Joey seemed withdrawn after school the next day, and it made me worry that my tension was having an adverse effect on him. So I felt guilty trepidation when I knocked and entered his room.

"Mom?" he asked at his desk, looking up from the homework he was doing. William usually did at least some of his homework as soon as he got home to "get it over with" in his own words, but Joey always put it off until just before dinner unless we insisted otherwise, so it didn't surprise me when he asked, "is it dinnertime?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. He gave me a curious, expectant look then. "You've been really quiet today. I wanted to know if we could talk about it."

"Oh. Okay," he said warily. He closed his reading book and turned his chair towards me. What I didn't expect was for the first thing for him to say was, "we got a new kid in our class this week. Jacob."

My first worry was that Jacob was proving to be another bully, but a nagging suspicion made me wonder if it might not be something else about his new classmate that had him upset. "What's he like?" I asked carefully.

This elicited a big sigh. "Jacob causes a lot of trouble," Joey told me. "He throws things and hides under the tables, then kicks the art teacher when she tries to get him out."

"Wow," I replied, thinking. That sort of behavior seemed really immature for an eight or nine-year-old. "Does he get punished a lot, then?"

"No."

"No?" I didn't know Aaron Blackwood well, but I found it surprising that he didn't discipline the troublesome student, but maybe it was because he was hoping the boy was just acting out because transitioning to a new class was hard.

"He doesn't ever get in trouble. Sometimes Wendy takes him out of the room, but he doesn't get detention like we do."

"Who's Wendy?" I asked, but I figured it out before he answered.

"Jacob's other teacher. She helps him do stuff."

Probably an aide, I decided. "Just Jacob?"

"Yup." Joey was quit for quite a while, then he looked up at me. "Mom... Jacob looks like Ava did. I think he's like her." Oh, I thought then, finally beginning to understand why the new boy's behavior bothered Joey but not William. "-does that mean she would've been a brat too if... if she didn't die when she was so little?"

"Jacob has Down syndrome too?" I asked, just for confirmation.

"Uh huh." He nodded. "I forgot what it was called but he does."

It bothered me a little that he hadn't asked the name if he couldn't remember it, but then, he rarely spoke about his former family, and Ava least of all. "Not necessarily," I told him. "When Ava was a baby, did people tell you that people with Down syndrome are all the same?"

"Yeah!" Then Joey looked puzzled. "Everyone said the kids like her are always happy and that was kind of blessing. They used to make me mad because mom and dad told me that she wasn't going to be able to do all the same stuff is me and just getting to be happier didn't seem fair."

"I thought so. A lot of people think they're being nice when they say things like that," I explained. "They don't necessarily believe it."

"Then why do they say it?" Joey demanded to know. I thought it was a good question.

Shrugging I said "some people think that they need to put a happy spin on things all the time. The type of people who tell someone who loses her house in a fire that at least they have their health, or at funerals say that at least someone who died is in a better place."

"They're fake nice?" he asked, looking at me for confirmation. It was hard not to nod.

"Maybe. But some other people have a hard time dealing with talking to someone who has bad stuff happened, so they insist that things aren't all that bad," I said, wishing Mulder was the one having the conversation with him. I didn't share his psych background but hopefully I was explaining people who had avoidant personality types well enough.

"Then they're wishing?" he asked me.

I thought about that. "Yes, it is wishful thinking, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"And some people probably have also heard that all people with Down syndrome are happy kids so often that they just believe it. This is the type of person who doesn't actually know very many people with Down syndrome at all. If you don't know people it's easy to believe the stereotype."

"Oh."

"But it's not true," I said gently. "People who have that genetic syndrome have all of the same types of emotions as everyone else. They can get mad, scared, excited, frustrated, and sad just like you and me. That means that there are some who are really nice and usually happy like the stereotype, and others are mad and frustrated often enough to kind of seem like jerks when they take it out on other people. Most are probably no more nice or mean than anyone else."

Joey surprised me by asking, "Is Jacob frustrated because of stuff he needs help with or just can't do even with help?"

"Don't you get frustrated by those things?" I immediately asked back.

The point I was trying to make seemed to sink in. "Yes..."

"We don't really know what Ava would have been like," I said but he shook his head. "No?"

"She would've been nicer than Jacob," he insisted.

"Yeah?" I asked, curious about the conviction in his tone.

"I would've helped her not be frustrated," he explained. "My old dad said she could learn stuff, just slower than me." I was interested by the apparent contradiction with what he said the Van De Kamps had told him earlier, but I'm sure my sons could readily bring up examples of when Mulder and I'd done the same.

