It's the middle of June and they're buying a late ("very late," Michael heard her hmph in his head) Mother's Day gift for Maddie. She had been pouting and cranky for weeks, until Sam took pity on them and not so subtly pointed them to Maddie's favorite "Antiquities and Curiousities," telling them to go redeem themselves. Looking at the dusty displays and stacks of crap, Michael amends the name to "Assortments of Crap."

He looked at a shelf lined with decorative plates with poorly-rendered depictions of British royalty on them and sighed. "How good a gift does this have to be to make up for us forgetting?"

Fi was examining an old hat covered in crumbling ostrich feathers and rhinestones. "I didn't forget," she says in a pious voice. "Back home, Mother's Day is the same day as Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent."

She grins at Michael, putting the hat down, and he narrows his eyes. "Then you would be even later than me, because it would have been... in the beginning of April this year."

She rolls her eyes and smirks. "Yes, and I took her out to lunch."

The shop is deserted except for a big black man reading an old Life magazine behind the counter, and then the door opens and street noise floods the room. Dust motes circle in the shafts of light pouring in, and they glance over. A man calls in, "Hey, you got a public bathroom?"

The black man nods, not lifting his eyes from the magazine. The man turns back and waves in a little girl and a chubby dark-haired woman holding a baby. "Go get him changed and I don't want to be here all day," he tells the woman, who disappears into the back of the store. The kid veers away from her father immediately, bouncing down the aisles and looking like Aladdin in a cave of treasures. "And don't you break anything, Destini, I mean it."

Michael inches closer to Fi. "You'd think she'd understand why I've been a little preoccupied, what with getting my job back and adapting to certain personal changes," he grumbles.

She's looking in a glass case at some rings and tangled chains. "I wish he would stock a few antique guns at least." She scrunches her nose. They are wearing their nonchalance like battle armor, not ready to admit how happy they are cohabitating. If their relationship history proved anything, it was that things could change at the speed of a bullet, and this might blow up in their faces yet.

He pokes a finger at some old brooches, lying on a velvet cloth. Fake, he thinks. Figures. Fiona traces a hand across his shoulders and leans back against him. "We should take her to that Afro-Cuban place she's been talking about," she muses as he wraps an arm around her waist.

"Didn't I get enough African food in Africa?" he replies, grinning at her despite himself, eager for any distraction. She's certainly enough of one- wearing her hair down over an off-the-shoulder t-shirt, her sunglasses hooked on the pocket of her jeans. He pulls them out and slides them on her face and she smiles. She's rising up on her toes and leaning in to whisper something in his ear, he can feel her breath on his cheek, when there's a crash.

Michael and Fiona's heads snap up and their legs tense on the ground, ready to move. They look around and see the kid lying on the ground. She had been hanging off a big carved Indian when it fell over and smashed into a silver-framed mirror. Now she's staring at the shattered mirror, her face stricken. Michael feels his intestines start to twist at the expression on her face, and the girl's parents emerge from opposite sides of the store. When her father starts to scream, the baby's hiccupy cries cut off in mid-gulp.

"What did I tell you? Huh?" He grabs her arm, roughly, pulling her to her feet. "Look at this! Look at what you did! Stupid, stupid, stupid!" He shakes her with every "stupid" and then yanks her forward. She stretches out her hand to catch herself on something, but there's nothing there but him and she falls to her knees on the floor. Fiona glances at Michael, who is watching the woman's eyes widen. She bites her lip and turns away, jiggling the baby on her hip.

The black man behind the counter gets to his feet slowly, like a train starting to roll. "Quit yellin', you're disturbin' customers." His deep, heavy voice rumbles out and breaks the mood. Michael has let go of her, and now he steps away and toward the man.

"Yeah, customers," the father mutters. He glances at Michael and Fiona, his eyes dropping to Michael's clenched fists. "Will you deal with this?" he throws back at his wife over his shoulder.

The door slams shut behind him and that spurs the mother into action. She goes to her daughter, reaches a hand down to lift her up. "Oh, Destini, it's okay. It was just a mistake. Daddy knows it was a mistake. We're okay now."

