able to hold her breath indefinitely under the water rather than exploding out of it, gasping for breath, after underwater fighting. She likes she would be the winner of any chicken fight, ever.
“You heard that man!” Colin calls abruptly, disrupting Daphne’s thoughts. “I guess you have to come swim with us.”
“What a shame,” Anthony says, “I didn’t pack my swim trunks.”
Daphne tries one last time to dunk her head and toss her hair. Then, she ruffles her hair to get it out of her hair and swims over to the side of the pool, and she raises an eyebrow at her oldest brother. “Are you saying you aren’t willing to ruin those shorts? Anthony, I mean this nicely, but they are ugly.”
Anthony is not a man who can pull off floral print.
“Ugly,” Gregory agrees.
“I wonder how I could take that in a way that wasn’t nice,” Anthony says.
Daphne rolls her eyes, but she retreats back from the ledge. She watches Gregory go for Anthony’s hand, giving him a wide-eyed, pleading look, and Daphne knows he will be ten times more effective than Daphne ever is. Sure, Anthony spends his free time with BCD, but everyone knows he has a soft spot for all Bridgertons E and down.
Daphne takes it as a point of pride, usually, that she is considered so mature.
Gregory pouts at Anthony.
Anthony loudly groans, but he tugs off his old t-shirt and tosses it onto the chair loaded up with the rest of the family’s supplies. Daphne grins. Thank God for Gregory.
Colin wolf-whistles, but it gets cut off midway when Francesca tips him underwater with a delighted cry.
Benedict, who has been peacefully minding his business, looks over at Daphne, and she can tell exactly what he is thinking. When he looks back at Anthony, there is something devious in his gaze as he slips from the steps and steps out of the pool, only wincing a little when his feet go on the hot concrete. When he looks back at Daphne, he winks at her.
She winks back.
Anthony takes his time getting up, stretching out. “I know you guys already owe me since I took you to the pool, but know that the debt has been doubled.”
“Why?” Daphne drawls out, louder than she usually tries to be. “We’re doing you a favor getting rid of those shorts.”
“I really don’t think they’re—”
Benedict shoves Anthony into the pool.
Anthony windmills his arms, clearly caught off guard, and his weight hitting the pool leaves a splash to be admired. In fact, Gregory gives a wide, open-mouthed smile as he crawls back into the pool. His floaty vest gets him immediately above the surface of the water as he waits for Anthony to emerge.
Anthony gasps when he breaks the surface, but then, he trains his gaze on Benedict, something dark there. “I’d jump in before I drag you in.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Benedict says before launching himself at Anthony. Anthony falls back underwater, but it doesn’t last long, not with the way he pulls Benedict under the surface. The two of them play dirty with one another, dirtier than they would if anyone else tried to get involved.
Gregory paddles over, splashing at the two of them, but Daphne reaches over as subtly as she can, snagging his ankle and keeping him out of the warfare.
Colin hops up on the ledge of the pool, and he leans forward, pretending to watch a real wrestling match. When Francesca giggles, he makes a show of eating imaginary popcorn, which even gets Eloise (who is pretending to be above the play fighting today) laughing.
When both Anthony and Benedict tire from fighting underwater, gasping, Colin leads them all in a round of applause. Then, Colin shouts over the clapping. “And here, we see evidence that Anthony Bridgerton is not a tired old man yet!”
“Just for that,” Anthony says, running his hands through his wet hair, pushing it out of his eyes, “you’re walking home.”
“We walked here,” Colin shoots back. “It’s a bad threat.”
“Until I abandon you somewhere in public,” Anthony says without skipping a beat. “Maybe, if we’re lucky, you will get lost on your way home.”
“Actually, I—”
Francesca grabs his ankle and drags him into the pool, and Colin cackles as he pushes her under the water with him.
And while she knows Anthony will never believe it, the pool day gets better with him playing with them like the old days. She convinces him to chicken fight, and she climbs atop his shoulders and fights with Colin with more venom than she has ever had before. Any time Anthony looks longingly at the lounge chair, someone climbs onto his shoulders or tries to push him underwater or loudly proposes a game.
And Daphne thinks they get a part of their older brother back that day, even if he can’t see it.
August 16th, 2003
“Are you coming down for breakfast?” Anthony asks, rapping his knuckles against the door. He gives Colin a look, and Colin scatters. If Benedict wasn’t in a sour mood, he might even laugh about it.
Benedict taps his pencil against his sketchbook. He tried to ‘express himself’ this morning, and all he ended up doing was wasting a charcoal pencil, pressing it into the sheet and scribbling, scribbling, scribbling until it was just a mess of black smudges and smears, and it creeps onto his hands, too.
Colin had looked over at that point, and he asked Benedict if he wanted to talk about it, or if he just wanted to massacre more pencils.
Benedict thinks he almost massacred Colin.
“She made me breakfast,” Benedict says, blowing on his hand to get some of the charcoal fleeing from him.
Anthony nods, still standing. “She made you breakfast.”
