A/N: As we move through seasons 3 and 4, episodes and plotlines will be skipped for the sake of the story I am telling. Casey doesn't really exist anymore in this universe, and neither does Dennis Rockmond. The rest of the story (as well as the beginning of it, really) exists to explore the themes of family, loyalty, and love.

Also, in this chapter, Jane and Cavanaugh are moderate Boston democrats. Because most people on the East Coast are moderate democrats. It's kind of baked into the culture. This is a very American topic and has very specific American implications, but you get the picture. Thank you all for reading and reviewing!


Angela, amongst an array of lawn signs and oversized campaign buttons, turned the volume way up on her laptop to hear Tom MacGregor, Jr., candidate for U.S. Congress, talk about healthcare reform. "We gotta build on what the ACA started," he said in his typically Southie cadence to a rally crowd of several hundreds, "it paves the way for universal coverage and protects people with pre-existing conditions. But we got a lot more work to do in terms of makin' healthcare even more transparent."

"You tell 'em, Tom!" Angela shouted with a fist in the air, which jolted Maura from her preoccupation with the packages that had delivered the evening before. "Sorry," Angela apologized, "was that too loud? I just get excited about protecting the ACA because it's the only way so many people can stay insured."

"I like your enthusiasm," Maura smiled the genuine smile that few got to see. In fact, these days, really only Rizzolis got to see it, and it was mirrored on Angela's face.

"I really like Tom MacGregor Jr. Good Scottish lad from an old Boston family, politics in his blood," Angela explained, "homegrown progressive values." She eyed Maura, watching for discomfort or for disdain.

"I'm glad you've found a candidate you can get behind," said Maura, ever the diplomat. She returned to her pile of gear on the counter, some for diving, some for hiking, and kicked herself for ordering so much at one time. Retail therapy or not, where was she going to put it all?

Angela would not be deterred, however. And sometimes, when her more subtle methods did not work, she went for the jugular. So to speak. "You and Janie discuss politics?"

This pulled Maura right out of her shopping conundrum. "We… we discuss everything. I will admit politics has not been at the forefront of our more recent discussions, however."

"You know she's a Democrat, right?" Angela plowed through. She could tolerate many things in in-laws, but support for the preservation of power for the rich was not one of them. She'd been thinking a lot about Jane and Maura's long term, even though Jane had told her they were taking it very slowly, and this was one thing that needed to be out of the way.

"Yes!" Maura said happily, relieved to know the answer to one of Angela's interrogation questions. "Maybe not as progressive as I'd like on the environment or prison reform, yet, but we can work on that, can't we?"

Angela laughed in equal parts relief for herself and pity for Jane. "We certainly can. She doesn't like to advertise that at work because it's not really a…"

"Friendly environment?" Maura supplied helpfully.

"Yeah, we'll go with that. Sean, Lieutenant Cavanaugh, is the same way. Old Irish catholic democrat through and through. But god forbid you try to talk to him about what he stands for, especially at work. He's quiet as the grave," Angela replied on the ends of her giggles.

Maura was about to ask how Angela knew Lieutenant Cavanaugh so well when none other than Jane walked through the front door. Her keys jingled in her hand as she stuffed them back in her pocket, and the other two women shared a smile. Maura actually winked.

"Holy crap, Ma, where's the counter?" Jane must have had her morning coffee, given her spirited entrance. "Glitter? Really?"

"It's festive!" Angela said in defense of herself.

"It's hard to clean up!" Jane retorted, looking at Maura as if to apologize. Maura shrugged as if to say there was no need for one. She walked around toward the other side of the kitchen island, trying on her scuba mask, when Jane gasped at the equipment in front of her. "What's goin' on here?" she asked, holding up the tubing for the oxygen supply, "maximum depth 180 feet? Who are you, James Cameron? Maura, at least he's certified."

"I haven't had time to take the course," Maura replied quietly.

"I hope you don't plan on making me take it," Jane said. "Would it be before or after your 'outback lady walk'?" She walked the hiking boot in the air and grabbed the safari hat from its box. "Ooh. Are you also in the remake of Out of Africa?" she asked as she put it on her head.

"Ok, meanie. Give me that," Maura reached out for the hat, mosquito netting and all, yanking Jane forward by her tucked in t-shirt. Jane smiled with her lips closed and her crow's feet out as she surrendered the hat. The scrutiny of the smile, combined with its intention to disarm, and its place on Jane's very good-looking face, made Maura unsteady. She put the hat on to break whatever tension was forming.

