There was a lengthy scuffle on the other side of Llanfair's front door. Blair understood why when it finally swung open to reveal Jessica's daughter Bree, who brightly greeted Sam and Hope.

"Bree, you know you're not supposed to answer the door by yourself." Viki's scolding voice preceded her.

"But it's Sam and Hope!" Bree bellowed.

This was one time that Blair was pleased to be less than an afterthought. Her son and granddaughter had a young cousin who was delighted to see them unexpectedly. That sense of family was something she had painfully, deeply wanted for her children.

"Hello, Blair, Sam, Hope" said Viki as she entered the room. "Were Sam and Bree going to school together today?"

"This wasn't planned," Blair informed her with a meaningful glance at three children.

Viki followed Blair's gaze. "Bree, why don't you take Sam and Hope to see if Mommy and Aunt Natalie need help with the babies?"

The three of them scrambled upstairs.

"This has something to do with Todd breaking out of prison, doesn't it?" Viki asked without preamble.

"You might say that."

"Have you heard from him? Is he all right?"

Blair nodded, not wanting to confirm exactly what she knew aloud. "But between this and Irene's behavior at the will reading yesterday, I'm concerned about Sam and Hope's safety." It was always best to lie only by omission whenever possible. "I wondered if they could stay here today. Shaun or one of his people would come over to do the actual security-"

"Security?" Jessica charged into the foyer with Ryder on her hip. "You don't want to bring security over here- Natalie might think he's a police officer and that that means she has to sleep with him."

Natalie was half a step behind with Liam in her arms. "This is about Irene and that creepy fixation with Victor Lord you told us about, right? Because the last time someone changed Victor Lord's will, I almost got my heart cut out and Todd was the one who took me to the operating room."

Blair winced. Natalie noticed.

"Blair, it was the whole drugging me and shooting Christian thing that I had a problem with. I would have come as bait to save you voluntarily. See, unlike some people I think other people matter. Liam's already been kidnapped once, right, Wes? So I want to protect him this time, like you want to protect Chloe- I mean, Hope."

"That wasn't me," said Jessica, looking sick.

"Girls! That's enough!" Viki snapped.

"She started it," said Natalie in a tone that would have done Bree or Sam proud.

"When did I have a baby with your fiance?" Jessica jerked her head in Liam's direction.

Blair headed toward the stairs, calling over her shoulder that obviously Sam and Hope were too much of an imposition today and she would bring them elsewhere. As she had known it would, the fighting stopped instantly amidst reassurances that Hope and Sam were welcome and safe.

Blair called Shaun to confirm the location and discussed possible activities for the children's day while she awaited his arrival.

Starr wandered through the disconcertingly empty house. For years, she had wished for more time. More time to spend with Hope while keeping up with school; more time for friends and boyfriends; more time to be a normal teenager; more time for singing and reptiles and things she just liked.

Now Hope was off somewhere safe and Starr couldn't very well go to class unless she wanted to get arrested. Her friends had drifted off to their own adventures and she hadn't exactly had time to make many new ones in between potty training and playgroup. She knew James wouldn't tell anyone where she was if she called him, but she didn't want to make him an accessory.

Her current life as college student-slash-teenage mother and her past life as Todd Manning's partner in crime were colliding, and they weren't exactly meshing seamlessly.

"Dad?' she asked the empty hall. There was no answer. "Dad, you better not have gone off to meet Irene without telling Mom and me. At least not without telling me! I didn't break you out of prison so you could get yourself killed!"

There was no answer.

She searched the house from top to bottom and found herself completely alone, like the last survivor in some post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Post-Irene nightmare.

Maybe Irene had gotten to them all—Hope and Sam and Jack and Mom and Dad. She had to go find them. She had to call the police. She had to find a gun and finish Irene off like Dad had wanted to do in the first place.

She sprinted to her bedroom to find her jacket. Instead, she found Todd seated cross-legged on her bed toying with a stuffed alligator that Starr decided not to tell him had been a gift from James.

"Dad?"

There was no answer.

"Dad? Didn't you hear me calling?"

Todd startled as if she had materialized unexpectedly. For an instant, there was a vacant expression on his face, followed by one of confusion. Then his eyes focused on Starr.

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Just thinking."

"Didn't you hear me?" she repeated.

