As I aged, I found that routine agreed with me more than it ever had when I was a young man. I suppose I had finally calmed down. I still went adventuring, I still wrote about it… but each Sunday morning would reliably find me at the small restaurant 'round the corner from my house, where they knew me and would have a pot of Earl Grey ready when I arrived. I would eat a full English, read all the day's news… on my tablet, as the last paper papers had given up the ghost a few years ago… and be pleasantly clucked over by the owner.

On a warm spring morning, I was doing just that, when I felt the familiar sensation of being observed. I glanced up from my eggs and saw that I was, in fact, being watched. My watcher was a tall, pretty, very young woman, sitting alone at one of the high tables near the pastry case. When she caught my eye, she frowned and looked down at her own plate. Shortly thereafter, though, she glanced back up again.

She was clearly a fan. The time when lovely young women would ogle me in restaurants just because of my dubious charms was long past, more's the pity. And this one was far too young for me… probably still a teenager, given her vivid purple-and-blue hair and cheeks still hanging on to the last traces of baby fat.

I smiled at her and tried to look friendly and avuncular as I returned to my news. I actually really do like meeting my fans. The sort of celebrity I've got as a semi-notable author involves handing out maybe one or two autographs a week rather than having paparazzi hanging around my house hoping for photos of me with my shirt off.

A minute or two later, the girl got up her nerve and stood. She was wearing the very high platform heels and extremely short skirt that, bless them, had just come back into style. She tottered over towards me like a teenaged giraffe and asked, "Excuse me, but- are you Doctor Watson?"

"I am," I replied. Her speech was clear and correct, but she had a pretty accent, possibly Spanish.

"Doctor John Watson?" she persisted.

"The one and only," I smiled.

"Well, sir," she said, wringing her hands and looking at her shoes, "I'm Rosa Echevarria. Rose. Rosie. And I think that you are my father."

I was fairly certain I wasn't having a heart attack, but I noticed my extremities had become colder. I tried to think clearly. This had always been at least a vague possibility, since I wasn't as careful as I should have been as a young man. But if anything… anyone... had come of those affairs, they would have been adults in their thirties, not teenagers. And this girl…

There was something familiar about her. The straight nose and the rounded cheeks… and she was tall, yes, but if she was in fact fifteen and not the eighteen or nineteen I'd taken her for…

"God, are you Mary's daughter?"

There really wasn't any question in my mind, even before she bit her lip and shrugged in a gesture that was so purely Mary as to remove all doubt.

"Well… she called herself Aurelia. But… this is my mum. And... you," she said, handing me her mobile, and showing me a photograph of a photograph.

I hadn't seen this one. It must have been taken by one of our friends, since the police had seized our photographer's camera as evidence and by the time they gave it back to me I was in no particular mood to spend time looking at our wedding photos. But there we were, young-ish, and smiling, dressed to the nines in top hat and morning suit and white lace.

Mary had been beautiful, that day, and I'd been happy. Then a month later it all ended, with a break-in and a bullet.

And now, the little blinking pixel from the screen of the dating ultrasound was standing over me, wringing her hands together. I stood up, pulled the other chair opposite me out, and asked her to sit down. She did.

"You- your mum. She gave this to you?" I asked, handing the mobile back.

The girl… Rosie… looked away. My heart sank.

"Not exactly. I saw it once when I was little and then I found it again going through her things. After."

And oh, I hadn't thought that Mary still had the ability to hurt me. But then she always was full of surprises.

"After." One word that put the final coda on a part of my life that had been… miserable, and painful, and terrifying… and also thrilling and startling and ecstatic.

All this time, more than sixteen years, Mary had kept that photo that I'd never seen. But now we were in the "after."

"God, I'm so sorry."I said. It was true, in more ways than one, "When-"

"She always said," Rosie interrupted me earnestly, "That once I turned eighteen she'd tell me who you were and if I still wanted that I could go and get in contact with you."

"But you're not 18. You're… you'd be just barely fifteen."

Rosie blushed.

"Three months ago. But I figured it out! All on my own, from all sorts of clues! Just like in your books!"

I smiled, despite myself.

"You found my books?"

She nodded. "They're… really good."

I raised an eyebrow, because evidently that was one thing she hadn't got from her mum. She was a very bad liar.

"I'm glad you like them," I replied, passing over the fact she obviously didn't. It would have been nice if anyone I knew actually cared for any of my popular, successful novels but at least unlike some of them she'd been polite about it.

There was a silence for a moment. I looked at her across the table… pretty, young… and hopeful. Like she was a bit scared of me. And that was a terrifying thought, that I suddenly had this new person and almost infinite capacity to disappoint her.

"Rosie… Echevarria," I smiled, "It is so good to finally meet you."

(Author's note: In this fic, Rosie is a Rosa del Sur and not a Rosamund. This is a name I took from the Ursula K. LeGuin story "Sur" available in the collection "The Compass Rose." I did this for a completely other story well before we had any idea she was going to be a Rosie in the show and so I'm keeping it kthx.)