AN: Alright guys, it's time for my third apology note. For those of you who don't read my other fics, this might be the first you're hearing of my disastrous June. I don't want to get too much into it, but suffice to say I lost my grandmother and my dog within a couple of weeks and it's just been... a lot. I've been dealing with all of the fallout from that and I just haven't been in the best headspace. I'm so so sorry for the delays in updates over the last couple of months. But, I can say with confidence that I am definitely getting my groove back. I feel it in my bones. As I've said before, I have NO intention at all of abandoning these fics, so please don't worry about that. Updates should be coming more regularly now that I'm in a better place mentally.

I also want to take a moment to thank all of you so much for your reviews. I haven't been great about responding to all of them lately because I am just trying to spend every ounce of energy into actually writing. But, I'm hoping to get back into the swing of that as well. So, please please please continue to review. Even if i don't respond rest assured that your comments are read, considered, and thoroughly appreciated.

Now, on with the show.

Chapter Eleven

2014

"Look at it. Just look at it!"

Logan was looking at it. He'd been standing here looking at it for what felt like hours at this point, and he'd yet to feel moved. If he was being honest, he wasn't feeling much of anything other than bored - and slightly triggered. His years spent in the confining grasp of the Catholic education system were rearing their ugly heads at the back of his mind by the mere image of the delicate script in front of his eyes.

"I'm looking at it…" he said, worried that his boredom might be bleeding it's way into his tone. Though, if it was, she didn't seem to notice. Thankfully.

"Have you ever seen anything so amazing in your entire life?!"

Logan had seen a great many amazing things in his life, and he couldn't help but think that a great deal of them were far more amazing than the item sitting encased in front of him. He'd seen the running of the bulls in Pamplona. He'd seen the ruins at Machu Picchu. He'd seen a great white shark jump out of the water not 500 feet away from him on a fishing boat off of Kangaroo Island. The sight in front of him didn't seem to hold a candle to any of them.

The look on Rory's face, however… well that was pretty close.

"It's just so beautiful…" Rory continued, running her fingers along the clear plexiglass in front of them. It was so abundantly clear that she ached to actually be able to touch it - though even if she could he knew that she never would. She wouldn't feel worthy. "Look at the gold leaf. I mean it was done centuries ago and it's still so shiny and… perfect."

"Yeah it's… pretty…" Logan said, scratching at the back of his head.

Rory apparently wasn't very impressed by his response. She turned to look at him, and the one beautiful and enchanting expression on her face quickly morphed into something more akin to shock, disappointment, and incredulity. He was almost saddened by the sight of it, and he would be still if he didn't think that it was a prime opportunity to tease her a little bit.

"Logan…" she said. "This is a priceless artifact. There are only forty-nine left of them in the world! I mean… this is what started it all. The whole world as we know it. I mean… most people weren't even literate before this. I certainly wouldn't have been. And you… well… you owe your whole career - your family's entire legacy to this!"

He looked once more at the book in front of him. The book that his… friend?… lover?… soulmate?... - he wasn't even sure what to call her in his mind - had so graciously pointed out was responsible for his entire life. His entire existence as he knew it. The first book ever created en masse via movable type. The first work of literature literally pressed into existence. Yet, unlike the woman next to him, that bit of knowledge didn't inspire the same sense of awe and wonderment. If anything, it sparked resentment and disdain.

In that moment he began to wonder what his world would look like without the invention of the printing press. It would be a much more primitive place for sure. He'd probably be nothing more than the modest son of a Bavarian cattle herder - the other long running Huntzberger legacy that was finally broken by his great-great-great-great grandfather when he'd hopped on a boat to Ellis Island in 1848 with the six year old son that would eventually start a pamphlet publication that would grow into the billion-dollar media empire that he ran today.

He wondered for a moment if his life might have been better. If he'd be happier in a pair of lederhosen than an Armani suit. If a small cottage high in the Alps would be a better home for him than his two million dollar Chelsea apartment. If he would have found more fulfillment with a simple life. Schnitzel and kugel instead of steak and potatoes. Beer and federweißer rather than fine whiskey and wine. A family instead of the seemingly never ending life of a bachelor. Two and a half kids and a dog - a German Shepard of course. And a wife. A dirndl clad wife with her hair braided into a crown around her head - brown hair. And blue eyes…

But then again… considering that he was partially Jewish on his mother's side, it was probably for the best that his family hadn't stayed in Bavaria. Although, in such a world… perhaps things would be different. Maybe it would have been a world without The Holocaust. Without nuclear weapons. Without global warming.