"I'm sure you would've." It did feel odd talking about the dead toddler, though. If Ava hadn't died in a tragic accident, she would have been old enough for preschool by that point and, likely would have attended kindergarten in the fall, with or without an aide like Wendy. Odd as it left me feeling to have the discussion, it was obviously important to Joey, so I didn't hush him just because it made me uncomfortable.

And then it got more uncomfortable. "I used to worry about if he did it on purpose, or not," Joey confided, and my stomach lurched when I realized he was referring to his adoptive father. Mulder and I had reluctantly promised Jonathan that we'd lead Joey to believe the prison wouldn't allow them to see or write each other and so far Joey hadn't challenged that. But what happened when Jonathan got out of prison? He didn't think he deserved a relationship with the surviving child he'd adopted, and maybe I agreed with him, but would Joey? Would he insist we visit him when there was no longer 'the prison' keeping them apart? "But I don't anymore."

"No?" I asked with trepidation, not really wanting to hear right then if he had decided that Jonathan had or hadn't done it on purpose. I barely knew Jonathan van de Kamp, but my gut said that he hadn't intentionally left Ava in the car all day. Still, his adopted daughter was dead because of his actions...sometimes inattention, rather than evilness, had the most devastating results.

Joey spun in his desk chair before answering me, and when he did, the answer surprised me. "If we make bad things happen, even by accident, it's okay to get punished for it. Because the bad thing happened even if we didn't want to. Do you think that too?" he asked earnestly, looking me right in the eye.

Without hesitation, I answered him. "I do. I think that one of the good things about punishing people for doing things accidentally is that it gives society more reason to think about consequences." I decided that eight going on nine was probably still a little too young for long lecture about the laws of unintended consequences, so I didn't go into all of that right then. "A lot of the bad things that happen to people happen because somebody acted without thinking. This doesn't necessarily mean that they were a bad person, but that they are just kind of irresponsible. And sometimes we have to pay for our mistakes from that too."

Joey thought about this for a moment. "Like how William and I got in trouble for forgetting about bouncing balls in the house and broke the vase? We didn't mean to do it, but if we had thought harder about it, the vase wouldn't have gotten broken. So I think we kind of deserved having to pay for it with our allowance."

That was sort of those simplistic example, but perfectly age-appropriate. "Right, and with grown-ups, it can be more like not keeping an eye on kids near traffic or swimming pools or doing something dumb when you're driving, like texting, or even things you don't get in trouble for with the police or go to court over, but get in trouble with other people, like having too much to drink and deciding that calling an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend is a good idea and ending up in a huge fight and feeling stupid when they don't understand why you bothered them," I said, thinking about how many times Charlie had fessed up to nearly starting World War III with ex-girlfriend after drunk dialing. "Or, somebody gets really angry at their boss or customer and sends an email that's belittling, and then end up getting fired. There are all sorts of situations when we fail to think through things and get ourselves in trouble, right?"

"Right," he agreed, spinning his chair the other way.

I began to wonder if he was going to bring up Jonathan or his sentencing again. As far as I knew Jonathan had only been sentenced to ten years, and if he made parole he might be out in just two or three years. But that wasn't on Joey's mind as much as it was my own. "So..." he said slowly, "is it okay if I think that Jacob is a jerk?" He frowned, looking up at me. "William thinks that I'm being mean. I don't think he understands."

"Well, if you can find a way to get along with Jacob, maybe you'll find that you like him better than you think. Perhaps one of the reasons he's frustrated is that he wants to make friends and hasn't yet. Do think that could be true?"

"Maybe." When the chair squeaked as he spun it again, I made a mental note to have Mulder squirt some DW-40 at it. Maybe he could make a lesson of it for the kids, since they seem to enjoy learning how to be handy. "But... I don't want to be his friend."

I raised an eyebrow. "I didn't say you had to be his friend. But it would be nice if you could at least be civil to him. And, if other kids start talking about him being a jerk or anything, I would like you not join in."

"Okay," he said reluctantly enough to clue me in that he had already been talking to classmates about Jacob. There wasn't anything to do about that since it was already done.

"All I'm saying, is just give him a chance. He might settle down in a week or two, and become a lot nicer member of your class." This was my honest hope. Not just for Jacob's sake, though I had no interest in hoping that a little boy got alienated by his classmates because he was intolerable to be around, but more for Aaron Blackwood's. He had enough to deal with in his personal life already, and didn't need friction at work too.

"Maybe," Joey said, halfheartedly at best.

"Scully! Joey!" Mulder's voice floated down the hall towards us. "Dinner!"

