1981

There was a different woman behind the counter at the florist shop. She was younger, about his mom's age, and kind of pretty. "I'm John," John announced nervously. "The lady last night, she was going to make me an arrangement."

"Oh, yes." The pretty woman smiled at him. "She told me." She turned to the cooler and came out with a white box that was about two feet wide and five feet long. "Here you go. Are you okay on your bike with this?"

John gawked at her. The bike wasn't a problem; he could put it under his arm, if it wasn't too heavy. But it was way too big for what it was supposed to have in it. "I don't think this is right," he stammered. "I only had ten dollars."

She nodded. "I know."

"But …"

She opened the box. Inside was an absolute explosion of flowers and greens. Most of the flowers were red. Carnations, John saw, and small roses, and peonies. And poppies. And a bunch of flowers he couldn't name. There were other flowers, purple and gold and yellow, that made the reds look redder, somehow. They were all tied with a big red ribbon. It was beautiful. But it was obvious even to the boy that it was worth way more than ten dollars.

"I can't …" he began.

The young woman put the lid on the box and wrapped it shut with white string from the dispenser with quick efficiency. She tied it at the top, the bottom, and the middle. "That should get them home for you."

"But I only …"

She looked at him. "Your friend died. You're using your own money to buy him flowers. And you have very nice manners. All that counts for a lot with Mrs. Winters. An awful lot."

The name on the front of the building said Winters Florist. John hadn't realized, the night before, that he was talking with the owner. He backed away from the counter. "It's too much, I can't …"

"John. Can I tell you a secret?" He moved forward again, but not too close. "Mrs. Winter's grandson died last year. He wasn't much older than you. She wanted to do this, for you and your friend, but it's also for her. It made her feel good to do this. It helped her. Understand?"

He did. He wouldn't have accepted the flowers otherwise, but he understood. "I …will you tell her thank you for me? I mean, really really thank you?"

She smiled, relieved. "Of course."

That wasn't enough, John thought. He would write her a note when he got back from the cemetery. A nice note on his mom's good paper — she'd give him a couple sheets if he asked — in his very best handwriting. He'd do a draft first on notebook paper to make sure he had it right. Ask his mom to look it over for spelling. And he'd bring it back himself, some time when Mrs. Winters was here.

That still wasn't enough, but it was a start.

"Thank you," he said again. He tucked the big box under his arm and went out.

2013

The entire city block was derelict, but it was by no means abandoned. Reese could see people in every shadowy corner. The users and the sellers. The furtive exchanges. The faces turned away. The place reeked of desperation.

Christine Fitzgerald moved through the squalor easily, quietly. Her dark clothes, her quiet voice, her careful undersized gestures made her unobtrusive. She belonged here, or she had once, and the city remembered. She stopped and questioned people occasionally. Her words alarmed no one. The regulars answered her, mostly with head shakes and shrugs. No one here, John knew, cared much about who else was here. But she kept moving and kept asking.

If her arrival didn't disturb the dealers and the junkies, Reese's certainly did. In his black overcoat and shiny shoes, he moved through the brackish squalor like a shark, and the little fish scattered anxiously before him. He hung well back of the woman, but his movement spread like waves ahead of him. It was going to catch up with her in minutes.

Christine stopped for a longer conversation with a skeletal pale man in a grayish coat. Reese dropped into his own shadow and was very still. After a moment, the woman produced something from her pocket. It was small, green, and even from a distance he knew it was cash. She gave it to the skeleton. He turned away, into his private shadow. When he turned back he handed her something similarly small, white.

She put it in her pocket.

Reese straightened, adjusted his coat. He had zip ties in his pocket; if he had to, he could bind her hands. He hoped it wouldn't come to that. But he hadn't expected her to go this far off the edge. He felt sick with disappointment and regret. He didn't doubt for a moment that his actions, the ones that had led to Agent Donnelly's death, had led directly to Christine's actions here tonight.

It was already bad. He could only keep it from getting any worse.

The wave of anxious whispers that ran ahead of him reached the woman and her dealer. They both turned to look in his direction. The skeleton vanished back into the darkness. Christine stood very still for a moment. Then she dropped her pretense of invisibility and strode directly past him and out of the alley.

Reese dropped the pretense that she didn't know he was there and simply followed her.

She leaned against the side of his car and waited for him. When he was close enough, she said, "What are you doing, John?"

Her tone was quiet, flat, just a little challenging. She was past her snapping angry stage. This was deeper. Reese was not impressed. "I'm watching a junkie who's been clean for more than a decade buy heroin in an alley." He held his hand out. "Give it here."

Christine stared at him. "No."

They'd had a moment like this once before, when they first met. It had ended with her taking a swing at him. They'd both known then that her little fist wouldn't actually get through his defenses. They still knew. He kept his hand out and gave her a moment to consider whether she wanted to make him take it from her. "Christine."

