A/N: The first draft of this story is finished! It will be 9 chapters total. Also, if anyone cares, I have a tentative total count on the number of chapters in Beyond Measure. At the moment, I'm estimating 76 chapters total. It could end up being a bit more, but that's my best guess for now. My first draft is complete through Chapter 69. Closing in on it! (Will probably still be a while til I finish, though).
xxx
Lisbon slept late the next morning. When she woke, she was alone in the bed. Even the cat was gone.
Instead, an origami flower rested on the pillow next to her. Jane. She smiled a little. He could be so damn sweet sometimes.
She sat up and picked it up carefully, examining the delicate paper folds. She never had figured out where he'd learned to do this.
She placed it inside the bedside drawer so it wouldn't get damaged by any of their other bedmates and got out of bed.
She wandered out into the kitchen, where the scent of freshly brewed coffee beckoned her like a siren's call.
Jane stood by the stove, cooking eggs.
Clara sat at the table with a piece of paper and a marker, her mouth forming an unconscious pout as she concentrated fiercely on drawing out the letter 't.' Henry sat under the table with the dog, moving a toy truck in a slow, deliberate half-circle around himself.
The cat twined around her ankles, meowing in a plaintive demand for attention. Lisbon obligingly stooped to pet him, then stopped and kissed Clara on top of the head. "Morning, Clara Bell," she said.
"Morning, Mommy," Clara returned, not looking up from her work.
Lisbon bent and looked under the table. "Morning, Henry."
Henry waved his truck at her, then went back to his game.
Lisbon went to fetch her coffee. "Thanks for the flower," she said to Jane on the way to the coffee maker, reaching up to greet him with a kiss.
"Mm, you're welcome," he said, kissing her back lightly. "Sorry we got interrupted last night."
"Me, too," she said with regret.
He slid his arms around her waist and locked his fingers at the small of her back. "Think it's too early to send the kids to boarding school?" he murmured, low enough that the children wouldn't hear.
As if he could bear to be parted from his children for longer than twenty-four hours at a time. She shook her head. "You'd be begging me to go get them before lunchtime on the first day."
"No, I wouldn't," he protested. He paused. "I'd at least wait until afternoon snack was over, anyway. That would at least give me a few hours alone with you. I can do a lot with a few hours."
Boy, did she know that all too well. Thinking about that now, however, was hardly helpful. "We'll figure something out," she said, patting his butt sympathetically.
He tightened his grip on her. "When? Watching you wander around in these short shorts and not being able to do anything about it is torture."
"I don't know," she admitted. "Soon, I hope."
"Mommy, how do you spell 'chicken?'" Clara asked from the table, looking up from her paper.
Lisbon tore her eyes from Jane and the way he was looking at her with some difficulty. "Huh?"
"How do you spell 'chicken?'" Clara repeated impatiently.
Lisbon spelled it for her. Jane nuzzled her neck while she did so, distracting her. She swatted him away. "Stop that," she ordered. "Now you're torturing both of us."
Unrepentant, he stole another kiss. "Misery loves company."
"I need my coffee now," she said firmly, extricating herself from his arms. If she couldn't have Jane giving her the best kind of wake up call there was, she was definitely in dire need of the next best thing.
She fetched her coffee and headed back to the kitchen table. She sat down and watched her daughter over the rim of her coffee cup. "What are you writing there, Clara?" she asked curiously.
"A letter," Clara said matter of factly.
"Who are you writing a letter to?"
"To you."
"A letter to me?" Lisbon said, surprised. "What for?"
"Cause I miss you."
"You miss me?" Lisbon repeated blankly. "But I'm right here."
"I know that," Clara said, her voice thick with scorn. "I miss you when you're not here. Like when you come home late from work."
The words hit Lisbon like shrapnel to the chest. "Oh, honey," she said, stricken. "I'm sorry."
"S'okay," Clara said, not meeting her eyes.
Lisbon reached out across the table and touched her hand. "Hey." She squeezed Clara's hand and Clara finally looked up. "I'd rather be here with you. You know that, right? It's just hard for me to get away sometimes when we're in the middle of a case."
"Why don't you quit?" Clara asked petulantly. "Then you could just stay here and play with me and Daddy. And Henry," she added as an afterthought. Clearly her brother didn't rate as high as her father in terms of desirable playmates.
