A/N: The next few chapters will deal with "the bad thing that happened to little Lilly." I've tried to avoid graphic details, but it still won't be any more comfortable to read than it was to write. So, by its very nature, this chapter is pretty angsty. Apologies in advance. I hope I don't bum you out.

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, nor can I control them. Both facts are unfortunate.

Chapter 21: Look After You

It's always have and never hold
You've begun to feel like home
What's mine is yours to leave or take
What's mine is yours to make your own

The drive to the crime scene was mostly quiet. After the news they'd received, Scotty didn't seem much in the mood for talking, and Lilly was glad. She was still trying to piece together what Stillman had meant by what he'd left unsaid. All he'd told her was that they'd found the body of a child, which was tough enough ordinarily, but his voice had had an extra added note of compassion, of warning, almost, that this case might be difficult for her. She tried to think if maybe she would have known the victim, but Boss had said there was no ID yet, so that couldn't have been it. Lilly wracked her brain for a logical explanation, trying to fight the dread that threatened to overwhelm her, but realized that she hadn't been making up what she'd heard in Stillman's voice, and that note of concern was the cause for her dread. That meant there was a concrete reason for it, and that realization just made her all the more anxious. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Scotty cast several concerned glances in her direction as he drove, but he never asked anything, and she'd told him all she knew about the case, which wasn't much more than Miller had relayed to Scotty in her phone call to him. She was grateful that he hadn't asked, because she wasn't sure what she'd have told him. Boss has me flipped out over this case, and I'm not sure why?

It occurred to her that perhaps she was reading something into Stillman's tone of voice simply because this was the first child case they'd worked since she'd inadvertently realized she did, eventually, want to have kids with Scotty. That maybe just that small inkling of an idea could have caused her to start feeling things she'd never felt before. Oh, they'd worked jobs involving kids countless times, and they were certainly never easy, but they were also the most satisfying. They were among the few cases where the victims were truly innocent. No victim deserved murder, ever, but, Lilly had realized, in the course of her career, that many times, the victims made choices, consciously or unconsciously, that put them in bad situations, some more obvious than others. But a child, more often than not, had absolutely no recourse against the evil in life…so those cases were always the most difficult to go through, but also the most satisfying to close. They were the ones that truly made her realize how rewarding her job could be, how important what they did really was.

But there was just something about this one…something that instinctively told Lilly it would be tougher than the rest. And that made the knot of dread in her stomach grow ever larger.

Get a grip, Rush, she ordered herself. It's just a case. No matter how horrible it is, it's your job, so just do it. You've got Boss, you've got the squad…and you've got Scotty. Whatever it is, you'll get through it. As though sensing her need for that extra bit of reassurance, Scotty reached over and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, shooting him a tight, grimly determined smile.

Over an hour later, Scotty and Lilly pulled up at the quarry. The crime scene was illuminated by floodlights and given an eerie quality by the flashing red and blue lights of the gathered patrol cars, as well as the ambulance that had been dispatched to the scene. That was the thing that always got him the most, Scotty realized as they approached the gravesite: that they'd send an ambulance to cart away remains from years, sometimes decades, ago. Fat lotta good those EMTs can do now, he mused sarcastically.

Miller and Vera arrived right behind them, much to Scotty's surprise, climbing out of the same car. He turned to Lilly to make some comment about this, but she was already several feet ahead of him, single-minded in her determination to reach the scene, so Scotty turned back and cast a curious glance in Vera's direction.

"Since when do you two quit fightin' long enough to come in the same car?" he asked with a grin.

"My car's in the shop, Man Candy," Kat replied smoothly, then quickly changed the subject. "Hey, kudos for gettin' your ass dressed," she commented drily as she looked him up and down.

"Man, you were--?" Vera began with a suggestive grin.

"Yes," Scotty replied tersely.

"With--?" he continued, his grin growing all the larger.

"Yes," Scotty repeated, his voice darkening with irritation at what he and Lilly hadn't been quite able to finish.

Vera studied Scotty carefully. His colleague didn't have the usual happy glow, and that could only mean one thing.

"And you didn't--" Vera began again, confident before he even started what the answer would be.

"No," Scotty grumbled petulantly.

Vera burst out laughing. "Oh, dude. Sucks to be you."

Scotty glared in Vera's direction. "Why's that?" he asked.

"I got mine in early," Vera bragged. "So I'm in tip-top shape and rarin' to go."

