"Here you go, Ziva—one breakfast sandwich from the Beltway Burger, two cartons of apple juice, a plastic knife, and… a jar of Nutella."

"Why, thank you, Tim." Ziva said sweetly as her friend arranged everything for her on her desk. "Ladybug and I are very appreciative."

"Don't worry about paying me back, ei—so that's what you wanted the Nutella for?"

"Indeed, and it is not a bad combination at all."

Ziva had taken her sandwich apart, and using the plastic knife, she spread a layer of the chocolatey hazelnut substance on the top layer of the inside of her food and put it back together before taking a bite to find out that she quite liked it.

"Really?" McGee asked. "A breakfast sandwich with Nutella tastes good?"

He wrinkled his nose, and when Ziva saw that, she deadpanned, "No uterus, no opinion."

From the other side of the bullpen, Tony called out, "Walk away, Probie! Quickly!"

Tony had yet to be subjected to Ziva melting down because of her yo-yoing pregnancy hormones, but in the spirit of good friendship, he had already decided to steer McGee clear of situations where such an outcome could occur. But only every once in awhile.

However, McGee only took one step before Gibbs came back into the bullpen, a fresh cup of coffee in hand.

"The only place any of you better be going is towards the big screen to tell me about Shockley's last twenty-four hours!"

The others hurried over to join him and as McGee quickly got everything set up, Gibbs turned to Tony.

"Track down Shockley's CO yet, DiNozzo?"

Tony bobbed his head in confirmation. "Yes, boss. His name is Captain Cormac Murphy of the USS Yorktown, which is actually docked right now."

Ziva wheeled around to face Tony. "Did you say Captain Murphy of the Yorktown?"

"Uh-huh. Do you know him?"

"Sort of—Miles introduced me to him last week at an event on the Yorktown."

The other two looked over and with an arched eyebrow, Gibbs asked, "Anything else you want to share, David?"

Recognizing a jibe when she heard one, Ziva protested, "I have a lot on my plate in the last day-and-a-half, so I truly forgot until just now, but as I recall, he did not look pleased to hear that I was Miles' date."

Gibbs, McGee, and Tony were now hanging on to every word, so Ziva had no choice but to continue.

"I think he was displeased that I was dating his 'right hand man,' as he put it, so soon after Miles' wife died. However, Miles did tell me that by the time that Moira was gone, they were complete strangers to each other, and I have never had a reason to doubt him on that. I also got an impression when I was talking to Murphy that he does not like women."

"How do you think it would go if he saw you while we sit him down for questioning?"

"Not well. If he saw me, he probably would not say much."

"Then we will make sure that your paths don't cross just yet." Gibbs turned to McGee. "What do you got?"

McGee cleared his throat and pressed a button on the remote in his hand, pointing it at the monitor. Miles' formal picture of him in his uniform appeared.

"This is Lieutenant Miles Kristoff Shockley of the USS Yorktown, aged thirty-two. As we know, he became a widower when his wife committed suicide, and we also know that he has three daughters, including the one that Ziva is carrying. Other than that, though, there is no other family."

"Does he at least have a friend, or someone we can talk to about him?"

McGee pressed the button on his remote again and they were rewarded with the driver's license photo of a new person who immediately struck Ziva as 'mindnumbingly ordinary.'

"Everyone, this is Liam O'Riley. He's thirty-four, and is even local. Bonus points—he's known Shockley for five years now."

"Then why is it that I have never heard of him until now, I wonder?" Ziva mused, feeling like she'd been left out of a loop. "What does he do for a living, McGee?"

"According to what I was able to dig up, he's a federal employee just like us, but of a different variety—Liam O'Riley is a postal worker."

Tony opened his mouth to say something about that, but Ziva shot daggers at him with her eyes. "No stupid jokes, okay?"

"Okay, okay." Tony changed tracks and spoke to Gibbs. "Boss, Shockley's CO should be here soon, and since we've already deduced that it would be bad if he saw Ziva, I was thinking that she and I should go do something like go to Shockley's apartment and maybe also talk to his neighbors."

"Not a bad idea, DiNozzo. You two go ahead and go."

Tony and Ziva grabbed their gear quickly and headed for the elevator.

"What about me?" asked McGee.

Gibbs clapped him on the shoulder. "After you track O'Riley down and get him to come here, you can question him solo."

McGee just gulped and glanced over at Tony and Ziva, hoping for some kind of reassurance, only to see that they were pulling faces at him behind Gibbs' back. Gibbs looked in the direction McGee was looking only to see Tony and Ziva just disappearing onto the elevator and the doors closing.

"What are you still standing there for?" Gibbs asked when he looked back and saw that McGee hadn't moved.

"Right." McGee said, heading back to his desk. "Tracking down Liam O'Riley."

"Good man." Gibbs told him as he headed back to his own desk. "Good man."