“Our mother,” Benedict says. He almost repeats it, just so everyone knows how much he can’t believe this is happening. Their mother. Violet Bridgerton. She made breakfast for Benedict.
“Yes,” Anthony says, his tone unreadable, “our mother made you breakfast.”
Benedict lets himself collapse back into his bed, abandoning his sketch of a black hole, and he flops an arm over his eyes, letting out a long whistle to buy him more time for something to say.
And, when he still doesn’t come up with anything, he just offers a “well, sh*t.”
“She made crepes,” Anthony offers. “She knows they’re your favorite, and she wanted it to be special for your birthday.”
And Benedict thinks—because, again, he tries to be an emotionally mature Bridgerton because sometimes, he realizes they’re all emotionally constipated and struggling—there are too many layers on this birthday.
It’s his first birthday without Dad around. It’s the first time he can confidently say Edmund missed a mile marker for him. Fourth of July is a dumb holiday—it’s just an excuse to blow things up, and while Benedict thinks the fireworks are pretty, it’s not deeply associated with his father. Father’s Day was hard, but it wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t a birthday.
It wasn’t his birthday.
And it’s his birthday, and he doesn’t know how to feel about Violet. He loves his mother, and he knows everything has been hard for her, but Benedict loves Anthony, and he knows everything has been so much harder for him because of it. Hell, maybe if Benedict wants to be selfish—and, arguably, today he gets to be selfish—Violet disappearing into her grief made things harder for Benedict. He had to be a rock for the younger Bridgertons, and he tried his best to be a rock for Anthony.
So, yeah, he doesn’t know if crepes are enough.
“For my birthday,” Benedict says because what else can he say? He whistles again just to fill the space around them.
“She’s trying,” Anthony says softly.
Benedict twists and sits up then, and he studies his brother’s face. “You’re telling me you’re not mad at her.”
There is a flicker—but only a flicker—of anger there. It isn’t quite anger; he doesn’t think it’s fair to define it that way. Yet, as he waits for it to surface, he realizes that it’s not going to.
“She’s trying her best,” he says.
Anthony isn’t saying that, though.
He’s saying that he’s trying his best.
“Why does her best get to be worse than your best?” he says, and he thinks about that day in the kitchen, wondering if he could be the one to persuade Anthony to go follow his dreams and realizing nobody could. “How is that fair?”
“She lost the love of her life, Ben,” Anthony says. He sighs, and he looks at Benedict, studying his face, waiting for something in Benedict to come to life. “I can’t even pretend to know what that would feel like.”
And Benedict thinks he would be torn apart if he lost his future partner. Already, just as he starts to date Henry, he cannot imagine letting him ever part from his life. Yet, at the same time, Benedict thinks he would be better, he would try more.
One day, Benedict might have a son.
And he hopes his son doesn’t ever feel as trapped as Benedict does, and Benedict is so mad at Violet not just for Anthony but for himself.
“Well,” he says as it dawns on him. “I’m mad at her.”
He doesn’t trust her, though, and he thinks that is worse. That he has seen the way Violet fled from the family, and Benedict knows he is not the best son. If she can leave them all behind like that, how can Benedict ever mess up without feeling like he will ruin whatever groundwork they have begun to lay again?
“You’re allowed to be,” Anthony says, “but do you really want to lose both parents?”
Benedict thinks he has, even if he goes downstairs and smiles at breakfast.
“I have you,” he says.
“I’m not your dad,” Anthony says.
Benedict cannot say anything back to that. He was the one who said that, but he didn’t mean it like… he wasn’t saying that Anthony was his father. He doesn’t want Anthony as his father. He wants Anthony as Anthony because he thinks Anthony would lay down his life for Benedict, and Benedict would do the same. He doesn’t think Anthony would ever leave him if he turns out to be…
Well.
If he turns out to be a f*ckup.
“You can feel however you’d like. I won’t take that away from you,” Anthony says. He blinks, his thoughts straying for a moment, before he looks at Benedict again. “But why don’t we go downstairs and have crepes, and we can decide how we feel later?”
“How we feel?” Benedict asks.
Anthony swallows and looks away. “How you feel.”
Benedict cannot shake the feeling this next moment will not matter. That he will eat his crepes, and he will talk to his mom, and he will pretend he is not exploding under his skin.
But Anthony can do that, so Benedict can do that as well.
“Fine,” Benedict says, shoving the thoughts away as he eases to his feet. “Who am I to waste perfectly good crepes?”
August 25th, 2003
Be better, Violet tells herself.
She can tell how her absence left cracks in the family, and she cannot forgive herself for that. Gregory and Hyacinth will both be too young to remember, so that bridge she mends with ease. Francesca is impossible to read; she doesn’t go to Violet more or less than usual. She just watches with those inscrutable blue eyes of hers. Eloise keeps avoiding Violet, and whenever she spends time with Violet, she looks so angry with herself. Like it is a crime to be happy with her mother. That one hurts, but Violet pretends she doesn’t see that. Daphne goes out of her way to make Violet’s life easier. She will make the dishes; she will get started on the laundry. No matter how much Violet reassures her she doesn’t need to do that, Daphne shakes her head and insists she must. Colin is the same as Francesca, impossible to read with his easy smiles and the way he maneuvers around any of her larger questions. He is not more guarded—not like Benedict, who Violet has hurt but she does not know how to begin to mend that rift.