"Well, good for you," Scotty congratulated his friend sarcastically.

"What's with Lil?" Kat interjected, noticing that her blonde colleague had already reached the crime scene and was deep in conversation with Stillman while the Neanderthals she was stuck with were acting like it was a damn high school locker room.

Scotty sobered instantly, remembering why they were there. "It's a kid," he informed them softly. "She's takin' it pretty hard."

Kat kept walking, hoping she showed no outward reaction, but inwardly, she froze. A kid? Goddammit. Those were the cases she'd been dreading the most since she got to Homicide. She'd been fortunate not to have to deal with anything that hit really close to home, not yet, anyway, and she prayed silently that her record would remain intact.

Vera noticed a change in Kat's demeanor, and glanced over at her. "You okay?" he asked, quietly enough that Scotty wouldn't hear him.

"Fine," she replied with forced brightness as they reached the scene.

Frannie was already there, crouched over the skeletal remains of what was definitely a child. She looked up at all the detectives, sympathy radiating from her almond-shaped eyes as she took in each familiar face. This wasn't going to be easy for any of them, she knew that. Frannie was inwardly, and a bit selfishly, grateful. Her part was nearly done. These detectives…their work was just beginning.

"Victim looks to be female, between the ages of eight and twelve. Been down here for probably 20 years, at least," she said, as professionally as she could while trying not to notice that all the surrounding air had been sucked out of the scene, and the detectives all tried to remain stoic and hide their shock, though none were successful. It never gets any easier, Frannie mused, no matter how long you've been doing this damn job.

Lilly was the first to speak. "Any idea on the cause of death?" she asked, her voice clipped and professional. Scotty glanced over at her, but she was still stone-faced. Even more so than usual.

"Not yet," Frannie replied. "No bullet wounds or anything obvious, except a few missing teeth…and this," she added, indicating a fracture. The detectives all leaned forward for a closer look.

"Looks like a broken jaw," Scotty mused.

"You're right," Frannie confirmed, and Scotty's heart sank. Beside him, Lilly stiffened. He glanced at her again to find her standing as still as a statue. He longed to put his arm around her, and almost did, but he figured now was neither the time nor the place. Instead, he settled for gently squeezing her elbow, but she didn't react or even move.

"We think that's what killed her?" Jeffries asked from behind them.

"I doubt it, but at this stage of decomp, it's hard to know for sure," Frannie replied. "I'll need to take her back to the lab, do a few more extensive tests tonight…but at the very least, someone roughed her up a little before she died."

The detectives all exchanged glances. So it was going to be one of those cases, they all realized.

Stillman broke the silence. "Let's go back downtown and look through Missing Persons starting in 1988," he suggested. "Maybe something'll match up."

The detectives all nodded and headed back for their cars. It was going to be a long night.

While they waited for Frannie to come back with her findings, the detectives immediately starting poring through the boxes in the section of the evidence warehouse devoted to missing persons. It was a ritual that had become sadly familiar to them over the years: one of them would pull several boxes off the shelf, and the others would all take turns glancing through them to see if the person in question was of the right age or gender. Most weren't, and so those boxes got taken back to their resting places to await another day, another discovery, another twist of fate that might bring closure to the family.

But a sizeable stack were of pre-teenage girls all disappearing in the mid-1980s, and, after exchanging reluctant glances with one another, the detectives all started the arduous task of giving those boxes a closer look to see if anything could rule them out.

"This one's a boy," Vera griped, glancing through the box.

"How'd that get in there?" Jeffries asked smoothly from his perch on the ladder, where he was glancing at dates on the ends of boxes.

"Hey, a name like Whitney, in the mid '80s, you kinda assume girl," Scotty retorted defensively.

"Yeah, whatever," Vera groused, hoisting himself up from his seat on the floor to hand the box back to Jeffries.

Meanwhile, a few feet away, Stillman and Lilly were removing the lid of another box, that of ten-year-old Annie Potter, last seen in March 1987, when she was going door-to-door selling candy bars as part of a fundraising project for her school band.

"I remember hearing about this girl," Stillman declared wistfully as he took her picture out of the box. "A friend of Rita's was her second-grade teacher."

