Sarah flinched. "Uh? Oh, I'm sorry, Amanda. Yes, it is beautiful--just the kind I always dreamed of when I was a kid."
Amanda, watching Sarah's reflection in the glass, smiled. "Somehow, I never pictured you as the kind of little girl that thought about growing up and getting married."
"I wasn't really," Sarah giggled, or at least she tried. "After Ham left, I thought about it a lot. I could hear my mother crying at night in her room, and I thought about getting married just to show him that we didn't need him."
Amanda tried not to react when she noticed the tears steaming down Sarah's face. Sarah Green was not one to let her emotions show, especially her pain. Lee often commented that Sarah reminded him of himself "BA". ("Before Amanda"--a term often used by him in a teasing tone, but everyone who knew him, also understood how serious he was about the joys Amanda had brought to his life.) "One day, Sarah will realize that hiding the pain isn't strength," he had recently said to her. Neither of them had been expecting the change to come soon, but life in this business brought few guarantees.
"I need him," Sarah whispered, reminding Amanda of a little girl. "I loved my Daddy. . .and I hated him." The tears were starting to flow quickly now. Amanda knew that Sarah was about to fall apart, and she knew her friend well enough to know that Sarah wouldn't want anyone to see. She pushed Sarah over into an ally next to the bridal shop. They walked a few feet into the alleyway when Sarah fell to her knees and started crying hard. Amanda wanted to rush over and hug her, but sensed that Sarah wouldn't welcome the contact right now. Knowing Sarah, she was already berating herself for showing weakness.
After a few minutes, Sarah stopped bawling. Tears still streaming down her face, she shivered. "He was always fun when he came home. No discipline, just do. Poor Mom--she had the day to day drudgery to put up with and so she always came out looking bad to me. 'She's no fun!' When I was a teenager, I didn't blame Ham for leaving her."
Hugging herself tightly, as if to ward off the pain, Sarah kept talking, and Amanda just stood and listened. It was all that she could do. "When I figured out what his job was--Mom and her nine to five job was just too boring. I jumped on his offer to help out with courier jobs--just like Philip did. Then, the day I turned eighteen, he managed to get the Agency to offer me a chance in training. Do you know what they trained me for, Amanda? Do you?"
Seeing the pain in Sarah's eyes, Amanda didn't want to answer. She and Sarah stared at one another for a few moments, before Amanda dropped her eyes and nodded. She knew why Sarah was called the 'Lioness'--she was a hunter. "I bet you don't know why I was picked for such a traditionally 'male' job. I didn't either for a long time. My Daddy asked them to, and I met all the criteria, so they did. My Daddy asked his friends to train his little girl to be a killer."
Amanda flinched. "Sarah--"
"Oh, I didn't kill many, Amanda. I remember the first one; I still see his face in my nightmares. He was a bad man. He had personally blown up several daycare centers and restaurants and. . . and his group was one of the best terrorists orgs their was--they had killed thousands. He was evil, but I took him out when he was out on a date with his wife. He walked out of that restaurant smiling, looking like a normal man, and I watched from the building across the way, and I put a bullet in his brain. I went to HQ, made my report, went home, and threw up."
"I hated myself, so I did my best never to get an assassination assignment again." Sarah sounded like she was giving a book report--her voice was flat and unemotional. "I got good at hunting the animals down and bring them back to the 'pride', so good that they always wanted me to do those jobs instead. Not that just hunting the scum was easy on me. . . Ham wasn't pleased, believe or not. I think he wanted me to do what he couldn't do. He had to follow the rules and arrest them. I think with me, he saw an opportunity to take them out. Not many of us outside of the military are chosen for Black Ops."
Sarah stopped talking, and looked up at Amanda. Amanda, unsure what to say or do, simply opened her arms, doubting that the hurting young woman would accept her offer of comfort. To her amazement, Sarah practically jumped into her arms, hugging Amanda so tight, she could feel it in her bones. "How can you both love and hate the same person?" she cried.
"I don't know, Hon. I don't know, but I understand," she whispered as the girl cried in her arms. "I understand. I understand. . ."
Amanda sat in the dark, thinking. The loud shrill of the telephone broke through the silence. Grabbing up the phone, Amanda leaned to look in the bedroom. Sarah didn't even shift on the bed. "Amanda?" she heard a familiar voice say from the headphone. Amazing how, after all these years, Lee's voice could still make her toes curl.
She put the phone next to her head. "I'm sorry, Lee. I was making sure that Sarah wasn't disturbed."
"She asleep?" Lee asked, amazed.
"Yeah, she's in a pretty deep sleep, too." Amanda tried to keep the worry out of her voice, and she thought she did a good job.