Jane stalked closer anyway - using her larger than average hand, she palmed the dome of the hat like a basketball and pulled it off of Maura's head. "I stay at my place for a weekend and all of the sudden you're redecorating? What's all this for?"

"Leave Maura alone, Janie," Angela said from across the island as she prepped her signs with glitter. "You're not her mother. She can buy what she wants."

"Sure she can," Jane replied. "But she… wait a minute," her eyes were back on Maura again, "c'mere." She took her by the arm to the privacy of the front hall, right in front of the bathroom. "That's what this is about - you buying all that stuff. It's about Hope, isn't it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Maura said without looking at Jane.

"Yes, you do, baby. Whenever you get in a crisis, you get on a first-name basis with the UPS man. Remember when I shot myself and you decided to invite Ron to Thanksgiving? Ron the delivery guy who has his own family out in Dorchester to spend Thanksgiving with?"Jane really was masterful at interrogation when she wanted to be. Even Maura wasn't immune. "It's time to find her."

"No, I don't know," Maura shook her head, wavering.

"You asked me to be ready to help you. That was almost a week ago, and you haven't so much as said her name to me since. But clearly you are in your feelings about it."

"No, I mean, only sixty-five percent of children seek out their biological parents. Maybe I'm meant to be in the other thirty-five."

"Yeah, the other thirty-five having an identity crisis," Jane said, taking Maura's neck in her hand and trailing her thumbpad up and down the length of her throat. "Let me take care of it. Say the word and I'll find her. Considering it's the only thing I can do for you right now."

Maura closed her eyes at the clearly sexual display, electrified by its softness and all that it promised. "That's not the only thing you can do for me. Just because we can't sleep together until tonight does not mean that we can't coexist. Or that you can't do nice things."

"I can barely coexist!" Jane said, stamping her foot, "I haven't touched you since you wanted to stomp on my neck. I'm dyin' over here. I had to sleep in my own bed this weekend because sleepin' in yours was like sleepin' in a volcano."

Maura chuckled, and Jane felt the pretty waves of it against her hand. Their reverie was broken when Jane's phone buzzed on her belt - her hand dropped to her side and pulled up the iPhone. "Rizzoli. Yeah. Ok, I'll be right there. I got Dr. Isles with me." dispatch, no doubt, with the way her face turned serious. "C'mon, we got a case."

They ambled back into the living area so that Maura could grab her purse and her medical bag, and so that Jane could say goodbye to her mother. "You two off to work already?" Angela said sadly, hoping to have had some coffee with them before they left.

"Yup," said Jane, "Oh hey, you can take your safari vest, Maura, since our body's out by Franklin Park." Maura wanted to retaliate against the teasing but Jane's subtle pahk made it hard to do anything but smile goofily.

"Walk, before I drive us there," was all she could manage as she watched Jane's hips sway all the way out the door.


"We should at least talk about it some more," Jane said, continuing their conversation from the car. They headed toward an alley behind a strip mall, the area already secured and full of law enforcement.

"What's there to talk about? My birth mother was an unwed college student sneaking around with a Southie gangster," said Maura. Her hot pink blazer brought out the vibrancy of her green eyes when they walked in the sun.

"So? That's at least interesting," Jane responded, "My mother married the neighborhood plumber. The only sneakin' around she did was in Filene's basement. Even our sneakin' is more noteworthy than that."

Maura smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Paddy Doyle, my father-"

"In sperm only," Jane corrected.

"Yeah, who is waiting to be tried for 15 murders, told Hope that I died at birth. Help me understand how that could make for a successful reunion," Maura finished. They'd nearly reached their victim and Korsak waved them over.

"Ok, but don't you at least wanna know somethin' about her? Anything?" Jane asked kindly, her hand flat on Maura's back.

"No!" Maura shouted, too nasally and too forced, and suddenly Jane's long index finger pushed her all the way backwards until she hit a dumpster.

"You. You found her, didn't you?" Jane accused. "You did. You and I were gonna do this together! And don't even pretend - you are gonna get the worst case of hives if you lie."

"I had her first name, her age, where she went to college… my birth date. I couldn't help it," Maura whined.

Jane sighed noisily. "You did the gumshoe thing without me. When you specifically told me you wanted my help doing the gumshoe thing."

