Author's note: Sorry again for the long wait, I hope the length of the thing helps to make up for it. I also hope you like backstory! ;) please do let me know what you think, and if my Liz works for you, it would go a long way to ease my mind about possibly getting jossed on some things in coming eps...

Oh, lament, for we are hapless
And made to repeat.
You have a waxwork daughter,
Come and make her sit before the fire
Watch if it will make her grow dewy
Or bend
And settle back in some semblance
Of living calm...

-Beauty, As It Begins, E. T. Iyall

When she was only a little more than halfway to work, and officially late, Liz's cellphone rang. It was Cooper. She answered and began stumbling through an apology but he cut her off, telling her that he had word from on high that they wanted Reddington to arrange to act as intermediary to bid in Dearborn's auction, because Reddington might legitimately be an interested party and was far less likely to set off alarm bells to a former insider.

Liz was left scrambling to find a way to tell Cooper that Dearborn wasn't really on the menu anymore, but she couldn't quite think how to phrase Red's hinting in a way Cooper would find palatable. She'd been hoping for the rest of the drive to figure out how and what to report.

"I'm not sure he's going to want to do that, Sir," she began uncertainly.

"You told me it was Reddington's idea in the first place, Agent, it doesn't seem likely to have changed his mind overnight. Let him know we want him to set it up, and get him to come in for the debrief this afternoon. Convey to him that we expect his full cooperation in this op," Cooper ordered and, while Liz still felt too worn and fragile to talk to Red again so soon, there was no way she was going to tell her boss that so she agreed.

She found a parking lot to pull into, not trusting herself to drive and make this call at the same time. Her whole self recoiled at the thought of talking to him again, this soon. She felt helplessly exposed, raw, had already visited a full gamut of emotions and imagining facing him again after her little melt down earlier was making her hands shake. She had a long staredown with her phone before she could make herself hit send. This was just work, she told herself, just business, and she'd always been good at soldiering on and doing her job, so she pressed the button and cast the die.

The phone run out for a time, she thought he might be ignoring her call, but eventually he answered.

"Cooper called me," she said before he could say anything, "He wants you to come in to the blacksite - he wants you to arrange to stand in as our bidder in Dearborn's auction."

"Did you explain to him that 'Dearborn's' auction is a scam?" he said crisply.

"He didn't really give me a chance to. Look, it seems like you and Cooper need to hash this out directly. He wants to meet with you this afternoon." She was thoroughly fed up with being caught between their different expectations of this case.

"I don't know where he gets the idea he can just summon me whenever he likes," he said. She couldn't tell over the phone line if he was truly annoyed and brisling, or if he was deflecting.

Liz was just surprised that he wasn't making any reference to their earlier fraught encounter. If one thing she had learned it was that Red liked to know where all her vulnerable places were, for good or ill.

"Well, he obviously thinks he can, so you'll have to take it up with him," she snapped, and reigned herself in. "I hadn't planned on bothering you so soon after…" she trailed off awkwardly. After what, she thought, don't think about it and move on. "But you've got to come in and explain the Dearborn situation to Cooper. I don't understand it well enough, for one thing, and he's not going to take my word for it that we're out of the woods - which I frankly, don't quite believe. He said, and I quote, he expects your full cooperation on this. So if you've like me to keep my job, you'd better come in."

"I don't see how your job could in any way be in jeopardy if your people expect me to continue to work with them. But fine. Tell Harold to expect me later today, and that he and I will be having some very pointed words," he said, and hung up without any further salutation.

Which was just as well, she had no idea what to say to him at this point. She tossed her phone into the passenger seat and let out a wordless noise of frustration. She had to take a couple cleansing breaths before she felt steady enough to get back on the road.

At work she put her head down and headed straight to her office, taking a few minutes to stash the files she had taken home in her desk as though they had never been out of the building. Then she went and let Cooper know that Red had agreed to come in, but not to expect him to be in a good mood about it. That was a brief, terse, meeting and she felt the weight of Cooper's skepticism, but on the whole, uneventful.

Cooper sent her off with a request for the profile she'd worked up. Liz considered for half a second, telling her boss just how little understanding the current suspect was likely to matter, but let it go. They'd want the report for the file in any case. She was unwilling to divulge any of what felt like a deeply private conversation between herself and Red, and she couldn't bring up one part without the other.