Anthony, though…
“And when does school start for you?” Violet asks, trying to keep her voice light, pretending this isn’t important.
Anthony flinches, and he drags his pen across his planner by accident. He stares down at the paper, too depleted by the minor mistake, too exhausted by something that surely has occurred before.
“Sorry,” Violet says. It means more than she can claim it does right now. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t,” he says, even though it is a clear lie. He sets it down on the living room table, and he draws his legs closer to the couch, almost curling in on himself, as if Violet’s presence is too big, too vast for both of them to exist in the same space.
She used to know how to talk to him.
For eighteen years, she knew how to talk to him. She knew he preferred his father, but she would never begrudge either of them that connection. Anthony always wanted to be the man of his family in some ways, and Edmund always wanted someone to give his legacy.
Oh, one day she will think about Edmund without this ache in her very soul.
I will fix this, she promises him in her head. If she cannot rely on herself, if she cannot keep promises to herself, then she will keep promises to Edmund until one day, she looks back and knows she has done her best by her children once more.
“When does school start for you?” She crosses the living room, careful, watching her son for any sign he might abruptly get up and flee, but he is not the runner of their family, so she eases down on the couch across from him, just watching.
He stares at his planner. “Oh, soon enough.”
“When?” she asks.
The silence hangs there, thick enough to hang herself with, and she knows exactly what he is thinking. She knows he must’ve sent a deposit—she still saved the graduation program, even though she did not have the strength to attend. She thinks she should have; she should have found that power within herself. Now, she will regret it for the rest of her life.
This is her son. This is Anthony Bridgerton, and he has put up wall after wall now, and she cannot breach them, but she can make it easier for him to take them down.
“I think I might drop out,” Anthony confesses, and it is one final twist of the dagger in her heart.
“No,” she tells him. “Absolutely not.”
This is Anthony Bridgerton, and he wants to be a lawyer one day, just like his father. This is Anthony Bridgerton, and he loves studying, loves learning, loves the academic rivalries he can form at school. This is her son, and he deserves to have more out of love than feeling haunted in this house by the ghost of his parents. Both parents.
Anthony hesitates, but he keeps going. “Maybe drop out is too harsh. I can take a gap year, and I can go back to school when it’s a better time for everyone—”
Better time for everyone. Not him.
“Anthony,” she says, cutting him off. “You are not dropping out, or taking a gap year, or any of that.”
He still is not looking at her. “It’s a bad time for me to pack my bags to go to university. I need to be home.”
“You already are home. You have already done enough.”
And Violet musters her courage, and she moves closer to him. His head snaps up, giving her a clear view of those bags beneath his eyes, of the bloodshot way he stares at her, the rest of the blood draining from his face, but she ignores it. She reaches out, she grabs his hands, and she makes him look at her.
And she repeats what she knows is true. “You have done enough.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Anthony whispers, but Mom strikes Violet at her core again because she has not been much of that for him, has she? “I don’t mind.”
“You should,” she emphasizes.
He doesn’t say anything back.
“I know you’re doing this for me,” Violet says, and she cannot stop speaking now. No, she needs to continue, or she thinks she will let it go forever unsaid between them, and she doesn’t want that. “Because I… I was not doing the best at the end of the last school year. I’m going to do better, Anthony. I am going to do better. I have and will appreciate any help you can offer, but you are not doing it at the expense of your future. I will do better.”
And she thinks it is alright if he doesn’t believe her yet.
She will still make it true, and one day, he will believe her.
“Mom,” he says.
“Anthony.” She squeezes his hands.
He looks away from her, not much, but enough to keep a cautious space between them. He blinks once, twice, and he looks toward the ceiling. It’s something he used to do as a child, right before he cried.
It squeezes at her heart.
“I’ll get my schedule soon,” he says, choked up. “We can work out a schedule. Make sure the kids always have someone picking them up.”
“Okay,” Violet says. If that is what he needs from her, she can do a schedule.
“And we can work out a schedule of who’s making lunch and dinner.”
“Okay,” she repeats.
“And we can—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head sharply. “Sorry. I know you know how to parent.”
“Anthony,” Violet says. “It’s okay if you don’t trust me right now. I understand that. But we will do this, together. You’re not alone in this.”
This is her baby boy.
At some point, he grew up the rest of the way. She thought he was perfect on his eighteenth birthday, taking Gregory from her arms and holding him, rocking him, and she thought there was no way he could have done more for her, for the family.
And now, she knows he will always find another way to give.
September 7th, 2003
Francesca isn’t ready for him to go.
Mom was the one who sat her—them; it was her and Eloise—down and told them things would have to change soon. Anthony would go off to university, and that meant he would be away from home longer and longer. Soon, he will make friends, too, so he might not come home for certain weekends. He might not have time to eat breakfast or dinner with them.
