Reyna sat between Jason and Leo in the police station lobby, her hands curled into fists on her knees. Jason was leaning forward, his head in his palms, and Leo played with his lighter in one hand and hung on to the edge of Reyna's sleeve with the other. His dopey grin was long gone now.

Piper had been in the back with the officers for almost two hours.

Occasionally Jason raised his head, started to say something, but it always petered out into a groan. Leo wouldn't say anything, even when Reyna leaned in and asked as a personal favor under her breath. So the three of them sat, knowing little, sharing less.

"Should we ask someone when she'll be out?" she asked, specifically saying when instead of if. With all they didn't know, it wouldn't help to assume the worst.

"I guess," Jason said, sounding lost.

"Ask who?" Leo pointed out, gesturing around. The one cop who'd been out front had disappeared a couple minutes ago and hadn't come back yet.

Reyna sighed. "I don't know."

But finally the familiar head of short braids and choppy hair came around the corner—with a grumpy-looking officer on each side. From the set of her jaw, Piper had done her best charming and sassing and gotten nowhere with either. For a second Reyna wanted to smile. Ha, I bet that was hilari—no! She caught her own thought and forced it back. Charming and sassing might be amusing on their own, but you have to cooperate with the law. The system rarely works in our favor as it is.

She wanted to believe that, once Piper got the rebelliousness out of her system, she had cooperated and solved whatever the mistake had been.

Yet she was still clearly handcuffed.

"What's…?" Jason started.

"They're keeping me overnight," Piper said flatly, her gaze not quite landing on any of her friends. "Maybe longer."

"What the…" He struggled against the profanity. "What for?"

A rare blush, rouge-like under her natural dark tan, crept over her cheeks. She glanced at her (arresting?) officers, who revealed nothing by their expressions, and then subtly she tugged away from them. Both grabbed her by an arm and brought her back to their side. "Don't make this harder than it has to be," said the male officer, who had clearly watched too many crime show dramas in his day.

Piper pressed her full lips together like she was withholding some choice words and oh what a shame that was.

The female officer bore dark circles under her eyes, presumably from long shifts, but she still had the decency to act like they were all human beings. "You'll be in custody for at least twenty-four hours," she said to Piper, "and when your lawyer arrives, I strongly encourage you to give us a statement. Work with us, and we'll work with you."

Reyna noted the name on her uniform. Kang. The man was labeled Montenegro. Good to know, in case this went… whatever direction this was going.

"You can talk to your friends," Kang continued, "until visiting hours are over, which is in about thirty minutes. There'll be at least one officer with you at all times." She didn't apologize, but Reyna thought, hoped, she saw sympathy in her eyes.

"I'd like to talk to my friends, then," Piper said, pronouncing each word with uncharacteristic precision. Full and rounded, then clipped off short at the end. As if she were making sure not to say anything other than what she needed to.

"All right. I'll be at this door—" Kang gestured to the only exit, five feet away. "—and Officer Montenegro will be at the main desk." Which was the way to the rest of the police station and its potential exits.

Piper said nothing more, and when she sat down beside her boyfriend, the clank of the metal around her wrists seemed deafening. No one spoke for a long minute. Reyna wasn't sure where to even start.

"Pipes," Leo began, still hanging on to Reyna's sleeve for comfort, "it might be… time."

"Time?" Jason echoed.

Looking only at her hands, Piper swallowed hard. Her beautiful kaleidoscope eyes shone with tears, but none dripped free. "I didn't… I'd hoped…" She squeezed her eyes shut. "I'm sorry."

Despite the confusion and worry creasing his brow, Jason reached out and laced his fingers through hers. "What happened?"

She glanced up at Leo, and they had another silent conversation, which involved a lot of head-shaking on his part. Finally he threw up his hands, even the one on Reyna's sleeve. "I'm not telling them," he insisted in a harsh whisper, in case the cops could still hear them. "I don't even know the whole thing. It's your problem—you tell them."

"Thanks for the support," she snapped, and then immediately her expression softened into guilt. "Sorry."

He just reached for Reyna again and then moved over so he could get ahold of Piper too. "I did a security sweep. You're good from your current angle. Just keep your voice down."

"I have a lawyer coming tomorrow to… help me out. Until then, I'm not telling these guys shit." Lifting her chin, Piper straightened the tiniest bit, though she kept her voice low, out of hearing range of Montenegro and Kang. "But you guys—you guys I'll tell." Her gaze flashed guiltily toward Jason. "You deserve to know."

The metal burned cold around Piper's wrists, and her legs wouldn't stop trembling. But as long as she maintained the façade of being totally cool, she was halfway there. Fake it 'til you make it.

"I'll start—I'm not sure where to start," she muttered. "The beginning, I guess."