Of course, the realist in him knew that was too good to be true. The world would hardly be a paradise. It hadn't been before the invention of the printing press, so it was hardly realistic to think it would be afterward. Such a world might exist without those specific horrors, but surely there would still be horrors. Just different ones… ones that he couldn't even begin to imagine.

"I mean just imagine the kind of world we'd live in without the printed word - without the ability to distribute writing to the masses…"

"I am…" he said.

In that moment, there was one horror that was jumping out at him, one that he could very well imagine but didn't want to spend a single second thinking about longer than he had to. A world without the printing press would be a world without that look of pure, joyous, and unbridled passion on Rory Gilmore's face. And as nice as things might be for him in that world… as far as he was concerned, a world without that face was not a world worth living in.

"It is my ultimate goal in life to see all of the Gutenberg Bibles…" Rory said as she turned away from the display in front of them and started moving around the room to the other exhibits. Logan, of course, knew this about her. He'd known this about her since before they'd even started dating, since he'd caught her in the Beinecke Library staring at the volume on display on a random Thursday afternoon still as a statute, and he'd unceremoniously ruined her meditation ritual by coming up and whispering teasing comments in her ear about how delectable it must smell and what a shame it was that she couldn't stick her face into its spine and inhale like a junkie with a coke habit.

"I know," he replied, smiling as he followed her around the library.

"I've seen eighteen at this point," she continued, before starting to count them off by tapping her fingers against the palm of her other hand. "This one obviously. I've seen this one before. And the one at Yale. I'm very familiar with the one at Yale. All the ones in New York. DC. Oxford. Oh - Harvard. When my mom took me there on a road trip when I was in high school and still thought I wanted to go to Harvard. Let's see um… there's the one in Paris and The Vatican - I saw that one when I went to Rome with my grandma the summer before we met. Copenhagen. Berlin. Vienna. I've got a few more in Europe to hit. And sadly a few more back home too, but working the campaign trail in '08 helped knock a few off my list - Austin and Princeton...I still need to see the ones in Russia and Japan. Sadly, Asia is still a mostly untraveled territory for me. And you know how much I've always wanted to go to Asia..."

"Yeah, I do…"

"Oh! You know my other favorite thing about this library?!"

Logan couldn't stop the enchanted smile from spreading across his face at her sheer enthusiasm. She was like a kid caught in a candy store, reminding him so much of the young twenty year old woman he'd fallen in love with in undergrad. The one still so dazzled by the world around her, the one who was in awe of Tony Kushner and Seymour Hersch and a full dispenser of Cocoa Puffs.

"What?" he asked.

"The original handwritten manuscript of Alice in Wonderland. Alice's Adventures Underground. That's what he calls in on this copy. And it has the original sketches and his handwriting is so neat. It's incredible! I mean… I always thought I had pretty good handwriting, but not like that! It's so perfectly straight and meticulously spaced. If you were looking at it far away, it would look like he typed it. I don't know how writers used to do that. I mean… think of the hand cramps! And - yep - see? We're right back at imagining a world without the printing press! Just think of all the carpal tunnel that Johannes Gutenberg saved us from..."

"I mean…" said Logan, shaking his head and letting a burst of air out of his mouth in a sense of faux wonderment, his tone completely dry. "It's miraculous…"

In the next moment, an absolutely devastating turn of events transpired right in front of Logan's eyes. The look of pure joy and passion that he had been all but worshipping just seconds ago melted away from Rory's face. Her brow furrowed and a frown curled at her lips. Her shoulders dropped, and she let out a sigh - a sigh that hurt him to hear and filled him with a sense of loss and sadness.

"You're bored…" she said.

Logan wanted to kick himself. In any other context, it was true that he would be bored as hell spending his afternoon in this building. However, at the current moment he was the farthest thing from bored that he could possibly imagine. Spending time with Rory, seeing her so in her element - it was impossible to be bored.

