Author's Note:Who ever would have thought we would have reached chapter 10? Not me that's for sure. And this is the last part of The Chapter That Would Not End (ie 8, 9 & 10) with all of it's important back story and mytharc. We are come now to the Big Reveal.

I feel like this is a good time to remind you all that this story is completely AU. I started working on mytharc theory last December, and continued to work on it for months. Berlin parts 1 & 2 have made me even more AU than i started out, but I honestly really liked my version of events and I decided to stick it out. In the end, I don't know how much I improved the situation, but I think I added at least a little bit of agency to Liz's mother's narrative. Warning: this chapter contains implied violence against women and children. You knew this already of course, but it's talked about it more directly here and I thought it fair to warn you. I know I find it difficult to write.

My next updates will be slower in coming, I'm sorry to say, but they will move the story forward at a greater rate now that you all are grounded in this AU. This chapter is unbeta'd and all mistakes are my own.

Oh you creatures of endless hope

who wear but do not soften

even when faced with days limned by fire,

cracking open, fearful, like fallen jars,

the spoiled promise of preserves vouchsafed

by fruitful seasons that once walked broad and mild

now made over in dust and withered cane,

- War Winter (we go on)

So he told her. Slowly, painstakingly through the course of the longest winter's night, he brought out the pieces of the story and laid them out before her, so she could inspect each one and test it's weight and it's clarity.

He told her of becoming the protege of a very powerful man, a man who turned out to be several magnitudes more powerful than his rank and position would lead any bystander to believe. A man who stood together with a handful men in positions equally powerful - or moreso - at the center of a web, a coalition, a vast network that was unseen and unknown but had a hand in influencing most of the pieces on the board in the Western World, and even now their power was spreading outward.

But he hadn't known any of that as a young sailor. He was just a man who was good at his job, grim though it sometimes was, whose boss liked him. He's been proud, expected imminent advancement.

Then his commanding officer's wife had sought him out, cornered him for a few minutes at a party at his commander's house for friends and colleagues and their wives and kids. She pulled him aside in the cover of the commotion and begged him to listen, begged him to meet again.

"I've seen you, you're his favorite, his current pet project," Julia had told him, "I think you're a good man and I don't think he's corrupted you yet, but he will if you give him a chance. You'll be in over your head so fast you won't even know what happened. It happened to me. I need your help. My daughter needs your help. Please just listen. And please don't tell anyone or my life is in danger."

And she was lovely and graceful, with the biggest, deepest blue eyes, and panicked, he recognized her very real desperation, and also the steel in her that would not give out. So he did the decent thing, and met with her again, and didn't tell anyone, planning to hear her out and see if her claims were valid - and then, most likely he would go to his commanding officer and get her the help that she needed. He'd never really believed she was as out of touch with reality as the rumours made out, and just that touch of doubt made him keep quiet, just in case she really was under threat.

The story Julia had to tell was a horror.

"Are you sure you want to hear all of this, Lizzy?," he asked, pausing in the tale and coming back to the present to study her face, "What your father did to your mother is a very hard thing to hear."

"I need to know it. I have to," she had stood then, restless with nervous energy and sick dread, and went to peer out the windows between the curtains, not knowing what else to do with herself, though her eyes took in nothing beyond the glass. "Please, go on. I'll tell you if i need you to stop."

Julia, Liz's mother, had married a man she loved and he had turned rotten on her - or rather revealed himself as what he'd been all along. He was a charismatic man with no natural empathy, driven only by his own ambition and his need to control everything around him. He changed from charming and attentive, to demanding, selfish, manipulative, cool most of the time with busts of fury that was aimed at her, and sometimes spilled over on their little daughter.

He wasn't violent, she said, not often, not always. And anyway it wasn't being handled a little rough that worried her the most, though she hated it and grew to hate him. No, it was the coldness in him that frightened her. She was sure, she said, that if she crossed him, if she tried to leave, he would kill her.

She'd had to turn watchful, vigilant, always aware of her husband and her surroundings. And in her careful creeping, she'd accidentally overheard a couple conversations in her husband's study, and they had worried her. They had sounded all wrong. So she had started poking through her husband's things when he was away with his work - which he was for great lengths of time when he was on assignment - she'd found things in his papers. She'd found a bank book, for an account hadn't known he kept with the kind of money in it that terrified, her because it couldn't have been honestly earned.

