"Have you heard from her?"

Sam looked up from his cup of coffee at Santana. It had been a year since she had married Brittany and six months since the statuesque blonde dancer had disappeared from their lives.

"You know that I haven't."

"How am I supposed to know that? How am I supposed to believe that she wouldn't tell you, of all people, where she is?"

Something twisted deep in Sam's stomach. There had been a time when he would have been fully confident that he is exactly who Brittany would have called with something like this. He had been there when no one else had, trying his best to make her happy when all she wanted to do was feel inexplicably sad. And then they had fallen in love and it had been wonderful until she was accepted into MIT and he realized that he was only a pit stop on the road to her reconciliation with Santana.

"You know I wouldn't do that," he whispered finally. The truth was, even if he wanted to, he wouldn't keep Brittany from Santana. He knew what that would do to his fellow blonde, and he had always cared about her more than he could ever care about himself. He couldn't, wouldn't, be selfish like that. "If I knew where she was and she wanted you to know, I would tell you, San. But she disappeared from my life just like she did yours."

Santana studied him for a moment, her dark eyes piercing his lighter ones. "You're still in love with her," she remarked plainly. It wasn't a question or even an accusation; it was an acceptance. "After all this - after the wedding - after everything, you still love her."

He smiled humorlessly. "Of course I am."

"What about Mercedes?"

"What about her?" Sam shot back. "She's off touring the world, too big and too important for someone like me." He raked his fingers through his blonde hair. "We weren't built to last. I never thought about marrying her. Shouldn't I have considered it after all that time?" Sam didn't wait for an answer as he forged on. "With Brit, when the world was ending, it was the most natural thing. And after Becky Jackson brought the gun to school and she was alone in the bathroom, it felt like it was the only thing. That's why I got that stupid cat in the first place."

Santana smirked as she thought about the pair of overweight cats that Brittany called her children and insisted that Santana only refer to as her stepchildren. "Sam is her dad, but you can be her stepmom," she had explained innocently when she had introduced Santana to the feline a short while after their last reconciliation. "He has visitation rights once a month."

But Sam never really collected on the in-person visits, instead having a biweekly Skype call with Brittany where she would fill him in on the cats' latest exploits and force them to wave to the screen. Lord Tubbington still hated him, even from afar, but Lady Tubbington seemed to recognize his voice. That gave him some strange kind of comfort.

Santana eventually grew bored with grilling Sam and wandered back to the bedroom she had temporarily claimed as her own. She had given up her place three months after Brittany had left to take up residence in the third bedroom in the Soho loft that Sam shared with Blaine and Kurt. She hadn't asked and neither had they. They had simply helped haul up her clothes and allowed her to have a shelf in the cramped bathroom.

Relieved that he was finally alone, Sam pulled out his phone and started to scroll through his email. The truth was that he had been working every possible channel over the past two months to track Brittany down.

He had tried Artie first, who had gone back to Lima to help take care of his dad after his stroke. Tina had followed him soon after, which meant that she was a dead end. Quinn didn't know anything in Boston, it seemed, and Mike Chang had only heard from her once when she had called to tell him about meeting some choreographer she had met that only the two of them would ever care about. Rachel had never been particularly close to her, so it made sense that she hadn't heard from her. After exhausting most of the original Glee gang, he had moved onto the second wave of students to go through the club. Marley, Jake, Blaine and Unique had all come up dead ends. That left only one person — Kitty.

There, waiting at the bottom of his inbox, was a lone message from the former blonde cheerleader. Sam had never really connected to her, though he supposed he had never really connected to any of the new kids. His stomach dropped as his index finger hovered over her name, just begging for him to press the screen and open the message. He somehow knew that the answer he needed was waiting there. If he did this, if he opened the email and saw that she was somewhere but hadn't wanted him to know, he wasn't sure how he would handle it. Rather than further delaying the inevitable, however, he jabbed his nail against the glass and watched as a few lines of text filled the screen.

Sam, she's with me in LA. She's ready to see you. Tell no one.