“That doesn’t mean he loves you any less,” Mom said, fiercely, squeezing both of their hands. “It just means he needs to go his own way. He’ll always be there for you.”
And Francesca gets that.
But she doesn’t want him to go.
When she sees his shoes appear beside her bed, she wedges herself deeper against the wall. When Anthony crouches down, looking at her, she hides her face in the University of Chicago sweatshirt she stole from Anthony’s closet this morning. The college can take a piece of him, but she wants a piece of the college then.
It’s almost like a promise that he’ll come back. He has to.
“That looks better on you than it does me,” Anthony says.
Then, he slips underneath the bed with her. She stares at him before leaning closer, tucking against him, and for a second, she can pretend nothing has changed. It’s Gregory’s birthday again, and he is protecting her from the loudness of her thoughts and the loudness of her family.
He shifts even more, allowing her to press her face into his shoulder, and he wraps an arm around her, keeping her close to him.
Don’t go don’t go don’t go, Francesca thinks, desperately.
“What are we hiding from?” he whispers, and the words rumble through him. “Was it a bad day at school?”
Francesca does not care about school, not really. She doesn’t want to do all the silly subjects when she wants to spend all of her time in the music room, plucking away at the piano. There is a half-finished melody in her mind at all times, and every time she manages to bring it back to life, she cannot help but smile.
And she doesn’t care about the other girls and boys at school. She knows they like her; she knows she should care more about having friends. But Francesca already has so many people in her life, and she cannot imagine needing anymore. She has her family, and she even has Penelope Featherington because sometimes, Eloise lets her play with her.
But her siblings are different. They want more people in their lives.
Anthony will want more people in his life.
“Are you going away?” Francesca whispers.
He shakes his head. “No, you won’t even notice I’m at school, Frannie. All my classes end before yours do.”
She thinks he’s wrong, though.
Maybe other people wouldn’t notice he’s gone, but she thinks he’ll be gone in more ways than anyone expects. He has been working over the summer, but he will work even more when he goes back to school. He’ll remember he likes all those subjects Francesca hates, that he likes math and science and reading, and he’ll be harder and harder to reach.
And he’ll expand his life, a little bit at a time. He’ll start going to parties again, and he can’t bring any of them to parties. Francesca doesn’t want to go, but she gets jealous every time she sees Anthony and Benedict sneaking out together. They never caught her catching them, but…
She pulls at the sweatshirt, and she stares down at the red sleeves. She likes how she looks in red, but she doesn’t wear it very often. It’s too bold according to Mom, and even Daphne agrees with that. “But you’re going to… who will notice me when you’re gone?”
“I won’t be gone,” he says. “Every time you’re at school, I’ll be at school. You just won’t see me in the mornings.”
That’s not enough.
She doesn’t want him to go.
“But they don’t talk to me in the mornings,” she says instead.
Anthony and Francesca don’t talk much in the mornings, and she knows that’s unfair. Anthony tends to just eat and nod along, listening to people’s stories, but his gaze will slip to hers, and there is a promise there. A promise that he sees her, even if she has nothing to add to Eloise and Colin’s loud (too loud) conversations at 7 AM.
“Daphne will talk to you,” Anthony tells her, “if you’re really afraid. Just start talking to her more often.”
Francesca wants to cry. “But Daphne isn’t you, Anthony.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment.
Then, he holds her a little tighter, and he stares up at the bedsprings. “I’ll miss you too, but we won’t even notice anything’s changed.”
Mom once said boys don’t notice things, that boys are too silly to see the big changes in their life. Dad used to be like that.
Right now, Francesca thinks that is right.
Everything is changing.
“Will you forget about me when you have breakfast with your friends?” Francesca asks.
He laughs, but she isn’t sure what’s funny.
Then, he looks at her, and he smiles. “I made you a promise, Frannie. I said I wasn’t going to forget about you, ever, and I meant it.”
September 8th, 2023
Just picking the University of Chicago feels like a miniature rebellion to Simon Bassett.
He knows his father has begun to keep tabs on him again—why, Simon does not care—and when mail for Princeton began to show up on his doorstep, Simon knew his father was trying to convince him to go to his alma mater.
Yeah, f*ck that.
He gets to be a football player here, and he gets to live in a major city.
The only downside to Chicago (besides the way Aunt Agatha picked up her things to move with him, insisting she wanted to see her old friend, Charlotte) is the presence of Bassett Enterprises. Far too many people recognize his last name and understand that he has a decent amount of money to his name.
So, he knows he needs to pick his friends wisely.
Today, he sits next to a smug-looking man with a travel coffee mug. Personally, Simon thinks the ego wafting off the other man makes very little sense because there appears to be a tiny shark hanging from his keychain.
The other man doesn’t say anything, not at first.
Then, as he leans back in his chair, he makes a face.
“The smell,” Simon says, “is unfortunately me.”
The other man lifts an eyebrow, but he doesn’t give a bigger reaction than that. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You made a face,” Simon points out.
He shrugs. “I’ve smelled worse.”
