A/N: I decided to push on ahead with Chapter Five, which may not have been the wisest course of action. Ten thousand words in one week - whew, won't be doing that again for awhile. *Sound of Scotchplaid collapsing* Back to my normal schedule and other fics after this.

It was after 9:00 when she arrived at Mrs. Frederic's brownstone, an opened vending-machine-sized package of Twizzlers and the remains of Leena's pita chips and hummus littering the passenger seat. There was a spot she could squeeze into in front of the fire hydrant, so she took it; she didn't plan on being here all that long, long enough to listen to Helena's ideas for entrapping Nate Burdette, if she truly had any, and that was it. Afterward she could stop by Sam's, make it up to him for bowing out of dinner, if she wanted to. Right now, she wasn't feeling it, but a half-hour in Helena's company could change her mind.

There weren't any lights on in the home except for those on the third floor. Perhaps Mrs. Frederic was out volunteering somewhere or visiting her grandchildren. Or maybe she was sitting in her living room, quietly watching the street. That didn't seem so unlikely, and Myka rolled her shoulders uneasily, feeling the woman's eyes on her. She rang the doorbell, which, as she had squinted at it in the dark, looked like it was labeled WELLS; the unscheduled inspection would have to wait for a time when Helena wasn't expecting her. The thought made her sigh. Perhaps Steve would be willing to do it, she wasn't looking forward to rummaging through Helena's underwear drawer or pawing through the nightstand and finding what else may have joined the vibrator.

The outside light flickered on, and Claudia opened the door. "Helena told me it was going to be you, but I was hoping for a surprise." She had a half-sandwich in one hand, and Myka could smell the melted cheese. Seriously not. . . . "Are you going to come in or are you going to stand out there gaping at me like a goldfish?" Not waiting for a reply, Claudia was clomping toward the staircase. She didn't turn on an interior light, and Myka stumbled against the riser of the first step, putting a hand against the wall to steady herself. She grimaced but didn't say anything. In a few minutes, she would have the pleasure of kicking Claudia out of Helena's apartment.

Claudia's grilled cheese couldn't be a coincidence. It had been what Myka made for herself when she returned, late in the evening, to Helena's loft, after hours spent at the office and in the agency's fitness room away from her. She liked to make it as her meal, not just because grilled cheese was easy and quick but because it was the dairy equivalent of Twizzlers, especially if you held the bread at arm's-length, drawing the cheese out into a long, gooey band. (String cheese, which appeared to be a permanent part of the Christina Wells (or Winslow) menu, was a soulless substitute.) Even now, it was one of her favorite comfort foods. When Claudia opened the door to the apartment, Myka heard the sizzle of bread frying in a skillet . . . in butter, if her nose wasn't telling her wrong. God, Helena wasn't playing fair. Myka didn't have a good view into the kitchen, standing stiffly as she was just inside the door, but she could see that Helena was bending over the top of the small stove. Claudia was toeing off an ancient pair of combat boots onto a mat and eating the remainder of her sandwich at the same time.

"I tried to return her to her owners," Claudia mock-complained through a mouthful of cheese, "but she just kept following me. I'm not sure she's housebroken."

Helena came out to the dining table, pointing her spatula at Myka but talking to Claudia. "We have to feed her since she's here, and I'm afraid that with her here, it's time for you to go home."

Claudia looked down at her feet in their mismatched socks and then at Myka. "And I bet you were just itching to kick my ass down the stairs, weren't you?" She stuffed the last corner of her sandwich into her mouth and began to put on her boots again. She didn't bother to lace them, but she made no additional move to leave. Instead she surveyed the room, letting her glance light on Helena, before she said, "I didn't find anything, but it can all change tomorrow, you know?" She picked up a black satchel from the floor beside the mat and slung it over her shoulder. "See you later."

Myka didn't step out of her way immediately, daring Claudia to nudge, or push, her aside. They locked eyes until Claudia reluctantly looked down, and only then did Myka step farther into the room and away from the door. Claudia slammed the door so hard it rattled. Helena had been observing them, and she said mildly, "You have fifteen years and forty pounds on her." She turned back to the stove. "I fear your sandwich has burned."

"I don't want it." Myka glowered for good measure.

"Yes, you do, because all you've had since I last saw you was Twizzlers." Helena disappeared farther into the kitchen only to return with a plate, which she placed on the counter, sliding the grilled cheese onto it. "Look, I need you to be able to focus, and your plunging blood sugar levels won't help." She put the plate on the table. "Now get over here and eat it while it's still warm." As Myka remained, mulishly, where she was, Helena added, "I haven't poisoned it."

Myka slowly approached the table and pulled out a chair. She pulled it out so far that it seemed she was still in the living room, but she could reach the plate with the tips of her fingers. She set it in her lap. The sandwich wasn't all that burned, and if the truth be told, she liked the bread burned a little. She nibbled a corner. "You can't have Claudia sweeping the place for bugs."

Helena put a glass of water in front of her. "I would offer you wine, but I don't have any." She smiled grimly. "I haven't even checked to see if it's a forbidden item, I'm doing it for my own protection. There's not enough liquor in the world to wash away the taste of this arrangement we have." As Myka's nibbles of the sandwich turned into bites, the hardness of Helena's expression softened, and she said, "You'd work late and come home about nine, and you'd fill the kitchen with smoke making grilled cheese. I didn't think your patterns would have changed all that much." If Helena realized she had used the word "home," she didn't seem to care. Myka, on the other hand, almost choked on the bite she was swallowing.

Once past the danger of choking to death, Myka took additional refuge in repeating, "You can't have Claudia sweeping the place for bugs."

And it was just as swiftly that the softness disappeared and Helena's expression became closed off and wary. "You don't know how dangerous Nate is, and I don't trust that there isn't someone in the FBI who's in his pocket. It may seem an absurd precaution to you, but I won't risk my daughter, Myka. If you feel you have to report this, go ahead."