Maura stepped into Jane now that they weren't a Rizzoli arm's length apart. "Sometimes my impulsivity gets the better of me. Don't be mad." Jane glared theatrically to prove a point. "My sutures are going to be removed after work," Maura continued, hoping to coax a smile from her, "don't ruin our reunion by being upset."

Jane swallowed thickly and all pretense left her. She looked at Maura's lips desperately, covered in the lip gloss she liked so much and parted just so, and groaned. "Like nine hours?"

"I'd say that's a fair estimate, yes. Nine hours from now we-"

"I'm sure whatever you're discussin' is riveting, but our victim, white female, looks like her hands have been blowtorched," Korsak interrupted with a loud throat clear and pointed to the dumpster right behind Jane and Maura.

"I'm gonna make sure you never get within 100 feet of a woman again," Jane threatened him with gritted teeth. "Ever. The hell's wrong with you?"

He only cackled with his gloved hands in the air. "Didn't realize it was that riveting. Wanna see ID?"

She continued to glower, but then reached out for the driver's license in his hand. "What's the point of burnin' her hands if you leave the ID?"

"No clue," Korsak said. "Celia Jaffe, 27, is what it says."

Jane walked over to where Maura had donned a Tyvek suit and climbed into the dumpster with the body. "What're you seein'?"

"Lividity indicates she died after midnight and was dumped here shortly after," Maura explained.

Jane picked up the victim's right hand. "Well, good thing we got an ID because we're not getting any prints off these."

Frost, who had conveniently stayed away for most of the initial investigation of the burned body, looked away when he spoke to Jane. "I'll find out if she has a husband or a boyfriend," he said, already starting toward his car.

"Let's get her photographed and get her outta here," Jane ordered. Maura nodded, and several techs walked over to do as told.


Jane tapped a pen against the grain of her desk, chin in her hand and boot tapping the linoleum.

"You've been distracted all morning," Frost told her, rocking back in his chair as he was wont to do. "Is it the Paddy stuff?"

She stopped her tapping and crossed her arms. "Eh. He's well enough to be transferred to Walpole. That's actually where Maura wants him."

"So what is it then?" He asked. He tossed her the stress ball he'd been squeezing.

She caught it. "Maura found her birth mom."

Now he leaned forward. "She found Hope?"

"How do you know about Hope?" Jane asked him severely.

Frost rolled his eyes. "You're not her only friend, you know. You especially weren't her only friend when you two were at each others' throats. Is she nice? Is she anything like Maura?"

"They haven't met yet," said Jane. Then she panicked for a moment. "I don't think, anyway."

"So then why are you so bent out of shape?"

"It's stupid."

"Alright, if you say so."

"A'right a'right," Jane put her hands out, giving the game up without any pressure from her partner, "she asked me to help her find Hope when the time came, but then the time came and I had no idea that she had even been looking."

"Really? You've been so far up her…" when Jane nearly lunged over their desks at him, Frost quickly altered course. "You two have been so close the past week or so that I figured you'd be tellin' each other everything."

Jane had to give him that. "Yeah, me too. But then this morning I found out that she'd looked her up all on her own."

"And that rubbed you the wrong way," Frost supplied. He actually waved his hand as if to beckon her to continue.

"What're you, my shrink? Yeah, it rubbed me the wrong way, but just because she asked for help. But I'm not gonna take it personal. If they do meet, it'll be turning her life upside down and I probably just need to be there to pick up the pieces," Jane said. Her chin was back in her hand and she huffed.

"Well that's very adult of you," he smirked, "so, things are good then?"

Jane stood up and pushed her chair without taking her blazer. "Things are good. I'm gonna go check how the autopsy's goin' before you get any more outta me." She smirked at him over her shoulder as she waited for the elevator and he waved her away with his own smile on his face.


The ride to the basement filled Jane with a familiar sense of yearning and a quickly familiarizing sense of hesitance. She stepped out with haste, the need to see Maura outweighing the awkwardness of their last conversation. As she swerved past the criminalists marching to and from the crime lab, she caught sight of Maura on her laptop, but couldn't make out the display on her screen through the blinds of her office. She took a breath and then walked into the room. "What're you doin'?" she asked.

"Checking the weather," Maura obfuscated, quickly slamming the computer shut.

Jane snorted. "Yeah, ok," she said, still standing, reaching for the computer.

Maura snatched it away and threw it under a pillow on the sofa. "What? I said, checking the weather!" she snapped.

