I was floating and could hear my parents come in. Ranger was sitting at the side of the bed holding my hand and periodically kissing it. Every time he kissed it, I smiled, so he knew that I wasn't asleep.

"How are you doing?" he said.

"Okay. A little shaky. How is Steph?" said my mother.

"Okay. A little shaky. Unfortunately, she moved and her legs hit each other as she was moving. She knocked off some of the scabs and was in screaming pain. We have now given her morphine and will see what we have tomorrow."

"Oh God", said my mother. She swallowed back a sob.

"She'll be okay, Helen", said Ranger. "She just knocked back her recovery by a couple of days. She'll have to be patient with herself, and she's not very good about that. However, it sounds like we'll be having staff meetings in the bedroom."

"I feel like I don't know Steph", said Frank. "I have learned so many things about her and her life in the last couple of days, important things that I never had a clue about."

Ranger smiled. "Steph is incredibly open and friendly with people, but there are few who actually know her. Val and Edna have been big impediments. She doesn't feel like she can be herself around them. Val bullies her for it, and Edna makes up stories and spreads it around the neighborhood. What has happened is that Steph becomes very protective of herself and doesn't share. Your willingness to understand that there have been problems has meant that over the last five years Steph has shared more with you than she has with most people. She has told you about some of the cases, and told you when she has gotten hurt. She has started to tell you some of her deepest feelings, like when she told you that she was struggling because our newest twin embryos died. She told me that, she told her doctors that, she told her therapist that, she told Tracy and Joe that. But she didn't tell anyone else, because Steph prides herself of being bubbly and witty and able to roll with the punches. And she is all that. But she also cares so intensely about things. She has deep feelings, and there aren't too many people that she trusts enough to share that with. As I said, the two of you are in her inner circle."

"But she didn't trust us enough to tell us about Dickie", said Helen.

"She trusted you enough. She just didn't want to worry you, especially when it was over."

"But the whole team knew about it, and we didn't."

Ranger smiled. "The team only knew because they were part of the punishment."

"Pardon?"

"I was pissed when I found out that Dickie had hit Steph. First of all, that he had hit anyone, but second of all, he hit Steph specifically. So I looked into things and found out that he was defrauding the government by not paying millions of dollars in taxes. I arranged for his arrest and he had FBI agents trying to capture him. The funny thing is that Dickie knew that he owed an enormous amount of money to a loan shark. And he thought the FBI agents were representatives of the loan shark and were coming to kill him. So in a weird twist of fate, Dickie came to me and asked us to protect him from the loan shark representatives." Frank started to smile. "I put him in witness protection and said we would save him from the loan shark representatives, charged him double my rates with an additional retaining fee and significant aggravation fee in case that he didn't do what we told him, and assigned my toughest and scariest guys to look after him. He was such an asshole that I had to change the staff every twenty-four hours, and I had regular requests for me to let them kill him. By that point, everyone on staff had heard that Dickie had hit Steph. My staff are tough, but they are all highly protective family men who adore Steph and would do anything for her. She knows all about their families, knows their likes and dislikes, and she honestly cares about them – and they know it. They would go to the ends of the earth for her. So we looked after him for a week, caught the loan shark's knee breakers and put them in jail, and then directed the FBI agents to Dickie and helped them catch him. He said that we lied, and I said that we didn't. He didn't hire us to protect him from jail. He didn't hire us to protect him from the FBI agents. He hired us to protect him from the loan shark and, in all honesty, the loan shark wasn't going to get to him in jail. I collected a hell of a lot of money from him up front and gave most of it to Steph to account for all the money he owed her since he had never paid her alimony."

"He never paid her alimony?" said Frank.

"No. He owed her something like forty thousand dollars. I gave her the retaining fee that we collected from him, and it was almost four times that amount." Ranger snorted. "She didn't want to take it, but when I finally got her to take it, she told me that it was the most money she'd ever had. And then she offered to give it to me when we were building the residence tower." Ranger smiled. "You've raised an amazing and wonderful woman."

My parents smiled. "Remember when we used to come for dinner every Friday night?" said Frank. "It was when Steph was pregnant with Tia."

"I do."

"I miss it."

Ranger grinned. "It was always the highlight of our week."

"What do you think we should do about Val?" said Helen quietly.

"That is a conversation that Steph will want to be involved in. We were talking about the call you heard tonight, and we have a theory. Val attacked you on the call because she knows that Steph has been shielding you from what is happening and she knows that Steph would do almost anything to stop Val from hurting you. It's another way of trying to extort money from Steph. Val didn't say it because she believed it. She said it to try to get money from her."

"Do you really think so?"

