Okay, so I just got back from statistics tutoring and feel even dumber than I did when I went in. Oh well. Statistics just isn't my thing I guess. I've come to accept this and am okay with it really. I hope that you enjoy this chapter, and let me know what you thought. Oh, and I ran out of song lyrics for the chapter titles, oops, so I'm just going to start repeating them....call it a lack of creativity. And thanks so much for all the get well wishes, you guys rock! Oh and one little note:

HatetoSayIToldYouSo: I think it would have been very intriguing to see the original review. Boat loads you say? Excellent. And it's totally okay. I don't mind you stalking me. I think having a stalker is the best way to know that you've arrived.

Disclaimer: The characters are not mine. : ( This saddens me so.

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Sandy moved instinctively in front of Kirsten, pushing Seth and Ryan behind him as well.

"Dawn, calm down," Sandy said slowly.

"They killed him! They killed him!" Dawn said pushing closer to Kirsten and Ryan.

"No, they didn't," Sandy said calmly. Kirsten kept her mouth shut. Sandy was better at dealing with these kinds of things. He could calm down irate people; Kirsten always just seemed to make them more irate. "Dave was killed by the police."

"It's their fault that it happened!" Dawn shrieked. "That ungrateful brat, and that bitch who couldn't keep her nose out of our business! We were a family again! And she ruined it!" Dawn dove for Kirsten and Sandy reached out and grabbed her before she could hurt his wife. Kirsten twisted and threw out her arm to block Ryan and Seth who were standing next to her bed. This action caused her great amounts of pain, and once she was sure that Sandy had a strong grip on Dawn, she allowed herself to sink back down to the bed and began to try to breathe through the pain. Though she tried to stop them, tears began to roll down her face from the sharp pains that coursed through her torso.

"Mom?" Seth asked alarmed at seeing his mother cry. His mother rarely cried. She was just not a crying sort of person. She had cried at the occasional movie, and had cried quite a lot when Ryan left, but she was not someone he would typically classify as a crier. "Are you okay?" Kirsten couldn't speak through her clenched teeth, but managed to nod. Dawn was still shrieking, and a nurse had come in to see what the noise was all about. Sandy had asked her to get security and two guards had come in a second later and took the screaming and flailing Dawn from Sandy. Sandy was about to follow them into the hall to explain the situation, but he heard Seth's panicked voice call him back. "Dad!" Sandy spun around and saw Kirsten clutching at her stomach and tears streaming down her face. He hurried back over to her, forgetting about Dawn for the moment.

"Kirsten? Honey? Are you okay? What's the matter? Do you need something for the pain?" She managed again to nod, and the nurse was summoned back in, as Sandy wiped the tears from Kirsten's face and felt tears of his begin to fall.

He hated to see her like this. He hated that he couldn't stop it.

"She turned around to protect us," Ryan said softly.

"She pulled out some of her stitches," the nurse said as she saw a stain of red begin to form on Kirsten's hospital gown where the bandage from the surgery was.

"Why don't you guys take the car and go get the rest of Ryan's things?" Sandy said spinning around and handing the keys to Seth. He needed to get them out of there. He had to deal with Dawn, and didn't want Ryan especially to be there. If he could, he would have found some way to have Kirsten gone too. Seth nodded absentmindedly, and Ryan looked as if he was going to argue, but thought better of it and followed Seth out of the door.

Sandy then went to take care of Kirsten. She came first. He would make sure that she was okay, and then go to deal with Dawn. The nurse had called the doctor back in to put the stitches back in, and Sandy held her hand as this was done, and then kissed her forehead.

"Go ahead," Kirsten said sleepily as the sleeping pills began to set in. "I'm fine now. Just pulled out a few stitches, it's all fixed now. Go deal with Dawn."

"Are you sure that you're okay?" Sandy asked.

"Yes," Kirsten reached up and touched his face.

"You scared us," Sandy told her.

"I know, I keep doing that, I'm sorry." He had to grin and he leaned down again to kiss her, and she felt some of his tears hit the top of her head. "Tomorrow, we can go home tomorrow and everything will be okay." Sandy nodded and kissed her one more time before leaving to go deal with Dawn and the trail of chaos she left in her wake.

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Seth pulled up in front of Ryan's old house and noticed right away that Ryan's breathing began to speed up.

