Hannah Griffith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
argyle_princess) wrote2007-02-23 09:43 pm
argyle_princess) wrote2007-02-23 09:43 pm
Entry tags:
Logically Follows
This? Is Star's fault. Well, Star's and Joan's. (Joan allowed me to natter on about this for two weeks and then graciously proofread it, so I think she gets to share in the fault.) It just . . . happened. 5500 words.
Logically Follows
“Have coffee with me.”
It was an odd way for a relationship to begin. Not the coffee, of course. Any number of modern relationships have begun over that particular caffeinated beverage. But the setting for the invitation—the crowded hallway outside an even more crowded federal courtroom where a high profile murder case was going on—was a little outside normal parameters. And technically, it wasn’t really the beginning at all, because they’d first met ten years ago, seen each other a handful of times after that, and heard about each other fairly regularly.
Still, if you asked either of them later, that’s how they’d tell you it began.
“Have coffee with me.”
He looked at her with what she would later dub his “Does Not Compute” look, and said, “Why?”
“Because it’s a more pleasant setting for a discussion than the corridor of a courthouse.”
His expression didn’t change. “I don’t think we’re supposed to discuss the case.” Expert witnesses for opposite sides and all that.
She shrugged. “So we won’t discuss the case. The defense rested today, anyway, so it’s pretty much over, until there’s an appeal. If there’s an appeal.”
“So what would we discuss?”
“Anything else. We haven’t seen each other for six years—there should be a latte’s worth of conversation in six years. In the last six months alone you’ve been to Ecuador and I’ve been to Israel. You had an article in the last Journal of Forensic Anthropology and I finished a dissertation last spring. We’ll manage.”
It turned out there were two lattes' worth of conversation in his trip to Ecuador alone.
“It was really nice to see you again, Zach,” she said, when he held the door for her as they left.
“You, too.” She got twenty feet down C Street before he called out to her. “Hannah!”
She stopped and looked over shoulder at him. “Yes?”
“What are you doing for dinner?”
* * *
Dinner was when they actually properly got caught up on what they’d been doing for the last six years. In her case, mostly school, first finishing her undergraduate degree at Northwestern and then her doctorate at Tennessee, and now teaching for a year at Widener, covering a sabbatical. “And then I’ll figure out what’s next,” she says. “Which will, I think, still be mostly teaching. I like it, even if it takes a few weeks to convince most athletes that the leggy blonde professor isn’t gonna go out with you, and really will fail you if you don’t do your homework.”
He was still at the Jeffersonian, and didn’t really see that changing. “Sometimes I think I should look for something else, try to run a lab or something. But it’s the Jeffersonian. Where do you go to top that?”
It was a long, slow, linger-over-your-wine sort of dinner, and they might have lingered straight on till morning if the manager hadn’t asked them to please go, the restaurant had closed over an hour ago, they needed to vacuum and he wanted to go home.
He walked her the five blocks to her hotel. He insisted—DC was not the safest place for a young woman to be out walking around alone at not quite 2:00 in the morning, and it wasn’t that he didn’t think she could take care of herself but it was still safer for her not to be alone.
He walked her all the way to the door of room 417, where she kissed his cheek and thanked him.
“One more thing,” he said, as she started to close the door.
“Yes?”
“Are you free for breakfast?”
Hannah laughed. “Is that diner still open?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll meet you at 7:00. Don’t be late. Good night, Zach,” she said, and closed the door.
And that was the beginning.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It worked, at least in those days, partly or even mostly because they decided it was going to. And, having made that decision, they didn’t let things interfere with it - things like the 126.3 miles from her door to his, or the fact that they had careers that used an insane amount of what would have been personal time for a lot of other people.
At first, they found or made excuses to visit each other. He went to a cousin’s wedding in Pennsylvania that he had planned to skip. She came to DC to research something at the Library of Congress that there was no particular reason to research in the Library of Congress. That trip was the first time she kissed him - she walked past the Capitol and down the Mall to meet him as he left work, and she kissed him outside the employee entrance to the Jeffersonian.
She maintained for years that she’d been aiming for his cheek and he’d deliberately turned his head. At which point he would tell her he had far too much respect for her to try anything like that. And really, what kind of argument could she make against that?
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Seven weeks after she called out to him in a courthouse hallway, she came down to visit him and, for the first time, didn’t bother with a pretense of an excuse. It was also the last time either of them bothered with the pretense of a hotel room. (An unnecessary expense, since she didn’t use it for anything that weekend but suitcase storage.)
The first time she woke up at Zach’s apartment, she found him propped up on one elbow, watching her.
“What?” she half-asked and half-laughed, suddenly self-conscious about things like morning breath and pillow-flattened hair and heaven only knew what her make up looked like.
“I know it’s not rational, given the amount of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, and given that I am not prone to delusion or halucination nor do I remember recently experiencing any symptoms that indicate the onset of an illness that includes either of those, but I’m just kind of amazed that you’re actually here,” he said.
It was the last time she ever felt self-conscious around him.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
To: Temperance Brennan <tbrennan@jeffersonian.gov>
From: Hannah Griffith <h.griffith@mail.net>
Subj: FYI
Brennan,
He might not think to tell you this, and you probably should know. I’m dating Zach.
Hannah
* * *
To: Hannah Griffith <h.griffith@mail.net>
From: Temperance Brennan <tbrennan@jeffersonian.gov>
Subj: RE: FYI
Hannah,
Define “dating.”
Brennan
* * *
To: Temperance Brennan <tbrennan@jeffersonian.gov>
From: Hannah Griffith <h.griffith@mail.net>
Subj: Re: RE: FYI
Brennan,
He’s seen me naked.
Hannah
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Zach, sweetie? Our Zach?” Angela asked when she called Hannah later that week.
“Yes,” said Hannah.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with Zach, of course, but you know he doesn’t have the greatest track record with dating, right?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning . . .” Angela trailed off, looking for the right way to put this. “Meaning he’s still got a lot to learn about women, Hannah.”
“Well,” said Hannah, “you guys are always saying that Zach can learn anything. And between you and me, he’s a quick study.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
She could never quite remember when it was that he started calling her to talk through things that confused him. (He could—May 28—the Hammerton case.) But it quickly became habit. And the conversations always went the same way. He would launch—without greeting or preamble—into whatever was bothering him, sometimes talking so fast that she couldn’t understand him. And when he ran out of air or words or both, she would say, “Really?” And then sometimes she’d ask a question or make an observation, and sometimes not. But she would invariably end by saying, “Well, Zach, let me know when you figure it out.”