"I'm not bored," he said, shaking his head.

"Yes, you are," Rory insisted. "This is the last day I'll be here until September, and I'm hogging all the fun. We can stop. And we don't have to go to The British Museum after this. I mean… I've been there before. I've seen enough mummies in my life… Oh! We're right next to King's Cross. We could go to Platform 9/3 and take a bunch of stupid pictures and mock all the people with wands…"

"I'm not bored," Logan repeated. Though, Rory still wasn't buying it.

"Logan…" she said. "I know you. I know when you're bored, and you look very bored."

"When you're happy, I'm happy," he answered with a shrug. Rory, however, wasn't buying it. "Besides… I dragged you to that party the other night and I know you hated every second of it. So…"

Something almost like a wince passed over Rory's face at the mention of the evening. Neither one of them had mentioned it for the duration of her visit. But, coming home that night, Logan was hyper aware of the fact that something was bothering her. If her clipped conversation on the way back to his apartment hadn't been indication enough, the way that she'd crawled into bed when they arrived and immediately turned on her side with her back facing him certainly would have.

At first, Logan had been under the impression that the evening had gone over pretty well. All things considered. Everyone seemed to be getting along well. And, even running into Odette, there hadn't been any big dramatic or awkward moments - not that he expected there to be on her end. After all, they'd been out twice at that point and neither one of them were under any delusions that they were exclusive or even remotely serious. In fact, Logan was pretty sure he'd seen her leave with one of Jason's friends at the end of the night. Still… he hadn't gone out of his way to introduce her to Rory as the woman he'd been out with a couple of times after her previous visit for fear of making her uncomfortable. But, he could only guess that Rory, ever the observant and analytical reporter, seemed to have figured it out on her own.

At least that was what he assumed.

Yet, lately it seemed like what he assumed one second was the exact opposite of what he assumed a second later. Going to bed that night, he was sure that Rory was upset with him - that she was upset with the entire situation. And he was prepared to have a long drawn out conversation about exactly what they wanted out of their newfound reconciliation. But then waking up in the morning, she was… well… in a much friendlier mood. And her friendly mood had persisted from the bed to the bathroom… to the kitchen… and to the living room…

In the hours and days that followed, everything seemed fine. She seemed fine. And Logan wasn't exactly anxious to blow things apart with another heavy conversation when all seemed well and good. They had a limited amount of time together, and he didn't want to taint it. And… it wasn't exactly like he and Rory were in a position that different than he and Odette at this point. They'd just started seeing each other again, and, as Rory had pointed out, they lived on entirely different continents. Things were complicated. Things were new. And the last thing he wanted to do was scare her off with premature talk of getting serious now that he finally had her back in his life again.

At the moment, Rory seemed fine with things being casual, and the foundation beneath them didn't seem sturdy enough at this point for Logan to go shaking it up too much. They needed more time together. They needed to get to know each other again. They needed to get to a point where the idea of a transcontinental relationship seemed worth the tremendous effort. And Logan needed to be willing to take things slow until they reached that point. If Rory was fine with things being 'casual' between them now, then that's what they would do.

All he needed to do was ignore the voice in the back of his head telling him that he wasn't.

"Okay…" said Rory, relenting at his insistence that they did not need to cut their visit to The British Library short. "But I insist that we fit in some quality Potterhead mocking when we're done and that we stop at the gift shop so we can gorge ourselves on disgusting jelly beans."

"Sounds good to me. I've been wanting a red and gold striped tie."

"Please," Rory said with a scoff. "You are the definition of a Slytherin."

"Oh, okay. I see how it is..." said Logan with a teasing smile. "And then what does that make you?"

Rory looked at him like he'd asked her what color the sky was.

"I'm a Ravenclaw…" she replied, dryly. "Why would you even need to ask that? Have you read Harry Potter?"

"You know, I haven't…" Logan admitted. "But I'm beginning to think that this trip to King's Cross might not actually be about mocking."

"Shut up," Rory replied. She turned and continued walking through the exhibit. Logan caught up to her with just a couple steps and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. And, much to his delight, she pressed herself tightly against him, her arm finding its way around his waist. "We should go to that Ivy place you like for dinner too."

