"Ray? How did you… What… You were arrested? With Lizzy?"

"The other day, yes. We were arrested together when we tried to visit you." Red shook his head, searching Sam's face with the most mournful eyes Liz had ever seen. "You should've told her, Sam. You should've told her you were sick."

"Jesus, Ray, I don't need the third degree from you, too." Sam looked back to Liz. "How would you know to go to him for help? What am I missing here?"

"I didn't go to him. He came to me."

Red stepped into the room fully, and shut the door. "At the end of the summer," he said, "I turned myself in to the FBI."

"You turned yourself in?"

"I did."

"Have you lost your damn mind? What possessed you to do that?"

"I had gotten wind that there was something suspicious going on with Tom Keen and Lizzy needed to know about it before it was too late—that was more important than anything else." Red took a slow breath and let it out even slower. "She was in danger, Sam. I had to improvise, and turning myself in seemed like the most efficient way of putting myself in the position to protect her directly. I thought I would help her out with her situation and she could help me with mine in exchange for some positive exposure at work, and afterwards let the chips fall where they may." Red glanced at Liz and when their eyes locked, she felt it thrum in her veins. "Things didn't quite go according to plan."

"What do you mean?"

Red tore his gaze away from Liz. "I planned to… take care of Tom for Lizzy, but that plan failed almost immediately, and by the time we uncovered hard proof of his duplicity, we had… backed ourselves into a corner, let's call it. After Lizzy made the command decision to put an end to his machinations once and for all, we had little choice but to run."

"But then you found out I was sick and decided to come back, is that it?"

"No. And please don't blame yourself for us getting caught, either. That's not on you," Liz said. "We found out you were sick when we couldn't get in touch with you at home. I wanted to visit you before I knew you were sick, because there's something I needed to tell you. Something that… something I found out after I killed Tom, after Red helped me disappear."

"Something good or something bad?" Sam asked, bracing himself for the worst.

"Under normal circumstances? Something good. With the way our lives have gone since we talked last? Something complicated, at best." Liz inhaled deeply, meeting Red's eye for a second before letting the breath out through her lips. "Daddy, I'm pregnant."

Sam frowned, confusion etched into every line of his face. "I don't understand. I thought you couldn't—"

"So did I! Believe me, it was a huge shock. Almost more than Tom was."

"My god. I am so sorry, butterball. Parenthood is scary enough even without… all of this. Going it alone is hard work, I can't sugar-coat that, but it has to be even more daunting considering what happened with Tom."

"Daddy, I don't think you get it," Liz said, shaking her head. "The problem isn't that the baby is Tom's. It's not Tom's. Tom doesn't have anything to do with this."

"Who, then? I don't… What happened these last few months?"

"A lot happened. Ever since I started working for the FBI, my life has been one land mine after another. My marriage falling apart, cases going spectacularly wrong, everything I planned about my life blowing up in my face—you name it, it happened. I—I even met my soulmate." Sam inhaled sharply; Liz took his hand and pressed it to her belly. "This is his baby."

"Wow. I feel like I should congratulate you, but with the rest of this going on, too, I… Well, it must have been pretty overwhelming, all of it happening back to back like that. First Tom, and Red swooping into your life like he does, and then meeting your soulmate on top of everything…" He trailed off, and his eyes narrowed. "Wait."

His gaze fell to her forearm, which she tried to hide reflexively before he reached an unsteady hand out to stop her. Once his eyes landed on the familiar words, he slumped back into his pillows and shook his head with an incredulous huff.

Agent Keen, what a pleasure.

Sam knew the wording of Liz's tattoo almost as well as she did. She remembered how good he'd been with her after her eighteenth birthday. He hadn't pried about what her tattoo said, but soon after it appeared, she could tell he had noticed she wasn't nearly as excited about it as she had been in anticipation. His reassurances had gone a long way to help her come to terms with the implications of it referring to her by a different surname—and his understanding of the history only served to inform his reaction now.

