The rest of the car ride passed in relative silence. The exhaustion of the day had caught up to Skye, and she drifted in and out of sleep as May guided the car towards home. The cool glass of the rain-streaked window felt good on Skye's feverish forehead, and the motion of the car lulled her into a drowsy daze.

She woke when the car stopped in the driveway, the sudden change from movement to stillness jolting her back to reality. A slithery knot of fresh guilt thrashed in her stomach at the prospect of having to go and face the others. She looked to May, poorly concealed fear pooled in her eyes.

"We should get inside. We can get you some dry clothes. And I'm sure everyone will be relieved to see you."

Skye wasn't as sure about that as May seemed to be, but the prospect of dry clothes was too good to resist, so she clambered out of the car and followed May into the house. She barely made it two steps past the front door before something solid plowed into her, nearly knocking her off her feet.

"Skye!" It was Jemma, holding on for dear life, her body shaking against Skye's. Skye felt wetness on her neck where Jemma's face was buried, and figured that Jemma had been crying. Her own eyes dampened as she returned the forceful hug, wrapping Jemma up as tightly as she could.

"Skye, I'm so sorry," Jemma breathed. "I ruined—"

"No, I'm sorry," Skye insisted. "I should never have done it. It was stupid and reckless, just like you said. I never should have asked you to lie for me, either. That wasn't fair."

"I was so worried about you, and I didn't want you to hate me for telling, but—"

"I could never hate you. And I'm… I'm really glad you did," said Skye. "You were right. I messed up. I would still be stuck in Sheboygan if you hadn't told."

"You're all cold and wet," Jemma remarked, pulling away slightly from their hug. "You need to go change, you'll catch cold if you stay like this."

"Excellent advice from Dr. Simmons," May said kindly. She had been nice enough to let the girls have their moment, but Skye knew she was probably ready to get down to business. "Skye, why don't you go take a hot shower and put on some dry clothes?" She turned to Jemma once Skye had nodded. "Jemma, where are Phil and Bobbi?"

"Bobbi's been up in her room," Jemma said. "She said she didn't like sitting around and waiting. I could hear her trying to pace with her crutches for a while, but it's been quiet for a bit. Phil's cooking."

"I thought I smelled something good," May smiled. "Skye, if Phil's cooking, then it'll probably be time to eat dinner once you're finished upstairs. Do you want to tell him we're back, or would you like me to?"

"You can," Skye said, her cheeks growing warm. Something about seeing Phil after everything she'd put him and May through that day made her feel anxious, and she felt herself wanting to delay the reunion for some reason. It had been different with Jemma, but things usually were.

When they went upstairs, Jemma lingered briefly outside of Bobbi's closed bedroom door, and Skye could tell she wanted to let Bobbi know that everyone had returned home safely. Typical Jemma, always thinking of everyone else. Skye nodded, to let her know it was okay, and Jemma knocked.

"Bobbi? It's Jemma. Skye's home." There wasn't any sound from behind the door for a long time, and Skye wondered if Bobbi had heard them. Jemma was about to knock again when Bobbi's voice drifted through the door, sounding as thin as a gossamer strand from a spiderweb.

"Oh. Okay. That's good. That's really good. Thanks, Jemma."

Jemma turned her furrowed brow on Skye, and Skye knew she had noticed that Bobbi didn't sound at all like herself.

"Just leave her," Skye said quietly, so that only Jemma could hear. "She's probably mad at me. I don't want to make it worse." Skye slunk into her and Jemma's bedroom and began pulling out some clean clothes.

"Skye, I don't think she's mad," Jemma assuaged, following behind her, step for step. "She was really worried this afternoon. You should have seen her. She's probably just…"

"It's fine," Skye said curtly. "She needs some space. Whatever's the matter, it's because of me, so the least I can do is let her have her space."

"Skye, please don't be mad," Jemma pleaded.

"I'm not mad at her!" Skye protested.

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh."

"I meant don't be mad at yourself," Jemma explained. "I know how you get after you think you've made a mistake. You don't need to punish yourself."

"Someone has to."

