Many thanks to my beta, ShipperGirl. I couldn't do it without you!

Chapter Two

Sara stood and stretched her arms high above her head, her back giving a satisfying pop in response. Gingerly stepping her way across the apartment towards her front door, she leaned in to look though the peephole.

'Nick? What's he doing here?' she thought as she turned the deadbolt and undid the chain to let her coworker into her apartment.

Nick greeted her with a bright smile. "Hi Sara!"

"What are you doing here?"

His smile faltered slightly. "Nice to see you too," he said, a little less brightly.

"Sorry, Nick," said Sara, flashing him a gap-toothed smile. "I'm just not used to people popping by my apartment on my day off. At ten in the morning no less. Shouldn't you be sleeping? You have to work tonight."

"Yeah, I'm going home soon. I just wanted to stop by and see if you have the file from the cold case you were looking over last week. I got a hit on some DNA from my case that matches that one, and I want to look it over."

"Oh, sure," said Sara, stepping back to let Nick into the apartment. "I'll go grab it."

Nick stood in the doorway and surveyed the apartment while Sara searched in the next room for the file. 'What was with all the boxes?' he thought.

Sara hopped over a few piles and handed Nick the file. "Here you are."

"Sara, is there something you want to tell me?"

She looked at Nick, completely puzzled. "What do you mean?"

He gestured to the piles of boxes littering her apartment. "Are you moving out?"

"No! I'm just sorting through a bunch of old boxes and giving a bunch of stuff to charity and tossing out a bunch of other stuff that I don't need anymore." Nick still looked doubtful. Sara put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a reassuring smile. "Nicky, don't worry. I promise I'm not just going to up and move away without telling you."

"Ok Sara, as long as you promise," he said as he made his way out of the apartment. "I'll see you later."

"Later, Nick," she said, shutting and locking the door behind him. Nick was such a nice guy. He sort of reminded her of her friend Jeff from college, except for obvious differences in sexual orientation. She briefly pictured Nick dancing around the lab waiving a piece of paper in front of her face and singing, "Sara's dating the boss…Sara's dating the boss…" Shaking her head she moved toward another box. Time to get back to work.

This box held mementos from her childhood. Old school papers, all with big red letter A's on the top, and some proposals she had written as a child trying to convince her parents to expand the B&B that they ran into a chain. Sara smiled at the thought. She was such an odd child. Raised by former hippies, with a future hippy as an older brother, she was the star student, the inquisitive scientist, and the thinker.

Reaching deeper into the box she pulled out an old, tattered photo album. When she was a kid she'd found it in the attic at her parent's house. She wasn't sure if her Mom would be mad if she knew that Sara had it, so she always kept it hidden.

Flipping open the cover she was greeted by faded pictures of the past. All of the pictures in this album were from before she was born. There were pictures of her parents surrounded by clumps of friends, all lounging in a park or on someone's lawn. A picture of her Mom in a tie-dyed sundress and rose-colored glasses flashing a peace sign. The last few pages even had her big brother dressed in tiny hippy clothes when he was little. About half way though the book the pictures ended, when her brother was around nine.

That was when her parents had ceased to be hippies. Life changed then. Sara really never experienced the change, as it happened before she was born. Her brother remembered the hippy lifestyle. Despite the best efforts of her parents, he was always a free spirit, a bit of a hippy.

As she ran her fingers over the pictures she wondered if she would have been a very different person if she'd lived with her parents and all of their friends in the time of free love. But the family she grew up with was much different…

"Hey Mooooom," Sara sang, skipping through the house looking for her mother. In one hand she held a small pile of her favorite books, in the other, she held a plastic baggie.

"What do you need now, Sara?" her mother asked, sighing. Sometimes the exuberant four-year old was such a drain. She and her husband had taught Sara to read at the age of three simply for self-preservation. That way they didn't have to spend the entire day being followed around, listening to her begging in her squeaky voice for them to read her just one more story.

Sara held up a baggie and handed it to her mother. "Found a bag of dirt under Bill's bed," she said, referring to her brother, ten years her senior. "He is so weird," she added in an exaggerated dramatic voice, as small children are prone to do.

Grabbing the bag from her daughter's hand, the color drained from her face, replaced by fiery anger. "Bill! Get down here now!!!" she screamed. Sara jumped, startled by her mother's sudden anger.

"What did I do?" she asked tentatively, clutching her books to her chest.

"Go to your room," was the only reply.

With tear filled eyes Sara crouched at the top of the stairs, listening to her mother berate her brother, who sat slumped on the couch.

"Mom, its just a little pot," he whined. "What's the big deal?"

"The big deal? The big deal? I'll tell you what the big deal is. You know how your father and I feel about drugs. That is not a road that I am about to let my only son go down. I will not let you turn yourself into a common criminal."

"You're such a hypocrite, its not like you've never done any drugs. I do have memories before the age of ten you know," he said, glaring at his mother, matching her anger with his own.