He handed the Missing poster to Lilly, and her breath caught in her throat when she saw the little girl's photo. From the stilted formality of a school picture, Annie beamed, though the impish glint in her blue eyes told whoever was looking at the picture that as soon as the shutter clicked, she'd be off and running once more. Her blonde hair draped over her shoulders, and a liberal sprinkling of freckles lay scattered over her nose and cheeks.

Stillman glanced over and saw Lilly paling, and in an instant, his worst fears had been confirmed. This case was going to be difficult for her. All jobs involving children were difficult for all of them, but normally Lilly didn't let her own personal experiences dictate how she responded to a case. But this one…Stillman had known from the moment he'd been called out to the scene that there was something different about it, and when Frannie had told him what she'd uncovered, his suspicions had been verified. He'd been intentionally vague on the phone with Lilly, wanting to warn her without seeming overly protective. From experience, he knew that Lilly Rush could take care of herself, but he couldn't stop himself from wanting to shield her from more pain than she'd already faced. It helped that Scotty had that same goal, and Stillman figured, with the two of them looking out for her, then whatever this case did to her, Lilly would be fine in the end.

But that glance, just that brief, unguarded moment when he saw not Lilly the detective, but Lilly the still-wounded adult version of the child she had been, told him that she would need extra care in this case. Stillman glanced over at Scotty, who was sitting on the floor, surrounded by boxes, leaning against a shelf and leafing through another file, and he felt a sense of security in knowing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Valens had his back, and together, the two of them had Lilly's.

Stillman glanced over at Lilly again and discovered that her brief moment of vulnerability was over, and she'd replaced that mask of cool professionalism, though he couldn't deny the small flame he could see burning just beneath the surface, that flame that told him that looking at Annie Potter's photo had given this already-personal case an extra meaning.

"Might not be her, Lil," Stillman said quietly, in an effort to reassure her.

"But it might be," Lilly said sadly, then began to sift through Annie's file.

Down the aisle, as Vera got up to hand the mistakenly-pulled box back to Jeffries, Kat lifted the lid off yet another box, steeling herself for a peek into a life most likely interrupted too short. It hadn't been like this in Narcotics, she thought bitterly. Narcotics was all about invading crack houses in seriously bad neighborhoods, ridding vermin from a dark underworld of the city that most average citizens would never even think about, let alone encounter. Most of their busts were in the same neighborhood, a squalid, dangerous place that nobody would even think twice about having a family in unless they had no other choice.

And Kat, fortunately, had had a choice. Even as a single mother, with Veronica's father safely locked away in jail, where he damn well belonged, she knew she didn't have to raise her daughter in a neighborhood like the ones she busted. Once she wrapped her mind around the fact that she was pregnant, she gave brief consideration to abandoning her career as a cop before it even really got started, and settling down to a nice, safe job with regular hours, a job that would let her be home more, but, truth be told, as a young, unwed, pregnant black woman, her options were…limited, she realized with a wry smile. And, regular hours or not, she was already one of the lucky ones. She had a job. A damn good job. A job that she loved, a job that paid…not well, but well enough. A job that would make the world a better place for her child. And so, as soon as her maternity leave was over, she'd thrown herself back into it, grateful each day for the opportunity she had to raise Veronica in a safer neighborhood. It wasn't Chestnut Hill, she realized, but, as she pored through those boxes, she learned that even the Chestnut Hill parents weren't safe from the kind of thing she, as a mother, feared most.

You just do your best, Kat had told herself over and over again through the years, and you hope that your best is good enough.

But for these parents, these lives she'd been spending her night poking through, their best hadn't been good enough. Every parent's worst nightmare had become a reality to each mother, each father, each family represented in that box. The girls who'd disappeared were, for the most part, from loving families, not dysfunctional ones. They were from the so-called "safe" neighborhoods: Chestnut Hill, Germantown, Roxborough…not the squalid, dangerous places Kat had spent her undercover career cleaning up and saving every nickel to avoid having to live in.

The more boxes Kat pored through, the more rattled she got. In her undercover days, when a child disappeared, it was usually due to parental neglect; drug-addicted moms and dads who'd let their kids out to wander the streets at all hours of day or night. But these parents had done nothing wrong, nothing that could have contributed to their child's disappearance. Parents…just like her, she realized, as a chill ran down her spine. They'd been at work…they'd been at the park with their kids…they'd been letting their child go two blocks over to ride bikes with a neighbor. And Kat realized, with a sinking heart, that no matter how many bastards she yanked off the streets, there would always be more. She, as a police officer, would always be one step behind the bad guys, no matter how hard she tried.

