A/N: discmaimer in first chapter.
Jen - Thank you for your reviews! It is highly appreciated! I might not take
the sory inthe direction you want, but I hope you like it anyway!

GSBS4L - Also great thanks to you! Good to know someone like my story.

Leave - I have tried to axplain her reactions in this chapter. Hope you enjoy it!

CHAPTER 3: Decisions.

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T. Washington

"You don't get it, do you?" Yelina didn't wait for him to invite her in but swiftly passed him into his living room. She was fuming.

"Get what?"

"GET WHAT!" her voice rose to an even higher level as she repeated his question. "How can you even ask that? You expect me to accept that you held back information from me?"

"I couldn't tell you!" Not sure whether he was trying to convince her or himself, he repeated himself, "I simply couldn't do it." His voice also elevated and less controlled than what he had hoped for.

"Couldn't or wouldn't?"

He had no definite answer for that, yet that did not stop him from saying "couldn't."

It was three eternally long days ago he had entered her house asking her to let Ray Jr. test as a donor for Madison's bone marrow transplant. He had known that this would change the fragile balance between his two promises, but Madison's health was first priority and her promise weighed the most on the scale at the moment. Violating his other promise was painfully necessary. He was constantly switching between blaming himself, Raymond and God for the situation he was in, but he also managed to focus on Madison long enough to know that all of the personas in that particular triangle were less important than the ill 6 year old girl in the hospital bed. When you are up against the greedy and terrifyingly strong threat that leukaemia is, everything else becomes trivial. It doesn't feel minor though, when an enraged woman is screaming at you, telling you that you are the scum of the earth.

"Hijo de puta," the Spanish curse came out low in volume but intensely all the same. He did not know if she meant him or his brother, and frankly he did not care. She probably meant both, and technically, if one of them were the son of a bitch, both of them would be, being brothers and all.

"I told you not to protect me!"

"And I told you that it is not possible," he gazed at her, "you are my responsibility. I don't want anything to hurt you! Not anything or anyone."

"And yet you are the one that hurts me!"

It was a punch in his stomach. Breathing was hard. He didn't answer.

"Is holding back information your way of protecting me from getting hurt?" She practically spat at him before her body suddenly lost the enraged energy and she sank onto his couch with a silent thud. She covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders were shaking. Soundlessly crying she was scaring him more than if she had ran after him with a sharp blade. Anger and fury he could take from her, but he had never seen her falling apart before; not even when Raymond died. She was strong, independent, never willing to let anyone help her, and she was not a person to burst into tears.

At Raymond's funeral, she had stood by the casket tall, with her head held high. She had met everyone's eyes, and did not look away for any curious looks. Accusations had been made about her husband, and she had met them with a proud support for the man she married and the man she buried. He was a good man, a good cop, and he died in the line of duty. No one and no accusations were going to stain his reputation. She mourned a good man, a good husband and a good friend.

"Yes, he had been away for weeks and weeks at the time," she once told him," But that was just to protect us. Protect his family. He had started using drugs for the job. He had to. He had to be credible for those he infiltrated. Why can't people see that? Why can't they see what he sacrificed? He started because of the job, and then he got addicted. He tried to fight it. He did! And he stayed away. Away from those he loved to protect them from it. He sacrificed everything, for his job! What right do they have judging him? What right?"

Horatio wanted to hug her then and save her from those feelings. There was nothing he could come up with that would ease her pain, and he wasn't ready to add even more to it. He wanted to box away the consequences of Raymond's actions, but he needed to know for himself. He needed to know so that he could take care of the family his brother had left behind.

"I didn't mean to hurt you." He couldn't meet her eyes.

"But you did, on so many levels." Her voice was low now. " First of all: you letting me believe Madison was your daughter. Your daughter, Horatio! Don't you think I was hurt by believing that you had kept that a secret from me? You are my family. I thought we shared what was really important in our lives, and suddenly you had me believe I was left out on something that important. It hurts! And though it's not, it true doesn't matter! It doesn't make it less painful. Because it hurt even more that you could keep something so important that my husband had a child a secret from me."

"I didn't….. I didn't know what to say."

"How about the truth?"

"I thought the truth would hurt you even more."

"The truth may be cruel, but a lie is always a hundreds times worse Horatio. Did you honestly believe you could keep this from me forever? Don't you realize, that the pain only grow as the time goes by, and I have even more to process now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Since Raymond died, you have been there for me, I can trust you. I admit things have been weird between us; you're a handsome man, Horatio. I thought maybe, well, I even hoped at one time that there might be more between us. I think you did too."

He only granted her silence.

"Then a daughter appeared? I don't care if that was true or not, you let me believe it was true, so for all I knew, that was reality. I felt betrayed. I did! I didn't know what else you might have withheld. And now… I get actually get confirmation on that, you did hide more; a whole lot more!"

"I am so sorry!"

"Sorry doesn't cut it." She wiped her eyes raising her voice again. "Who died and made you God? Who gave you the right to choose how much information I should have about my marriage? MY MARRIAGE! You hear that? It was my marriage to fight for. It was my marriage to lose. It was my marriage to fail! Not yours! Not fucking yours!"

He tried to reach out a hand to her, but she brushed it away.

"I don't just mourn the loss of Raymond's life; I mourn the loss of the life I thought I was going to have with him and the life I had with him! I had plans Horatio! Those plans included your brother; some of the plans revolved around him! And they were based on the life we had together! I lost that! And I am dealing with that loss. And now you are telling me that I might not have known that man as well as I thought. It makes me question not just who he was, but also the life we had together. I am not sure who I lost anymore, and I can't just ask him, now can I? I have to figure out for myself what part of my life that was real and what was a lie, and to do that I need to know the truth. I though I was about to close that part of my life and go on, but now, thanks to not knowing the truth before, I have to start all over again. I have to figure out who I lost and what I lost. Who I am supposed to miss now? I could have been over it by now, but you robbed me of that opportunity!"

"I didn't realize..."

"No you didn't!" She interrupted him, "you just went on deciding on your own what was best for me, for my son! Even for Madison! It was not your decision to make! You don't get to decide how I shall deal with my life! My marriage! Yes, you were his brother, but I was his wife! His wife, Horatio! Don't you ever forget that! I have clearly been left out of the marriage long enough! Not any more and certainly not by someone who was not even a part it!"

TBC