"I do. Remember, I've been watching Val treat Steph like dirt for a long time. It started slowly, before she even broke up with Albert. She was unhappy with her life, was tired of struggling to make ends meet, and we were doing better than her. So she started attacking Steph to make herself feel better. She regularly used me to torment Steph and told Steph that the only reason I was marrying her was because of Tia, that I would leave her and take Tia with me, that she was worthless and stupid and that I would drop her and settle down with Val instead. The only problem is that Steph was clinically depressed at the time, and unfortunately she believed Val. I was angry, but I didn't figure out that Steph was so sick until after Tia was born and Steph crashed. We got her on medication, but it was touch and go for a while. Steph agreed with Val and believed that she should kill herself and remove herself from the way of Val settling down with me. She thought Tia getting kidnapped was God's way of saying that she shouldn't be a mother. She did a lot of therapy over the years and has come a long way, but she still doesn't have as much confidence in herself as a person as she deserves. She is confident in her research skills, and she is confident in her parenting skills. But that is about it.

"When Albert left, Val took out her anger on Steph – and Steph let her. It was a long time before she realized that Val was being unfair rather than just telling the truth and, to be honest, that is something that she still struggles with. She fundamentally doesn't understand that I love her and I don't love Val, and that I love Steph partly because she has more compassion in her little finger than most people have in their whole bodies. I saw that time and again with her skips. Even though she earned less money doing this, she would take her skips out for meals or, with one skip, she would take him to the grocery store and buy him a bag of food for his family. I've been with her when we visit some of the skips and have coffee with them. She gives them a hug and makes them feel special. She just connects with people. My favorite story was when Tia was kidnapped. The woman who had done it was sick – and Steph recognized that it wasn't her fault. As Steph said, if her mother and baby and husband had all died so close together as the kidnapper's had, she, too, might have lost her mind for a while. So when the woman had healed and recovered, Steph and I took Tia to see the woman, so Steph could show her that we didn't blame her and the woman could see that Tia was okay. The woman cried through the whole meeting, and her doctor told us that we had done more for the woman's recovery than he had been able to do in weeks. But that's not all. Steph got the woman's email address and every two or three weeks she emails Yvonne to find out how things are going. The woman is now doing well. Tell me, how many people would be concerned about a kidnapper's mental health and wanting to do what she could to help her recover? I know how hard that meeting was on Steph. For us, it brought up the terror again and that night, Steph and I had to sleep with Tia in the bed. But for Steph? It was the right thing to do and that was that. That was all that was important."

"I don't know if I could have done that", said Helen.

"I would say that ninety-nine percent of the people out there couldn't have done that." Ranger sighed. "I have met a lot of incredible people in my time, but I'd have to say that Steph is the most incredible person that I have ever met. She's my life, and it makes me angry when Val is successful at getting Steph to question that."

"So how did you end up funding Val?" said Frank.

"About a year and a half ago, Val was working as the manager of a plus-size store and thought that she was going to get a promotion to head office at work. Head office set her up for some management and leadership courses to help her prepare for the role, and she said that she went and instead took the days off work to sit at home and drink. Only, the company caught her in the lie and she didn't get the management position. In a fit of pique, she quit, then came to Steph to demand a job. Steph said no – you can now see why after seeing what her team does – so Val hit her. Steph cuffed her while Eduardo, who you met tonight, and another employee stood guard until Joe got there. Val had a hissy fit and demanded to be uncuffed, I was called down since one of our staff members had been assaulted by a member of the public, and I decided to let her go on the condition that she left quietly and stayed away. Joe walked her to her car and told her not to push me. She didn't heed the warnings. She came at Steph several other times over the week, screaming and swearing. She wanted a job in the Research Department and she wanted to become a Vice-President, she wanted to prove to me that she was more intelligent and a better employee than Steph, and she was furious that Steph wasn't giving her a job to let her brilliance shine. It was bad. Steph didn't want to weaken her team by giving her a job, Val was screaming and swearing and attacking her, Steph felt guilty and she spent each night crying herself to sleep. And while all this was happening, Lula was in the hospital after being poisoned, and when Steph researched it, there were a number of poisonings but Lula was the only one that had survived, and Steph was hot on the trail to identify and find the poisoners who were, technically, serial killers, before they killed more people. We ended up closing the case but, when we did, one of our staff members was caught and Steph went undercover to save Carrie. It came close to Steph being forced to eat some poison. So we were all unwinding the next day with our closest friends over dinner, talking about the case and supporting Steph through the close call the night before, when Val came to the house. We invited her in for dinner. It was embarrassing. Val groped all the men, outright propositioned Nick, and tried to cozy up to them. Our friends were disgusted with Val and were ready to throw her off the balcony. I think every single one of them offered to murder her in her sleep. The thing is? They could have gotten away with it. My team is comprised of the most elite soldiers in the US.