To her chagrin, she felt her long-repressed doubts about her life choices beginning to surface. They didn't often, but when they did, they threatened to overwhelm her. Was she doing the right thing, keeping the kind of hours she did, sometimes not seeing her child for two or three days at a time? Was the greater good really that great, when the cost was that the only time she could really guarantee that she'd get to see Veronica was at those carefully-guarded Wednesday night dance classes?

Knowing from experience that she could wrestle with those questions until she was blue in the face and still not get any concrete answers, Kat sighed as she replaced the lid on the box and handed it to Vera, hoping that her swirling thoughts could be contained just as easily.

"This one ain't her," she said confidently. "Victim was taller than that."

Vera nodded, glancing at Kat with concern as he took the box. To the casual observer, she appeared fine, but the hollow look in her eyes was a dead giveaway. With a defeated sigh, Vera turned away and headed back toward the shelf. He'd been afraid of this. He'd been worried that this case would wear on her. How the hell could it not? The victims being approximately the same age as her own little girl? Vera silently cursed the brutal nature of their job and the effect it was having on the woman he loved.

"This one's a possibility," Scotty declared as he removed a Missing poster from another box and handed it across the aisle to Kat. "Dad's outta the picture, Mom's an ER doc…in emergency surgery when the kid disappears…"

Kat took the photo from Scotty and felt her heart sink to her shoes as she took in the details of the little redhead's smiling face. She wasn't sure why she was inflicting this on herself, looking at every single picture of every single little girl who went missing in the mid-80s. Surely learning the tragic story of whichever girl it would end up being was enough. No point in knowing the details of the lives of the others. Especially when they were all probably buried God alone knew where, waiting for some flood to expose a bone, or some construction crew to dig them up. The cop in Kat knew from bitter experience there wasn't much chance for any of these girls…but the mother in her refused to give up hope. Maybe she's out there…somewhere…Kat mused, as she handed the photo back to Scotty.

"How do you like that," her partner remarked darkly as he slipped the photo back into the file. "Mom's out savin' some other kid's life, and her own daughter goes missin'."

Kat froze momentarily. Scotty's words were like a dagger to her heart, and she glanced up, prepared to tear him a new one, and then tear that new one a new one…but the fact that his offhand comment resonated in her guilt-ridden soul along with the questions and doubts about her own parenting that had resurfaced knocked her for such a loop that the words simply wouldn't come. She glanced at Scotty, hoping to find some arrogant, judgmental smirk on her partner's face that would inspire a more characteristic response from her, but one look at him softened her heart and made her realize that there simply wasn't any point. Valens was buried so deep in the case that there was no way his remark, ill-advised though it may have been, was in any way intentional, or even directed at her. She knew that her own situation hadn't even crossed his mind, nor, on second thought, was there the slightest reason for her to expect it to. He'd merely been reporting the facts of the case, as was his duty. They were cops. The job came first, before any and all concern over their colleagues. She knew that, and he knew it, too.

Her reverie was interrupted by the thwack of a cardboard box falling to the floor right next to her, and Kat glanced up and realized, to her chagrin, that Vera had apparently overheard Scotty's most recent comment, and was none too happy about it.

"Try keepin' your parenting opinions to yourself, jackass," he muttered, quietly enough that Kat wasn't even sure Scotty had heard him, but the dark flash she saw from her partner's eyes indicated that he had.

"What, just 'cause you're shootin' hoops with Andre, you think you know everything there is to know about bein' a dad now?" Scotty retorted.

"Well, I know a helluva lot more about it than you do," Vera shot back, before he was silenced by a glare from Kat.

Scotty sighed and shook his head as he started digging through another box. This job was tough enough without people's personal issues crapping all over it.

After several hours of running tests, Frannie came back in with the report. "Dental records confirm that the victim was ten-year-old Annie Potter," she announced grimly. "Looks like she was beaten, strangled. Some…signs of sexual assault," she added after a pause.

Lilly stiffened even further. Of course it's her, she thought bitterly. A ten-year-old blonde girl with a broken jaw. Just what I need. She felt Scotty's gaze on her, but didn't dare to glance back. Not yet. Not until she could hide what she was sure would be reflected in her eyes. Not until her walls were firmly in place, and she could pretend this case didn't hit her where it hurt.

