Summer 1991

There were times Luke marveled at just how far he had come from Stars Hollow. And there were others that made him think he hadn't ventured very far from his hometown at all.

The bowl of various combined alcohols that formed a potent drink was one of those moments.

And a small part of Luke wished it was actually a cup of Miss Patty's Founder's Day punch he was holding in his hand. That at least had good memories associated with it. When he was 15, Rachel had sneaked enough of punch for them to get plastered for the first time under the bleachers at Stars Hollow High's stadium. It also led to fumbling around that was now funny but mortified him at the time. He and Rachel had zero idea of what they were doing. It wasn't like sex education had helped them in any way. A maiden aunt of Taylor Doose's taught their 10th grade health class, and they weren't even afforded the courtesy of learning how to put a condom on a banana.

That bit of knowledge had come from Liz.

Luke lifted the red Solo cup to his nose, took one sniff, then eyed the plant next to him. He wondered if pouring it out would kill it. It's not like he actually knew these people. He'd fallen in step with his teammates, on a rare day off in a city that wasn't home. Los Angeles was about as far from Boston as you could get without wading into the Pacific. The palm trees were nice to look at, and walking along the beach had done more to settle his soul than years of losing himself in the job. Part of him had wanted to take a photo and send it to his dad. Another part yearned to go home. He just wasn't quite sure where home was any longer.

It definitely wasn't in this mansion, with a ton of crap that bordered on the gaudy. His teammates mixed with Hollywood actors and wannabes, and several of them were already three sheets to the wind. He frowned at the cup and thought of joining them.

"It smells horrific, but it won't kill you."

Luke glanced up from the cup. Dark hair curled around a familiar face, and her smile was warm and welcoming. Like him, she held a cup of poison that masqueraded itself as punch. She winked at him, and then he placed her face. Anna Nardini. He'd seen enough of her show at the clubhouse to place her. It was her house he was in, her furniture he was silently mocking, her houseplant he was considering murdering with alcohol.

"You're the doctor," he replied in the lamest come-on known to man. He nearly tossed the punch in his own face in response.

"That," Anna replied, "was terrible."

He shrugged. No use not admitting it. "Yeah, well, I can't even blame the punch."

"I bet if you actually drank it, you could retroactively blame it on the punch."

Something about the way she said it reminded him so much of Rachel that Luke found himself smiling at Anna. He lifted his cup to hers, and they clanked them before downing back the contents.

Yup. It was as lethal as he thought it would be.

But it also made him far more confident when she led him up the stairs to her bed.


"So, we started dating. It's not easy when you're living on opposite ends of the country. I mean, being a spouse of any professional player's an exercise in endurance. You're gone for stupid long periods of time. Even when you're home, you're fighting to see each other a good chunk of the year. I never thought she was the one, you know? But we had a good time until we began fighting. She was starting to make it big, and she decided I was useful to have on her arm. I had just become the team's main starting pitcher, and my own career was doing well. We split a year later. Two months after we broke up, she told me she was pregnant."


April 1993

Luke tried to bite back his fury as he walked into the hospital, the anger drowning out his intense dislike of them. He told Anna he wanted to be there when the baby was born. It had been the latest in an endless series of fights they seemed to be having since she told him about her pregnancy six months earlier. He wanted to make it work. God knows, he tried. Hard. The first couple months had been great. Anna had been past her morning sickness, and they were making an effort to live together despite his career on the East Coast.

OK, the effort had been on his part. Anna steadfastly refused to spend any sort of time in Boston. She also turned up her nose at being taken to Stars Hollow to visit his parents' graves and yelled at him when he suggested flying Liz and Jess out to meet her. So all his free time was taken flying cross-country to appease an Anna that had become far worse than the woman he'd broken up with. He proposed several times, and she refused every single time. It made no sense at all.

