"Mom's asleep," Sydney sighed as she sank down next to her father. He had been sitting out on the terrace ever since Will and Jenny had left. "I think she was more tired than she realized."
Jack nodded. "We were worried about you. She was on the phone constantly, trying to find out about you. Then, she had to pretend that nothing was wrong when I was there. It had to wear her out."
He sounded like he was giving a book report instead of talking about his wife. He felt numb inside, even though he had told Vaughn that he had a lot to be thankful for. And he had been thankful for Sydney's safe return. She had not told him about her time in the mental hospital, but Jack knew it could not have been pleasant.
He could see the tiredness start to settle on her shoulders. Like her mother, she had been running on sheer adrenaline for the last few hours. He should wait until later, but now felt like the right time.
He walked inside and got his coat. He spotted his lying asleep on the couch, a blanket covering her. He watched her breath and wondered when everything had gone wrong between them. Shaking it off, he went back outside and walked over to Sydney. He pulled an envelope out of the pocket and handed it to her. She looked up at him, her eyelids heavy, and her eyebrows drawn up in confusion. "What's this?"
"The report on Case 332L," he told her as he sat back down beside her. He put his feet out in front of him. He heard the ripping of paper as she tore into it. She opened the package, and he knew at what she was looking. He had arranged the pages in a specific order before stuffing them into the envelope.
"That's a picture of Bentley Calder. He was an FBI Agent. And A traitor," he told her.
"Why are you giving me this?" she asked.
He smiled and it felt like his face was cracking. She sounded like him, demanding answers, never being satisfied with just being told the official story. "Vaughn told me that you had mentioned it to him, and that you had asked him if he knew anything."
"He didn't," she sighed.
Jack shifted in the lounge chair. "He's the reason the file's missing."
"You mean he lied to me?" She sounded so shocked by the idea. How could she be so damn naive after all that she had seen? He realized that she sounded just like him. He knew the score, knew the dangers of their life, but he had never for one moment ever doubted his wife, his family. Until it all fell apart.
If it had been anyone else besides Sydney telling him that his wife was an agent for SD-6, he would not have believed him. He would have denied any evidence they tried to show. Sydney was the only person who he would have believed, and she had been the one to tell him the truth he didn't want to know about Laura.
"No," Jack told her. He looked over at her. "I asked for them to be removed in case he ever came looking at my file. He never did, until you told him that you felt like you didn't know me anymore."
Sydney looked away from him. She bit her lip and sighed. "I'm sorry."
"You should be," he told her. "And I should be angry, but I'm not."
Sydney chuckled. "You were always too lenient as a father."
He grasped her hand in his. "I remember you saying the exact opposite when you were a teenager."
Sydney squeezed his fingers. "I went crazy the day I turned thirteen and stayed that way for years," she teased.
"You were a good kid, even as a teenager," he told her. She had been wonderful. He was blessed; even all the lies Lara had told him for the past decade, all the pain he wasn't allowing himself to feel, was worth it. Sydney was worth it.
"I remember you saying the exact opposite when I was a teenager."
They both smiled at each other. "Well, I was the father of teenage daughter, and I had been a teenager myself. I knew the trouble you could get into."
"Mister Honor Student got into trouble?" Sydney gasped. She laid her hand across her chest. "Say isn't so."
He felt his smile fade, and Sydney looked like she wished she could grab it back. "I joined the CIA when I was seventeen, Sydney."
"You have to be eighteen to work for the CIA," Sydney replied, and Jack grinned at the primness in her voice.
"Supposedly," he answered with a sigh. "It was two days past my eighteenth birthday when they set me down in Viet Nam."
Sydney was silent for a moment. "You told you weren't drafted."
"I wasn't. I never went as a soldier, Sydney. I was there as an agent of the CIA." Jack could still remember the smell that had hovered in the air. The smell and the screams.
The moonlight reflected off of Sydney's tears. "I thought that meant--"
"I hadn't been. I know. I wanted you to think that," he told her. "I don't know why; I just didn't want you to know."
Sydney looked down at the papers in her lap. "Why didn't you want Vaughn to see these?"
An old guilt regurgitated in his mouth. "I didn't want him to know that I once accused his father of treason."
"What?"
Jack's fist clenched. "Doesn't that man look familiar to you, Sydney?"
She stared at the photo for several minutes. He could see her thinking, struggling to remember. Her memory was almost photographic, but it had been years since she had even seen the article. He pulled it out of his coat pocket and handed it to her.
She stared at the newspaper before taking it from his hands. She gasped when she seen the headline, but she stopped breathing when she saw the picture of Calder, the one beside a picture of him and her mother.
"I don't understand," she whispered.
Jack remembered the confusion he had felt afterwards. It had been a difficult time for him. He had almost gone insane in his struggle for revenge. "Calder worked for the KGB, Sydney. He was a plant. No one even had a clue until I drove your mother to a meeting one night, to some faculty get together that I didn't even usually attend."
"But Mom asked you to," Sydney whispered. She had asked for them to tell her about the accident the day she graduated from high school.
Jack nodded. "And that son of bitch tried to kill me and damn near killed your mother instead."
He heard Sydney sniff. He didn't feel like crying; he could still taste the desire for blood that had choked him at the time. "When we investigated why, we discovered his secret. Several agents had died from an unknown assailant. He had been killing us, and we didn't have a clue who it was until an icy road took care of the assassin for us."
