AN: The song is "Where Do I Begin?" by Jill Sobule.

where do I begin? where do I begin?
to clean up this mess I made, where do I begin?
what corner of the room I better pick up soon, before I can't find myself?
better pick up soon, 'cause over there is the ashes of the bridges that I've burned
and over there is the stack of the same lesson learned
and over there is my lover underneath the dying fern
where do I begin?

"So he's gone, huh?"

"Yep."

"He didn't say goodbye."

"He did to me," Fiona shrugged indifferently.

"Oh."

She just made a face into her cereal bowl.

I tried again. "Do you think he went to see Gabe?"

She looked at me like I was stupid.

"Not Gabe," I deduced.

"No. Not Gabe."

I sat down across from her at the table and waited for her to say something else. When she stubbornly remained silent, I sighed and laid my head down on the table. She crunched her cereal methodically.

"I give up."

I lifted my head and stared straight at her, hoping to shove her off the precarious edge of faked calmness, shake her up a little. She just looked back at me as if she had no idea what I could be talking about. Oh, yeah. She was mad. But then, she had a right to be. Of course she did. Well, she did and she didn't, you know? I still didn't--I mean, of course I realized that what I had done was certainly hurtful to her, I could see that, and in some way I really had known that it would be from the very beginning.

But on the other hand, this was my life, and hadn't I spent enough of it in service, in mourning, in stasis, just waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to change? And now it had, and we had been happy, when we were, and it had been such an incredible relief not to have this burden of what had somehow become my life on my shoulders for those brief periods of time when the circumstances weren't forcing their way into my mind, screaming "You can't do this anymore!" I always knew the age difference would be a problem, but it was never a problem between us when we were together; it was only a problem when the reactions of others were taken into consideration.

She was still gazing back at me, unblinking. I couldn't decide whether to be apologetic or angry. "All right, I'm sorry, okay? I know I fucked up. What can I do about it now? The damage has been done. I understand that you're upset, but what else can I do for you? It's over. I can't go back in time and make it not happen."

She didn't say anything. What could she say? What did I want her to say? Oh, yeah, you're right, I'm completely okay with the idea that you've been screwing around with the boy you know I've always loved. And she would call him a boy, wouldn't she, just to rub it in. She did have a lot of her father in her. I waited. She wasn't going to say, "You're right." She wasn't going to come to her senses. How could I expect that? So I decided not to expect that. I decided not to expect anything. I had done my part. I had sworn him off, even if he didn't know it yet. Jack might be gone this morning, but I knew one day he'd come back, because I had done my part. So now she was the only one left to decide whether that was good enough to satisfy her moral outrage, however unjustified I secretly thought it might be. It occurred to me that I could no longer talk to her like she was a child, my child; suddenly she was an adult, demanding to be dealt with in adult terms, a shift I wasn't sure I was ready to consider.

"What do you want from me?" she asked, as I had hoped she wouldn't. "What do you want me to do? Do you want me to tell you it's okay? Well, it's not okay. I'm not okay."

"I know, I just--"

"No," she interrupted. "I really am not okay with this. With you. With what you've done."

"Well, I really don't think I--"

"But as long as it's over, as long as you tell me it was a mistake and it's not going to happen again, then... I don't know what, exactly, will happen then." She paused. "But it might make it easier to look at you."

"All right," I said calmly. "It's over. It was a mistake, and it's not going to happen again."

where do I begin? where do I begin?
to clean up this mess I made, where do I begin?
what corner of the room I better pick up soon, before I can't find myself?
better pick up soon, 'cause over there is the guitar with the broken string
and over there is the cat that I forgot to feed
and over there is the memory of a beautiful broken dream
where do I begin?

"All right," she replied, and we sat there in the sunlight for a few moments, silent, as she drank the milk out of her bowl and I watched her.

"You didn't--" I wasn't quite sure how to approach the subject. The most direct method was never my favorite, but I was out of ideas. "You didn't tell Irene about any of this, did you?"

She arched an eyebrow, amused, and didn't answer.

"I mean, I know, I know that you might--"

"Relax. We didn't say anything."

"We? Oh, you and Jack. Well, okay. Just you know, I was just curious."

She shook her head. "I don't know why we didn't, exactly, but we didn't. We could have. Maybe we should have." She eyed me, drumming her fingers on the table, making me nervous. "I mean, really, what would you say if you were her and she was you and he was Jack?"

"I'd probably say 'Help, we've been attacked by body-switching aliens.'"

She cracked a joyless smile. "Seriously, though."

"I I don't know what I'd say. But I guess I'd have a better sense of understanding about it, about how things can happen between two people that make their age and their roles irrelevant, about how there can be a connection that--" I paused. It was a pathetic argument. Maybe I should have said: look, Fiona, I know it's difficult for you to wrap your mind around, but it's not like I raped him.

It didn't matter; pathetic or not, my argument had served its purpose. She wrinkled her nose. "Okay!" She put her hands up in a surrendering gesture. "I wasn't that interested. Really."

And I just laughed, an empty gesture that closed the conversation. The morning passed without incident, without a phone call from Jack, without another argument.

It was almost frightening how easy it had been to decide to make that sacrifice, to fly instead of fight, frightening because instead of feeling too much, like I usually did, I didn't feel much of anything at all. Just empty. Drained. I hadn't slept much the night before. When I told Carey the dreams were gone, it was a lie. It would be nice to think he had cured me, helped to drive out my demons, but I was incurably infested. Always had been, always would be. The dreams were less brutal now, at least, but maybe it just seemed that way because I was used to them. Clearly, avoiding sleep altogether hadn't worked--it had, in fact, only seemed to better serve their apparent purpose, since avoiding sleep had nearly killed me. Now the only thing I could do was surrender. It was a motif. I surrendered to sleep, surrendered to my nightly death, surrendered to my children, surrendered to the easy way out.

Now all I had to do was find a way to convince him to let go. I remembered love at that age, when it seems too rare to fathom the idea of giving it up just because you have to. I remember the first time my heart was broken. It never really healed. I hated doing that to him, but clinging to this would only be worse. He would get tired of me. One day he would wake up and say, what the hell am I doing here? What have I done? And I'd live in fear of that day the entire time we were together, if I didn't do this now. Yes, it would be best for him. And it would be best for me. Judy had asked if he was bad for me; of course he wasn't, that was ridiculous. She was asking the wrong question. I, on the other hand, was bad for everyone. I could only hurt him, just as I'd ended up hurting Rick, and the others before and after him, the way I'd hurt my own children, even. It almost seemed easier when I thought about what I needed to do now as ultimately beneficial for him, because thinking about it any other way made the prospect nearly unbearable.

where do I begin? where do I begin?
to clean up this mess I made, where do I begin?
what corner of the room I better pick up soon, before I can't find myself?
better pick up soon, 'cause over there is the stack of the unpaid bills
and over there is the couch with the unexplained spill
and over here is the lonely heart that can't be filled
where do I begin...