"Hey dude, we don't have to do this. I can go get Summer and she and I can do this," Seth offered.

"No," Ryan broke in. "I need to do this. This is something that I have to do." He opened the car door and stepped out onto the broken sidewalk. He made his way to the front door, with Seth hurrying along behind him. Ryan pulled out a key and opened the door and stepped inside. Seth looked around. The table was knocked over, and there was broken glass, and then his heart stopped.

Blood on the floor. His mother's blood. Ryan's blood.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, Ryan had disappeared. Seth figured that he had gone back to finish packing, but he heard the toilet flush and Ryan appeared in the doorway a second later looking a little pale. Seth sighed a little, forced a smile on his face and then said to Ryan,

"So, let's go load up the car?" Ryan just nodded and led the way back to his bedroom. It was tiny. Seth could barely contain his look of disdain as he glanced around.

"Can you hand me those boxes in the closet?" Ryan asked and Seth obligingly opened the closet and handed the boxes and they began to pack up in silence.

"Dude, what is this?" Seth held up a stuffed dinosaur. It was green, with blue spots, and to Seth looked quite well loved.

"That's nothing," Ryan said reaching for it quickly.

"What's its name?" Seth asked teasingly.

"It doesn't have a name," Ryan said angrily swiping at it again.

"Oh wait," Seth said hopping around a bit to avoid Ryan. He read the little tag on the stuffed animal. "Mr. Stompers? You seriously named a dinosaur Mr. Stompers?"

"This coming from the person who at sixteen still talks to a plastic horse named Captain Oats," Ryan said scathingly.

"Hey, Captain Oats is a perfectly legitimate name, but Mr. Stompers? Dude."

"Well, that's what dinosaurs do," Ryan argued placing his hands on his hips. "They stomp around." Seth couldn't control his laughter, and doubled over, tears streaming from his eyes. He lost his grip on the dinosaur, and Ryan snatched it up and smacked Seth with it. "Don't make fun of Mr. Stompers." Seth's laughter was contagious, and Ryan found himself laughing along with Seth.

"First the Snoopy thing, and then Mr. Stompers," Seth roared. Ryan's laughter halted and he pointed a finger at Seth.

"No one finds out about this," he warned. "Or Summer finds out how you like to talk to yourself in the mirror to encourage your chest hairs to grow." Seth's mouth dropped open and he gaped at Ryan.

"How did....but I....hey...I....I won't tell," he finally agreed. Ryan wasn't paying attention to him anymore, he was staring a framed photograph that was on his dresser. He had another picture up there too. The framed Chrismakkah photo, but his mother had throw such a fit when she saw it, that he had slipped it under his pillow where he would study it before he went to sleep.

But this photograph, it had stayed. It was their first family portrait. He was about a year old, and Trey was about six, and it was before his father had gone to prison, it was before they had moved from Fresno.

It was when they were happy.

He wanted to tell the smiling happy family in the photo that it wouldn't last. It couldn't. The father would be taken off to jail, and the mother would start drinking, and the oldest son would follow the same path as their father, and the baby. That baby, well, he would find another family, a family that loved him and sheltered and protected him. And a family that he loved back.

That was the main source of Ryan's guilt. It wasn't just that his father was dead, it was that Ryan had in an essence chosen the Cohens when Kirsten had come to Chino. Sure, his father was going to hurt her, and anyone put in Ryan's place would have tried to help her, but Ryan could have been more forceful with her in the first place and made her leave. He had been trying to spare her feelings, he had been trying to let her talk him into leaving. Because he had wanted to ditch his own family. And that was awful. He wanted to ditch his family for another family. After all, the Cohens weren't really his blood. They were just strangers that by all intents and purposes, he was never supposed to know. But he loved them fiercely. For all the obvious reasons, and for the ones that weren't so obvious. He loved Kirsten because she couldn't cook, and she wasn't as perfect as everyone thought, but she was kind and good, the best person that he had ever met. He loved Sandy because of his passions, his family being his biggest passion, and he loved that Sandy still believed that the world was a good place. Sandy still believed that people were good at heart. And he loved that Sandy passed that to Seth. He loved that Seth was goofy, and a little bit of a nerd, but meant well, and was loyal and protective of those that he loved, and Ryan couldn't understand how he had been the first person to see that.