Meanwhile, across the room, Kat realized, to her horror, that fatigue and helplessness had brought her dangerously close to tears. An entire night spent combing through Missing Persons reports, having pulled sixteen files that matched their victim's description, sixteen girls that were close to Veronica's age, sixteen families that had seen their little girl walk out the door never to return again, and it turned out that the victim was, in fact, Veronica's exact age, and had come from a loving, functional family where the parents had done their best, and yet their daughter was still brutally murdered. Kat didn't know which was worse, the fact that Annie's family would have twenty years' worth of hope shattered, or that fifteen other families still wouldn't have the answers they so desperately needed.

Stillman's voice interrupted everyone's thoughts. "It's almost nine," he informed the group, much to their surprise. Time flew when they were hard at work on a case, especially down in the evidence warehouse, where the lack of natural light always screwed with their sense of time.

"People oughta be awake by now," he continued quietly, casting a glance at Scotty. "Valens, take Miller and go talk to the family," he instructed.

Scotty nodded grimly, but, across the aisle from him, Kat froze again. Surely not. She'd done just about everything as a cop: busted drug lords, taken down entire prostitution rings almost singlehandedly, helped take more doers than she could count off the streets, even been shot…but this…tell parents that their little girl truly was never coming home…this was the one thing she simply couldn't do. Well, that and admit to the others that there was one thing she simply couldn't do.

Lilly seemed to be the only one who heard the quiet gasp from her colleague, and she glanced up in alarm to find Miller staring, wide-eyed, with a look she'd never quite seen from her before. It was, Lilly was nearly certain, the same look she had, and in an instant, she knew why. Oh, God, she realized, Miller HAS a ten-year-old girl.

Lilly's heart flooded with compassion. No matter how difficult this case was going to be for her, she was sure it would be at least that hard, if not harder, for Miller.

"I'll go," she heard herself volunteering.

Everyone else looked up in surprise. Stillman glanced curiously from Lilly, to Scotty, to Kat, and back to Lilly, silently debating the ramifications of heeding Rush's request. Professionally, it was potentially a good idea…Lilly was one of the best. But…was she too close to the case? Too involved?

"You sure?" he asked her, his voice quiet and his eyes trying to hide his concern.

"Of course," Lilly answered, almost defiantly, then glanced at her watch in exasperation. "Look, the longer we stand around deciding who's gonna do this, the longer that bastard's out there. I said I'd go, and I'll go. C'mon, Scotty," she finished, heading for the stairs without waiting for him.

Stillman knew, in that moment, that any resistance he might have offered was futile. Despite her personal involvement, or, maybe, because of it, Lilly was bound and determined to see this case through, from beginning to end, and the cop in him couldn't blame her. He'd done the same thing himself countless times, and he couldn't deny her the thing she seemed to so desperately need. As sort of a last-ditch effort, he cast a glance in Scotty's direction.

Scotty nearly jumped at the expression he saw in his boss's eyes. It was Stillman's usual steely gaze, but beneath it was something Scotty had never seen before. It was an unspoken directive that implored Scotty, in no uncertain terms, to remember the precious responsibility he now had with regards to Lilly. It was as though Stillman had never dared to truly give free reign to his affection for her until Scotty brought it out in the open, but now that it was there, it was an understanding between the two of them. I'm trusting you to take care of her, Valens, the boss's sharp look seemed to say, and you damn well better.

Scotty felt like saluting, but settled for giving the boss a slight nod and an expression that he hoped conveyed his iron-clad determination to do exactly that. This job was going to be tough on all of them, both as people and as cops, and if part of the job was looking out for Lilly, then look out for Lilly he would. Ain't like I wasn't gonna do that anyway, he reasoned as he turned to go, but as he stuck his hand in his pocket to retrieve the car keys, his fingertips brushed the black velvet box that had been his constant companion for most of that week, and he realized that looking out for Lilly had taken on a much deeper meaning, not only for him, but for Stillman as well.

A few moments later, all the others had headed off to take care of other responsibilities, leaving Vera and Kat to pack up the files and put them back in the appropriate boxes. Too damn many boxes, Kat thought grimly as she reached up to put one of them back on the shelf. Each box represented a little girl lost, a family without answers…she suddenly felt nothing more than the most overwhelming desire she'd ever felt in her life to just go home and hug Veronica tight, if only for a moment. Forget the greater good, her mother's heart cried plaintively. I just need my little girl.