At one point Aram dropped by her office to drop off the background files on the other bidder, that she'd entirely forgotten she'd requested. But she thanked him happily, glad of the distraction from putting the last polishing touches on a profile of a likely-dead man.

Reddington was right, none of the, were savory characters, she'd be hard pressed to pick out the one Red considered bad enough to require his special attention. Still better to get familiar with them now than to have to catch up later. And better to be distracted for the moment rather than let her mind be free to wander to other matters when she still had to get through the rest of the day.

There was no time in the past weeks when she had stopped wishing that Sam was still with her. But now she felt it with a more specific, cruel frustration. There were so many things she wished she'd asked him about her past, and his. She'd always thought there would be time enough for that later, when she was settled and more prepared to confront it all, when he was past all danger and the lingering pall of slight frailty he had seemed to live under since the cancer. The first time. He'd beat it once. He'd almost made it those supposedly magic five years. She'd thought, she'd been willing to hope it was gone for good, that they were both of them safe and she would get to keep him. And the truth was, neither she nor her father had ever liked talking about the small, ancient but indissoluble things that meant they weren't family, the things that made her just a little bit other. Those things had never mattered to her reality before, that she knew of anyway. It turned out she'd been wrong, about a lot of things.

Late in the afternoon Red came in to the blacksite, Dembe shadowing him and looking especially imposing. Neither of them spared her a glance as Red went in to meet with Cooper in his office. They were in there behind closed doors for what felt like an awfully long time before Red emerged, with Cooper right on his heels and a meeting was called in the bullpen.

Liz hovered in the background, uncertain, perched against an unused desk. Red put on his usual show, briefly outlining his suspicion that Dearborn was coerced, vaguely agreeing to line up a up a dummy bid if that's what they really wanted and suggested that they not turn to him when the whole thing came to naught.

As Cooper, Ressler and Meera peppered him with questions, she noted that Red had left out any mention of a 'coalition of powerful men' or his hypothesis that the bidding was a trap of some kind. This left her in an awkward position: report these things based on no evidence and reveal that she was in communication with Red outside of work hours, or let it go and put the team at risk. In the end she resolved to split the difference and talk to Meera about it all when she got the chance.

Meera revealed that the young activists she'd interviewed the night before had been coached and payed off by whom, they had assumed, was Dearborn. Aram was in the process of tracing it back to see if that was borne out, and who was funding him if it was. He was still working on that, but he had found a name with an address attached when he was tracing back the alerts on the message board. Probably another false trail but they would still need to check it out. Cooper ordered the team to suit up and take a tactical to investigate and in the ensuing activity, Liz noticed Red conveniently slipping away. She considered going after him, to ask why he was cooperating with the FBI on this despite what he'd said earlier, be realized it was not the right time, and chasing after him might give Cooper the wrong impression.

The warehouse in Virginia proved largely fruitless. The property was abandoned and obviously had been for some time, although there were some signs that someone had been there recently, fresh tire tracks in the mud near the road, an abandoned empty backpack that didn't show signs of dust or animal interference. It was Liz's gut feeling someone had been holed up here, perhaps even Dearborn, or perhaps he had been held there, but these could also indicated more innocent trespass, kids partying or a drifter finding shelter. They'd have to wait for forensics to report back on trace evidence before they could count the site in or out with any certainty.

Liz had given the scene tech guys a heads up on what she wanted them to look out for and was content to hang out and wait until Ressler finished checking out the perimeter of the property. She was certain they wouldn't find anyone hanging around in the scrubby woodland that concrete yard of the warehouse. That would be too big of a lead for the way this case was going, besides it was dark, frigid and still raining. Liz was going to have to remember to keep a pair of rainboots in her trunk if they kept having to go out to rural sites like this, she was sure her sensible work shoes would never be the same.

"Well, that was a waste of time," said Meera, who caught up with her as she was heading back to the SUV, and handed her a small to-go cup. "Coffee," she explained, "Or coffee-like substance, anyway. I bribed Polaski to bring us some from that gas station a ways back."

"Polaski?"

"One of the rookies on the scene team, looks sort of pointy and weasly to be honest, but he's a good kid, and he's rather terrified of me." she smiled serenely and shrugged as if to say should couldn't see why someone would find her intimidating.