"That's where we went the night before you left last time too, you know…" said Logan. "At this rate it's going to become a thing."

"I'm fine with it being a thing," Rory replied with a smile as she craned her neck up to look at him. Logan smiled in return, and he bent down to press a kiss on the top of her head.

"Me too, Ace."

2036

"There's only like… thirty-nine left of them left in the world. Or something like that…"

For a good while, the only sound Logan received in response to his statement was the clearing of his own throat.

His young long-haired companion merely stood next to him, staring down at the clear box in front of them with a furrowed brow and a pair of pursed lips.

"I think it's forty-nine," she said eventually, sticking her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.

"Right. Yeah. Forty-nine," said Logan, scratching at the hair around his temples. "That… that sounds right now that you mention it."

Riley took the following moment to rock back and forth on her feet ever so slightly. She started nodding her head for lack of anything else to say, and yet another awkward silence settled over them as they stood in the exhibition room, the only sound being the loud rumblings of a group of children who seemed to be on some kind of summer school field trip.

"It's pretty…" Riley offered. "With the… gold and… stuff. It's pretty."

The last time Logan had seen such a look of forced interest on someone's face, it was when he was trying to explain offsides to Alex at the Chelsea/Manchester City match he'd dragged him to in an ill-conceived effort to spend some time bonding. So far it seemed he was 0 for 2 when it came to having fun quality time with his children.

"You're not into this…" he said with a tilt of his head.

A panicked look fell over Riley's face, almost as if she had been caught sleeping in class or staring at a crush across the room. She forced an excitable expression on her face and tried to play it off as if she hadn't been caught drowning in utter boredom. And, as kind as the gesture might have been, Logan had been around the sun too many times to not recognize bullshit when he saw it.

"No!" she insisted. "I'm into it. It's really cool. It's so… old… and valuable…"

Logan sighed and his shoulders sagged. Riley had been with them for almost a week at this point, and while things between them were getting significantly less awkward, there were still moments where Logan was reminded just how out of his element he was when it came to relating to her. And this was without a doubt one of them.

At this point, he'd learned a laundry list of things about her. He'd learned that she loved Indian food (much to Miriam's delight). That she hated pickles and mustard. He'd learned that her favorite movie was Anchorman, and he'd cringed when she referred to it as a 'classic.' He'd learned that she was majoring in economics and mathematics, something that had taken him completely and utterly by surprise. But in a good way. The best way. He'd learned that her best friend's name was Mia and that she hadn't really gotten along with her roommate last year, but she was optimistic about her sophomore year.

He'd learned so much about her in the short time they'd spent together. Enough to fill an entire book it felt like. But, even with all of the things he could list about her on paper, he had yet to get a grasp on her. He felt like he was still so in the dark about who she was as a person. What made her tick. What got her excited. What made her laugh, smile, cry…

"Your mom liked to come here," he explained with a shrug of his shoulders. "I guess I just thought that… maybe…"

"No, you thought right!" she said. "This is… great. I'm having fun."

"Riley…" Logan said, pleading. He lifted his hands and started gesturing back and forth between them. "I know this… relationship… between us is new. You don't know me very well, and I don't know you as well as I want to. But… You don't have to placate me or… lie to me to keep me happy, okay? If you're bored you can tell me. We can do something else…"

His reassurance seemed to be working on her, because as soon as the words were out of his mouth, she was biting her lip and giving him a somewhat pained expression.

"I'm not really into it," she said with a tone as if she were pulling out her fingernails. Strangely enough, Logan found himself letting out something of a laugh now that the truth was out. He couldn't help but wonder exactly how much time they'd wasted today with him dragging her from museum to museum and her using every ounce of her being to look like she cared.

"Okay…" he said.

"I mean… I like books!" she said. "I like to read. I love to read. I just… I guess I'm more interested in reading books than just… looking at them?"

"That's… understandable," Logan said, nodding his head. He took a moment, trying to think of something to do that might be more interesting to a nineteen-year-old college student. The only problem was it had been a long time since he'd been a tourist in this town… and an even longer time since he'd been a nineteen-year-old college student. "Hey! I know. How about we walk over to King's Cross and do the whole Harry Potter thing. Everyone likes Harry Potter. Right?"