Lee's question told her different. Oh, well, he always could read her better than anyone else alive. "What's wrong?"
"You said it would happen one day."
"What?" Lee sighed, signaling to Amanda that he understood what she meant. He had learned how to understand Amanda years before, but sometimes she did manage to confuse him. "Did you think she will be okay?"
"Yeah, with a little love and attention, I think she'll be just fine. She has a support base now to fall back on, and she's willing to use it." Amanda thought of Sarah crying in her arms, and she thought of the woman who would only say that she was doing "fine" after she helped arrest one of her few close friends for treason. Philip's influence on her was both noticeable and wonderful.
"Oh?" Lee knew Sarah almost as well as Amanda did. He made it a point to know the people Amanda worked with, and he made it especially clear to Sarah that he expected to get close to her. He wouldn't let someone he couldn't trust partner with his wife.
Amanda sighed, wondering what to tell him. "We were walking back to the car when she spotted a wedding dress in this window. She stopped to look at it. She was smiling, and then. . .She said that she started thinking of the opposites in her life. Lee, she was walking out from arranging her father's funeral, and spotted a wedding gown she wanted to try on. It finally hit her hard."
"I'm glad it happened, Amanda. You and I both know she needed it, and I'm glad it happened away from here. She wouldn't have forgiven herself if it had," Lee said, trying to help soothe Amanda's raw nerves. "She was really lucky that she had you there."
"I wished Philip could have been there though. She needed him, and he needed to hear what she had to say." Grimacing, she thought about her son and the possible problems he might face in his marriage. She tried hard not to worry about him staying in that safe house, because she would go crazy thinking about all the danger he might be in right now. "Did you know about Sarah's relationship with her father?" she suddenly asked, needing to know.
There was empty air for a few minutes. "Amanda--"
"Did you?" She didn't care about rules and regulations right now.
Sighing, Lee told her without telling her. "We don't have many secrets from this place, Amanda. With all the psyche evaluations and mandatory meetings with the psychologist, agents don't have many secrets from their supervisors. He wasn't a bad man, Amanda."
"No, but I don't think he was a very nice man, either." Amanda, worrying about what influence Luke Hamilton had on her son, closed her eyes and prayed he had very little.
She could hear breathing over the phone, could almost hear the thoughts through his mind. They had done well at keeping the job separated from their relationship. They had learned early that they had to make sure their marriage stayed strong, especially after Lee's promotion to section chief. Everyone generally believed he was harder on his wife than he was on anyone, and Amanda accepted it as part of the cost of being married to the boss. He had to be harder--if he even treated just like the rest, someone was sure to yell "Favoritism!"
Sometimes Lee slipped and let something out than he shouldn't, but usually Amanda was as much in the dark as the other agents. It was his way of protecting her. She remembered the hassle of the first few months after Lee's promotion--subtle jokes, sly comments, and outright questions to see what she knew. If she had of known, Amanda knew enough about herself to know that, no matter how much training, she was a lousy liar.
"Amanda," Lee said softly. "I hadn't even met Luke Hamilton. I heard about him, and I made it my business to know what he was doing after Sarah partnered with you. I knew he was a professor, and if I had thought about it, I would have known the chances were large that Philip would have contact with him."
Amanda lay down on the couch, staring up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan. Lee was trying to apologize to her, but she didn't want him to feel like he was responsible. She gave a sad laugh. "Well, I never thought about the possibility myself. Should of never agreed to let him attend school anywhere D.C." Lee laughed. "I don't know though. The way my family seems to attracts international intrigue, he could have went to school in Iowa probably would have been given a package, and told to give it to the cow wearing the red hat." They shared a laugh together over that line.
"Amanda, I am sorry." Lee's words and tone told her how much he was worried about her.
"Don't be. You aren't responsible anymore than I am." Amanda sighed, and asked herself how Lee knew she was thinking about Philip. Shaking her head, Amanda told herself that she was being silly. Lee Stetson had become an expert about Amanda Stetson, a connoisseur of everything Amanda.
"He's a good kid, Amanda." Lee had a lot to do with Philip turning out so well, helping to keep him steady during the turbulent teenage years, but he wouldn't believe it; He always gave her full credit for the wonderful young men that her sons had turned out to be.
Amanda thought about his comment for a moment. "No, he isn't, Lee." A heartbeat of silence loomed between them. "He's a good man, and while I may hate some of his choices, I have to admire them, too."
Amanda could feel Lee's smile over the phone, and it warmed her. "Took after his old lady."
