Chapter 2
Thanksgiving was hard. Holidays always were and it had only been a matter of days since the BAU arrested Jordan Halloran, which didn't give Emily enough time to process the thoughts and emotions the case brought up for her. Her daughter was still top of mind when she attended the Thanksgiving dinner Rossi hosted for the team and their respective families.
She always enjoyed spending time with her BAU family outside of work, and the team's Thanksgiving was certainly preferable to the alternative of spending the holiday alone - or worse, with her parents. But at the end of the night, Emily would be going home alone. She wasn't the only one on the team who was single, but sometimes it felt like she was the only one who was completely and utterly alone. It was a feeling Emily Prentiss was no stranger to.
Growing up as the only child of two distant parents, she'd been left to her own devices from the time she didn't need a nanny anymore until the time she left for college. Her parents were away or at important events far more than they were at home with her. It had always been the nanny or the car service or the housekeeper taking care of her – and they moved around enough that she never really built a close bond with any of her various caretakers. She'd had everything she ever wanted growing up, but none of the attention she'd been so desperate for. Throwing money at her had not bought her love. It had only bred bitter resentment.
The way she grew up Emily didn't really know what it was to have family. The sad reality was that the closest she'd ever come to a normal family dynamic had been when she was playing house with Ian Doyle. She knew an undercover operative, a world-renowned arms dealer, and a little boy who everyone thought belonged to the housekeeper did not constitute a conventional family. But at the same time, she probably had more family dinners in the two years she was living in Doyle's house than she'd had in seventeen years in her parents' house. It was hard to feel alone when she was never alone in Doyle's house. It was, however, a different kind of loneliness when no one in the house could know who she really was.
When the undercover assignment ended, Emily knew she wanted that – the family dinners, the child running through the house, the house that she would never be left alone in – but as Emily Prentiss, not Lauren Reynolds.
Emily wanted to build the family she'd never had but always desperately wanted. She assumed she would eventually meet someone, get married, and have kids – kids she could keep without the constant worry that they would be in danger because of who they were, or rather who their father was. But that had never happened and now it was too late. Emily was in her forties and still single. She knew it was likely the only child she would ever have was the one she'd given up.
The job made relationships hard - not that relationships were ever easy. But the unpredictable schedule and the constant travel were especially hard. Hotch's marriage hadn't survived it, and neither had any of Rossi's. Somehow JJ made it work. So had Matt Simmons, for that matter. It was possible to make it work, but it wasn't easy.
It wasn't even just the job. Part of it was Emily. It was hard for her to get close to anyone and even harder for her to really trust anyone – anyone except her team, that is. They had become her family.
Emily hoped they wouldn't see through her I'm-fine façade the way Rossi had. He was still the only one she'd told about her daughter, and she wasn't ready to discuss it with anyone else. With any luck, the excitement of the long holiday weekend would distract the other profilers from…well, profiling her. She took a deep breath and knocked. The door opened to Rossi, beaming happily at her.
"Wine and pie?" Rossi said as he took the proffered bottle and pie box from Emily. "Store bought I presume?"
"Ooh! Wine and pie! Two of my favorite things!" Penelope exclaimed from behind him.
"Mine, too," Emily agreed. She turned to Rossi with a mock glare. "You know, I can actually cook."
She knew cooking wasn't exactly her strong suit. Her mother never taught her to cook – not that Elizabeth Prentiss ever actually cooked. Since any big dinners or parties the Prentiss' had were to entertain foreign dignitaries, they were always catered affairs. Emily ate dorm food and free food from the restaurant where she waited tables while she was in college. After college she had jobs where she was always traveling and it just didn't make sense to stock her fridge with food that would just go bad anyway. She lived off take out, but there were a few things she knew how to make on the rare occasion the team was out of rotation and she actually had the time and inclination to cook. She thought she could manage helping Rossi in the kitchen.
"Last time we let you in the kitchen on Thanksgiving you burned the turkey," Rossi reminded her.
"That was one time," Emily said defensively.
"Only because we haven't let you anywhere near the kitchen since," Rossi said with a soft chuckle. "You can watch football with JJ and Spencer. Just stay out of my kitchen."
"But the kitchen is where the wine is," Emily protested.
"I'll have someone who won't burn my kitchen down bring you a glass," Rossi told her.
Emily found JJ's whole family along with Reid in Rossi's living room. Reid was sitting on the floor with the boys doing a card trick they both appeared completely transfixed by while JJ watched from the couch with an amused smile. Will was engrossed in the football game on TV.
"Can I watch, too, or is this magic show invitation only?" Emily asked, making her presence known.
"Aunt Emily!" Henry jumped up to give her a hug. "Thank you for the video games," he said, referring to the birthday gift she'd given JJ for his birthday earlier that month. She'd gotten him the video games he wanted for the new Nintendo Switch JJ and Will were giving him.