Skye didn't wait for Jemma to respond, turning quickly on her heel and heading towards the bathroom. The water from the shower was warm, but she still shivered slightly under the spray. At least the heat of the running water helped her to feel like all of the horrible, sticky bad parts of her day were melting off of her, like drippy wax sliding down the side of a candle. She didn't know yet how she was going to make it up to everyone, to atone for her misdeeds, but she knew in her bones that she would do whatever it took to put things right.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, May had just found Phil, chopping and mixing in a cooking frenzy.

"Phil, honey, we're home. Skye's home. I found her."

Phil looked up, snapped out of his culinary reverie, and sagged. If May hadn't known any better, she would have thought that the only thing keeping him from collapsing on the floor was the grip he held on the counter. "Oh thank god. Is she all right?"

"She's… okay. I sent her upstairs to shower. She was soaking wet and sitting in the rain when I found her."

"But she's not hurt?"

"Not physically, no."

"What was she even doing all the way down in Sheboygan? And at a hospital?"

"She was looking for her parents, Phil," May said sadly. "She thought I wasn't doing enough, so she tried to do it herself. She went to the hospital to try and find their records."

"How would she even know where to look? Or when?"

"Apparently she found the copies of her file that Victoria sent us in my email," May sighed. "One of her many confessions during our car ride home."

"What does that mean, exactly?"

"It means she's not hurt, Phil, but she's hurting. She's got all this pain that she's carrying around, and we didn't see it. I… I think she needs help. Help that we can't give her."

"You mean like a therapist?" Phil asked. He looked so serious, the lines around his mouth standing taut, and yet still so kind, so concerned. Love was pouring out from within him, just like it always did.

"I don't know, maybe. Someone she can talk to, who can help her work through everything. It's more than any one person should ever have to shoulder on their own, much less a 13-year-old kid."

"Well, we can talk with Victoria about it when we call her tomorrow morning. Maybe she'll have some suggestions about where to start. And we have that meeting with the guidance counselor at school we already had scheduled for next week, too. I'm sure Polly will have some ideas, maybe some names of professionals in the area..." Phil trailed off, looking a little helpless. "She's really hurting, Mel?"

"She's really hurting. She looked so small when I pulled her off the street. Her eyes were all red and she was just shaking. I tried to talk to her in the car—"

"One of your mother's favorite tricks," Phil teased gently. "A captive audience."

"Don't you dare, Phil," May said, pretending to be aghast. "I'm nothing like my mother. And I tried to talk to her in the car because I thought it would be easier if she thought I was focused on the road instead of on judging her."

"I know," Phil appeased, chuckling. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt for the sake of a lame joke."

"She didn't want to talk. She kept giving me these short little answers, deflecting, you know. And then, I don't know, something just… snapped, I guess. I don't know what triggered it, exactly, but all of the sudden she was so angry, and she kept listing off all of these things she had done wrong, like I was supposed to take notes and suddenly realize that she wasn't worth the trouble." May felt her mouth twist in dismay, and her voice came out thick when she spoke again. "Phil, she doesn't believe she deserves love. She asked me why I didn't hate her."

"Oh." Phil's eyes filled with the same sadness that May felt tugging roughly at her own heart. "Oh, Skye…"

"I tried to explain that that wasn't true, but I… I messed it up, Phil. I told her that I didn't hate her, and that she did deserve love, but I should have said… I didn't tell her that I love her. I just froze. She needed to hear that, and I couldn't give it to her."

"Hey," Phil said softly, crossing around the counter and wrapping her up in his arms. "Mel, I'm sure everything you said was all right. You're too hard on yourself. You give these girls so much, and even if you couldn't say the words to Skye tonight, I'm sure she knows. You drove all the way to Sheboygan for goodness' sake. That's an act of love right there. Sitting with her through whatever emotions she had to process in the car, wanting to get her help. You can show love without saying the word, honey, and you do, in so many ways."

"I just worry that it's not enough," May admitted, leaning into Phil's embrace. "Sometimes you just need to hear it out loud to believe the rest of it. Skye's not you, Phil, I'm not sure she can wait almost two years for me to say 'I love you.'"

"Two years after we started dating," Phil corrected, smiling. "I had known you for much longer than that before you told me you loved me. But it was worth every second of waiting. It meant so much more when you finally said it, because I knew you really meant it, because you took your time."

