Yay! The document uploader wouldn't play, but I found a way round it.

Meanwhile, back at the lab...

When Brennan finished her meeting with Goodman it was midday, and she suddenly realized she was starving. Somehow she and Booth had not gotten around to breakfast that morning. She thought of him for a moment, wondering how he was getting on.

Avoiding the rest of the squint squad, since she really was not in the mood for more of Angela's cross-examination, she decided to call into Sid's for some lunch, but as she walked in and headed towards her usual table she was startled to hear someone calling after her. "Bones!" Turning, she half expected to see Booth there, although he was out of town and the voice didn't even sound like his. She saw instead a small boy, clutching a woman's hand.

"Parker!" she said in surprise. She had met Booth's son on a couple of occasions, but didn't realize he would recognize her, or know who she was.

The woman with Parker smiled. "I'm sorry," she said. "You must be - Dr. Brennan, isn't it? I'm Rebecca, Parker's Mom. I've heard a lot about you."

"I'm pleased to meet you," Brennan said. "Please, call me Temperance."

"We're having lunch," said Parker excitedly. "Do you want to have lunch with us?"

Brennan shook her head, but Rebecca nodded. "Please do, Temperance, if you'd like to. I'd love to have a chance to chat to you. You probably hear this a lot, so let's get it over with - I really enjoyed reading your book."

Brennan agreed to have lunch with them, and they sat down together at a table. Much to her amusement, Parker insisted on sitting next to her.

"Bones, where's my daddy?" Parker asked, looking solemnly up at her with those startlingly familiar big brown eyes.

"Don't call her Bones, darling," Rebecca corrected him. He looked at Brennan for help.

"My name's Temperance," she said to him, saying her name slowly. "Your Daddy is the only person who's allowed to call me Bones." She smiled so that he wouldn't think she was cross with him. "And he's out of town at the moment, working on a case, but we're trying to get it solved real soon so he can come back and see you."

Parker looked disappointed. "Tempance," he said. "Will Daddy be back on Sunday? He's taking me to the zoo."

"I hope so," Brennan told him. "We're both working really hard so that he will be."

Rebecca looked annoyed at the news that Booth might miss the outing. Brennan wished she'd be more understanding.

"I have to admit," said Rebecca, "I do have one or two things I want to ask you."

Sid brought them food, and they started to eat. "Tell me, Temperance," Rebecca said. "Your work with Seeley - is it really like it is in your book?"

Brennan thought for a moment as she chewed her mouthful. "Some of it is," she admitted. "But there's a lot more to it than that. There's a lot of routine work, as well as the more exciting parts."

"It makes me see him in a new light," Rebecca said. "I never really understood properly what he does. I mean, you see on TV shows, and you hear things, but - this felt like I was reading about him personally."

"Well, a lot of the book is dramatized, and of course the characters aren't really based on any one person," she explained. "But the basic procedure, that could all happen. It's just condensed into a shorter time, for narrative purposes."

Rebecca nodded. "I never really showed that much interest in his work, but I guess what he does is pretty important, isn't it," she said. "Dangerous, too."

"So are a lot of jobs." Brennan dismissed Rebecca's concerns and continued eating, wondering whether to say anything about Booth and Parker. The woman seemed a lot more friendly than she had been given to expect. But then, all she had learnt about her so far came from her ex-boyfriend.

They chatted about Brennan's book, and about life in general, while they ate their meal. Brennan gradually relaxed. She wasn't usually good with small talk, but practice with Angela was paying off. She found she was starting to enjoy Rebecca's company. Perhaps that was why she took the step she did, once Parker had finished eating and went to talk to Sid.

"Booth was pretty upset the other night," she said eventually. "He said he'd had a fight with you over access to Parker."

Rebecca looked cagey. She absorbed herself in studying her meal, moving the last bits of noodles around with her chopsticks.

"I told him I'm moving out of town," she said. "He took it badly."

"What did you expect?" Brennan stared at the other woman. She had been hoping Booth had misunderstood, or had been exaggerating. "Why on earth would you want to move Parker away from his dad? The role of the father is incredibly important, especially for a young boy."

"I have a right to move if I want." She sounded defiant, as if trying to justify her behavior to herself.

