I don't own Hereos :(

Thank you again to the readers and reviewers! I was going to wait to reveal more about Olivia, but have decided that the story might flow better if you guys weren't always in the dark about what was going on. Don't worry, next chapter will deal with Gabriel, Olivia and Peter so you won't have to keep wondering what is going to happen next there.

Enjoy!!!!!

Chapter 13

"When she was 15 she broke her ankle walking down the front steps to catch the school bus…" Tina had been spewing out inconsequential mundane details about her daughter's life for over a half hour.

Nathan seemed to have the patience of a saint as he quietly sat listening to the woman talk about her daughter without actually having revealed anything particularly useful. He was content enough to let her continue rambling at first, thinking she would quickly run out of steam. Unfortunately for Nathan she had more tidbits of pointless information than he could have guessed. It made him wonder how long his own mother would be able to go on like this.

When Nathan abruptly stood from his chair Tina snapped her mouth shut. Nathan's expression was blank as he stared at her. She knew then her game was over, but was surprised at how long he had let it continue. Without a word Nathan turned and headed for the door causing a surge of panic to rush through his prisoner.

"Wait!" She called to him, half rising from her chair.

"What? Are you going to tell me how she lost her first tooth, or maybe about her first date? I'm sorry Tina but I don't have time for games." He spoke in a very professional manner, void of any discernable emotion and continued to the door.

"She swallowed the first tooth she lost in the middle of the night and she's never been on a date!" Tina added quickly, before Nathan could leave.

At that he halted and turned to face the woman. His eyebrows came together in confusion as he searched her face for any hint of a lie. The statement was odd, but intriguing.

"Never been on a date?" Nathan queried.

"No…she…she doesn't trust easily. It was always hard for her to make friends." Tina admitted.

"Because of her ability…" Nathan assumed.

"No, she's been that way almost her entire life. The ability had nothing to do with it." Tina corrected.

Now he knew they were getting somewhere. "Why?" He asked.

Tina turned her head and pursed her lips, wishing she hadn't divulged the information so freely in an effort to keep him from leaving. She wanted her daughter to have a chance at some sort of life, and if that meant providing assistance to the government on this matter then Tina was willing to make that choice for Olivia. But Nathan wanting to know everything about her was another story. Pertinent information was one thing, but there were events in her past, in anybodys past, that should remain their personal secret to tell, this was one of those events.

Finally Tina huffed out the breath she had been holding and looked again at Nathan. "When Olivia was five we lived in Pennsylvania, a city called Bethlehem…"

Olivia and David's parents had been friends for years, since Olivia's older sister was born. The two children lived next door to each other since before either of them had been old enough to form memories. They grew up forced to play together by their parents who assumed the two children being of the same age should form a friendship of some sort, and they did, as children of that age often make friends without prejudice. Both of them were even in Mr. Elmer's afternoon kindergarten class together. They lived in a nice neighborhood where the worst crime to occur was underage drinking at the park across the street from their houses. What made the area even more agreeable was that any parent with a kid under the age of 12 had a built in babysitter as Olivia and David's teacher lived on the block and would often spend Saturday afternoons over at the park with the kids which afforded their parents a nice break from the chaos. The kids loved him as he would push them on the merry go round and the swings, make sure they didn't fall off the slide when they attempted to run up it instead of slide down it, and always carried a tube of Neosporin and a pocket full of band aids for when some one got a scrape or cut. Olivia's sister Kyra was nine years her senior and couldn't be bothered with the youngsters as she had important mall loitering to do on the weekends.

It was a Sunday in April when Olivia had tapped on David's front door and asked his mother if he could come outside. Of course neither his mother nor David had any objections and they both ran off to the playground to spend the late afternoon. Disagreements between the two children were not uncommon, and that day was no different. Olivia wanted to go on the swings and David wanted to use the sliding board. The activities were at opposite ends of the playground area, and while it was not overly spacious there were quite a few trees obstructing the view from one end to the other. Their parents always told them to stay together when they were over there, not to wonder off and lose each other. But they weren't concerned about those sorts of things, they were children.

The sun had started to sink down beneath the tops of the trees signaling the five year old Olivia that it was almost time to go home. She hopped off her swing and scurried over to the slide to ask David to check what time it was on the cool new digital watch that his dad had bought him for his birthday in February. When Olivia rounded the last tree she looked for David, but he wasn't there. She turned to the merry go round but he wasn't there either. She yelled his name twice, then started chewing her nails as she got scared realizing that David wasn't around. Immediately she ran home to tell her mom that she couldn't find David over at the park. Her mom didn't look that worried and told her he was probably just hiding. Tina took Olivia back over to the playground and the two of them looked for David, Olivia thinking then that it was merely hide and seek. After about 15 minutes Tina hadn't been able to sense the boy anywhere in the area and began to feel her heart crawl into her throat as she realized the boy just wasn't there.

