Chapter 11

A few weeks after they returned from New York, Emma and Neal pulled up to Regina's for their trip, half an hour behind schedule. Henry was out the door before the car was even stopped. "Whoa, buddy," Neal greeted him, window down. "Wait 'til the car's in park, okay?"

"I'm just excited, Dad! My first real road trip!"

"I know bud," he replied, stepping out of the car to toss Henry's suitcase in the trunk.

"Hey, I'm gonna go talk to Regina for a sec, okay?" Emma said, getting out of the car as well. "Can you get him settled?"

Neal nodded and she made her way up the walk, where she found Henry's other mother leaning against the front door, watching him.

"Hey," Emma greeted her.

Regina smiled tightly - a wordless, aloof greeting.

"I, uh… I just wanted to say thanks for letting us take Henry on this trip. I think it'll be good for all of us."

Regina shrugged. "Legally, he's yours, Miss Swan. I had no grounds to object."

"Listen, we both know that's not true. You could have made life very difficult if you didn't want him going."

"I suppose," she conceded.

"We'll be back next weekend, and I figured we'd drop him back by on our way into town. We'll call when we're close. Sound okay?"

Regina nodded, and Emma waved as she departed down the walk.


"What do you think they're talking about?" Henry asked his father as he jimmied the suitcase into the overstuffed trunk.

Neal shot him a look out of the corner of his eye, assuring Henry that he already knew the answer to the question.

"Yeah, that's what I figured. Me." He let out a sigh, far more burdened-sounding than one should from a young teenager. "Why do they always have to have drama?"

"Who says they're having drama, Henry?" Neal replied as he slid the passenger seat forward, allowing Henry to climb into the back seat.

"It's always drama with those two when it comes to me," he said, clambering into the backseat of the yellow car. He tossed his backpack onto the bench next to him and yanked the front seat back into position, allowing his father climb back into the car and shut the door behind him.

"Hey, they don't look angry. A bit uncomfortable, maybe," he said with a chuckle as he watched both women talking awkwardly, "but not angry."

"I suppose," Henry replied, watching his mother - his birth mother - come down the walk as quickly as she could without actually running.

"Wave bye to Regina," she said as she climbed into the car.

"Bye Mom!" Henry hollered, sticking a hand out of the front window as he plastered his face up against the glass next to him. Regina mustered up a smile and waved to her son, trying to fight her mounting feelings of exclusion by reminding herself that this was the best thing for him.

"Everybody ready?" Emma asked, as she put the car into gear.

"Yep!" came the enthusiastic response from the backseat, as Neal nodded next to her.

As Emma headed down the road and crossed the town line, it dawned on her that this was the first time that the three of them had been together in the car that had held such importance in their lives - at least since that fateful day in Portland, in which Henry was not even a whisper of a thought. She glanced at the boy in the rearview, marveling out how far they'd all come, separated for over a decade only for their insane lives to pull them back together.

They drove in silence for a while until Henry tried to shift in the backseat and found himself kicking something underfoot. "Hey, what's this?" he asked, lifting the wrapped parcel he'd found on the floorboard next to his feet.

"Road trip present for you," his father answered.

"For me?"

"It's a long trip, I thought you might want something to do other than play on your Game Boy."

"Especially since the battery's about ready to die," he lamented. "Can I open it?"

"Of course," his dad replied with a smile.

He opened the package to find a cellophane-wrapped set of books. "A Wrinkle in Time?" he read off the first book in the series. "That's an… unusual title," he continued.

"Belle suggested it. I looked up the summary and it sounded like something right up your alley."

Henry nodded in acceptance. "Thanks, Dad," he said, peeling off the cellophane and settling himself crosswise across the backseat as he opened the book.


A couple of hours into the drive they stopped to gas up the car. Emma and Henry popped out to use the restroom while Neal filled the tank, and they had headed back to the car before he even made it inside to pay. This made it easy for him to pick up a few small items unbeknownst to them before sliding into the driver's seat, his characteristic grin cluing Emma in that something was up. "Yes?" she said, inviting him to spill it.

"I got you a present," he said with a smile.

She closed her eyes briefly, hoping his sense of 'for old time's sake' did not extend to resurrecting his sticky fingers. "Please tell me you mean bought," she said quietly, eyes lighting to the ever-observant teen in the back seat as she hoped he remained wrapped up in the book he was currently devouring.

"Of course," Neal replied, his expression torn between amusement and hurt. "I'd never – especially not with Henry –"

"What about me?" came a voice from the backseat, their son perking up at the sound of his name.

"Nothing, kid," both parents replied in unison, causing Henry to laugh at them before returning to his story.

