Eight year old Rory Gilmore sat on the floor of her new living room staring intently at the photos laid out before her.

One was of herself, her mother Lorelai and the man she called Daddy.

The other was again of herself and a nice man named Luke.

Luke owned a diner and he made the best burgers and really good milkshakes and her mom said that his coffee was the best in the world but that Rory was too young to have any yet.

Her mom called the man in the other photo Chris and she got mad at him a lot. She didn't think Rory heard, but sometimes she got really loud and the place they used to live was really just one big room so it was hard not to.

Chris called on the phone a lot – every couple of weeks at least – but he didn't come to visit, at least not to Stars Hollow, usually the three of them would meet up somewhere in Hartford for lunch, but he wouldn't eat much, and her mom only ever had coffee and a couple of Rory's fries.

As Rory touched the side of Luke's face in the picture she knew it felt prickly, because that was how it had felt when she pressed her cheek against his when they took the picture, and that was how it still looked when he was pouring coffee for her mom the night before. But when she did the same with her dad's picture, she couldn't say what it was supposed to feel like, she couldn't remember.

She knew both of their last names – Hayden and Danes – could write them as well. But when it came to their addresses she could only recall one – the diner. Luke lived above the diner in the centre of town, easy to find. But Chris lived somewhere else, far away from Stars Hollow, further even than Hartford which was really far on the bus they caught to get there.

One of them said that he loved her and the other asked if she wanted a piece of pie. She could picture both of their smiles.

Even with all this information written out in front of her, Rory was no closer to answering her question.

"Honey what are you doing on the floor?" Lorelai asked, coming in with a basket of laundry. "We've got all sorts of chairs and tables you don't have to sit all the way down there."

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked, staring at the two faces again.

"Anything,"

"Is Luke my daddy?"

"Wha-" Lorelai stared dumbfounded for a moment. "Why would you ask that? You know who your dad is. This is him, right here." She crossed the room and stooped down, to pick up one of the photos and Rory held her breathe, quite unsure of which she would choose.

"This is your dad, sweetheart, you know that." She explained, holding out the three person picture.

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure, yeah,"

"But Katie said that a dad is someone you see everyday, and he fixes things around the house, and makes dinner sometimes. Unless he's, you know…." she made a face and looked towards the floor.

"That's usually true. Yes." Lorelai nodded and hooked a loose piece of hair back behind her ear.

"And we see Luke a lot!"

"Not every day though."

"Almost,"

"I guess we do see him a lot, but that isn't exactly how the whole being-a-parent-thing works."

"So, how?"

Lorelai sighed. Growing up in the Gilmore household whenever anything difficult or uncomfortable arose, it was pushed aside, not dealt with.

When Lorelai became too hard to handle, she wasn't dealt with at all.

But when she had her little girl, she'd vowed to not be anything like her parents; she'd promised that there would never be a subject she would shy away from. She'd planned to talk to her kid and answer any and all the questions Rory had to ask.

But what age was the right age to explain how one became a parent? Especially how she and Christopher became parents? Would it be right to then explain exactly what tequila was?

"Can you just do something for me? Can you just trust me that your dad is your dad and that when you're a little older I'll explain to you how that happened?"

Blowing her bangs out of her face and pushing her bottom lip up over the top one, Rory nodded.

"Yeah?"

"Ok,"

"Good girl. Now, how about we leave this laundry for later and go get some ice cream?"

"Yeah!"

"Yeah! Grab your shoes and we'll take a walk around town, ok."

Gathering her pictures and the list of things she knew about the two men in question, Rory raced to her room and dropped them on her bed.

The two men smiled up at her from the comforter and she couldn't help but take another look.

"I'm not so sure Mom knows how the whole being-a-parent thing works," she told her best friend Lane Kim the next day as they sat down to lunch. "I'm pretty sure she's wrong about who my dad is,"

"But maybe you shouldn't tell her," Lane replied. "Not yet anyway. It might make her sad." Rory nodded her agreement, just glad that someone else knew about her father, even if she couldn't announce it.