The lift of Helena's chin seemed especially accusatory, and Myka unthinkingly pushed back some strands of hair that had escaped the loose knot she had bunched it into for her workout. Great, now she had bread crumbs caught in her hair. "I'm not going to report it, but if you feel that unsafe talking about Nate here, we can go elsewhere. There has to be a bar, a coffee shop, some place around here that's open in the evenings. I'm sure you don't think my place is any safer."

"And about as inviting as a monk's cell," Helena said wryly, "unless that's changed about you."

Her place was clean and organized and furnished. More furnished than Helena's loft had been. Granted the furniture in her apartment had been bought as a suite, which had been on display, but it matched and still looked new - more than two years after it had been delivered. Myka supposed some people wouldn't see that as a positive. The apartment she had lived in when she and Helena had been involved had been old and small, barely larger than a studio, and the furniture she had purchased had been second-hand, except for the bed. But the mattress and box spring, though new, were cheap, and after the one night Helena had spent in it, she made the rule that all subsequent overnights would happen in her loft. After a month, no more than that, the rule had been superfluous because Myka had all but moved in. She would visit her apartment once a week to check the mail. The only time she had ever cried about Helena's betrayal was during her first night back in the apartment, back in that horrible swaybacked bed and all she could remember was the feel of their bodies together and how Helena had laughed at the loud, protesting creaks of the box spring.

But she wouldn't be telling Helena that. "It suits me." She shrugged and put the empty plate back on the table. "Tell me what your ideas are for getting Nate Burdette's attention."

"You have to understand, despite your boyfriend's beliefs to the contrary, Nate has no interest in me. We were together for six months when I was nineteen years old, mainly because we were more turned on by fucking with my father than fucking each other. And when that was over, we both moved on. At my father's funeral, we exchanged a few words, and I didn't see him again after that." Helena had drawn up one leg, hugging it to her and resting her chin on her knee. "There's no personal relationship to build on."

Myka wanted to rub her eyes to clear her vision. Wearing yoga pants and a long-sleeved top and hugging her leg to her chest, this Helena was the Helena she would come h . . . she would see when she returned to the loft of an evening, waiting at the trestle table off the kitchen, two glasses and a bottle of wine in front of her. Brusquely she asked, "It was mutual, your splitting up? You just tired of each other, and you waved good-bye? Hard to believe someone as ruthless as Nate Burdette would let you go so easily."

"You may be prejudiced," Helena said quietly but with the hint of a smile. "And Nate wasn't Nate twenty years ago. I had just come to the States, at Jim's behest. I was angry at being summoned, and Nate, even then, was butting heads with him. Anger fueled the attraction." A bark of a laugh. "Anger was the attraction, and back then. . . ." She hesitated, thumbnail making a groove in the material over her knee. "Back then, I liked the threat of violence, until the night Nate was violent with me. That's all it took. He made a few half-hearted attempts to win me back, but there were other women, there had always been other women, and Nate left me alone after a few weeks."

"How badly did he hurt you?" Myka remembered pictures she had seen of a teenaged Helena in photo albums that Jemma had pulled from bookshelves, the hair considerably shorter and spiked, the make-up garish, the clothes ripped and torn. A Claudia when Claudia herself was just an infant or toddler. She felt . . . she didn't know how she felt. Not protective, exactly, since it was easier to believe people needed to be protected from Helena than to believe that Helena needed protection herself, but it made her oddly jittery to think of Helena being hit. She wanted to walk around the room or go out on the balcony. Instead she held herself very still.

"He slapped me one night, hard enough to break my nose. He was drunk, but all the blood sobered him up." Helena stopped running her thumb across her knee. "I stayed with my father for a few days. I made up some story about what had happened, but he knew it was Nate."

"You must have really been afraid of him if you decided to stay with your father."

Helena narrowed her eyes. "What are you getting at, Myka?"

"Maybe he had stronger feelings for you than you think. Or maybe he blames you for the split with your father. You say there aren't any old feelings, but how can you be sure?"

Helena laughed, another harsh bark. "You think Jim severed connections with Nate because he hit his daughter? Nate was still bringing in money for him, and Jim thought I deserved having my nose broken for taking up with Nate in the first place. It didn't help their relationship, but it was hardly the last straw." She leaned over to pick up the plate and took it into the kitchen. "Believe me, there's nothing about me that Nate has the least interest in anymore," she said over the sound of running water. She came to the end of the counter and leaned her hip against it, this time hugging her arms around her waist. It drew down the vee of her top, revealing the swell of her breasts, and Myka looked away. No sense giving Helena the idea she was checking her out.

"So, what do you have?" Her mind was still on the story Helena had told her about her time with Burdette. She hadn't known about Nate when she and Helena had been together, she hadn't known about Helena's previous lovers in any detail. The file the FBI had had on Helena at the time had been slim, and other than noting in strange officialese that "Ms. Wells appears to have bisexual proclivities," there had been no information about her relationships. Helena hadn't been circumspect so much as off hand or indifferent when recalling an old boyfriend or girlfriend. Myka had received the strong impression that their relationship was the first significant relationship Helena had had, and she realized much later than she should have, long after Houston, that it was precisely the impression that Helena had wanted her to have.

And her own reticence? She hadn't named names or spoken at any length of her past relationships, almost embarrassingly few in number, because they had been insignificant in comparison. She hadn't been trying to lead Helena toward a predetermined conclusion because she hadn't known, until Helena, that they had been unimportant. Mark had seemed important because he had been her first, Rachel because, well, she had been a first, too, and then Sam, but what had made them memorable, Mark's sweetness and patience, Rachel's intimidating intelligence (and her positively sexy pronunciation of all those Latin legal phrases during their first year of law school), and Sam's ambition, lost distinctiveness in the shadows cast by Helena's sun.