It felt like he was a glorified babysitter rather than a boyfriend, especially as Anna's pregnancy had gotten near full term. Even attending the doctor's appointments together seemed like a battle, but he put his foot down and went to as many appointments with her as he could.

When the doctor pointed out the baby girl in the sonogram, it felt like someone had seized his heart. That was his child in there. A bit of him and Anna. No matter how bad things got, he would have a daughter. He carried a printout of the sonogram in his wallet, reminding himself every night that he would be a good father to his kid.

Well, he wasn't getting off to a rousing start now, was he? Granted, it would help if the mother of his child actually told him she'd given birth. Luke didn't even find out from Anna directly. Her mother had called to deliver a scathing set down over his lack of attendance in the delivery room. He had skipped that night's game against the Astros and taken the first flight to Los Angeles.

The nursery was on the way to Anna's room, and he found himself lingering outside the window rather than walk into a fight. He quickly picked out the right bassinet, and his heart gave two hard thumps at the small bundle wrapped within. He caught the attending nurse's eye, tapped on the window, and held up his wrist. A wristband had been strapped on once they verified his ID and that Anna had recorded him as the child's father.

The nurse led him into a room where he washed and donned scrubs, then he was pushed into a chair as the baby was brought out to him. No name yet, the nurse informed him as she settled the baby in his arms. He remembered quickly from holding Jess how to do it right, and the nurse stepped away to give him privacy so he could greet his daughter for the first time.

Luke let himself look down into that tiny face, then froze.


"At first, I thought I had the wrong kid. For days, I was convinced that despite the stupid wristbands that someone mixed up my kid with someone else's. I knew Anna had started seeing other people before we broke it off completely. I suspected she had been cheating on me with another one of my teammates. To this day, I still don't know who the father is. But when I saw Anna's daughter for the first time, I knew right away she wasn't mine."


Luke left the hospital, refusing to confront Anna while she laid up with her family surrounding her. He went to her place three weeks after she brought baby April home, and informed her that they were done. With one problem. Despite everything Anna had put his name on the baby's birth certificate as the father.

He considered swallowing it and living with the lie for April's sake. She needed a father figure in her life. All kids did. But it was just wrong. Whoever he was, April's father needed to know he had a child in the world. He thought of a future with Anna, and saw nothing but a bleak loneliness as fight after fight rendered whatever scraps of affection he still had for Anna null. Not that there was much to begin with.

So he left. He changed his phone number and walked out of Anna Nardini's life.

Six months later, the court summons came.


"It took a year to sort everything out. Anna was suing for child support for a kid that wasn't even mine, so through the team, I got a stupid expensive lawyer who ordered a DNA test. Anna's legal team balked, arguing that I had accepted April as mine in the months leading up to the birth and my name was on the birth certificate. The test wasn't a surprise. Whoever the dad was, it wasn't me. So her legal team ordered a second DNA test. Same result. Finally, the judge ruled that I had no financial obligation to April, and even went so far as to chastise Anna for lying to me about it. My name was removed from April's birth certificate, and I thought it was over. Stupid me. Stupid, stupid me."

Luke wasn't sure he'd ever spoken so much at once. His throat was raw from all the talking, and he yearned for a glass of water. As his words hung in the air, Lorelai suddenly pushed off the sofa. She stomped into the kitchen, yanking open the freezer.

"What're you doing?" Luke got to his feet as Lorelai rummaged through the frozen meat and vegetables he kept stocked in there, muttering under her breath.

"Of course he wouldn't have any," she said, more to herself than to him. She brushed by him and through the unlocked door leading into Liz's half of the duplex.

Jess sprawled on the couch, an open copy of Franny & Zooey in his hands. He sprang into a sitting position as Lorelai tore into the room. "What the …?"

Luke followed, shaking his head at his nephew as Lorelai headed into Liz's kitchen and into her freezer. "Knew it," she said, emerging with an unopened pint of Ben & Jerry's.

"Hey, that doesn't belong to you," Jess protested.

