Okay guys – here are the first two chapters of the sequel I promised. I'm sorry if they seem a bit disjointed, but I figured that I could either spend thousands of words fleshing out Jack's first eleven months without Kate, or I could skip ahead to the part where he tries to find her, which is what I know you're all waiting for. I'm going to write it as a kind of mystery story, so it might be a while before we get a clear picture of what she's been up to.

I wracked my brains for a title, but couldn't come up with anything poetic, so I decided to go with something simple. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet -- the story or the title – I'm never happy with the first few chapters of a new fic. It usually takes me a while to warm to it, and then all of a sudden it's my favourite…

Chapter 1. The Card

"So I guess this is goodbye then."

"Not forever. I'm going to figure something out, and then I'm going to find you. I'll find you, Kate."

Twelve months.

For almost twelve months, Jack had been replaying these words over and over in his head, wondering how he was ever going to keep his promise. Kate was a fugitive; she prided herself on being invisible. It wasn't like she'd left him much of a trail.

For the past twelve months, the only knowledge he'd had of her whereabouts had come from the card.

He'd only spoken to her once since he'd left her in Australia, just a few weeks after he got back to L.A. She'd called his office in the middle of the night to let him know she was safe; after a lot of awkward pauses, he'd managed to wrangle out of her the name of the place she was staying.

He'd found the address on the Internet, so he'd sent her the card.

It wasn't easy to get a credit card under a false name, but Sawyer had helped him as soon as he heard it was for Kate. It would have been easier to send her cash, but she was determined to avoid direct contact with Jack, for fear that the Feds were still watching him.

Almost a year ago now, in Australia, when they'd burst into the motel room he was sharing with Kate, Jack had told them that she'd drugged him into order to escape. They'd forced him to undergo blood tests to confirm his story, but he knew how to fake the results of a tox screen, so in the end, they'd had to let him go. But they'd been keeping an eye on him ever since, sending cars to stake out his apartment, screening his mail, tapping his home phone – fortunately, confidentiality laws prevented them from listening in on his work calls as well – apparently unconvinced that he'd ceased having any kind of contact with Kate.

Even though it was the truth.

It wasn't even close to what he wanted – he would have given anything for a letter, at the very least – but it had helped at first that every month, when Sawyer sent him the bill in a nondescript envelope, Jack could see where she'd been, and know that she wasn't sleeping on the streets, or in a shelter somewhere. He'd been able to track her progress that way, through Australia, and eventually, back to the US, but he could never catch up with her, because by that time, she'd already moved on.

Still, it had been enough to know that she was safe, until a little over three months ago, when the charges had stopped. She started withdrawing cash then, until about a month earlier, when all activity on the card had ceased.

Suddenly, for the first time in almost a year, Jack had no idea where she was.

It had terrified him, a few days into November, when he tore open the envelope to find that first blank statement. He called Sawyer right away, hoping that it was a mistake, but the southerner insisted that there was nothing wrong with the account; he'd been pulling this stunt for years, and the bank never seemed to cotton on.

He hadn't heard from Kate either; he tried to cover it up, but Jack could hear the fear in his voice when he realised what the sudden lack of activity could mean.

Either she'd found another way to get by, or something had happened to her, something neither one of them wanted to contemplate. With no evidence to the contrary, Jack began to fear that she was dead, or that she'd been caught again. He tried to console himself with the idea that if she was, or if she had, he would have heard about it, but when no news came one way or the other, he decided it was time to make good on his promise.

He still didn't have a plan, as to how he would find her, or what he would do when he did, but he needed to make sure that she was okay, even if he couldn't be with her. He needed to see her again.