"We can't all be like you and declare our love after 8 months of seeing each other," May teased. "But I knew you meant it, too, even though it felt fast. I was worried you would want me to say it back right away."

"You did, in your own way," Phil told her, planting a kiss in the space where her neck met her shoulder, the little dip right beside her collar bone. "Like I said, you're very good at showing love in ways that don't use words. You came to my mom's funeral not that long after I'd said it. You let me cry on you for hours, you handled all the details with the funeral home. That's when I knew you loved me back."

"You knew, all the way back then?"

"I knew," he said seriously. "Just like how I know you'll find a way to make sure Skye knows she's loved. And Jemma and Bobbi, too. Because you do love them, don't you, Mel?"

"I… I really do," May said, just above a whisper. She had surprised herself. Somewhere deep inside her, she had already known, she supposed. But she had never put it into words like that, never put a name to the swell of feeling she had for the three amazing children she now had running around her house. "I can't believe it happened so fast."

"I think that's part of becoming a parent," Phil smiled, a little sadly. "They grab ahold of your heartstrings and never let you go. And you realize one day that you wouldn't have it any other way."

Dinner was a quiet affair, and no one ate much of anything, despite Phil having outdone himself with a chicken casserole and a myriad of side dishes. It was one of his ways of coping with stress, May knew, to keep busy with things that distracted him. Cooking, tinkering with the car, or organizing his movie collection by title, or release date, genre, or director. May never knew exactly what the current system was going to be, which is why she left the movie selection up to him. Once, he had organized by the color of the box, which had looked nice but made it impossible to find anything.

Skye in particular pushed most of her food around her plate, something that caught May by surprise. She was almost certain that Skye hadn't eaten anything since breakfast that morning, but she wasn't interested in pushing Skye any further that night.

When they had given up on trying to finish anything on their plates, Phil had leapt up to start doing the dishes as well, even though it was supposed to be Jemma's night to do them. May had noticed how cautious Phil was being around Jemma, and she wondered what exactly she had missed between the two of them before arriving in the principal's office that afternoon. She was fairly positive that Jemma had tried to tell her that she'd had another episode, like the one during the somewhat disastrous shopping trip to the mall, even though she hadn't used those words exactly, and the delicate way Phil was treating her supported her theory.

Jemma, to her credit, seemed mostly unfazed, although it could have had more to do with the fact that her joyous relief over Skye's safe return outweighed her lingering anxiety, May reasoned. Still, she was slightly more fidgety than what May was coming to understand was normal for her, and the only person she looked at directly or talked to was Skye. It was like a flashback to some of their first nights in the house.

"It'll just take me a minute," Phil had assured her, when Jemma rose to take the plates from his hands. "We've all had a long, hard day. Let me just take care of it, all right?"

Bobbi was the mystery of the bunch. May had gathered from Phil that Bobbi had been with him when he'd gotten the call about Skye, which is how she ended up sitting in the office with them. Bobbi had been worried – they all had been – but she had spoken evenly with Jemma and had been the one to convince her to reveal Skye's location. May had assumed that once Skye had come home safe and sound that Bobbi would let go of that haunted look in her eyes, but that hadn't been the case. Not for the first time, May wished she could pop open the heads of her foster daughters like the hood of a car and take a look at the inner workings to find out what was really going on in there.

Her ex, the only other person she'd dated besides Phil, had once teased her because she'd told him that everything would be so much easier if people came with instruction manuals. He'd said that was what psychology was for, and she remembered how much they'd both laughed at the idea of Melinda May cracking a psych textbook. Besides, it wasn't so much the psychology that gave her trouble – it was the feelings. The emotions tied up in every aspect of life. Phil was open with his, so she never had to guess what he was thinking or feeling. But Bobbi, Skye, and Jemma weren't like that. They were guarded. They were teenagers. It was practically their job to camouflage their feelings until the rare moments when they let a flash of color slip; a glimpse of happy yellow or angry red peeking out from the dense foliage of carefully constructed expressions and body language.