She started keeping track of what faces came around for a 'casual drink' late at night when her husband sent her off to bed as soon as they appeared. She had done her research and she had found nothing good. But she knew no one would believe her, after all he was a respected man, and more than that his allies were powerful and even more respected, and she was just an unstable housewife in the eyes of the law.

She knew her husband was not a good man, that was dangerous not just to her but to everyone in his sphere of influence - and that, she said, was endless. She wanted to get away from him, take her little girl and go somewhere safe. But she didn't know how she could possibly do that when her husband's reach stretched around the world with the weight of so many official channels behind him. Her only hope was to take him down but she didn't know how to do that either. She was trapped.

Her only hope was her husband's young protege - maybe he wasn't tied into it yet, maybe he could use his access, maybe he would do the right thing.

She had pressed a stack of handwritten notes and bad photo-copies into Red's hands, and rushed off home to pick up her daughter from preschool, leaving him to sit in the little cafe and pour over everything. He didn't want to believe it, but it had the awful ring of truth. He wanted to go to the authorities, he wasn't even sure which ones, but Julia had made him promise to tell no one, she was sure her life was on the line, and he was beginning to be inclined to believe it.

He'd looked into it on his own and confirmed what she'd found, and more, but only in the most roundabout ways. Nothing could definitely be tied back to the man in question or his cohorts, and as he looked, the few tracks he'd found were erased as though they'd never been. In the end he was left only with his own suspicion, a taint that coloured his promising career, and the memory of the real mortal fear in the face of his commander's wife.

"Were you in love with her?" asked Liz as he paused, afraid of the answer, not wanting to hear she was nothing more than an extension of some long buried feelings for her mother.

"No. I was in love with my wife, though our marriage was maybe not what I… it was more difficult than I like to remember at times," he told her, blunt and definite and she was relieved.

"I was not in love with your mother," He continued, "It was something more insidious than that, something full of much more ego. I thought I could save her. I thought I could swoop in and bring a bad man to justice and free a captive woman and her little child."

It was slow going and he moved very carefully, but no one was any the wiser. They'd trained him for intelligence work after all and he was a prodigy. But he had no case and could prove nothing. He might have been a young man on the rise but he held no real power, yet. He'd run out of avenues to pursue, began to doubt his own intuition.

He had his own wife to look after, his own daughter. He didn't want to do anything that would hurt them, or disrupt their lives. He didn't want to worry them. He wanted them to be happy and safe. For a time he put aside his investigations and began to live his life again. But his eyes were open, and now he saw that not all of the things they were ordered to do were ordered for the right reasons. He could no longer serve out all his missions without wondering if the reasons behind it were for the good of the country or the advancement of the fortune and power of one man and his friends.

His conscience gnawed at him. He couldn't sleep easily and he couldn't tell Sarah why.

In time Julia contacted him again, wanting to know what progress he'd made. He didn't have much good to tell her. She made it clear she and her daughter needed to get out. She couldn't stand living in perpetual fear anymore and she didn't want her daughter living that way either. They couldn't wait. They needed to leave now, and do it so they would never, ever be found. They needed to do it so there were trails leading in opposite directions, so that Julia and Lizzy, as her mother called her, would simply vanish with no trace.

But they were up against a very powerful man, and they had few resources, and no plan is foolproof.

Raymond was aware with every step farther in that he was putting himself in danger, and he was putting his young family in danger. But at the same time, he was a father, he knew what it was to worry about a child before anything else. How could he abandon another person's daughter to the winds of fate?

They hatched a plan. The little girl would be got out first. She had turned five that autumn, old enough that it was possible to move her separately from her mother - and that was vital because a girl alone was easy to hide and a woman alone almost as easy, but a woman and a girl together would be far easier to recognize and track.

"Wait," she interrupted, alarmed, "Autumn? My birthday's in May."

"I'm sorry, Lizzy," he said, and he really did sound pained, full of remorse, but that didn't help the sinking feeling of realizing that almost nothing she knew about herself was true. He'd been right all along. "Sam and I had to change many of the details when making your new identity. I always thought that was especially cruel, but it was necessary to hide you away."

"But my name is really my name, right? I couldn't have forgotten that could I?" she asked, sounding desperate and not caring. Something of her had to be real and permanent. She wasn't willing to be stripped of all identity. Even if her name had been changed, she nearly hoped he would lie and tell her it hadn't, or she was sure she would collapse into nothingness.