Liz wrapped her hands around the warm cup and was glad to feel her fingers prickle with warmth as they came back to life. "Thanks," she said, and tried a sip, and couldn't help making a little face at the bitterness. At least it was warm, and caffeine. "Listen, I wanted to talk to you, actually. It's this case, it just doesn't add up right. If someone turned our leaker, or forced him into it, why not just take the intel and disappear with it? Why call all this attention by auction it off? If they really had all this sensitive information, they could run the board, as long as no one knew they knew it, if you see what I mean."

Meera gave her a speculative glance. "I agree, there something seriously not right with this one, but I don't see as we've got much choice. Whether or not it's some kind of set up, we can't take the chance on the intel getting out. Believe me, I voiced my concerns to Cooper earlier, but I got the impression he's acting on pressure from higher up the ladder. And then there's Reddington - you've spent the most time with the man, was it just me or did our pet criminal not seem his usual jovial self this afternoon?"

Liz winced internally, realizing that she'd been too preoccupied trying to avoid his attention to assess his demeanor. "Actually, I didn't really notice. I was a little distracted during the debrief… with discrepancies in the profile." She hoped she didn't sound like she was fumbling to cover.

Meera took a swig of her coffee and glared down at the cup. "I should have told the kid to get extra sugar. Oh, look, the cavalry returns," she nodded over at Ressler and the last of the tactical team, coming back over to where they were parked in the drive. He was looking a little bedraggled and they were empty handed, as Liz had expected.

"Okay, guys," he called to the rest of the team, "Keep a perimeter, but the scene crew can take it from here."

The tactical guys set about wrapping up as Ressler walked up to them with a shake of his head. "We got nothing. No sign of anyone out there either, if our guys were here they kept to the road. Maybe we'll get lucky with the traffic cams, but it could just be another false trail like Mojtabai said." Ressler sounded tired, and fed up. She could sympathize.

"Let's get back to the blacksite to report in," said Meera, "At this rate I'm not even going to be home before Joti goes to bed."

It was a long drive back to base, and a short but frustrated debrief afterwards. There was a growing tension in the air among the team. They all had enough experience to know this case was going badly, and that it was unlikely to be one of those with a decisive end, or a clear victory despite the stakes, not one to be written up in a nice, tidy classified report for posterity. Meera was right, they didn't wrap up until well into the night, and past bed time for small children. Luckily Tom had had leftovers to reheat, or she would likely be going home to sulking about his having cooked for two when she wasn't there or his having eaten takeout along again.

Liz turned in the Dearborn profile before she left for the night, almost as an afterthought. Cooper looked it over briefly, and for once, nodded his approval.

"Good work, Keen. I can see this case is going a different direction that we anticipated, but the profile still stands. Go home, get some rest. I need the whole team in top form tomorrow."

Liz happily took the unaccustomed praise and headed out before she could get drawn into anything else. She only hoped that Tom wouldn't remember her promise from very early in the morning that she wouldn't be home too late.

Liz had loved four men in her life. The first, the most obviously and simply, was Sam, with a child's whole and eager devotion for her guardian and father.

It wasn't an instantaneous thing, it didn't happen immediately on washing up at her new home at the age of six. There was a grey, fearful, angry time when she first came to be Sam's daughter when she wary and furious at the reshaping of her life.

Later in life, her earliest years were lost to her, all she remembered was a prickly uncomfortableness from before the the little house in the chicago suburbs where she first lived with Sam. Even that time became hazy to her, as she grew. She remembered her mother though, back then, and even still she remembered demanding over and over to know when her mother was coming to collect her - like she once thought had been promised her.

That first year was the hardest. She protested all the violent upheaval in her life the only way a six year old can, with bouts of limp sullenness and fits of temper, refusing to speak or crying or pitching toys around her room. Sam tried to tell her how happy he was to look after her and be her guardian, that she would be safe and loved, only they had to get used to each other for a while until it felt okay. She was watchful, unwilling to believe him because everything in her life had just been radically changed, what was to say it wouldn't happen again, and soon. Some days she refused to get up and go her new, unfamiliar first grade class, wanting only to hide under the covers, no matter sweetly Sam cajoled or how firmly he reasoned - but he almost always let her stay home, and didn't shout, and didn't make her feel small and hurt, and these little victories seemed disappointing in some ways she didn't understand, wouldn't for years.