"Ok, ok - Jesus," Jane couldn't help the bark of laughter that ensued. She looked down at the coffee table to see a large frame under some case files. "Why aren't you examining the body?" she asked Maura to distract her. When Maura sighed and rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, Jane exposed the frame with the drawing of Hope inside. "I knew it! The weather? Really?"

"It's the daily forecast on her Wikipedia page," Maura explained, opening the computer back up.

"Whose page?" Jane sat down next to her and saw Hope for the first time. "Oh my God, Maura. She looks just like you," she said as her jaw literally fell open.

"You mean I look like her," Maura said. "Her name is Hope. Doctor Hope Martin."

Jane leaned in to get a better view of the picture next to her biography. "She's kinda hot," she said, squinting.

Maura exhaled, and took Jane's face in her hands to kiss her. Their lips clung together and Jane hummed when Maura ran her fingernails over her cheeks. "Don't make me jealous of a woman I've never even met. Who is also my mother."

Jane turned back to the screen, Maura still touching her, and said, "She's kinda famous, too. ' founded an international relief agency, M.E.N.D.'"

"Medical Emergency Network for Doctors. Their mission is to treat women and children. Keep scrolling. See the forensic pathology residency she did in Sarajevo?" Maura asked. She ran her thumbs against the dimple in Jane's chin before placing her hands back in her lap.

"Yeah," Jane said, not sure if she was supposed to be impressed.

"She's done everything."

"So she identifies victims of genocide and saves women and children around the world. Big deal. You're just as accomplished, babe."

"No, I'm not," Maura said bashfully, "Paddy said she was brilliant."

"And recently divorced," Jane pointed to the screen.

"She has a daughter, Cailin, 18. She's been living abroad for the past twenty years," Maura said. Jane watched Maura's nose twitch to keep her from crying, and then she glanced toward the very un-autopsied body of their victim on one of the morgue tables.

"Ok, Celia Jaffe needs an autopsy and I need a cause of death, Maura," pleaded Jane, tapping all of her pent-up investigative energy onto Maura's knee.

Maura ignored it. "Hope even developed a technique to identify the victims of genocide that we are still using today."

Jane's eyes shot back to Celia's burned hands. "It's too bad she's not local. We could use her right about now." Maura continued to concentrate on the screen in front of her, oblivious to Jane's hints. Jane watched her with equal parts concern and love. "She's probably very curious about you, too. You've done lots of important things. You're also kinda hot. What's not to be curious about?"

Maura leaned forward and then back, a physical manifestation of her turmoil. "Why would she be curious? She doesn't even know I exist. Or maybe she does," she said, toggling to a tab with an article from The Globe about her relation to Paddy Doyle, "how could she not? She hasn't made any effort to contact me."

"Ok, Maura. Maybe she saw that and thinks Paddy was cheating on her and had a kid named Maura," said Jane, all the Irish names sounding foreign on her tongue. "Or maybe she only reads fancy French newspapers. Or maybe…" as Jane started, Maura could tell that this last one was the most plausible to her, "she hasn't thought of Doyle in the past thirty-six years."

"Or me," Maura presumed, resigned to Hope's utter indifference, even if she had no idea how Hope actually felt.

"Nah. I bet she thought about you every day, for a long time. And I bet she still thinks about you often, even now. Ma told me that kids become a parent's number one priority until they die. So somewhere deep down, you still gotta be Hope's priority," said Jane, never having birthed children or been a parent.

Maura shrugged, not sure if she wanted to be consoled, and started to close her laptop again.

Jane, who had been scanning it, reached out to stop her. "Wait a minute-"

"No, don't," Maura pleaded, just wanting to be done.

"Oh my god, she's back in Boston?!" Jane exclaimed, "I don't believe in coincidences; this is meant to be."

"I'd be turning her world upside down. For what?" Maura said.

Jane shook her head. "So she can have you in her life. Ok? Late is a million times better than never, and a life with you in it is better than any life without."

Maura blushed. "You're biased. And it's not if it causes her pain."

"What? Listen, you're my concern here, and look at the pain you're in," Jane pointed out. Maura had to concede this; knowing Hope existed and not being able to at least meet her was tearing her up inside. Jane let her hand be taken and intertwined with Maura's for comfort when her phone buzzed with a text. "Shit. I uh, I got a suspect upstairs. C'mon. Do the autopsy, ok? I need it and it'll make you feel better. Let's go. March, babe, march."

