"Yes Diane, Will wanted a family." She paused seeing the skepticism in Diane.

"Will didn't know how to flip from being one of Chicago's most eligible bachelors to husband and father. He probably didn't ever allow you to see that side of him."

Diane had a thought, a memory. "I think he may have figured that out at some point over the time he spent with you."

"You know that voice message he left me the day he died?"

"Yes"

"It haunts me," she admits, feeling the heaviness again in her heart. "As far as I have been able to piece together, he left the message after he had seen photos of Finn's children. What if he wanted to fix things? What if he was ready to spill his heart again? What if I made the wrong choice, again?" She stood again and returned to stare out the window.

"Alicia, you can't continue to blame yourself. It's life. Life is all about choices, and consequences. They work hand in hand. What ever made you choose Peter at the time must have felt right. It had to have been what you wanted. I've seen you and Peter over the past few years, and I know you love him, or loved him," she said hesitantly.

"I did, but I loved Will too."

"So why did you choose Peter over Will at Georgetown? What happened?"

"What happened? I got pregnant… Will and I were best friends, but Peter and I were dating. Peter was the one you were serious with, the one who was "marriage material". Will was always the fun guy who you did wild and crazy things with. The one you walked around campus with in the middle of the night discussing baseball, well he would discuss baseball I would listen. He was the one you made chocolate chip cookies for at two am, because it was fun, and seemed like the thing to do.

One night he and I, and my roommate were watching some TV, and a commercial came on for a local market. It was almost Thanksgiving. He turns to me and says, "Leesh lets have Thanksgiving dinner." I laughed. It was about eight o'clock at night. So I said we could have our own Thanksgiving dinner the following Sunday. "No Leesh, I mean tonight." She chuckled at the memory.

"He dragged my roommate and I to the market. We bought a freezer to oven turkey breast, potatoes, some other items, and went back to my apartment and made Will's Thanksgiving dinner. We ate at about one am. It was crazy, but so fun! Will was always fun!"

"Sounds like fun, tell me more about Georgetown. I mean that's always been the big mystery for everyone. And I saw the way Will watched you from day one. I knew there had to be more to the story than what he had told me which was that you knew each other at Georgetown."

"Will never told you about us at Georgetown?" Alicia said, with pleasure and surprise in her voice.

"No" Diane laughed. "Other than you were friends, all he said was that you were the top of your class."

"Well I was!" she said, with a raised brow.

This caused Diane to chuckle again. "I know, that's why I agreed to hire you."

"Will always goofed around. He was a really good student. He was serious when it came to grades. But he played around an awful lot for a guy who did so well in school. Whenever we were studying he would get bored after awhile, and would try to get me to run with him, or go watch him hit balls. He was very convincing, as you can imagine. He would always say to me, "you only live once Leesh. You're only in college once. You have to make the most of it." And he did. He dated half the women in our graduating class."

"That doesn't surprise me!" Diane said.

"One thing is for sure, Will lived life to the fullest back then. I always had to have a plan, and I always had to know what was going to happen three weeks in advance."

"You still do!"

"Yes, but sometimes I wish I would have let go, lived life a little more."

"Tell me more about those Georgetown years. Were you dating Peter and Will?"

Alicia chuckled. "No. That seems like a thousand years ago, and it was complicated."

"It always is!"

"Will and I were best friends, but we never dated officially. Peter was a year ahead of Will and I. He was a TA for one of the law professors his last semester. Near the end of our 2L year, the law school student association held a social. They played some dating game. Will wasn't with me. He had procrastinated on getting a paper written, and had to complete it. Peter and I got to talking. He had landed a job here in Chicago and told me to give him a call while I was home doing my summer internship.

I did call and he took me out. We saw a lot of each other over the summer. Peter was mature, serious, stable, had a real job. At the end of internship I was offered a full time position once I graduated. So Peter and I kept in touch."

"Did Peter know about Will?"

"Yes, in fact Peter never seemed to mind that Will was my best friend. Maybe because he knew I would be returning to Chicago after graduation and Will was headed to Baltimore."

"What did Will think of Peter?"

"Peter drove Will crazy. Will thought Peter was arrogant, and Peter thought Will was immature and careless." She sighed. "They were both right. That's probably why Peter never seemed to feel threatened by Will when he came to visit. That and when he did come to visit for a weekend I spent most of my time with him not Will. The two only interacted a few times during that last year.

I had to laugh a few years ago because Will come to my apartment to talk to Peter about a case we were on. After Will left Peter said, "He's great! I don't remember him being so nice." Peter would have never said that during college. Peter never knew the fun loving, laid back side of Will that I knew. He was always seen as such a player and hard to get back then. Not many people knew the real Will. It's too bad because he was so great around kids. He could have been swept up my some really great women if he'd acted a little more mature."

"I guess I'd never thought about Will wanting kids. He never talked about it, and he certainly never dated any women who seemed the type to want some," Diane said, thinking back on the years she had known Will.