In Chicago, Sam had a friend called Maggie, and Maggie was there a lot at first, with them. Maggie babysat her when Sam was at work, and talked to her in a syrupy voice she hated and wanted to be called Auntie Maggie. She was pushy and persistent, and Lizzy was cold to her, refusing to be cosseted and petted like an infant. But when Sam asked her about why she didn't like Maggie, she found that she could actually tell him and Sam actually listened, took her quiet, fumbling words seriously.

When she was able to remember that time at all, she knew she'd been a nasty, angry little thing Even though her later training told her it had been a natural reaction to fear and vulnerability, it made her uncomfortable to remember she'd acted that way. Sam was patient and understanding through it all, would only look down at her some days with a sad look on his face that made heart sting with the inarticulate sensation of wishing things could be better, easier for her to understand and live with. On those very hard, angry days, Sam took to asking her if she was having and "Ornery Lizzy" day - and then tell her that that was okay, that he knew things were really difficult, so it was okay to be ornery and angry if she needed to be, but wouldn't she like her snack, or her favourite movie, or to go to the park and swing on the swings for a while today, too?

Sam only lost his temper a few times, and then only shouted a little, and apologized to her later when he calmed down. There was no looming menacingly over her, there was no being sent to her room in quiet, shaking terror, there was no menace in Sam at all, no matter what she said, or refused to do, and finally Lizzy's heart began to unclench and uncurl. She stopped walking around hunched and braced for a fear that she eventually stopped expecting. More and more she forgot to be angry and became instead interested in the way Sam came home from work and still wanted to talk to her or play board games with her or admire her artwork of the day. He checked her toothbrush to see if she'd really brushed and made sure there were no monsters in the closet or under the bed, just like daddys on TV, and taught her things like magic tricks and how to make her peanut butter and jelly sandwich into triangles instead of squares, and he did it all like he really meant it.

Sometimes he kept her home from school so she could go see Doctor Hank, who had a white, clean, sweet smelling office in a tall building in the city, not a Doctor doctor, but a therapist, whose receptionist always remembered her name and gave her stickers for her collection, and whose waiting room was painted with murals of classic children's book characters, so that all through her life while sitting in waiting rooms Liz would find herself thinking of Aslan and the Pevensies, and Alice and the Mad Hatter without really knowing why. Doctor Hank asked her a lot of seemingly aimless questions and had her draw pictures of her feelings and her house and her toys, and her old house and her old family, and she thought it was all pretty babyish but he seemed to think it was important so she obliged. Then Sam would take her to have pizza or to have milkshakes and french fries and then they'd go to the park, sometimes even to the aquarium or the planetarium, like a just-you-and-me-kid field trip, and those days at the park, running around in the open air, she felt free and alive in a way she couldn't remember feeling before in all her short life. Somewhere in all that, Sam and Ornery Lizzy went away and were never heard from again, and Daddy and Butterball moved in to stay. And the older she got, the less she remembered that transitional time, it got lost in the haze of distant childhood, and was obscured by shock and panic of that time. It seemed, eventually, that there had never been any 'before,' only just the two of them, father and daughter the way it should have been all along.

They moved to Nebraska after she finished second grade. Maggie was gone by then, and Sam was at work a lot, and Lizzy didn't ever take to any of her babysitters. They wound up in Nebraska because Sam's sister Judy had moved out there a few year previous, following her husband and his job. Judy had a son, Nick, a little older than Lizzy and a daughter, Amy, who had just started preschool around the time they moved out there. Sam was on the phone to Judy a lot the first few years after he'd adopted Lizzy, needing advice. Though he'd always wanted kids, none of it had happened in the usual way, with the usual support systems in place. Eventually Judy convinced him that Lizzy needed the company of her cousins, as she hadn't made many friends in school, and he needed help from his family - between that and trouble at work, that he never explained to Lizzy, it was decided that they would move. This change didn't wholly alarm her though, strangely enough, maybe they were going to have a different house, but she was still going to have the same Daddy, she wasn't going to have to forget another previous life and start over.