And, despite himself, Simon is a little intrigued by him. He doesn’t think the other man is lacking money, but he also thinks the other man’s backpack is from Costco, and he didn’t go to a local coffee shop but brought it from home.
Simon isn’t sure what that adds up to mean, but he’ll give it a whirl. Why not?
“Open that up,” he says, nodding toward the coffee mug. “Waft it over to me. I’m tired of smelling like grass and dirt.”
“Did you fall on your way in?” the other man asks, trying for a vague sense of politeness. He opens his coffee up, though, and he takes too long of a sip. Simon doubts it will make it five minutes into the lecture… which is odd, considering the lecture is at 8 AM. Unless the other man had a party last night, he doesn’t understand why he would be so exhausted already.
But Simon gives him a small, reserved smile. “No. I’m on the football team.”
The other man studies him.
“You don’t have to look so surprised,” Simon says, bemused.
“I don’t have a good poker face,” the other boy says.
Simon shakes his head. “Now, I’m not sure if I believe that. I have told you more about me than you have given away about yourself.”
Of course, none of it has been all that important. Simon hasn’t gone out of his way to flex his last name; he hasn’t even attempted to see if the other man recognizes the name. If he grew up in Chicago—like so many people Simon has met—then he surely will. Will he change his attitude if he knows? Will he trip and fawn over himself, trying to access a fortune that Simon cannot access himself?
“What do you want to know?” the other man asks. “I’m an open book.”
Then, he downs the rest of his coffee.
Simon thinks he should be concerned for the other man’s heart.
“What’s your name?” he asks at last.
“Easy pickings. Anthony Bridgerton.”
Bridgerton, huh. Simon thinks he has heard Aunt Agatha say something about Bridgertons, but he cannot remember what it is. Is she friends with one of them? He can only confidently say that she’s friends with Charlotte, the mayor’s wife.
“I’m Simon Bassett,” he says, studying Anthony’s face.
But Anthony does not react; he doesn’t even seem to care. “I wasn’t going to ask. I was going to wait to see it on the back of your jersey the first time you get taken down on the field. I imagine that will be happening on the first down of the first quarter?”
“Harsh,” Simon says with a laugh. “When you go to one of the games, I’ll prove you wrong, Bridgerton.”
“I look forward to you getting tackled,” Anthony says back. “I don’t know you very well, but somehow, I imagine you just have a very punchable face.”
“I’ll have you eating those words,” Simon says. There is something comfortable about the patter of this conversation; it almost feels like he has known Anthony longer than this random occurrence. “Besides, I think you have a more punchable face.”
Anthony rolls his eyes. “Very clever. Repeating my insults back to me.”
“Wow! You’re quick with it early in the morning,” Simon says. He respects that. He likes getting up as early as possible, starting his day as soon as possible. Part of that comes from his commitment to training; he couldn’t start slacking if he wanted to get farther than what his name would allow him.
And Simon will not be coasting by virtue of his name, thank you very much.
“I have brothers,” Anthony says as if that explains everything. “If you don’t know how to stand your ground, then you will be kicked in the balls at eight in the morning.”
Simon winces at the idea. “Sentences like that make me glad I never had brothers.”
“I could tell you much worse stories,” Anthony says, and he has a feeling he’s telling the truth.
And Simon, even though he hates hearing stories about other people’s families, wants to know more about the Bridgertons.
“I don’t think I would mind hearing them,” he says, nodding toward what surely must be Anthony’s emptied coffee mug. “Will you be getting a coffee refill after class? I think I will accompany you.”
“Not waiting for an invite?” Anthony asks, but he is grinning.
“No, I don’t think I will,” Simon says, and then, he winks. “I think you should be honored by my presence.
September 9th, 2003
“Can I ask you a sad question?” Daphne asks Colin.
Both of them are sitting on a bench in the Art Institute of Chicago, watching Anthony take Hyacinth around to paintings he clearly does not care about. He keeps pointing things out, and Hyacinth coos, and then, Anthony looks physically pained as he attempts to add something else to say.
Daphne is not close enough to hear everything he says, but she has heard him talk a lot about “well, that is certainly a color” and “yes, I think I can see that line too.” Arguably, Anthony may not be the artist in the family.
Colin pauses. “I mean, you can. Do you want to?”
“Do you think I’m different? From March?”
“Well, arguably, you’re eleven now instead of ten.”
“Colin.”
“Daphne.”
“You know what I mean,” she says, and she goes back to staring at Anthony and Hyacinth making their rounds for each painting. The second he gets back to them, she’ll drop the topic. She knows Anthony doesn’t want to talk about this kind of thing, no matter how much Daphne thinks she might burst sometimes.
She didn’t realize Colin didn’t want to talk about it, either.
“Anthony looked like he was going to cry when he saw those pictures you took of me,” Daphne says. “I wanted to look more grown up, but I didn’t think… well, it’s still just me.”
“And you still look like you’re six years old,” Colin agrees sagely.
She swats at his chest.
He laughs and throws up his hands.