"Yes, absolutely yes. You were born Elizabeth, and unless you want to change it, Elizabeth you shall remain," he reassured, and hesitated, something obviously bothering him. "You were introduced to me as Lizzy, all those years ago. It's a hard habit to change, but would you really like it better if I called you Liz?"

A little late to worry about that now, she thought, and looked over at him sharply, seeing he was sincere, maybe even a little chagrined. She considered it, not carefully, her mind in too much disarray. Tom had called her Liz and she hoped he never would again. Red called her Lizzy and it had driven her up the wall at first, it was so personal, intrusive, but now, now she would much rather be his Lizzy and he would be her Red, not the terror and the masquerade, the general of the invisible war, but the man. The man who was friend and protector though it defied all rational sense.

"No," she said at last, casually, belieing it's vital importance, "Lizzy's fine."

Julia would go to her sister and her fiance's in New York State, by train for a long weekend, under the pretence of wedding planning, and thus a solid alibi was made. Her sister, who knew the danger, would swear it being a normal visit, that nothing was amiss, and give Julia a few days lead time.

Raymond would sneak in one dark winter's night and help the child escape. Then he would take the girl to meet her mother in a distant location and the three of them would make the long drive out to Raymond's old brother-in-arms, Sam. Sam who had been a mentor and friend to him, Sam who had felt something souring in the air around their unit and had retired from the Navy when his tour was up, who had planned to settle down with the woman he thought he was going to marry and have a family, Sam who came from a cold, stifling home where he and his sister had basically raised each other and who wanted a big, warm family somewhere quiet to make up for the lack. He was the only person Raymond knew who was comfortably out of view of the major players, and he was happy to look after the girl for a while, with the help of his girlfriend Maggie.

It wasn't supposed to be forever, at the time, just long enough that it would be safe for Julia to come and get her.

"You're being so careful to leave out the names, but I have your files," she said at one point, putting off thinking about the implications of this tale, "I have all your files from the Post Office because Cooper wanted me to do a profile while you were still… away, so I could just look it all up."

"Lizzy," he said, weary and faintly exasperated, "Do you really think the files haven't been doctored, and a very long time ago? Do you really think these people would be that careless?"

"But they couldn't - it was hardly the dark ages, people were keeping track."

"Oh, yes, they very easily could. Haven't I always said that everything about me is a lie? What exactly did you think I meant?"

"I was so young then, just a stripling, a boy. I didn't know it, though. I thought I was a brave knight riding in to right all wrongs. I thought my honor and courage would save me and reward me. It's a wonder your mother trusted me at all, but she was desperate and she had no other avenues of escape, not with what her husband was. Looking back, it's amazing the plan worked as well as it did," he shook his head, watching it unfold all over again in his memory, hazy with time and all the traumas that had passed since.

Liz had returned to perch beside him, unable to venture far from the lure of his low voice, but uneasy, somehow frightened of the story he told, sure that more horrors waited within it that she suddenly didn't really want to face. She had demanded these answers over and over, and now she thought she saw why he hadn't relented. He hadn't done it simply to string her along, to keep her interested. He'd been kind. He'd known that she had needed to keep her wits about to to survive Tom. He hadn't wanted to dismantle her whole sense of self.

"Now that I've gotten to know you, Lizzy," he continued, interrupting her thoughts, "As you are, I hardly think of that little girl I met that night more than twenty-five years ago. She was very brave. And she refused to leave without her teddy bear, this floppy, ratty bear almost scuppered the whole endeavor. But she was you Lizzy, I came and stole you away."

"You were the man in the shadows. You were the man in the car," she said as though testing out the concept and leaned forward and inspected his face as though she might be able to recognize it from her own past, but she couldn't. He was just Red, beloved but not familiar in that way. She might have recently found some dim silhouettes in her memory but she couldn't connect them to his present self or hers.

"You remember?" he said, clearly surprised.

"Maybe. Not really. It was something in a dream," she paused and thought of the little picture of Young Sam and Young Red that she'd found, but even that young face didn't mean anything to her. It was far too long ago, and her early years had always been alarmingly diffuse to her, but his story sounded so similar to what had been appearing in her subconscious mind - And she didn't believe he would lie to her, not now, not tonight when dishonesty would break them both.

