“It’s a nice story,” Emma said.
“It’s not a story.”
“Fine,” Emma said. “It’s a nice story about something that’s not a story.”
“I think next time you see Mary Margaret,” Henry said, “you should look at what she wears around her neck. Before you think you’re so smart.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she has it,” Henry said. “That’s the ring.”
Emma realized she knew what he was talking about—she’d seen the ring on a chain around Mary Margaret’s neck. She hadn’t thought much about it and had never asked her what it was. She’d always just assumed it was a family heirloom.
“So just to get this straight,” Emma said. “Your teacher, who is Snow White, who is also my mother, who has fallen in love with a man with amnesia, who is Prince Charming, is right now wearing a ring around her neck that was, for a time, in the possession of a gang of greedy bridge trolls and which was, before that, stolen by her from Prince Charming, who was on his way to give it to King Midas’s daughter, Abigail.”
“Who is actually Kathryn,” Henry added.
“Got it,” Emma said. “All cleared up.”
Henry nodded. “Yup. All cleared up.”
• • •
Mary Margaret went to the toll bridge knowing she was going to get hurt. Despite the fact that she’d believed David when he told her about his feelings, the man was flaky somehow, he was… he didn’t know who he was. Not literally, not metaphorically, not any way. Why was she letting herself fall into this?
Because a part of you believes, came an answer from somewhere within herself.
She was early to the bridge, and she went down beside the water to listen to it trickle, to wait. The moon was big and bright. Her hand went to her necklace, and she twisted the ring between two fingers as she wondered what life might look like with him. Would the town hate her for taking David away from a married woman? Did it matter? She didn’t know. Love was worth quite a lot, though. She knew that much.
She waited alone for what felt like a long time. The pleasure of the fantasy was now starting to shift into anxiety. He was late, and this brought reality into sharp relief. Another side of her—the skeptic—began to tick off all the problems with this situation, starting off with what was glaringly obvious: She didn’t know him. She did not know this man and was acting like she loved him. How much, she wondered, could loneliness make you believe in something you’d invented, just to make it hurt a little less?
“Mary Margaret.”
She turned and smiled, saw him.
“You came,” he said, moving toward her. He stopped when he reached her, and held her arms as she tried to embrace him.
“Of course I did,” she said, looking worried. “But you sound… disappointed.”
“It’s not that,” he said, still out of breath. “It’s that I… I remember.”
Mary Margaret looked into his eyes, considering this, then took a step back.
“Your old life, you mean,” she said flatly.
“Everything,” he said. “I—I got lost on the way, and I went into Mr. Gold’s shop, and I saw this… this windmill for sale there. And I had this whole flood of memories about Kathryn, about getting the house together. I—It’s in there, Mary Margaret. A lot of things are in there. And I’m remembering.”
“And you remember that you love Kathryn.”
He stared at her.
She didn’t say anything—she had no interest in letting him off the hook.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. But I remember her now, and I feel like I have to honor those memories. It’s the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do, David,” she said, her voice quivering, “was to not lead me on in the first place.”
“I know that,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I understand,” she said. “You’ve made your choice.”
Her eyes were dry. She felt more angry than hurt. Angry at herself for not knowing better. This was all just a result of her loneliness, and the feeling she’d always had that she deserved more—so strong it sometimes felt like she’d even had more, somewhere, at some time, and was being tortured by the illusion of a life in which she had very little.
“I don’t know,” he said.
An arrow pierced her heart. Hearing him work out his feelings so violently, so sloppily, so cavalierly…
She turned.
“I guess it’s just not meant to be after all. You should go,” she said, her back to him.
“Mary Margaret.”
She said nothing, walked away.
She didn’t cry until she was alone.
• • •
Emma didn’t know the details, what had happened between David and Mary Margaret, that Mary Margaret had headed for the bar, that she’d had more to drink than she’d had in the last six months combined, and that Dr. Whale was talking into her ear. As Emma patrolled the town, though, she sensed a new tension in the air. Storybrooke didn’t seem so sleepy anymore. Affairs! Intrigue! She kind of liked this new Storybrooke. If she were to ask Henry, he would probably say that it was her presence pulling apart the status quo. She still—
“What in the…?” Emma said out loud.
She stopped the car.
Case in point.
She was on the corner of Mifflin and Main and could swear—swear—she’d just seen someone jumping out of the second-story window of Regina’s mansion.
She killed the engine, grabbed her nightstick, and crept toward the gap in Regina’s hedge, which she knew would be the spot someone tried to get out through. She took a quick breath and heard footsteps, raised the stick, and slashed downward when she saw the dark figure.
The stick connected, and the figure went to the ground.
After a groan, she heard a familiar voice say, “Ow.”
“Graham?” she said, kneeling and putting a hand on his back. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Realizing the answer to her own question, she helped him up, brushed him off.
“Ah. I get it. Well, sorry. You okay?” she asked.
“The mayor needed me to—”
“—sleep with her?”