"How familiar are you with the thefts at the Bowdoin Art Museum?" Helena had returned to her chair at the table, and Myka silently conceded that there was nothing particularly sun-like about her now. She was hunched over the tabletop, her thumbnail between her teeth, worry lines wrinkling her forehead.

"Enough to know that your father has always been a primary suspect." It remained the biggest art heist in U.S. history, a treasure haul of late nineteenth and early twentieth century paintings and sketches. Although every law enforcement agency brought in to investigate had believed that the thieves received inside help, no one had ever been able to isolate who among the museum staff had been a part of the theft. At one time or another, suspicion had fallen on the curators, the directors, the various assistants, the security guards, even the janitorial crew and the volunteer tour guides, but there had been no confessions, no inadvertent disclosures. The only mistake was that the security guards hadn't been sufficiently disabled, and when one regained consciousness and drew his gun on the thieves, he had been killed. Myka knew that it was also commonly believed that the murder had hampered the thieves' ability to sell the works since there was never an indication from the agencies' confidential informants that any of the art had been placed. Few potential buyers wanted to be associated with a murder, particularly if it remained unsolved. Looking at the pensive woman across from her and thinking that, in her yoga pants and worrying a fingernail, Helena hardly seemed the picture of a criminal mastermind, Myka reminded herself that Helena had been in the States a year before the Bowdoin Museum was robbed. She may have been a student at a design school hundreds of miles away, but she was still Jim Wells' daughter.

"I've been a part of many deceptions, Myka, but I wasn't part of that. My father didn't trust me, especially since I had taken up with Nate, and he sidelined me with . . . smaller projects. He never admitted or denied that he was behind the break-in in my hearing, and I knew better than to ask him. But that's not what's crucial." She took a deep breath. "What's crucial is that Nate wasn't in on it either." Smiling tremulously, Helena let her eyes drift away from the table. "I heard this from Charlie, as I did everything I know about Bowdoin. He told me that he and Nate had been working with Jim on it from the beginning. And then something went wrong with a scam he and Nate had been working - Nate put one of the people they were fleecing in the hospital - and Jim shut them out. He couldn't afford to have anything go wrong, and Nate was proving to be unpredictable. Of course, something did go wrong, and it only infuriated Nate the more that Jim had taken him off the job. Charlie said that Nate never forgave Jim for it." This time she shuddered as she breathed in, and the sadness in her face had been replaced by apprehension. "Nate wants the Bowdoin haul, he always has, and I'm going to give it to him. At least that's what I want him to think I'm going to do."

"If Nate's as powerful as the FBI and Justice believe he is, and if he's wanted the art as badly as you say he does, what makes you think he hasn't already gotten it? Your father's been dead for six years, your brother for two, and the others who were your father's partners, the ones we suspect anyway, they're old men, by and large, and some are in ill health. Nate wouldn't have had to threaten them, he could have bought them off." Myka thought she already knew what Helena's answer would be, but it had been a long time since they had worked together on a case, and, despite being able to follow Helena's train of thought about the jewelry thefts, Myka wondered if they would be able to work together well enough to be effective. She didn't expect a return of the tendency they had to finish each other's thoughts, but she needed to know that they could reach the same conclusions.

"They may be old and in ill health, but what's that line from every police procedural? There's no statute of limitations on murder." Helena wasn't so apprehensive about trying to con Nate Burdette that she couldn't summon a cynical smile. "Nobody wants to end his life in prison, take it from me, and none of them would trust Nate's willingness to run interference in a resumption of the murder investigation."

"Do you know where the works are?" Myka asked it casually, but she could feel her skin prickle, as if she were about to sweat through her clothes again, as she had on that first trip to the prison. She didn't know why Helena's answer was important to her since what were the odds that she would believe it? But she was remembering Leena's measuring look, her quiet suggestion that perhaps she had it all, or mainly, wrong, that Helena could be trusted, because Helena was looking out for someone other than herself this time. On the flip side, maybe Helena knew where the stolen art was, had known where it was all the time, and had been waiting, years even, for just the right distraction. She would direct the eyes of law enforcement one way, toward Nate Burdette, while she slipped away with a painting or two. That would be all she needed, one or two; in combination with what she must have gotten for setting up the Marston Gallery thefts, the black market sale of a Bowdoin Picasso or Van Gogh would set her and Christina up for life, no matter how princely - princessly? - they chose to live.

"What answer do you want to hear?" Helena asked, almost plaintively. "Which would you be most inclined to believe?"

"I don't know."

"I understand that it's easier to believe that everything I ever told you was a lie, but it wasn't." Helena had quit worrying her thumbnail and, instead, was hugging both legs to her chest. "You know what was true, Myka."

Knees practically under her chin, pretzeling herself like Christina might, Helena presented a vulnerability that Myka couldn't accept, and she turned away, looking at the balcony doors and the night beyond them. As black as night, some might describe Helena's hair and eyes, but they were darker yet because the night, with all its hobgoblins and knife-wielding madmen, the stuff of the campfire stories that had terrorized Myka when she was a child, couldn't hurt her as Helena had. Maybe the only response to an impossible question was to brush it aside.

"I guess what's more important is whether Burdette will believe you."

"Not without proof that I have access to the works." She paused, resignation settling over her face. "So I'm planning to do what I've always done, which is fake it."

"And you just happen to have a forged Picasso to give him?" Myka was only half-joking.

"He's not going to be easy to fool. I'll have to be clever." She had given "clever" a mocking lilt, but her tone sobered. "I'll need your help. I have to go somewhere out of the range of my monitor, and I don't want the FBI at large to know the real reason for why that is." Her expression began to lighten. "You'll have to provide a plausible explanation for why we need to go to Hoboken."

"Hoboken?" Myka echoed.

"Hoboken," Helena confirmed, amused.