"So why didn't she come back?" she asked at last "Why didn't she ever come and get me?"

But she knew there could only be one answer, or else why would such a devoted mother abandon her child forever and ever in a stranger's care, however trustworthy he turned out to be?

The girl had been delivered safely to her would-be temporary home and Raymond had gone back to his life, with his new pretense that nothing had changed while he continued to work to uncover the web that surrounded his boss, and Julia got a call at her sister's house that her daughter had disappeared from her bed. The calls had been answered by Julia's sister, of course, taking advantage of the similarity of their voices.

Julia was reported as having failed to return home from her sister's, though in truth she'd been on the road a few days earlier. It was done, she too had disappeared.

Raymond didn't know what happened to her for the next three years and would never know. He made very little progress with his own investigations. He had his career to maintain, and sometimes he even forgot that any of the other, darker truths were real. Other times he was painfully aware that he was working the career he once valued above anything else as a cover, as a means of access.

It took him years, but eventually he had a slim notebook if damning facts he could finally show someone to prove his case. Even then he did not understand how conspiracy stretched, he trusted the wrong authorities to be impartial and incorruptible and planned to bring his information forward.

It was only as a precaution that he sent his wife and daughter away to his grandparent's old place in the country and started the process of turning in the man who'd made him protege. He planned to join them later, and celebrate the holidays in joy and relief of a job well done.

It was then that there came another of the fateful confluences of unstoppable events.

Julia had lived so carefully for so long, had fallen down into crushing, debilitating depression over the separation from her daughter, her desperate circumstances - and begun to climb out again. She became sure the she was out from under the threat of her former husband and his connections. She sought out her daughter, hoping to make a home with her at long last. But she was not free and safe, she had been watched all that long while by patient minions waiting to see where she had stashed the girl.

She saw her daughter once, from a distance, and talked briefly with the man who had become the girl's adopted father. Then she was caught.

The girl's father sent men to steal back the girl, once more in the middle of the night. Sam fought them off, and somehow the house was set ablaze. The girl tried to open her bedroom door and her hand was burnt on the handle. She called for her Daddy but he was fighting off the men who'd come for her. She climbed out the window of her second floor bedroom to the porch roof and fell trying to climb down the drainpipe - hit her head. Never had a clear recollection of that night, or the day before it, or even the day after it in the hospital, where Sam had rushed her as soon as he found her on the ground outside after desperately searching the house.

She and Sam and Aunt Judy, and her cousins moved to Nebraska immediately after that, on the insurance money from the house. Sam's business changed, that too, moving underground.

Action was taken on the report Raymond had turned in, not towards justice but towards obfuscation. Transfers were made, reports were changed, tracks were wiped away.

The man whose daughter he'd stolen made the connection between the records the young man had kept and the things his wife had said before she died. If he'd simply been a nuisance they would have killed him, no matter what failsafes he'd put in place - and he had, he'd at least been canny enough to know that he should - or who his father was, but since he had wronged his commander so personally, he was punished instead. He was left alive and made to suffer. He was discredited and made harmless - or so they thought - and robbed of something of equal value.

They made him into a traitor. They sent him underground. They took his Sarah and his Abby and left so much blood - He had hurried to meet them on Christmas eve, thinking his work was accomplished, that justice for the guilty and corrupt was on it's way down from on high.

He found so much blood. And a little baby tooth. He looked all over the house and all around the house, in the fields, in the old Meadow, even digging in the snow, and he found nothing more of them. Not even blood. Not even tracks. They were gone.

He knew they could not still live, he knew it. But he didn't know it, somehow he still didn't know it, somehow for a half second at a time, once every few years he believed he might still find them. Or his daughter, at least, because after all, who could kill a little child?

But that hope was a sweet madness, and it hurt him as much as it spurred him on.

The time after that, months, more than a year, more than two, was a wreck of pain of confusion that he could never clearly remember, could never even put the events in a solid order. All of it hurt. All of it was impossible. It was impossible that he was even alive. He thought at times it would be better if he weren't, but though they'd taken everything else, he still had that information in his head, and that was to valuable to waste on death. And he still had contacts on the ground, even if he used to know them from the other side of the law.

He lived. He found a benefactor, or rather a benefactor found him. He planned to make his own justice.