Of course, it was hard to fake when all her smooth-talking skills seemed to have deserted her.

Okay, focus, she told herself. Basic smooth-talking principles: Who are you talking to? What do they know? What do they want to hear? No, she cut herself off, what do they need to hear?

"Leo and I met in high school," she began again, "but before that, I got loaded off on my dad's secretaries mostly for school, for everything really." All three knew who her father was, so she didn't need to go into much more detail than that. "I hardly ever got to see my dad. I just saw his employees spending his money."

Jason squeezed her hand in sympathy. This much he knew already. It was what was about to come up that would really test his compassion.

"So I figured out ways to see my dad. I terrorized my tutors, I acted out like crazy. And when that stopped working so well…" She clenched her teeth and looked down at her knees, unwilling to watch the reactions. "I started picking things up. Things that weren't mine. Cheap, small, it didn't matter.

"At first I was really bad, mostly 'cause I was only, like, eight. The first time I got caught, I got a lecture. Just from the tutor. So I did it again, and that time they called my dad." She screwed up her mouth in a mirthless smile. "They thought that would scare me into stopping. It just convinced me to continue."

None of them said anything. She still didn't look up. The student gov two were probably crossing themselves or something.

"Eventually I got better at it. Stealing. I could get bigger, better, more expensive stuff. Sometimes I could even talk my way out when I got caught. And I got caught less, but then when I did get caught, they always called my dad, every time. And I got to talk to him.

"In junior high, they warned me. Said if you don't stop, we're gonna assume you have a serious problem and take serious measures to deal with it. I didn't believe it, figured they would just fly my dad in instead of having him call. So I dove in way over my head. Stole a car right off the street, let myself get caught. Didn't even try to talk my way out."

A sharp intake of breath from Jason. He hadn't pulled away from her, but neither had he given any more reassuring squeezes. It'd be stupid to expect any more after he hears all this, she told herself, trying to make the coming blow hurt less. Part of her hoped his loyal, loving side would win over his law-abiding side. But part of her knew he might just be a little too straight-arrow to accept so much deviance. And the lying that had covered it up.

"Well, they didn't fly my dad in. They called him—and they called the police. For real this time. I was a kid, so they gave me a deal: community service and the god-awful Wilderness School." Her voice cracked, and she winced. Fake it, fake it, fake it. "The only, and I mean the only, good thing about those four years was meeting Leo. Everyone else was absolute garbage to me, to him. Only way I kept myself sane was by perfecting my pickpocketing techniques, plus double-teaming with Leo for pranks. I threw a party for us the day we got our GEDs and got the hell outta there.

"And we'd somehow scored scholarships to Central too," she almost choked out, still in awe of however they'd managed that. "So we were set. Except that we were broke and we didn't have jobs and we didn't have cars and, oh yeah, my dad's secretaries made him ignore me for four years, minus a couple weekend visits in the summer. So we get out, and I call my dad." She swallowed again, tears burning her eyes. "First day, nothing. I leave a message. Second day, some woman I don't know picks up the phone. Know what she tells me?

"He's busy." Piper shook her head angrily and pressed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. "He's busy. I just wanted five minutes to let him know I hadn't died or anything, and…" She exhaled sharply and tilted her head up to glare at the ceiling, hoping gravity would help keep the tears in her eyes. "…and I got nothing. And I was just so—f–ing—mad, it was like I couldn't see straight.

"So I figured, okay, I'm on my own now. So I pick up a shitty waitressing job two seconds off campus, Leo picks up as many shifts at the local garage as he can, we have a little minimum-wage money coming in now, but we still don't have a single vehicle between us. No taxi service in the area, no bus system. If we wanted any decent groceries, or to do a job interview, anything, we were shot to hell, we were so screwed.

"And we probably would have managed," she admitted, looking back down to her knees. Humiliated to admit that the particular line of thought now felt like too much but at the time had seemed like the perfect screw-you. "We could have sweet-talked our way into bumming rides. But it felt like just one more thing. The universe giving me the middle finger. And I'd seen the cars my dad's people drove. And I just…"

She shook her head again.

Leo ruffled her hair.

Jason was silent.

"I went to this old parts place," she started again, once she was no longer in danger of crying. "Swear to God, I was just looking for stuff Leo might be able to use. But I saw this big-ass lot of all these cars, variously crappy, all about to be squished up and tossed. And in the veeeery back—"

She could still picture the near-totaled Malibu and almost unrecognizable Camaro hidden in the back of the lot, marked for dismantling and smashing.

"Katoptris and Festus," Leo mumbled.

Jason and Reyna sucked in a sharp breath at the same time.