She reached into her coat pocket, then put her hand out and dropped something white into his palm. Reese frowned. It was very light. He unfolded the paper without taking his eyes off the woman. It was empty. Just paper, nothing more. He glanced at it. There was an address scrawled on it.

"Is this where we go?" Reese asked. "To get the drugs?"

"To get what I came for," Christine answered coldly.

"Let's go, then."

He moved toward the car, but Christine shook her head. "We can walk."

"All right." He took her arm lightly. Her body practically crackled with resentment, but she didn't pull away.

At the end of the block, she said, "Did you ever drink until you blacked out?"

Reese felt himself bristle, but her tone was unexpectedly conversational. He rewarded her attitude adjustment with an answer. "Once or twice."

"Ever get any of that time back?"

He glanced at her, puzzled.

"I lost three years," Christine explained. "I remember some of it, but there are days, weeks, that are just gone. Except once in a while, something comes to the surface. A little shard of memory shows up, a tiny glimpse. And I almost always wish it hadn't."

She pulled her arm gently out of his grasp, but kept walking beside him. "There's this guy, in my memory. I see his face, and his jacket. It's just plain black, the jacket, wool, but the one button here at the neck, it's been sewn on with dark green thread. It must have fallen off and someone sewed it back on by hand, but with green instead of black."

Reese nodded, though she didn't seem to need any encouragement.

"This man, he's laughing. Everybody's laughing. He has a twenty dollar bill between his fingers, folded, and he's holding it up over his head, like this." She put one arm up, her first two fingers stuck up, the others folded down. "Like this, where I can't reach." She put her arm back down. "Twenty dollars. And I need it. Because my teeth hurt."

"Your teeth?" It bothered him that she was speaking in the present tense, as if she could see everything unfolding in front of her. As if it were happening right now.

As if he would let it happen.

"When I start to come down," she explained readily, "when I need to fix, I grind my teeth. I never know I'm doing it, I'm not aware of it, but my teeth start to hurt. In the back." She rubbed her jaw with both hands, over the joints. "When my teeth hurt, I know I need to fix. Before I crash, before it gets worse. So there's this man, with this twenty dollar bill, and I need it because my teeth hurt. And if I can get that money, I can get right, I can make everything stop again. But he won't give it to me. He's holding it up," again her hand reached up, "and he's laughing at me. And he wants something from me."

Reese knew where the story was going. He wanted to stop her; he didn't want to hear it. But he clenched his own teeth and kept walking.

"I can't remember what he wants," Christine continued, quietly. "This little piece of memory, it's just that moment, isolated. I don't know what he wants. But it doesn't matter. Because my teeth hurt. So whatever he wants, no matter how disgusting or degrading or … painful it is, it doesn't matter. I'll do it. Because I have to have that twenty dollar bill. To make my teeth stop hurting. Because that's all that matters, that next fix. And that's all that will ever matter. Whatever he wants me to do, or whatever he wants to do to me, I'll go along. And I'll do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, as long as he has that twenty dollars. Because that's what it is, when you're an addict. Nothing else matters except the drug. You understand that, right?"

John nodded grimly. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I need you to tell me something." She stopped dead in the center of the sidewalk. When John turned to face her, she looked him squarely in the eye. "What have I done to make you think that I'm fucking stupid enough to go back to that?"

Reese felt his breath catch, as if she had actually managed to hit him, in the gut and hard. He stared at her. She stared right back. Her blue eyes were sharp and angry; for an instant he was sure they could cut right through him. And she was …

He could see it clearly: Bear kept following the cat, even after she'd warned him off with growls and hisses, until finally she spun around and lashed out, pinking his nose with her claw …

… right. She was absolutely right.

He dropped his eyes away from hers. He could still feel her gaze burning into him. "You're right," he admitted, very softly. He brushed his hand across his nose to make sure it was not, in fact, bleeding, though she hadn't physically touched him. Then he glanced up. "You're right."

"Damn straight I'm right. What the hell is wrong with you? I tell you I need a little space and next thing I know you're clocking my dates and following me all over the city."

… perfectly aware that he could bite the little cat in half, but unwilling to do so, Bear took the only step he could that would prevent her from hurting him further: He rolled over on his back, exposing his throat and his belly, placing himself at her mercy …

John put his hands up in front of his chest, palms out, open. "You're right. I'm way over the line. I apologize. It won't happen again."

His surrender led her to break off her attack. Her glare softened. She sighed, exasperated. "What is it, John?" she asked, almost gently.

"I don't know," he muttered.