Vera was just fitting the lid on another box when he heard what sounded suspiciously like a sniffle coming from Kat's direction. Alarmed, he glanced over at her to find her facing the shelf, leaning her forehead against one of the boxes, and, in about a step, he reached her.

"You okay?" he asked her. Oooh, score one for Captain Obvious.

"No," Kat admitted brokenly. "I wanna go home," she declared.

Vera paused. They couldn't. She knew that. They had work to do. And she never wanted to leave work in the middle of a shift. Ever. Even in the worst of cases, she never…

Suddenly, it occurred to him what must be causing her so much pain. Valens, shooting off his mouth. Again. That jackass never did know when to keep his mouth shut. And for him to basically lay the blame for a little girl's disappearance on her hardworking single mother, a woman who was out there doing a really damn important job…did that man ever think before he said something? At all? Ever? Vera felt his blood starting to boil as the impact of Scotty's careless remark began to hit his girlfriend now that they were finally alone.

"I wanna go home," Kat repeated. "I wanna go sit down on the floor next to Veronica, who's probably watchin' that damn horse movie for the twenty-seventh time this week alone, and I wanna take back the last thing I said to her, which was some stupid thing about her not leavin' her shoes in the middle of the floor, and I wanna hold her and tell her I love her and forget about this stupid, fucked-up job," she announced, her voice wavery.

"Shhh," Vera began, pulling her close, his anger taking a momentary back seat to the flood of compassion that was washing over him. She resisted at first, but eventually, her need to be held and comforted won out over her desire to keep their secret. So what if someone saw? At that moment, she didn't give a rat's ass.

"I wanna go see my little girl," she whispered against Vera's shoulder.

"I know," he replied huskily. "Me, too."

The car doors slammed in unison, and Lilly heard a deep, shuddering sigh from Scotty. She glanced over and saw her boyfriend rubbing his eyes, although whether it was fatigue or tears he was trying to scrub away, she wasn't sure. Neither one would have surprised her. That had been one of the more wrenching parental notifications they'd ever done. The parents had clearly been in denial for the last 20 years, keeping Annie's room exactly the same as it had been the day she disappeared, except for the pile of birthday presents, Christmas presents, and the like stacked in a corner, the ones on the bottom showing signs of obvious wear. Pictures of the grinning blonde were everywhere, and it was clear from the look on the parents' faces when they opened their front door to two Philadelphia detectives that they were convinced it would be good news. She and Scotty had exchanged a reluctant glance, knowing that with five little words, we found your daughter's body, they'd shatter the hearts and souls of these parents, change their lives forever, deliver news from which they may never recover, and become nothing more than bit characters in the worst day of their lives. All the hope they'd be able to offer was that maybe, just maybe, they'd be able to find whoever did this to Annie and make a date for him with the needle, though Lilly knew that would be no consolation. She could tell from the look in Scotty's eyes that he was willing to step in and deliver the blow if need be, but, despite the tears in her own, she took care of it herself. She couldn't explain it, but she needed to do this.

After Lilly had delivered the news, she and Scotty had sat together on the couch, looking on uncomfortably as the parents wept in each other's arms. She'd expected the outpouring of grief, having seen it far too many times, but what she hadn't expected was the total shock. Most parents of missing children seemed to have innately known the truth, but these parents…these parents still clearly expected Annie to walk through that front door any day now, and the possibility that she was dead had never even occurred to him.

As the Potters continued to try and console one another, Lilly had stolen a glance at Scotty and noticed the twitching of his jaw muscle and righteous indignation burning in the depths of his eyes, as though he wanted to memorize every single detail of this scene, all the pain, all the heart-wrenching disappointment, in order to give himself extra motivation in the long days that lay ahead to catch the son of a bitch who had done this. Like anyone needs extra motivation with this one, Lilly mused wryly. But while Scotty's anger was righteous, outwardly focused, Lilly discovered, to her horror, that the anger burning within her own soul wasn't directed toward the doer.