Almost an hour later saw Ziva and Tony just getting to Miles Shockley's apartment in his building, and Tony was grumbling.

"You could have said that Miles lived in a 'don't ask, don't tell' kind of neighborhood!"

Ziva pretended to play dumb. "So that is the phrase—I could not think of it."

"Yeah, well, either way, you could have warned me that Missus Bianchi is kind of special!"

"If by that you mean 'deaf as a pole,' then I could not resist."

"It's actually 'deaf as a post,' and you also didn't have to string me along that far before 'suddenly' revealing that you speak Italian and Sign Language!"

"But I was having fun!" Ziva pouted.

Tony sighed heavily and hung his head, knowing that if he looked at Ziva at that particular moment, all he would see would be her puppy eyes, and now that she was pregnant, her direct gaze was his new Kryptonite.

Pointing at the door in front of him, he asked, "This is his place, right?"

Ziva nodded as she pulled a set of keys from her pocket, selected one and used it to open the door. "Yes, but when Miles was away, especially out at sea on the Yorktown, I would live here to look after the children, but only then, so my things are here, too."

Tony finally looked Ziva in the eyes. "Is that a subtle way of saying that if I make fun of your stuff, you'll shoot me?"

"Shoot you? No. Break a finger or two? Probably."

Tony immediately stuffed his hands in his pockets, and in seeing that, Ziva tacked on an afterthought.

"I won't shoot you for being annoying because finger-breaking is more satisfactory, yes," (Tony was thrown by that until he saw the glint in his partner's eyes that let him now she was playing with him) "And besides, my friend, the girls and I all need you too much."

And for the second time in one morning, Ziva had left Tony speechless to the point where he found himself staring after her in wonder.

When he finally did catch up to Ziva, he found her standing in the front room of a modest apartment that definitely looked home to a family with small children. A year ago, when he was first getting to know Ziva, he could not have imagined her in this kind of setting, let alone as a mother, but now that she'd shown all of them about this new part of her life, it seemed natural. Before Tony could start daydreaming about a proper family life with Ziva and her daughters, though, he noticed that the woman in question was beckoning to him.

"Come this way, Tony." she called. "If we are to find anything suspicious about Miles, it will probably be in his office."

"His office?" Tony echoed, following out of the living room and down the hallway. "Why does a mostly-seafaring lieutenant need an office?"

"I do not know. The room is off-limits to the children, and it is enough of a project keeping Ella Brave out, so I have never bothered going inside."

"There's a first time for everything, I guess."

By now, they were at the office door and since it was closed, Tony opened it and motioned for his partner to go ahead of him.

"After you, Z."

Miles Shockley's office was a bit ordinary. It had a desk set-up, complete with both a desktop computer and a laptop, and even a printer and a paper shredder. Off to the right, by a window, there was a comfortable armchair set up in front of a big plasma tv, which in turn was hooked up to a gaming console of some kind. There was also a stack of DVDs and video games on a small table next to the chair. Some of the DVDs were even x-rated. The room was a bit of a man cave.

"Huh." Ziva said after a few moments. "I do not know what I was expecting, but this was not it. This feels like a scene from a spy movie just before something is to go zigzag."

"That'd be sideways, but yeah, I totally know what you mean. Come on."

They proceeded to investigate the top of the desk, and all of the papers on it.

"There are a lot of bills here." Tony remarked. "A lot of them are saying 'past due' and 'final notice.' Does this mean anything to you?"

Ziva sighed and shook her head. "No, but then again, we were still at a point where we had separate lives from each other."

"Even though his kids imprinted on you?"

"Even then. I was seriously going to tell him this week that I was in love with him, but I did not get a chance because we were both busy, and then I found out about Ladybug." Ziva gave her bump a rub, smiling a little briefly when she felt her daughter stretch out in reaction to her touch. "Miles was a bit private, anyway, so it really does not surprise me that he'd leave me out of the loop called financial debt."

Tony cringed as he examined the contents of a folder he'd just came across. "Then this will add insult to injury—I found receipts and other kinds of records from a recent trip to Atlantic City. It looks like he stayed at a casino there and racked up the kind of debt that would have the wrong sort of people come looking for him."

Ziva briefly pinched the bridge of her nose. "He was gone all weekend, yes? And he never left, except to come back home?"

"Yes."

"I was here last weekend, Friday afternoon through Sunday night, being the girls' mother, and Miles told me that he was taking his trip for something related to work, and that he was going to New York! He also told me that should anything happen while he was gone—then, or at any other time—that he wanted me to be the girls' legal guardian and make important decisions on their behalf!"

"And that didn't strike you as weird?"

"Not at that time, no. I took it as a sign of enormous trust, and the documents are probably still here somewhere because he didn't get to filing them yet… here we go."