He loved that he was one of them. That he was, in everything but name, a Cohen. But it caused guilt to lay upon him thick and heavy. What about his mother? What about his father? And Trey? What about that family in the picture that had been happy once? Didn't he love them too? He heard Sandy's voice in his head.

"You can have both," Sandy had said once as he and Ryan sat on the patio overlooking the ocean and talking about their respective pasts. "You can love your family, and you can love us too. There's no rule that says that you can't, or that you have to love one more than the other. Loving us isn't like negating the love that you had for your mom and dad and Trey."

"You okay?" Seth asked. Ryan nodded and thought for a moment before taking the picture out of the frame, and slipping it into the pocket of his bookbag. He left the empty frame on the dresser.

"Let's start taking these things to the car," Ryan said grabbing a box that Seth had finished packing and heading towards the front door. Seth grabbed another box and took that out too.

"Which car do you want to drive?" Seth asked. "Mom's car, or Dad's car?" And Ryan looked at the two shiny cars and then back at the dilapidated house that he had just come out. He didn't have to choose, he reminded himself. He could have both. He could have this shiny new life, and still have the good memories of this house. Maybe he would let the bad ones go, he decided. Yeah, he would definitely let the bad ones go. But maybe he would start sharing some of the good ones with the Cohens. Maybe he would start remembering the good ones a little more often. After all, his life hadn't been all bad.

"I'll take the Range Rover," Ryan answered giving Seth a smile. "It's more badass. And besides," he added with a hint of teasing in his voice. "Everyone knows a dinosaur is way more badass than a horse."

"Not so," Seth argued as they went back in to get the rest of Ryan's things.

"Oh please," Ryan said. "Mr. Stompers could totally take out Captain Oats." He laughed to himself as Seth tried to argue the merits of the horse, and argued that the horse could outrun a dinosaur.

"Definitely could outrun the dinosaur," Seth said. "And, let's just look at which species is still around, shall we?" Ryan just ignored him as he packed up the rest of his stuff. He then closed the door to the house and locked it behind him as he headed towards Kirsten's car. As he started the engine, he took one more at the house and the street and the life that he used to have, stored the mental picture in his head, and drove back to Newport.

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Dawn was calmed down now, sitting on a chair in the police station that was down the street. Sandy had explained the situation to the police, and they agreed that the best thing for right now was to get a restraining order against Dawn so that she couldn't go near Kirsten, and then send her to a rehab center. Sandy had pulled some strings and got her into a rehab center with a wonderful reputation and then went back to the hospital.

Kirsten was still sleeping, and for this he was grateful. He wondered if they could ever return to normal. His phone rang and he looked down and saw Seth's name.

"Seth?"

"Hey Dad, we're on our way home. Ryan's driving the Range Rover."

"How did he do?"

"He was fine," Seth assured him. "Everything was fine. How's Mom?"

"She's asleep," Sandy said looking over at his wife's sleeping form.

"Good," Seth said. "I think we're just going to stay home today. We'll see you guys when you bring Mom home tomorrow. She is still coming home tomorrow right?"

"Yes."

"Fantastic. We'll talk to you later," Seth hung up and Sandy closed the phone only to have it ring a second later. It was Caleb.

"Hello?"

"Sanford."

"Hi Caleb."

"How is Kiki?"

"She's fine, we had a little problem with Ryan's mother Dawn and she pulled out her stitches from surgery, but they fixed it and she's fine now. She's sleeping."

"What? Where is this Dawn now?" Caleb asked. Sandy turned from Kirsten.

"Caleb, it's fine. We took care of it. There's a restraining order against her, and she's going into rehab. I did everything legally. You don't need to take care of Dawn like you did Dave," Sandy sighed.

"Fine. Tell my daughter that I will be around later to visit her," Caleb answered. Sandy heard a click and then turned back around and was surprised to see Kirsten's eyes open.

"What did my father do?" She asked in a hushed tone. "You said he didn't need to take care of Dawn like he did to Dave. He killed him, didn't he Sandy? My father killed Dave."

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Oh my! I hope that you enjoyed this chapter, and let me know what you thought of it. Please review and I'll try to get up the next chapter as quickly as I can! Thanks!