And he always did.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
She did things he absolutely did not understand, like send him an e-card in honor of their seven month, two week, and four day anniversary. He puzzled over it for half an hour and then called her.
“You got my card,” she said, instead of “hello.”
“Yes, and I don’t understand the mathematical significance of seven months, two weeks, and four days.”
“Did you think of me when you got the card?”
“Well, yes,” he said, and she could hear the Does Not Compute look over the phone. “It is a card from you. So it logically follows that I would think of you—”
She cut him off. “And when you thought of me, did I have clothes on or was I naked?”
There was a moment of silence, and then he said, “You were naked.”
“There’s the significance, then, Zach. But it really has nothing to do with math. I have to run. I’ll see you Saturday.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He took her to dinner on October 12, and said, while they were looking at the menus, “I think I might be in love with you.”
“Really?” she said, looking up from a list of chicken entrees. “Well, Zach, let me know when you figure it out. Do you know what you’re going to order?”
Zach wasn’t entirely sure what answer he had been expecting, but that wasn’t it.
* * *
The phone rang at 2:54 a.m. on October 17, and Hannah shook herself awake and blinked at the caller ID.
“Zach? It’s three in the morning. What’s wrong?”
“Hannah, I’m in love with you,” he said, in a bit of a rush. “I’m in love with you and you said to let you know when I figured it out. And I just figured it out, so I’m letting you know. And I’ll call you tomorrow, or rather, later today, as it’s already past midnight,” he said, and he hung up.
As declarations of love go, she would tell her best friend Hilary the next afternoon, it was very Zach. “And you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?” Hilary said.
“No,” said Hannah. “No, I really wouldn’t.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He took her home to Michigan for Christmas, to the warm chaotic whirl that was an Addy family holiday.
“Uncle Zach brought home a girl,” his nephew Bradley yelled into the house from the porch as they came up the walk. Hannah half expected to find people watching from behind the curtains and was more than a little surprised when she was hugged a few moments later by twenty people she didn’t know in rapid succession.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell this one what you do, Zachary,” said his mother. “She seems like a nice girl.”
“Woman,” Zach corrected, automatically. “Hannah is a woman, and she already knows. She does the same thing.”
Hannah, catching this, grinned at Zach. She found his family completely overwhelming, generally delightful, and thoroughly wonderful.
* * *
On Christmas Eve, just after Zach and his brothers and assorted nephews set out to find a twelve-foot tree in the woods behind the house, Hannah got dragged into the kitchen to help make several hundred sugar cookies. “It’s tradition,” explained Gretchen, who was twelve and with whom Hannah was sharing a room. (The Addys, it turned out, had rather traditional ideas about the sleeping arrangements of their unmarried children.)
“I’d forgotten how much I liked this,” Hannah told Zach’s mother, two hours later, cutting stars and trees and snowflakes out of cookie dough. “My grandmother and I used to make cookies every year. She had these cookie cutters - one I loved, of an angel with her hands out in front of her, like she was praying. Nine times out of ten, her hands would tear off when you tried to get the cookie out of the cutter. And if you did manage to get them out, they’d burn before the rest of the cookie baked. But she let me try, over and over and over again, all those handless angels. I think my mother threw the cookie cutters out when Gran died. They’re the one thing of hers I wish I had.”
Zach, with snow in his hair and pine sap on his hands, came in to check on her and caught her smile at the end. “I have to go out,” he said. “Be nice to Hannah while I’m gone.” He spent the rest of Christmas Eve at any store that could reasonably be expected to have cookie cutters, and quite a few that could not.
“I was trying to find one like your grandmother’s,” he said the next morning, as she started to open her present. She reached down in the box and then looked back at him, her hands full of angel-shaped cookie cutters of all sizes and styles.
In that moment, Hannah knew this was the man she was going to marry.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
When he proposed, a month and a half later, it was hardly a traditional, down-on-one-knee, ring-in-a-box, popping-the-question sort of proposal.
For one thing, he didn’t kneel. For another, there wasn’t a ring. And for a third, he didn’t exactly phrase it in the form of a question.
“I want to marry you, Hannah,” he said, at the Starbucks in Union Station. He’d given this some thought and decided it was best to be very clear about this—no “I thinks” or “mights.”
“I want to marry you,” he said again, “and I would like to inquire about your opinion on the subject.”
“I want to marry you, too.”
“Then it logically follows that we should get married,” Zach said.
“Yes. Yes, we should.”
“Then I think this is when I’m supposed to give you this,” he said, and put the box down next to her coffee. “I know a ring is the traditional betrothal gift, but I thought that a ring with a stone would potentially hinder your ability to work in the lab, especially when you had to put gloves on and off, and even though the common use of a diamond as a symbol of engagement is a relatively modern development and partly or even mostly due to effective advertising by the diamond industry, I thought this was a suitable surrogate.”
Hannah opened the box and looked at the diamond she would wear around her neck every day for the rest of her life. “It’s beautiful, Zach,” she said.
“No,” said Zach. “It’s a piece of compressed carbon that was mined, cut and polished, and put into a setting by a jeweler, and to which we as a society have attached a value and significance it does not inherently possess. You’re beautiful. It’s just a rock.”
But he had to admit, he liked the way the rock in question looked hanging in the hollow of her throat.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“I asked Hannah to marry me,” he told Hodgins the next morning.
“When?”
“Last evening, when I picked her up at the train station.”
Hodgins stared at him. “Dude, who proposes to a woman on the thirteenth of February?”
“What’s wrong with the thirteenth of February?”
“The day before Valentine’s Day? Any other guy in the world would have waited twenty-four hours.”
Zach looked almost impossibly smug. “Perhaps. But I’m guy in the world who gets to marry Hannah.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Hannah almost never went back to Neptune after she left for college, but she took Zach to meet her parents that March. She talked a great deal on the flight there – about her new job at GW, about Brennan’s newest book, about Zach’s new grad student assistant – the conversational equivalent of white noise.
They stayed with her mother and her stepfather Brian, who didn’t care where or how they slept.
“I like him,” Steph told Hannah, while Zach and Brian were busy with what Zach called a modern suburban adaptation of a male bonding ritual and Brian called cooking out. “I don’t think I entirely understand him,” Steph went on, “but I like him.”