Sometimes, Daphne thinks her brothers will only ever see her as a six-year-old kid, however. Anthony and Benedict remember her before she remembers them; they probably saw their parents change her diaper, and that is always a humbling thought to have. Colin doesn’t have as much room to talk, considering he doesn’t even have a full two years on her, but she knows he tries to use that to his advantage.
“One day, I’m going to be all grown up,” Daphne says.
“This is a crazy thing to be saying on your eleventh birth—”
“And Dad will only ever know me at ten years old,” Daphne finishes, ignoring Colin’s comment.
He stills at that one.
Neither of them say anything for a moment, just watching Anthony and Hyacinth. Anthony seems to pick up on their gazes, but the moment he turns to look toward them, they both mumble nonsense to each other and pretend to be looking at a painting. While it may still be suspicious to Anthony, he returns his attention to the paintings.
“I’d like to think Dad sees you,” Colin says at last. “That he can see all of us growing up.”
“Do you think it’s easier for Anthony?” she says, and she regrets it immediately. She holds up a hand before Colin can correct her. “I know it hasn’t been easier for him, and I know it’s not a competition, but… but Dad got to know him, all grown-up. Sure, he’s not a lawyer yet, but he…”
Anthony knew what he wanted to be when their father died. Their father could have hazarded a guess at who he would become.
Daphne feels like she is all potential, nothing concrete right now. She is only eleven years old, and that means she can be anything, but that means she can be anything. Will her father be shocked by the person she becomes?
She knows he is gone, that he will never come back, but if he could, would he even recognize her in ten years?
“I think,” Colin says softly, “it just sucks for everyone.”
She nods at that, blinking back the sudden onslaught of tears.
Then, he knocks his knee against hers, and he offers a soft smile. “But I have to say—and you can’t tell anyone—that I’m happy I’ll get to see you all grown-up. When you become a model.”
Daphne snorts at that, and she shakes her head. “I’m not a model. I’m just… me. Plain old Daphne.”
“Plain old Daphne is growing up, and I’m going to have to beat your boyfriends back with a stick,” Colin says jauntily.
She knocks their shoulders together. “You can’t do that. Anthony is already going to be doing that.”
“That’s very true,” Colin says. “Dating will be miserable with him breathing down your neck, I guarantee it.”
She laughs. “That doesn’t sound that bad.”
Colin gives her a mischievous smile, almost as if he knows something she doesn’t. “You say that now, but…”
She only rolls her eyes.
How bad can it be?
September 21st, 2003
Congratulations, Benedict thinks as he eases the door open, you made curfew today!
In his defense, he thinks having a curfew at all feels excessive. Edmund and Violet never cracked down on Anthony; he could drift in and out of the house without any guidelines. Whenever he brings that up, Violet shrugs it off, saying something about Benedict needing to be a ‘good role model’ and other things he tunes out.
Still, as he slips the front door shut again, he tries to be as quiet as possible. He beat curfew by a few minutes, so everyone should be asleep. Luckily, Benedict masters this house, board by board. He knows so much more than the notches on the doorframe and which closets mark the best hiding spots for hide-and-seek. Now, he can navigate it in the dark without making a single noise.
He makes halfway (though halfway might be too generous; maybe a handful of steps) up the staircase before freezing.
Anthony leans against the banister, one hand cupped under his chin, the other holding a book steady in his lap. It’s an old book too, worn and weathered, battered in a way that it can only come from one place.
“Is that Dad’s?” Benedict whispers, still mindful of keeping the noise down to a minimum. He thinks Gregory and Baby Hyacinth might be competing for who can get up the most during the night. A selfish part of Benedict blames Anthony and Violet; maybe, they should let the kids tough it out a little longer before dropping everything to coddle them.
Then again, every time Eloise wakes him up by crawling into his bed, citing a nightmare, he drops everything for her.
“Ant?”
His brother doesn’t move.
Benedict crouches on the step next to him, squinting into the darkness. Anthony needs to cut his hair; Violet keeps trying to mention it in subtle ways, but it begins to grow wild, and it hides his eyes just enough it fakes Benedict out. Clad in the oversized sweatshirt—his brother so seldom allows himself to wear sweatshirts, but this one came as a gift, supposedly, from his football-playing best friend who had enough merch from university to swim in it—his sweatered hand also obscures his face.
That’s why it takes Benedict a ridiculous amount of time to realize Anthony is fast asleep.
On the staircase.
In the worst position possible.
His first impulse is to shake him awake. He can’t leave him here on the steps. What if he falls over in his sleep? What if someone trips on him? Or, in a less extreme situation (because Benedict is the least dramatic in the family, thank you very much), that position would give anyone such a sore back and neck, and then, Benedict would watch his brother pretend to be unbothered for the next day, all while secretly massaging his shoulders and neck.
Benedict grabs the book first, gently extracting it from Anthony’s grip. He maneuvers it in the barely visible light from the outside window, catching the title. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It’s not a book Anthony would choose for himself; in fact, Anthony would never pick up a book for fun.
He opens it to the front page and drops the book. It clatters against the stairs, loud enough it startles Anthony awake, who jerks upright and blinks, wide-eyed and confused, before settling back down.
