Author's Note: Got tissues?

Chapter Thirty-Six

As Javier opened the back door and leaned in to pick up Angelina from her car seat, a wave of stench hit his nose, and he stopped, gagging. "Whew!"

"What? Oh, god!" Letty started to turn around, flinching back as she smelled it, too.

"I think she needs changing," he deadpanned, then looked down at his now-wailing daughter. "How can such a tiny little thing make such a big stink?"

"I'll get it," Letty volunteered, going for her door handle again, but again, he stopped her.

"No, I'll change her. I can't feed her, but I can do this. Shit don't scare me," he grinned at Angelina as he got her out of the car seat.

Letty reached quickly for the diaper bag behind the other seat to hand it to her husband. "Do it in the trunk; there's room beside the bags." At his outraged look, she clarified cryptically. "It's a flat surface, the back seat isn't. Trust me."

"Okay," he acquiesced. "Come here, little stinky; Mommy says to put you in the trunk, where all the stinky bodies go."

"What?" Letty cried. She twisted around in her seat as Javier raised the back hatch and set Angelina down on the level trunk floor. "That is not... funny... Mister Perez!"

Javi raised his head so he could see her over the barrier, his face serious. He raised his eyebrows, then grinned and nodded. "Yeah, it is." Then he ducked down again, and she heard him croon in falsetto, giving the baby a voice, "Oh, hurry, Daddy, hurry! Get this nasty thing off me! It feels terrible!" Letty had never heard him do anything like that before, and she snorted, then continued quietly giggling as she listened.

Suddenly he stopped. "Um... Letty?" She looked over her shoulder again as he raised his head above the barrier, his eyes now slightly terrified. "Is it supposed to be... greenish... black?"

"Yes!" She suddenly remembered. "Just for a few days. And smells fucking terrible. She's getting rid of, I don't know, extra iron I think? From the supplements I've been taking."

"Oh, okay!" With the relieved reply, his head disappeared again and he resumed the falsetto, chiming in with her tiny newborn cry of outrage. "Daaaaaddyyyyy! Hurry UP!"

"Are her clothes okay?"

"Yes, Mommy," came the falsetto reply, making her giggle again, "my clothes are clean and dry!" He was remarkably fast for a brand-new father, bringing his red-faced infant around to Letty in another half minute with a snug new diaper and pajamas resnapped.

"Do not leave that stinking thing in the trunk, please. There's a trash can right there."

"Si Señora."

As Javier climbed back into the driver's seat, his phone buzzed. He frowned as he looked at it – an email from KronosKai. He briefly explained who that was as he opened the message, then cursed at the contents. "Fuck!"

"What?"

He sighed. "The police have put out an APB on you. 'Wanted for questioning', not arrest, but still. Description, 'mother with newborn baby'. It's under Raines-Pereira, so we'll have to avoid having you show ID."

"Anything about you?"

He scrolled on down, making sure he'd read the whole thing. "No. It briefly describes Christian, though, as a probable companion and accomplice." He looked up at her. "That will give us more cover, then."

"Is it statewide, or national?"

He looked again. "National. But highest priority in Alabama."

"I'll feel better once we get out of this state, then. How much further?"

He gave her the side-eye. "We already did. We're nearly to Atlanta."

"Oh. Well, that's good then," she brushed it off nonchalantly. "But let's still be very careful."

"Very."

And they were, stopping only in busy places to use the crowds themselves as camouflage. They called each other "Juan" and "Michelle" – two common names grabbed at random – whenever they were in public, and both of them adopted flat, midwestern accents – although Juan's inexplicably had a bit of a Texas twang. "I can't help it," he laughed when she teased him about it. "It's automatic. I don't know where I picked it up."

Late that afternoon, on the outskirts of another large city on I-95, they pulled into a hotel parking lot, one of several in the immediate area, full of tourists and hurricane escapees. Javier went in solo to check in, lucking into the last room, and they used a back stairway to reach the third-floor quarters. Letty called down an hour later to ask for a crib, so the desk wouldn't associate it with Javier, and they called out for Chinese food delivery.