"Here," said Neal, handing her a card of ponytail holders. "Legal and everything."

"Thanks," she replied, tentatively accepting the gift. "I hardly ever…"

"Use those anymore? I've noticed. I miss the ponytail." His shrug was indifferent but his nerves were betrayed by the way he was unconsciously chewing on his bottom lip.

She shook her head, discretely sliding the hair ties into the door's pocket. "I don't really wear my hair like that anymore… not since Portland." The expression on her face indicated that he had hit a nerve he hadn't even realized was there.

"I'm sorry," he said with a small half-smile, "I didn't mean to bring up bad memories."

"It's okay," she reciprocated the smile. "Just been a long time."

They drove in silence for a few minutes, Neal watching Emma out of the corner of his eye, and to his relief she seemed to recover from the unexpected memories with a minimal of trouble, sinking back into the seat and resuming her chatter with Henry about the roadside sights.

As they merged onto the highway, Henry popped his head between the seats. "Hey, can we listen to some music or something?" he asked, one elbow propped on each seat, glancing between his parents.

"Sure," his dad replied. "I've got some on my phone," he told Emma, who picked it up from its resting spot between the seats and started thumbing through the listing.

"Lou Reed!" she exclaimed. "You have it!"

"Dad, you like Lou Reed too? Mom loves him," Henry said.

Neal chuckled. "I know she does, bud. Who do you think introduced her to his music?"

"You?"

"Yep. Not that she appreciated it at first…"

"Hey now! It was just… different than what I was used to," Emma defended.

"You mean… it was actual music and not a boy band?" She shot him a glare. "Anyways… your mom and I had been, uh, hanging out for a couple of days, and she was flipping through the radio one day, couldn't find anything she liked. So she asked me if we could put on a CD or something, and I laughed at her."

"Which, if I recall correctly, just about got you shoved out of the car at the next stoplight."

"Until I explained that the car was way too old to have a CD player, and if she didn't like the radio, her only other option was the Lou Reed 8-track jammed into the tape deck."

"What's an 8-track?" Henry asked, his childlike innocence shining through.

"Uh…" He glanced at Emma, who shrugged in deference. "It's like a tape, buddy. You know what that is, right?" Henry nodded. "It's like an older version of a tape, little bit bigger." He nodded again, and Neal continued on with his story. "So we put on Lou Reed and got about half a song in before your mom turned up her nose at it. But there was nothing else so we left it on… anyways, it grew on her, I guess. It was completely stuck in the player so it was that or the radio. And then, your mom hated this one song, so she'd just wind it back and listen to the one before again, since it was her favorite…"

"Which one?"

"Her favorite? Charley's Girl."

"That's still her favorite!" Henry exclaimed with excitement, eating up the opportunity to hear about his parents when they were younger. "We listened to it a lot in New York."

Neal shot Emma a look of surprise and found her looking sheepish, clearly embarrassed to have this bit of sentimentality exposed.

"Well, the entire tape only had about six or eight songs on it but with all of the skipping we mostly we just listened to that one. Over, and over, and over…"

"I fixed it though!"

"She did. Here's the funny part of the story, Henry. After about a month of listening to that tape, she finally got fed up and jimmied the thing out of there. Two days after that, she decided she missed Charley's Girl and stuck the darned thing back in!"

"You were so mad at me…"

"I kinda was."

"I didn't know it would get stuck again!" she said with a laugh.

"Of course then we realized since we didn't actually have any other 8-tracks it didn't really matter, so we just left it…"

Henry propped his chin on his fists and contentedly listened to his parents banter back and forth about their time together so long ago. When he'd gone to get Emma all those years prior, he hardly could have hoped they'd end up here like this, all three happy and spending time together. Outside of finally getting to visit the Enchanted Forest, he was reasonably certain that this trip was the best thing ever.


Later that night they drove on while Henry snored softly, stretched out across the backseat, having fallen asleep after the last time they'd stopped to switch drivers. From her spot behind the wheel, Emma caught Neal out of the corner of her eye, absentmindedly playing with the hair ties he'd given her earlier in the day. She released a drawn-out sigh before breaking the silence. "You really can't do that, Neal."

"What?"

"Assume that just because we're hanging out again, or whatever, that things are back to how they used to be."

"I didn't –"

"You kinda did."

"I'm sorry you felt that way, Em. I didn't mean to."

"Seriously, enough with the sorries."

"You're yelling at me, what did you want me to do then, if not apologize?"

"I wanted –" she stopped mid-statement, becoming aware of the rise in the volume of her voice and glancing back at Henry to ensure he was still asleep. Spying an approaching exit, she put on her blinker and abruptly changed the subject. "We need to get him into a bed."