It seemed to happen all at once, in a great hurry that seemed at odds with the drowsy, awful heat of high summer, all the packing and shipping and buying of plane tickets and listing the house done in a matter of weeks. Lizzy wasn't sure what to expect of her new state, only that it sounded flat and metallic, 'brass' in the name, and there was a city called Lincoln which made her think of pennies. It wasn't so bad though, once they got there. There was a new house pretty quick, and Aunt Judy was much different than "auntie" Maggie, she was kind and bustling and knew kids songs and kept band aids and gummy worms in her purse. She adjusted, as small children do, to the new school, to the company of her cousins at her aunt's house while her father was at work.

Lizzy was a smart, dedicated student with a talent for memorizing facts and a stubborn streak for difficult subjects, but she was always a little awkward around her peers, always a little instinctually wary of new people, though she'd forgotten why. She was athletic, she took to the exhilaration of playing and winning at sports but she was generally clumsy for years, especially in middle school, growing those last inches in just a few years, making her self conscious in front of those graceful, popular girls who took ballet lessons and travelled in packs.

She didn't go boy crazy when her friends did, just didn't see the appeal of those boisterous, gangly creatures that had become of Nick's friends, or the awkward, arrogant boys who tried to flirt with her. She was busy, anyway, she was working hard at school to be sure to get into a prestigious university, and helping out her father and Victor at work from time to time, when he allowed it. It wasn't till she was away at school, in a new city, on the cusp of adulthood, that she began to think seriously about grown-up love, and whether it was real.

There was a short string of boys, friends, and study mates that she allowed herself to grow close to, who seemed to find her attractive, intriguing, called her lovely and adorable and wanted to see more of her. She found herself willing to acquiesce to their sexual interest, excited by the power it gave her, the pleasure, how grown and independent it made her feel. But there was an emptiness to these short-lived relationships, even if a couple of these boys professed a real attachment, they left her deeper self untouched. She began to wonder if she had been built wrong, made with a stoniness inside, a closed and unwilling heart.

She'd gone to university thinking she'd study literature, being always interested in human stories, and how they moved her, but she realized very quickly she was in the wrong field. All of it seemed stultifying, already chewed. These weren't the right questions for her, she didn't want to live always in the analysis, the implication and the structure of these dead-to-her works. She wanted to understand the ticking gears and strange foibles of the mind.

She called up Sam long distance and laid out her case for her change of plans, and he told her it sounded like she'd already made up her mind, that it was her decision after all, even if they'd had a deal. She'd tried for something safer, saner, like they'd said. Only excavating the depths of the most troubled and dangerous minds was a tough business. Only he wanted her to be happy and untouched by the life that had dragged him in and never really let go. It was a strange evening, once of the first times that Sam spoke to her as an equal rather than a child, not even a hint of nagging. He told her she could consider therapeutic work, rather than profiling and forensic psychiatry, study everything she can, keep her options open. She told him she didn't think her being responsible for other people's sanity was a good idea, but she'd need to study most of it anyway, not to worry, she'd tougher than she looks.

She took her intro classes and her core classes and then veer into specializations, child development, abnormal psych, criminology and forensics. From time to time she prodded at herself, like the willful poking of a half-healed wound, was her interest pure? Was her ambition altruistic? Or was it selfish, personal, only more of the futile chasing of old questions she only rarely let herself acknowledge, why didn't Father love me, and why did my mother send me away? She asked herself these questions defensively, intentionally sneering, knowing it was unfair to Sam, because she worried she would never be clear of their influence. She worried about what people might use to undercut her interest in her chosen field, when they looked her and saw a pretty young woman with an uncertain beginning. She wanted to be sure she could prove her interest was true and unassailable.

Acquaintances and friends caller her lovely, sweet, saw her girlish smile and all her energy, told her that she would be a good therapist, and seemed bewildered when she corrected them, saying she was interested in profiling, in maybe being a detective. Some of her friends were supportive and some couldn't fathom wanting to study such dark, difficult things and make a career of them. It made her hold herself more stiffly, more aloof in defense of these assumptions. She worked hard and she excelled.