They stared at each other, and then Graham tried to explain.
Emma, a little grossed out by him, didn’t want to hear it.
Just like that, her attitude toward intrigue changed.
CHAPTER 6
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER
“You do realize,” Mary Margaret said, eating her cereal, “that those were mine. Right?”
Emma looked across the kitchen at the shattered vase and pile of dripping flowers in the corner. She’d come out and seen them and had lost control. A little.
She couldn’t stand the idea of Graham continuing with his quest to get her into bed, especially now that she knew about Regina. She’d seen the flowers, assumed they were from him, and had thrown them across the room. Sometimes she was definitive.
Sometimes he was, too. Last night, Emma had gone to Granny’s Diner for a nightcap, only to find Sheriff Graham there, completely hammered and completely belligerent. Things had been very strange between them in the few days that had passed since she’d caught him outside of Regina’s, and in a way, this was to be expected. He couldn’t handle the idea of someone knowing his secrets, which was true of all the men she’d tracked.
Sudden disdain. That was what she had thought, at least, when Graham drunkenly tossed a dart in her direction and nearly hit her. Things got stranger, though, after she left Granny’s Diner and he followed her out to the street.
“Stranger” was one way to say it. She left the diner and he grabbed his jacket and followed her out. Outside, the air was crisp.
“Let me talk to you,” he said on the sidewalk.
She didn’t stop, but she did slow.
“About what?” she said eventually.
Graham hurried to catch up. “I’m sorry.
Let me apologize. Let me—let me explain, Emma. Everything.”
“Explain what? You’re sleeping with the mayor, who I don’t particularly like, who is trying to keep me from my son, and who is, incidentally, our boss. There’s nothing to explain. I don’t want your apology. Go home.”
“But I don’t feel anything with her. I don’t—you don’t understand.”
Emma stopped walking and turned to face him. “I’ve been in bad relationships, Graham,” she said. “Big deal. Get out of it and get over yourself. It’s not my problem.”
“I am trying to explain this to you,” he said. “Because I do feel something. With you.”
This caught Emma off guard.
He leaned forward and kissed her before she could react.
For Emma, it was a foreign feeling to be caught off guard in this way, and she honestly hadn’t expected him to do something so brazen. For a fleeting moment before the anger came, she allowed herself to feel what it might be like to be with Graham. Not for long. But it was a nice moment. The kind of feeling she hadn’t felt for a long time.
She couldn’t show him that, though.
“What the hell are you doing?” Emma demanded, pulling away. There was a faraway look in Graham’s eyes.
“Did you just see that?” he said quickly, looking around.
“Did I see you kiss me without my consent?” Emma said angrily. “Yes. I was here.”
“No. Did you see that wolf?”
“Don’t cross lines like that with me again,” Emma warned, stepping back, not interested in any more of his games. “It’s not okay. You’re drunk, and that was a little too close to assault for my comfort. Go home, get over this.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just want to feel something. I can’t—”
“Fine,” Emma said. “Feel something. That’s good. But whatever it is, you’re not gonna feel it with me.”
That was last night. She hadn’t stopped thinking about the kiss since then.
“Yours?” Emma said, looking at Mary Margaret. “I thought they were from Graham.”
“Um, no,” Mary Margaret said. “They were from Dr. Whale.”
“Oh,” Emma said, going to the cabinet for the dustpan. “Oh.”
As Emma cleaned up, Mary Margaret told her about her one-night stand with Dr. Whale. It gave Emma a kind of gleeful satisfaction to imagine her friend indulging in such things, harmless as they were. It was the opposite of her experience with Graham. Mary Margaret needed some more risk in her life, and besides, she needed to get past David. This was good. Emma told her so.
“Maybe,” Mary Margaret said. “I guess so. But do you know what’s also good?”
“What.”
“Admitting that you have feelings about somebody,” Mary Margaret said. “For example. You admitting you have some feelings for Graham.”
Emma screwed up her face. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s obvious, Emma,” Mary Margaret said, smiling mischievously. “Everyone can tell. You don’t have to be smashing vases for it to be obvious.”
“The guy gets under my skin, that’s all,” Emma said, knowing she wasn’t quite telling the truth. “Can’t I be irritable without people gossiping?”
“Emma,” she said. “Come on.”
“What?”
“The wall,” Mary Margaret said. “This wall you have up around your heart.” She shook her head, shrugged. “You think it protects you. And it probably does. But there’s a cost to that.”
Emma was surprised at the plume of sadness that expanded in her chest as she listened to her friend’s words. A wall. A shield. She didn’t want to risk saying anything, for fear of sounding choked up. So instead she waited, privately admiring Mary Margaret’s emotional intuition, privately resenting it as well.
“It makes it hard to love,” Mary Margaret said, “when you’re defended so well.”