“Well,” said Hannah, “he’s a good man, and he makes me very happy, and I love him, and he loves me.”
“Yes,” said her mother. “That’s the part I understand, and that’s why I like him. Are you taking him to meet your father?”
“We’ve having dinner Sunday night. Some restaurant I’ve never heard of.”
“Zach knows about all that, right?”
“The drugs, the criminal record, and the strained father-daughter relationship? Yeah, Zach knows.”
It made for a tense and awkward dinner, the night before they went home to DC. Hannah went to bed early that night, and didn’t say much at all on the flight back.
It would be four years before they’d go back to Neptune.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A month before their July wedding (which was in Michigan, and which was mostly planned by his mother), Hannah spent two weeks in Arizona, helping to process and identify the remains of passengers from Flight 45. It was the first major disaster she dealt with – grim unsettling, difficult work, and on a scale that was nothing she’d seen before. It was complicated by an NTSB agent who hit on her shamelessly, despite the fact that she told him she was engaged and that even if she weren’t, this was hardly the time and the place.
“Tired,” she said, when he called to ask how she was the third day she was there. “Mostly just tired, but I’m . . . it’s . . . I’m not . . . I’m all right.”
“You’re not completing sentences,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re speaking in incomplete sentences and thoughts. You only do that when you’re emotionally distraught. Which means you’re not all right.”
“No, I’m really not. I’m tired and sore and preoccupied and kind of . . . I’m . . . it’s hard, Zach. To be around that much . . . that many . . . It’s draining. And it’s not helping that there’s this guy who’s kind of being a jerk and . . . I wish you were here.”
In her defense, she really was tired. Otherwise she would have remembered that Zach occasionally took things very literally.
He was in the lobby of her hotel when she got back that Friday.
“Zach? What are you doing here?”
“You sounded like you were having a hard time and you said you wished I was here. I was able to get away, so I came.” He looks at her. “Also, you said someone was being a jerk, and I have an irrational desire to punch him in the nose.”
“You really don’t have to do that,” she said, quickly. “I can do my own punching, if I have to. But I am glad to see you. Let me shower and change into clean clothes and we’ll go find dinner and you can tell me what’s going on in DC. How long can you stay?”
“As long as you need me to,” he said. “Or Wednesday. Whichever comes first.”
“Wednesday, then,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stayed till she left on the following Friday.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Their honeymoon got cut short twice for "professional reasons." The third time Hannah planned it – a full ten months after their wedding – she confiscated Zach’s cell phone and refused to tell anyone where they were going.
“Angela knows how to get in touch with us if there’s an emergency,” she told Brennan, the day before they left.
“Well, what constitutes an emergency?” Brennan asked.
“That’s up to Angela. But my answer would be not much. This is our honeymoon, Brennan, and it’s been interrupted on the second day twice because someone called to get Zach’s opinion on a case.”
“I didn’t mean for him to come back early when I –”
“Well, I’m not taking any chances this time. I am taking my husband off someplace wonderful and beautiful and romantic and utterly unknown even to him, and the only body he’s allowed to examine for the next two weeks is mine.”
Brennan grinned at her. “You know, Zach tends to be very thorough in his examinations.”
“Oh, believe me,” said Hannah, grinning right back. “I know.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Zach was not the person to marry if you needed grand dramatic romantic gestures. He just didn’t think that way. If he did do something like send her flowers, it was generally because someone (usually Angela, occasionally Hodgins) had told him to.
But he was given to countless small romantic gestures, or at least things Hannah considered romantic gestures. Zach honestly never thought of then that way consciously; they were just things he did. Which was, in Hannah’s opinion, exactly what made them romantic gestures. (She tried explaining this to him once, and he told her it was totally counter intuitive.) They also tended to be examples of what Hannah called Zach Logic, which was a lot like Earth Logic, only on steroids.
“I bought you shampoo,” he said one evening near the end of the spring semester, when she got home. “I noticed this morning that my shampoo was at the front of the shower instead of the back of the shower, which I assumed meant you used it, and you’re usually very particular about things like that, even though there’s minimal difference in the basic chemical make up from one brand to another, and most of what differences there are have to do with cosmetic and fragant aspects as opposed to the efficacy of the shampoo as a cleanser, so I also assumed that meant you’d run out of yours and I knew you wouldn’t have time to get to the store today, but they seem to have discontinued the one you were using, so I looked up the most exact chemical composition I could find and this one seems to be almost the same.”
Given the choice, Hannah would take that kind of thought and effort put into buying her toiletries over a vase of roses any day.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A few eyebrows went up the first time she accompanied him to the annual Gala at the Jeffersonian. She did not look like the sort of person anyone expected to turn up on Zach’s arm. And when one slightly inebriated donor old enough to be her grandfather asked her, “And who do you belong to, little girl?” Hannah just laughed and told him she was “Dr. Addy’s trophy wife.”
He gave her an appraising sort of look. “And he must be very proud of such a pretty wife.”
“The sociological implications of that term hardly apply,” Zach said, joining them. “This is my wife, Dr. Hannah Griffith, professor at GW and consultant to the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et des médecine légale in Montreal.” Zach was very proud of his wife, for reasons that had nothing at all to do with how she looked in a red dress.
Though he would not have denied that he liked the way Hannah looked in that particular red dress a great deal.
“Montreal? That’s a long commute. Doesn’t your husband mind you being away so long?”
Hannah shrugged. She was used to that question. “Dr. Charles Pelletier retired last year, and they needed a trained forensic anthropologist who was fluent in French. Dr. Brennan recommended me.” She looked over at Zach. “We manage.”
It was a long commute, and it meant Hannah generally spent at least three and as many as five months each year in another country. Since Zach also traveled fairly extensively, it they sometimes spent as much of a year apart as they did together.
It was hardly the ideal situation, but it didn’t faze them much, either. They called a lot, e-mailed more, and simply didn’t let it become an issue.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Five days after their third anniversary, he went to Central America to join an international team working to identify remains found in fifteen-year-old mass grave. Hannah sat on the side of their bed, folding his clothes as he selected them, and tried to shake a vague feeling of misgiving she had. It wasn’t rational, he’d have told her, if she had mentioned it. And he would have been right. But so would she.
