Against the Wall Two days after he and Robert had been forced to knock in a substantial portion of Jessica's bedroom door - Arthur wielding a crowbar, and, when that had proven ineffective, his butler surprising him by proving an adept hand with a small axe; it would have been simpler to get the shotguns, but unfortunately, that would have almost certainly have killed either Jessica or one of them or both - Arthur Hayles was very, very worried.
"What are you going to do?" demanded his wife, walking up behind him. She did not seem surprised to find him standing and staring at the ruins of Jessica's door; long ago, he had sometimes teased Rosalie Groves that he thought she could read his thoughts. Sometimes, now, lately, he wondered if perhaps she actually could - that was, if this - problem - of Jessica's came from her side of the family.
Ros was worried, too - they had always agreed that hitting children was not a particularly effective way to parent them, but when she had realized that Jessica had done - something - which had rendered the door inoperable from the outside, Ros had panicked, her accent thickening like peanut butter as she threatened to make Jessica wish she'd never been born if she didn't open the door. Predictably, that had not helped the situation at all; it had taken Jezi a good two minutes to even manage to effectively communicate that she didn't know what she'd done and that she couldn't open the door, either. It had also not helped that by the time Arthur and Rosalie had understood that, one of those accursed big birds had been wheeling around the hallway, pecking the door until after the decision was made to assault it; at that point, with his daughter appearing to have had a nervous breakdown and his wife vomiting in a poinsettia pot and his butler running around like a madman with an axe and yet still trying to speaking soothingly to 'Miss Jessica' through the door, Arthur had directed some of his own terror into rage toward the thing, taking a swing at it with the crowbar so it had at least done him the courtesy of getting out of the way.
It had had its revenge, though, which was at least a tiny fraction of a percent of why he and Ros were still worried. At the time, it had seemed obvious that they could not let Jessica go back somewhere that she hated so much that being asked to start packing had made her cause all of that; however, no sooner had they reached her than the bird had dropped a letter on her head, calling her down for casting something called a 'sealing charm' in violation of some law he'd never heard of passed by some organization he'd never head of and telling her she would get in trouble if she did it again.
He had expected Jessica to completely collapse, then, but she had surprised him. Instead of becoming more hysterical over the fact they were being watched so closely that these people knew what she'd done as soon as she'd done it, or even at the thought of legal trouble, Jessica had instead seemed first shocked and then offended; she had not set out to do anything, it had just happened, and how dare they take such a tone with her. Anxiously, Arthur and Ros and Robert had all agreed with her, petting her and making much of her until she had seemed steady again (though who knew, anymore, what Jessica was? She had been his little girl, and then he'd heard she was a witch; she had always been a good girl, and then she had had two breakdowns in the course of two weeks, and had come home with a mixed bag of grades instead of the rigorous perfection he was accustomed to, and she flinched when people spoke to her and the pediatrician was after them about that and why she'd lost weight and how she looked exhausted) and Ros had managed to bundle her off for a hot bath and some hot chocolate while Arthur had called a friend of his from the university hospital, a very discreet man who hadn't minded quietly procuring a few nerve pills.
One thing had stood out to him, though, through it all - that Robert had not seemed nearly as fazed as everyone else by Jessica screaming the house down after she locked herself in her room and then couldn't get out. This had reminded him of how Carmela had reacted to her earlier outburst at the apartment in the city. It had taken some prying (a lot of prying, in fact; he shared too many secrets with those two, Jessica's condition among them, so threatening them with firing or deportation had not proven particularly effective), but finally, the truth had come out: Jessica had always been like this. Not the sealing herself in a room she couldn't escape from, of course, that was new, but the fits, the anxiety at the least suspicion of criticism, the crying spells at the first hint something wasn't going the way she wanted it to - these were all things she had done for years. She had just done them almost entirely with the staff.
"Why didn't you tell me?" That question had been no better than threats. Robert had simply looked at him as though he were a child asking why Santa Claus only came once a year before murmuring a demurral about not supposing "you would take much interest in the small troubles of a small girl, Mr. Hayles," but Carmela had been more direct: "What, and have her shut us out, too? The child had to have someone she could trust. And you and Rosalie didn't want to see anything but report cards - oh, shut up, Arthur. If either of you had wanted to know, you would have. You think I wouldn't know if Mara was like that?"
There were important differences, he had wanted to protest, but he had realized before he spoke that most of those would not exactly help his case. Jessica ate with him and Rosalie - when they were home - and had played in his office while he worked when she was small and so forth, but it was her teachers and the staff who she had spent most of her time with, when it was all added together. The summer vacations...well, they had taken her with them on something most years (had he noticed a tendency toward fear or petulance then, he wondered, and not recognized it as a serious problem? She'd had the occasional temper tantrum, of course, but she was a child, wasn't that what they did?), and of course she was always in this class or that one in the summer, but when all the time she'd ever spent outside of school was put together, the nanny and the butler had spent more of it with her than either of her parents. There had always been something to do - a conference, a meeting, a trip out of town, a trip to the Golden Dome, a publicity stunt....even on holidays, they had taken Carmela. Jessica had been with them on the beach or visiting tourist attractions or concerts or the like, but even when he'd taken Jessica to New York or the Capitol or a movie set or London or Milan, he had had to work, and Ros had usually had to work, and it had been Carmela who had kept up with her, kept her out of the way when they didn't have time to supervise her.
And now, here they were.
"Arthur?" said Rosalie, sharply now.
"I don't know," he admitted.
He had not told Ros yet that they had been deluding themselves about being good parents, and he didn't know if there was any point to doing so. They already had enough other problems. This was painful personally, but the bigger issue lay with that bird, and what it had represented. Perhaps the watchers were gone now that Jessica, sedated into compliance, was also gone, but he couldn't be sure, not when he hadn't known they were there in the first place. And even if they only came when she did, that made Jessica a massive threat to corporate security every time she was in the same building as him, not to mention to the Groves' and their politics. He felt as though the Grim Reaper had his bony fingers on his neck every time he thought about what could have happened, what could still happen, if these wizards knew about him and Carmela and Mara and Lola, if they put two and two together....
Visions of stock prices plunging and family values advertisements unrolling danced in his head, and he did not like them at all. He and Ros had never much, after the first few years, cared what the other did, or with whom, so long as it remained quiet, but they lived in Georgia; if the story broke and they tried to claim an open marriage, they would both be ruined, and even if Ros declared it every man for himself and played the part of the innocent betrayed beau belle, she'd still be publicly humiliated, and the red majority under the Dome would still have a field day with her father and brother. Sam Groves might recover - the man was already a senator just on his father's name alone - but Jason's career might find itself over before it had even properly begun - he was too closely associated with Arvale and its charitable foundations to extricate himself, at least not before he had gray hair. He and Ros had worked far too hard and far too long on their projects, both those they shared in common and those they kept separately, to allow any of that to happen - but what could they do to stop it? What could they do to stop them?