"People in China heard you." Todd bounced off the bed; the alligator lay forgotten.

Starr watched her father closely. He seemed like himself again, not that she was even sure who he was supposed to be after eight years.

She did notice that his shirt was hanging strangely. She lunged forward to grab at it.

"What the idea?" Todd demanded.

"You're wearing a bulletproof vest," Starr accused.

"Irene threatened to kill all of us if she didn't get her little toy. You won't let me shoot her, so I have to give it back. There aren't any other options."

"Does that mean you know what she wants?"

"Right here." Todd pointed to the ring he wore on his finger.

"Isn't that the ring Irene gave Jack yesterday? Why would she give it away if she wanted it back?"

"She didn't know what she had. There was a computer chip hidden underneath the stone."

"What's on the computer chip?"

"I don't know."

"You're going to give it back to her without finding out what it is?"

"I'm kind of under a deadline, here. Unless you have an all-purpose 8-year-old microchip reader?"

"No, but, what if there's information there that she's going to use to blow up the world or something?"

"That wouldn't be it. Her connections are so high up that if she wanted to blow up the world she'd just use the Pentagon's supplies." He reached over Starr's head for a small cane and tophat sitting on the top shelf of her desk. Starr didn't remember putting them there. In fact, she knew she would never have left them there; they were supposed to be a surprise for both Hope and Todd.

"Is this for Peanut for Halloween?" Todd looked so touched that all other thoughts vanished from Starr's head. It was overwhelming to see how much her real father loved Hope. This was a man who would have been horrified to knock her down a flight of stairs while she was pregnant, whether he'd knocked her down by accident or not. This was a man who would never, never have considered kidnapping her child (regardless of what he'd done with Jack).

This was a man who wouldn't have backed her and Cole into the corner of having unprotected sex before they were ready in the first place. If Todd had never been replaced with Victor, Starr would never have had Hope.

Her eyes flooded with tears at the thought. A life without Hope was incomprehensible. If given the choice, Starr would have to choose a world where her father was beaten and shocked and tortured every day for eight years over a world without Hope. She would have to choose to have Todd startle with fear when someone entered a room and slip into vacant trances.

Sobs rose in her throat.

"Don't—don't cry like that, Shorty."

She brushed off Todd's hands. She couldn't take comfort from someone who had spent eight years in agony when she wouldn't even go back and stop it if she could.

Maybe she had known, subconsciously. At first, she had despised the man who called himself Walker Lawrence. But then she had accepted him as Todd Manning.

"Starr has such a special bond with her daddy," everyone had said. "If she says Walker is Todd, Walker must be Todd."

Victor had reminded her of it the night of the Vickerman premiere when she'd seen Todd and Victor together for the first time.

"You believed me then. You believe me now. You didn't send a man to a torture chamber because you didn't know your own father, did you? You didn't turn everyone's world upside down because you would have replaced your daddy with anything that walked through the door, did you?"

The sobs came harder. She couldn't catch her breath.

"Starr, if this is about that Halloween costume—"

That was the most ridiculous thing Starr had ever heard, and Starr was a Manning.

"I'm sorry," she managed to choke out.

"What for? Did you put piranhas in my bathwater? Because I didn't even notice. I like piranhas better than most of the people in this town."

That wasn't funny. She wasn't going to laugh. At anything. Ever again.

"I'm sorry I didn't stop Victor from taking your life," she tried, even though she had just realized that she wasn't, really, because no Victor would have meant no Hope. No Sam, either, come to think of it. What would their family be without Sam?

"Not your fault," Todd said harshly. "Not your fault at all, Shorty. You were a child. You're still a child. They knew everything about you and they set it all up to trick you. You never had a chance. No one could have."

Starr kept crying. Todd watched helplessly. His instincts had always been to give Starr whatever she wanted to keep her from being sad. Now there was nothing to give her other than his time.

And his time was spoken for.

This was the perfect opportunity. Blair was over at Viki's dropping off the babies. The only one he had to shake before his meeting with mommy dearest was Starr. He'd gone into her bedroom in the first place to see if it would inspire him.

He'd considered drugging her. The Crazy Cramer Coven being what it was, there was sure to be something useful in Dorian's medicine cabinet. But he knew that Blair had a dangerous allergy to a certain kind of anesthesia. Starr might have inherited it, and it might be linked to some of the sedatives.

