Carolyn POV

"Are you okay?"

"You mean, does it bother me that our best friends know some of the things my mother did to me? That they might even know about what happened with…you know…"

"They knew some of it anyway," I said calmly. "And it's not like they'd ever judge you for anything that happened."

"I know, but…" He trailed off his argument and instead let out a heavy sigh. "You're right. It doesn't matter."

"I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm just saying that I'm glad it was them who read it and not you. And whatever was in that file, it won't change what they think about you. They both love you – you know that."

"Yeah. You know, I never considered the possibility that my mother had confided in Helen," he said, still looking out the window as I drove us uptown to the office building of our suspect, Victor Ashe. "She wasn't exactly a social butterfly."

"Maybe she wanted some kind of absolution," I suggested. "Maybe she recognized how wrong she'd been, and since she was facing certain death, she used Helen as a kind of confessor."

"You think she was seeking forgiveness?" he asked, turning to look at me. "That she felt remorse for the things she'd done?"

I glanced at his face, doing a quick assessment of his mental state. He didn't look as bad as I'd expected. And at least he was talking.

So that made me want to lie.

But I just couldn't. I'd promised myself that I'd never lie to him again.

"No," I answered quietly. "No, I don't. I think that for whatever reason, she didn't see anything wrong with her actions. She was sick, Mike. A long time before she was ever diagnosed with a disease."

He continued to stare at me as I drove through the congested streets. I could feel his gaze even though I couldn't look at him.

"Thank you," he said after a minute.

"You're going to thank me? It's my fault this whole thing was brought out of the closet."

"No, it's not. It's Jack's. But I'm thanking you for being honest," he said, reaching over to take hold of my hand.

My phone buzzed with an incoming text, a sound that now instilled fear in me because it was most likely Jack.

"Don't get it," I said when Mike went to reach for it.

"You know what? This asshole thinks he's going to come between us, but the joke's on him. I feel closer to you than ever, and nothing, not even some damn picture, is going to ever make me love you less, okay?"

He picked up my phone from the cup holder, but just held it in his hand until I nodded my approval.

"Okay," I agreed reluctantly. "Just…if it's…"

"No secrets," he said, leaning over to kiss my cheek. "About anything. This guy's declared war on us, so we both need to have all of the intel we can in order to fight back, okay? You're making yourself sick, worrying about what he's going to do next, or whether or not I'm going to see one of those pictures. You don't need to do that."

"You're feeling awfully…confident," I said as I brought the car to a stop at a red light.

I turned to look at him, as he still held my phone in his hand. He hadn't checked the message yet.

"Yeah. I am," he agreed with a smile. "What'dya know?"

He held the phone out to me and added, "We're at a light. Go ahead."

"No," I said, with a rush of fear and apprehension. "You check it."

I didn't breathe as he opened my phone and clicked on the message.

"He wants to meet you tonight," he said and then he rattled off the meeting details. "He says he'll let you know what you need to do if you want to protect me."

"That's it? No picture?"

"Oh, there's a picture," he said quietly, and I glanced at him as he continued to stare at the phone's display.

"Mike…"

He snapped it shut and then moved quickly across the car, sliding his hand over my thigh as he pressed another kiss against my cheek.

"I'm glad I looked."

"You are?"

"You were gorgeous back then," he said, his voice low and husky, bordering on a whisper. "But that image doesn't hold a candle to what you are now. And you know what seeing that does to me?"

"I'm…almost afraid to ask."

"Looking at your face…it shows me the difference," he said simply. "You didn't love him, at least not like you love me."

"You thought that I did?" I asked, praying for another red light so that I could stop the car. As it was, I kept glancing back and forth between him and the road.

"Maybe. I mean, yeah, I figured you loved him. He was married and you wanted him enough for that not to matter."

"I was young and stupid," I answered. "And my reasons for wanting him had a lot more to do with me than him. It was never about love."

"It's okay if it was. I can't expect that you've never loved anyone."

Finally, a red light.

I stopped the car, rather abruptly so as to make the most of the time.

"I haven't," I said emphatically. "Just you."

I brought my mouth to his, kissing him hard in an effort to convey my conviction.

I hadn't loved anyone. In fact, for a long time, I just assumed that I was incapable. That it was an emotion that had been somehow skipped over during my creation.

But now I knew that wasn't true.

And for the first time in nearly a week, I felt like I could comfortably breathe.

"So…you're okay?" I asked him hesitantly once I began driving again.

"After seeing the picture?" he asked. I nodded, and he continued, "It's not something I'm going to print off and carry around in my wallet, but…yeah. Like I said, it's actually better now that I've seen it."

"And the meeting tonight? Are we both going to go?"

"I'm thinking we'll just mike you up," he countered. "And I'll be nearby. That way, he'll still believe that he's getting to us. We'll find out what he's up to and then we'll take him down."

Twenty minutes later, we walked into the lobby of Victor Ashe's place of business, and I felt a renewed sense of confidence.

