"My daughter's missing." Gregory held the warrant lazily as he read through the contents. His chest still shook slightly with hysterical amusement. "Her ship went down off the coast. AJ Deschanel's searching for her right now. She might be dead. My wife-" He paused and corrected himself. "My ex-wife is lying there, in surgery, fighting for her life and you want to arrest me because my grandson is actually my son."

"However ridiculous this is. The warrant is in order." He handed it back to Ricardo. "But you can't arrest me now."

Ricardo sighed and felt the weight of his badge on his chest. "I have too."

Gregory shrugged and returned to his chair. "I'm not arguing that." His smile was that of a dying man. "Your warrant is dated the twenty-eight of July."

Looking down at his watch, Ricardo nodded. "That's today."

"It's half past five." Gregory pulled his knee up into his hands. "The courthouse doesn't open until eight. Judge Waterhouse jumped the gun a bit on that one."

"He can't be serious." Officer Jefferies insisted as he watched Ricardo put away the handcuffs.

"Will Olivia be out of surgery by then?" The detective wondered softly.

Gregory had won, but he cemented his position. "I'm not a serial offender. If I were a danger to the community, I would have hurt others by now. I would have bastards all over Sunset Beach." The hypothetical situation was nearly as ludicrous as the current one. "Until eight am I'm not resisting arrest by refusing to come with you."

Ricardo sat down in the chair across from him. "Are you saying you intend to after the courthouse opens?"

"I intend to sit here and watch that door until Olivia gets out of surgery. Everything I might do in accordance with that is still open to interpretation." Gregory's chest shuddered in a hidden sob of pain.

Turning to Officer Jefferies, Ricardo dismissed him with a wave. "I'll take responsibility for bringing Mr. Richards in. You can go back to the station."

Officer Jefferies nodded to his superior and kept his displeasure to himself as he left the waiting room. Ricardo watched the reflection of the sunrise in the ocean. He expected little from the conversation but Gregory surprised him.

"Do you remember high school biology?"

Ricardo turned in his chair and realized there was coffee on the table in the corner of the room. Getting up and collecting a cup from the large metal dispenser, he shook one of the little plastic cups of creamer before dumping it into his coffee. "Vaguely." He replied as he sat down next to Gregory.

Pulling over the table full of magazines, Gregory searched his pockets for a piece of paper. "I want to show you something."

Ricardo ripped a sheet from his notepad. "Here. Take this."

"Thanks." Gregory drew a square and divided it into fourths. "Olivia and I have the same blood type. O positive. Two people with O type blood can only have children with O type blood, so Sean and Caitlin are both type O." He wrote Caitlin's name across the top of the chart.

"As AJ pointed out earlier. Deschanel's are type AB, including Cole." Gregory added Cole's name on the side of his chart and started filling in letters. "If Cole and Caitlin had a baby, it would have to have blood type A or B. Cole can't have a baby with any other blood type."

Ricardo glanced down at Gregory's chart and nodded. "Okay, so Trey isn't Cole's son. Don't take this the wrong way but-"

"Anyone with type O blood could Trey's father." Gregory sighed heavily. "But Tyus must have run a DNA test, otherwise Judge Waterhouse never would have given you a warrant."

Ricardo stirred his coffee idly. "He said something about T-cells and genetic markers."

Gregory left his chart on the table and leaned back into his chair. "Dr. Robinson is nothing if not exact. The blood types must have tipped him off. Started him thinking."

"So Trey is your son?" Ricardo asked frankly. It was too early in the morning to worry about blunt words.

"it appears so." It hadn't sunk in. Everything was trapped on the surface because the only thing he could deal with was Olivia being in surgery. Olivia fighting for her life. Trey- Caitlin- the whole mess was only a mild distraction from what really mattered.

Picking up the paper, Ricardo looked at the little chart and up at Gregory before he asked his question. "Caitlin's not his mother, is she?"

One of his eyebrows shot up in surprise and Gregory's expression fell back into inscrutable. "Perhaps. Did the good doctor get a chance to run a full DNA profile?"

Ricardo shook his head. "No. He wants to draw more blood from you, Caitlin and Trey to send to the crime lab in Santa Barbara." The detective grew silent again but Gregory knew what he was thinking. His baby had died the same night Caitlin's was born. Olivia and Caitlin had the same blood type. Trey's blood hadn't been tested against either of theirs.

"Olivia's blood type is the same as Caitlin's." Ricardo ventured softly, relieved to think he wouldn't have to deal with this volatile case as long as he feared.

"And Olivia is a consenting adult, to which I share no relation outside of the bonds of matrimony, which were intact at the time." Gregory allowed himself the hint of a smirk, but his eyes remained closed in thought. "If Trey is the son I thought was dead, the rest of the world has a hell of a lot to answer for."

Ricardo nodded and even though Gregory missed the gesture, silence reigned quietly between them. After a while Ricardo read through the morning paper, most of it was tales of the earthquake, but it was a sign that things were returning to normal that it had been published at all. When he'd finished even looking through the classified advertisements and wondering if he could justify buying an old convertible MG to fix up.

The forty-five minutes Ricardo spent on the paper didn't seem to have passed for Gregory at all. He hadn't even moved. As seven am passed, Ricardo flagged down one of the hospital volunteers in search of something to eat. Muffins and orange juice were all she had to share with him, but he took it gratefully.