Late that evening, Letty came out from the bathroom after a shower, finding Javier sitting on the far side of the king bed, leaning over the low crib beside it, lightly rubbing Angelina's belly and crooning to her to settle the fussy baby down. It was working. Letty paused to listen: he was speaking in mixed Spanish and English, but she understood enough of the former now to get the gist, if nothing else.

"Shhhh, little angel. Mommy and Daddy are both here, and we always will be. You will grow up knowing you are loved, and wanted, and approved of. You will never have to question that, I swear. Shhhhh." As she quieted, Javier looked over his shoulder; he'd seen Letty in his periphery. "Well," he told her wearily, "I've heard that all new parents swear they will not repeat the mistakes their parents made with them. I guess I'm no different."

"Me, neither," she replied, stepping up beside him and laying her arm around his shoulders, as he put his own arm around her waist. "Wow," she added, not quite sarcastic. "That's nice."

"What?" he looked up at her, mystified and ready to be outraged.

She gave him a raised eyebrow. "Being normal. For once."

He snorted, then nodded his head. "Yeah," he agreed. "It is." Reaching across with his other hand, he took a tiny hold of her nightgown and tugged it. "Come here. I need to tell you something." As she sat beside him on the bed, she took note of how drawn and pained his face looked. "This is something I need you to understand," he went on by way of preface. "I haven't been keeping it from you – I only just now found it all out myself."

This is going to be heavy, she realized. "Hang on," she said aloud, then, "Come here." Standing again, she moved around to the head of the bed, pulled down the covers, plumped up the pillows for them to lean on, and got in, beckoning him beside her. He followed suit, and she put her head on his shoulder as his arms came around her again, slipping her own arms around his waist. When they were comfortable, she prompted him, "Okay, go on."

It took him another moment, then he started as he had with Paulo, asking what she knew of Argentina and the Dirty War. Only a few paragraphs about that, she admitted. "But wasn't your – wasn't Oscar part of it?"

"How did you know that?"

"Your nieces said so, back at that damned dinner, when I asked them quietly what the hell was going on."

"Yes, he was. And thank you for using his name, instead of..." He let that one go, not quite ready yet. He told her briefly about the Disappeared, and the Lost Ones – the Children of the Disappeared. She was quicker than Paulo, straightening up immediately and hitching around in bed to stare at him.

"You?" she whispered the question, horrified. Javier could only nod, his face wretched. "How did you find out?" she went on.

He picked his phone up off the nightstand, called up the picture of himself and Miguel on the docks and handed it to her. She recognized it immediately. "What was his name?"

"Miguel. Miguel Perez." She looked at him sharply, recognizing the last name, and he nodded the admission before laying out the facts of Miguel's life that he had learned from the pages of his personnel file, including their official birth dates – one day apart.

"But are you sure?"

He nodded, confessing that he had kept Miguel's hairbrush from their shared ship's cabin in a zipper bag, complete with his twin's hair, and one day would run their DNA for proof, but he didn't need it to know the truth. "I never felt... deeply connected to any of them, except Ava – and that was because she tried, so hard. None of the others..." He had to stop and breathe for a moment. "I could never get his approval, even though the others could. He would smile at them, but only push me harder, push me away. Letty..." Another long pause. "I swear, I didn't realize this until the last few months, after it was all over. I never thought it consciously. But I think..." He swallowed. "I think now... that one of the reasons I did..." He had to force himself to say the words. "that I killed people... is because... somehow inside, I thought... if I was more like him, did what he did..." Javier couldn't finish, so she did.

"He would approve of you at last?"

"Of course it didn't work. He just shoved me away, harder." Tears were now pouring down his face. "Letty... why couldn't he just tell me? That night, at dinner. Why couldn't he just say: 'oh, you're not my son, we adopted you, that's why'? Why couldn't he set me free?" It was the cry of an abandoned child.