Joey bounded out of the room, but I didn't follow. This had not been my most successful conversation with one of my kids. But, maybe he would learn to like Jacob after all. And, at least my worries about what would happen when Jonathan got out of jail could wait for another day. Sometimes, you have to settle for what you can get.

Not for the first time, I found myself selfishly glad that Joey hadn't spent a lot of time around Ava. From what I was able to piece together from what little he'd told me himself and articles about the trial, Ava had been placed with the Van De Kamps just a week or two before Joey had been shipped off to boarding school, which meant he'd only seen her after that at Christmas, when his parents took both kids out for dinner to celebrate Ava's adoption from foster care being finalized, and at Easter.

The only picture I'd ever seen of her - from an article; I knew Joey had pictures of his other family but if he looked at them, he never did while anyone else was around - was probably from Easter, just weeks before her tragic death. Fortunately Joey wasn't in this picture that seemed to be inserted in every news story. Instead she's alone except for a stuffed bunny, and she's grinning happily at the camera. Her pigtails were tied off with ribbons that matched her red dress and looked nice against her platinum hair. In the photo Ava looks happy and well-cared for, and I'd like to think she was. It wasn't malice, just one thought less act that had ended everything for her.

"What are you thinking about?" Mulder asked behind me before putting a hand on my shoulder.

I shrugged and tried to summon up a smile for him. "How a moment of thoughtlessness can end a life."

"Heavy topic for this time of night," he comment, and then held something out to me. At first I wasn't sure what it was, but I soon recognized it. "Sunflower seeds?"

"Uh, sure..." I gingerly took two out of the bag and stared at them. When I looked up at him, he gave me an expectant smile. Trying not to sigh, I popped them into my mouth and chewed. They weren't too bad.

"Like them?"

"They're okay."

To my surprise he held the bag out to me, saying "Then they're yours. It's not that I don't appreciate the gift, but it's hard to top the unflavored ones."

"I thought you liked buffalo," I replied even as I took the package from him.

"Just chicken," he called over his shoulder. I could hear a faint "Dad!" from upstairs.

"Duly noted."

As I watched him scale the stairs, admiring the view, I picked a few more sunflower seeds out of the bag and ate them. After all these years he could still quietly lift my spirits better than anyone else.


The adoption agency was reluctant to speak to us but I pressed and they eventually let us set up an appointment. That morning I imagined all sorts of things that might complicate the search for answers, but all my imaginings set the issues in the offices of the adoption agency, not in my living room.

Mulder was in Autumn's room, hunting for diapers he swore we bought the last time we were at Market Basket, when the doorbell rang. I thought that it might be our mail person so I opened the door without hesitation. And then was confused when an older woman I didn't know gave me a semi-dismayed look. "Doctor Scully?" she asked nervously.

"Yes?" I asked, already a pensive myself. My first thought was to wonder if she worked for the medical center and was coming to tell me that the renovations had been completed earlier than expected, and I'd soon need to start my new job sooner than I'd hoped. She didn't really look like the sort of woman who worked at the center, but she had called me doctor.

The woman with dark brown hair gave me a tight smile. "I'm Lydia Coburn, Leigh Blackwood's mother."

"Oh," I said dumbly, staring at her. Maybe I should have guessed her identity sooner, but not only did she look nothing like Leigh (only later would I realize how ridiculous an assumption that she should was) she was several older than I would have expected Leigh's mother to be, practically Judith's age. Apparently she and her husband had adopted later in life than I would have, if adoption had become the only option for parenthood.

"Can I come in and speak to you?" she asked when I just continued to let the cold air in.

"Um. Okay." Stepping back, I let her in.

She sat down and I paused, wondering furiously what she wanted to talk about. I knew a lot of adoptive parents felt hurt when their children sought out their birth families, but even if it did turn out that Emily and Leigh were the same person, it wasn't like she'd actively looked for us.

"Scully?" Mulder said behind me, making me jump. "I found those diapers so we won't need to stop at..." He trailed off when he noticed our visitor. "Oh, hi," he offered, shifting the baby in case he was called upon to shake hands.

"This is Leigh's mother, Lydia," I explained. He sat next to me and let me take Autumn. "She was about to explain why she's come to see us. Right?"

"Right!" She looked as flustered as I felt. Giving us a sickly smile, she said, "I was hoping to speak to you before you visit the adoption agency."

"Just in the nick of time, then," Mulder told her. "That's where we're headed."

