AN: Hey guys. I want to start off with an apology for the long note at the top and the delay. There were several factors. Firstly, work is still a bit crazy. Secondly, I was out a couple days because I got pretty wiped from my second COVID shot. And lastly, because this was kind of an important chapter, and I wanted to make sure I got it right. I appreciate all of your reviews and your enthusiasm so much. The response to the last chapter was overwhelming. Thank you so much for reading and being so responsive and engaged.

That being said, I would like to acknowledge the fact that I got several reviews in the last few days from an anonymous reviewer that seemed to be prodding me for updates (this is excluding one from earlier today who seems to be someone else cause there was an actual name signed at least). But, anyway, please don't do this. I have said several times that this fic is flowing out of me at a slower pace, and I have asked for patience. Or at the very least, if you do feel the need to check in on me and want to know what's going on, don't leave anonymous reviews. Login and review or just PM. That way I can actually talk to you and tell you where I am. With anonymous comments, I have no way of replying other than doing this - saying something in a public note. And, honestly, I don't like this option. I feel like a teacher scolding her students or something and that really sucks. This isn't to discourage anon reviews in general. They are always welcome and encouraged. Just if you have a question you want a legitimate answer to… there's not much I can do with a guest review.

Anyway, thanks again and on with the show…

2014

"We might need to talk…"

Rory stood there blinking for a moment, the dread filling her stomach like a lead weight, making it almost impossible for her to move. In front of her, Logan was standing with a nervous expression, his right hand scratching at the back of his head and his lips pursed as if saying just those five little words was already incredibly difficult for him. It didn't bode well for whatever he had to say next.

The last - and frankly only - 'we need to talk' conversation she and Logan had with each other had ended with her handing a diamond ring back to him and him walking out of her life for what she had assumed was forever. She couldn't help but feel as if these two situations were too similar for comfort. They both felt immensely uncomfortable. They'd both come at her during a time where she had previously been bubbling with excitement about all the possibilities for their future. They'd both come completely out of left field and knocked her off course entirely.

"Okay…" she finally said, forcing herself not to sound too freaked out, but knowing that she was just a few words away from the possibility of shattering into a million pieces.

"It's not a big deal…" said Logan, attempting to reassure her.

It wasn't the comfort he assumed it would be. Rory had known Logan long enough and intimately enough to realize that his assessment of 'not a big deal' was usually not to be trusted. They'd always had pretty different definitions of 'not a big deal.'

"I just um…." he continued, the hand that had been rubbing at the back of his neck and moved around to his jaw as he attempted to string the best series of words together. "Before we go, I thought you should know that there might be a girl there…"

"Well… I kind of assumed this party wasn't going to be held at The He Man Woman Haters Club."

Logan laughed uncomfortably at her attempt at levity, but he didn't look any more comfortable than he had before the words had come out of her mouth. Rory wasn't any more comfortable either if she was honest. Yet, pushing out unsolicited witticisms at times when they were entirely unwarranted was one of her many dysfunctional habits, one that she was particularly talented in.

"No...ah…." said Logan, the laugh still trailing in his tone ever so slightly. "I mean I… That is there might be a girl there who I've kind of….dated… in the past."

Strangely enough, Rory was actually filled with relief at the sound of his confession. It wasn't as if it was something that she was happy to hear. The prospect of seeing a guy's ex - any guy's ex- was never something to look forward to. And, she also wasn't entirely loving that she was already having to confront the seven years worth of space between them. But seeing a girl that he used to date was hardly the end of the world. It wasn't like it was an ex-wife or anything.

"Oh," she said. "Well… okay… that's fine I guess."

"Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said firmly. "Look I'm not like...jumping for joy about potentially running into an ex of yours. But I know you haven't been a monk for the past seven years…."

"She's not really an ex," said Logan with a shrug. "We've just been out a couple times."

"Well then it's really not a big deal at all," she said with a shrug before resuming her unpacking. "How long ago are we talking here anyway?"

"Like…. Three weeks ago."

Rory suddenly felt as if ice was filling her veins. The grip she had around one of the hangers from Logan's closet went white knuckled and her mouth opened with shock, no doubt leaving her standing there looking like some moronic mouth breathing idiot. But she couldn't help it. All of her brain power was going into focusing on staying standing, she couldn't expel any extra effort on anything else.

"Um…" she said as she turned and attempted to hang up the dress in her hand only to find herself missing her target over and over again from her shaking hands. "Okay… that's…. yeah. Okay."

"It's not a big deal or anything…"

Very different definitions.