It's the sweatshirt, he thought as he spoke. It's Nicholas Donnelly's damn sweatshirt. The fact that he even owned something as casual as a well-worn sweatshirt. The fact that he'd been someone other than the Fed in the Suit relentlessly chasing the Man in the Suit. That he'd been a real person. That he'd had a girlfriend and sisters and an ex-wife. That he'd had an apartment and a ratty old sweatshirt in his closet or drawer or laundry basket …

And of course John had known all of those things, but he'd kept them at a safe distance. The Army had taught him that, and the CIA had reinforced it. Enemies were not people; they could not be. Because if he remembered that the men he was shooting had mothers and dirty clothes and ex-wives, he might hesitate – and that hesitation could get him or his allies killed.

Agent Donnelly had not been an enemy, precisely. An adversary, certainly. And a good one. John's mission, his work with Finch, had led directly to Donnelly's death. He'd been able to shove that into the background, into the dark corner of his mind marked 'collateral damage'. He had not thought about Donnelly much. He'd been focused on his own survival. And then on making sure his own seemingly inevitable death caused as little damage as possible. And after …

… after, he'd celebrated that he still had his life.

Bad people had died by John's hand. Good people had died as well. A great many people that Reese wasn't sure about had died. Every one of them, good, bad or unknown, had had lives, families, comfortable old sweatshirts. Some variation of those things, anyhow.

And all of those things had ended with him

If he actually let himself consider the results of his destructiveness, he knew he couldn't live with himself.

He wasn't ready yet to think about Nicholas Donnelly as a person. He wasn't that strong. He hadn't come that far out of the darkness. Donnelly had to remain an abstract.

But Christine was real. And Donnelly had been a person to her. She'd considered him a friend, and she mourned his loss. If John couldn't let himself grieve for the dead agent, he couldn't help but to grieve for the woman left behind.

Donnelly had been, despite his flaws, a good man. And if John was honest about it, he knew that the agent might have been good for her. He might have helped repair some of the damage Christine's dark childhood had inflicted on her. Given time, he might even have made her happy. But he hadn't had time. And he'd wasted what time he did have chasing the Man in the Suit. If it hadn't been for John, they might have found a way. Donnelly was patient, persistent. He could have worn down her defenses, waited out her resistance. He could have given her a home, a family. A more conventional life. The life she deserved, and would likely now never have.

All those possibilities, remote as they may have been, had vanished the moment Kara Stanton pulled the trigger. All the futures, all the good things that might have come into Christine's life through Nicholas Donnelly, were lost in that instant. It was likely that she didn't even realize they'd existed. But John knew. And in their place, now, she had an old sweatshirt with rolled-up sleeves that made her feel a little less lonely.

There was nothing John could do to fix it. Nothing he could give her that came close to replacing the potential life she'd lost. Nothing except to fall back on his oldest instinct: To protect her. To take care of her. To look after her as Donnelly might have if Stanton had not ended his life.

If John had not led Kara to come after him …

The fact that Christine Fitzgerald needed looking after less than any civilian Reese had ever known, and that she actively resisted and resented it, had not deterred him in the least. It was all he had.

It wasn't what she needed. But it was the only thing he could do.

And he couldn't tell Christine any of that.

"I don't know," he muttered again. He pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket and held it out to her. "Here." And though it made him feel physically sick, he added, "Go … do whatever you were doing here."

He half-expected her to snatch the paper and vanish. Instead, Christine studied him for a very long moment. He could see equal parts puzzlement and perception in her eyes; it was as if she were exploring the corners of his brain, looking for the answers he could not give her.

And checking that his capitulation had been genuine.

Whatever answered she found, she breathed out softly and he could see the rest of her anger leave her body. She folded his hand back over the scrap. "You can come with me if you want."

"Where are we going?" He was careful to keep any trace of suspicion out of his voice.

"To find a man who can't forget what I can't remember." She turned and started off.

John exhaled, relieved, grateful, and followed her.

Finch sat back and stared at the code. It was definitely code, computer code, though he didn't recognize it. Some kind of activation code. It was a bit flowery, unnecessarily complex. A bit amateurish, actually. But it would work, whatever it was.

What he didn't know, he mused, was why Hart Roth had been working on it. Had he been encrypting it, or cracking it? And was it something important, or simply a clever puzzle someone had put in front of the young man to keep him busy?

Reese might be right, he mused. Day-by-Day might have nothing at all to do with the attempts on Dylan Roth's life. But it was the only thing in the young man's life that seemed at all out of the ordinary. John had broken into Liquid Lite and looked around, but there was nothing very suggestive there. Finch didn't know where he was looking next.

He looked at the data Christine had compiled on the new residents. They had all been diagnosed as autistic. All of them were deemed to have near-genius IQ's or higher. All of them were profoundly gifted in mathematics. He wondered if they had anything else in common.

Fortunately, he had all of Mr. Jackson's records to tell him the answer.