He kissed her good-bye at Dulles, quickly and on the cheek, like always. Public displays of affection, their own or other people’s, made him uncomfortable. He liked holding her hand, or putting his arm around her when they walked (and it was only logical, in a crowded place, to keep you from becoming separated). But anything beyond that he tended to reserve for private.
“I’ll see you on the twenty-third,” he said.
“Call when you can. If you can. I love you,” she said. It was not something they usually said when one of them left. It was not something they usually said much at all. It was, after all, a statement of the obvious, and there was no reason for two intelligent people to make statements of the obvious to one another.
Zach stopped, looked into her eyes, and tried to figure out if there was something here he was supposed to be picking up on.
“You’re going to miss your flight,” Hannah said, finally.
“I love you, too,” he said, “and I’ll call when I can.”
* * *
He called when the plane landed, and again three days later. “I may not be able to call again for a week or so,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“Well, I will be leaving for Montreal tomorrow, and I’ll be there till the twelfth. I’m testifying and there are some odds and ends I need to go over first. But I’ll have the cell with me.”
When her phone rang, six days later, it wasn’t Zach.
“Am I speaking to Mrs. Addy?”
“It’s Dr. Griffith, actually, but I’m Zach Addy’s wife, yes. Who are you?”
“Dr. Griffith, I’m afraid we have a situation.”
“Situation” she learned, was the diplomatic world for “the workers at the grave site have been kidnapped by parties unknown who or may not have ties to the government and your husband is being held at an unknown location under unknown conditions, but we are doing everything we can to find him, and it might be best for you to come back to DC now.”
It was a nightmarish three weeks, which she spent sitting around waiting rooms, and was never alone. Her in-laws were there, her mother, Hilary, Brennan, Angela, Hodgins, Booth. She didn’t ask her father to come and he didn’t offer.
She found a postcard from Zach in their DC mailbox, one asking her to see about getting a book he wanted, that he’d forgotten to get before he left and needed for his next paper. She called the library at GW, asked them to find it for her, put the card in her purse, and absolutely forbade herself to think anything as maudlin as, “This is the last word I’ll ever have from him.”
She thought that at least thirty times a day for the next twenty-two days.
The room at the airport was full of people when he came in, tired and unshaven and almost ten pounds lighter than he’d been when he left. Half of those people were friends and family and the other half were reporters and government agents, and he didn’t see anyone but Hannah.
He kissed her so hard he bruised her lips, held her so tight there were marks from his fingers on the back of her shoulders for days. That was how she knew he’d believed he would never see her again.
“I got your book,” she said, when he finally let her go.
“Thank you.”
It was, Angela told them later, very much a Year In Review moment. And she was right – it was one of those moments that just looked good on film – noble scientist and pretty blonde wife and thwarted terrorists and happy ending. It cropped up in a lot of magazines and morning shows that December, which annoyed Zach more than Hannah expected it to.
She just shrugged it off. “It was a pretty public display of affection,” she told him.
Zach turned off the television. “It was a pretty damn private public display of affection.”
* * *
It was February before actually talked about it. He had told her what happened – the facts – the day after he got back – being taken, being held, being released. Coming home. But he didn’t say anything about how he felt and she didn’t push. They’d get to it when they got to it.
“I hated being afraid,” he said, without preamble, curled up against her back, with his chin on her shoulder and his arms around her waist. “Fear is not rational. Of course, neither is hate. So hating being afraid is doubly irrational, which only made me hate it more.”
“It’s pretty human, though,” she said. “Especially the fear of death.”
“I wasn’t afraid of dying.”
“All right. So what were you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of leaving you alone.”
She started to say something and then stopped, and turned around to face him. “You’re going back, aren’t you, Zach?”
“Yes, I am. I have to. There are at least 120 people in that grave, and no one here cared at all until I wound up being news. All those people need to be known. Deserve to be known. And that’s what I do.”
Hannah nodded. “If anything happens to you,” she started, and then stopped. He pulled her closer, her cheek against his chest, his chin on top of her head, and he waited. “And,” she said finally, “if anything happens to you . . . I’d be all right.”
“I know you would,” he said. “But I don’t want you to have to.”
“I don’t want to have to, but if I do, I will. Just . . . promise you’ll be as careful as possible, and call me when you can.”
“I will,” he promised, into her hair. “I will,” he said again, tilting her chin up to kiss her mouth. And again, “I will,” as he moved to her neck and then her shoulders. “I will. I will. I will. I will.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
When first three years, and then five, went by and they didn’t have children, most people assumed they didn’t want any. It was a logical assumption. They both had careers to which they were passionately committed and that demanded a great deal of their time. Furthermore, those careers were spent examining just how many gruesome ways a human being’s life could end. It would have been quite understandable if children just didn’t fit into their plans.
And it was easier, Hannah thought, to just let people assume that, than to explain that after three miscarriages, they were coming to the conclusion that children were something they just didn’t get to have.
They were talking about alternatives, adoption or foster children, in a half-hearted sort of way, when she got pregnant the fourth time. Her doctor ordered bed rest.
It was not easy. Hannah was used to being active – she ran three miles before breakfast most days, and worked two jobs, and generally just wasn’t still. But when Zach expressed concern about that fact, Hannah fixed him with a determined glare. “We’ve been trying to have children for eight years, Zach. If I have to spend the next six months standing on my head, that’s what I’ll do.”
She felt like climbing the walls most days, but she found things to occupy herself. At first Zach brought home DVDs, until she told him to get the TV out of the bedroom before daytime television destroyed her brain. So he brought home work. She peer-reviewed articles, redid her syllabuses, and read the rough draft of Brennan’s ninth book (Skin and Bone) as each chapter got finished. She even met with her graduate advisees, wrapped in her dressing gown and propped up on pillows.
* * *
The name, on the birth certificate and in the dedication of Skin and Bone, was Brennan Joy Griffith-Addy. No one ever called her that, except when she was in trouble.
“Oh, sweetie, she is beautiful,” Angela said to Zach, when she came to visit after the baby was born. “Yes, you are,” she added, to the baby. “You are going to look you’re your mother, I think, and thank God for that, kitten.”
“Kitten?” said Zach, ignoring the fact that he was pretty sure he’d just been insulted.
“Kitten. It suits her,” Angela said. And that was that. It stuck, though it evolved first to Kitty and then to Kit.