"You are very welcome," Emily told him, giving him a squeeze. With a hand on the ten year old's shoulder, Emily gently steered him back over to their resident magician. She sat down between Henry and Michael in a little circle facing Reid and offered her colleague a grin. "Sorry to interrupt your act."
Reid told Michael to pick a card. The three year old put a lot of thought into it, studying the cards splayed out in front of him carefully before finally choosing one.
They made it through Reid's entire repertoire of card tricks and started a game of Go Fish, but called it quits mid-game when Rossi announced that dinner was served.
They had quite a spread. In addition to the traditional turkey, mashed potatoes, veggies, and rolls, they also had lasagna as a nod to Rossi's Italian heritage.
"Where's everyone else?" Krystall asked, noticing that there was one additional place set at the table and they were missing a few of the team members she'd been introduced to.
"Tara's having dinner with her dad and her brother. She'll be joining us later for dessert," Rossi said, explaining the extra place setting at the table. "Matt and Kristy have her entire family in town so they're out. And Luke is introducing Lisa to his parents. To be young and in love."
"What about the rest of you?" Krystall asked with a friendly smile. "Does anyone have anything fun planned for the long weekend?"
"I'm going to visit my mom. I'm actually leaving early to catch a flight. The TSA predicted that this Thanksgiving will be the busiest on record. There will be an estimated 30.6 million people traveling by air. Only 1.73 million are traveling today. It's actually the lightest travel day," Reid said, rattling off statistics a mile a minute.
JJ caught Emily's eye and they exchanged amused smiles at Reid's long-winded response to Krystall's attempt at small talk. For her part, Krystall looked a little dazed by the information overload, and he wasn't even done yet.
"With higher than normal wait times due to the increased passenger volume, I still need to get to the airport at least two hours early to get through security. I'm flying out of Dulles because it has approximately 320,000 less passengers for the month of November than BWI does," Reid continued in earnest.
JJ had been waiting patiently for Reid to finish rattling off travel statistics, but took pity on Rossi's fiancé and jumped in, knowing Reid would keep going if they let him. "Good luck with that, Spence. Now I'm kind of glad we're not going anywhere. My mom's in Pennsylvania, and Will's family is in New Orleans, but we decided to stay here since we only have today and tomorrow off."
Emily felt Krystall's warm gaze shift to her and glanced up from her plate. "Oh, uh, my parents are in Europe." She didn't tell the other woman that she wouldn't have spent Thanksgiving with them even if they were in D.C., but the team knew she always spent holidays with her BAU family and not the family she was born into.
"Emily's parents are ambassadors," Rossi added in explanation, hoping to bring an end to any further questioning before it began. Emily looked melancholy enough as it was. There was no need to delve further into her relationship – or lack thereof – with her chronically absentee parents.
Unfortunately, that piqued Krystall's interest. She looked at Rossi speculatively. "Wasn't your ex-wife an ambassador?"
"Hayden," Rossi supplied. "Joy's mother."
"Oh, yeah. Which ex-wife was she again?" Emily asked with a sly grin.
"What, because there are so many to choose from?" Rossi said dryly. "She was the second Mrs. David Rossi. Krystall was the third."
"Third time's the charm," Penelope said with a wide smile.
Emily was relieved when conversation shifted away from family and holiday plans to wedding plans. Penelope wanted to know every little detail of the wedding plans, and Krystall was happy to oblige her.
Bored with wedding talk, Henry asked JJ to be excused when he'd finished about half the food on his plate. JJ started to get up even though she hadn't finished her own food yet, but Emily put a hand on her arm to stop her. "Let me."
Emily picked up the boy's plate and her own plate, scanning the table to see if anyone else was done eating. She added Reid's empty plate to the stack and paused to give Rossi a wry look. "I assume I'm allowed in the kitchen now that the turkey made it out unscathed?"
"I don't know," Rossi murmured with a contemplative expression. "There's a lot of dessert in there that you could ruin."
Michael's eyes widened and he gasped in horror from Will's lap. The three year old looked up at his father with a pleading expression, whispering none-too-quietly for Will not to let Aunt Em near the "pump kin" pie because it was his favorite. Everyone laughed gently – even Emily, though she balanced it out with the pointed glare she aimed at Rossi.
"Just for that, I really may ruin a pie...by throwing it in your face," Emily told Rossi as she walked past him to get to the kitchen.
Emily rinsed off the plates and loaded the dishwasher. Instead of rejoining the team in the dining room, she found the only one who hadn't laughed at her, or rather her limited cooking skills – Henry – in the family room, sitting on the couch playing Mario Kart on his new Nintendo Switch.
"Can I play?" Emily asked, sitting next to him.
He stopped his game and handed her the second controller, explaining what the buttons did before starting a new game. As it turned out, Emily was only a little better at Mario Kart than she was in the kitchen – which wasn't great. In other words, she got her ass handed to her by the ten year old.
