Chapter Text
Chapter One: Before
She woke up at seven-fifteen because her mother knocked.
Not loud — Mary Margaret had a specific knock for Emma's door, three taps with the knuckle of her index finger, the one that meant I know you're awake, I just want you to know I know. Emma had been hearing it since she was twelve. She still found it more effective than any alarm.
"I'm up," she said, to the ceiling.
"Breakfast in twenty," her mother said, through the door, and her footsteps moved down the hall.
Emma lay there for another thirty seconds — the specific luxury of knowing she could, of having no commute, no roommate, no 8 AM lecture to sprint to — and then got up.
The house was the same house it had always been. Emma had grown up in it, had left it briefly at eighteen for a room in student housing in Boston that smelled like damp carpet and other people's cooking — a city she'd been excited about in theory and found, in practice, full of people who seemed to know exactly who they were, which had the effect of making Emma feel like she was performing a version of herself that didn't quite fit. She'd told herself she'd adjust. She'd told herself that for eight months. And then June happened, and she'd come back eight months later with her things in two bags and the specific quality of failure sitting in her chest like a stone she was learning to carry.
That had been a year ago. The stone was smaller now. She'd gotten used to its weight.
She showered. She pulled on jeans and a flannel shirt and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror for a moment — not long, just the habitual check — and then went downstairs.
Her father was at the table with his coffee and the sports section, which he read in the same order every morning: hockey, football, hockey again. David Nolan was a creature of comfortable habit, which Emma had grown up finding embarrassing and now found deeply reassuring. He looked up when she came in and smiled — the easy, genuine smile that Emma had inherited, according to everyone who'd known them both.
"Morning, kid."
"Morning." She poured herself coffee and sat across from him. "Any scores?"
"Canadiens lost again."
"Shocking."
"Your sarcasm is noted and disrespected." He turned a page. "Your mother made eggs."
The eggs were on the stove, keeping warm. Emma served herself and sat back down and ate and listened to the particular sound of a Tuesday morning in the Nolan house — her mother moving in the kitchen, her father turning pages, the radiator doing its thing. She had friends who found domestic life suffocating. Emma found it, when she was being honest with herself, like being held by something larger than herself. Which was embarrassing to admit at nineteen, so she didn't admit it.
Mary Margaret came in from the kitchen with her own plate and sat at the head of the table and looked at Emma with the expression Emma privately categorised as the loading screen — the one that preceded a topic she'd been thinking about.
"So," her mother said.
"So," Emma said.
"Regina confirmed for this afternoon."
Emma took a sip of coffee. "I know."
"Three o'clock. You know where she lives — "
"I've known where she lives since I was eight, Mom."
"I'm just reminding you."
"Noted."
Her father lowered the sports section slightly to observe this exchange, then raised it again. A wise man.
Emma ate her eggs and looked at the table and thought about Regina Mills, which was something she had been doing, in varying degrees of deliberateness, for approximately eleven years.
The thing about Regina was that she had always been there.
Not there in the hovering sense — Regina wasn't a hovering kind of person, she was more the kind of person who occupied whatever space she was in with such complete self-possession that you noticed her absence more than her presence. But she was a fixture. Mary Margaret's person — the friend from before Emma could remember, the one who showed up at Christmases and birthdays and the occasional Tuesday dinner, who had opinions about wine and literature and the current state of secondary education and who expressed those opinions with a precision that did something to Emma's chest she'd been not-naming since she was approximately thirteen — the way Regina's voice dropped half a register when she was making a point she knew she was right about, the way her hands moved, the way Emma had once lost an entire dinner staring at her collarbone and been asked by her mother if she was feeling okay.
The literature thing was real, though — not just opinions but something closer to devotion. Emma had grown up watching Regina Mills move through a room and inevitably end up in front of a bookshelf, had watched her pull things out and quote them unprompted and argue about them with a precision that Emma had found, depending on the year, either intimidating or unreasonably appealing. The books Emma had borrowed — without asking, always, because asking felt too exposing — she'd never quite gotten around to returning. Regina had never asked for them back. Emma had always wondered if she'd noticed.
Dr. Mills, Emma's brain supplied, unhelpfully. Regina had finished her doctorate four years ago — a PhD in physiology — and Emma had been nineteen before she fully understood what that meant in relation to her own situation: brilliant woman with a doctorate, meet Emma Swan, who couldn't get herself through an exam door.