"I dunno, he looks awfully comfy back there," Neal joked in an attempt to lighten the mood as he sent a fond glance at the boy sprawled across the backseat.

"You'll have to pardon me if I'd rather he didn't know what it was like to live out of a car," she replied, taking Neal aback with her ill-humored response. Confounded, he opted to sit silently until she'd found a hotel that was to her liking and gotten them a room. He retrieved the suitcases while Emma guided Henry to a bed, then followed her as she motioned for him to join her on the patio. Once they'd stepped outside, with the door closed solidly behind them, he broached the subject of her attitude in the car.

"You want to tell me what's going on, Em?"

"I'm not sure this trip was such a good idea, Neal."

"Okay?"

"It's all a little much, the proximity, the car, heading to Tallahasse…" Her voice caught in her throat as the statement trailed off and she studied the ground for a while, considering her next words as he waited patiently for her to continue. Looking up at him, she tried to explain her hesitance. "I didn't need anything when I met you, except to survive. And I was doing that, I was doing okay. And then I met you and you gave me everything I never knew I needed… my first friend, my first love, the promise of a home… even the child I never knew I wanted. And then you took it all away. So when I got out of prison, I found myself searching for these things I'd never needed before. I went to Tallahassee, I spent two years trying to find ANYTHING that resembled how I'd felt in those months we'd been together. There was nothing there for me, so I closed all of those doors for myself, convinced myself that was all I'd ever know of a home and a family, and it became my mission to make sure other people got the justice I couldn't have. I couldn't find you, I couldn't find my parents – but I could find people who had hurt someone by running out on them."

She looked at her feet for a while, and then back at him. "You broke me, Neal." She could tell it knocked the wind out of him, to hear her finally say it – a physical punch probably would have done less damage – but she was finally able to get it out. "Losing you, then giving up Henry… it shattered me. I do still love you – I never stopped, you know that – but this is still going to be a hard road back from that. We have to put the pieces back together, and that will take me some time. I need to learn to trust you again." Her voice dropped to a whisper, then. "Just please stay with me while I do that… I couldn't bear to lose you again."

True to his nature, he stepped forward and enveloped her in a hug – safe and warm on his chest. He buried his nose in her hair and she could feel his tears permeating through to her scalp. "I'm sorry, Emma… I'm so, so sorry. I know you don't want to hear it, but I have to say it. What August told me – I only wanted to get you to your family."

She pulled back slightly to look up at him. "And you did, in the end, and of course I'm thankful for that. But what I don't think you understood then – I'm not sure you understand now – is that you're the only family I needed. Why didn't you have faith that you were enough?"

She could hear him take shaky breaths in and out for a solid minute before he answered, absent of his usual carefree bravado. "How could I be? I wasn't enough for my mother to stay, I wasn't enough for my father to choose me over his power. I was a thief, a liar, I had nothing to offer you. Why should you be stuck in that life when you could have everything you'd ever wanted – find the parents you'd always longed for, answer those questions of why they'd given you up, how you'd come to be found on the side of the road. I had nothing to offer you that could compete with that, Emma. Nothing."

"Not true," she pulled back, challenging him as she met his gaze. "You had YOU. You're what I wanted, what I needed. And you said I was what you wanted…"

"More than anything."

"And yet you left." It was his turn to look at his feet now, as she soldiered forward. "It was just… everything… it was there and then it was gone. And for two months, I was alone again - just me, in a cinderblock cell, biding my time until I could get out and scrape together a semblance of a life. Hoping that maybe the whole thing had been a misunderstanding. Until one day –" she hesitated, not wanting to dump on him further, not needing to harp again about how he hadn't been there for Henry.

He looked up at her, waiting a moment in the silence to see if she'd continue, watching as she studied the cluster of trees that lay just beyond the edge of the patio. When she didn't, he prompted her. "Tell me about it?" She shook her head, no, biting her lip and he knew without seeing her face that she was trying to keep tears from falling. "Have you ever told anyone?" She answered with another shake of the head, and the answer did not surprise him. He reached out to lay a comforting hand on her arm, and asked again. "Tell me how you found out about Henry?"

She looked back at him, finally, and he saw that she'd lost the battle with the tears. He reached up to brush them away with a thumb and bit back the instinct to say "I'm sorry" for the millionth time. Her lower lip remained clamped firmly between her teeth, but at the action he saw the ghost of a smile wash across her face. It only lasted a moment, but with it left the vacant, terrified look her in eyes and to his surprise she started to relay the story.