When Sydney looked over at him with concern in her eyes, he forced himself to breathe. "Only the dates didn't match. He was out of town for a few of them. We realized that he had to have had an accomplice."
Jack remembered the frantic search for that accomplice. "Then, we found the message: sent in a magazine article. Someone had picked it up and noticed that his copy of the magazine didn't have the same article in it. We found the code, deciphered it, and realized that he had been ordered to kill the assassin. That they had become a rogue agent."
Sighing, Jack stretched, trying to get his muscles to relax. "We researched the date of the magazine, but realized that might not matter. He apparently got some in the mail, but others were old ones dropped off at and picked up from dentists and doctors' offices. A brilliant way of passing information."
"What happened then?"
"They started looking at everyone who had died, focusing on those in the year of the magazine. They would have investigated me, but they realized that I was out of town every single time one of the murders had taken place. Hell, I was out of the country when most of them took place," he told her. He wished he had a drink, but he had been cutting back on them. Because Vaughn had asked him to and because he knew Sydney needed him sober.
Jack stared down at his hands. "Your mother was recovering by then. We narrowed our suspect list quickly, and William Vaughn was at the top of it." He sighed. "I hounded his poor widow, and the clues kept popping, and then a much-too-old-for-his-age Michael, his fist clenched by his sides, demanded to know my intentions."
"What?"
Jack grinned at the memory. "He thought I was ready to marry his mother.
"I looked at Elizabeth--his mother--and told her that he deserved to know the truth," he said.
"You didn't?"
Shaking his head, Jack remembered the horror in Elizabeth's eyes. She was already reeling from the possibility that her husband may not have been the man she thought he was. She had been terrified that he would rip away the illusions of a boy. It had been then that he had regained control of himself, had realized that even if William Vaughn had been a villain, Elizabeth and her son were as much his victims as Laura.
"I told him that I was a CIA agent investigating his father's murder, that we weren't giving up," he said. The relief in the room that day could be physically felt. That teenage boy had not been ready for a replacement father, no matter how much he tried to act like an adult. And that mother wanted her son to believe his father was a hero.
Vaughn had just turned thirteen when they met. He had been plagued off and on by nightmares ever since his father's death four years earlier. They had stopped after Jack told him about the investigation. He had never told his mother that he dreamed he was letting his father down by not investigating, by not demanding answers. The fact the CIA was still involved, still looking, had given him comfort.
Jack sighed. "Elizabeth waited until he was gone to ask me what I was going to tell him when I found conclusive proof."
He remembered his younger self's words. "I told her that he should be told the truth. He was almost a man, and I thought truth was the answer." Laura had always agreed with him when it came to telling the truth. There are too many lies in this world, she had used to say.
"Yet you never told me the truth," she whispered.
He looked over at his daughter. "No, I didn't. I lied to you. I lied to Michael. He invited me to a baseball game one day when I was over there searching through some more of his father's papers. I could tell he was desperate for an older man to look up to. His grandfathers were dead, and he only had his mother and one grandmother. So I started filling in for William Vaughn."
Sydney stared down at the papers in her hands. "Did you find the proof you needed?"
Jack nodded. "Yeah, I did. Six months after I met Michael, I found conclusive proof that his father was innocent." He had apologized to Elizabeth, explained to her why it had been so important to him. She had eventually forgiven him, had understood his desire for revenge. Then, he had gone to William Vaughn's grave and asked for forgiveness from him. And made a promise to look out for his son.
"Who--"
"We still don't know," he admitted. He had never found his answers. Every night, he had sat beside his wife's hospital bed, watched her struggle to breathe in her bruised body and promised to find everyone responsible. He had failed.
"I told Laura the day I brought her home that I didn't blame her if she wanted to hate me," he whispered. He was talking more to himself than Sydney.
Looking up, he spotted the horror on Sydney's face. She had just realized something that she didn't want to deal with. "Sydney--"
"Dad, don't ask me!" She stood up and the papers crumbled in her hand.
He didn't stand; he gave her the space she needed. "You know I will."
She stared down at her hands. He could see the tension in her shoulders. The muscles were knotted beneath her shirt. "Mom told me on Halloween when she started working for SD-6."
Jack sat up straight. "No one informed me of that."
"I didn't tell them," she whispered.
"Sydney--"
"I couldn't." She turned to look at him. Tears stayed in her eyes and voice. "I just couldn't."
Jack sighed and leaned back. "I should reprimand you, but I don't have the energy."
"You wouldn't have told them either," she realized.
He shrugged. "You're right. I don't know; I might have."
The sounds of the night surrounded them. Finally, Sydney told him what was on her mind. "1982."
Jack's eyes closed. "Right after the accident." He looked at her. They were both hoping that maybe they could understand her decision, accept the anger that drove her. They both knew they couldn't forgive twenty years of lies.
"Take the file and read it, Sydney. You need to go to bed. It's late, and you've went through hell the last few days," he told her.
"Dad--"
"Go to bed," he told her. "I'm fine."
Sydney stared at him for a few minutes. Finally, she nodded and went back inside. Jack stared up at the sky for the remainder of the night. He couldn't see the stars, but somehow the black void of the sky fit his mood.