"It's not serious, I mean," he clarified. "I just… I wasn't sure what this was…" Logan gesture between them, waving back and forth with a couple flicks of his wrist. "If we were… starting somethingor… It just wasn't very clear. I hadn't heard from you after you left. And then Bobbie kinda set us up, and I couldn't say no without it being a whole thing…"

"No… yeah… no," said Rory, shaking her head.. "It's uh… it's fine."

"You're sure?" Logan asked.

Rory looked him over in that moment. He was watching her through a somewhat wincing expression. His brow was furrowed and he was kind of almost leaning away from her, as if she was like some snake that he was afraid might spring out at him if he didn't move with extreme caution. Rory, however, didn't think she could summon the effort to spring even if she wanted to.

His question hung in the air for a couple moments, Rory not entirely sure how she should go about answering it. She didn't really have any other choice but to be fine. After all, he was right. They weren't really… anything... to each other at this point. They'd slept together once in Hamburg and she'd stayed with him for a whirlwind week three months ago. They weren't in a relationship. They hadn't even had a conversation about it.

She couldn't exactly say no. She couldn't say that she wasn't sure. That the idea of him being with another woman just weeks ago made her want to dig herself into a hole so that she could have her own dark space to crawl into and cry without him finding out. She couldn't tell him how much this had thrown her for a loop, how she had been holding out hope that maybe this was the beginning of something and maybe he was feeling the same way. After all… she'd given him no indication that that was the case whatsoever.

"Yeah," she said with a slight quiver. "Of course, I'm sure."

"Really?" he asked.

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, there was a thirty year old woman trapped inside her that was screaming out to say 'no.' That she wasn't fine. That she didn't want him seeing other women. That she didn't want to share him with anyone else. And, yet for some reason, standing here now Rory didn't feel like that woman. She felt like a twenty year old college student, shopping on the streets of New Haven with her mother, running into Logan sitting at a cafe table with some other girl, telling him later in the newsroom that she was totally fine with it. Only now she knew that it was only a matter of time before she would desperately need to drown her sorrows in an entire bag of tacos.

She knew and yet she still couldn't bring herself to do anything differently.

"Yeah," she said, forcing some conviction behind her voice. "Look… you're right. I mean… We're not in a relationship. We didn't really talk about what this was after I left."

"I know," said Logan. "But I just… If you're not okay with it… I mean we should probably talk about it now. Because, I - "

"There's nothing to talk about," said Rory with a shrug as she furiously continued to put her clothes away. "You didn't do anything wrong."

"Okay…but…"

"But nothing, Logan," said Rory. "It's fine. I mean… we live on two different continents. We both have unpredictable work lives. Neither one of us is in a position to make this...thing… between us serious or exclusive. I can't ask that of you…"

"Rory…That's not what I - "

"Look this is fun," said Rory, giving him her full attention once more. "I love seeing you. I love being with you when I'm here. But when I'm not here… I don't expect you to sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for me to come back. You have a life to live. I have a life to live."

Logan furrowed his brow and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

"So what are you saying?" he asked.

"I'm saying that this is like… Vegas."

"Vegas?" Logan asked.

"Yeah, you know," said Rory. "It's like… what happens here - now - stays here and now. And it's fun and exciting. But eventually we have to go back to our regular lives. Get on with reality."

"Reality…" said Logan with a curt nod. "And in reality we can't be together?"

"We can be together," said Rory. "When we're together. And when we're not together… we're not together."

The expression on Logan's face was indecipherable. For a man who usually had such expressive eyes, his gaze was almost entirely blank as he stared at her in that moment. And she felt herself growing even more anxious with every passing second.

"I mean that makes the most sense, right?" she asked. "We've done it before…"

Silence passed over them. Logan just stood there staring at her, his expression still blank and unreadable. Eventually, however, she saw his head start to bob in the tiniest hint of a nod. He glanced down at the floor briefly, and by the time he looked up at her, the blank expression on his face had been replaced by a tight lipped smile.

"Yeah…" he said with a shrug. "We've done it before."

She thought she'd feel relieved. She thought that hearing him agree so effortlessly was what she wanted. That she could be happy that they avoided a massive confrontation where they both decided that what they were doing was insane and would never work. She thought they'd avoided an emotional atom bomb that neither one of them was ready to face just yet. She thought she'd bought them some time to figure out what they were doing before they had conversations about whether or not this was serious.

