I keep starting this chapter, and then it keeps going wrong. So, I'm sorry about the delay. One more chapter, and then the different ending that people have asked for.

Disclaimer: here's to a season 6? Please ABC? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?


When Audrey is seventeen, her father announces he's writing a new book. It takes them all by surprise, family and public alike, considering he'd said that he'd never write again, not when the one person he said he always wrote for can no longer read. But he's writing, and Audrey is hoping that this is it. That this is the start of her father starting to get his life back in order. It's not like he's ever been a bad father. He's not, not at all. He'll read stories to them, he'll take them out on trips, and he spoils them positively rotten. They have movie nights, camped out on the sofa with massive bowls of popcorn, laughing and joking with each other. Just like a family should. Sometimes, only sometimes, Audrey forgets that there's someone missing, that her mother and her father should be making disgusting faces at each other, arguing over whether they've eaten too much popcorn, about the fact it's way past Healy's bed time. It's not that she wants to forget. She never wants to forget about her mother, but there's one small part of her that relishes those moments. When she doesn't have to worry about a grieving family, and she's free to be a seventeen year old girl. Getting annoyed at Healy taking up too much space on the sofa, at her father for being embarrassing and so not funny. She wishes she could be a normal seventeen year old. Just for a while.

She's more than a little surprised when he tells her that he's finishing the half written book that has been sat deserted for the past nine years. She was happy he was writing again, but she never expected him to pick Nikki and Rook up again. Not when it was based so completely on her parents. But he wants to finish it. If he can't finish his own story with Kate, then he should at least finish the one thing he has control over. They deserve that. Kate would want him to do it, he says. Kate would want him to do something else too, but Audrey refrains from mentioning it. Soon, maybe. When he's happier, and his book is done and he's accepted the fact that things need to end. Then she'll talk to him.

City Heat is, without a doubt, one of his best works. It's complicated, and it's full of twist and turns and surprises, but it's good. It sky rockets to the top of almost every best seller list. Reviews come in thick and fast, singing high praises, applauding his courage, crediting his imagination. Going out with a bang, that's what her father says. And Audrey is ridiculously proud of him. It's taken him a while, and lord she's wanted to scream at him on more than one occasion, but he's getting there. Slowly. She tells him, one evening when it's just the two of them on the sofa. Healy is at a friends for a sleepover, and Audrey wanted to do something just for the two of them. Something Healy doesn't like to do (much to their father's chagrin). Marvel films. In order. Start to finish. All in one sitting. Audrey knows her father thinks that she's disappointed in him, but she's not. She understands that he's grieving, she is too, in her own way. She just wished there was a way to make him see that there was a better option. But that's neither here nor there. Not right now. She tells him, and he kisses the top of her head, and she pretends she doesn't feel the tears on her skin.