And then there was Malcolm Davies. He was a charismatic young professor, she took a course from him her sophomore year explored possible ties between archetypes and cultural influences and pathologies, a course that had the sort of Jungian flair that's especially compelling to young women of a certain type, and her professor ended up with a number of vaguely besotted young women taking his classes. Liz was a notable skeptic, and wasn't shy about speaking out about it, they argued many points during and after lectures. She realized later that this had been flirting, in her unpracticed way. They coaxed each other into having coffee after class to continue these discussions and after the course was finished, Malcolm continued to seek her out, as she had been hoping he might.

Liz was drawn to Malcolm. He was handsome, in a scruffy, delicate way, full of energy and brilliance and sharp, dry humor, and overtaken at times by a vicious self doubt that caused her own chest to seize with hurt when he aired it in front of her, making her wish she could reach out and gather him up, protect him from it. He was also, provisionally, married.

The summer before her junior year at college was the first year she stayed in the city rather than fly back home over the break. Her father was sending her a tidy monthly allowance and she found a job at a little bookshop where she moved heavy boxes most of the time and tried to help customers with requests like 'I can't remember who wrote it, but it has the word daughter in the title' and 'my friend said it was orange on the front cover' that didn't pay very much but it was enough to make her feel like she was living on her own means. She lived in a tiny apartment where the bedroom was an alcove just about big enough to fit her bed and she would find out as winter set in that the radiator had two settings, tropical heat or arctic. Liz filled it with the least objectionable thrifted furniture she could find, and a few other trinkets, and felt herself quite arrived in adulthood - even though there were entire weeks she lived on cheap cereal for breakfast and cheap pasta and sauce for dinner because that she could afford, or cook.

This was Malcolm came to see her, this is where Malcolm stayed with her most nights they could manage between their her work and summer studies and his continuing doctoral studies and his mostly dissolved, yet still in limbo, marriage.

That summer was like a fever, a sweet summer fever of lethargy and pleasure, where you know you will not be called upon to rise, may sink happily down in. Malcolm woke her body to pleasures she had feared mythical after her earlier fumblings, and drew her mind from her solitary studying to the joys of thorough, often heated debate. She exalted in his attention. More than that, he kept her up nights talking her theories of the human psyche and his curiosity a collective unconscious, and idea that was going out of fashion but still resonated with him. He talked to her with such focus and intelligence and listened to her every response as though it was the most valuable thing - saying often how the mind seemed to stifle with time and mundanity and how it was so refreshing to talk someone who was still so sharp and unentrenched, how enlivening it was to live in their honest discourse. Liz was enchanted. Liz was in love, drugged with it, and possessive of this wide, warm, vital feeling. Malcolm was 32, and seemed so cultured and knowing, though when Liz reached that age, while she was studying to be a Special Agent, she realized how young he'd been, how little he must have really known and felt sad and protective of her younger self all over again.

Malcolm bought her department store perfume and carefully chosen vintage store jewelry - even years later Liz keeps a string of clear venetian beads with milky blue, gold flecked hearts that he draped around her neck one night, although she kept nothing else - and sweetly naughty negligees for her to wear. Those first months were like a dream of love. Liz didn't feel guilty about the wife, who she viewed with mild scorn and vague indifference, and Malcolm had no children to worry about (of course he didn't, she realized later, he was young and not the fatherly type).

Liz bared her body and her psyche to him. Some nights he was curious about past, and hearing about it, wanted to pick apart the tangled mess of her lost, early childhood with her and she allowed even that, brazening it out when she wants to retreat because it seemed the mature, objective thing to do. Malcolm is the one who convinced her to stop compulsively covering her burn scar with long sleeves and bulky bracelets, that it was a part of her and not something she had to protect others from seeing. For that alone she would always be grateful.

With time though, she found her own ambition would not be softened, even face of Malcolm's devotion, which had run at length to the needy, the clingy. She had her work to do, she had her education to consider. She was at university on a scholarship and she was going to bet every bit of good out of it she could. She loved Malcolm as much, and more, as she'd ever loved anyone, and longed for him, but she found that, beginning from some place inside her she didn't recognize, she was pulling away from him. She was beginning to see through some of his bright, endless geneous to the manic personality that lay beneath. His broadly cultured mind was also compulsive and tallying, exhausting her, keeping track of his own generosity and her lack of it. His sleeplessness and intensity, the constancy of his expectations, that she should sit up with him through every crisis, began to wear on her. Sometimes, when he stayed with her, when his work was going poorly, which it often was, he would go for long walks in the night to "get his head straight" and she would later have to collect him from bars or from street corners when he'd walked himself to exhaustion.