Piper winced. Quickly she jumped over the next part: "I figured either, A, we'd get a couple free cars, or, B, I'd get caught and get to talk to my dad again. And, well, one thing led to another, and suddenly Leo had two cars to fix up." She glanced over at Kang. The officer was straining just a little to hear the whispered story, which reassured her: in her experience, cops who could actually hear her always pretended they were too far away to hear, so she wouldn't quiet down. If Kang had looked nonchalant, that would have been reason for concern.

"No one was going to miss them. And with Leo's overhaul, all the major fixes and changes, no one was going to recognize them either." She chewed the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. "That was over two years ago. I kinda figured that if the shit was gonna hit the fan, it would have happened already."

"Piper," Reyna whispered. "That was not one of your better life decisions."

But Piper already knew that, and she was more worried about someone else's response. For the first time, she dared to glance up at Jason.

Her horrible liar of a boyfriend sat frozen, pale. He opened his mouth… and shut it again.

He stomach clenched. No. Please… but even she knew she was asking a lot for him to come around right this second. So she dropped his gaze and looked toward Leo, who'd already known most of the story and so hadn't gone catatonic with betrayed disgust.

"You guys should probably go on home," she said, raising her voice back to normal volume. "I'll be here overnight. And hey, they took my phone, so one of you needs to text Annabeth and let her know I won't be home tonight." No need to tell her why.

"I can do it," Reyna offered. "I've already got her number." Her serious gaze made it clear that she understood the minimum-information-only subtext.

Piper nodded once. "Thanks." She chanced another glance at Jason but saw nothing encouraging. She pressed her lips together, prayed that the burning tears would disappear, and nodded for them to go ahead. They didn't. All three of them sat with her until Kang and Montenegro declared that visiting hours were over.

Just before the officers took her back, she searched once more for Jason's gaze, for the tiniest bit of hope in those impossibly blue eyes.

He averted his face from her. But not before she saw the pain there.

The remaining three no longer felt up for Dairy Queen, or even a solid meal. So they went back to the apartment, where Reyna texted Annabeth the bare facts ("Piper won't be home tonight and doesn't have her phone on her") and then forced the guys to each have a glass of water. Jason barely managed to get his down. No one tried to talk. No one tried to start up Netflix. No one tried to do anything other than stare at each other.

"What the hell," Reyna sighed finally. "Leo, you knew about this, didn't you." It wasn't a question.

"Yeah, I did." He palmed the back of his neck. "Sorry. It was another one of those not-my-secret-to-tell things."

"Seems like we've had a lot of those," Jason said, somewhere between frustrated and angry and hurt. Logically he understood that yes, most of the stealing went on a long time ago, and yes, this was an old thing that had suddenly come up again, and yes yes yes, he loved Piper and he needed to support her.

But she hadn't told him. She hadn't even tried. Didn't she trust him? Could he really trust her?

Guilt needled him at having left her at the station, even though he knew full well he wasn't allowed to stay overnight with her, even in the lobby. Surely there had been another option. One that had involved him sleeping in the parking lot, or her telling him before she was in police custody, or maybe her not stealing two cars.

He dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

Her vice couldn't be pride or profanity or something legal. What was he supposed to do? He couldn't encourage theft. And it wasn't like he thought she was stealing from him, but if she was stealing from other people, he couldn't just stand by. Had he let this happen? Had it happened right in front of him and he hadn't seen, blinded by Aphrodite?

"You okay, man?" Leo asked him.

Jason shook his head and gestured broadly. "I don't know," he admitted, voice low. "I don't know."

They lapsed back into silence.

The police station fell quiet with the night, but Piper couldn't get any good sleep in the holding cell. It could always be worse, she reminded herself, but surprise, it didn't help. After four in the morning, she was so exhausted she drifted off briefly against the wall, but it was a catnap and she woke feeling just as worn. She knew Leo had a Saturday morning work shift and Jason had a game, but she still held out hope that they would show up. So she waited and watched the clock. Once, around eight, she tried chatting up the guard, but he must have been given specific instructions not to engage with her, because he was having none of it. The only words he responded to were "I have to go to the bathroom."

But the clock ticked on, and she had no visitors.

Maybe it's for the best, she told herself. I'm all tense waiting for the lawyer, so it's not like we'd be having a party anyways. She tried to ignore the fact that having them there, for emotional support if nothing else, would have helped.

Officer Kang came back on shift and brought her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. Piper took it, grateful that it wasn't meat and cheese. And that using truth serum was inadmissible for evidence in the United States courts.

Around one o'clock, her luck improved. Kang let her out of the cell, saying, "The cavalry has arrived."

Oh, good. The lawyer. Finally. Piper said nothing but let the officer lead her to a back room. She walked in, expecting a suit and a briefcase and a bad attitude—and found her father sitting there at the table, his expression troubled.