She was thirty-two. She'd been thirty-two in Emma's head for several years before she actually was, because Emma had done the maths at fifteen and arrived at an age that seemed both impossibly adult and, theoretically, not impossible, which was the kind of thought she'd spent a significant amount of energy suppressing.
Emma was aware that she had not entirely suppressed it.
She was also aware that Regina almost certainly had no idea. Because Regina looked at Emma the way she'd always looked at Emma — with that warm, slightly distracted attention that said I know you, I've always known you — and the specific torture of it was that she did know her. Just not the right version. Not the version that had been doing maths at fifteen and arriving at ages, not the version who was fourteen, sitting on the floor while Regina argued about a book Emma hadn't read, legs crossed, back against the armchair, watching Regina's mouth shape words she wasn't really hearing anymore — and felt something shift in her chest that she hadn't had a name for yet, and hadn't wanted one.
Mary Margaret's Emma. That was the file. The Swan girl. How's university going — which, as of June, was a question Emma had stopped being able to answer honestly, which meant she'd been smiling and saying fine to Regina Mills for four months while the stone sat in her chest and Regina looked at her with that warm familiar attention and saw absolutely nothing.
Which was fine. Obviously. She'd known that for years — it was fine, it had always been fine, Regina looked at her and saw Mary Margaret's kid and that was — yes. Fine. She knew that.
What made it worse — what made it specifically, precisely worse — was that she hadn't even seen Regina in eighteen months. The last time had been a dinner here, spring before Boston, before everything. Regina had asked so you're off to university in September and Emma had said yeah, Boston and Regina had said good with that warmth that meant she actually meant it. That was the last file update. Which meant this afternoon Regina was going to ask how's university going in that warm familiar way and Emma was going to have to figure out what to say.
She hadn't figured it out yet.
She'd missed the exam.
That was the fact of it, stripped down. Fourteen June, English Literature, two hours, she'd been registered and prepared and she hadn't gone. She'd driven to the examination centre. She'd parked. She'd sat in the car with her hands on the steering wheel and her notes on the passenger seat — English Literature, her best subject — and she'd thought: okay, get out.
Her chest had tightened. Her left shoulder ached. Her breath came shorter than it should have. She'd watched other students walk through the glass doors and she'd thought okay, now, get out now and her hands had stayed on the wheel and she hadn't moved for forty-five minutes and then she'd driven home.
She hadn't understood it then. She still didn't, not really. She'd been ready. She'd wanted to go. Something in her body had just panicked. And she'd never quite found a way to explain that to herself, let alone anyone else.
The grade was a zero. The unit was a fail. The academic year was unrecoverable.
Her parents had been — not angry, which had almost been worse. They'd been worried and gentle and practical, and her father had offered her shifts at the dealership, and her mother had made her tea, and neither of them had pushed for the reason because they'd learned, over nineteen years, when Emma would tell them things and when she wouldn't.
She hadn't told them why. She wasn't sure she ever would.
What she had done was register again for the following year, defer her university place, take the dealership shifts, and spend three months living in her childhood bedroom with the stone in her chest getting smaller and her friends' Instagram feeds full of lecture halls and freshers' events and lives that had gone on without her.
It was fine. She was fine
She was also — and this was the part she was managing with varying success — about to spend an afternoon in Regina Mills' study, receiving private instruction in the subject she'd failed, from the woman she'd been managing feelings about since she was fifteen.
The universe, Emma thought, had a very specific sense of humour.
Not just any tutor. Not a stranger whose opinion didn't matter. Regina Mills — who had known her since she was eight, who was brilliant and accomplished and had a doctorate, who looked at her and saw a child she'd watched grow up — was going to sit across a desk from Emma and help her pass an exam she'd already failed once. Emma was going to have to be bad at something in front of her. She was going to have to be the student who needed help. She was going to have to show up, in every possible sense, as less than.
This was fine. This was survivable. Emma had survived worse.
She was also aware that survivable and fine were doing a lot of heavy lifting this morning.
"She's doing you a favour," her mother said, still on the subject, because Mary Margaret did not drop subjects until she'd fully covered them.
"I know."
"She's very busy. She does this as a favour, not a profession — you know that."
"I know, Mom."
"She asked after you, you know. When I called her. She said — " Mary Margaret paused, considering. "She said she'd be happy to help. That she'd always thought you were bright."
Emma's hand tightened on her coffee cup. Just slightly — not enough for her mother to notice, probably.