Annie had clearly been loved, adored, and given every advantage in life. The family wasn't ostentatiously wealthy, but they were definitely comfortable, and Annie had never wanted for anything, Lilly could tell just by looking around the little girl's room. It was unthinkable that Annie would be in danger, the parents had said, right in their own neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone else, and families had lived on the same block for generations, which was why they'd had no qualms whatsoever about letting her troll the street selling her candy bars. And these parents… they'd obviously been holding out hope ever since Annie's disappearance, confident that whoever had taken her would have treated her well. Lilly's cynicism prevented her from sharing that hope, and she found herself almost jealous of their murder victim. Annie's parents hadn't sent her out late at night, it was right after school. She wasn't wandering the streets of Kensington alone, she was in Mt. Airy, on a block full of people who knew and loved her. And she wasn't out buying a bottle of vodka for her mother, she was trying to raise money for her elementary school band.

Lilly found herself burning with bitterness as she sat there, watching those parents grieve, knowing in her heart that if she'd disappeared, her mother would have wondered about her vodka long before she wondered about her daughter. When Lilly had limped home, battered and bleeding, her mother had flown into a panic, wondering how this possibly could have happened when the store was just three blocks away. She'd hurried Lilly to the emergency room, where they'd dosed her up with heavy-duty painkillers, wired her jaw shut and explained that she'd be fine, then asked Ellen what had happened.

Lilly, through her haze of drugs, pain, and fatigue, had heard her mother say that she'd fallen. "I don't know what happened," Ellen had explained. "She's always into everything, running out in the middle of the street at night…worries me sick."

The hospital had been required to notify the police, due to Lilly's age and the severity of her injuries. Standard protocol, they'd said. But Ellen had refused to press charges, insisting it was an accident, and that she'd just encourage Lilly to be more careful next time. They'd stopped by the store on the way home, Ellen buying even more vodka than normal, and she'd spent the next two days in her bedroom, presumably in a drunken stupor.

Ray had come by the next afternoon, having missed Lilly at school, and was shocked to see her injuries. Through hand gestures and crudely-written communications, she was able to articulate to Ray that she was hungry, and, in a gesture of childish love that, to this day, still stung her eyes with tears, he'd run to the store and purchased some ice cream and chocolate syrup and had cobbled together a milkshake. He'd made a mess of her mother's kitchen, having forgotten the importance of leaving the lid on the blender the first time around, but, as he would reminisce years later…it was a mess already. He came by every morning and afternoon after school, making her milkshakes, and staying with her until bedtime. His parents were too busy to miss him, he reasoned, and so they'd whiled away the hours watching TV, playing games, and sometimes just being quiet together. It was far more maturity than she'd ever seen from him, before or since, she realized with a wry smile, and, despite the way things had ended between them, she knew he'd always hold a special place in her heart.

Lilly and her mother never spoke of the attack after that, which was why Lilly had almost fallen over with shock when Ellen had mentioned it, almost casually, to Jackie the night she'd insisted on pretending they were a happy family.

"Remember when you broke your jaw?" Ellen had asked, right in the middle of pre-dinner drinks. "She was always into something," she explained as an aside to Jackie, then turned her attention back to Lilly. "What happened? You fell, right?"

Lilly had been too stunned to even move, and she'd seen a similar reaction flit across the face of her mother's latest paramour.

"A broken jaw is horrible," Jackie had rightly observed, but Ellen, as usual, was prepared with a cover story.

"Well, she used to run out in the middle of the night. I can't believe I even slept, I'd worry so much," she said, painting herself, as always, as the loving, caring mother of the year, but Lilly had lived under her mother's umbrella of denial for far too long.

"I was attacked," she pointed out, angry tears stinging her eyes. "I didn't fall."

"We lived in some bad neighborhoods," the chastened Ellen had quietly explained to her fiancé du jour, who had chosen that moment to flee the scene under the guise of checking on their order.

It was then, as Lilly relived all this while sitting on the Potters' sofa, waiting for them to recover their composure enough to answer a few questions, that she'd vowed to lock away those memories. This case would be difficult for her, she knew, but if she could just get through it, could just bury herself in the job and not think about what had happened to her, then she wouldn't have to deal with it ever again. That terrible night, Lilly ran, she fought, and she lived. So she'd run through this case, she'd fight the memories, and she'd survive once more.

She felt Scotty's eyes on her in the car, and she shot him a tight, professional smile. She couldn't think of him as her boyfriend right now; if she did, she'd fall apart. And she couldn't do that. Not here. Not now. Not during this case. Maybe…maybe later, when the memories weren't so close to the surface, when Scotty's probing eyes wouldn't draw out her darkest secret. If she could just get through this, she thought…maybe that secret could remain in the dark recesses of her heart.

Maybe.