"Why do you -"

"That's what you'll need to invent for everyone else. As for you, you'll understand once we get there."

She could demand an explanation now about why they had to go to Hoboken, but it was past 10:00, and she was tired and still a little hungry. Helena had always liked to draw out the suspense, whether it concerned a discovery about a case or a surprise she had been holding back for days. Sometimes it had been tickets to a show; on other occasions, it had been weekend jaunts to an inn in the Adirondacks or New England. Myka had learned that the more she pressed, the more annoyingly vague Helena would become. "Okay" was all she chose to say as she rose and pushed the chair closer to the table.

Something about the way she had said it caused Helena to look suddenly abashed. "I'm not trying to tease you, I just want you to see it without my explaining it first." She hugged her legs tighter to her. "I know I'm not being very clear, but it'll make sense when you see it."

Myka spread her arms in concession. "I'm too tired to argue, Helena, I'm going home."

"Before you do, I want your input on something." Helena unfolded herself and started down the hallway, stopping in front of the second bedroom.

Myka reluctantly trailed after her, noticing that the bed and dresser in the room had been removed. In their place was a worktable of sorts with a paint-splattered straight-back chair. An easel that appeared old enough to have come from Picasso's studio was off to one side, but it held no pad or canvas. A homemade kite was propped against a wall, decorated with a painting of what looked like a miniature goat. Myka picked it up; it was lighter than she had expected, the material stretched over the frame not canvas as she was expecting but muslin or something similar, more bedsheet than sail.

"We're flying kites this Sunday?" She put the kite down.

Helena was at the table, a hand smoothing, straightening a large square of the same white fabric. At the end of the table was another square, with an unfinished painting of Van Gogh-like sunflowers. Some of the flowers had already been painted a dark gold; others were still just sketched in. "Ever since last Sunday, it's all Christina's been talking about. Thank you for reminiscing about flying kites when you were a child." She had attempted to say the last sourly, but a fond smile that creased her face whenever she talked about Christina gave away the fact that the prospect of flying kites - and the labor she was expending making them - wasn't as onerous as she was letting on.

Kite flying. Christina had been sprawled on the living room floor, drawing flowers in a sketchbook, the most recognizable of them being tulips, looking like Pacmans ready to gobble the sky. Helena was next to her on the floor, reading the Sunday papers, and she, she had been on a stool at the breakfast bar, watching how the dark heads increasingly leaned toward each other and ignoring the impulse to join them. Not looking up, Christina had asked her idly, "My-ka, were you ever a little girl?" Helena had snorted derisively, and Jemma, steeping tea in large mugs on the other side of the breakfast bar from Myka, had chuckled. Somehow, in her muddled defense that even FBI agents had to have been children at one time, Myka had fastened on a memory of flying kites with her father and Tracy on a long-ago Sunday afternoon. It was rare that a pleasant memory involving Warren Bering readily came to mind, and, for a moment, she was transfixed by the heat of the sun, Tracy's giggles as their kites threatened to collide, and their father's only mildly pained complaints that they needed to pay attention. She blinked as the intensity lessened; it had been a good day that day.

She gestured toward the finished kite. "Are you sure they're going to fly?"

"Aerodynamically, they're not all that complicated." More begrudgingly, Helena added, "Plus I got the instructions for making them off the Internet."

"The idea for the goat, too?"

"Jemma and Christina have developed an addiction to 'cute animals' videos," Helena said with an exasperation that sounded mostly assumed. "Christina is enamored of pygmy goats, she says she's going to ask Santa for one."

Myka cocked her head, assessing the kite against the wall, not as confident as Helena that they weren't, in fact, aerodynamically complicated. The kite was big, and the frame seemed small in comparison to the amount of fabric it was being asked to support. "Good idea to have a spare, in case these two don't fly as well as you think they will. Maybe you ought to make the spare smaller. "

"It's not a spare, Myka. It's your kite, and I need to know how you would like it decorated." As Myka stared at her in surprise, she said, "Christina fully expects you to participate, you know. Every night she wants confirmation that we'll have three kites ready to go on Sunday."

"Telling her to go fly a kite would be lost on her, I suppose." Myka found herself grinning, oddly pleased that Christina had thought to include her.

"And mean." Helena had picked up a pencil, tapping its eraser on the cloth. "She likes you. She asks after you." Blowing out a breath and tapping the pencil more aggressively, she asked, "So, what design do you want? And don't tell me you're fine with a blank piece of cloth. In that Appalachian corner of Colorado Springs you grew up in, you may have flown kites made out of your father's old t-shirts, but Christina will insist that your kite have some color to it."

Myka began to say "However you want to decorate it," but she realized that it would only fuel the impatience that Helena was expressing through her sighs and fidgeting. It occurred to her that Helena might resent any coziness that developed between her daughter and her guard; after all, it was hardly her choice to have supervised visits. In a slightly less imperfect world, Helena's visits would not only be more numerous but absent a third wheel as well. Or absent her presence, at least. She blushed, embarrassed that she had so forgotten herself and her assignment to believe that it mattered whether Christina liked her. Turning her burning face away from Helena, she offered, "I know my being with you and Christina on Sunday afternoons is like a thumb in your eye, so maybe Steve and I or another agent can alternate. Might reduce your frustration a little."

"Hardly. And you're not using that to get out of this Sunday." Myka turned back toward her, but Helena was the one looking away this time. "Christina has had enough changes to adjust to. Since she likes you and since you don't seem to hate being around children, I'd prefer that you remain our jailer. Unless we're cutting into your time with Mr. Martino."

It was noticeably watered down from the other times Helena had referred to Sam, but Myka felt the acidic sting of "Mr. Martino." She decided not to respond to it. Joining Helena at the table, she looked down at the material. She envisioned a black kite with FBI stenciled in white in the center if she didn't give Helena something. "My favorite fictional character, if you remember. Otherwise I guess you could paint a package of Twizzlers."