Kit grew up cheerful and clever and the tiniest bit spoiled, and something of free spirit, far more interested in art and acting that she ever was in science. This perplexed her father and amused her mother, but didn’t change the fact that they could not have loved her more if they’d tried.
All in all, it was a pretty good return on a cup of coffee.
Logically Follows
“Have coffee with me.”
It was an odd way for a relationship to begin. Not the coffee, of course. Any number of modern relationships have begun over that particular caffeinated beverage. But the setting for the invitation—the crowded hallway outside an even more crowded federal courtroom where a high profile murder case was going on—was a little outside normal parameters. And technically, it wasn’t really the beginning at all, because they’d first met ten years ago, seen each other a handful of times after that, and heard about each other fairly regularly.
Still, if you asked either of them later, that’s how they’d tell you it began.
“Have coffee with me.”
He looked at her with what she would later dub his “Does Not Compute” look, and said, “Why?”
“Because it’s a more pleasant setting for a discussion than the corridor of a courthouse.”
His expression didn’t change. “I don’t think we’re supposed to discuss the case.” Expert witnesses for opposite sides and all that.
She shrugged. “So we won’t discuss the case. The defense rested today, anyway, so it’s pretty much over, until there’s an appeal. If there’s an appeal.”
“So what would we discuss?”
“Anything else. We haven’t seen each other for six years—there should be a latte’s worth of conversation in six years. In the last six months alone you’ve been to Ecuador and I’ve been to Israel. You had an article in the last Journal of Forensic Anthropology and I finished a dissertation last spring. We’ll manage.”
It turned out there were two lattes' worth of conversation in his trip to Ecuador alone.
“It was really nice to see you again, Zach,” she said, when he held the door for her as they left.
“You, too.” She got twenty feet down C Street before he called out to her. “Hannah!”
She stopped and looked over shoulder at him. “Yes?”
“What are you doing for dinner?”
Dinner was when they actually properly got caught up on what they’d been doing for the last six years. In her case, mostly school, first finishing her undergraduate degree at Northwestern and then her doctorate at Tennessee, and now teaching for a year at Widener, covering a sabbatical. “And then I’ll figure out what’s next,” she says. “Which will, I think, still be mostly teaching. I like it, even if it takes a few weeks to convince most athletes that the leggy blonde professor isn’t gonna go out with you, and really will fail you if you don’t do your homework.”
He was still at the Jeffersonian, and didn’t really see that changing. “Sometimes I think I should look for something else, try to run a lab or something. But it’s the Jeffersonian. Where do you go to top that?”
It was a long, slow, linger-over-your-wine sort of dinner, and they might have lingered straight on till morning if the manager hadn’t asked them to please go, the restaurant had closed over an hour ago, they needed to vacuum and he wanted to go home.
He walked her the five blocks to her hotel. He insisted—DC was not the safest place for a young woman to be out walking around alone at not quite 2:00 in the morning, and it wasn’t that he didn’t think she could take care of herself but it was still safer for her not to be alone.
He walked her all the way to the door of room 417, where she kissed his cheek and thanked him.
“One more thing,” he said, as she started to close the door.
“Yes?”
“Are you free for breakfast?”
Hannah laughed. “Is that diner still open?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll meet you at 7:00. Don’t be late. Good night, Zach,” she said, and closed the door.
And that was the beginning.
It worked, at least in those days, partly or even mostly because they decided it was going to. And, having made that decision, they didn’t let things interfere with it - things like the 126.3 miles from her door to his, or the fact that they had careers that used an insane amount of what would have been personal time for a lot of other people.
At first, they found or made excuses to visit each other. He went to a cousin’s wedding in Pennsylvania that he had planned to skip. She came to DC to research something at the Library of Congress that there was no particular reason to research in the Library of Congress. That trip was the first time she kissed him - she walked past the Capitol and down the Mall to meet him as he left work, and she kissed him outside the employee entrance to the Jeffersonian.
She maintained for years that she’d been aiming for his cheek and he’d deliberately turned his head. At which point he would tell her he had far too much respect for her to try anything like that. And really, what kind of argument could she make against that?
Seven weeks after she called out to him in a courthouse hallway, she came down to visit him and, for the first time, didn’t bother with a pretense of an excuse. It was also the last time either of them bothered with the pretense of a hotel room. (An unnecessary expense, since she didn’t use it for anything that weekend but suitcase storage.)
The first time she woke up at Zach’s apartment, she found him propped up on one elbow, watching her.
“What?” she half-asked and half-laughed, suddenly self-conscious about things like morning breath and pillow-flattened hair and heaven only knew what her make up looked like.
“I know it’s not rational, given the amount of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, and given that I am not prone to delusion or halucination nor do I remember recently experiencing any symptoms that indicate the onset of an illness that includes either of those, but I’m just kind of amazed that you’re actually here,” he said.
It was the last time she ever felt self-conscious around him.
To: Temperance Brennan <tbrennan@jeffersonian.gov>
From: Hannah Griffith <h.griffith@mail.net>
Subj: FYI
Brennan,
He might not think to tell you this, and you probably should know. I’m dating Zach.
Hannah
To: Hannah Griffith <h.griffith@mail.net>
From: Temperance Brennan <tbrennan@jeffersonian.gov>
Subj: RE: FYI
Hannah,
Define “dating.”
Brennan
To: Temperance Brennan <tbrennan@jeffersonian.gov>
From: Hannah Griffith <h.griffith@mail.net>
Subj: Re: RE: FYI
Brennan,
He’s seen me naked.
Hannah
“Zach, sweetie? Our Zach?” Angela asked when she called Hannah later that week.
“Yes,” said Hannah.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with Zach, of course, but you know he doesn’t have the greatest track record with dating, right?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning . . .” Angela trailed off, looking for the right way to put this. “Meaning he’s still got a lot to learn about women, Hannah.”
“Well,” said Hannah, “you guys are always saying that Zach can learn anything. And between you and me, he’s a quick study.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
She could never quite remember when it was that he started calling her to talk through things that confused him. (He could—May 28—the Hammerton case.) But it quickly became habit. And the conversations always went the same way. He would launch—without greeting or preamble—into whatever was bothering him, sometimes talking so fast that she couldn’t understand him. And when he ran out of air or words or both, she would say, “Really?” And then sometimes she’d ask a question or make an observation, and sometimes not. But she would invariably end by saying, “Well, Zach, let me know when you figure it out.”