"And you know what came of it. There is no more discussion on this topic. You are grounded for a year, go to your room," she said with a dismissive wave, to exhausted to argue any more.

Stomping up the stairs Bill shoved past Sara on the way to his room. "This is all your fault you know."

Eight years later…

Sara flew in the front door, dropping her books on the kitchen table. "Bill, what are you doing here?" she asked, walking over to give her older brother a hug.

"What, I can't come to see my baby sister on her twelfth birthday?"

Sara grinned. "Whatever. You're just here because Nancy next door is home from college for the weekend."

Her brother shrugged. "Can I help it if I have an irresistible urge to corrupt the college bound?" He had never been the four-year-college type. After high school he had gone to a trade school and became a chef. He worked for a catering company that he hoped to own one day.

"Well, you get to be the first one in my experiment," Sara said, pulling a couple plastic trays and bottles of unknown liquid out of her backpack.

Bill gaped at Sara with an expression of mock-fear. "Promise not to kill me?" he asked, gulping.

"Promise," said Sara. "Now give me your hand." Taking his hand she pricked his finger with a sterile needle and collected a few drops of blood in each little notch in one of the plastic trays.

"Are you going to tell me what this experiment is?" he asked as he watched Sara drip drops of liquid from each of her mysterious bottles onto his blood drops.

"Nope, not till I get Mom and Dad, too," she said, closing her kit and hauling her bag and books upstairs.

Later that night, after the diner dishes were done, Sara sat in her room with four plastic trays laid out in front of her. Each was labeled with a name: Mom, Dad, Bill, and Sara. 'This can't be right,' she thought to herself. 'There has to be something wrong. I must have done it wrong.' Wiping her eyes she grabbed a needle and was about to prick her finger for the fourth time when Bill stuck his head in her door.

Seeing the tears in her eyes, he stepped in quickly, shutting the door behind him. "Sara, baby, what's wrong?"

Shrugging his hand off her shoulder she moved to sit up on the bed. "Nothing."

Sitting beside her, Bill wouldn't back down. "That's a load of bull. I know when something is wrong with my baby sister. Call it brotherly instinct."

"What if I told you that I knew you weren't my brother?" she said softly, not looking up from her lap. Beside her, her brother stiffened.

"What do you mean?"

Sara gestured to the trays on the floor. "My experiment has to do with blood types. The chemicals that I was putting on each of the samples that I got from you, Mom, Dad, and myself turn different colors depending on what type of blood they have, either A, B, O or AB. Mom came up A, Dad came up O, you came up O, and I came up AB."

"So? We are all different, big deal."

Looking up at Bill with a tear-streaked face, Sara spoke with surprising calm. "It is physically impossible for people with the blood types A and O to produce a child with AB blood. My biological parents have to be A, B or AB. There is no way that Dad is my father."

Bill sighed and put his arm around Sara's shoulder. "I guess you would have figured it out someday. But that's not going to make this any easier." Sitting patiently by his side, Sara waited for her brother to tell her what he had to say.

"I'm actually your half brother. We have the same Mom, but different biological fathers. Dad is your Dad, he is the one that raised you…but he isn't your biological father.

When I was little, Mom and Dad and I lived in a house with a bunch of their friends. They were hippies really, free love all around. I was with Grandma and Grandpa for the weekend, so I wasn't there when it happened, but this is what I know. There was a big knockdown drag-out party at the house. There were a lot of drugs floating around, and at some point Dad lost track of Mom. The next morning they found her in the field out back of the house, and she had been raped and beaten. She was in the hospital for a couple weeks, I wasn't aloud to visit her because the doctors thought it would be too damaging for me to see her like that.

To make a long story short, nine months later…you were born. We weren't positive if Dad was your father or if the rapist was. As you got older…it just became more obvious that Dad wasn't your father. We are all blond haired and blue eyed, you have brown hair and eyes. All three of us are a bit on the short side, and here you are growing like a weed. And I think you came out of the womb with more brains than any of the three of us."

"Do they know who it was? The guy?"

Bill nodded. "He was a serial rapist. He had been cycling around the area for years. When you were about a year old they caught him in the act of raping another woman. He confessed to all sorts of crimes, Mom's rape being one of them."

Sara shut the photo album and placed it gingerly back in the bottom of the box. She couldn't dispose of that. Something in her needed to hold on to it.

It was the same urge that kept her working so hard to put criminals behind bars. Especially in rape cases. In every case she saw her mother, once a happy and carefree young woman, turned by a crime into something bitter and scared.

Sara took the brunt of it growing up. Just merely by existing she was a daily reminder to her mother of what she had gone through. She couldn't undo that, but she could do everything in her power to stop the same horror from taking over another life, another family.

Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand she reached and pulled a different box to her side. She needed some happier memories to look through. Some things were just too painful to revisit.