"Are you challenging my memory, even after the grilled cheese?" Helena lifted her eyes, and Myka saw in them the familiar mocking glint. "I not only remember your favorite character, I know that you wanted to grow up to be just like him. But as rational as you pretend you are, I know what's underneath." Her lips slowly curved into a smile that wasn't fond, that was a universe away from the nakedly loving smile she reserved for Christina, and though Myka was responding, in spite of herself, to this smile, she wondered how she would respond if Helena gave her the other, meant the other. . . .

"Stop trying to play me," Myka said, steadily meeting Helena's gaze.

Helena didn't stop smiling, although it took a crooked line, becoming more sardonic than seductive. "And you weren't flirting with me, with a line like 'My favorite fictional character, if you remember?'" She tossed the pencil on the table. "But I'm still ready for a bed check, if that's what comes next."

"Not tonight and not by me."

The staircase wasn't quite the tunnel of darkness it had been earlier, Myka noticed, particularly that last stretch to the first floor. A floor lamp in the living room had been turned on and in the chair underneath sat Mrs. Frederic, still impeccably dressed at a quarter to 11:00. The rest of the room was in shadow and the lamplight, the weak amber glow of an energy-efficient light, only enhanced the depth of the shadows. But Mrs. Frederic didn't seem diminished by the contrast, she seemed larger, more imposing, and Myka couldn't unsee the image of a spider at the center of a web, a spider outfitted in a lilac dress suit and pumps to match.

"Sorry to disturb you," she said, instinctively slowing her descent as Mrs. Frederic approached her.

"I'm not disturbed," Mrs. Frederic replied, without a hint of a smile. "This is your job, isn't it? Checking up on Helena, on call at all hours of the day or night?"

There might not have been a slight pause between 'day' and 'night,' but Myka knew she was blushing as if there had been, as if she and Helena were teenagers, and she had been caught coming out of Helena's bedroom with a bad case of bedhead and a poorly buttoned shirt.

"I hope everything's all right," Mrs. Frederic said rather than asked, with the imperturbable confidence that nothing could have gone wrong without her finding out about it first. "I haven't known Helena long, but I find her a charming person."

Myka couldn't pinpoint what it was that had her bridling, whether it was the sense that behind that quiet, uninflected voice and the impassive expression that Mrs. Frederic was enjoying her obvious discomfort, the image of the well-dressed spider, or the fact that she was hungry and tired and having to make conversation with a woman, who, frankly, gave her the chills, but it had her responding testily, "I find her a felon."

"Of course you do" said as if it wasn't a matter of course at all, as if she knew that Myka found Helena to be many things, most of them unsettling in one way or another. With a dip of her head, as if to concur that it was late and past time to call it an evening, Mrs. Frederic opened the door for her.

"Good night, Mrs. Frederic."

"Happy kite-flying, Agent Bering."

...

Myka did manage to invent an excuse for why she and Helena needed to go to Hoboken. By a happy coincidence, although "happy" really wasn't the word for it because she had already had too many conversations with Bobby "B.O." Olson for her liking (he wasn't called B.O. because of his name), Bobby operated out of Hoboken. He was a small-time fence and a surprisingly reliable confidential informant; the FBI had turned to him before for information on who was behind various waves of counterfeit designer items, purses, watches, shoes, but not for leads on stolen jewelry that needed to be recut. Which was why Pete, after shouting "B.O.!" because he always liked to shout Bobby's nickname, regarded her with a skeptical squint.

"And you think he's the guy a bunch of golf-playing Ivy Leaguers are going to get to take their jewelry off their hands?" Pete was behind his desk, catching - most of the time - a golf ball he was continually tossing in the air. The office, every spring, started up a golf league, and Pete was always on it, despite being the worst golfer Myka had ever known. He was always eager to get out of the office on a Thursday afternoon to start the traffic crawl to the suburban golf course where they played, and that was why Myka had scheduled a 4:30 meeting with him.

"You have to admit that no one would think they'd go to Bobby." She knew it was a weak explanation. She was tempted to tell him the truth, what she knew of it, especially since Pete knew about Justice's plan to use Helena to go after Burdette, had, in fact, asked for the kind of update that Myka could now give him, but Helena didn't want anyone to know where they were going in Hoboken, she didn't want anyone to know about the place, whatever it was, except her (and Myka knew that Helena had told her only because she had had no choice). Myka knew where her allegiance lay, but she also knew that Justice wouldn't have an issue with her shutting her boss out if it got them closer to Burdette.

"We have never asked B.O. for information on stolen jewels. What's going on here, Mykes?" Pete missed the catch and the ball bounced off his desk, rolling past Myka's chair. She picked it up and turned it over in her hand.

"Helena kind of knows people who work with Bobby, and she thinks they might have handled the jewels. She says she can't approach them directly, but she thinks she might be able to talk to them through Bobby." Myka hadn't once lifted her eyes from the ball as she spun the lie. If she looked at Pete, she'd give herself away somehow, and he would notice it, he always did.

"Why are you in here then making her argument for her?" Pete held his hand out for the ball.

"Because she thought you'd be more likely to make the exception if the explanation came from me." She tossed the ball up and caught it before placing it in Pete's hand. "We don't have a lot to go on with these thefts, Lee and Jennifer were spinning their wheels, and that's why you put her on the case. Let her do what she thinks she needs to in order to solve it."

He squirmed in his chair as he stuffed the ball in a pocket of his pants. "Okay, talk to Parker. Have him. . . ." The ball secured, he began rapidly moving his fingers in the air to suggest a mad scientist at work. "You know, have him re-jigger all the monitor-y stuff in her monitor so we're not alerting the entire city that she's on the loose."