"I'll pay your mom back," Lorelai tossed over her shoulder as she took her prize back into the other half of the duplex.

Jess gave his uncle a baleful stare. "You know how to pick 'em."

"Just go back to reading." Luke pulled the door behind him and frowned at the bolt. He had never locked his sister or Jess out of his half of the building, but for the first time, he was tempted.

In the interim, Lorelai had dug out two spoons and was headed back to the couch. "This requires ice cream."

He walked into the kitchen for that glass of water. "I don't eat ice cream."

"Everyone eats ice cream," she said as he filled the glass.

He took two deep swallows before he felt somewhat normal again. "Not the lactose intolerant."

Lorelai pried the top off the pint and licked the ice cream on the underside. "Are you?"

"No, but I'm still not having ice cream." But Luke could happily watch her eat ice cream for the rest of the day.

"I don't know about you, but I need ice cream right now." She dug in, waved her spoon at him. "Come on, at least a bite."

Resigned, he sat next to her and took the spoon she offered. He scooped out the tiniest of bites and sampled it. Cookie dough. Damn it, Liz. It was the one flavor of ice cream he permitted himself to eat, and his sister knew it. Luke took a bigger spoonful.

"Did I find your kryptonite?" Lorelai teased.

No, because he was pretty sure Lorelai herself was his kryptonite, not the damn ice cream.

They polished off the pint, and as they did so, Luke found the words coming a bit easier.

"By then, the media had gotten ahold of it. And these Hollywood types are crazy, especially with those rags you buy at the store. I ignored it throughout the legal case, figuring they would lay off once it came out that I wasn't April's father. But it got worse. Anna knew the system, and I didn't. She started spinning that I had lied and paid off the court to back out of my obligations to April. There were all these doctored photos of me with women I'd never even met, claiming I was sleeping around and getting them pregnant. I even had some lady spit on me when I was in the grocery store before she said she would pray to Jesus for my soul. I kept getting hounded by reporters, and it was putting my career at risk."

Luke jabbed at the bottom of the pint with his spoon. "What's ironic is that I was playing better than ever. But the press was bad for the team. So, I decided to prove I was too valuable to lose. I didn't have anything else. At the worst of it, Liz showed up with Jess in tow. She'd fallen off the radar after Jess' no-good dad split, and I couldn't find her. But she managed to find me, and she informed me that we were family and she wasn't going to leave me alone like that again." He glanced at the door linking the duplexes. "Liz was pretty messed up herself, especially after our dad died, but she read what happened to me in one of those tabloid rags. She didn't believe any of it. I suppose if anything good came out of it, it caused Liz to stop drinking and clean up her own life. She yelled at the reporters at the top of her lungs. Don't tell her this, but she sounded just like dad when she did so. I bought this duplex and we moved here. I spent all my time with Liz and Jess or at the clubhouse. Eventually, it almost stopped. It gets brought up again from time to time. I think you know the rest."

Lorelai didn't say anything, and Luke stared at the sticky drips of ice cream left in the empty container, too afraid to meet her gaze. He didn't want to see the pity he knew was there. She placed the container on the coffee table and took his hand, lacing their fingers together.

They sat in silence until Jess strolled in, asking for a ride to a friend's house.


Rory was reading on the couch when Lorelai walked in the house, and she was amused to find her daughter clutching a copy of Franny & Zooey. She really should orchestrate a meeting between her and Liz's son.

"Everything go OK?" Rory asked casually, then did a double take when she saw Lorelai's face. Mascara was smudged on her cheeks from where she had tried to wipe it away, and her eyes were red-rimmed. "Have you been crying?"

"Peachy keen, everything's fine!" A completely bald-faced lie. She had pulled over in the parking lot of a McDonald's and had cried her eyes out. For Luke. For April, who was doomed to be a pawn in her mother's life. For Liz and Jess. The pint of ice cream she had shared with Luke threatened to revisit itself in the parking lot.

