Kayden was a ridiculous name, in Jamie's opinion.

Not, Jamie knew, that she had any say in it. She'd signed over the rights to whatever decisions she could make about the baby when the Fullers had agreed to take her. She could acknowledge that while also acknowledging the poorer of the choices they'd made.

(Who had the Fullers spoken to, that someone was able to find out Kayden was her daughter?)

There was simply no melody to the name. Kayden. Rough, a cough in the mouth, crude… pedestrian. There were fewer things Jamie hated than things being pedestrian.

Kayden Fuller. Bland. Criminally bland.

Paired with Jamie's own last name, it was laughably mismatched. Kayden Moriarty. It lacked the finesse of Jamie Moriarty, or Irene Adler, or any of the fake names Jamie had taken on.

(Of course Jamie wasn't her real name. Some days Jamie thought she'd forgotten her real name. It didn't matter anymore, really. She'd become so very good at cutting out the things that didn't matter.)

Which begged the question of what she would have named the baby, if she'd kept her. Something better than Kayden, of all things. Kate, if she'd wanted to keep to the idea of a K name. Kate Moriarty had a nice ring to it, the delicacy of the first name strengthened by the force of the last one.

Kate Moriarty. Jamie liked the way it tasted on her tongue.

Not that it mattered. She was not Kate's mother. Jamie had simply incubated the fetus for a time, gave birth to her, then handed her off to someone else and went about her own way.

She hadn't even held her.

It was not in her nature to feel remorse for anything. The concept was as foreign to her as the idea of love. She could read about it and understand it, to an extent, but as far as experiencing it herself to put an emotion to those understandings — no.

But Moriarty supposed she did feel something of a regret that she would never know how a daughter of hers would have turned out.