In all of the clutter on Miles' desk, Ziva had somehow managed to find the papers she'd been talking about, and when Tony examined them to find that they were legitimate legal documents pertaining exactly to what Ziva had just described.

"Hey," he said when he got to the bottom of the stack. "This is for you."

He handed her a sealed envelope with her name on it. Ziva took the envelope, although she had a foreboding feeling about it. Thanking him, she left the room to read it in private.

Just when Tony finished inspecting the office for anything else that would be important (and also to see exactly which DVDs were on display), he heard Ziva call out to him from wherever she'd gone to.

"Tony, will you please come here?"

He found her in a nursery-type room, standing between Ella Brave's bed and Alison Joy's crib, near to tears. Tony wanted to hug Ziva, but he had a feeling that if he did, she would kick him where it counted, so instead, he approached her with caution. Seeing Ziva sad always made Tony want to do anything he could to fix it.

"What is it?" he asked her.

She brandished an evidence bag at him that contained a letter that had been inside the envelope. "Miles left me a message, and now I know that everything we had, expect for Ella and Alison, was all just a lie! Go on and read this!"

Tony took the bad and read the letter. It was not cheerful.

Ziva,

If you're reading this, then it means that I got away, and I'm not coming back. There's nothing in D.C. for me anymore, now that Moira is gone—even the Marines doesn't feel worth it. I'm dying here.

So… I'm starting over completely. I won't tell you where I'm going, but only that I need a passport and a lot of money to get there. I'm almost in the process of acquiring both now.

I know that you're married to your work, so I won't ask you to leave NCIS and come with me, but I'm asking you something else—take the girls, adopt them, love them, be their parent the way that Moira and I couldn't. They deserve better than what Moira was and I have been. To be truthful, neither of us wanted children, but we couldn't give them up for adoption because people would talk. The girls have no idea.

Ella and Alison love you very much, and they miss you when you aren't here, anyway.

Call me a selfish bastard or a deserter if you want because I know I deserve it, but don't split the girls up if you don't keep them. Above all else, don't look for me because I won't answer.

—Miles

Tony looked over at Ziva to see that she had started crying now, and with one hand, she was wiping at her tears while with the other, she was winding the control on the mobile attached to the crib. When it had been completely wound up, Ziva let go and 'All The Pretty Little Horses' began to play. For just a moment, Ziva looked lost in her own little world.

When she turned to Tony, though, she looked heartbroken. Something told Tony that not even Gibbs or the director saw her like this, and she loved them like parents.

"All this time, and I was just a means to an end. Never have I felt so used before."

She reached into the crib and pulled out one of Alison Joy's blankets. Tony watched in fascination as his partner inhaled the scent of the blanket, again getting lost in her own world for a second before putting the blanket back in the crib and turning to him again.

"I love Ella, Alison, and Ladybug even more now, though."

"How can I help you right now? Do you need a chair, or something?"

"No, but that is very sweet. Thank you."

Ziva began rocking her hips from side-to-side as she felt the baby wiggle restlessly.

"I am now a pregnant single mother, and I am not even thirty!" she exclaimed. "I am alone; who is going to want me like this?"

Tony desperately wanted to say that he already did, but something that she'd said had caught his attention.

As much as he adored Ziva and cared for her and about her, she was an enigma, and part of that was because he had never gotten around to figuring out how old she was.

"How old are you, Ziva?"

She immediately flushed red. "I just turned twenty-four last week, but I do not like to talk about how old I am all that often."

Only because he didn't know what else to do just then, Tony let out an appreciative, long single-noted whistle.

"Wow—you had me fooled!"

Tony's bamboozled state immediately lifted Ziva's mood and the familiar playful expression returned to her face. "How old are you? I promise not to tell."

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, suddenly feeling very on the spot. "Thirty-six, but who's counting?"

"I had you fooled?"

"Yeah, you did, and I have to say that I am very impressed."

Ziva gave him a mocked curtsy. "I am younger than McGee and Palmer; this does not change anything?"

"Not at all. I like you just the way you are."

She gave him a genuine smile and said, "Thank you, Anthony," before exiting the nursery.

When he was alone, a sudden look of realization hit him, and if it was possible, he would have had heart eyes.

"She called me Anthony." he said softly to the empty room. "Wow."

Ziva's voice cut through his thoughts as she called to him from another part of the apartment. "Tony, what are you still doing in the nursery? I have just thought of someone we need to go pay a visit to!"

Tony looked around the nursery, and for a brief moment, he envisioned a scene in a bigger nursery where he was reading a story to Ella Brave and Alison Joy while Ziva sat nearby in a rocking chair, listening while she fed Ladybug.

Not until that very moment did Tony realize how badly he wanted a family… and who he wanted one with. It wouldn't feel right with anyone else.

And then he remembered that she was waiting.

"Okay, Z! Don't leave without me!"

Tony left the nursery quickly.