Chapter 8 — Lydia Counts the Wrong Numbers
Lydia Martin found out on Thursday, in the school parking lot, from Malia, who said it the way she said everything.
"Stiles has a baby."
Lydia stopped with her hand on the car door.
"What?"
"A baby. A daughter. Scott saw her Tuesday." Malia shouldered her bag. "He's been weird about telling people."
"He's been — Malia."
"What?"
"You can't open with that."
"I opened with it. It's open." Malia looked at her. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Your voice went up."
"My voice did not go up."
"It went up and you're holding the door handle like it owes you money."
Lydia let go of the door handle.
"Where," she said.
"His house. The mom's staying there. She drove from Louisiana."
"Louisiana."
"That's what Scott said."
Lydia stood in the parking lot for a second with her keys in her hand and the wind coming across the asphalt, and she thought, with a precision that unsettled her, *that's not the part that matters.*
"Malia," she said.
"Yeah."
"The tree. In the preserve."
Malia's expression flattened.
"He told Scott most of the blood wasn't his," she said.
"Do you believe that?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I smelled it," Malia said, "and there was one person in it."
They went that afternoon.
Lydia had a plan, which was to be gracious for eleven minutes and then ask a question, and the plan survived exactly as long as it took Hope Mikaelson to open the door with a burp cloth over her shoulder and say, "You're Lydia."
"I am."
"He talks about you like you're a weather system."
"That's fair."
"Come in."
Mira was on a blanket in the middle of the living room floor doing nothing in particular with enormous concentration. Malia sat down next to her immediately and leaned over and sniffed, openly, at the top of her head, and Hope watched her do it without comment.
"She smells like him," Malia said.
"Yes," said Hope.
"Not the way a human smells like somebody. Under that."
"Yes," said Hope again, and something passed between the two of them that Lydia caught the edge of and filed.
Stiles came down the stairs with a basket of laundry and stopped.
"Oh good," he said. "Everyone's here."
"You have a child," said Lydia.
"I'm aware."
"You have had a child since Sunday night and I learned about it on Thursday in a parking lot."
"Okay, in my defense — "
"There is no defense. Sit down and let me look at her."
He sat down.
Lydia got on the floor in a four-hundred-dollar coat and put her finger in Mira's fist, and Mira held on, and Lydia's whole face did the thing that everybody's face did, and for about forty minutes it was almost a normal afternoon.
Then Hope took Mira upstairs to change her, and Malia went to find food because Malia always went to find food, and Lydia stayed on the floor with her back against the couch and her legs out in front of her.
"Stiles."
"Mm."
"Sit down."
"I'm sitting down."
"Sit down *here.*"
He slid off the couch onto the floor beside her.
"I want to tell you something," Lydia said, "and I need you to not be funny for ninety seconds, which I know is a physical hardship."
"Okay."
"Do you know what it's like for me? In a room?"
"Not really."
"There's a — " she moved her hand. "It's not a sound. Everyone says sound because it's the closest word, and it isn't right. It's a pressure. It's what a room feels like right before something ends. And I get it early, and I get it about everyone, eventually, because everyone ends."
"Lydia."
"I got it about Allison eleven days before," she said.
Stiles stopped.
"You never said that."
"No. I didn't." Lydia looked straight ahead. "I got it about your father in March, for about nine seconds, and then it went away, and I sat in my car outside your house for an hour deciding whether to tell you, and I decided not to, and it never came back. I got it about Scott twice. I get it about Malia constantly, which I think says more about Malia than about death."
"Okay."
"I have never gotten it about you."
Stiles didn't move.
"Not once," Lydia said. "In two years. In every room, in every tunnel, in every idiotic situation you've walked into with a bat and no plan — I have stood four feet away from you while something was happening and gotten absolutely nothing. It's like there's a hole in the room where you are."
"Maybe I'm just not going to die soon."
"That's not how it works."
"You don't know how it works, you said yourself you don't — "
"It's not a forecast, Stiles." Her voice stayed low and level. "It's not a countdown. It's a quality. Everybody who's alive has a door in them that's eventually going to open, and I can feel the door even when it's a hundred years off. It's the same as knowing a wall has a window in it."
She turned her head and looked at him.
"You don't have a door," she said.
The furnace came on somewhere under the house.
"That's a hell of a thing to say to a guy," Stiles said.
"I've been not-saying it for two years."
"Why now?"
"Because there's a baby on this floor," Lydia said, "and I sat here holding her hand for forty minutes and I got the ordinary thing. Immediately. The way I do with everyone. She's got a door. It's a very long way off and I want to be extremely clear about that, but it's there, it's normal, she's — " her mouth tightened. "She's like the rest of us."
"And I'm not."
"And you're not."
Stiles pulled his knees up and put his arms across them.
"Say the rest of it," he said.
"There isn't a rest of it."