By the time nine o'clock came around Tina and David's mom Eileen had half the neighborhood either searching the park with flashlights or driving around in the vicinity looking for the boy in case he had just wandered off. The police waited until midnight to put out the amber alert when the boy still hadn't turned up.

The next two days Tina kept Olivia home from school since she wouldn't eat, or play, or talk really at all. Even with Tina's ability she hadn't been able to get her daughter to open up, she had barely been able to get a good sense of how she was felling. On the third day she had an idea and asked Mr. Elmer, Roy, to come over and try to talk to Olivia, get her to come out of the shell that had been hardening around her. Tina was at work, and instructed Kyra to stay home from school and keep an eye on Olivia until Roy came over in the early afternoon before his class.

As soon as Kyra let Roy in the door and Olivia heard his voice she scampered out of her room and ran to him wrapping her little arms around his legs. He laughed and smiled down at her before picking her up and taking them both over to the couch. Kyra returned to her room with a roll of her eyes leaving Roy to try and talk to the troubled Olivia.

After about an hour Kyra stopped the CD in her stereo to change the disc and could hear laughing from the living room. She went out to check on her and saw that her sister was actually smiling as Roy helped her color in her coloring book. He told Kyra that he would be taking Olivia with him to class that day, and Olivia nodded furiously in agreement.

The next two weeks Olivia slowly began acting like herself again, and Tina could finally get a read on what was going on with her youngest daughter. She found, not shockingly, that Olivia felt responsible for David being gone because they were supposed to stick together and Olivia hadn't done that. She could have gone on the slide with him, she liked the slide, but she was tired of always doing what David wanted to do so she stubbornly insisted that she wanted to go on the swings. In her naïve young mind it was all her fault. When Tina tried to talk to her about it she wouldn't say a word, just folded her arms and looked at the floor. Kyra had told Tina about how Mr. Elmer had gotten Olivia to laugh and color the day she went back to school so Tina thought it would be a better idea to have Olivia talk to some one she felt comfortable with, instead of forcing Olivia to open up to her.

It had become a regular event. Tina and her husband Tim would both leave for work, and before Kyra got the bus for school Roy would come over and keep an eye on Olivia before taking her to class with him in the afternoon instead of Olivia going to daycare for the morning. Then, three weeks after David's disappearance his body was found in a shallow hole about seven miles away from their neighborhood in a small patch of woods. Everyone was shocked. It was in the local papers that the boy had been kidnapped and killed, but it wasn't immediately released that he had been assaulted first. Tina insisted that Roy be there when Olivia found out, knowing how fragile she still was, even though a brightness had started to return to her eyes. At first Olivia didn't understand why David wouldn't be coming home. Tina, Tim and Roy had only told her that David was in a better place. It wasn't until later that night Olivia had been sneaking back out into the kitchen while her parents watched the news that she passed her sister's partially open bedroom door. Kyra was on the phone talking to a friend about David and had said something about the funeral. At that Olivia started wailing. She knew what a funeral was; it was when they buried you in the ground because you were asleep and couldn't wake up. Olivia hardly thought that was a better place than being at home with his mom. She retreated even farther into herself. Tina was coming undone by the fact that she then couldn't sense a single emotion coming off of her little girl even thought she was clearly overtaken by grief.

The visits by Roy didn't stop, they in fact increased. After school was over for the day Tina and Tim gave permission for Olivia to spend some time over at his house since he wasn't able to give her his full attention during class and Olivia had been anything but cooperative in the mornings. Again, slowly over the next week Olivia started talking again and Tina judged Roy Elmer to be a godsend to her daughter.

Exactly five weeks to the day that David had gone missing Olivia was drawing a picture in Roy's living room as he made grilled cheese in the kitchen. The crayon she had been using broke in half, and since she wasn't finished with the color she got up and made her way over to the cabinet where she had seen he kept his art supplies. On the bottom shelf she saw a big wooden box stained almost black. Carefully she opened it hoping to find a new box of crayons or maybe even some markers, but when she pulled the lid up and saw what was inside she didn't understand why he would keep it in the art cabinet. There were pictures of kids, necklaces, matchbox cars…and a digital watch. Olivia looked at it, and wanted to grab it and put it in her pocket to take home with her because she knew it was David's watch and looking at it made her smile. She knew stealing was wrong and she could get in big trouble if she took it and Mr. Elmer noticed it was gone, so she replaced the lid and closed the cabinet door.