"So anyway, we tried to tell her that everyone who worked at Rangeman had to pass a personality test to judge their teamwork abilities. If they don't value teamwork and supporting each other, I don't care how good a researcher they are, they will not get the job. Val's propensity to attack Steph in itself is a reason to not hire her. Steph would lay down her life for her team, and her team would do the same for her. Can you see Val doing anything other than look after herself? As they say, there is no 'I' in team.

"And when she came to our party and started groping all the men, I had enough. I briefly talked to Steph about it, then we offered a deal to Val. We would support her to go to school for four years and take something that would get her hired in a job that she'd like, we'd pay her living expenses, and in return she had to maintain a minimum B- average, she had to create a budget and stick with it, and she had to quit drinking. We'd pay for her to go to a counsellor and for any medication that she might decide to take on top of her monthly amount. However, she had to go. As we explained to her, we have responsible jobs and cannot take the chance of not being in our full faculties as we could be ordered into service at any time. Our staff aren't allowed to drink and had to go through regular drug and alcohol testing, and she would have to as well. Besides, we have kids and drinking could slow your reactions so that if you were ever in a life-or-death situation, the kids could die. And no drink is worth that.

"She created a budget. Steph and I thought it was high, but we didn't want to rock the boat. We agreed to give her five thousand a month, tax free, to support her." Frank's mouth dropped open. "However, what she didn't know was that we were watching her and, when she started struggling and demanding more money, we analyzed her. We realized that she was spending a thousand a month on alcohol. We realized that she spent a significant sum each month while shopping online. She was behind in her rent, she was barely passing in school and we had someone spot check – she wasn't even going to classes. She offered to sleep with the prof for marks like a washed-up hooker. She and her family were eating at your house every night, despite us giving her twelve hundred a month for groceries." Helen's eyes filled with tears. "We then found out that, not only wasn't she paying rent, but she had also almost doubled the rent when she reported it to us. In other words, she was lying, stealing and cheating, and she wasn't only doing it to us, but she was doing it to you and in a roundabout way, to her kids.

"We were hurt and angry, but we talked about it, and we decided the true problem was her drinking. She was drinking all day long, and because of that was in no condition to cook dinner, and was skipping classes and failing them because of it. Steph and I decided to give her one last chance. The difference was that this time, she would have to go for regular drug and alcohol testing to prove that she was stopping her alcohol consumption. As I said to you earlier, this is a normal thing for anyone in my company. Steph and I also go for random drug and alcohol testing simply because we don't believe that anyone should be excluded. So I told Val that I wanted her to start testing, and Val told Steph that God would kill her because she was a horrible person, and when he did Val would celebrate and dance on her grave. Steph's doctor, Jim, was furious at how Val was treating Steph and he offered to start the testing right then and there. When she refused, I told her that it was akin to proof that she was drinking, and since that was on the no-no list I was then taking away her funding. And that's what started this latest volley of venom."

"Why was her doctor so angry?" said Helen.

"Ah, there's a story." I snorted, and Ranger kissed my knuckles again. "Jim was Steph's obstetrician. His daughter, Hannah, had gone down to Costa Rica on a mission, and she was kidnapped. Jim and his wife Emily knew that something was wrong, but no one would listen to them. Out of desperation and not sure where else to turn, they came to us, hoping that we'd know who to contact. Steph and her team looked into Hannah's disappearance and found her within twenty-four hours. I went down to Costa Rica with a team, and we rescued Hannah, and the other mission volunteers, and also shut down the drug trading routes in Costa Rica. That was last December, when I was shot. The last I heard, the drug cartel is still scrambling to recover. Hannah had been tortured, but Kai had looked after her and she gradually recovered. Grace took her under her wing and slept with her every night, listened to her and cuddled with her, and by the end of it Hannah was feeling much more comfortable with the world. As Jim said, we saved Hannah's life and to hear Val say that Steph was useless? Jim was furious. If it weren't for Steph, Hannah would have died."

"Steph really is a hero, isn't she?"

"Her whole team is. They do amazing things and achieve the impossible. They save lives, and what could be more heroic than that?"

"She's going to be ticked to not be part of the group tomorrow, won't she?" said Helen with a smile.

Ranger sighed. "She's going to be even angrier when we keep giving her morphine tomorrow."

"Does she need it?" said Frank.

Ranger sighed again. "She has needed it all along but has been refusing to have something that strong. But tomorrow, we aren't giving her any choice."

I sighed and stopped fighting sleep, and seconds later dropped off.