However, as she stood there staring at him, she couldn't help but feel the exact opposite of relief. She couldn't help but notice that even as he stood there smiling at her, the light was missing from his eyes. And she couldn't stop the tiny little voice in her head that wouldn't shut up.

'Yeah, you've done it before, Rory,' it said. 'And look how well that turned out for you…'

2036

"You've spent the last twenty years making that abundantly clear."

"Ugh!"

Rory groaned out loud as the sound of her ex-husband's voice sounded unbidden in her mind once again. She hadn't been able to get the words out of her head since she'd heard them. They would pop up at the most random and inconvenient times - like the memories of an embarrassing moment from childhood flashing in front of your eyes as you tried to fall asleep or the sinister voice in the back of your head whispering words of self-doubt when you should otherwise be proud of yourself.

She cringed as she heard the timbre of his voice inside her mind and saw the look of pure vulnerability and pain that had flashed across his face as he'd said them. The red gel pen that she was holding in her hand suddenly found it's way off of the paper she had been grading and went flying across the kitchen. It slammed against the pantry door and landed on the hardwood floor with a satisfying clink.

Paradise Lost was just going to have to wait. In truth, she'd had just about enough thoughts of paradises lost lately. She really wasn't in the mood to think about more. She wasn't in the mood to think about falls from grace, about torments of one's own making, about the confounding difference between good and evil, about forgiveness. Surely some things were unforgivable. Surely, even God's forgiveness - if real - had its limits.

It was never a good thing when one found themselves relating to Satan. Even if it was just Milton's Satan. Even if one didn't particularly believe in Satan. He was a character best kept unrelatable.

With a loud exhale, Rory collapsed against the kitchen table beneath her. Her head landed on the forearms that were spread out against the surface in front of her. And, with a few bends of her neck, her forehead pounded against her flesh in a series of thumps.

Once finished with the physical manifestation of her self-loathing, Rory rose from the kitchen table with a long sigh, leaving behind the papers in favor of a quick break. If one could call it that. In the end, even though she'd stopped ramming her head against the table, it wasn't exactly as if she wasn't still punishing herself in her mind. She was. The thoughts continued, going through the same familiar dance they'd been going through for twenty years.

This is all your own fault. You deserve to feel miserable. You're the reason why your husband was so full of resentment. You're the one who always kept him at arm's length. You're the one who never let him be the father-figure your daughter wanted. You're the reason why she never had one. It was you. Your lies. Your cowardice. Your inability to move on from the man who made it clear he didn't want a full life with you. Who married someone else.

She groaned out loud once again just as her fingers landed on the handle of the coffee maker sitting on the counter next to her sink. As she pulled it out, the glass carafe landed with a clank against the grey speckled granite countertops in her kitchen, followed closely by the airtight jar holding her coffee beans.

Rory had spent the last twenty years trying desperately not to think about Logan Huntzberger. At first, she'd been naive enough to think it might be possible to simply get over him. To become so used to being a single mother that she couldn't imagine her life looking any other way. She'd quickly discovered, however, that the idea was laughable.

In the early days of Riley's infancy, the thoughts of Logan would always come up during the worst bouts of her exhaustion. She'd found herself wondering what it would be like to have a partner, someone to roll out of bed at three in the morning so that you could get just a couple more hours of sleep, someone to change half of the diapers, someone to leave her with for ten seconds when you just needed to go outside and scream into the ether.

As time went on, she'd been stupid enough to think that she would think less of him as she got older, when she relied less on Rory for everything and she wasn't so exhausted from sleep deprivation and being needed constantly. But, of course, that had been a foolish idea as well. The older Riley grew, the more Rory realized that she would never be able to escape the thoughts of Logan. Not with the way she so reminded her of him at every turn.

She thought of him every time she brushed out her wavy blonde hair, every time she looked at her with the eyes that were her's in color but his in expression. She thought of him every time she took a photograph at an angle that almost made her cringe with the realization of how much she took after her grandmother in certain ways, the grandmother she had never met, the grandmother Rory couldn't stand to think about.

She thought about Logan with every little accident she'd gotten into being too reckless or too adventurous for her own good. With every basketball game she'd sat through. With her still unbeaten cookie sales record for Troop 787 - the one she'd made by purchasing hundreds of boxes up front with the help of 'investors' (namely her grandparents), the one she'd developed an entire marketing plan for, created 'business cards' out of construction paper for, created her own website for, set up 'boutiques' for in her Nana's Inn and her PaPa's diner, the one that got her featured in The Woodbridge Intelligencer with a headline dubbing her the town's own 'Girl Scout Entrepreneur.'