"So what do you feel like doing today?" Mike asked under his breath to me as we went towards the elevators. "Good cop?"

"Uh uh. I want to be the bad cop," I told him as I flashed him a smile.

"You know he's going to be a jerk, right?"

"I'm sure," I agreed.

Our suspect was a number cruncher for a brokerage house. He had more letters after his name than a fish has scales and in my experience, people like that tended to look down on cops.

Especially when said cops were coming onto his turf to interrogate him for murder.

I usually enjoyed being the quiet, understated one, but I thought that in this situation, the guy would peg Mike as competition.

According to the DMV records, Victor was well over six feet tall and nearing two hundred and fifty pounds. He'd have a slight size advantage on Mike, and I could only imagine that he'd want to play up to that.

So considering what we knew, I thought it might work better to let Mike be the nice one.

That way the threat would come at him from an unexpected direction.

And of course, there was also another reason why I wanted to let him be the good cop.

Because I kind of felt like being a badass bitch.

Besides, it would give me practice for my meeting tonight with Jack.

"Can I help you?" a twenty-something secretary greeted as soon as we stepped off the elevator.

She was painted to the hilt and she'd immediately zeroed in on Mike, so I held back slightly in order to let him work his magic.

"We're here to see Victor Ashe," he told her, flashing her a charming smile.

"Do you have an appointment?" she asked, looking skeptically at me.

Her blatant evaluation annoyed me, so I pulled my badge and held it up, closer to her face than was necessary.

"Yes, as a matter of fact we do."

She was unimpressed with my display of hardware, but she smiled again at Mike and said, "He's not in yet, but you can wait. So you're a detective?"

"That's right, Karen," he answered, reading the placard on her desk. "Major Case."

"That sounds…fascinating."

"Oh, it is," I said, moving slightly closer to Mike. "We get to arrest murderers and their accomplices. It's a lot of fun. So tell me, Karen. When my partner called yesterday and asked the whereabouts of your boss…did you report that back to him?"

"That was you on the phone?" she asked Mike with interest.

"Hey," I said sharply in an effort to recapture her attention. Mike wandered away from her desk, looking down a hallway that contained a number of closed office doors.

"Did you tell Victor that we'd asked about him?" I repeated.

"No," she answered. "He was in Boston. I don't interrupt when he's out of town."

"Because you know…if you tipped him off…"

"I didn't," she insisted, and she finally looked like maybe I'd intimidated her.

Damn, I was losing my edge. It had taken me almost five minutes.

"So he should be here in…"

"Ten minutes, at the most," she said. "Do you two want to wait in his office?"

"Not if you're going to give him a heads-up as soon as he steps off that elevator."

"I won't," she promised.

"Okay," I agreed cautiously. "Because if you do, I'll take you in for aiding and abetting. You know what that means, right? Handcuffs…lock-up…"

"I get it."

"And you can forget any twisted fantasy you might have about my partner being the one to slap on the cuffs, okay? It'll be me, and I won't be nice."

I turned away from her and met Mike where he was standing halfway down the hall in front of a door labeled with Victor's name.

"Handcuff fantasy?" he questioned in a low tone.

"Okay, so maybe that was my fantasy," I admitted as we went into Victor's office.

He barked out a laugh and closed the door behind us.

"I need to let you be the bad cop more often."

"You do, actually, because I'm a little rusty."

"You were great. And that was just the warm-up. Lay it on with Victor so we can put this case to bed."

I gave him a nod as I wandered aimlessly around the office.

"Oh, and that fantasy…" he continued. "I'll take care of that a little later, okay?"

I looked over my shoulder to find him giving me a smoldering gaze that nearly made me forget we had a job to do.

I don't know how the events of this morning had helped to turn his confidence around, but they most definitely had.

Maybe it was the acceptance of Bobby and Alex concerning the abuse Mike had suffered at the hands of his mother.

They'd always known about it, but only in generalities. Now they knew details and yet they'd shown nothing but support for Mike this morning.

Maybe that had helped him to realize, even more so than before, that none of what happened was his fault.

He was an innocent victim, to both his mother and his priest.

Or maybe it was that we were dealing with Jack, now completely together.

He'd seen one of the pictures.

And he'd been okay with it.

It made me wonder what kind of image he'd conjured up in his mind, considering that actually seeing the photo almost seemed like a relief. It wasn't as bad in reality as it was in his imagination.

And he'd been able to look at it objectively.

He'd noticed the look on my face.

That said volumes about his maturity and about our relationship.

So maybe it was one or the other, or a combination of both of those crucial events that had occurred this morning.

But whatever it was, it had worked.

His eyes walked over me in a slow, deliberate manner that had me holding my breath, waiting to see what he might do or say next.

And my reaction was crazy since we were presently working, but still…

The man was on fire.

Unfortunately, my response was curtailed by the opening of the office door.

"Victor Ashe," I stated as I walked towards him, holding up my badge. "Detectives Logan and Logan with Major Case. We need a few minutes of your time."

TBC...