And he always did.
She did things he absolutely did not understand, like send him an e-card in honor of their seven month, two week, and four day anniversary. He puzzled over it for half an hour and then called her.
“You got my card,” she said, instead of “hello.”
“Yes, and I don’t understand the mathematical significance of seven months, two weeks, and four days.”
“Did you think of me when you got the card?”
“Well, yes,” he said, and she could hear the Does Not Compute look over the phone. “It is a card from you. So it logically follows that I would think of you—”
She cut him off. “And when you thought of me, did I have clothes on or was I naked?”
There was a moment of silence, and then he said, “You were naked.”
“There’s the significance, then, Zach. But it really has nothing to do with math. I have to run. I’ll see you Saturday.”
He took her to dinner on October 12, and said, while they were looking at the menus, “I think I might be in love with you.”
“Really?” she said, looking up from a list of chicken entrees. “Well, Zach, let me know when you figure it out. Do you know what you’re going to order?”
Zach wasn’t entirely sure what answer he had been expecting, but that wasn’t it.
The phone rang at 2:54 a.m. on October 17, and Hannah shook herself awake and blinked at the caller ID.
“Zach? It’s three in the morning. What’s wrong?”
“Hannah, I’m in love with you,” he said, in a bit of a rush. “I’m in love with you and you said to let you know when I figured it out. And I just figured it out, so I’m letting you know. And I’ll call you tomorrow, or rather, later today, as it’s already past midnight,” he said, and he hung up.
As declarations of love go, she would tell her best friend Hilary the next afternoon, it was very Zach. “And you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?” Hilary said.
“No,” said Hannah. “No, I really wouldn’t.”
He took her home to Michigan for Christmas, to the warm chaotic whirl that was an Addy family holiday.
“Uncle Zach brought home a girl,” his nephew Bradley yelled into the house from the porch as they came up the walk. Hannah half expected to find people watching from behind the curtains and was more than a little surprised when she was hugged a few moments later by twenty people she didn’t know in rapid succession.
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell this one what you do, Zachary,” said his mother. “She seems like a nice girl.”
“Woman,” Zach corrected, automatically. “Hannah is a woman, and she already knows. She does the same thing.”
Hannah, catching this, grinned at Zach. She found his family completely overwhelming, generally delightful, and thoroughly wonderful.
On Christmas Eve, just after Zach and his brothers and assorted nephews set out to find a twelve-foot tree in the woods behind the house, Hannah got dragged into the kitchen to help make several hundred sugar cookies. “It’s tradition,” explained Gretchen, who was twelve and with whom Hannah was sharing a room. (The Addys, it turned out, had rather traditional ideas about the sleeping arrangements of their unmarried children.)
“I’d forgotten how much I liked this,” Hannah told Zach’s mother, two hours later, cutting stars and trees and snowflakes out of cookie dough. “My grandmother and I used to make cookies every year. She had these cookie cutters - one I loved, of an angel with her hands out in front of her, like she was praying. Nine times out of ten, her hands would tear off when you tried to get the cookie out of the cutter. And if you did manage to get them out, they’d burn before the rest of the cookie baked. But she let me try, over and over and over again, all those handless angels. I think my mother threw the cookie cutters out when Gran died. They’re the one thing of hers I wish I had.”
Zach, with snow in his hair and pine sap on his hands, came in to check on her and caught her smile at the end. “I have to go out,” he said. “Be nice to Hannah while I’m gone.” He spent the rest of Christmas Eve at any store that could reasonably be expected to have cookie cutters, and quite a few that could not.
“I was trying to find one like your grandmother’s,” he said the next morning, as she started to open her present. She reached down in the box and then looked back at him, her hands full of angel-shaped cookie cutters of all sizes and styles.
In that moment, Hannah knew this was the man she was going to marry.
When he proposed, a month and a half later, it was hardly a traditional, down-on-one-knee, ring-in-a-box, popping-the-question sort of proposal.
For one thing, he didn’t kneel. For another, there wasn’t a ring. And for a third, he didn’t exactly phrase it in the form of a question.
“I want to marry you, Hannah,” he said, at the Starbucks in Union Station. He’d given this some thought and decided it was best to be very clear about this—no “I thinks” or “mights.”
“I want to marry you,” he said again, “and I would like to inquire about your opinion on the subject.”
“I want to marry you, too.”
“Then it logically follows that we should get married,” Zach said.
“Yes. Yes, we should.”
“Then I think this is when I’m supposed to give you this,” he said, and put the box down next to her coffee. “I know a ring is the traditional betrothal gift, but I thought that a ring with a stone would potentially hinder your ability to work in the lab, especially when you had to put gloves on and off, and even though the common use of a diamond as a symbol of engagement is a relatively modern development and partly or even mostly due to effective advertising by the diamond industry, I thought this was a suitable surrogate.”
Hannah opened the box and looked at the diamond she would wear around her neck every day for the rest of her life. “It’s beautiful, Zach,” she said.
“No,” said Zach. “It’s a piece of compressed carbon that was mined, cut and polished, and put into a setting by a jeweler, and to which we as a society have attached a value and significance it does not inherently possess. You’re beautiful. It’s just a rock.”
But he had to admit, he liked the way the rock in question looked hanging in the hollow of her throat.
“I asked Hannah to marry me,” he told Hodgins the next morning.
“When?”
“Last evening, when I picked her up at the train station.”
Hodgins stared at him. “Dude, who proposes to a woman on the thirteenth of February?”
“What’s wrong with the thirteenth of February?”
“The day before Valentine’s Day? Any other guy in the world would have waited twenty-four hours.”
Zach looked almost impossibly smug. “Perhaps. But I’m guy in the world who gets to marry Hannah.”
Hannah almost never went back to Neptune after she left for college, but she took Zach to meet her parents that March. She talked a great deal on the flight there – about her new job at GW, about Brennan’s newest book, about Zach’s new grad student assistant – the conversational equivalent of white noise.
They stayed with her mother and her stepfather Brian, who didn’t care where or how they slept.
“I like him,” Steph told Hannah, while Zach and Brian were busy with what Zach called a modern suburban adaptation of a male bonding ritual and Brian called cooking out. “I don’t think I entirely understand him,” Steph went on, “but I like him.”
“Well,” said Hannah, “he’s a good man, and he makes me very happy, and I love him, and he loves me.”
