Charlotte's on her third piece of pizza, feeling like a glutton, when Travis' cell phone starts ringing. He frowns at it, then pauses the episode of Mythbusters they've been watching and says, "I've gotta take this," before answering. Charlotte waves a hand dismissively – you've gotta take the calls you've gotta take, after all.

"Hi," he answers, and she can tell by the low tone of his voice that this isn't a business call. "It's late; is everything okay?" East Coast, she thinks. It's not quite what one would consider too-late-to-call here in LA. He's still frowning, until suddenly he isn't. Suddenly he's smiling, chuckling a little and saying, "Yeah, of course. Put her on." Charlotte feels a bit like a voyeur, so she shifts her gaze to her pizza, picks off a black olive and pops it in her mouth. Then does it again. Her ears are all on him though.

"Hey, cricket." His voice is even softer now, and if that wasn't a good indication he was talking to a child, he follows it with, "Momma says you're havin' bad dreams, huh?" Charlotte's heart is torn between melting and breaking. "Monsters? Well, you tell those big bad monsters that they've gotta reckon with me if they want to get to you." She smiles, and it's almost painful. "What?" he scoffs. "I am too scary. I'm a big, scary guy. I can kill any monster deader than dirt, and don't you ever doubt it."

Travis had always been good with kids. His cousin Bailey was a goddamned baby factory, and there'd been more than one family cookout where she'd watched him tear ass around the back yard after the boys, or patch up scrapes and flirt harmlessly with the girls. She used to think what a great dad he'd be if they ever got around to having babies. And then they'd been thrust into the idea of parenthood and had it taken away just as quickly, and when everything went to hell in a handbasket, she'd vowed never to think of babies again. Until Cooper, that is. She'd wanted babies with Cooper.

"Why, yes, little ma'am, I will. They won't come within a frog's hair of ya, I promise. And if they do, I'll take 'em out quicker than they can blink." She wonders about the little girl on the other end of the line. Wonders what it was like to have Travis as a daddy for a little while, to have him as a surrogate daddy now. Wonders what he'd have been like with their kid, if she hadn't lost it. Her heart aches, and it's getting a little hard to breathe in here. "I promise, cricket. You're safe as houses. Just close your eyes and imagine me right there with ya, keepin' you safe. Okay. Sleep tight, and don't let the bed bugs bite." He chuckles again, and then kills her: "Love you bunchies and bunchies and banana boat munchies right back, cricket."

He hangs up, and looks at her, and the anxiety must be written all over her face because suddenly he's apologizing. "I'm sorry – I should have taken that in the other room."

Charlotte swallows down the hurt and forces a smile, shaking her head. "No, it's fine. The monsters all taken care of?"

"Yeah. She has night terrors sometimes. She had a real bad one once, and I talked her down and tucked her back in, and in the morning she said when the monsters came back I killed 'em for her and kept her safe. So every once in a while now, they'll call real late so I can talk to Kota. As long as I promise to protect her, the monsters never win, she says. Swears it only works if they hear it straight from me."

It's so quaintly domestic, so everyday and parental, that Charlotte almost wants to scream. Her own parents were God-awful soothers, and the nannies never stayed nights. Charlotte fought her own monsters, stayed up wide-eyed and scared in her big princess bed through the fury of thunderstorms and nightmares. She still has the night terrors, now and then. Awful, drowning dreams, where she's pushed under and held down, and fight as she might, she can't ever break free. Travis always talked her through, just like he did Kota, with soft words and soothing hands, and promises that he'd never let her down. She'd sworn up and down that if she ever had kids, they'd get the full Evans kiss-and-cuddle treatment instead of the nothing's-under-that-bed-now-you'd-better-get-back-in-it that she got. But Evans babies weren't in the cards for her, and she wasn't the kiss and cuddle type on her own. She feels cheated, on two counts. But there's nothing to be done to change that now, so she just finds herself thinking of little Dakota and saying, "She sounds sweet."

"As pie." He looks at her for a second, really looks at her, that way he does that'd make her feel naked through a parka. When he opens his mouth again, what he says makes her stomach drop. "Y'know, we never really talked about what happened..."

She doesn't need the clarification. They both know he's talking about the miscarriage. "We talked about it when it happened."

"Not really. Not enough."

"I'm not a talker."

"Charlotte-" He reaches over, threads his fingers lightly with hers and squeezes.

"I'm not a talker," she tells him again, before he can start in with something sweet and soothing meant to wear her down. This is one conversation she is not willing to have with him.

"You are when you wanna be."

"Well, I don't wanna be."

"We should've talked-"

"You talked to Todd. I know you talked to your parents, to..." Trisha's name dies on her lips. She can't quite bring herself to go there.

"They're not my wife," he tells her, and she thinks maybe she dropped the ball in their marriage more times than she knows. "None of them were my wife."

"Travis, I don't want to talk about this, okay?"

"Lola-"

"I don't want to talk about this right now," she says, more sternly. This whole thing makes her heart hurt too much. "I can't."

He doesn't say anything for a minute, just looks at her, and when she sneaks a glance at him, he's watching her with this expression on his face that says he's disappointed in this, in how this conversation is going, but she just doesn't have it in her.

"It's in the past. It's done, it happened, talking about it won't undo it, so let's just not, okay?" she tries again, and he sighs, nods his head.

"Fine." Then he gives her hand a little tug. "C'mere." Charlotte doesn't budge. She's not entirely sure that she won't actually cry if he ends up holdin' her, and she's already let him baby her through a heartache once in the recent past. She doesn't want this to become a pattern. But he's persistent, wrapping his other arm around her bicep, and telling her again, "Come here."

She lets him reel her in until she's resting against him, her head on his shoulder, and she tells herself she does it because if she can't give him the conversation he wants (the one she apparently couldn't give him years ago, either), the least she can do is let him comfort her a little. She knows him well enough to know he draws from that as much as she does. He traces his fingers through her hair in slow, lazy passes, and presses a kiss to her forehead; she closes her eyes.

After a minute, she exhales, says the only thing she can think of right now: "Life is unfair, Travis."

He chuckles, but it's a little bitter. She thinks she knows the feeling. "Yeah. It is."

"We got dealt a shitty hand. We were supposed to have a marriage, and a family, and a life, and we got... crap."

He kisses the top of her head again, tugs her arm across his body and wraps his other over her shoulders. "Yeah. But we had some good years, didn't we?"

She tilts her head up to look at him, smiles through the sadness. "So, what? We should just be grateful for what we had?"

"What else can we be?" he asks, and she thinks they can be a whole lot things. Angry, bitter, resentful, hurt. She knows because she's been all of them, over this, for years. She can forgive him, she thinks. She has, in fact. But forgiving life is a whole other story, so she just tilts her head back down, reaches her hand over to press PLAY on the remote. They stay that way, pressed together, for the rest of this episode and all through the next, and she tries not to think about the miscarriage anymore. When she finally sits up, intent on heading home before it gets to be too late, she's all out of whack and has to squeeze her shoulder to work out the ache. His hands cover hers, warm and familiar, kneading gently and after that it takes her another five minutes to muster up the will to leave. Still, her neck twinges the whole drive home.