Michael turns away and put his hands flat on the counter. Fi glances at her face and immediately wishes she hadn't. His face is blank, except for his dark eyes, looking weary and terrified. He looks like the little girl, who is hanging her head down as she trudges out of the store behind her mom and the baby.

Fi stands next to him, watching his hands now, the fingernails whitened from pressure. "Want to tail them and blow out their tires?"

"No, that'll just make things worse for her." Michael straightens up, turns to her and gives a halfway typical Westen smile. "Shit always rolls downhill," he says, his voice struggling to be light. He grabs the first thing at hand, a small bejeweled peacock lamp. "Think she'll like this?"

"Isn't your mom freaked by peacocks? I thought there was some kind of traumatic vacation in your childhood or something."

"Let's get something and go." He puts the lamp down with a clack that sounds like her knees hitting the floor. Fi winces. "She-I just want to go."

"Okay," Fi says. "Let's go. If you don't want to get her anything, we don't have to." He looks at her for a long moment and finally nods. "I'll be out in a minute," she tells him.

He's waiting on the corner, his hands shoved in the pockets, and they fall in step together. When he starts talking, it's like he's unaware of it. "I don't think about it much anymore. I used to keep the words in my head, the feeling- feeling hot all over. And when I let go of that," he stops and she reaches down and holds his wrist, curling her fingers around his blood-beat, so tight he can feel the pulse in her fingertips. "I don't know when I let go of that, it wasn't there until they started- until I heard her say that." He looks down at her hand on him and their feet matching pace and his sunglasses slide down until she can see his eyes. She is glad of that, and then he looks up again and they're gone. "Then it was like hearing my mother again."

"Do you think she's sorry?"

He exhales loudly. "Does it matter?"

"If it matters to you."

"I didn't think it did." She is quiet until he looks at her and then she gives him a wry, humorless smile. He returns it.

"I know it matters to her," she says softly. He doesn't respond. They reach the car and she doesn't let go of him. "I can't hear it. When I hear her, I don't hear that woman's voice in it."

She squeezes his wrist hard, as hard as the ache of pain inside him, and when she lets go, standing there on the street beside the car, passers-by bumping into them, he feels his guts loosen for the first time since he saw the little girl look at the shattered mirror. He looks at her face, serene behind her wide sunglasses, and then he realizes he can let go of everything he wants to release.

She weaves around him and gets in the car, and when she rolls down the window he tells her, "I think I'm going to go back and get her something."

Fi reached in her purse and pulled out an antique silver cigarette lighter. "I thought you might say that."

Much later that night, Michael is sitting at the counter, bits and pieces of a gun laid in front of him. Fi comes out of the bathroom, shoves the gun aside, and boosts up in front of him. She is rubbing the wet out of her hair, a towel hanging over her face, and without needing to look at him, she puts her feet on his knees to balance herself. "Why are you rebuilding a gun at nearly midnight?" she asks from around the terrycloth.

A long pause fills up the corners of the loft. "I don't like seeing things and not doing anything."

"You can't save everyone, Michael." She drops the towel and looks at him, a drop of water sliding down her cheek like a tear. He doesn't respond. "Some people save themselves." She walks her feet up his chest to the base of his throat, twisting her legs up. "You did."

Finally he grabs her foot and pulls it back down, putting his hand flat against the sole. "Did I?"

"Sure. We wouldn't be sitting here now if you hadn't."

"I got myself out, made my life the life I thought I wanted it to be." He rubs the silken curve that is the arch of her foot. "But who I am now, that's because of the people I work with. I am better because of Sam and because of you," he tells her, his voice deliberate and his eyes so serious it makes her want to laugh. He runs his free hand up her face, along the line the drop of water had taken. He doesn't say it, but she sees it in his face. This is the better parts of me. What's worth saving.

Her face is clean and naked, shiny with the humidity from her bath. She could pass for a co-ed talking to her boyfriend during finals, especially when she smiles at him, like now. "Do you want some help?" she asks in a voice vibrating with emotion, pointing to the gun.

"Sure," he nods, and as she starts to climb off the counter, she wraps her arms around his neck and embraces him. And he understands what her arms are saying: Same goes.

She kisses his mouth three times, rapidly, and he pulls her onto his chair, half on his lap. It's the best words they never say, and when they crawl in bed together, they don't say them again and again.