Maura, given over to melancholy, let herself be pulled up by the arms and her behind be patted in the direction of the autopsy suite.


An hour later, Maura, with her hair clipped back and her white coat on her shoulders, watched Jane enter the morgue through the glass of the shelves in front of her. She pushed through the double doors and took her place on the opposite side of the table where Celia Jaffe lay. She was fidgety, brimming with barely bridled impulse. She flitted her gaze down to the exposed skin of Maura's middle chest, probably unknowingly, if Maura had to guess. But she was so handcuffed by want the past week that she did it often, and Maura let her, if only to have at least a modicum of mercy. "What's wrong?" she asked Jane finally.

"Two things," Jane said, twisting her knuckle into the scar on her left palm to soothe the ache of it, "One. That ain't Celia Jaffe."

Maura looked down at the corpse with fresh eyes, her compartmentalization instant. "The ID was fake?"

Jane shook her head vigorously. "No. It was stolen. Probably by whoever she is," she waved toward the victim, "so now we're at square one with no prints."

Maura pursed her lips as she tried to think of solutions. "What was the second thing?"

Jane snarled. "BPD's got a new counselor for families of homicide victims. Wanna know who it is?"

"Who?"

"Sister Winifred Callahan. One of my old teachers and the meanest person I've ever met. Her desk is literally behind me in the bullpen." Jane threw her head back and her voicebox bobbed up and down like an apple in water and Maura started to sweat. Maybe Jane wasn't the only one who had needs.

"That sounds… unfortunate," Maura consoled, loath to see Jane dip her chin back toward the ground again. But, Jane hung her head in defeat and huffed.

"She's here doin' 'the Lord's Work.' That's what she said when she hit me with a ruler when I was seven because I misspelled 'flamboyant," she replied, and Maura saw some far off hurt in her eyes to go with all the annoyance.

"Why was 'flamboyant' on a second-grade spelling test at a Catholic school?" Maura asked in solidarity and true confusion.

"You know why, Maura." Jane narrowed her brow. "One kid in the class who doesn't like to pull girls' pigtails and talk about the Sox and all of a sudden we all gotta get a lesson in what 'flamboyant' means and why we should never be it. I also put my foot through a classroom window trying to kill a fly that year, so maybe me and Danny Alberti were two flamboyant peas in a pod."

"The church is…" Maura began, not sure how to finish her statement without offending Jane.

"Homophobic as shit," Jane did it for her. "And that's how they make the rest of us homophobic as shit, too. Start us young."

"I'm sorry that you were exposed to those types of attitudes growing up," said Maura. "My parents were very… bohemian in that way, I guess. With my mother being an artist, and my father a university professor, I didn't really see homophobia in that way. When I think about that, it makes me grateful for them. Like maybe I don't need to meet Hope after all. They could be enough."

Jane put both her gloved hands on the table and leaned forward. "It's not about that, about meeting her because your other parents aren't good enough. It's about putting all this uncertainty behind you."

"Let me tell you what I know," Maura smiled, leaning in, too. "She has a depressed skull fracture."

She pointed to the x-ray on the monitor by Jane's head and Jane followed her gaze. "Musta been a hefty weapon," she said as she saw the size and shape of the crack.

"Not a weapon," Maura clarified.

"So… she woke up this morning and after she brushed her teeth she thought, 'gee, my head really hurts'?" Jane teased.

"No… she has a countrecoup contusion from a fall," Maura said. She smirked. "'Countrecoup' means-"

"You gotta stop that - it's not my first rodeo. It means her brain bounced around inside her skull."

"After striking a hard object, yes."

"So, not a pillow then?" teased Jane.

"No - otherwise I'd have a massive coup-countrecoup injury from last weekend," Maura said, not looking Jane in the face, but grinning wickedly when she knew Jane would be looking at her.

"Uh, hmmm." Jane sputtered, most of her skin exposed to the light now a pinkish hue. "You, you can't say stuff like that. Not until…" she looked at her watch, "Whenever I get off work."

"Well, it takes longer when you make jokes," Maura retorted. She rotated the victim's hand in her own grip, examining each finger.

"Baby if I didn't joke, I'd poke my eyes out with a scalpel. Just so I didn't have to endure the torture of looking but not touching," Jane said. She crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow.