"It's not so simple as that," Lisbon said slowly, drawing back. She glanced at Jane, wondering if he might have said something that prompted this request, but the concerned frown he wore as he abandoned the eggs and turned to look at Clara told her this was news to him, too.
Henry appeared at Lisbon's side and tugged on Lisbon's arm. She looked at him. He head-butted her arm gently and made a silly face at her. She smiled and stroked his soft curls.
"And Samson and Mr. Tigerlily," Clara wheedled. Mr. Tigerlily was the cat. His name was more often abbreviated to 'Mr. T' by her parents, but Clara persisted in calling him by his full name. She was the one who had named him in the first place.
Henry raised his arms in the universal signal for 'up,' the truck still clutched tightly in his hand. Lisbon lifted him onto her lap obligingly, wrapping her arms securely around him. He ran his truck along the length of her forearm, the plastic wheels kneading the muscles under the skin.
"Clara Bell, we've talked about this, haven't we?" Jane said gently. "Your mommy goes and fights bad guys during the day so all the other mommies and daddies and their kids can be safe at night."
"But I need her to keep me safe," Clara wailed.
"And she's doing that," Jane said firmly. "She keeps us all safe." He met Lisbon's eyes. "Every day."
Lisbon sent him a grateful smile, relieved that this was not a battle she'd have to fight on multiple fronts. Jane had made his peace with her career choice long ago. She knew he still worried about her, but once they'd moved past that particular conflict in their own relationship, he'd been nothing but supportive of her decision to keep working.
"Adeline's mommy quit her job," Clara said stubbornly. "And now she makes cupcakes all day."
Lisbon struggled to process this for a moment before she remembered that Adeline's mom was a former tax attorney who had decided to turn her baking hobby into her own business. "The thing is," Lisbon said slowly as Henry leaned forward and banged his truck on the table. She moved her coffee cup farther away. "I'm not very good at making cupcakes."
This gave Clara pause. "That's true," she grudgingly acknowledged after a moment's consideration. "The ones you made for my birthday when Daddy got his cough were yucky."
Lisbon was startled into a laugh. "Yeah, they were, weren't they?" Poor Jane, she thought, thinking back. Clara had caught the virus first, then passed it on to Henry. And after two and half weeks of taking care of two sick, miserable children, Jane caught the virus as well and came down with a bad case of pneumonia.
"Maybe Adeline's mommy could teach you," Clara suggested.
Privately, Lisbon thought that the next time that there was a cupcake related emergency that Jane wasn't available to deal with, she could just save herself the trouble and order the cupcakes from Adeline's mom herself. "Maybe. But I'd rather just eat Daddy's cupcakes, wouldn't you?"
Clara brightened. "Yeah. With sprinkles."
"Of course," Lisbon agreed, kissing Henry on the top of the head. "Daddy always makes cupcakes with sprinkles."
"That's because he's the best daddy ever," Clara said confidently. Henry hummed in agreement.
"Yeah," Lisbon said, looking over at Jane. "He is."
"Well, this daddy says it's time for breakfast," Jane announced. "Who wants eggs?"
"Me!" Lisbon and Clara chorused at the same time. Henry banged his truck on the table enthusiastically in response.
"Coming right up."
Lisbon looked back at Clara. "So… can I read my letter now?"
Clara looked at her appraisingly, clearly calculating which course of action would be more beneficial to her cause: to hand the letter over now, or withhold it until a more advantageous moment. Lisbon always found it slightly disturbing to see that calculating look, so familiar in Jane's face, looking out at her from a mirror image of her own green eyes. "All right," Clara said at last. She pushed the letter across the table. "Here."
Henry wriggled down off Lisbon's lap and went into the kitchen to show Jane his truck. He ran the truck up Jane's leg. Jane stroked his head affectionately with one hand and continued serving eggs out onto plates with the other.
Lisbon picked up her letter. It read as follows:
"Dear Mommy,
I love you. I like when we eat ice cream. I like when you play catch with me the best. No I like when you read me stories the best. We should get chickens.
Love, Clara."
A lump rose in Lisbon's throat. She read the letter twice, a soft smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.
Clara got down from her chair and came over to hover at Lisbon's elbow. "Do you like it?" she asked anxiously.
Lisbon swallowed the lump in her throat. "I love it," she said honestly. She put her arm around her daughter and gave her a hug. "Thank you for writing it."