Once the tears passed, the anger had swept in. Suddenly, banishment to Litchfield's library was too good for that little collection of Anna Nardini movies that had been banished from the Crap Shack. Screw the environment, only fire was good enough for those things.

"Which one did you pick?" Rory asked

Shit. "We couldn't, so Luke kept the applications and we're going over them again soon." Almost the truth. Mainly because she had forgotten them where they had fallen to the ground during their wild pre-confessional makeout session, and she hadn't thought at all afterward.

She looked at the clock. It was just now getting dark, and part of her wanted to go to bed. But more than anything, she wanted to snuggle with her kid.

"Hey, call in the usual to Joe's while I change. And you pick the movie."

An hour later, they were on the sofa, curled together with giant slices of pepperoni and watching Pretty Woman. But her thoughts kept drifting to an achingly lonely man who had shut himself away from the world to escape pain. She hugged Rory hard and tried not to cry into her pizza.


Cesar Muñoz worked as the night chef in a small 24-7 diner just off the interstate outside of Hartford. Luke came in shortly after 1 a.m., having just finished a game against Cleveland at Fenway. He ordered a turkey burger and a salad, silently approving of how the burger was made. It wasn't dried out, which was all too easy to do to turkey burgers.

The diner was small enough that Cesar also served as cashier and server for the overnight shift, and he came out from the kitchen to see if Luke needed anything else as he finished his meal.

Luke held up the application he brought with him, one of the ones Lorelai had left behind. "You interviewed with my …" Girlfriend? Manager? To be determined? Hell, he wasn't sure where to place Lorelai in the four days since he told her about Anna. "With Lorelai Gilmore in Stars Hollow," he amended. "Got a moment to chat?"

"Oh, yeah!" Cesar gratefully took the seat opposite. "I was starting to wonder when I hadn't heard back from the application. Figured I didn't get it, you know? But Ms. Gilmore seemed like the type to actually call and tell you no in person."

"How long have you tried to get a place?"

"About three years now. Let's just say my face is too charming for a lot of these New England towns." Cesar flashed Luke a wide grin. "Why don't you open a Mexican restaurant, they tell me. But that's not my dream, you know?"

He understood that. "And what is?"

"I watched Happy Days all the time when I was a kid, read Archie comic books. I wanted to run one of those types of diners. You know, like a soda hop. I've been saving for the space. I took some classes at the community college in Hartford, and there's a business outline there." Cesar outlined his plans for the building, which included preserving a lot of the built-in shelving his father had added to the place. "I've seen you on TV. You've got a wicked curve ball."

"Thanks." Luke braced himself for the oncoming accolades and fan gushing.

"You're the building owner, right?" Cesar asked, quickly switching topics.

"Yeah."

"Ms. Gilmore told me a bit about the history, but your old man built it, right?"

"Yeah." And he found himself telling Cesar about the history of the building, wishing he had some of those early photos right when the store opened. There was one Liz had which had him and her covered in sawdust after they discovered a pile of it. As he talked, Cesar had fished a pencil out of his apron and was taking notes on a napkin.

Luke went with his gut. "If you still want it, the lease is yours. There's my dad's old office above the space, but it can be turned into a small efficiency if you need an apartment. I can recommend a good builder who'll work with you to turn it into what you need. Just tell Lorelai what you want, and we'll make sure the work gets done."


He hadn't been in the Independence Inn since he was in high school. He'd taken odd jobs around the place, helping Mia out to earn a bit of extra cash. It was a good way to hone the handyman skills his dad had taught him, which went on to serve him well once he bought the duplex. What Luke hadn't told Lorelai was he had done most of the work in rehabbing the space for him, Liz, and Jess. With the media situation the way it was in the days after the scandal, he hadn't wanted to risk strangers having access to their things. He hadn't been so worried about himself, but rather Liz and Jess.

