Sonny walked along the docks. This sometimes cleared his head. His bodyguards were at a discreet distance.

He heard some voices below. He saw Brenda and Zander leaning against the railing over the docks. He stopped to listen. You never knew what you could find out.

"Maybe it was the gardener or the chauffeur or something," Brenda was saying to Zander, "And Mrs. Lewis couldn't resist."

"Son of a chauffeur," Zander answered. "Yeah, I like it. She'd have been lonely. She seems so passive to me, though. That's why it doesn't seem likely."

"Aha, but her very passiveness left her helpless in the arms of this chauffeur," Brenda smiled. "He was an aggressive sort. Like his offspring. In just the right way, of course."

"I wonder if I could dare to ask her," he grinned, putting his arm around her, low, so that his hand touched her rear end. She wriggled and giggled. "I don't think I can," Zander continued. "I am used to thinking of her as someone who is easy to upset. That would be too much."

"Too much for you," Brenda said, reaching up to him and kissing his lips. "There's no such thing. You do your date under a pier."

"Which I don't think she minded."

"Of course she didn't. It's that you would even try it. Or to fall in love with your kidnap victim."

"I hate being in love."

"I know what you mean. But it is having your heart broken that you hated."

"That only happens as a result of earlier falling in love."

"I understand."

"You do, don't you?"

"Yeah. And only you would do your bosses' wife, and knock her up to boot."

"Not intentional."

"Still, you didn't back off out of any abundance of caution. Not when the prize was offered to you."

"Some prize. All right. You make it sound good, the same stuff other people give me a lot of crap for. So, I'll thank you."

She grinned. "I cannot wait to find out how you intend to do that."

He grinned back. "Let's go," he said.

They walked off into the night.

"Screw you, Sonny," Carly yelled.

Sonny just stood there, in the living room of Bobbie's house.

"You can go and be with that bitch for all I care now," Carly said. All of the demands and worries of the past few months had suddenly snapped Carly's brain. "She just gets a warning for being with Zander, and I get a lot of crap. One minute you'll adopt my baby, and the next you're giving me a hard time because I was with Zander."

"She's not my wife, and - "

"I wasn't either! You had kicked me out!"

"It's just that if it was someone who didn't know, Carly - but Zander. Carly, he's a real pain in the neck. And you told him! How could you tell him first?"

"Because it's his child. His and mine. So you can't take this one away from me. Forget using your threats."

"What threats?"

Carly hardly knew what she was talking about. "You'd rather I slept with some stranger than my own bodyguard? Who you picked out."

"Yeah, because this stranger wouldn't be so much of a pain in the neck."

"Nothing better happen to him, ever, Sonny. I don't care what he does to you. That's my baby's father and my baby's going to have a father."

Sonny was stunned. He felt practically paralyzed. Carly never talked like this before. He couldn't do anything to Zander anyway. He had a code, and well, there was no way that code allowed him to snuff Zander out - this was a personal matter.

"I didn't threaten Zander or anybody," he said. "But how could you?"

"You had your little affair during that separation! Why the hell is it worse for me than you?"

"The consequences aren't the same. You got pregnant"

"You could get someone pregnant. Or no, you can't, can you? Well, I want two kids, and now I will have two kids, and you can't take this one away from me, so forget about adopting this kid."

"I would never take a child from its mother! When have I ever made such a threat? Never."

"I'll stay on the safe side of that, thank you. At least Zander wouldn't do it. Couldn't do it, in a court of law or anywhere. No court will give Zander custody, anyway. He can't pay off people in the courts, either."

"I wouldn't do that to take a child from its mother!"

"I don't care what you say, screw you, Sonny, you give me a hard time about sleeping with Zander when you slept with someone else too!"

"Someone else is one thing. But Zander! Damn, Carly, don't you know what kind of father you got for your kid? Zander never thinks."

"Which is exactly why he'll never get custody."

"What a terrible father for a kid to have!"

"I don't know. He will be affectionate to the child, I think."

Sonny was silent.

"Come back," he sighed. "This will work out somehow."

A day earlier Carly would have given anything to hear those words. Now she was so tired of it all, suddenly. And she started to sense she might have some power, after all. Well, it wasn't as if he never used his.

"Forget it," she said. "I've had it up to here. If I'm not there, you can't kick me out. I'm tired of you kicking me out. That penthouse is your house, it seems, not ours. I end up here anyway. I am not subjecting Michael to moving back and forth at your whim and not subjecting this child to that either."

Sonny walked on the docks some more to try to regain his head.

He could not understand how Zander Smith managed it. He hated not understanding a thing, because that meant you could not control it.

Carly, then Brenda. How? A millionaire corporate raider like Jasper Jax, he could understand. He had lived through that awful competition, which he knew he had brought on himself. It was not all that unexpected. But a kid, twenty years younger than himself, who never thought before he acted, blew up suddenly and did stupid things, didn't have a dime, belonged nowhere - how did he do it?