Anthony tries for a stern look. “Sneaking back in?”
“Back before curfew,” Benedict says with a grin. “No sneaking involved this time.”
“And what were you doing?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” He shifts, hiding his hands behind his back. There is still chalk under his fingernails. Henry and Benedict spent the night making art on his driveway, illuminated by an old, plastic lantern from Henry’s childhood. There might even be some pink chalk smudged on Benedict’s cheeks still.
He doesn’t need Anthony teasing him right now.
“Were you stealing that?” Anthony says around a yawn, reaching down to pluck up the copy again.
Benedict plops down next to him. “I could ask you the same question.”
“I don’t think Greg would mind yet,” Anthony says, but there is a certain edge to his voice now. He sighs and all but slumps against Benedict, who tries his best not to go rigid. They might be a very touchy-feely family (as Eloise so gracefully put it), but Anthony tries for hugs so rarely.
“I don’t know; Greg has a very refined taste in literature.”
“Okay.” Anthony flips open to the first page in The Little Prince, and there is something so raw in his expression that Benedict has to look away. “You can read Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus next time.”
Benedict laughs, but it doesn’t come out quite right, not with the book sitting open right there. “As long as you volunteer when he demands you read it a third time in a row. I can only stop that pigeon so many times.”
“I can quote that book. I think I did in my last essay.” He wrinkles his nose. “My professor won’t like that.”
“Counterpoint: I would find that f*cking hilarious.”
“Language.”
Benedict rolls his eyes.
Then, he slides closer to his brother, and he reaches, holding half of the book, as the two of them stare down at the front page.
To Gregory, reads their dad’s loopy handwriting. It’s more legible than usual—lawyers must compete with doctors for illegibility in handwriting—but it is undeniably Edmund’s. Benedict has a book on his shelves from his father. Never stop dreaming. Love, Dad.
Neither of them say anything. Benedict reads the lines again and again until the writing starts to blur, and he closes his eyes with a sigh. Anthony hums, agreeing in their silent conversation, and after a moment, he closes the book again. “I should put this back before Greg wakes up.”
“He wouldn’t mind if you kept it a little longer,” Benedict says.
Anthony is already rising though, stretching out. “I have more work to do anyway.”
Benedict thinks about it for three seconds.
Then, he launches upwards, snatching the book and dancing up a step to avoid his brother’s clumsy attempt to get it back. “If you do more work, I will tell him that you stole it, and you’ll have to explain to a literal toddler why you stole from him.”
“I—”
“And I’ll tell him that you hate the Pigeon.”
Anthony gawks at him. “I don’t hate the Pigeon—”
“Too bad. I’m not above lying.” He folds his arms over his chest, and he arches an eyebrow. “Your play, Ant. Go to bed, or I start blackmailing you.”
Anthony throws up his hands. “I’ll tell Mom you broke curfew.”
Benedict narrows his eyes.
He spins on his heel and marches upstairs, ignoring Anthony’s protests. “I’ll take that chance.”
September 17th, 2003
“I love you,” Violet says when Anthony comes down for his birthday.
He pauses on the steps, caught off guard, and she thinks that is the only reason she can brush a hair against his forehead. Then, she affectionately ruffles his hair, knowing how he hates it, but she knows she will not have that much time left to treat him like her baby boy. Soon, he will be so far away from childhood that she can barely recognize him.
No, that’s not true.
She will always be able to recognize Anthony.
“I love you,” she says again, “and thank you for everything this year.”
“I can’t let you pass,” Benedict says, swinging his legs.
Anthony shoves him, rolling his eyes. “Love me enough to get off the kitchen counter. I’m trying to make lunch here.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the distraction today,” Benedict says. “Colin and Daphne are making you lunch, and I’m not allowed to let you eat ramen.”
Anthony gives him an unimpressed look.
Benedict shrugs. “It’s not on me that you want to have ramen at ten AM. Nobody has lunch then.”
“Can I have a snack?”
“Nope,” he says. “I’m on guard duty.”
“I hate you.”
“Aw, but I love you, brother,” Benedict says in a singsong.
Anthony blinks, his eyes oddly misty.
Colin retreats back a few steps, and he holds up a hand. “Don’t make me regret getting you this. Daff told me you’d be a huge sap about it, and I told her that we were going to be manly men and never talk about this moment again.”
“Ah,” Anthony says, his voice still tight in what Colin can only describe as a threatening way. “Well, I’ll get to pretending I hate this gift.”
“Don’t go that far. I still worked hard,” Colin says, his lips twitching into a smile.
Anthony doesn’t say anything, just flipping through the scrapbook again.
It’s not the most cohesive project Colin ever had. It’s the photos he has taken over the past year, really, and it’s just every time he thought he caught Anthony looking truly happy. It just happens most of those times are with his siblings.
“I love you,” Colin says. Then, he holds up his hands again. “In a macho, manly man kind of way.”
Anthony just rolls his eyes.
And Colin grins.
Daphne gives him a tight hug the first moment they are alone.
