"Morning, Mags."
Yeah, Margaret saw this coming.
"Kennedy," she says, shrugging out of her blazer.
Kennedy and Patrick know each other all the way back to law school, with all the attendant anecdotes that barely make fucking sense to anyone who wasn't there, but are apparently deeply hilarious and/or meaningful, and usually involve inadvisable amounts of cheap beer. They went all-in on this together after — well, whatever it was that torpedoed Patrick's career in legal practise. They don't talk about that one.
Kennedy is tall and bony and has one of those faces that's so singular it defies anyone to think of it as anything so easy as attractive. She gets called striking a lot. She's the common term in half the polycules east of the meatpacking district, and she's very calm and adult and emotionally intelligent about it, very fond of the word processing, which Margaret thinks would drive her to enraged murder if they ever found themselves in a relationship, no matter how tenuously intermediated.
Fortunately, Margaret doesn't have those, despite Kennedy every-so-often getting a self-satisfied I'm about to fix everything look and trying to set her up with people, so everybody's safe.
Kennedy's draped against the doorframe of the inner of the two rooms they rent as an office, a tall travel cup of some grassy-smelling herbal tea in hand, and she's watching Margaret, like she knows something, or suspects something, and wants to help Margaret process. Which means Patrick told her, as much as there was anything for Patrick to say.
Time to bluntly and brutally head this off.
"She's operated under more names than Azoth," Margaret says brusquely. "She was there, under another, when I was stabbed. That's it, Kennedy."
"Shit," Kennedy says, then, "shit, Mags."
"It was, thanks."
Kennedy goes into the inner office to cover for immediately texting all that to Patrick, then comes back and hovers as Margaret sits at the outer desk and leafs through the day planner to keep her hands busy. "There are some guys we used to contract on an ad-hoc basis, before hiring you on," she says. "If you need, we can look them up, get one of them in just for this brief—"
"It was a surprise," Margaret says grimly. "I'll handle it."
"You don't have to handle it," Kennedy says, stooping a little to perform peering-at-Margaret's-downturned-face, empathy on parade.
"I'll let you know if it's a problem," Margaret says, closes the day planner, clasps her hands on top of the desk, stares pointedly at Kennedy until she backs off, and fixes herself coffee.
