A/N: We're going to see what Ranger has been up to in this chapter.

"Connie wants me to stop by the office," I told Tank, as we drove down Hamilton Avenue. I could see from a block away that there weren't any cars parked out front. I hadn't wanted to stop by when Stephanie was in the office, so I hadn't told Tank about Connie's text. I didn't need him giving me shit for avoiding Stephanie, even though he took every opportunity he could to remind me not to look her up.

Connie was the only person in the office when I arrived. Vinnie's door was shut, which didn't necessarily mean he wasn't in there, just that he wasn't checked-in with what was going on out front.

"Thanks for stopping by," Connie said. "I need a favor."

"Personal, professional, or sexual?" I asked.

She laughed. "If you'll do this professional one, I'll throw in the sexual. It's a nasty skip, and there's no way I can send Lula out on it. They'd both end up dead."

"What about Stephanie?"

"What about her?" Connie asked, looking confused.

"Why isn't she going after this guy?"

"Stephanie left at the end of the year," Connie said. "What rock have you been living under?"

I took a second to absorb that information.

"Who is it?" I asked, deciding not to comment further.

Connie handed me the file. I had heard about the guy on the streets, and more recently on the news. Marco Benet was a big-time drug dealer. He was running most of the cocaine in the tri-state area. He had a notoriously nasty temper and was finally arrested after he murdered three people in a drive-by shooting, including the intended target's five-year-old sister. Somehow, a judge thought it was a good idea to release him on a $5 million bond and an ankle monitor. They had found the monitor in a dumpster five blocks from the office where it had been activated, and Benet had been in the wind since. I hadn't realized Vinnie had written his bond.

"My normal twenty percent," I told Connie. She nodded. "Vinnie's a tight ass who doesn't want to hire anyone new because no one will take anything less than fifteen, but he's just going to have to suck it up on this one."

I signed the paperwork and headed back out to the SUV.

"You're taking a skip?" Tank said, eyebrows raised. "You swore you'd never do it again after that asshole your cousin bailed out tried to kill all of us a couple of years ago."

"It's a $5 million bond, so it's a good payday. Connie told me Stephanie quit at the end of the year and Vinnie's too cheap to hire anyone so it's all being put on Lula. But this is way over her head," I said as he pulled away from the curb.

"Yeah, I heard she left," Tank commented as he headed back towards the office. I glanced over at him.

"You said you didn't want reports on her," Tank reminded me. "You brought her trackers into the office back in August, told me to deactivate them and that you didn't need reports on her anymore."

"I remember. I was there."

"So, then why are you looking at me like that?"

I shook my head and went back to reading Benet's file. "I'm just surprised I didn't hear anything around the office."

"That's because when Hal and James came to me to ask about moonlighting for the bonds office because Stephanie was leaving, I told them to keep the information to themselves and not to settle for anything less than twenty percent."

Tank looked over at me when I didn't respond. "Don't do it," he warned for what felt like the millionth time.

"Stop saying that," I replied. "Say it again and I'm going to tell Lula you want her back."

"That's just cold, man. I'm looking out for you whenever you get that look on your face that tells me you're thinking about her and wanting to know what she's doing."

My men knew better than to ask about my personal life, but I had felt the stares and the abrupt ends to conversations when I walked around the office for those first few weeks after Stephanie had told me to leave her alone. I had left it to Tank to inform them that there was no need to report on her any longer. But I would hear the police scanner when I walked past the monitoring room and wonder if a call about a car on fire or a disturbance at a convenience store was about her.

I had resisted looking her up in the nearly nine months since I'd talked to her in that burned out apartment. I knew she was still in Trenton, at least she had been before Christmas, because I had seen her on State Street one day as I was leaving a commercial client's office. She had been stuck behind a bus, looking frustrated as she shouted and gestured at the bus. I had the feeling she had seen me and was wanting to move on in case I decided to try to approach her. But I'd had no intention of doing so. Her words had stung, and even though I had known there was plenty of validity in what she had said, I had been hurt that she never gave me a chance to apologize or explain. She had just thrown my apartment key at me and told me to not bother her anymore. During those first few months, I had tried to tell myself that I would be fine. I had lived thirty years without her, it wouldn't be hard to go back to that. But after having Ella point out to me that I was noticeably unhappy, I had finally conceded that she had placed herself inside my heart in a way no one else ever had, and that the idea of living life like I had before her wasn't going to happen. She had changed me, and now I was left with a hollow feeling. There was a significant part of my life now empty. She had taken up more of my time than I had realized, and I missed it. I didn't miss her being in danger or worrying about her, but I missed spending time with her.

It took me three days to track down Marco Benet. He was better at hiding than most of the skips I'd taken in during my bounty hunter days, and he scared more people than I did. But I finally found him hiding out in a woman's apartment in Princeton. He had shot at me and tried to escape down a back alley, but I'd caught up with him and cuffed him. The bullet had grazed my arm, but the wound wasn't deep. I had him back in Trenton Police's custody an hour later. I bandaged my arm and took the body receipt into Connie. Lula was sitting on the couch and glowered when she saw me.

"See, look at him. He got hurt too," she said, indicating my bandage.