“Yes,” said her mother. “That’s the part I understand, and that’s why I like him. Are you taking him to meet your father?”
“We’ve having dinner Sunday night. Some restaurant I’ve never heard of.”
“Zach knows about all that, right?”
“The drugs, the criminal record, and the strained father-daughter relationship? Yeah, Zach knows.”
It made for a tense and awkward dinner, the night before they went home to DC. Hannah went to bed early that night, and didn’t say much at all on the flight back.
It would be four years before they’d go back to Neptune.
A month before their July wedding (which was in Michigan, and which was mostly planned by his mother), Hannah spent two weeks in Arizona, helping to process and identify the remains of passengers from Flight 45. It was the first major disaster she dealt with – grim unsettling, difficult work, and on a scale that was nothing she’d seen before. It was complicated by an NTSB agent who hit on her shamelessly, despite the fact that she told him she was engaged and that even if she weren’t, this was hardly the time and the place.
“Tired,” she said, when he called to ask how she was the third day she was there. “Mostly just tired, but I’m . . . it’s . . . I’m not . . . I’m all right.”
“You’re not completing sentences,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re speaking in incomplete sentences and thoughts. You only do that when you’re emotionally distraught. Which means you’re not all right.”
“No, I’m really not. I’m tired and sore and preoccupied and kind of . . . I’m . . . it’s hard, Zach. To be around that much . . . that many . . . It’s draining. And it’s not helping that there’s this guy who’s kind of being a jerk and . . . I wish you were here.”
In her defense, she really was tired. Otherwise she would have remembered that Zach occasionally took things very literally.
He was in the lobby of her hotel when she got back that Friday.
“Zach? What are you doing here?”
“You sounded like you were having a hard time and you said you wished I was here. I was able to get away, so I came.” He looks at her. “Also, you said someone was being a jerk, and I have an irrational desire to punch him in the nose.”
“You really don’t have to do that,” she said, quickly. “I can do my own punching, if I have to. But I am glad to see you. Let me shower and change into clean clothes and we’ll go find dinner and you can tell me what’s going on in DC. How long can you stay?”
“As long as you need me to,” he said. “Or Wednesday. Whichever comes first.”
“Wednesday, then,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stayed till she left on the following Friday.
Their honeymoon got cut short twice for "professional reasons." The third time Hannah planned it – a full ten months after their wedding – she confiscated Zach’s cell phone and refused to tell anyone where they were going.
“Angela knows how to get in touch with us if there’s an emergency,” she told Brennan, the day before they left.
“Well, what constitutes an emergency?” Brennan asked.
“That’s up to Angela. But my answer would be not much. This is our honeymoon, Brennan, and it’s been interrupted on the second day twice because someone called to get Zach’s opinion on a case.”
“I didn’t mean for him to come back early when I –”
“Well, I’m not taking any chances this time. I am taking my husband off someplace wonderful and beautiful and romantic and utterly unknown even to him, and the only body he’s allowed to examine for the next two weeks is mine.”
Brennan grinned at her. “You know, Zach tends to be very thorough in his examinations.”
“Oh, believe me,” said Hannah, grinning right back. “I know.”
Zach was not the person to marry if you needed grand dramatic romantic gestures. He just didn’t think that way. If he did do something like send her flowers, it was generally because someone (usually Angela, occasionally Hodgins) had told him to.
But he was given to countless small romantic gestures, or at least things Hannah considered romantic gestures. Zach honestly never thought of then that way consciously; they were just things he did. Which was, in Hannah’s opinion, exactly what made them romantic gestures. (She tried explaining this to him once, and he told her it was totally counter intuitive.) They also tended to be examples of what Hannah called Zach Logic, which was a lot like Earth Logic, only on steroids.
“I bought you shampoo,” he said one evening near the end of the spring semester, when she got home. “I noticed this morning that my shampoo was at the front of the shower instead of the back of the shower, which I assumed meant you used it, and you’re usually very particular about things like that, even though there’s minimal difference in the basic chemical make up from one brand to another, and most of what differences there are have to do with cosmetic and fragant aspects as opposed to the efficacy of the shampoo as a cleanser, so I also assumed that meant you’d run out of yours and I knew you wouldn’t have time to get to the store today, but they seem to have discontinued the one you were using, so I looked up the most exact chemical composition I could find and this one seems to be almost the same.”
Given the choice, Hannah would take that kind of thought and effort put into buying her toiletries over a vase of roses any day.
A few eyebrows went up the first time she accompanied him to the annual Gala at the Jeffersonian. She did not look like the sort of person anyone expected to turn up on Zach’s arm. And when one slightly inebriated donor old enough to be her grandfather asked her, “And who do you belong to, little girl?” Hannah just laughed and told him she was “Dr. Addy’s trophy wife.”
He gave her an appraising sort of look. “And he must be very proud of such a pretty wife.”
“The sociological implications of that term hardly apply,” Zach said, joining them. “This is my wife, Dr. Hannah Griffith, professor at GW and consultant to the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et des médecine légale in Montreal.” Zach was very proud of his wife, for reasons that had nothing at all to do with how she looked in a red dress.
Though he would not have denied that he liked the way Hannah looked in that particular red dress a great deal.
“Montreal? That’s a long commute. Doesn’t your husband mind you being away so long?”
Hannah shrugged. She was used to that question. “Dr. Charles Pelletier retired last year, and they needed a trained forensic anthropologist who was fluent in French. Dr. Brennan recommended me.” She looked over at Zach. “We manage.”
It was a long commute, and it meant Hannah generally spent at least three and as many as five months each year in another country. Since Zach also traveled fairly extensively, it they sometimes spent as much of a year apart as they did together.
It was hardly the ideal situation, but it didn’t faze them much, either. They called a lot, e-mailed more, and simply didn’t let it become an issue.
Five days after their third anniversary, he went to Central America to join an international team working to identify remains found in fifteen-year-old mass grave. Hannah sat on the side of their bed, folding his clothes as he selected them, and tried to shake a vague feeling of misgiving she had. It wasn’t rational, he’d have told her, if she had mentioned it. And he would have been right. But so would she.
He kissed her good-bye at Dulles, quickly and on the cheek, like always. Public displays of affection, their own or other people’s, made him uncomfortable. He liked holding her hand, or putting his arm around her when they walked (and it was only logical, in a crowded place, to keep you from becoming separated). But anything beyond that he tended to reserve for private.