She wasn’t sure if she was going to catch him alone today. After all, all of them have been vying for his attention, and she cannot exactly blame them for it. It’s his birthday, and he has played such a huge role in making sure the family ran smoothly this year.
But she hugs him, and she leans closer to him, dropping her voice so nobody else can hear her. “I love you.”
“I know you do, Daff,” Anthony says, hugging her back.
“But you don’t know how much,” she insists. “I love you so much, Ant.”
“I know,” he says.
She pulls away from him, giving her a dubious look. Then, she shrugs. “I will have to remind you a lot, probably.”
“That you love me?” he asks, amused.
She nods. “I don’t think you hear it enough, and I’m going to change that.”
Eloise doesn’t believe in being sappy anymore. She’s too old to be saying all of those ooey-gooey I love yous.
So, she wandered around the family’s small library today, the one kept in her father’s study, and she read all the titles, looking for a book she thought might describe him. Even though Anthony spends the most time there, she knows he hasn’t been reading anything.
Anthony stares at it, turning the book over in his hands.
“You read it,” Eloise tells him, helpfully.
Anthony looks at her then, unimpressed. “I know how to read.”
“You don’t, though,” she says. “So, I’m going to fix you.”
Anthony manages to keep a straight face for two seconds.
Then, he lets out a quiet chuckle as he admires the book a little longer.
“Open it,” she says.
He rolls his eyes, but he opens the book to the front cover.
He pauses as a sheet of paper almost falls out in his hands.
She gives him a satisfied smile. “It’s a letter from Dad.”
Anthony’s head jerks up. “What?”
“It’s about you,” Eloise says. “Happy birthday.”
Francesca is supposed to distract Anthony while they finish setting up the plates, so she plays the piano for him. He sits there, listening to her, actually listening and not doing that fake listening he does sometimes when he really should be doing homework rather than hanging out with her.
“You’ve gotten really good,” Anthony comments.
Francesca gives him a look.
Anthony holds up his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry. I forgot that you’re in the zone.”
She glares at him a little longer, and he pretends to zip his lips, so she goes back to plucking out the melody on piano.
He’s right, though.
She has gotten good.
When she finishes, she gives him a small smile as he begins to clap.
“What was that song called?”
“It doesn’t have a title,” Francesca says, and that part is true because she stole it from the library. She ripped it out of the music book because she knew she didn’t want to give it back, and the title happened to be torn out. “I think it’s something about love, though.”
“Ah.”
“It’s fitting,” she says, “because I love you.”
Gregory has decided he is going to be exactly like Anthony when he grows up.
He stumbles down the stairs in a shirt he stole from Anthony’s room, and he throws his arms wide the second Anthony sees him. Well, actually, Benedict sees him first because he starts laughing, but then, Anthony sees him.
Anthony presses a hand over his mouth, but his eyes are shining. “Is that mine, Greg?”
“Happy birthday,” Gregory says matter-of-factly, and then, he goes to his older brother and gives him a tight hug. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Anthony murmurs back to him.
“Oh, so you love him,” Benedict says, laughing.
Gregory turns and blows a raspberry at Benedict. Of course Anthony loves him.
That night, Anthony reads the letter from his father that Eloise found in the book.
It is a long, rambling letter, and it makes Anthony smile. He doubts his grandfather needed this much detail about Edmund’s experience house hunting in Chicago, but he remembers how seriously his father took real estate. He used to watch HGTV at night with Violet, and he would whisper about the crown moldings reverently.
It’s weird, Anthony thinks, to think of his father and realize there is still more to remember about him. Sometimes, he gets flattened in Anthony’s memory, just the core aspects he remembers best.
His father always made him feel seen.
His father always knew exactly what to say.
His father was the greatest man he ever knew, and Anthony knows his father will be the greatest man he does know.
Anthony misses his father more than words can say.
But he was also someone who talked too much about real estate, and he’s sure, if he would have sent this letter, his grandfather would have skimmed some of these details in order to get to the point.
Anthony doesn’t skim any of it.
It feels like he’s trying to commit to memory, actually.
Then, he reaches the section Eloise pointed out to him, and he has to stop. He closes his eyes, and he takes a deep breath.
Then, he starts reading it again:
…and you should see Anthony! I cannot believe how fast he is growing, even though I know you warned me it would go by too fast. You will barely recognize him the next time you see him, Dad! It overwhelms me, sometimes, just how much love I have for him.
I hope he always remembers that: that I love him so much, it brings me to my knees sometimes. It humbles me.
But never mind that sappiness. You are a father as well. If you feel a fraction of the love I feel for Anthony—and I know that you do! you were always the best father, and I only hope I’m doing my son justice the way you did for me—then you must understand that. I love my family more than words can express. I can never write it enough.
I hope you make it out here one last time, Dad. I know you haven’t been feeling well, but I already miss you so much. I think the pain of it would be less if I loved you less—but I cannot bring myself to regret that. Long after you’re gone, I will have all these memories with you, memories I treasure so much. I know you are scared to leave me behind; I know you are scared I will grieve you too much.
But to grieve you is to love you.
And I do. I love you, Dad.
Love,
Edmund