"Oh. Oh, I might have something," said Maura, and then they were all business again, "her fourth digit on her right hand isn't as badly burned as the others. I might be able to try a rehydration technique."

"You can get a print off that? Yikes. It looks like a charred tootsie roll," Jane said.

"I've never done it. I've only read about it in an article published by… her," Maura attested quietly.

"Well, perhaps we should call Dr. Hope Martin, then, since she's in the city," Jane said what Maura refused to.

"No!" Maura shouted, then revised, "no. I'll just try it myself." She squared her shoulders and snipped the finger free. "You have to detach the finger to rehydrate the tissue."

"A'right…" Jane followed as Maura placed the digit in a beaker and carried it over to a workstation at the lab. She printed a copy of the research paper by Dr. Martin and immediately got to work.

Jane watched with no small amount of awe as Maura took chemicals from a shelf in the back of the lab, put on goggles, and set out to measure and pour with pipettes and more containers. She knew that she could never be Maura's intellectual equal, not in this way. In the way that she had instinct for lies and for motives, Maura had instinct for reactions and chemical cause and effect. She had instinct for physics and for mathematics and for all the things that Jane struggled with. None of it came naturally to her, and she had busted her ass in high school to get grades good enough in the sciences to be accepted by BCU. But science was an extension of Maura's right, dominant hand. So when she cursed after the first trial, Jane was surprised.

"Shit," she said, "that wasn't it." She marched over to a glass writing board and began to chart chemical compounds.

"Shouldn't a crime lab tech be doin' this?" Jane asked. She wasn't sure they should if Maura couldn't figure it out, but maybe it'd be less stressful to delegate.

"No, stop criticizing," Maura snapped, "I tried potassium chloride but it was too destructive to the friction ridge skin."

"You only got one finger, Maura," Jane warned as she walked behind Maura back to the table.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Maura asked with bite.

"It means you can't screw it up. So maybe you call Hope to do this."

"You don't think I can do this?"

Jane bit her tongue as she thought of something better to say than the reply that first popped into her head. "Ok look at it like this: So the Sox are in an elimination game in the playoffs. Who do they start?"

Maura wondered why she was being asked about baseball at a time like this, but she went along with it. "Clay Buccholz, obviously. His ERA and WHIP are by far the best on the team."

"Right. You're Clay Buccholz. But he can't go nine every time. He'd blow his arm out or he'd cough up all the leads he worked so hard to build. So if we need to relieve him, who do we throw in?" Jane asked, hands now on Maura's arms.

"That would be Koji Uehara. I suppose I don't need to explain to you why that would be," Maura guessed.

"Nah. This metaphor works because I know all the answers. Hope is Koji right now. Call her in because we have a game on the line and one chance to get it done," Jane replied.

"I also only have one biological mother and I'd rather not screw that up," Maura reasoned. She turned to the finger again with her new elixir and swirled it to bring out ridge detail. "Damn. The Ruffer rehydration method modified by Walker isn't working."

"You don't know how to do it," Jane said, moving back to the other side of the table and meeting Maura's eyes that way, hoping to will her point across.

"Yes, I do," Maura answered back petulantly.

"No, you don't," Jane shut her down. "You said you wanted to know her, ok? Meet her on a level playing field. Meet her here, as a colleague." When Maura didn't budge, Jane tried to implore for her own sake. Maura never refused Jane a favor. "I gotta find out who this woman is so I can find out who killed her." That also didn't work, so Jane pulled out her phone and started to dial.

"Who are you calling?" Maura finally asked.

"Dr. Pike. He'll help," Jane replied.

"Jane don't you dare call that knucklehead," Maura ordered.

"Just face whatever it is that's terrifying you, then!" Jane shouted. "Face her!"

Maura, always influenced by Jane's hot-blooded displays, bolted into action. She grabbed her phone. "Ok."

"Ok?" asked Jane, flummoxed that it was that easy.

"Ok. Ok, I'm going to do it. I am going to call her now."

"Like now now?"

"Yes. Before I lose my nerve," Maura replied as she pressed the numbers.

"Ok," Jane said, still pleasantly surprised, "you don't wanna…?" she made a motion to represent practicing a conversation first.

"No, no. I am perfectly calm," said Maura, phone to her ear. "I am Dr. Maura Isles, the Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonweal-" When a woman on the other end answered with Dr. Martin, however, Maura silenced herself. She stared at Jane, her brash, Italian lifeline, for the briefest of seconds, then held out the phone to her.