“I’ll see you on the twenty-third,” he said.
“Call when you can. If you can. I love you,” she said. It was not something they usually said when one of them left. It was not something they usually said much at all. It was, after all, a statement of the obvious, and there was no reason for two intelligent people to make statements of the obvious to one another.
Zach stopped, looked into her eyes, and tried to figure out if there was something here he was supposed to be picking up on.
“You’re going to miss your flight,” Hannah said, finally.
“I love you, too,” he said, “and I’ll call when I can.”
He called when the plane landed, and again three days later. “I may not be able to call again for a week or so,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“Well, I will be leaving for Montreal tomorrow, and I’ll be there till the twelfth. I’m testifying and there are some odds and ends I need to go over first. But I’ll have the cell with me.”
When her phone rang, six days later, it wasn’t Zach.
“Am I speaking to Mrs. Addy?”
“It’s Dr. Griffith, actually, but I’m Zach Addy’s wife, yes. Who are you?”
“Dr. Griffith, I’m afraid we have a situation.”
“Situation” she learned, was the diplomatic world for “the workers at the grave site have been kidnapped by parties unknown who or may not have ties to the government and your husband is being held at an unknown location under unknown conditions, but we are doing everything we can to find him, and it might be best for you to come back to DC now.”
It was a nightmarish three weeks, which she spent sitting around waiting rooms, and was never alone. Her in-laws were there, her mother, Hilary, Brennan, Angela, Hodgins, Booth. She didn’t ask her father to come and he didn’t offer.
She found a postcard from Zach in their DC mailbox, one asking her to see about getting a book he wanted, that he’d forgotten to get before he left and needed for his next paper. She called the library at GW, asked them to find it for her, put the card in her purse, and absolutely forbade herself to think anything as maudlin as, “This is the last word I’ll ever have from him.”
She thought that at least thirty times a day for the next twenty-two days.
The room at the airport was full of people when he came in, tired and unshaven and almost ten pounds lighter than he’d been when he left. Half of those people were friends and family and the other half were reporters and government agents, and he didn’t see anyone but Hannah.
He kissed her so hard he bruised her lips, held her so tight there were marks from his fingers on the back of her shoulders for days. That was how she knew he’d believed he would never see her again.
“I got your book,” she said, when he finally let her go.
“Thank you.”
It was, Angela told them later, very much a Year In Review moment. And she was right – it was one of those moments that just looked good on film – noble scientist and pretty blonde wife and thwarted terrorists and happy ending. It cropped up in a lot of magazines and morning shows that December, which annoyed Zach more than Hannah expected it to.
She just shrugged it off. “It was a pretty public display of affection,” she told him.
Zach turned off the television. “It was a pretty damn private public display of affection.”
It was February before actually talked about it. He had told her what happened – the facts – the day after he got back – being taken, being held, being released. Coming home. But he didn’t say anything about how he felt and she didn’t push. They’d get to it when they got to it.
“I hated being afraid,” he said, without preamble, curled up against her back, with his chin on her shoulder and his arms around her waist. “Fear is not rational. Of course, neither is hate. So hating being afraid is doubly irrational, which only made me hate it more.”
“It’s pretty human, though,” she said. “Especially the fear of death.”
“I wasn’t afraid of dying.”
“All right. So what were you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of leaving you alone.”
She started to say something and then stopped, and turned around to face him. “You’re going back, aren’t you, Zach?”
“Yes, I am. I have to. There are at least 120 people in that grave, and no one here cared at all until I wound up being news. All those people need to be known. Deserve to be known. And that’s what I do.”
Hannah nodded. “If anything happens to you,” she started, and then stopped. He pulled her closer, her cheek against his chest, his chin on top of her head, and he waited. “And,” she said finally, “if anything happens to you . . . I’d be all right.”
“I know you would,” he said. “But I don’t want you to have to.”
“I don’t want to have to, but if I do, I will. Just . . . promise you’ll be as careful as possible, and call me when you can.”
“I will,” he promised, into her hair. “I will,” he said again, tilting her chin up to kiss her mouth. And again, “I will,” as he moved to her neck and then her shoulders. “I will. I will. I will. I will.”
When first three years, and then five, went by and they didn’t have children, most people assumed they didn’t want any. It was a logical assumption. They both had careers to which they were passionately committed and that demanded a great deal of their time. Furthermore, those careers were spent examining just how many gruesome ways a human being’s life could end. It would have been quite understandable if children just didn’t fit into their plans.
And it was easier, Hannah thought, to just let people assume that, than to explain that after three miscarriages, they were coming to the conclusion that children were something they just didn’t get to have.
They were talking about alternatives, adoption or foster children, in a half-hearted sort of way, when she got pregnant the fourth time. Her doctor ordered bed rest.
It was not easy. Hannah was used to being active – she ran three miles before breakfast most days, and worked two jobs, and generally just wasn’t still. But when Zach expressed concern about that fact, Hannah fixed him with a determined glare. “We’ve been trying to have children for eight years, Zach. If I have to spend the next six months standing on my head, that’s what I’ll do.”
She felt like climbing the walls most days, but she found things to occupy herself. At first Zach brought home DVDs, until she told him to get the TV out of the bedroom before daytime television destroyed her brain. So he brought home work. She peer-reviewed articles, redid her syllabuses, and read the rough draft of Brennan’s ninth book (Skin and Bone) as each chapter got finished. She even met with her graduate advisees, wrapped in her dressing gown and propped up on pillows.
* * *
The name, on the birth certificate and in the dedication of Skin and Bone, was Brennan Joy Griffith-Addy. No one ever called her that, except when she was in trouble.
“Oh, sweetie, she is beautiful,” Angela said to Zach, when she came to visit after the baby was born. “Yes, you are,” she added, to the baby. “You are going to look you’re your mother, I think, and thank God for that, kitten.”
“Kitten?” said Zach, ignoring the fact that he was pretty sure he’d just been insulted.
“Kitten. It suits her,” Angela said. And that was that. It stuck, though it evolved first to Kitty and then to Kit.
Kit grew up cheerful and clever and the tiniest bit spoiled, and something of free spirit, far more interested in art and acting that she ever was in science. This perplexed her father and amused her mother, but didn’t change the fact that they could not have loved her more if they’d tried.
All in all, it was a pretty good return on a cup of coffee.