Alicia smiled. "He did want some. At least he did back then."

"Really?" Diane said, with a raised brow.

"Yes really. Not right then, not right after college, but eventually. He and I told each other things back then that no one else knew about." She paused for a moment as a memory crossed her mind.

"One time the two of us and some of our class mates went to a local homeless shelter to help out. We needed some community service time for a class we were taking. There were so many kids. It was so sad. But Will got right into it. He played ball with all of them. He performed funny magic tricks, like pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. A quarter seemed like a million bucks to those kids. He told the funniest stories, and the kids loved it.

A few weeks later mid November of our third year we were studying. It was late, and the snow was falling. He asked if I would go for a walk with him. I thought he was crazy, but I agreed. Many times when we would walk places together he would do most of the talking. I was usually busy trying to keep different cases for different classes straight in my head. He'd talk about sports, the latest girl he was dating, or trying to date. Sometimes he would talk about his sister's. But on this occasion he was quiet which was not like him.

I soon realized I was the one doing all of the talking. I'd been telling him about my previous weekend with Peter. His mind was somewhere else that night. We walked in silence for a few minutes and then he stopped and looked at me. He asked if ever wanted to have a family. I assumed he was asking the question because he'd decided he really liked Tami's sister, who he had been dating, and was going to try and commit to a relationship for more than two weeks. So I answered honestly saying yes, and then turned the question back on him. He said, "I don't know, I used to think that some day I would like to have a wife, and maybe kids. But there is so much to do, and so many things I want to experience before I settle down. But maybe if I found the right person I would." I was a bit surprised at his answer, I almost jokingly said, "Well you let me know if you find that person, I would love to meet the women who could settle Will Gardner!" He looked a little stunned and hurt, but smiled back and said very seriously, "I will, you'll be the first to know." We continued walking and he changed the subject. As I've thought about that conversation recently I've realized he asked the question that night because he had wanted me to be the one to settle him."

Diane chuckled. "I enjoyed watching the woman who did settle Will Gardner. Even if it caused all kinds of issues at work, it did make me happy to know that he could switch from sixteenth most eligible bachelor, to a settled man."

Alicia smiled. "Well the outcome of that discussion is just another example of our bad timing. Two weeks later we had finals and all left for the holiday break. When we all came back he had broken up with Tami's sister. He probably would have tried to get more serious with me then, but Peter and I had gotten more serious over the break. What if it was really Will I was supposed to be with? What if I made the wrong choice?"

Diane looked at her very seriously, "Then it's very possible you would be a widow with fatherless children now. And knowing you and Will, you would have waited some years before having any children after college. They would probably be much younger than Zach and Grace are now."

Alicia took her words to heart realizing how heartbreaking it would be for Zach and Grace if Peter was gone. She bit her lip in an attempt to swallow the emotions of the thought.

"Did you and Will ever date officially?"

Alicia looked up as she pondered the question. "No, not officially. We became more serious for a few months our second year, but we just liked to be with each other. We were to busy having fun to get really serious. We dated other people, but we were really close friends. Anyone we dated had to accept that Will and I were friends, and we weren't going to quit being friends just because we were dating other people. We had our quiet intimate moments every once in awhile."

"So you slept with each other periodically?"

"Only a few times, I think we were afraid of what that would do to our relationship. We didn't want to ruin what we had." Alicia pondered for a moment.

"Our first kiss is kind of a funny story," she said, relaxing back into the soft cushions on the sofa. "It was a night near Halloween during our second year. We had just finished a movie. It was a scary movie. I had jumped several times, and by the time the movie was over I had snuggled my body very close to his. He started teasing me. "I'm going home now so that the scary investigator can come and get you." She laughed at the thought.

"I was really scared, and begged him to stay. He thought it was so funny. He said, "Okay Leesh I'll stay, but only if you kiss me." So I said, "I can do that, just please don't go," and I kissed him. Then we sat in silence for a few minutes, because we had just crossed a relationship line and we didn't quite know what to do next. I think Will did the only thing he could think of, which was to start tickling me. He found it so funny, all of my squirming around to get free from his hands. I hated it. The more I tried to get away the tighter he held on. And before I knew it we were looking right at each other, and he was lying on top of me so I couldn't squirm away." Alicia paused for a moment to recall the memory more vividly.

"Leesh"

"Yes Will?"

"Do you want too…" Alicia remembered vividly their bodies getting closer and closer, the kissing becoming more and more intense. And then how their first kiss had turned into one of the few times they slept together.

She turned back to Diane. "Things did change that night, even though we pretended they hadn't. There was always something more to the relationship after that night, something that was still there fifteen years later. Something that I don't think will ever die. Something that we renewed with more intensity a few years ago."

"Your thing three years ago wasn't just an affair was it?"

Alicia looked away. "As much as I like to tell myself it was just an affair, I can't deny there was more to it than that."