As he spoke I wondered if we'd have time to keep the appointment. Since we didn't know what she wanted yet, there was no way to predict how long the conversation would take. Or if she was going to do her damnest to keep us from it altogether.

"I'm glad I caught you before you left, then," she murmured. Looking up at us, she said, "I really appreciate your willingness to help Leigh but I'm not sure that you'll learn anything useful by visiting the adoption agency."

She appreciated it? Apparently she wasn't one of those women who felt betrayed when the child they raised decided to look for answers about their origins. It made me wonder if that was because Leigh had been so old when she was adopted, or if it was more of a reflection of the sort of person Lydia Blackwood was. For no good reason I found myself hoping it was the latter.

Mulder bounced the baby when she began to fuss but still managed to ask "why's that?" before I could extract myself from my thoughts and reply.

Lydia wrang her hands, which seemed like a bad sign. "My husband and I fell in love with Leigh as soon as we saw her photo when we went to the agency with the intention of adopting a special needs child. There was just something in her eyes that tugged at the heartstrings..." she looked far away for a moment, lost in the memory, but began speaking again. "I think the fact that we were so sure that she was the child we were meant to have is the reason we didn't make a fuss when we realized that there was something strange about the adoption."

"What was strange?" I wanted to know.

Lydia shrugged. "There wasn't anything overtly wrong, not like those Lifetime movies about selling babies. But there were subtle things that just felt wrong. My biggest concern was the complete and utter lack of information about her past. Every question we asked was met with 'I don't know.' when was she born? I don't know. Was she born like this or did she have an accident or illness that caused her cognitive impairment.' I don't know. Where did she live before she ended up in the group home we took her out of? I don't know."

She sighed. "I halfway expected to be ambushed in an alley one night and told to stop asking questions if I knew what was good for me. Oh, they tried to make excuses, to give reasons that they knew almost nothing about the child they were trying to place, but none of them rang true."

"You thought they were lying," I surmised.

"I did. Ben, Leigh's father, he was more willing to take what they said at face value. If the doctors they said she had to see hadn't made any predictions about her prognosis, I might have been more willing to believe them myself."

"You didn't expect her doctors to have any idea what she'd be like?" I asked. "Didn't they do testing on her?" It would have surprised me a lot if they hadn't done any medical or psychological testing on a child who presented like Leigh had. Even if they didn't do a lot of genetic testing to determine if there was a biological reason she was so delayed I thought they'd at least do an IQ test.

"They did enough testing to tell me that whatever her problem was didn't seem to be from a genetic disorder. I assumed that meant that perhaps her mother had drank or did drugs when she was pregnant," Lydia looked up at me, and I noticed that her expression was apologetic. It took me a moment to figure out that she meant she had had those assumptions about me. That made me wonder if she now knew that I had not given birth to Emily in the first place. Somehow I thought not. "But their predictions for her outcome were odd."

"Odd how?" Mulder asked, seizing upon her words.

"They told me that they had no idea if she was going to improve. I don't know how much Leigh or perhaps Judith told you about what Leigh was like when we brought her home… She was a big girl, they thought she was eleven or twelve maybe, and we decided that she must be eleven after we had another pediatrician examined her, but she acted for all the world like a preschooler. She could speak some, but you would've thought you were speaking to a child a third her age. She was curious, and picked things up quickly, but in the way a small child does. Ben and I thought that was hopeful, actually."

"Okay…" I said slowly. There was obviously more to the story, but she was having difficulty getting it out.

Lydia shook her head. "The strange part was that they told me that if she got better, and they hope she would, it might happen quickly. That's an odd thing to say, don't you think? How could they possibly know that her improvement would be rapid? And it was: by the time she was thirteen she seemed just like the other thirteen-year-olds that I knew from being a secretary at the middle school. It was around then that we decided to put her in public school."

"That does seem a little strange," Mulder said, startling me a bit when he apparently decided to wrench the conversation back onto topic. "Back when I was in college I did a lot of reading on so-called feral children. These children were not literally raised by animals like the legends about them claimed, but severely deprived of human interaction by uncaring custodians. After being rescued most of them took a very long time to make any sort of improvement. I'm not saying that Leigh was raised by wolves before you got her-" he said with a small smile, and I found myself thinking that if this girl actually was my daughter, she would've been better off with a wolf pack than in the hands of the Consortium. At least wolves are loyal to each other. "-But their supposition that she might improve does imply that they thought her problems were caused by deprivation rather than some sort of brain damage. So yes, it is a little strange that they would tell you that she might rapidly improve considering other children in the same sort of dire straits while small historically have not."