The look that flashed over Riley's face made it seem like nothing could be farther from 'right.'

"I dunno…" she said with a shrug. "I never really read it. Plus I have a friend who's trans so…"

"Right…" said Logan with a wince and a nod. "Right I… I forgot about all that… stuff… Well, is there anything you would like to do? What did you have planned when you came here?"

Riley looked sheepish for a moment.

"I didn't really have much of a plan I guess," she admitted. "I just… wanted to meet you."

Logan sighed. Once again, she was blowing him away with just how similar she was to him in so many ways. Even growing up without him as a figure in her life, the similarities were uncanny. It was score one for the nature side the equation he supposed, but it was so like him to do exactly what she had done. To wake up one morning and decide to travel across the ocean to track someone down - a complete stranger - without any plan whatsoever. He supposed he should be grateful that she'd at least thought to find a place to stay, even if he had no interest in letting her continue to stay there. It was so like him to be that… stupid. To be that reckless. To be that adventurous. To be looking for that kind of thrill.

And he suddenly had an idea…

"Alright! The day is still young." he said, clapping his hands together before looking toward the exit. "I have an idea. Let's go."

Riley let out a small squeak of surprise as Logan placed a hand on her back and started leading her out of the building. They walked the couple of blocks to the car park, making a quick stop at a Tesco Express where Logan told her to grab a drink and some snacks because they had a little bit of a drive ahead of them. She grabbed some Haribos and a couple of bags of Maltesers and a few minutes later they were on the road, making their way through a congested central London with the traffic not thinning out until they hopped on the M4.

"So…" Logan said, alternating between keeping his eyes on the road and glancing over at her while she typed away on her phone. He found himself wondering who she was talking to - if it was a friend back home or someone else. Someone that Logan maybe knew… "Have you uh… have you talked to your mom at all since…"

Riley looked up at him, somewhat surprised at the question. She locked her phone screen before throwing it in the cupholder to her left and shrugged.

"A little bit," she said. "I've texted her."

"But you haven't talked to her about…"

"I'm going to," Riley assured him. "She just… she doesn't really like to talk about you."

Logan's jaw suddenly tightened. There was a lot that he would like to say about that particular comment, but he knew he had to keep those thoughts to himself. As livid as he was with his ex at the current moment, he knew that it was his responsibility to maintain calm and composure when talking about her in front of Riley. Such was the burden of a parent, he supposed.

He took a deep breath in an effort to cool down. It wasn't exactly the answer that he had been wanting to hear. He'd been hoping that she and Rory had actually had a chance to sit down and really talk about what was going on, about Riley's plan for the rest of the summer. He had been hoping that Riley was going to take him up on his offer to stay with him longer, to cancel her flight home in less than a week's time and spend the rest of the summer with him.

"Plus she was just…" this time, Riley took a deep breath. "She was really mad at me on the phone the other day…"

Strangely enough, something about that last comment actually caused Logan's anger to start melting away. The pained look on his daughter's face was breaking his heart, and the fact that she was still avoiding her mother because she was worried about her being upset with her wasn't sitting well with him, especially since Logan had already tried to assure her that wasn't the case.

"Riley, sweetheart…." he said, sparing another glance over at her. "I told you… she's not mad at you. Okay? If anything she's mad at herself. But… she's not upset with you. Trust me. I know when your mom is mad… and she wasn't mad."

She was scared and ashamed… but she wasn't mad. Rory didn't cry when she was mad. She didn't beg for forgiveness when she was mad. When Rory got mad, she was almost always the one with the moral high ground. But, the woman he had spoken to on the phone the other day knew that she was anything but.

Still... that was as much thought as Logan was willing to give that particular truth at the current moment. The more he thought about how utterly sorry and devastated Rory had sounded on the phone, the less he was able to hold on to his anger. And right now, he wasn't willing to give up his anger. She didn't deserve him giving up his anger.

Riley looked over at him with a slight tilt of her head and a pensive look on her face, as if she was really considering what he had just said to her. One other thing that Logan had learned about her over their brief time together was that she was incredibly perceptive. She took after him in so many ways, that was true. But, he'd also noticed that she wasn't entirely just like him. There was a bit of Rory in there too. And her pensive introspection was definitely one of those bits.