"There's a rest of it, Lydia, you built a whole runway. Land the plane."
Lydia was quiet for a second.
"Two months ago you went into that basement first," she said. "Before Scott. You went through the door ahead of an alpha werewolf. And I've thought about it a lot, because at the time I decided you were being reckless, and you're not reckless, you're the most calculating person I've ever met, and I couldn't make it fit."
"Lydia — "
"You always go first," she said. "Always. For two years. Every room, every door, every time somebody has to be the one standing in front of it, you find a reason that it should be you, and you make the reason sound like logistics."
Stiles said nothing.
"So here's my question," Lydia said. "And I'm going to ask it once and then I'm going to drop it, because I know you, and pushing you is how you get further away."
"Okay."
"What do you know," she said, "that lets you do that?"
He looked at the carpet for a long time.
Upstairs, the floor creaked. Water ran, and stopped.
"If I told you," he said, "it wouldn't help you. That's not me being cryptic. I've run it about a thousand times, and every version where I say it out loud, the room gets worse, not better."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got."
"Stiles."
"Lydia." He looked over at her. "When Allison died."
Lydia went still.
"You had eleven days," he said. "You said that. Eleven days of knowing something was coming and not what, and not who."
"Yes."
"Was it better?"
She didn't answer.
"Was it better," Stiles said, "to have the eleven days?"
"No," Lydia said.
"No."
"But that's not the same."
"It's exactly the same."
"It is *not*, because in eleven days I couldn't do anything, and you're asking me to let you carry something I could actually help with — "
"You can't help with it."
"You don't know that."
"I do know that," Stiles said, and there was something under his voice for a second, something raw that he put away almost immediately. "That's the whole problem. I know that better than I've ever known anything."
Lydia looked at him.
And Lydia Martin, who had gotten a 5 on every exam she had ever sat and who had never in her life let a variable go unsolved, sat on the floor of that living room and understood that she was looking at the answer and that it was not going to be given to her today.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine?"
"I said I'd ask once."
"You did say that."
"I'm a woman of my word." She got up off the floor and smoothed her coat. "But I'm putting something on the record."
"Naturally."
"When you finally say it," Lydia said, "and I promise you, you will, because things like this always come out sideways at the worst possible moment — I want you to remember that I gave you an afternoon on a carpet with nobody else in the room. That's the nicest possible way this could have gone and you didn't take it."
Stiles winced.
"That's — yeah. That's going to sit with me."
"Good."
Malia came back in with an entire block of cheese in one hand.
"There's nothing in this house," she said.
"There's a block of cheese in your hand."
"There's nothing *else.*"
Hope came down the stairs with Mira, and Malia immediately abandoned the cheese on the arm of the chair and put her hands out, and Hope, after a beat, handed the baby over.
Malia held her badly and correctly at the same time, like somebody who had never been taught and had good instincts, and looked down at her with an expression of open, uncomplicated approval.
"She's fine," Malia announced.
"Thank you," said Hope.
"No, I mean — " Malia searched for it. "When I was in the woods, if something was wrong with a kit you could tell. You could always tell. There's nothing wrong with this one."
"That's actually really nice," Stiles said.
"I know."
Lydia picked up her bag.
At the door, with her hand on the frame, she stopped and looked back into the room — at Malia with the baby, at Hope leaning on the counter watching Malia with the baby, at Stiles picking the laundry basket back up like the last twenty minutes hadn't happened.
And she felt it, then.
Not from him.
From the house. From the whole street. A low, wrong pressure, far off and enormous, like weather building somewhere past the county line — not a door opening, not yet, nothing she could name or point at.
She stood in the doorway for three full seconds.
"Lydia?" Hope said.
Lydia blinked.
"Sorry," she said. "It's nothing."
She went out to the car, and sat in it for a minute with her hands on the wheel, and did not start the engine.
Across the street, at the Hendersons' place, a truck was parked in the driveway and two men were carrying the FOR SALE sign out of the lawn and laying it flat in the bed.
There was a man on the porch of that house.
He was standing with a folded paper in one hand, not reading it, watching the two men work, and he was at the wrong angle for the light, so Lydia could not see his face.
She could see that he was not watching the men.
He was watching the Stilinski house.
Lydia sat there with her keys in her hand.
The pressure came up again — not sharp, not the way it came before a death, but broad and low, the way a room feels when the barometer drops and nobody has said anything yet. It filled the car. It was not coming from the man on the porch. That was the part she would think about later, in bed, at two in the morning, with her phone face down on the nightstand.
It was coming from everywhere else.
The man on the porch turned his head.
He looked directly at her car, across forty feet of street, through a windshield with the afternoon glare on it, and he raised the folded paper an inch in what was unmistakably a greeting.
Lydia raised two fingers off the steering wheel.
Then she started the engine and drove home, and she did not look in the mirror once, and she was aware the entire way of exactly how deliberately she was not looking.