Liz had only been a Keen for two years. She'd only been an agent a few months. For someone to refer to her with such a strange mix of formality and familiarity after such a short time boasting the title, well… Knowing what Sam now knew, it would only make sense for it to be one person.

Red stood at the window, anxiously fiddling with his fedora on the sill. He closed his eyes, soaking up the late afternoon sun, and ignored the sensation of Sam's eyes boring a hole into his back. He might have even looked peaceful if Liz couldn't feel his guilt surging through her veins as if it were her own. (Maybe it was, just a little.)

"Hey. Reddington. You better look at me, you jackass," Sam said with as much force as he could muster with the limited air in his lungs. "You have anything to say for yourself?"

"Honestly, I'm surprised you didn't recognize the handwriting sooner," Red said, but his quip fell flat, nearly as much from his own strained tone of voice as from Sam's disapproval.

"Well, shit, Ray."

"What do you want me to say?" Red said, throwing up his hands in frustration. "It's not like either of us had a choice in all this. I sure as hell didn't expect to hear the words on my chest come out of her mouth the day I turned myself in. Who the hell would? After all this time?

"You know, I had started to convince myself that maybe I missed my soulmate, that I just never noticed who said those words to me. Or that I was a mutation, broken somehow, and I didn't really have a soulmate. Can you really have a soulmate if your soul is as damaged as mine? But then Lizzy sat down in front of me that first day and took my breath away."

"That's great. It's great. None of it explains why the two of you couldn't be goddamn adults about it. You've known each other for what? Three months? The whole fucking world's turned upside down. What the fuck were you thinking?"

Liz and Red exchanged a look. He pulled another chair over to Sam's bedside and sat, resting a cautious hand on Liz's back, offering her as much comfort as he dared with Sam's shrewd eyes watching their every move.

"You know what this is like, Daddy," Liz said. "You used to tell me about your soulmate when I was young—how the two of you burned bright and fast, and even though you never would've worked in the long run, you're a better man for having known her. You sharing that always made me feel better about falling for Tom before I met my soulmate. You weren't less than because you didn't end up with yours, so I wouldn't be either. Yeah, it was unfortunate it happened in that order, but it wouldn't matter—that's what I believed for a long time.

"But that day, Daddy… I could tell, even that first day, that it would matter. That I would never be the same as I was before I met Red. That I would never be able to look at my husband the same way again. Even if Tom hadn't been an evil son of a bitch, I wouldn't have been able to stay with him forever. All the things I thought I felt for Tom, all the time we spent together—it wouldn't be enough to make up for the fact that he wasn't Red. It's actually been a relief that Tom turned out to be a fraud, because that meant I was off the hook. I don't know what kind of person that makes me."

"Butterball, it doesn't make you any particular kind of person. And I don't mean you should've stayed away from Red forever, just… I don't know. I'm worried about you. The world isn't gonna be kind to you being with someone like him. It's sure not gonna be kind to you having a baby with him."

"I know that. You think I don't know that?" she said. "You think we just jumped into this completely blind? Hell, I tried to kill him because I couldn't handle what it meant for him to be my soulmate."

Sam let out a nervous laugh. "What? You tried to kill him?"

"More than once," Red clarified, with an incongruously warm smile on his face. He looked almost… proud. Sam seemed taken aback at his entire demeanor.

"You're a helluva lot more forgiving than most people would be in that situation."

"Forgiving? I damn near proposed—despite the fact that we were complete strangers and she was still married at the time." Red sighed and Liz couldn't resist taking his hand and entwining their fingers.

"I thought I knew what it was like to need someone. I thought I knew what it was like to worry, to pine, to love. And maybe I did. But this… this is… so much more than anything I've ever felt before. I love your daughter, Sam. With everything that's left of my lonely, tattered soul. I hope… I hope that'll be enough."

Liz lifted Red's hand and pressed her lips to the back of it; he cleared his throat and blinked away the tears that had welled up in his eyes.