"It was just a graze from a bullet," I told her. "He was hard to find and hard to catch. I think Connie made the right call on this one."

Lula gave me the finger. "Whatever."

"I'll wire the money if that's okay with you," Connie said.

I nodded. "Sounds good."

I turned to leave, and Connie called my name. "You haven't asked about where she went," she commented. No one needed to ask who she was talking about.

"She doesn't want that," I replied. I left before she could say anything else.

We were always at our busiest between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when people were frequently gone on vacation and burglars decided to steal their stuff or residents were coming home drunk from barbeques and messing up their alarm system codes. We usually had an extra patrol car out during those periods, as well as from Thanksgiving to New Years, when we saw a similar trend. It meant I would be out on patrol more often, which I didn't mind. I preferred being on the street instead of in an office. It also meant life was more difficult when one of my family members guilted me into coming up to Newark.

"I don't care how busy this time of years gets," my oldest sister Celia said. "You're coming up here on Saturday. You can give up a few hours. Dad's depressed about all his work stuff and I'm trying to cheer him up. I think all of us being together would do that."

Our father's business had survived every recession since the Reagan administration, but he had recently decided to sell out to another company. He had told us that he was getting older and knew that he needed to help secure his employees' livelihoods. He had called me multiple times since first approached about it. I was one of the only people in the family who owned my own business and understood the struggle he was facing. My mother was pushing him to just retire, but he said he couldn't just abandon his people with someone new.

"I think Mom being on him about retiring every day is what's depressing him," I said as I read through shift reports. Celia was silent on the other end of the line. "Fine," I sighed. "What time?"

"Be here at noon."

Celia and her husband lived a few blocks away from my parents in the North Ward of Newark. Their house was a former duplex that had been converted into a single-family home. It had a two-car garage and a decent-sized backyard. It was larger than the home where my parents had raised six kids. Until recently, Celia and her husband had only had two kids, a fourteen-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy. After unexpectedly getting pregnant while on a cruise for their wedding anniversary, Celia had given birth to another girl in September.

I showed up at Celia's at noon on Saturday as ordered. My brother Emilio's four-year-old son, Henry, ran up to me as soon as I came within view, and I picked him up.

"Hi," he said, wrapping his tiny arms around my neck. He was small for his age, having been born fourteen weeks premature. He almost hadn't survived and had several developmental delays. Once he had been able to walk, he had started seeking me out whenever I was around. I was the only one not forcing him to talk all the time, and he knew it. His mother was constantly reminding everyone to make him do one thing or another to work on his skills. Not that they weren't important, but he needed breaks and he knew he got that with me.

"Hey buddy," I said, carrying him back towards the rest of the family.

"Hey Uncle Carlos!" Henry's older brother Micah came running towards me. "Did you shoot any bad guys today?"

"I haven't," I said. "Maybe we can go find some later. I bet there are some around here."

"Daddy says the guy next door is a dick," Micah told me. Unfortunately for him, his mother also heard it.

"Micah!" Lucy snapped. "Don't say that!"

"Daddy does."

"Well, Daddy shouldn't say it either."

I found an empty chair next to my father, who was nursing his favorite beer.

"Hey, son," he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "Sorry your sister dragged you up here to cheer me up. No one seems to believe I'm fine."

"I don't believe you're fine either, but I don't expect you to be," I told him. "You're selling your business. That's a big deal."

My father's business had been his seventh child. I knew handing it over to a stranger hadn't been easy. He would have preferred to keep it in the family, but none of us worked in his field.

"It's officially sold," he told me. "I signed the paperwork on Thursday, and we change over in thirty days."

"How many people did you have to let go?"

"Eight. But as I keep telling myself and everyone else, all of them would have been out of work if we'd gone under. The majority stand a better chance at keeping their jobs when the next recession hits."

My father and I were the only ones in the family who paid attention to the markets and the economy, and the writing was on the wall: another recession was lurking around the corner. I had been working to shore up my own business, since security systems were considered a luxury and often one of the first services cut or downgraded when a family or business needed to tighten their belts.

"You had a tough choice, and it sounds like you made the best decision you could," I told him. "Don't let Mom or your people get to you too much. They'll see that you did the right thing one day."

"When did you sneak in?" Celia asked me, the baby on her hip. She immediately thrust the squirming child into my free arm. "Here, hang out with Lily."

"You know they do that because they want you to settle down and have more kids," my father told me as Celia walked away.

"I know," I said, adjusting the baby so that she was sitting on my lap rather than hanging over my shoulder. I immediately thought about Stephanie, who was the only person in the world I would ever consider having children with and was immediately reminded that it would never happen. It was just one of the many things I regretted having never told her.

Lucy eventually came to fetch Henry, who had been perfectly comfortable sitting my lap playing with a toy cell phone, because she told him he needed to work on talking to his cousins and throwing a ball around. Lily started crying and I was handed a bottle before I could even ask for it. I fed her and then took her inside to change her diaper and put her down for a nap. She was a good baby, seemingly unphased by the noise and the people. Probably because she was constantly on the go between soccer practices and the other extracurricular activities of her older siblings. I brought the monitor out with me and set it on the table next to me. I was officially the babysitter until I left.