"How well did you and my mom actually know each other?" she asked. "I mean… were you like… together… or…?"

Logan felt something like a knife split right through his heart at the question. It cut all the way through his anger, through his pride, through the years that he had spent mending himself and moving on and seemed to pierce right into an open wound that he'd thought had healed years ago.

"I loved your mother very much…" he said, willing his emotions not to bubble up to the surface and get the best of him. Next to him, Riley's brow was furrowed and she was nodding her head very slowly while wringing her hands in her lap.

"I thought so…" she said. "I always thought… Or well… I guess I always wondered if that's why she didn't like to talk about you. Cause it hurt too much…"

"So…" Logan asked with a clearing of his throat, needing desperately to move on from this topic of conversation before he broke down in front of the daughter he'd just met. "Are you and Alex getting along? He's not being mean to you is he?" He turned his head to look at Riley and a somewhat indecipherable look had appeared on her face, one that was profoundly difficult to read and one that didn't do much at all to ease Logan's anxieties about the way that his son might be behaving toward her when he wasn't around.

Riley shrugged.

"I wouldn't say he's mean…" she admitted.

"He's not…" said Logan. "Or... he doesn't mean to be. He's just… He can be kind of… dry… I guess is the right word. It's not personal."

Logan had always supposed it was the Englishman in his son. Or maybe it was something that he'd gotten from his mother. But, where Logan had been charming and outgoing and friendly as a young man, Alex was quiet, discerning, and had a particularly cutting wit. He supposed it was charming in it's own way, but it could also be off-putting to people who didn't know where they stood with the boy. He knew because these days, Logan found himself a part of that category more often than he liked to admit.

"I suppose he has a right to be…" Riley said with another shrug. "I mean… I don't think I'd be in a very good mood either if my mom had just died."

Before he could even realize what he was doing, Logan found himself gripping the steering wheel in front of him tightly as an unbidden image of Rory lying pale and lifeless in a casket flashed before his eyes. His heart started pounding and he had to blink his eyes tightly to banish the images away from his mind. Surely, it was the trauma from his own wife's recent death that made the image so particularly painful to him and not the newly reopened hole in his heart. At least, that was the only explanation that he was willing to entertain at the moment.

"That's really kind of you…" said Logan, looking back over at the girl. "Most people might not be that patient with him. Even considering the circumstances."

"Well…" said Riley, wringing her fingers together in her lap once again in an obvious show of self-consciousness. "He is my little brother… I guess… sort of…"

Logan felt a rush of affection for her come over him, and had he not been driving on the M25 he would have pulled her into his arms and squeezed her within an inch of his life. Sometimes he was amazed at just how quickly he'd fallen so irrevocably in love with her. Miriam had been right that he'd loved her from the moment he'd seen her name on that passport, and every day it seemed like his love for her only grew by leaps and bounds.

And, now, here she was, defending and showing compassion to the other person that he loved more than anyone else in the world. The person who - to Logan's prolonged heartbreak - many found difficult to love at times. Despite Alex's thick skin and his somewhat aloof demeanor, Logan knew that he felt it. And he knew that it affected the teenager more than he would ever willingly admit to anyone.

"He is," said Logan, prompting a smile to spread over Riley's face. "And… speaking as a little brother myself… I can't overstate how important having a good big sister in your corner can be for a kid."

Riley smiled before looking down at the hands that were in her lap. Logan smiled as well, but it wasn't very long between the pink elephant sitting in the backseat made itself known and the air around them turned heavy.

Alex still didn't know Riley's true relationship to him. It had been days that she'd been staying with them now, and things were going pretty well. Most of the awkwardness between him and Riley had melted away, and the kids seemed to be getting along well enough. But why wouldn't they when his son thought that the young lady sleeping in the room across from his was just a random friend of the family taking advantage of a nice cushy place to stay.

Things would be different when he learned the truth.

For the most part, Logan hadn't told Alex the truth yet because he was worried about how it would affect him. His emotions were so unstable on the best of days, and the tiniest thing could send him into a spiral of anger, rage, or grief. He had just started eating somewhat regularly again, and Logan wasn't exactly anxious to put him through an emotional setback and watch all that progress fall down the drain.