No matter of well intentioned comments claiming that she 'so took after her great-grandfather' had ever kept Rory from knowing the truth. She took after her father. She took after father in so many ways that it often felt as if her house was haunted by his ghost. It was no wonder that even after twenty years, she'd never been able to get over him completely. It was no wonder that right before she'd walked down the aisle at her wedding, she'd momentarily had a vision of another man standing at the altar.

There was a reason Rory couldn't get Jess' words out of her head. There was a reason they had hurt so much. And it was because in the depths of her soul, Rory knew that they were true. She'd always known. Every time he'd left, it was because she'd pushed him away. She'd never given him a reason to stay. In her darkest moments, she wondered if she ever actually wanted him to… or if she was just afraid of being alone.

Tired of being lost in the cacophony of her own thoughts, Rory reached into her pocket in search of a distraction. She pulled out her phone, pulling up her mother's contact information and tapping on the green phone icon. A ringing sound chimed in her ear as she pressed the device against it, but with every passing ring that wasn't interrupted she found herself growing in disappointment.

"Hi, you've reached Lorelai Gilmore. I'm most likely too busy to take your call at the moment. But, then again I'm retired now so it's also just as likely that I really just don't want to talk to you. Leave a message if you want. If you don't get a call back… well I guess you know what category you're in. Bye!"

Rory ended the call before the beep sounded at the end of her mother's automated message. She lightly tossed the phone down on the counter and went about prepping her cup of coffee. Yet, the entire time she did, her eyes kept flitting down to the device.

She could try Riley.

The internal battle started raging within her once again, the one that she had been fighting since the day she'd dropped her off for her first night at Yale. Her instinct was to call her all the time. Going from seeing her every day, talking to her every day, having her constantly need to check in with her for everything, to her being mostly on her own was the hardest transition Rory had ever had to make as a parent.

She was trying to give her space. And, in truth, she wasn't very good at it. It wasn't helped by the fact that her relationship with Riley was so vastly different than her relationship with her own mother. When she'd left for college, she'd called her mother the same day and begged her to come back and spend the night. It was three days until Rory heard from Riley after she'd left the Yale campus. Some of the most stressful three days of her life.

It wasn't as if they weren't close, or as if they had a strained relationship. Their relationship was pretty good as far as most mothers and daughters were concerned. The truth of the matter was that their relationship was just… normal. They didn't have the strangely strong bond that Rory'd had with her mother growing up. They weren't as close in age. They weren't friends first and mother and daughter second. Rory hadn't been practically growing up alongside her own daughter. She was thirty-three when Riley was born. Already grown. Already two generations ahead of her baby. It changed things.

Perhaps it was Rory's abnormally close relationship with Lorelai that made it so much more difficult for her to give Riley the space that she wanted. As much as she knew that it was her job to step away and let her go off and discover who she was without her mother looking over her shoulder, a part of her felt like something was missing. A part of her missed having the close relationship like she had with her mother. She wanted it.

Looking down at her phone again, Rory could feel herself losing the battle with her better angels. She was already starting to rationalize. She'd waited a whole day to text her asking if she landed safely - something that she felt she deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for. She hadn't houded her with questions. She'd stopped after Riley confirmed she was safe and sound. She hadn't attempted to call yet. At this point it was mid afternoon in London, which meant Riley'd had plenty of time to go off and explore before talking to her.

With a sigh of defeat. Rory reached out and picked up her phone again, quickly finding her daughter's contact information before she had the chance to think better of herself and not call. She brought the phone up to her ear, and with every ring that went subsequently unanswered, she grew more and more disappointed. Yet, just as she was about to give up the hope of hearing her daughter's voice on the other end, she was suddenly met with a clear… but strangely hesitant greeting.

"Hey…" said Riley, clearly yet quietly. Rory figured she'd probably caught her out and about, maybe in a museum or at her hostel where she didn't want people eavesdropping on their conversation.

"Hi, hun!" she exclaimed, trying hard to keep any trace of melancholy out of her voice. "I got your text. Just calling to check in. How's Old Blighty treating you? Are you having a good time?"

"It's…." Riley trailed off for a moment, prompting Rory to raise an eyebrow. It was starting to seem as there was something more than volume control behind her daughter's quiet responses. She seemed almost… timid. "It's good. I'm fine."

She didn't sound fine. She seemed upset about something, which wasn't helping at all with her overall anxiety about her daughter being by herself in a foreign country to begin with.

