Capp & Capp LLP
or How Fast Scribonia Wove

It's a patchwork fix, and we all know the way those leave holes.

If you could make it all wrong to spare a little feud and save a little life, wouldn't you?

Scribonia Capp takes the baby, Contessa, and runs thread-tracks all the way out of Monte Vista and around the bend.

•

The Exceptional Edifice hasn't been exceptional in a while, unless you mean in the sense that none of the other houses in Monte Vista are collapsing at the seams except the one here at 20 Via Veronaville, burnt orange buckling and ivy snatching up the walls as its own—so Bianca Monty isn't sure why, or how, or whatever, she ends up bug-eyed in front of it with her jack-o'-lantern bucket clutched at her ribcage on Spooky Day.

"Come on, Ani, seriously, let's get out of here, you said we could go to the GilsCarbos' next and I want to see how big Mrs. GilsCarbo's chocolate pumpkins are this year. It's creepy here."

"But it isn't supposed to be creepy," Bianca tells her little brother, rooted. "It's supposed to get torn down. They were going to build over the town with Tudor houses. There was supposed to be a fight, I think—it was a great big one."

Bianca's not sure where the words are coming from. Through the holes, maybe, because Scribonia, she leaves holes, and is it really so surprising that the molten mud's trying to right the town by curdling over?

•

She says things like that sometimes, Bianca does. She can't figure out why. They just spill out. Her mom and dad take her to see the Sim Shrink at school and everything, but she's not doing it on purpose, she swears, and Bianca bets it scares her more than all three of them combined.

Like when her mom is pregnant with her youngest sibling, when she tells Bianca and Antonio that she and Dad are having a boy, when she tells them that they're naming him Claudio. "He's going to get really big and really old, but he isn't supposed to," Bianca says. "There's supposed to be a bad thing that happens to us."

She doesn't think her mom and dad are very happy, and the funny thing is she doesn't think they should be, either. It's just that they ought to be a little happier because at least they share the restaurant after Dad quits at the firm, but there's no restaurant, and there's no firm, and Dad is a doctor and Mom is a writer and they don't even get to have that one thing. Not even one little thing—and they're supposed to know why Dad thinks Mom's second-best, and they don't—not now Scribonia's threaded his first-best away.

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Bianca gets a funny feeling in her belly when she hears that Capp & Capp LLP are looking to expand their prospects into Monte Vista, to give the city planners some of their designs. She hears they're for skyscrapers, but that's not right, either, just like it's all wrong the way Kent Capp and Antonio become best friends, or Cordelia Capp and Claudio fall in love.

(there ought to be a Romeo—why isn't there going to be a Juliette—?)

She's got this gut feeling she should want to have a family, a big one, but she never has, not knowing what she's known about the way families curdle.

•

"God, I hate graveyards."

"Oh, Cordelia, you're made of tougher stuff than that, aren't you? I know you," says Caliban Gale, and Cordelia wishes he didn't, because there's Claudio and the wedding and everything Grandmother taught her about devotion and peace and loyalty—but he does. Of course he does.

"Just let's not go in the mausoleum, okay, because Mum doesn't believe her but Regan swears she got mauled by a bear when she and Kent went exploring in the catacombs, and don't give me that about how it's Spooky Day because I don't care if it's…"

It's partly cloudy out, and hazy, like the purple in the sky is something she could scoop right up out of the fog at eye level, at her feet. Cordelia's shoes aren't built for ground off the path, and her heels are damp and sunken inches into the sod, and Cordelia isn't built to handle life off the path like when Caliban is looking at her like that, if only he'd just stop looking at her like that, then she'd have been able to take a big gulp of air when she ran out from all her raving (Cordelia is words and excuses) instead of just stand there like a breathless idiot because that's all she is, isn't she, all pampered and prepped to sit on Daddy's board of directors but not say a word, Claudio loved her before she said a word and then there's Caliban, listening, why does it have to be he who listens, oh why?

"No mausoleum. I promise," says Caliban, and she believes him.

But it doesn't change the way she hates graveyards—the sog and the greys and the feeling she can't shake like there are murmurs just behind her, and then she'll turn to face nothing but her own bug-eyes staring back, like she's seven again with that jack-o'-lantern bucket asking Mum why she's got this feeling like somewhere out there they've got enemies hidden away and waiting with whites in their eyes. Cordelia used to wonder whether there was anybody out there who'd ever felt that feeling, who'd tell the Sim Shrink to suck it and stay with her and marvel at the way sometimes you can know when things are wrong, you just know them, but she gave up on that a long, long time ago.

"Delia, come look at this."

She comes. Octavius Capp, reads the gravestone.

"Didn't you say your pa was named Octavius?"

"I… Grandmother would never say much about him, not even to Mum, but I think… he was. I think he was."

(And to remember, Scribonia fights so hard, bug-eyed.)

He massages her shoulders when he notices how tense they've gone, turns her around and the course of things with her. Bianca Monty sleeps a little easier that night. The Simverse does have that nasty little tendency of unraveling to reveal its uglies when somebody tries to patch them over.