The story had taken hours to tell, most of the night. Sometimes he spoke so slowly, paused for so long that she thought he wasn't going to continue. She had looked over at him, once, as he hesitated and saw his face so full of pain, as though he had to dredge each word from deep within himself, as if each word cut him as he spoke it. She turned away, kept her eyes focused on nothing, the dark distance, and gave him what privacy she could.

Liz listed, spellbound and horrified by everything she heard, but not disbelieving. She knew he wouldn't lie to her this way, and that no lie could cause him this much agony. She tried to absorb and understand, but it was too big, and too strange, and it felt like the air was getting so thin, and she was vibrating all the way through with nerves and confusion - as though the danger in his tale had been invited into the room and might soon attack.

She had started out with his hand in hers, comforting and warm, but she was too restless, they were both were, to sit comfortably, as though the size of the history that was between them kept forcing them opposite ends of the room. She had paced, and then she had perched on the edge of the her seat as though she had been on the verge of flight. He had paced, he had sat beside her, he had stood, distant from her, peering out into the night between the thin white curtains.

In the end, dizzy with the facts of her past reforming around her, she had settled on the floor, her back pressed hard into the front of the couch, her knees bent, staring at the corner of the coffee table as she tried to weather the revelations that had poured down on her.

She pressed a hand to her forehead and reminded herself to breathe. She heard Red leave the room and rustle around in the kitchen and return. She didn't look up. She made a strangled sort of noise, somewhere between distress and relief and a tortured kind of irony. She had finally gotten what she'd asked for. She hadn't really expected a nice story, had she? Well. Now she knew.

Red sat very carefully on the couch beside her, his knee and her shoulder touched. A balloon glass of amber liquid extended into her field of vision, and after a moment's hesitation she took it from him.

"Not my usual choice, but it's what dear old Isaac had in his cupboard. Sip it nicely now, it's the good stuff," he told her quietly. His voice was hoarse and dry from overuse. She heard him sip his own drink and sigh, like he was the tiredest man alive.

"Do I really look like I need a drink?" she asked, trying for humour but her voice sounded wrong, too.

"You look like you need several, but there's every chance you're going to be called in to talk about Tom Keen tomorrow. I don't think a hangover would help our cause."

"Oh, god. That was just today, wasn't it? Or yesterday now, I guess."

It was, in fact, a very nice brandy, she found after a shaky sip, but the acid made her stomach hurt. She was fairly sure she would drink it anyway. Too much, she thought, it's far, far too much for two people to bare. I don't think it'll work. We'll go crazy.

"You must hate me," she said, a hard, desperate whisper, "How is it you don't hate me? Me for her doesn't seem like a fair trade."

"I think maybe I did for a short while, but only because I hated everything. I hated myself. I hated everything that continued on and kept breathing when they were gone. But how can you resent a little child?" he said this as though he were sorry for admitting to it, but hadn't she asked for the truth? "And like I told you before, Lizzy… you were the one good thing, I had helped to keep you safe," he continued on, rushing to make himself understood, not to let her think there might still be any bad feeling, "And if you were happy and well, maybe that helped to balance out all the other sins I have committed. And now I know the real you, not as a good deed or a symbol, but as a truly remarkable person… " He stopped, seemingly unsure what to say.

She wondered idly if anyone else had ever gotten the whole tale from him, or if she was the only one. She had a feeling she knew the answer to that one all on her own.

"You were the thing to come out that wreck largely unharmed. All I wanted was to continue to protect you, like some mysterious benefactor, I suppose… and that way it wouldn't all have happened entirely for nothing. Because you really are something, Lizzy," he told her, after some time, after some careful, calming breaths, "Someone precious. But even in that I wasn't careful enough."

She thought of Tom, and wondered for the thousandth time about the person-or-organization Berlin who had sent him. She wondered if they would ever catch up with her husband and wring that information out of him. She wondered how Berlin could have known enough of their tangled history to know she was important enough to target. To know that she could be used to lure out Red, when she'd had no idea.

She wondered if she ever would have met Red, have ever even seen his face as a grown woman if it hadn't been for Tom conniving his way into her life. She had a feeling she knew the answer to that one, too.

When Red had spoken of finding his family, or not finding them - finding gore instead, in his old family home where he had thought them safe, she couldn't even picture the pain, the fear and grief of it.