Once Liz moved in, her past exploits had gotten sucked into the fallout that was his life. So-called exclusive interviews with her ex-boyfriends, publication of her arrest records in New York and Connecticut littered the tabloids. At one point, child protection services had swooped in and attempted to take Jess away. It was only by the skin of their teeth and the same expensive lawyers that had gotten Luke through the court battle with Anna that Liz was able to maintain custody of Jess.

He sat in his dad's old truck, looking at the light burning in the front lobby of the inn. Six years since this entire mess began. He deserved to move on with his life. It was the one thing Luke realized as he went through the motions in the days following his talk with Lorelai. There hadn't been much of a chance to actually talk with her. Their phone calls had resumed, but the conversations steered far away from what they had talked about that day. They discussed the applications, Taylor, Rory, Liz, and Jess. She told him she was filling in for the night manager at the Independence for a couple of days, so Rory was spending the nights with Lane.

Luke wasn't even sure why he had come here. After chatting more with Cesar, he found himself order a burger and fries to go. The food sat next to him now, slowly cooling in its Styrofoam container. They were flying out to Anaheim in less than a day, and it would be another week before he had a day off. He was tired of the limbo, of being lonely. He wanted to see Lorelai more than he wanted his next breath. It was those things that propelled him toward the inn's front door.

And there she was, head pillowed atop her arms on the front desk, softly snoring. For a moment, he simply forgot how to breathe. He wondered how she would take it if he walked over and started running his hands through her hair.

Lorelai sniffed a bit. "Whoever has the cheeseburger, just leave it on the desk and back away slowly," she muttered into the polished wood of the desk.

Luke did as she asked, setting the container a few inches away from her nose. She sniffed once again, then cracked open an eye. "Man, those genies come up with some realistic hallucinations these days."

He wasn't sure he even wanted to know what she was dreaming about. "If you don't wake up and eat this, I'm dumping it in the trash."

She came fully awake, hair sticking out every which way as she snatched the container. "A wise man knows not to come between a Gilmore and food."

"I never said I was a wise man."

Lorelai had the top open and a fry in her mouth before Luke could blink. "Not bad. A little cold."

"Well, you'll be getting them fresh and hot soon enough."

"Oh yeah?" Lorelai took another fry, giving him a bright smile. "You picked the diner!"

"Yeah. I stopped by there on the way here and let him know." Luke outlined the same terms that he'd given Cesar, and she simply nodded.

"The house closed today," she informed him. "New owners are moving in this weekend. So we just need to get Cesar's paperwork squared away, and everything's good."

"Yup."

"And approval by the town for Cesar."

"Sorry, what?"

Annoyance flashed in her eyes, and she grabbed a pen to fidget with it. "Taylor came by the inn earlier. He knew we were close to picking a candidate, and told me that the selectmen would have final approval over the permits. It's just a formality, he claims."

Luke thought of how the other towns had turned Cesar away. All because of his heritage and his name. "They wouldn't shut out Cesar, would they?"

"I think Mrs. Kim would have Taylor's head if he tried. No, I think he just wants a say in everything. Taylor being Taylor and all. The meeting's on the 17th."

"I'll be there," Luke said without thought.

"You don't have to-"

"I'll be there," he repeated.

"OK." Lorelai absently doodled on a notepad with her pen before her head snapped up. "Hey, you should make me some coffee."

Luke just stared at her. She was out of her mind. "What? It's 3 a.m.!"

"C'mon, Luke. Please, please, please. You're here, I need coffee. The universe has put all the pieces in motion for this to happen. It's fate." Lorelai pulled a sign from beneath the desk, propping it next to the bell. She grabbed his arm and started tugging him toward the kitchen.

"How many have you had since starting work?" Luke asked, letting himself be towed along after her.

"None! Well, five. But yours is better!"

"Junkie," he scolded.

"Angel." Lorelai flashed a smile over her shoulder. "You've got wings, baby."

At that moment, Luke felt like he really could fly.