"Fine?" she asked. "Just fine? Are you tired of London already? You know Samuel Johnson said, 'if you're tired of London, you're tired of life.' You're not tired of life at nineteen are you? Cause I've got some bad news if you are…"

"I'm not tired of life," came her daughter's quick response. The amusement in her tone helped Rory to relax a little bit. Perhaps she had been too quick to assume something was wrong.

"Well, I'm glad to hear it," said Rory. "Have you met anyone?"

Riley was strangely quiet in response to what Rory had thought was a pretty innocuous question. Her daughter had always been something of a social butterfly. She made friends easily. It was yet another trait that she'd gotten from her father, though Rory didn't want to think about that right now. The entire reason she called her was to keep her mind away from such thoughts. Still, Rory assumed that by this time Riley would have befriended the entire population of young people staying at her hostel. The quiet seemed a strange reaction.

"Wh...what?" asked Riley with a slight tremor in her voice, a tremor that wasn't making her reaction seem any less concerning to her mother.

"Have you met anyone at your hostel?" Rory asked again before deciding to throw another question in there at an attempt of levity. "Any cute boys?"

"I um… I've met a couple boys I guess."

"Ri, sweetheart are you okay?" Rory asked. "You seem off."

At this point there was no denying that her daughter was acting strangely. Riley wasn't usually this quiet. She wasn't usually this… nervous. And she was rarely so cagey. Even when she was hiding something, she tended to talk too much. Now, however, it felt as if Rory was prying the words out of her.

"I'm fine," said Riley. "I just… I didn't sleep that great last night. That's all."

Rory raised an eyebrow again.

"Is that all?" she asked with a leading tone, knowing that it wasn't. "Or - "

She found herself cut off by a sound that she hadn't been expecting to hear. A loud sound. A sound that definitely wouldn't have been something her daughter would hear in a museum or a hostel.

"Is that a dog?" asked Rory, her confusion mounting with every passing second.

She couldn't wrap her head around where on Earth the sound of a barking dog had come from. In her estimate, Riley was inside somewhere. It didn't seem like she was in a park or even on the Tube for that matter. There wasn't any other background noise, no sound of wind blowing into the speaker on her phone the sound of busy streets leaking over the line. No overhead announcements being made in the robotic voice that was so familiar.

"It's...um...yeah… I…"

"You don't sound like you're outside," said Rory. "Is there a dog at your hotel?"

"He's - "

Rory started pacing as the conversation was interrupted yet again. This time, however, it wasn't the sound of a dog barking, but rather the sound of someone speaking in the background.

"Beau! No! I have your treats here!"

The words were clear as day, as if they were being spoken just feet away from her daughter in an otherwise empty and quiet room. It was a woman. Her voice was sweet. Her accent was English, but with just a light trace of something slightly different behind it, something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

"Who's that?" she asked.

"That's um…" said Riley. "She works here."

"So there's a dog that lives at your hostel?" Rory asked, assuming that the 'here' in question was the 'there' where her daughter was staying for the next couple of weeks. "That's kind of weird."

"Not exactly…"

At this point, Rory had officially reached the limit of her toleration for her daughter's strange and out of character behavior.

"Riley, what's going on? Where are you?"

"I'm… I'm at… I'm um..."

In the background, Rory could hear a commotion that could only be described as a tussle. The barks were getting louder, and Riley's breathing was starting to become labored. It sounded as if she was fending something off, something that probably had four legs and a tail wagging enthusiastically in the air no doubt.

She could hear the sound of a jangling collar, the pitter patter of paws landing on the going over and over again. She could hear the sound of her daughter grunting under her breath as she no doubt tried to push the animal away. All of those sounds made sense in context. All of those sounds were things that she would expect to hear from someone dealing with a hyperactive and excitable pet begging for attention. The next sound she heard, however, was the last sound she'd ever expected to hear. A sound she never expected to hear again in her life.

"Beau!"

One word.

All it took was one word and she knew.

One. Word.

And not even a particularly long one.

A single syllable, a single consonant, three vowels, and the fuzz of a transatlantic phone connection, and yet the sound was still entirely unmistakable to her.

"Riley…" she found herself whispering - somewhat miraculously. There was one name ringing through her mind like a claxon at the moment. And it wasn't her daughter's.

"Beau! Get down!"

There it was again. Even clearer this time. The timbre of his voice. The gravel in his throat. The way that he seemed to almost bite down around the words that came out of his mouth.

"Riley…" she said again. She was louder this time. But, she could still hear the quiver in her own voice. "Riley who is that?"