"Yeah," Amanda answered. "And his old man, too." She closed her eyes and imagined Lee sitting at his desk, leaned back, relaxing as he talked to her. She could even see his embarrassed grin. Even now, he had a hard time accepting her compliments about his parenthood. He was an incredible father, and for a moment, Amanda regretted that they had decided not to have any children together.
"I, um, guess you are going to stay there for a while."
Amanda nodded, even though Lee couldn't see her. "Yeah, I want to be here when she wakes up, and I might end up spending the night if she needs me."
"I'll see you in the morning, then." Amanda could hear the sadness in his voice, along with his acceptance. They hadn't spent many nights apart since their "marriage" had been performed in front of their friends and family.
"Lee, I don't--"
Lee stopped her. "Amanda, it's Sarah. She'll be even more determined to come in tomorrow."
Amanda sighed and stretched. She hadn't realized how tired she was until now. It was so easy to get lost in the case, and forget the basics of life like eating and sleeping. "When Sarah wakes up, tell her we managed to pull a partial print from the library that so far hasn't turned up to be from anybody that we know was in the house recently, but. . ." Amanda could see him in her mind's eyes sitting up straight, getting back to business.
"No guarantees," Amanda whispered, trying to imagine being in Sarah's place. She couldn't begin to understand the horror of having a parent murdered, and the additional pain of having no answers or clues as to why.
"No, not here," Lee whispered.
Amanda sighed, "There's no guarantees in life anywhere, Lee."
"Amanda, for what it's worth, Hamilton is the reason Sarah got yanked off the team and brought in to be a field agent. He asked for it," Lee told her. "I think he understood what he did was wrong. Maybe he hadn't even realized how bad it was until he saw how cold Sarah was becoming."
Amanda was quiet, thinking about the complex life of parents and children. What should be so simple was so complicated--had she really once believed that parenting was easy and over with when they turned eighteen? She smiled at the memory of her naive youthfulness. "Goodnight," she told her husband, knowing that he would be at his office until three or four o'clock in the morning and back in it by seven.
"Goodnight, Beloved." He had teased her a lot since their trip to Rome, and his having found out the Latin meaning of her name. After the American scholar who shared that tidbit of information with him had gotten off the bus, Lee had leaned over and told her that her mother had an amazing knack for naming children: "Amanda" was a perfect choice.
Reaching over to hang up the phone, Amanda noticed Sarah standing hesitantly at the bedroom door. Her hair was in disarray and her clothes were all twisted on her body. With that and adding the hesitantly look on her face, she looked like a lost little girl who had woken up to a nightmare instead of her pleasant home. "I'm sorry--"
"Don't be," Amanda smiled, trying to reassure her friend. "How are you feeling?"
Sarah gave a wry grin. "Like my head got blown off, my eyes torn out, and my throat feels like I drank some kind of acid." Amanda struggled again not to show her reaction. Such an honest answer from Sarah on what she was feeling, even physically, was indeed rare, or at least it had been.
"Did I hear you tell Lee you might spend the night?" Amanda could hear the hope and the desire not to show it.
"Yeah, I thought I'd just go ahead and sleep here, if that's okay."
Sarah nodded, putting her hands into her jeans' pockets. She looked nervously around the room. "How about some popcorn and 'Dirty Dancing'?"
Amanda's face lit up at the idea. She remembered how hard the Logan case had been on both of them. One night, unable to sleep, the two women and sat down in one of their hotel rooms and ended up catching the movie on Showtime. Nerves and giddiness reigned supreme that night as the two women "woofed" and "ahhed" as they watched Patrick Swayze make all his moves.
"That sounds wonderful," she replied. Just what the doctor ordered, she thought. Both of them needed mindless fun right now. The could go work on the case, but Amanda knew that they needed some time. They would be more of a hindrance than a help to the investigation.
Sarah walked over to her kitchen. Amanda got up and watched as her partner--her soon to be daughter-in-law--began pulling out a bowl with her hot air popper. "I didn't think I ever told you how I met, Philip."
Amanda tried to sort out the comment, but realized that Sarah had lost her. "You haven't as far as I know."
Sarah stopped to look at her. "Then what was the joke about the red hat?" Amanda stood still, suspecting what was coming, but not believing it was. When she didn't say anything, Sarah went on explaining, "Dad couldn't give Philip a package one day, and I had to do it. Such stupid directions! 'Give this to the man in the red hat!'"
Amanda was shocked silent for a moment. She thought of a British lady and her cheeky Yank. She thought about herself with Lee, and now Philip with Sarah. . .She busted out laughing. The connection between the generations was becoming stronger. Sarah twirled to look at her, surprise written on her face. "What?"
Between gasps, Amanda managed to get out, "We have to remember to warn the grandkids to watch out for men--or women--bearing strange packages!"