Clara eyed it critically. "It's not as neat as I wanted." Clara had very high standards for herself. She got notoriously frustrated when she failed to meet them.
Jane set down two plates of eggs and fruit, one at Clara's place and one in front of Lisbon. "That's because you're a perfectionist like your mother. You'll get neater as you get older. Right now your fine motor skills haven't caught up with the speed of your great brain."
Clara scowled. "But I wanted it to be nice now."
"It's wonderful," Lisbon assured her. "It's one of the best letters I've ever read."
Mollified by the praise, Clara preened. "Daddy helped me spell the words," she said with false modesty.
Lisbon looked at Jane as he retrieved the next pair of plates from the kitchen. "That was nice of him." Jane winked at her as he set the two plates down.
"He's very nice," Clara agreed.
Lisbon took a bite of her eggs. "So…we should get chickens?" That was the one part of the letter she hadn't quite followed.
"Yes," Clara said with certainty. "That way, we can have eggs every day."
Lisbon laughed. "You are your father's daughter, that's for sure."
Clara frowned. "I'm your daughter, too."
"Of course you are," Lisbon assured her. "It's just an expression. It means you're like your daddy in a lot of ways."
"You're like your mommy in lots of ways, too," Jane told Clara as he helped Henry into his booster seat. Henry reached for his eggs and stuffed a huge handful into his mouth.
"Like what?" Clara asked Jane hopefully.
"Well, you have a great big heart like mommy," Jane told her. He sneaked a glance at Lisbon. "And you're very bossy like her." Lisbon threw her napkin at him.
"I am not bossy," Clara said indignantly.
Jane raised his eyebrows. "What do you call it when you tell all the kids at school what to do all the time?"
"I'm organized," Clara said after a moment's consideration. This was a new addition to her vocabulary that she was very proud of. "I'm good at organizing people."
Jane chuckled. "Yes, you are."
"You're very good at organizing people into doing what you want to do," Lisbon commented. "But sometimes you could be better at remembering to let the other kids have a turn having their own ideas about what they want to do."
"But my ideas are the best ones," Clara protested.
Lisbon looked at Jane. "Yeah," she said dryly. "The bossiness is all me."
Jane grinned, unrepentant. "She's intense and particular, too."
"Is that good?" Clara said uncertainly.
"Absolutely," Jane assured her. He looked back at Lisbon. "Those are two of my favorite things about your mother."
Lisbon rolled her eyes. Henry paused in his consumption of his eggs and looked back and forth between them. Lisbon made a funny face at him. He laughed and banged a fistful of eggs on the table in delight.
After breakfast, while Jane took Henry to get dressed, Lisbon went to Clara's chair and knelt beside it. "I have to get ready for work now. But I want you to know I really love my letter."
"Really?" Clara said hopefully.
Lisbon stroked her hair. "Really."
"Daddy said he used to write you letters when he missed you, so I wanted to write one, too," Clara informed her.
"When I read the letters your daddy wrote to me, they always made me feel closer to him, even though he was very far away. And you know what?"
Clara fixed her green-eyed gaze on her mother with laser like focus. Jane was right—their daughter's intensity sometimes felt like a tangible thing. "What?"
"I'm going to take your letter to work with me. Then when I miss you, I can read it, and it will make me feel closer to you."
"You miss me when you're at work?" Clara said, eyes wide.
Lisbon traced her finger over one soft cheek. "Of course I do."
"Good," Clara said, satisfied.
Lisbon smiled. "You know what else?"
"What?"
Lisbon poked her softly in the stomach. "I'm going to write you a letter, too, so you have something to make you feel closer to me, even when we're apart."
"What are you going to write me a letter about?" Clara asked curiously.
Lisbon smiled and ruffled her hair. "Guess you'll have to wait to read it and find out."
Clara pouted. "I hate waiting."
Okay, Lisbon had to admit that particular trait had definitely come from her. "I know. But sometimes letters are even better when you have to wait for them a little while." She thought of how eagerly she'd torn into each new letter from Jane when it arrived from the post office. How treasured each precious letter was.
"Really?" Clara said skeptically.
"Yes. I promise."
"All right," Clara sighed.
Lisbon leaned forward and kissed her on the head. "I love you, darling girl."
Clara wrapped her skinny arms around her neck and clutched at her tightly. "I love you, too," she whispered into her ear.
Lisbon cradled her close and savored the feeling of her daughter's tiny, warm body pressed against hers.