"Dad?" Her voice came out higher than normal, younger. She sank into the second chair, unable to take her eyes off him. Had she lost her mind?

"Piper," he sighed. "What have you done?" Based on his disappointed tone, it was a rhetorical question.

"I…" She searched for a good explanation and came up empty. "What are you doing here?"

"Take a wild guess."

She averted her eyes.

"This is the last time, Piper. You're an adult; it's time you started acting like it."

"I have!" she protested, looking up at the accusation. "I've changed. I'm different than I was in high school, and if you would give me half a glance, you'd know that!"

He gave her a sharp look. "Don't take that tone with me. I love you, but you know work keeps me busy."

"Yeah, so busy," she snorted. "Give me a break. Nobody's too busy for a ten-minute phone call."

"If you wanted to talk to me, you should have called."

She pretended to brighten at this. "I should have called? Wow, maybe you should tell that to what's-her-nuts, your secretary who hates me. Oh, wait, that's all of them." She sank back down in her seat. "I do call. Or I did. But there's only so many times I can call and get told you're 'busy' and they'll 'take a message' and then never get a call back. I know when I'm not wanted."

He looked surprised at this, and a little wounded. "They told you that? When?"

"Like, twice a week for half a year after I got out of that crappy camp school." She shrugged, working too had to feign nonchalance. "I figured it out eventually, no worries."

"Piper, no." He reached for her hand, and she was too surprised to shake him off. "I never—I didn't get your messages. I didn't know. I'm sorry."

She wanted to demand more, to scoff, You think sorry is going to cut it? But she had missed him, and sorry was halfway to what she'd been pursuing since she was eight. Her fingers curled around his. "I called for you," she whispered, "and you were never there."

"I'm so sorry." His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. "Things will be different now. For both of us. Deal?"

She looked her dad in the eye and held on to his hand a little tightly. "Deal," she agreed. And she didn't even cry.

After they made the deal, Piper had to sit in the room by herself (well, probably with some cops watching in secret) while her dad took care of some business out in the hall. Years of experience told her it was probably a work call, but he'd promised. So she waited, and she purposefully trusted him.

Maybe half an hour later, the door opened again. Her dad and Officer Kang stepped inside.

"So, what now?" Piper asked, which was three more words than she'd said to the cop all day.

"Hands, please." Kang leaned down and, to Piper's surprise, unlocked the handcuffs and dropped them on the table. "You're free to go."

"I'm…?" Piper looked to her dad, then back to the officer. "What?"

"The parts businessman dropped the charges," Kang said lightly. A little too lightly. "Said there was a mistake. He's not going to press it. So you're free to go."

Piper could feel her lips forming a little O. What the ever-loving…? She jumped up. Well, I'm not going to stick around and wait for the other shoe to drop. "Uh, okay." Her dad shot her a look, and she added a halfhearted "Thanks."

Kang let them out into the hallway, shut the door, and then headed to what smelled like the break room, leaving father and daughter alone.

"What'd you do?" she asked him, flat-out. "The car parts guy didn't make a mistake."

Tristan McLean gave a sneaky little half-smile that made her smirk reflexively, a mirror image. Bet his stupid secretaries never get to see that side of him. "Let's just say I took care of it."

There it was: he'd played the Rich And Famous card. Piper's guess, based on past parallels, he had paid the parts guy as much money as the two cars had been worth, and then some. The parts guys had probably made bank and been more than happy to drop the lawsuit.

"But I was completely serious," he warned her. "This is the last time. If you break our promise, you'll have to deal with the consequences on your own. Wherever it takes you."

"Got it." She pretended to salute, but he saw through her flippancy. He gave her a little smile, this one less trouble-making, and gave her a hug that she returned fiercely.

"I'll call you tonight," he promised, the words a warm breath in her hair.

"I'll hold you to it."

He drew back and studied her face as if he were taking in everything about her. Maybe he was. "I love you," he said with a smile.

She was starting to believe him. She smiled back. "I love you too."

He chucked her lightly under the chin and then headed out towards the lobby, probably to get on a flight ASAP. She took a deep breath to steady herself.

Officer Kang said something about getting her stuff back, but Piper's focus was already elsewhere. Jason's hurt, she thought, preparing herself for the worst. And it's my fault. This was huge, and I lied about it. I can't blame him if he needs time to think about it.

The officer led her out to the lobby area, chilly from the fall air let in by opening doors, and Piper barely registered signing out or getting her phone and purse back. She'd found the people who were there to pick her up. Her closest friends.

Leo and Reyna stood by the door, huddling close in jackets and scarves and holding a pair for Piper as well.

But Jason was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, guys." She approached them, rubbing her arms. "Is he in the car?"

They winced in unison. "Sorry, Pipes," Leo said, too gently.