And that had been it. Pete had been on her heels as she left his office, anxious to take the elevator down to the fitness room where he could change into his golf pants and shirt, always in blinding shades of the primary colors. There had been no warnings, no additional squinted looks that suggested he still didn't believe her, just a "Let me know what you find out."

But that wouldn't be until next week or later because Bobby didn't answer the voice mail Myka had left on his phone, not Thursday night or Friday. Friday, she and Helena and Steve planned their trip to Barrington Academy, and by the end of their planning, Myka wished B.O. had called. In fact, she wished B.O. had called to demand that she come out to Hoboken and explain why the FBI thought he would know anything about stolen jewels. Because she would have gone out to Hoboken, and she would have stood downwind of him. Hell, she would have stood next to him in a closet and breathed in deeply. For hours.

They had talked about reinterviewing the victims to find out how many had gone to Barrington, but Helena feared that it might tip their hand too much to go back to them now, especially when they had nothing else in which they could bury the question. No positive news that a strong lead had been identified or that one of the jewels had been recovered. Maybe it was better to work it from the Barrington angle, but it had taken them awhile to decide on a plan. Did they go in straight, as FBI agents, or did they try to come up with a ruse? Helena was all for a ruse, not surprisingly, and she was the one who eventually suggested that she schedule an interview with an admissions officer to discuss what she . . . and her spouse . . . should do to see that Christina was accepted as a Barrington student when the time came. Perhaps she could charm the admissions officer into letting her look at some old yearbooks or introduce her to the head of the school's alumni office, someone or something that would provide her access to records of previous Barrington students.

"But it would go better, and faster, if all three of us had the same purpose for being there." Helena was fingering her lips, as if deep in thought, though Myka suspected she already knew what it was she wanted to suggest. "While it's logical that Steve and I should go in as Christina's parents, what are you going to be doing, Myka? Loitering in the hallway? Skulking somewhere on the grounds?"

Standing at the end of the conference room, where the windows fronted onto a steeply pitched but arresting view of the city's streets, arresting enough that Myka always forced herself to stand or sit with her back to them, she said, "I could be another parent looking to get my child accepted into the school. In fact, maybe it would work even better like that. After he or she shuffles the two of you off to the yearbooks, maybe I could ask to be directed to the alumni office. Or vice versa."

Helena's fingers had moved from her lips to her chin where she slowly rubbed the skin. But Myka wasn't convinced that she was considering any more than she had been pondering. It was all playacting. "The idea has its merits, but. . . I think there would be less cause for suspicion if all three of us went in at the same time. Not that there would be suspicion, necessarily, except that I happen to believe someone working at Barrington is involved. And he or she is going to be on the lookout for an oddity, something that doesn't seem to ring right. I want to be very careful." She arched her brows and then she smiled, almost gleefully. "Steve can remain Christina's father, but why don't you and I, Myka, pose as the happy couple?"

"I thought you were afraid of something not ringing right," Myka said, drifting to where Steve was sitting and looking with iron concentration at the empty water bottle between his hands. "What do you think about this?" She said it to the top of his head as he refused to look up.

"I'm thinking that you and Helena need to work it out. I'm just the dad."

"Myka, it's an hour or two at most of coupledom, and if there is a little tension, we can write it off as your wanting Christina to go to Phillips Exeter. That slightly startled look you can get, the hesitant smile. Lovely and high strung." Helena's smile was becoming more aggressive, and her eyes, almost canting over her cheekbones as the smile grew slyer and deeper, had a predatory light. "It's why I made you mine." A long pause. "If the admissions officer asks about how we met."

...

"Do you think I'm high strung?"

She and Sam were on Leena's balcony, a small cement patio that was just big enough to hold a few potted plants and two people, if one of them sat in the sole patio chair. Or if one of them was holding the other against him, as Sam was holding her, arms linked around her waist, head tucked into the crook of her neck. They had arrived late, Sam having worked into the evening on trial prep for a RICO case. She hadn't protested very sincerely since it had given her time to drive out to the island to do some reconnaissance on the park she and Helena and Christina were to fly kites in the next day.

It was a cute park, with the usual assortment of swings and play areas and picnic tables, not big but big enough to have a central green space in which people could fly kites or couples could spread blankets and sun themselves or teenagers could play frisbee. The parking lot was at the far end of the park. There could be no quick lifting of Christina and running with her to a car waiting in the lot. As if Helena would do something so cartoon-like anyway. All this was going to be was a simple outing for a child. Maybe Leena was right, and she was inventing excuses not to trust her, and maybe Helena was right, and she was seeing her as a villain through-and-through because it was easier to see her as that than as a person with flaws, big flaws, but someone recognizable, a mom trying to please her daughter.

As late in the afternoon as Myka was visiting, there weren't that many still in the park. At one end, a man was throwing a frisbee to his dog, a border collie with a blue bandanna as a collar, and at the other, a few teenagers were lackadaisically kicking around a soccer ball. Myka sat in the middle of the grass, legs crossed, letting the breeze push her hair into her face, listening for the sounds of her sister's laughter and the flapping of kites in the wind. She hadn't worried then about being high strung or playing Helena's wife or discovering what Helena had painted on her kite. It had been enough to sit, her eyes closed, and hear the voices intermingle, those of the man calling to his dog, the teenagers joking with each other and Tracy's "Myka, leave my kite alone!" and her father's "Keep it steady, Myka. There, there you go."

"Leena's the therapist," Sam rumbled against her neck. "Why don't you ask her?"