"I kept getting sick… I didn't eat a lot and just figured it was stress or whatever but there was finally a warden who had enough. She sent me to the nurse they had there, who asked me all kinds of questions – I think at first she thought I had an eating disorder or was trying for sympathy or something. Then she lit onto the questions about my last period, all I could think was, 'Who keeps track of that when you're living out of a car?' We didn't even know what day it was half the time, you know?" He sent her a small smile of camaraderie, recalling precisely what she was talking about. "When she asked if I'd had one in the two months since I'd gotten there, I knew – I just knew. I hadn't realized I'd been in so long, the days all ran together, but two months and… it just made so much sense. She had me take a test but I didn't need to wait to see what it said to know.

"So once they were satisfied I wasn't dying of the plague or making myself puke for no reason, they sent me back to my cell, test in hand. And I didn't know what to think, then, whether I should be happy or sad or terrified – in the end I guess it was kind of all three, at points. So I just sat there, cross-legged on my cot, and stared at this plastic stick for, I dunno, probably a couple of hours. Which is when I got the keys."

"Oh, Emma," he said, his voice thick with regret, barely biting back the apology that leapt to mind. "Can I ask? When—"

"A couple of days before the watches, I guess."

He shook his head. "We should have been more careful," he responded, and couldn't hold back the "I'm sorry," that followed.

"For Henry?" she replied, raising her eyebrow and tilting her head towards the hotel room where the boy slept. "Don't be."

A small smile. "Well, I guess I can't be sorry for Henry, I don't really regret him. But… for you having to go through that, alone."

"I wondered, a lot, how different it would have been if – if…"

"If we'd gotten to Tallahassee?"

"Yeah." She paused and then, "Even with twenty thousand dollars, I'm not sure we were in any place to raise a kid. I was just a kid myself, what did I know about raising one?"

He frowned slightly. "We would've figured it out."

"I don't know, Neal. Regina was able to give him everything-"

"Everything? Obviously not - he went to find you. She wasn't you. Material things aren't everything. You know that better than anyone."

She bit her lip, tears threatening to fall again. "I really wish you'd been there." She stood silent for a moment before expounding on the thought. "Having even one voice that had faith in me might have made a difference. They had all of these classes and counseling sessions they made me do, and every last one of them worked to plant the idea that I had no business keeping him. By the time he was born, I'd been thoroughly convinced that if I wanted to do right by him, there was no other option." She blew out a long, steady breath. "Carrying him had been such a bundle of conflicts anyways... I'd lay there at night and feel him rolling around under my skin - and part of me desperately wanted to cling to him as this piece of you that you'd unknowingly left behind. But then some nights it was like he was this tiny adversary, serving as a constant reminder of the pain of you leaving, keeping me tied to you even when I just wanted to be done. In those moments, it was everything I could do not to resent him. But it wasn't his fault, he didn't ask to be created, to be brought into this crazy screwed-up situation. And at the end of the day he was my child, and I loved him in ways I couldn't begin to comprehend. If I had kept him..." she shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. "I loved him enough to give him up. I had to give him a shot at the family I hadn't had and couldn't give him.

"It doesn't matter now, really. The past is the past and it can't be changed." She caught herself and chuckled. "Well... I guess it can, but we won't be going that road," she said with a shake of her head and a faint smile.

"You did what you felt was best," he replied. "I don't fault you for it. I hate that I wasn't around for the two of you, but I don't doubt that you made the right choice given the circumstances."

"Yeah," she replied. "Regina's fake memories are nice and all but... it's a bit of a pipe dream. I don't think it really would have all gone down as smoothly as she had me believing it did."

It was his turn to shake his head. "That's gotta be tough, Em. The two sets of memories thing."

She shrugged. "I'll manage."

"Listen, if this trip is too tough... we can always go back home. Or change destinations," he offered. "I thought it would be helpful. I don't want it to cause you more pain."

"No, I wouldn't want to disappoint Henry like that. He's so excited... I'll be fine. I just wasn't prepared for the flood of emotions from heading there, this time with you guys instead of without you."

"If you're sure..." he offered tentatively.

"I think so," she said, a small smile serving as a peace offering.

"We should probably get to bed, then. Long drive again tomorrow."

They returned to the room and Neal chuckled as he saw Henry spread out, somehow occupying every square inch of the double bed. Emma groaned before walking over to give him a gentle shove. "Hey, kid. You gotta move over, your Dad needs some space too."

He muttered as he rolled over, never really waking up. Emma looked over at Neal, gathering his bedclothes, and told him, "Kid sleeps like a rock. Definitely got that from you."

He laughed as he headed into the bathroom, grateful that despite the past he got to spend time learning these things about his child in the present.