When she tried to talk of codependency, needing boundaries, about how she had only just begun to live her life and she was wary of getting absorbed into his, he flew into a panic, talking about how his, by then ex, wife had been the same, how he thought Liz's heart had been warm and pure and giving, that he would support Liz in every way if she would only do the same. He told her that if she would only be patient with him through this difficult time, he would repay her in time, he only needed her to love him enough and be strong enough to see him through.

She was young then, still impossibly young, and she could only see his selfishness at times. Other times he believed him and his scathing assessments, believed that he was right, that the old unmoveable quality of her heart was to blame. She could see herself losing her way, getting mired in that relationship, and even Malcolm's most endearing qualities started to make her edgy. With a sudden, tectonic shift, she could find no more room for him in her life and started avoiding him and finding ways to push him away.

She called up the ex-wife, in a fit of something like guilt or desperation, and went to see her one balmy, humid day late in spring, at Elaine's nice, airy apartment. It was the first time she had fully confronted the idea and the reality of the woman who had been married to Malcolm. She wasn't sure why, at the time, but her conscience demanded she make peace there before she made her decision. Elaine was an intimidatingly elegant and beautiful woman in her early 30s, who gave Liz iced coffee and looked at her with such pitying eyes that Liz felt about twelve, and in over her head. It was an awkward conversation but Elaine took pity on her, sympathized about being drawn to Malcolm, how easy it was to get sucked in, but he was a lot to take. If you gave him anything he would just want more and more.

"I'm not mad at you," said Elaine, "I wasn't even jealous, really. Malcolm seems so smart, and I think he really is kind at heart. But he get's cold and he get's demanding. I thought maybe, with someone younger, who could keep up…" she sighed, "I left him, you know. I couldn't let my life get… subsumed. It's not up to me to tell you what to do. But i think you should protect yourself. You're a bright young woman, I hope you'll keep your potential in mind."

Liz spent the rest of that afternoon wandering and thinking, and by the next time she saw Malcolm she was decided. It was the first time she had to actually tell someone she needed him out of her life and she needed him out of his. It was the most difficult thing she'd ever done at that point, but she looked him in the eye. Malcolm looked at her with such hurt and anger, like a little boy, but in the end he gave in. It would take her a long time to shake that parting expression from her mind.

That summer she let her lease go, packed everything she could pack and went home to her father, chastened and bewildered. She felt less grown and able than ever, possessed of a new stone of dread, that would haunt her for years to come, that she didn't have a loving enough heart and that those who loved her long enough would always find it's insufficiency. Still, her father was proud of her, that she'd done what was best for her even though it was hard. He let her come back to work with him and Vic at the office, like she'd done in high school until she had to go back to classes and her independent life.

It was this ungiving, unloving quality she saw in herself that she feared would drive Tom away in the end, her unwillingness to compromise. She worried that she would wake up one day, hardened to him, having simply run out of love for him. She was worried it was happening already. Tom's goodness and steadiness had seemed to her, so different than the other two men she'd loved, Malcolm and the even more disastrous Josh. She was trying so hard to live up to what she felt he deserved. Liz was so used to guarding against that fear that it took her so very long to realize that there was something wrong in Tom as well, something deeply strained in their relationship. A distance he maintained from her that only grew and grew no matter how hard she tried to bridge it. She was seeing now how he fit her pattern after all, not the escape from it she had thought.

And now there was Red, intense, insistent, who looked at her with genuine care but kept himself ruthlessly distant, stringing her along with a scant handful of facts and hints, secure in the knowledge that she would follow him, eager and willing, because that's what she did. Chase after strange, cruel, distant men who would eventually find her lacking if she ever caught up. She could see it ahead of herself clearly and felt, not outrage or determination, but exhaustion.

Oh, lament, she thought tiredly, a scrap of a half remembered poem, for we are hapless, and made to repeat.

She slept on the couch that night, working on the background files to keep herself occupied until Tom went upstairs. She stared at the wall, and the ceiling, and the couch cushion in turn until she surrendered at last to sleep.