Because, first, she would ask me what I thought 'high strung' meant. Because, second, she would ask me if I thought it was a bad thing. Because at no point would she ever tell me what she thought. "Because I would rather ask you. You've seen me in all sorts of contexts, in other words, at my absolute worst. Morning hair, morning breath. Meeting your parents." She said the last as a joke, but Sam's parents, especially his father, put her on edge. She had never before met anyone who had had to fill every moment of every day with purpose. From the moment he got up at 5:00 in the morning until he turned in at precisely 9:45 in the evening, Frank Martino never let himself take a breath and he didn't let anyone else around him take a breath either. Jogging, cycling, putting in a few hours at the consulting business he ran in his ostensible retirement, and that was all before noon, he knew if you cracked a book open or turned on the TV. Then he had you by your arms, pulling you up from the sofa and yanking you with him to the golf course or the tennis court. He had been the CEO of a number of mortgage companies, and Sam had grown up hearing the taunt "Keep up or eat my dust." He was still trying to keep up.

"You're what I call focused, and I like it." He kissed her below her ear and squeezed her harder against him. "I also like the rest of you, undressed. What do you say we tell Leena that we had a wonderful time and go back to my place? I haven't seen you . . . you blew off dinner with me this week."

"I didn't blow off dinner with you. I asked for a rain check on it because Helena wanted to talk about Burdette."

"The other woman who's on my mind," Sam teased, "but I prefer to think about you." He rubbed her stomach gently. "Has she come up with anything yet?"

"We're working on something. If it's viable, I'll let you know." It was more or less what she had told Pete when he had called her into his office on Friday for the update he had demanded earlier in the week. He had wanted something more concrete but had reluctantly decided not to press her for more, giving her the same skeptical squint he had when she had told him of her "plan" to talk Bobby Olson about the missing jewels. She couldn't tell whether Sam was squinting at her, but she heard his sigh.

"You need to give me something soon, Myka."

Myka leaned forward against his arms and looked through the patio door into the apartment. A lot of the guests had left, but some were playing what looked like Trivial Pursuit on a coffee table in the living room, and Leena herself was chatting with a man Myka vaguely remembered seeing at other get-togethers Leena had hosted. She wondered if Leena was dating him. Leena was a wonderful catch who had yet to be caught, or if someone had caught her, she wasn't admitting it. Myka wished she could manage a romantic relationship so casually and unself-consciously. Couldn't she just date someone, have dinner, go to a show, sleep with him if they both felt like it, and not feel as if she couldn't breathe until she saw him next or, alternately, suspect that she would forget his name fifteen minutes after leaving his bedroom? She wanted something that didn't consume her but wasn't also something that she kicked into a corner so she didn't have to look at it too closely. Millions of years ago when she had been with Mark and then with Rachel, and even with Sam those first few months after she had joined the FBI, it had been like that. Easy, fun, and while she had occasionally entertained the hope it would turn into something serious, possibly permanent, she wasn't crushed by the thought that it might not. But she didn't know how to do that anymore. Sometimes she couldn't believe that she and Sam had actually married because she wasn't capable of that kind of commitment; she couldn't trust that the hand someone held out to her wouldn't be retracted, leaving her pedaling air over an abyss. Yet, at the time, marrying him had seemed no big deal . . . .

She imagined that this must have been the convalescence described in nineteenth century novels, when a character was felled by an illness that, today, antibiotics or antivirals would clear up in a few weeks but in 1860 or 1880 kept her bedridden for months. Pale, weak, but having survived, the heroine would move from the bed to a chaise lounge where she would rest for another six months. Eventually she might creep downstairs to a sunroom or a garden where she would sit in a wheeled chair with a blanket drawn up to her neck. Wars would have been fought, politicians elected, and family members born and buried, but she would have little recollection of the events and even less interest in them.

Myka hadn't been able to take to her bed. There had been the initial investigation of the Marston Gallery thefts, and then, when the open secret of her relationship with Helena had come to the attention of the assistant directors, there had been the investigation of her. It had lasted forever, or so it seemed, although Pete kept insisting that it had been only a couple of weeks. But the interrogations, and they were interrogations, went on for hours. Agents had searched Myka's apartment and her parents' home. "In case I hid paintings in the bedroom closet," she had told her mother, her voice heavy with sarcasm, her mother's heavy with tears. Her parents had been "interviewed" by field agents as well, and when Myka's father got on the phone, all but accusing her of working in tandem with Helena on the theft, she knew she wouldn't forget the call for a very long time. When she had finally convinced him that she had been as misled as everyone else, he had hung up on her. She'd hear that dial tone, angry and contemptuous in her ear, for forever too.

The investigation concluded, her innocence vindicated, Myka was restored to her (old) position, but the suspicions lingered. Not about whether she had been in on the robbery all along but about her fitness as an agent, and she couldn't blame the assistant directors and other agents for feeling that way. She wasn't sure she was agent material either. Bates had been "reassigned" to a field office in Illinois; she had only been suspended. She supposed she should count herself lucky, but she didn't feel it. She didn't feel anything. She worked, she ate when she remembered to, and she occasionally slept. That was her routine for months, then a year, and then another. The only people she saw outside work were Pete and Sam. But Pete and his wife had just had their first child, and he couldn't spend much time with her. A beer nursed at a bar for an hour or two every once in awhile, that was her time with Pete. Not that she was much company. Their conversations were mainly about sports because Pete did 90% of the talking. Myka drank and listened to him and thought there had to be some word for the numbness she felt, some multi-syllabic German word that Freud had invented and which had since fallen out of favor, like Freud himself, but which would describe her perfectly. Because she was a mess. Who the fuck would want to take her on?

It had taken her several more months to realize that Sam wasn't scared of the mess she was. He cooked her dinner, he watched old movies with her. He was a better friend than he had been a boyfriend, and when, out of some combination of loneliness and gratitude, she had asked him to spend the night, in her bed this time, not on the sofa as he had done before, she hadn't felt that it was a mistake. They didn't talk about what was happening between them, by mutual agreement it seemed, and though Myka recognized the return of the old attraction, it wasn't the same. She cared for him, she might have even begun to love him, but it wasn't how she had loved Helena.