He set half of his spoils in front of Gregory, who opened his eyes slowly and took them mechanically. Ricardo couldn't help noticing how pale the other man was. The unstoppable force that was the myth of Gregory Richards had been brought down by a single twist of fate. He'd seen enough car accidents to know that a split second changed everything. One turn of the wheel changed deadly wrecks into accidents people walked away from.

Gregory had walked away. Some men might joke about wishing their ex-wives ill, but these wounds were too fresh. How long had Gregory and Olivia even be divorced? Two weeks? Three? There'd been something in the paper just last week about Gregory marrying Bette, but that was something financial. Something about Del Douglas.

The door on the other side of the room opened and Gregory was out of his chair before the sound finished echoing through the waiting room. Dr. Machida removed her blue face mask and tried to coax Gregory back into his chair but he was having none of it.

"Olivia? What happened? How is she? What's her condition now?"

"She's stable." Dr. Machida began as she removed the covering from her hair. "She lost a lot of blood. The donation Dr. Robinson took from you is what kept her alive long enough to get to me. We repaired all of the internal bleeding, but her spleen had to be removed."

"Removed?" Gregory ran his hand through his hair and tried to take it all in. "What does that mean?"

"It means it was too damaged for me to repair." The doctor removed the rest of her surgical garb and left it in a pile on one of the chairs. "But you have to concentrate on the fact that she's stable. She can live a completely normal life without her spleen."

"She can..." Gregory paused, curious about the wording the doctor choose. "Don't you mean she will?"

"Olivia's still unconscious." Dr, Machida pointed to the chair across from her as she tried to roll the kinks out of her neck. "She probably will be for some time. yet. Her body has a lot to recover from. There's also the possibility of secondary infection."

Gregory sank down into the chair like a man awaiting his own death sentance. "Infection? From what?"

"Olivia's spleen was ruptured in three places, there was tearing of small intestine, damage to her liver and severe internal bleeding. She's on antibiotics and she's not in immediate danger-"

"I want to see her." Gregory left his chair and started towards the doorway. "Where is she?"

"Maybe in a few hours." Dr. Machida recommended calmly. "When you've had some time to calm down-"

Ricardo cleared his throat and drew the doctor's attention. "Gregory won't be able to be here in a few hours. If you could give him some time now-"

The doctor pulled herself up slowly and collected her pile of cast-off clothing. "She's in recovery. Right this way."

Ricardo followed a step behind, filling in the thanks Gregory didn't seem to be able to find. "Thank you doctor. SBPD will owe you one."

The petite doctor managed a small smile. "I have a parking ticket from last week in front of the movie theater-"

Gregory let their voices fade into the background. Dr. Machida indicated Olivia's room with her hand and he followed that gesture. His hand slipped on the knob. His palms were sweating. He wiped them over the dirt on his pants and turned the knob.

His mind did a careful inventory, filing the view of the room away so he'd remember it always. Olivia was off of the respirator. Her chest rose and fell on it's own. A monitor in the corner kept track of her heartbeat in slow green peaked lines. The chair by the bed was waiting for him. He could take her hand and pour his heart out and she'd never know.

Gregory couldn't sit down. He'd been sitting too long. He stood at her side, and one hand fumbled with the sheet. Her hand was a moment's reach away but he didn't want to touch her. What if her hand was cold? What if her fingers were stiff? What if they never moved again?

He didn't dare touch her. He couldn't.

His hand had other ideas. Without his consent, his rebellious fingers caught her still ones like a lifeline. There was still warmth there. Touching her sent a rush of feeling up his arm that he wasn't prepared to deal with. It cut through him like a lance, ripping his chest to shreds. Before he knew it, he was speaking and like his hand his voice had joined the rebellion.

"I love you." His throat was so tight he could barely breathe. "I've always loved you. I think about my life, and everything I've done- " The cascade was unstoppable now. "I've been running towards every unreachable goal I could find because I thought that was what I wanted."

He collapsed, crumpling down to her bed. His head found her shoulder and he wept. "You used to tell me I was running away. That I'd never be happy until I turned around and faced what I was running from. If you don't wake up I'm never going to be able to tell you that you were right."

Gregory lifted his head to look at her. Her face was entirely still but just knowing she was there was comforting. "I should have taken care of you when our baby died instead of pushing you away. It was just so easy to tell myself it was your fault."

His fingers worked their way into knots in the sheet. "It was my fault. I never should have left you home alone and gone to work. I don't hurt when I'm not with you. I can push it away and pretend it doesn't exist. I can shut myself off, but not when I look at you."

"Not with you." He let his tears fall onto the bed and disappear into the white. "I love you more than I can handle. More than I can deal with. I'm losing you and I'm already lost."

He cupped her cheek, unable to find what he needed but still too stricken to turn away. "I can't ask you to save me Liv. I don't deserve it, but our son needs you. You can stay here for him because he never hurt you, or betrayed you. He never failed you the way I have."

His lips brushed her forehead and his tears ran down into her hair. "I swore the world away when he died. I don't have anything left but you. But you gave him back to me."

Gregory kissed her lips and sank into her shoulder again. "I'm going to spend every day telling him how wonderful his mother is." He stroked her arm and adjusted the blankets as the tears dried on his face. "It'll be easier if you're there."

It hurt too much to cry anymore. He had to go with Ricardo. "I won't be dead inside."

Gregory dropped his head to her ear. "You used to tell me how much you trusted me. This time I'm going to trust you. Don't leave me. Don't-"