The next day, a Saturday, Tina asked Olivia if she wanted to go over to the park together and Tina would push her on the swings. Olivia didn't want to go, she wanted to go over to Mr. Elmer's and look at David's watch again. Tina asked her what she meant and Olivia told her that she felt better after seeing that David's watch wouldn't be under the ground like he was. It didn't take long for Tina to comprehend what Olivia had inadvertently told her, and she immediately called the police knowing through Eileen that David's watch had been missing when they found him. Eileen had hoped it was just lost in the woods where he had been discovered and it would be founds and returned to her, but the police had a different idea about what could have happened to it.

Roy Elmer was arrested and charged with the sexual assault and murder of David Bellows. The more they searched his home they more evidence they found that he had been doing what he did for quite some time. The box Olivia had found contained the photos of over a dozen children, none of which had been indentified as living in the immediate area. Over the next few months it would come out that Mr. Elmer had a different name in almost every state he had lived in, and everywhere he had been there was either a missing child case or the unsolved murder of a child.

In October of that same year, three weeks before her birthday, Olivia had been required to give testimony in chambers during Elmer's trial. While he had never made Olivia one of his victims in anyway, she had spent almost everyday in his care during the five week period between the crime taking place and him being caught. It was Olivia's finding of the watch that had set it all in motion in the first place, and at the very least she was required to tell that story.

Tina was distraught over the entire ordeal and hated herself for leaving her child with the monster. She racked her brain trying to figure out how she of all people had not known she was trusting her child to some one like that, how she had not felt what kind of man he was. But thinking back on it she could hardly remember ever having been alone with the man, and on occasion when they were in the same room Olivia was always there and she was Tina's main focus.

Elmer was convicted and sentenced to a life term for the crime before being extradited to another state to be tried for another murder of another child. Tina was afraid that Olivia would never recover after having lost her best friend because of the only person she had felt she could talk to about it. In December Tina and Tim learned they would be expecting their third child, and they made the decision to move away from that place in order to give their new baby, and Olivia, a fresh start. They settled in a town called Seekonk, Rhode Island, a place not unlike their last home.

"…It took a while, but Olivia got better, started talking and laughing again. She made friends with a girl down the street and it seemed she going to continue on like a normal little girl…as normal as we could expect her to be. I noticed changes in her; she didn't talk as much as she used to, she was so shy around other kids, she was very weary of strangers, especially male adults, and she never ever talked about David or Mr. Elmer. Not even when she was older. I once asked her if she ever thought about David. She just looked at me and asked 'who?' But I felt it, when I said his name I felt a blunt wallop of pain right to my chest like some one had hit me with a baseball bat. I never mentioned it again after that." Tina sighed and looked up at Nathan as she finished her story.

Nathan had taken his seat at some point and sat arms folded across his chest listening to every word Tina had said, wanting to absorb as much information as possible. Nathan felt sad after hearing the story. For anyone to have their childhood disrupted in such a horrible way was a thing of evil. At the very least however Nathan would better understand the kind of woman he endeavored to persuade.

"How about now?" Nathan posed.

Tina closed her eyes, knowing that she had given Nathan exactly what he wanted. "Like I said, she never talks about it. As she got older I think she forced herself to forget by offering herself up as a shoulder to lean on to anyone she knew that needed it, her way of keeping from thinking about her own problems."

"But you're her mother, she never confided in you?" Nathan probed, wanting to know more.

"In ways." Tina looked sadly at her lap. "If it weren't for my ability I'm afraid I wouldn't know half as much about the inner workings of my daughters heart as I do."

Nathan looked at his watch. He had been talking with Tina for quite some time, but didn't feel that he was done just yet. He had one more question. "Of what you do know, would you say that if some one gave her the opportunity to help stop people who hurt others, or help save people from being hurt…would she take it?"

Tina knew her answer would solidify her daughter's future roll in Nathan's plan, and keep her from enduring the kind of confinement she feared might mentally destroy her child. She saw this as a way to make up for the terrible decisions she had made all those years ago when she could have saved Olivia from the events that would change her from the inside out.

"Without a doubt." Tina responded simply, no longer looking at Nathan as he rose from his seat with a satisfied nod of his head.

"Thank you Tina." He said as he opened the door. "When we do find her, I'll be sure to let you two have a reunion…if that's something you think would be helpful to her."

Tina merely nodded as she sat feeling a little more than guilty and nervous about her daughter's immediate future.