"How are you?" my mother asked, having finally made her way over to me. She had been helping my sisters get food out, then scolding the older grandkids for being bad influences on the little ones.

"I'm fine," I told her, knowing very well that wouldn't be enough for her. She would soon be asking if I had talked to Stephanie, and when I told her I hadn't, she would ask why. I hadn't told her that Stephanie had told me to leave her alone. I had given various excuses every time my mother had asked, but I was running out of them. She knew something had happened and was hellbent on getting the truth out of me.

"I'm going to assume you haven't talked to Stephanie recently," she said, taking the seat next to me that my father had vacated while I had been inside.

"No, I haven't."

"What happened?" she asked. "I really thought one day the two of you would be together, now you haven't spoken to her in months. I know you said she had a boyfriend that was off-and-on. Did they get more serious?"

"No, she broke up with him," I told her.

"Then why aren't you in the picture?"

"Mom, please," I begged. "I don't want to talk about her."

My mother would have pushed my other siblings to the brink of sanity, but she knew that didn't work with me. I loved my mother, but there had been a reason I set my office up in Trenton and not Newark.

She sighed and crossed her legs angrily. "I just want you to be happy," she said.

"I am happy."

"Don't lie to me," my mother said. "And don't lie to yourself. It doesn't make things any better."

"Being married with kids doesn't guarantee happiness," I told her. "And no one should do either of those things unless they know they can balance it with everything else."

"Oh, Carlos. If everyone lived like that, then no one would ever marry or have children," she said. "If you're waiting for everything to be perfect, then it'll never happen. You have to decide that it's what you want, and you make it work."

Micah ran up to me in that moment and I thanked God for the intervention. "Can we go find bad guys now?" he asked quietly, looking over his shoulder to see if his mother was nearby.

"Bad guys?" my mother asked.

"He thinks I shoot bad guys for a living. I told him we'd go find some. I have a reputation to uphold," I told her, and she smacked me on the arm.

"Don't encourage him."

I took Micah around to the front of the house and we sat on the front steps deciding who looked like bad guys. His definition of bad guys differed greatly from mine. He saw the eccentric old man and the woman talking to herself as the threats, but I knew it was the guy hanging around the park across the street who was the real problem. He wore a coat that was much too warm for early June and was constantly changing his position to keep an eye out for cops.

We were summoned to the backyard after a while to eat. I had been halfway through my food when Lily woke up. I headed inside to get her and ate the rest of my food with her in my lap as she tried to take it off my fork. I had given myself four hours to spend with my family, and at exactly four in the afternoon, I said my goodbyes and headed to the car.

Talk about Stephanie had brought her back to my mind as I made my way back to Rangeman. I cringed when I thought about the way she had described our first time sleeping together. I had made it a transaction because I'd been trying to convince myself that what I felt for her was just an intense sexual attraction that once satisfied would ease. I hadn't expected to wake up in the middle of night to watch her sleep and realize that I was in love with her. I had felt immediately guilty about the way I had done things and hadn't been able to leave her apartment fast enough the next morning. It had taken me all afternoon to work up the nerve to face her, and even then it was awkward. It was awkward for a while after that. We could both sense it, though I didn't know if she knew why it was awkward for me.

I knew I had been guilty of not always listening to what she wanted. Yes, I had tracked her when she had asked me not to. But there had been many times when that had ended up saving her life. I didn't regret that part, but I did regret not telling her why she was so important to me. I regretted not telling her how much I loved her. I had always downplayed it because I couldn't face it. And then there was the complication of her relationship with Morelli. I knew I wouldn't have wanted him intruding if the tables had been turned, but I would have made it very clear to him. He never seemed to have the nerve to tell me to keep things platonic, and I hadn't been sure why. As far as I had known, he hadn't been seeing anyone else on the side. Maybe my presence in her life helped keep the pressure off him to get more serious with her. I didn't know, and it didn't matter anymore. Morelli had a new girlfriend these days, some tall blonde with a dancer's body. Had Stephanie moved on too? Had she found a man who respected her and was able to be in a relationship with her without fear of commitment? It made my stomach hurt to think about it.

I pulled into my spot in the parking garage but didn't get out of the car right away. I pulled out my phone and opened a file that I had hidden inside another file. It was a picture of Stephanie. I had taken it in Hawaii when we had been pretending to be a married couple at a retreat in order to catch an FTA I hadn't been able to find for months. I couldn't have cared less about catching him because I was having far too much fun with Stephanie. We had been trying to catch a glimpse of the man and his wife as they went on a hike up a volcano. Stephanie had been posing in front of a railing overlooking the ocean and I had taken her picture. She had been so beautiful in that moment that I had almost suggested we get married for real. I hadn't looked at the picture in months, mostly because it made me miss her too much. It felt like I was grieving her, even though I knew I could type her name into my computer and it would spit out her address within a minute, then I could drive over there to beg her forgiveness.

But I wouldn't do it. She had accused me of not respecting her wishes in the past, so I was going to be damned sure to respect the last thing she had ever asked of me.