If Sam felt the lack or felt cheated or short, he never said. He acted as if he was happy. They spent most of their time together, but neither suggested the other move in. Over Christmas of that year, Myka had gone to Colorado Springs. It was never a pleasant visit, but the visit was further marred by her mother's quiet confession that Myka's father had been diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer's. The memory lapses weren't obvious to most, but they were occurring more frequently. Myka had noticed little change except that her father seemed more unsure of himself, looking to her mother for confirmation of the smallest things, where the ketchup went in the refrigerator, when they had packed themselves in the car and gone to the Grand Canyon on a family vacation. The one bright spot had been seeing Tracy, who had entered her last trimester and sought distraction, usually from Myka, to keep her mind off the pain in her back and her legs, which was all "from carrying this bowling ball everyone keeps promising me will turn into a baby," she would claim in an aggrieved tone that wasn't very convincing.

Myka had been more than ready to return to the city when Sam literally showed up on the Berings' doorstep on New Year's Eve day, flashing two plane tickets to Reno at her. From there they would drive to Lake Tahoe and ski and. . . .

"You're an incredibly bad skier," he said, having watched her ski down a relatively easy slope. She had fallen at least twice.

"Pretty horrible," she cheerfully agreed, raising her visor. It was snowing, and she blinked as the wind chased snowflakes into her eyes.

"How did that happen? Your dad kept telling me the story that a bum knee was the only thing that kept him off the Olympic ski team."

He had told Sam that story twice when they had seen in the new year in the Berings' cluttered living room, drinking eggnog, but Sam had politely listened to the retelling without letting on that he had heard it before only a couple of hours earlier. "Well, that and talent," Myka said, laughing. She looked down at her skis, one of which was already crossed over the other. "I could never get my arms and legs working together, and my balance was always off."

"And yet you were able to learn how to fence," Sam said dryly, "because that doesn't require coordination or balance."

She responded with a quirk of her lips. "Yeah, I've got a ton of issues, so what are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to marry you." He looked shocked as the words escaped him, and then he grinned. "I'm going to marry you," he repeated. "Let's go back to Reno and just do it. I mean, why the hell not?"

Because I'm not sure I love you enough. Because I'm not sure you love me enough. But she was tired of feeling numb and today, today, she turned her head slowly, taking in the snow, the other skiers, and, finally, Sam, who was still looking surprised but happy, and she felt . . . good. So, why the hell not?

She stepped away from him but hooked a finger around one of his belt loops and pretended to drag him to the patio door. "Let's go tell Leena good-bye, and then I'll let you have your way with me."

...

It was too windy for kites, but she and Helena gamely let the wind catch at them and snap them aloft, a pygmy goat, sunflowers, and Sherlock Holmes. Myka had half-expected to see the bowl haircut and split-fingered greeting of Spock, but Helena had remembered. She wouldn't have minded Spock, he came in second only to Sherlock, but she was more pleased than she wanted to be that it was Sherlock on her kite. The explanation of who the strange man on My-ka's kite was went over Christina's head, but her serious nod as Helena described him as a "super-duper FBI agent, almost as good as Myka" had Myka stifling a laugh and wanting to hug her at the same time.

A sudden gust caused the pygmy goat's frame to break, and the kite fell to the ground. Christina's face was just as crumpled, but she didn't scream or cry. Instead she stroked the goat's painted head and murmured in singsong, "Sorry, goatie, sorry, sorry, sorry."

Myka held the other two kites, while Helena knelt beside her daughter. "Come on, pumpkin. I need your help to fly my kite. Will you help me?"

Christina shrugged. Sighing, Myka walked the kites over to Helena. "Hold these." She jogged toward her car in the parking lot. There had been many tense and frustrating minutes fitting Christina's car seat into the backseat, and Helena had almost worn her sunflowers kite as a necklace, but with a maximum of swearing they had finally gotten the seat hooked in, Jemma and Christina watching their efforts from a kitchen window.

In the trunk, behind a strategically placed emergency kit, bin rather, was a bag with three cheap plastic kites Myka had bought earlier in the morning after leaving Sam's apartment. The fact that she had spent any time choosing them from the drugstore's limited selection of kites was an embarrassment, and even more embarrassing was the acknowledgment that most of the indecision had been about what kite to get Helena. Too late now for regrets. She pulled out the bag and slammed the trunk door. As she jogged back to where the two were sitting in the grass, the other two kites no longer in the air, she felt light, unburdened in a way that she hadn't felt since. . . she couldn't remember how long, but a long time. As a couple of men walking past her checked her out, she flashed them a smartalecky grin and increased her pace.

Christina welcomed her with a loud and cheery "Myka!," Goatie apparently forgotten, as Myka sank onto her heels beside them and began handing out kites. She clapped her hands and cooed over her One Direction kite, while Helena rolled her eyes. Helena stared at the design of her kite as she unrolled the plastic and saw the shock of green hair and maniacal grin of the old-fashioned DC Comics' Joker and started laughing. She peered over Myka's shoulder at Myka's Batman kite, and her laughter grew louder. "I would have preferred Catwoman," she stage-whispered.

"I know," Myka said, "I searched for one." It was true, she had, every kite, twice over.

They flew the replacement kites until the wind sheared through them and sent them tumbling, in tatters, to the ground. There was still time for Helena to push Christina on a swing before they needed to return her to her grandmother, and Myka commandeered a see-saw and sat on one end as Helena pushed Christina into higher and faster arcs. Christina didn't mind, the few shrieks erupting from her sounding excited rather than fearful. When they walked to the parking lot, Christina stumbling tiredly between them, she had one hand in the firm grip of her mother's. After rubbing her eyes with the other, she searched for Myka's hand and clutched it. Myka darted a glance at Helena, ready to disentangle her fingers from Christina's.

Helena looked down at her daughter's and Myka's interlocked hands and then looked ahead, her lips curving in the faintest of smiles.