She'd always thought you were bright. That was — what was that. That was the category of thing adults said about children they'd watched grow up. Affectionate. General. It meant Regina had noticed she existed and was being kind about it. It didn't mean anything else. Emma knew it didn't mean anything else.
"Great," Emma said.
"Don't be like that."
"I'm not being like anything."
Her mother looked at her for a moment with that expression — the one that saw more than Emma intended to show — and then let it go, which was its own kind of kindness.
Her father turned a page. "She still drive the Volvo?" he asked, to the sports section.
"David," her mother said.
"I'm making conversation."
Emma laughed despite herself, and the stone in her chest was briefly lighter than usual, and she finished her eggs and drank her coffee and tried not to think about the fact that in approximately four hours she was going to be sitting in a room with Regina Mills trying to discuss English Literature while managing eleven years of accumulated — she was going to call it appreciation — for a woman who thought of her as Mary Margaret's daughter.
She worked the morning shift at the dealership.
It was, she had discovered over the past few months, genuinely good work — not intellectually demanding in the way she'd once imagined her life would be, but satisfying in a physical, immediate way that she'd needed more than she'd expected. She knew cars. She'd grown up knowing cars, helping her dad on weekends, learning the specific pleasure of something mechanical that either worked or didn't and could be fixed if it didn't.
There were no failed exams in a car engine. There were no ambiguous feelings about how she'd ended up here. There was just the work, and the work was fine.
Her father appeared at her elbow at half twelve with a sandwich and the particular expression he used when he was being careful with her.
"Big afternoon," he said.
"It's a tutoring session, Dad."
"Right." He handed her the sandwich. "How are you feeling about it."
Emma considered this. Her father asked questions like that — direct, low-pressure, genuinely wanting to know. She'd gotten more of that quality in him than most people got from their parents, and she tried to honour it by answering honestly when she could.
"Weird," she said. "It's Regina. It's just — weird."
Her father nodded slowly. "She was always very fond of you, you know."
"I know."
"In the fond-of-a-child way," he added, because David Nolan was perceptive in a quiet way that Emma sometimes forgot about until it surfaced at inconvenient moments. "Which is what it is. She's known you a long time."
"Dad."
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying."
He looked at her for a moment — the same look her mother had, the one that saw past the surface — and then clapped her on the shoulder and went back to his office, and Emma ate her sandwich and looked at the car she'd been working on and thought: I am extremely easy to read and my parents love me and this is going to be fine.
She left at two thirty-seven. It was a twenty-minute walk and she knew that because she'd done it a hundred times, and she was not going to arrive early, and she was not going to time it so she arrived exactly on time either because that would be obvious, so she left at two thirty-seven which gave her a built-in three minutes of standing at the gate looking normal.
She knew every street on this route. That was the thing. She'd walked it in every configuration — with her mother on the way to dinner, alone at twelve cutting through the neighbourhood on her bike, at sixteen in the dark after a party she wasn't supposed to be at. She knew the house with the badly trimmed hedge and the one with the green door and the corner where the pavement buckled up from a tree root and you had to step over it or you'd catch your toe.
She caught her toe.
She kept walking.
The thing she was trying not to think about — the thing she was, in fact, thinking about constantly — was She said she'd be happy to help. That she'd always thought you were bright. Happy to help. Like Emma was a stray her mother had found and Regina was doing a kindness. Like it was simple. Like Emma hadn't spent the better part of eleven years constructing an elaborate internal architecture designed specifically to keep Regina Mills in a category labelled not applicable and had therefore become, by necessity, extremely good at it.
She was fine at this. She had practice.
The house came into view at the end of the street — brick facade, the garden exactly as immaculate as it had always been — and Emma's stomach did something she was going to describe as anticipatory and not as anything else.
Twenty-three minutes since you left, she noted. You've been walking slowly.
She stood at the gate and thought: you have been managing this for eleven years. One hour.
She rang the doorbell.
The door opened.
And there was Regina.
Dark hair. Glasses. Green blouse — the kind of green that made her eyes look like — Emma was not going to finish that thought. Heels, in her own home. Eighteen months, and somehow Emma had managed to remember her wrong.
Her mouth went dry.
"Miss Swan. You're three minutes early. Come in."
Her voice was exactly the same. Emma didn't know why she'd expected it to be different.
Emma came in.
She thought: I am going to fail this unit again.
Regina turned to walk down the hall ahead of her and Emma followed and she thought — briefly, involuntarily, in the part of her brain she had absolutely no control over —
absolutely worth it.
End of Chapter One.