There was a small part of his avoidance of the topic, however, that was far more selfish. The truth was he was scared. And not just of the emotional toll the news might take on Alex, but he was afraid of what Alex's reaction might mean for their own relationship. It was already dangling on a thread and had been since about a year ago when Logan had brought Victoria Emmerson - a young, charming, amenable colleague of his - home from a fundraiser late on a Friday night, thinking that Alex and his mother had both left for her parents' home on the French Riveria for a week long getaway.

Apparently, Alex had decided at the last minute to stay home - something about some audition for some prestigious summer music program at some university. Suffice to say, his evening had not gone as planned. Alex had never looked at him the same way again. And, while at the time there was a dark part of him who wanted to tell his son that his mother was almost certainly spending some quality time with Pierre Marceau now that he was no longer tagging along on her vacation, he had kept that piece of information to himself. It wasn't long after that Odette got sick, and at this point Logan was willing to take that piece of information to the grave. As far as he was concerned, Alex could spend the rest of his life thinking that his late mother was a saint of a woman and his father hadn't deserved her at all. Logan had no problem with that.

Of course, the reality of his marriage to Odette was far more complicated than any sixteen-year-old would be able to understand. They had never been madly in love. They had married mostly out of convenience. There were arguments and down and out fights. There were moments of resentment and pettiness. There was infidelity. There were bad patches, times when Logan would sleep in the guest room on the other side of the house from his son.

But there was also so much more than that. There was a partnership. There was the bond that came from the loss of two babies after Alex. There was the unbreakable friendship that had developed between them over the years. The unwavering support they showed for one another. The mutual love they held for their child. There was a trust that even in the worst of times, even when they were angry at each other, or sleeping with other people, or were being distant or cold, when push came to shove they would stay by each other's sides no matter what.

Odette may not have been the love of his life, but there was something to be said for the woman that stayed. For the woman who said yes.

He felt the now all too familiar sensation of tears starting to prick at the corner of his eyes, and in an attempt at emotional deflection, he started turning his first around the steering wheel in his grasp and cleared his throat.

"I'm sorry I haven't told him yet," he said, looking over at her briefly before returning his eyes to the road. "I don't want you to think for a second that I'm ashamed or… embarrassed or anything like that I just… I worry about how he'll…"

"I understand," said Riley, but Logan couldn't help but feel that she wasn't being entirely truthful.

Suddenly, he was hit with the overwhelming understanding that he had no idea what to do. For so long, he had been the father of an only child. He had one child to consider. One child to worry about. One child to protect. And now… well now he found himself the father of two overnight. What was he supposed to do when protecting the emotional well being of one child meant sacrificing the emotional well being of another?

"I'm going to tell him. Soon. As soon as I find the right moment," said Logan.

Riley just flashed him another tight lipped smile and nodded. She turned to look out the window just as Logan was merging onto the A308 through Chertsey, and the moment he could, he reached down and grabbed one of the fidgeting hands in her lap, squeezing it in a show of affection and comfort.

"I'm really glad you're here," he said, prompting a smile from Riley.

Silence once again fell over them for a few minutes as Logan continued down the road. However, this time - unlike so many of the silences that had transpired between them since the moment she'd stepped into his life - this time, it was a comfortable silence. A peaceful silence. One that didn't beg to be broken or filled - at least not until a small and excited gasp escaped from Riley's lips as they neared their destination and a tall white metal track reaching up hundreds of feet into the air became visible through the passenger window.

"Is that...?" she asked, turning to look at him with a beaming smile on her face.

"I hope you like rollercoasters," said Logan with a nod, flipping on his blinker to turn into the entry gate to Thorpe Park.

"I love rollercoasters!" she said, practically jumping in her seat as if she was all of nine years old rather than nineteen. And he couldn't help but find her enthusiasm instantly contagious.

"Yeah?" Logan asked with a brilliant smile of his own, relishing in the fact that he'd finally gotten something right with her. "So do I."

TBC...

AN: Once again, I hope you all enjoyed the update! Please don't forget to review. They mean the world to us needy writers. Lol.