She had tried to check on Bobbi, to ask if she was all right, but Bobbi had waved her off, claiming that she was fine and just wanted to get to bed. May had let her go, but not without a series of mental notes for future follow-up conversations. She had missed the signs with Skye, she wasn't going to make the same mistake with Bobbi.

Jemma, too, had gone up for an early bedtime, although that came at Phil's urging, since he had caught her yawning and rubbing sleepy eyes at the table. Jemma's reluctant departure meant that Skye was left alone in the kitchen with May and Phil, something she looked deeply uneasy about. She hadn't said a word to Phil since coming home, although she had let him hug her tightly when he'd first seen her.

"Skye, I think you know that we need to talk," Phil said, returning to the table. Skye looked down at her feet, but nodded. "I'm sure you're tired, so we won't talk long tonight. We can say more in the morning after we've all had a good night's sleep. But there are some things that need to be said."

"I'm really, really sorry," Skye said, sounding every bit of her young age.

"We know, sweetheart. We know you are," Phil assured her, reaching out and taking her hand. "We're all just relieved you're okay, that you're safe. You had us really worried, kiddo."

"I know."

"Skye, you should know that I told Phil a little about what we talked about in the car," May told her. The crestfallen look on Skye's face was one she had been hoping to avoid, but May wasn't interested in keeping secrets from Skye. "We don't need to get into all of it tonight. I just wanted you to know that he knows."

"You are extraordinary, Skye, and worthy of every good thing. That's why it makes me so sad to see you make bad choices. Choices that put you danger," Phil said. "You're not disposable, and we don't want you acting like you are. You mean far too much to too many people for you to put yourself at risk."

May fought the urge to smile. Phil's words sounded so much like the little speech he had given her not too long ago. She wondered if he thought that she and Skye were more similar than either of them realized, or if it was just a coincidence.

"Are you going to call Miss Hand?" Skye asked.

"We are," May said. She hadn't thought it was possible, but Skye looked even more pitiful after hearing the answer than before. "We're calling her tomorrow morning. She's your social worker, Skye, she has to know."

"I guess I should pack up, then…"

"What do you mean?" Phil wanted to know.

"When you call Miss Hand, that means I have to go," Skye said, like it was obvious. "Just promise me you'll keep Jemma, okay? She didn't do anything wrong, I was the one who made her cover for me. She… she likes it here. She's doing good here. Don't send her back, too, please."

"Skye," Phil said, confusion and hurt creasing his brow, "we're not sending you back. We're just letting Miss Hand know what happened. We don't want you to leave."

"Unless… that's what you want?" May asked uncertainly. "Are you unhappy here? Do you want to go back to St. Agnes?"

"No!" Skye said suddenly. "I don't want to go back. I never want to go back. I just… usually you don't get to stay past your third screwup. I'm pretty sure this is way past three, so I thought…"

"Skye, you will have a home here for as long as you want one." Phil was deadly serious. "Melinda and I will never send you back unless that's something you decide you want. We told you and Jemma that when you both first came, and we meant it then, and we mean it now."

"Okay," said Skye. She was staring at the tabletop, her face totally still. May wished again to be able to see inside her brain. "What kind of punishment am I going to get?"

May was a little taken aback by the question, and by the look on Phil's face, he was, too.

"Why don't we wait until tomorrow to talk about that, love?" May soothed. Phil got a funny expression on his face, and he turned to May like a lightbulb had just gone off in his brain. It took May a minute to realize what he was trying to telegraph to her, but then it clicked. Love. She had, without realizing it, been telling their children of her love from the very beginning. In the same way that kiddo and sweetheart rolled off of Phil's tongue, love rolled off of hers. It still wasn't the "I love you" that she wanted to be able to give, but she was amazed by her own subconscious, and by the fact that it had taken her this long to see it for what it was.

Fortunately, Skye had missed their whole ridiculous, silent exchange, opting instead to shrug simply at the table. "Okay." She paused for another moment. "I really am sorry."

"We know," Phil said again. "And we forgive you. We're not mad, Skye. We're just happy to have you home."

And we're back to our burst of three :) I honestly have no idea how I got these written so fast, but I was excited to share them with you all! I hope you like them :) A thousand thanks to you all for reading and reviewing - you guys make my day!