It was a little bittersweet playing with JJ's sons when thoughts of her daughter lurked in every corner of her mind. Emily wondered what her daughter had been like at their ages and if the fourteen year old liked Mario Kart or if she was too old for videogames.
Later that night when Emily was home, she opened her laptop and stared at the open Google Chrome browser, long fingers hovering over the keyboard as she fought her thoughts and emotions.
Maybe it was the time of year or the half bottle of wine she'd had at Rossi's that made her type the names of her daughter's adoptive parents in the search window. She was no Penelope Garcia, but Emily could Google stalk with the best of them. After a cursory glance at the search results, she added Bethesda, MD to narrow it down further.
Of all the places she could have gone to hide during her pregnancy, Emily picked Bethesda, Maryland. She spent a few months in Reston, Virginia first, renting a house in the same cul-de-sac where Declan was living with Louise.
There'd been questions about the boy in the staged pictures, and not just from Clyde. It didn't look good that she hadn't mentioned Declan in any of her reports and then had suddenly produced the photographs of him as the key to getting Ian Doyle to talk. No one had questioned whether the boy was really dead, but Emily knew they still could – and if they did, Declan would be in danger.
Emily stayed close to Declan until she was almost five months pregnant and couldn't quite button her pants anymore. That was when she called in reinforcements in the form of her friend, Tom Koehler.
It was hard for Emily Prentiss to trust anyone, but she knew she couldn't protect Declan and her unborn child - at least not alone. She was only one person.
She didn't tell Tom about her baby. It was enough that she was trusting him with Declan. She wasn't going to put two eggs in the same proverbial basket.
Emily left Reston while she could still hide her growing belly under loose-fitting shirts and jackets, but she didn't go far. She crossed state lines, renting a house in Bethesda under a new alias.
It was far enough out of the way that she wouldn't cross paths with anyone, but close enough that she could get back to Declan if anything happened. At least that's what she told herself at the time.
Looking back on it now, Emily thought there might have been a little more to it than just sticking close to Declan. She'd moved around a lot, never staying in one place for more than two years, certainly not long enough for anyplace to really feel like home. D.C. may not have been home –not then anyway – but it was where she'd spent the most time growing up. When her parents' ambassador assignments ended, they always inevitably ended up back in Washington. It was where she graduated from high school and she had more friends and connections there than everywhere else she'd lived combined. In hindsight, that should have made it the very last place she went to hide, but she'd been scared and hadn't wanted to stray too far from her comfort zone.
At that point Emily still hadn't been sure what she was going to do. It was a phone call to Tsia from a burner phone when she was almost eight months pregnant that made her decision for her. Tsia told her Doyle was still being interrogated. Would it ever end? At what point would it be enough? Apparently not before the baby was born. It was only then that she resigned herself to giving the baby up.
Emily briefly considered choosing a friend – someone like Tom Koehler – to raise her baby as their own, but the few people she would trust all had some kind of connection to the Intelligence community. And she didn't want her kid to have any connection to that life – her life, her work for the taskforce. No, she wanted a clean break for the sake of her child if not for her own sake.
Emily had no idea if the couple she'd ultimately chosen to raise her child still lived in Maryland, but she figured it was as good a place to start as any. With the city added to the search criteria, she bit her bottom lip as she pressed enter. So much for a clean break.
The first result that popped up made Emily's heart drop to her stomach. She clicked on the blue link apprehensively, hoping against hope that the obituary was for a different Sarah Johnson. It was a common name.
There was a picture of a woman with shoulder-length auburn hair, creamy white skin, and a warm smile staring back at Emily from the top of the page. She'd only met the other woman once, but Emily would never forget the face of the woman she chose to raise her daughter. It was definitely her in the picture.
Emily closed her eyes and let out the breath she'd been holding. She didn't think she wanted to know what happened to the kindhearted woman, but she knew she needed to know. What if her daughter had been with Sarah? She opened her eyes reluctantly and forced herself to read.
Sarah Rose Johnson
1972 - 2016
JOHNSON, Sarah Rose
Sarah Rose (Smith) Johnson of Bethesda, Maryland passed away on May 26, 2016 at the age of 43 after a long battle with breast cancer. She was born on August 7, 1972 in Naperville, Illinois. She graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1991 with Honors. In 1995, she graduated from University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. She worked as a nurse at Bethesda General Hospital before taking on her favorite job of being a stay-at-home mom to her daughter, Hannah Rose. Sarah loved spending time with her family and was an avid supporter of Hannah's volleyball team. She is survived by her husband of 18 years, Steve Johnson, and her daughter, Hannah Rose of Bethesda, Maryland; her mother, Carole Smith of Naperville, Illinois; and other loving family and friends. She was preceded in death by her father, Peter G Smith. A funeral service will be held at 2:00 pm, Tuesday May 31, 2016 at St. Michael Catholic Church. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in Sarah's honor to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
Emily's eyes filled with tears. She didn't know who she felt worse for - the dead woman or her daughter who was still a child and had lost the only mother she'd ever known.