Her hands and forearms were wrapped around his head, stroking his hair. "That is why, exactly. Because he's – he was – " she corrected herself; Teo had taken him and David out, "a fucking psychopath, a walking shitshow. He never did or said anything to benefit anyone but himself. The concept of helping someone else literally never once entered his head, his whole life. The idea of other people having feelings and being worth consideration was entirely foreign to him. That's how psychopaths work." She shook her head, and returned to the point. "He didn't set you free because it never occurred to him to do so, or would have made sense why." He was sobbing openly now, and she pulled his head down onto her shoulder, stroking his back as he let out the pain at last.

After a while, the tears eased, and he sat up again. It seemed he wasn't done. Oh, god, what else could there be? she thought. "I told you, that night... that it didn't bother me, what I did. That I didn't believe I was evil. But now that I know why – all the why's... now I do. I was evil."

" 'Was'!" she cried, soft but intent. "Not any more!"

He shook his head again. It seemed there was one more hard knot. "The very worst thing, that I realized... Letty!" His voice when he said her name, cracked and laden with pain and sorrow, shredded her heart. "You know the old joke... 'oh, it wasn't me, it was my evil twin!' Letty... That was me. I was Miguel's evil twin! And he took the blame for everything I did!"

"Only after he died! And you didn't cause that!" He started to shake his head at that, but she caught his face with her hands and stilled it. "No, listen to me. I listened to you, now you listen to me." His face said he wasn't going to believe, but he let her speak. "He was there to buy drugs, wasn't he? Didn't he contact – what was his name? Your contact?"

"Marco."

"And Marco contacted you. So if it hadn't been you there that night, it would have been somebody else. And none of you had anything to do with those goddamn gangs that started shooting. Miguel's getting wounded – and you – was completely by accident. And you did not cause him being there. Listen to me. You were not responsible for his death." She waited a beat, trying to see the light in his eyes. "I want to hear you say that," she demanded.

It took him a few seconds, but he finally whispered, "I wasn't responsible."

"His death was not your fault."

Another few beats. "It wasn't my fault." She was satisfied, as he had been earlier that day. It would take time for both their self-messages to really sink in deep.

"But..." he started, but she put her fingers over his lips to stop him.

"As for what happened later, the cops thinking he was you, and pinning all your crimes on him? You know what? I don't think he would have been unhappy. No, listen. You know I don't believe in any kind of afterlife. But I think if there was one, and he was somewhere looking down, and knew what had happened? I don't think he would be unhappy. It didn't affect his life. And after..." She paused, and whispered the last momentous ideas so softly, as though to say them any louder might shatter them. "It was the only gift he could give you... his twin brother, who he never knew in life. He... set you free. And I think he would have been glad to do it if he knew." Whether it was true or not, she couldn't possibly know, and of course she didn't believe in an afterlife, but if it helped ease her husband's pain... and if Miguel had been anything like Javier, she did believe it would have made him happy to give this single posthumous gift to his unknown twin in so much pain.

Javier was feeling even more devastated than before at this way of looking at what had happened, but... he grabbed onto the idea of the gift with all the desperation filling his soul. Letty saw the lifeline, and knew it was there for both of them.

"So to honor him... you have to honor his gift, always... and never throw it away," she told him.

"I won't," he replied immediately, his fervency making it a sacred pledge. "One hundred percent legit, from now on."

"One hundred percent legit," she agreed, liking the repeated phrase, too. She held up her right hand so they could both see the SCS tattoo on her wrist. "Straight, clean and sober. For Miguel... for Angelina... and for you and me. For each other. For the rest of our lives."

"Absolutely!" Javier pulled her in close, holding his beloved in a tight, tight hug, letting the last few tears fall on her shoulder, and at last, her magic began to work on him, and he finally, after all those long, tortured months, began to feel a measure of peace.

She pulled back slightly, and their lips met in a long, loving kiss, full of promises of all sorts. After several minutes, Javier broke it to look into her eyes. "I don't suppose we could..."

"No," came her instant, flat reply. "Not for two more weeks." Then her eyes twinkled. "I could..."

"No," he echoed her, and grinned for a moment before it softened again. "Until I can make love to you properly, I just want to hold you."

"Hold me," she whispered, pouring all her long lonely months of longing into the plea.

And he did, all that night, and every night thereafter.