She didn't know why she was asking. She knew who it was. But her mind wasn't functioning properly. The question that she really needed answered was not who but how. Yet, no manner of desperation was enough for her to pull herself together in the face of this turn of events.

"That's just...um… he's…"

"Stop jumping! Leave Riley alone. Come here."

With every sound of his voice over the line, Rory's heart started to beat faster and the world around her began to blur and spin with increased intensity. She found herself gripping the counter with her right hand, her knuckles turning white as she used all her strength to keep herself upright.

"Who is th - " Rory took a sharp breath in, not quite able to finish the question. Maybe she was afraid to hear the answer and have her worst fears come to life, or maybe she simply realized how fruitless it was to ask in the first place. She didn't really need the answer. Nevertheless, there was a part of her who needed to actually hear the words. "Riley, where are you? Who are you with?"

"I'm… I'm with…"

Her daughter went quiet again. In fact, everything went quiet. The dog had stopped making noise. The woman she'd heard in the background was no longer audible, and the sound of the voice that had sent chills down her spine was gone. It was just an eerie silence. At least it was. Until she heard four words that sent a dagger through her heart and caused her legs to lose all function.

"She's with me, Ace," the voice came as she slid along the back of her cabinets to sit on the kitchen floor and draw her knees to her chest. "I think we need to talk."

Silence reigned again as Rory tried - in vain - to compose herself. There was no telling how long she sat there, unable to speak. The only sounds she could hear now were her irregular and shallow breaths and, eventually, the click of what sounded to be like a door closing from the other line.

"Logan…"

The name came out in yet another miraculous whisper. The fact that she was able to string any combination of consonants and vowels together into an intelligible word was miraculous. Though, the man on the other line didn't seem to have any problem carrying on the bulk of the conversation for both of them.

"So you do remember who I am…" he said, sending something that felt like an icy dagger through her heart. "I guess I wasn't quite sure… I mean… considering the fact that I haven't heard from you in twenty years and seems like...uh… maybe there might have been a reason for you to call me."

"Logan…" she said again. But, the words failed her from there. Even if she could gather her thoughts well enough to get a sentence put together, she wouldn't even know where to begin. "Please. I - I'm sorry. I…"

"No," he said, in a firm yet calm tone of voice.

He was so calm. So calm that it unnerved her. It wasn't like him to react to something in this way. It wasn't like him to stay so calm and stoic in the face of anger. She could deal with his anger. She could deal with screaming and yelling. There was no shortage of screaming and yelling in their relationship. They were champions at arguing. But this wasn't the Logan that she was used to. This was someone else. Someone that she didn't know at all.

She supposed twenty years was enough to make strangers of anyone.

"No," he said again. "You don't get to do that. You don't get to cry and beg to get me to feel sorry for you. Not now."

"I wanted to tell you…" she squeaked, pathetically.

"You wanted to tell me?" he asked. She could hear the incredulity behind his tone and even sense his calmness beginning to waver. "You - "

Logan cut himself off with scoff. She heard him take in a shaky breath, and silence settled over the line for a few moments as he took his turn to gather his thoughts.

"You'll forgive me if I have a hard time believing that…"

"You were married."

"I'm her father!" he exclaimed.

Rory closed her eyes, pushing the tears that had been pooling in her eyes down her cheeks. Every instinct in her body was crying out for her to start pleading with him. To beg for his forgiveness. To apologize for all the ways she had screwed up her life - their lives. Yet, she knew she couldn't. He'd asked her not to. And, frankly, she didn't feel like she deserved it.

"How could you do this to me, Rory? How could you not..." Logan began with a quiver in his voice. "She's nineteen years old. She's an adult. I missed… I missed it. I missed everything."

"I…" she said. "I didn't…"

She didn't know what to say. She didn't want to ruin his life. She didn't want to ruin his marriage, his future. She didn't want to face the wrath of his family. She didn't want her daughter to face the wrath of his family. She didn't want her daughter to grow up with someone who couldn't commit himself to her fully.

"I didn't want to hurt you…" she said.

"You didn't want to hurt me?!" he asked. "You...You know what? Nevermind. I don't want your excuses. I don't want to hear why you did what you did. I don't care. It doesn't matter. She's with me. She's safe. I'll make sure she gets to Oxford."

"Log - "

This time, Rory wasn't even able to finish his name. The line went dead before she could even finish saying his name. Her phone fell to the floor next to her and she brought her hands to her mouth, covering up the choking sob that rose from her throat.

It seemed like she was right after all. Some things were unforgivable.

TBC….