"Surely you surrendered the right to do whatever you want when you had a child. Your main responsibility should be to him while he's still so young. If what you want will cause him hurt, then no, you don't have the right to do what you want."

"He's getting hurt anyway. Seeley's let him down a few times lately, and he's getting old enough to notice." Rebecca looked down at the table, running her fingers along the edge of the tablecloth. "It upsets him, and when Parker's upset I get upset. It's too unsettling for him, being mucked about like that."

"We were working a case," Brennan pointed out. "We needed to catch a murderer. Sometimes that entails overtime."

"I know." Rebecca was silent for a long while, and Brennan thought she'd said all she had to say on the subject. Then she heard her say, very quietly, "My Dad walked out when I was about Parker's age. He'd always promise he was coming to take me out for the day, and he'd never show. Every time, it broke my heart, and every time he swore it would be different next time, and Mom would let him do it again."

"But Booth's not like that. Booth hates letting Parker down. He would never hurt him for no reason." It irritated Brennan that Rebecca could think Booth would be that uncaring.

"Even so, it hurts him," Rebecca insisted. "However important the reasons why Seeley cancels, it still upsets Parker, and he doesn't understand. And I won't keep putting him through that. Better to have a clean break now than constant disappointment."

"So you think you have a right to take his father away from him?" Brennan questioned angrily.

"I'm not taking him away. Seeley's doing that himself. I'm just protecting my son. Like any mother would. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot; you wouldn't understand. You don't like children."

"I don't want children. That doesn't mean I don't like them," Brennan corrected her automatically. Those words had been uttered on TV a few months ago as part of an interview. Was she going to be living them down for the rest of her life?

"But still, you can't expect to understand what it's like for a mother, seeing her child hurt," Rebecca snapped.

"I can understand what it's like for a child whose parents disappear," Brennan snapped back. "It hurts, Rebecca. No matter what the explanation, you can never understand. No one can ever heal the hurt. And you're intending to do that to Parker. How can you? What right do you have to take him away from his father?"

"I'm just protecting him," she insisted.

"No, you're hurting him. If Booth were to let Parker down, which he won't, then yes, Parker would feel hurt. But it would be between him and his father, and he would understand that. But even if you're just trying to protect your child, if in the process he feels abandoned, then he'll blame you for it. When he grows up and finds out what you did - and he will find out - he will find it very hard to understand and to forgive."

Brennan paused for breath. She looked at the horrified look on Rebecca's face, and suddenly wished she could swallow all her words back. She hadn't even been talking about Rebecca and Parker, she realized. She'd been talking about herself, and her parents.

"I'm sorry," she said lamely. "I shouldn't have said all that."

"It has nothing to do with you what I do with my son. Nothing."

"What you're doing is hurting my partner, and that has a lot to do with me." Brennan saw the shock on Rebecca's face, and wondered if the woman had misunderstood her use of the word partner. Then she realized that perhaps she hadn't misunderstood, perhaps it was just that she herself hadn't thought through the implications of her new relationship with Booth.

"Come on, Parker, we're going." Rebecca stalked over to the bar, paid Sid for the meals, then left, not even letting Parker say goodbye. The boy stared back over his shoulder, looking bewildered and trying to wave. Brennan could appreciate his confusion. She was left staring at the remains of her own meal, and wishing she could wind the clock back and start lunch again. This time, she would keep her opinions to herself. But although she regretted saying what she did to Rebecca, she still believed in her words. Denying a father access to his son was unfair either to the father or his son. She thought of Ryan and Jason Swift. Maybe denying access could even be dangerous, because people could do stupid things when they didn't get what they wanted. She felt sure that whether his father was directly responsible for his death or not, if the boy had remained with his mother, his bones would not be lying on a lab table right now.

Her phone startled her back into the present moment. She fumbled in her pocket, found the phone, and answered it. "Brennan."

"Where will you be in a few hours, Bones?" It was Booth. He sounded keyed up. "I'm coming back to DC. We've had a breakthrough."

"What? What breakthrough?" She forced her thoughts back to the case. Booth had been continuing investigations in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. Why was he coming back here?

"Ryan Swift just walked into the Bureau asking for me. He said he's heard about his son's death, and is volunteering to answer our questions."

And so the plot thickens! Please let me know what you think.