Her mind turned towards the image, still fresh in her mind, of the woman and the girl that Eric Trettle had murdered and mutilated to stand in for his own wife and child, the two lifeless figures on the floor of that nice, clean house. All the blood, and the smell of it, the dark glisten of it. She pictured walking into a house she thought was her home, on a night where she had expect to celebrate, and finding that instead - and worse.

It was a wonder he was still standing. It was a wonder his mind was the quick, sharp, brilliant thing it was, not turned in on itself and lost down a maze of grief. Or maybe it was, she realized, maybe, in some ways, he was still finding his way back.

"Which is not to say I'm an innocent, Lizzy," he had warned her, at one point that night, "Just because they fabricated my first offence, that doesn't make me innocent of all the others. You must never forget that. I am not a good man, I'm selfish and I'm dangerous. I'm not a tender man - I might have been once, sometimes I can remember, but not now. I don't have any mercy."

"I know," she said in the smallest, quietest voice, because she knew - intellectually she knew that it was true. But her whole chest hurt with the longing to protest, because he was tender with her, and careful, and patient, and told her the truth. He might not be a good man, but he was good to her.

She knew that made her selfish, to value that above all his other crimes, but she couldn't help it. He was frustrating and he was unpredictable, but to her, he was kind.

She'd been keeping the little picture close, though she didn't question or articulate why. It was a reassuring token, and yet also a troubling one but she had puzzles enough to dog her days that she let this one small indulgence stand without giving it much thought. It came with her out of that house in an interior pocket of her coat that had been left in the car, and mostly she was glad that the agents taking apart the house never saw it.

She thought maybe it was her good luck charm, leading her to the truth over and over. Maybe that wasn't so much luck, because the knowing had hurt her. Knowing, she realized, had endangered her life and also saved her, both at once.

After a long time in silence, as she sat on the floor and finished her measure of brandy, she thought of the picture again. She set her glass aside and struggled to her feet, her bruised body wanting to rebel, and rushed back to her room to retrieve it from her coat.

When she returned, Red was still and slumped and lost in thought as if he thought she'd run off from him again, as if he didn't expect her back. She saw him rub a hand over his face and behind his neck, slumping forward even further. It was strange the way, even now, in the midst of everything else, she was captivated by the line of his nose, the fan of his lowered eyelashes. This used to frighten her, the pull she felt, but she'd begun to accept it as unalterable - and the least of her worries.

She stopped and stood in front of him, and then consciously sat herself next to him, abrupt and intruding in his space. She held up the little snapshot. Sam, Raymond and the girl, who must have been his Abby, tiny and captured on paper.

"Here," she said, waiting for him to acknowledge her and take it, and didn't look at him because she felt her throat closing up with tears and didn't want him to see, "Sam kept this, I found it in his things. I thought… I thought you might like to have it."

He slid it out of her fingers, as careful as it were a precious, ancient relic. And it was. She heard him take a ragged breath and pressed her shoulder hard against his. There were tears running down her face and she wasn't even sure why and she didn't bother to wipe them away.

"I'm sure you'd prefer," he said, and cleared his throat, "I bet you wish he'd been the one to show up last August."

"No," she said, definite, almost insulted, but she knew he was trying not to dwell on the other aspects of the picture, "No, I wouldn't prefer him. I don't know him. I know you."

He was quiet again, and upset and lost in thought, and she had no idea how to comfort him, or if she should even try - or how she'd come from barely tolerating his presence those months ago to wanting nothing more than to make him stop hurting.

"Thank you," he said, at length, "I didn't have any pictures of her."

Morning came far too early. She hadn't gotten any more sleep, but Red had sent her off eventually to get a few hours rest. She'd gone along with the idea because her head felt full and her heart was racing and he was right, Cooper would almost certainly be calling her in to give official statements. It was going to be humiliating enough without being too exhausted to speak.

The day began clear and bright and dry and freezing, the promised cold snap coming through - and her head still felt too full and her sense of reality had warped, maybe at last irreparably. But the world was continuing on as though nothing had changed. And nothing had changed, not in fact, it was just that now she knew, and she hadn't known before and she had to get used to a new perspective.

And Hudson was whining and yipping and needing his morning walk and his breakfast, and there was a message on her phone, a firm request for her presence at the Post Office at ten. She got up. She went on.