He'd considered locking her in a room. But he'd spent most of eight years locked in a room; he couldn't do that to Starr, even for a minute. Visions of her being trapped in a fire filled his head. Never mind that locking someone in a basement hadn't worked out well for Jack in the recent past.

He'd considered tossing her in the swimming pool and making a run for it. But as determined as his Shorty was, he couldn't be sure that that would leave him enough time.

As always, Starr had offered him the perfect solution. He could leave her sobbing hysterically with guilt, and it wouldn't occur to her to chase him.

It would make him feel like a douche, but that was nothing new.

He ignored Starr's flailing arms and lifted her up, depositing her facedown on her bed. She barely weighed more than she had when he'd left. How had this tiny little girl managed to have a baby of her own?

"I love you, Shorty," he said, caressing her back.

Then he silently backed out of her room and headed for Irene's new headquarters.

Irene wasn't hard to find. She was looking out the front window when he arrived, as if she were waiting for him.

He raised his fist. "I have it right here."

"Where was it?" she demanded.

He opened his fist. "Victor Lord's ring. You had it all along. Victor Lord gave it to me eight years ago with the microchip hidden underneath. I might've remembered it sooner if you hadn't shocked me and drugged me so many times."

She shrugged. "Trial and error. Give me the ring."

"I want a guarantee of my family's safety."

"You have it. If I wanted to kill them, I would have killed them. There's no point in killing them now when I may need them in the future."

"Why would you need them in the future?"

"Leverage over you, of course, my son. I never could control you like I could my Victor. It's why I chose him to begin with."

"And you gave me to Peter Manning of all people."

"An interesting social experiment, wasn't it? A baby who was already selfish and defiant and impulsive and a sadist who couldn't be trusted with a puppy." She laughed.

Todd felt the last vestiges of the Irene he'd read about in the diary so many years ago- the woman who had wanted him and tried to give him to a loving home- slip away. Both of his fathers had been vile child abusing scum, but at least he had had the idea that his mothers had been good women who loved him even if they were too weak to protect him.

Now he was certain that there had been born from a revolting partnership between two equally disgusting participants who had loathed him from his birth, if not before.

"The ring!" Irene prompted.

"Gladly." Todd dropped it on the rug, pleased to be free of it.

Jack spent the early hours of the morning catching up on his homework as much as he could. Except for God damn Spanish, which always reminded him of how Victor-dad had liked Dani better than him, the work came naturally to him. No one was ever impressed, though; Starr had been the family genius until she got pregnant and then Dani had taken her place. His good grades had only really been useful after he'd started bullying Shane Morasco. No one had thought that Jack Manning—rich, handsome, athletic, smart—would do such a thing. At least, no one had thought that until it was too late and Gigi Morasco was dead.

At 5:30, he packed his bag and got ready for school. Outside, it was still as dark as it had been when he'd spied on Irene. Night seemed to last forever.

The long run with the soccer team was invigorating instead of tiring. No one knew how to talk to him at his locker or in the cafeteria, but everyone knew how to act during a workout. It was like riding that stupid horse the day before. While he was running with the team, he fit with them.

During class, everyone stared and whispered as usual, except for Shane, who sullenly looked in the other direction. Just to confuse the hell out of everyone, Jack raised his hand in every class (except Spanish; there were limits) and answered questions correctly.

As much as he hated the stares and the whispers, Jack hung around school for as long as he could. School was better than home. Home was where Mom and Scarface-dad and Starr and probably even Sam and Hope were having their mutual admiration society bonding time and giggling over how Jack was so dumb that he'd thought that Mom had actually believed him about Scarface.

At first he didn't notice when a car pulled up alongside basketball court where Jack had been engaged in a half-assed game of around the world.

"Dude, isn't that your mom?"

Jack looked. Blair waved.

Jack recognized the message in that wave—he could get into the car or there would be a very big scene that would give Jack's classmates something else to gossip about. (Having your classmates think your mother was hot was a major inconvenience.)

Resolutely, Jack got into the front seat beside his mother. The doors locked themselves all around them. They drove silently until they were on the highway.

"All right," said Blair. "I don't think anyone is going to interrupt us now."