"And that's not the strangest part," she went on. By then I was sitting at the edge of my seat, wondering what else she could possibly tell us. As I listened to her I found myself losing hope that we were going to get any answers from the adoption agency. It might not matter that we were very clearly going to be late for our appointment. "They told us that if she did get better, she might end up having a problem with lies."

"With lies?" Mulder repeated, his tone suggesting that he wondered if he'd misheard her.

"Yes. That struck me as… I don't know, it just seemed like that wasn't the sort of thing you could predict about a child's development. I asked them if they thought she had the potential to become a pathological liar, because that's the only thing that seemed to make any sense in that context, but they said no. Instead they thought she might just be a little confused, and use her imagination to fill in the blanks in her memory."

I looked at Mulder. "People do do that, don't they?" I asked, thinking of some of our cases. Specifically one when he had himself woken up covered in blood, confused, and eventually coming to believe that he had committed a murder.

"Yes-"

But Lydia cut him off before he could continue. "But could you predict that someone would come up with a specific line of reasoning, that they would imagine a predictable filler for their missing memories?"

He gave her a curious look. "I'm not sure what you mean."

She frowned, but not at us. "They thought she might make up stories about aliens."

I blinked. "Aliens?" I don't know about Mulder, but that wasn't what I expected at all. I thought perhaps lies about people treating her badly, but aliens? Shooting Mulder look I dared him to say that maybe Leigh really had run into aliens. He didn't accept it.

Lydia waved a hand, obviously uncomfortable with the topic. "I know. Isn't that the most outlandish thing? I asked them what they meant, and they tried to explain it by saying that she had probably been in and out of hospitals, and might be confused by IV lines, and conflate that with what she had seen on sci-fi movies, but they said in a way that was too pat, and they wouldn't meet my eyes."

This made me think of those boys, the proto-Curts that Mulder had once seen suspended in liquid. That was an image straight out of a horror movie, even I had to admit that. "Did she? Did she tell you stories about tubes and aliens?"

"No. She used to dream of the ocean, nightmares actually, but nothing about aliens ever got brought up."

"That's unusually specific a theme for nightmares," Mulder said quietly.

"She hated the beach. Ben and I tried to bring her to the ocean several times when she was young, but even after she caught up to the other kids her own age she could never tell us exactly what it was about the ocean that frightened her so much. At the very beginning she just cried and told us it was too big," Lydia said, making me flinch. Joey had had the same reaction to the ocean when he saw it for the first time when he was six. Somehow, I didn't think that it was because Leigh had also lived inland most of her life. "And later, when she could articulate things better she just insisted that she hated it. I don't think that we ever managed to get her into the water to swim with us. Instead she would just stand on the shore, looking miserable and worried for us, as if she expected us to be swept away by the waves at any moment. After a few times Ben convinced me that it was cruel to keep trying to get her to acclimate to the beach, so we stopped going. I don't think that Ben and I went again until after Leigh graduated high school."

That must've been quite the sacrifice, considering the fact that the humidity in New England nearly reaches rainforest levels during the summer, and Ballyguest is only twenty odd miles inland. Still, I didn't know the woman well, but she seemed like the type of person who would do what was best for her child rather than think to her own comfort, even in a sweltering summer.

Lydia offered us a confused little smile before shaking her head. "I'm sorry, it just feels a little strange to be thinking of all this so many years later. I suppose that most sound odd, but Ben and I are so grateful that Leigh grew so far beyond our early expectations that we don't spend much time looking back."

"That's understandable," Mulder told her.

"Thank you," Lydia stood then. "For hearing me out, I mean. If you can't get answers from those people Leigh will be crushed. I'm not sure how you feel about the possibility of getting nowhere-" She didn't seem to notice me staring at her. Surely Leigh hadn't told her that we'd been looking for answers too? That we'd believed Emily dead had to have come up... hadn't it had to? She was being damn nice if she was under the mistaken impression Mulder and I had sought Leigh out while on a quest to reunite with our long lost child. "-but I didn't want you to feel blindsided if the agency brushes you off too."

"We appreciate that," Mulder told her with a glance at me. He didn't add "don't we, Scully?" so I guess I didn't look like I was in an agreeable mood.

"Well, I'll let you get going," Lydia announced when Mulder stood up with the baby in his arms. The look she gave Autumn was complicated. All I could think was that it must have just occurred to her that if Leigh was Emily, the baby my husband was bouncing in his arms to ward off her beginning to fuss would be Leigh's sister. "She's lovely," Lydia murmured before slipping out the door.

"We're going to be late," Mulder remarked as the front door closed.

"I doubt that will matter."