• • •
When her father died, there was a haze. Snow White would not have been able to describe it that way immediately after it happened, and besides, there was nobody with whom she could talk to about her feelings. One day he was okay; the next, he was gone. The haze came, and she dwelled alone within it through the funeral. Pain. That was what made the haze. That was what created the fog that rolled down through her soul. Snow White couldn’t see through it and wasn’t herself within it. She was a lost girl alone in the world. She was blind.
The haze never fully cleared, of course. She had never felt loss like this, and her whole self seemed to have come undone. She could not find clarity; peace seemed to have left her, and peace no longer even seemed possible. It never does after the death of a parent.
She also felt guilty, as though she might have saved him, even though she didn’t know what she could have done. Again, it was all very hazy.
She was quickly shuttled away from the castle by Regina and sent to one of the country estates. She slept fitfully on the first night there, dreaming of her father as a younger man. Her father, the man who’d showed her the world. The man who’d taught her to know reason, and kindness, and compassion. But in the dream, she kept losing him down on the beach; she would show him seashells, and whenever she would find one, she would turn, holding it up, but he would not be there.
She hardly slept.
The next morning, a knight—one of Regina’s guards?—awaited her in the gardens. He offered to escort her on a walk through the forest.
Snow White looked at him. He wore a helmet, and she couldn’t see his face, but she felt uneasy, and couldn’t place his voice.
She nodded at the man, and he nodded back. “M’lady?” he said.
“I keep a brisk pace,” she said, consenting. A walk would do her good. “Please try to keep up.”
He nodded again, and they set out toward the woods.
They walked in silence for some time. She had seen that the man was uncomfortable in the heavy armor.
The forest was calm. Her thoughts went again to her father—this time, to the man whom she had watched fall in love with Regina, all those years ago. He was still kind and still compassionate then, but Snow—young as she was—had seen how loneliness had worked away at his spirit. Even the wisest man could become… something else. After heartbreak, anything was possible.
When they were far from the castle, Snow White began to speak.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “the summer palace was my favorite place. The mountains surrounding it were like a cradle. They always made me feel safe. I look forward to returning there, I do.” She paused in her speech but continued to stroll. “But I wonder now whether that feeling of safety didn’t come from my father, not the palace itself.”
The strange knight studied her through the slit in his helmet. She stopped walking and turned to face him, studying him right back.
“Go on,” she said. “You can take it off.”
The man did as he was told and pulled the helmet from his head.
She studied him. He was handsome, gaunt, and stern-looking. A ragged beard covered his jaw. He said nothing.
“Much cooler this way, isn’t it?” she said.
He nodded, tucked the helmet under his arm.
“And you are not a royal knight, are you?” she asked.
“How would you know that?”
“Because without fail, whenever I mention my father, I receive condolences from a knight. But you are someone else, aren’t you?” she asked. “You are who she chose. To take me. To get me out of the way.” She took a deep breath, readying herself.
“You have good instincts,” he said, dropping the helmet. He reached for his sword.
“And you have too much armor,” she said.
Before he could react, she coiled up and exploded toward him, both arms out. She caught him in the stomach, enough to send him stumbling backward. Not used to his center of gravity being so high, the stumble turned into a crash. She had a good hundred-yard head start before he was on his feet again, chas
ing her.
• • •
“You know that I’m a good person, don’t you, Mary Margaret?” Graham was at the school. Class was over. He and Mary Margaret stood outside of her classroom, the trickle of remaining students whispering through the halls. She was looking at him with tender concern in her eyes. Apparently, he’d been a mess since this “incident” with Emma last night. Mary Margaret couldn’t tell what was going on with these two, but she wanted to help. Somehow.
“Of course, Graham,” she said. “Of course. And you—are you okay? You’re covered in sweat and white as a sheet. Have you not been sleeping?” She felt his cheek. “You’re burning up. What have you been doing all night?”
“I’ve just been having this sense that you and I used to know one another,” he said. “In some kind of—in some kind of other life. I don’t know. It sounds crazy.” He shook his head, looked down the hallway. “I’m sorry for coming here. I don’t know what I’m trying to accomplish.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Last night,” he said, “when I kissed Emma, I saw this whole vision. Of… of something. Another world. And you were there, and we knew each other. Somehow. I was—I was attacking you. With a knife. I think? I don’t know. I don’t know why I would be doing that.”
“You sound like Henry, actually,” she said.
“Henry?”
“He thinks that we’re all characters from his storybook,” she said. “And that we just can’t remember.”
“What kind of storybook?” Graham asked.
“Fairy tales,” Mary Margaret shrugged. “Snow White and the dwarves, that kind of stuff.” She rolled her eyes.
“Yes, I know,” he said. “That boy. How insane.”
• • •
Emma Swan was sitting with her feet up on the sheriff’s desk when Regina stormed into the office. Emma glanced at her and didn’t move.
“So wonderful to see you, Regina,” she said.
“Wonderful,” Regina said with disdain. “Doing your civic duty, then?”
“I’m on break, lady,” Emma said, scowling at her. “What do you want?”
“I want to make things clear,” Regina said. “To you. About Graham. Stay the hell away from him.”