Sonny's brain was frozen trying to figure this out. Emily, he remembered. She was an innocent, unsuspecting, unsophisticated kid who got herself involved in what she didn't understand.

But Carly? It made no sense. He supposed Zander was a bad choice for a bodyguard, but he had at the time wanted to place Zander somewhere, and Carly was not so much in danger as that he had wanted to have someone who could give him an idea of what she did with herself. He realized he had never tried to get any such report out of Zander. He had become too busy with other things.

And neither of them had revealed to him how far they had gone when he had fired Zander for trying to seduce Carly. Then, Carly made out she was some sort of victim. Sonny hadn't really believed she was all that bent about it, but had put on a show to impress Zander that he couldn't get away with trying to seduce the Wife of Mob Boss Sonny Corinthos. That just wasn't done, by anybody, let alone some stupid 20-year-old kid. And now, Sonny realized, that as he had delivered him impressive firing to Zander, Zander knew, the whole time, that he had already succeeded in seducing the Wife of Mob Boss Sonny Corinthos!

It was beyond maddening. Zander is so thoughtless and stupid, Sonny thought, it almost allows him to get away with things nobody else would even dare try.

And Brenda. Sonny shook his head. That made no sense.

No sense at all. He knew Brenda was just playing around, but just playing around - well, even for that, Brenda could find somebody a lot better strung together than Zander.

He was amazed Brenda would even consider a younger man, period.

But Brenda was not his wife. Carly was. One's wife was one's wife. Sonny lived by a strict set of rules. He had to get her back.

"Hmmm, I love holding you like this afterwards," Brenda said, as she and Zander lay, naked after another bout of passion, in her bed at the hotel. "You can make a good case that sex is better than being in love." She said the last three words with a mocking sarcasm.

"With you, anyway," he said. "I mean, it's way better to be your boy toy than to have someone else be in love with me."

"I think that's a compliment," she giggled.

"Of course it is."

They were silent a moment. "But how was your brother?" she asked. "I mean, how was his attitude to you? Was it the same?"

"No. No, he was actually more – more, I guess I would say, affectionate."

"He understands more how your father was when you aren't what your father thinks you should be."

"Yeah, it's got to kill Dad that Pete just wants to be a therapist."

"Does it surprise you?"

"I don't know. Odd question, Brenda. Nobody ever asked what I think of anything."

"I do."

"OK. Yes. I thought Pete wanted to be a doctor. Or assumed he did. You know, maybe he never did tell me that himself. It was all presumed, you know, all the time, so nobody said so, because it was just known. Maybe it's not a surprise. That might never have been Pete's desire, specifically, for Pete."

"Then he's lucky he ended up in a rehab."

"How do you do that, miss?" Zander hugged her a little. "Even with that! It sounds like I did Pete a favor or something. But no way – that had to be a lot of suffering. He'd have figured out that he didn't want to be a doctor anyway."

"Well," Brenda said, stroking his arm, "Pete needs you, now."

Zander smiled. "He said that. He could use an ally."

"He has a good one."

"I wonder," Zander said, "if Emily really had another guy, could it have been Pete?"

"Probably not. Wouldn't he have told you?"

"I guess. I don't know. He mentioned one of the patients having been in a bus accident casually enough."

"She told you she had another guy?"

"Yeah, that's why she dumped me."

"You don't sound sure you believe it."

"Sometimes I think she might have done it for my own good. She was paralyzed. She does that self sacrificing stuff."

"Like Sonny did for me."

"To me that is way worse. I would rather find out she really found another guy she found out she really loved, rather than me, than to think she would do a thing like break it off when she knew she loved me."

"Maybe it would be like Sonny and me. She was right. She did you a favor, then, because she frees you up - somebody who loves you enough to stick with you, or show up for your wedding, might be out there."

"How do you know they won't do that same thing, when you thought it was love before and it wasn't?"

"You have to chance it."

"I feel worse for you. Leaving you at the church like that is plain cruel. Why didn't he leave you well before it had gotten to that point, then? He's supposedly so smart. It's almost like the whole thing was revenge. Didn't you have the other guy earlier?"

"Yeah, but I'd left him for Sonny. Wouldn't seem right for Sonny to want any revenge for that."

"Do you think you could ever stand in a church like that again?"

"No," she giggled. "It will have to be an elopement."

"I don't blame you," he said. "I used to think it was so mean to call me on the phone and tell me she had another guy and she never wanted to see me again, but that's nothing compared to waiting in a church like that."

"Never wanted to see you again? Why wouldn't she want to be friends, at least?"

"You think that means it was that self sacrificing stuff?"

"Yeah."

"I am so aggravated with all that. All those games are just hurtful."

"I hear you."

"I much prefer being dealt with straight," he said.

"Me too," she murmured, against his chest. "Go to sleep," she advised.