"You - no, you have to do it!" Jane gasped, recoiling.

"No, no, no, I can't," Maura panicked. She threw the phone at Jane, who caught it.

"Hello?" said the woman on the phone, and Jane transformed again.

The change was subtle, but her posture improved and her eyes got soft. "Hi, I'm calling from the office of Dr. Maura Isles, the Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Could you hold for her please?" she shoved the phone back at Maura after her secretarial performance.

"I can't, I can't," begged Maura, and Jane was about to hang up when the tiniest, most helpless "please," fell from her lips. She pulled the blackberry to her ear again and cleared her throat. "I'm so sorry. I hate cell phones, don't you? We're trying to identify a Jane Doe. Would you be willing to do a consult? Half an hour would be fine. Thank you so much!" She finally did hang up, fully aware of what she had just done to Maura, and winced.

"A half hour? Are you out of your mind?" Maura screeched, and her hyperventilation response kicked in.

Jane grimaced. "You can do it."

"No-"

"Yes you can, you can do this," Jane said, hands defensively out in front of her. "Take it slow, ok? Remember, right now you're just passin' the ball. Just hand the ball off."

"Oh god," Maura groaned.

"Ok, ok, you need to get ahold of yourself. Take off the coat, spritz on some perfume, and let's powerwalk up to the cafe because like it or not, we're doin' this. Now," Jane's pep talk moved from soothing to ass-busting, and if Maura weren't so distraught, she might have found it endearing. Instead she moved on autopilot, following Jane's instructions as they moved from the lab, to her office, to the elevator.

"Is it too late to call in sick?" Maura asked when they exited onto the ground floor, "I don't think I can do this."

Jane touched her wrist reassuringly as they entered the cafe from the BPD employees' side. "What? No, you can - oh my god! Ma!"

Angela Rizzoli, in a campaign shirt, had set up an information center and one-stop shop for Tom MacGregor in the entire back wing of the cafe. There were posters, streamers, buttons, and even volunteers. "What?" she asked, sounding both innocent and annoyed.

"Cavanaugh is gonna kill you; BPD hates Tom MacGregor - he's soft on crime," Jane whined as she waved her arms at all the political paraphernalia.

Maura was momentarily distracted by confusion. "You're going to vote for him," she said to Jane.

"So is Sean," Angela shrugged.

"Yeah, and if he finds out you set this up and somehow it gets associated with him - wait," Jane interrupted her own rant, "Sean?"

Angela diverted expertly, wrapping a motherly arm around Maura's shoulders. "Honey," she said, ignoring Jane, "don't you want to at least meet her?"

Maura walked with mother and daughter toward the counter, and daughter dropped her previous line of questioning because mother was taking care of Maura. "Well, obviously I'm curious. But I don't need a mother," Maura said, "I have a mother."

"What can I get you?" asked Angela, in typical Angela fashion. "Have a coffee. That always makes Janie feel better."

"Do you have those green-label organic beans?" Maura responded timidly.

"Of course," Angela smiled, half at Maura's request and half at Jane's hand on Maura's elbow.

"Make it extra hot," said Maura, now emboldened by feeling so understood. "And 1 percent milk, not 2 percent."

"Flat, with just a hint of foam? Yes, baby," Angela chuckled and got to work.

"And a spoon, please. No coffee stirrer."

"There's an aftertaste," a feminine voice called from behind them, and they all turned around. At the entrance of the cafe, in a mint green designer dress and a floral Hermés scarf draped across her shoulders, stood a woman who looked exactly like Maura. "Most coffee stir sticks are made from 100 percent birch wood. There are no chemicals, or toxins, or glazes, but the birch plant is known to be bitter - thus the slightly unpleasant aftertaste." She talked like Maura too, with an explanation for something as banal and yet complicated as Maura's distaste for coffee stirrers.

Jane stood straighter by the phrase - Maura felt her growing taller next to her and even though she felt a twinge of guilt, she drew comfort from Jane turning into Detective Rizzoli. "You must be Dr. Martin," said Jane cooly and kindly. "Hi. I'm Detective Jane Rizzoli," she introduced herself, long arm reaching out to shake Hope's hand. Maura registered the fleeting signs of shock on her birth mother's face at the strength of it, the firmness of it, and she shivered with anticipation and more than a little bit of thrill. Her… Jane was shaking her… mother's hand and her mother was impressed by Jane's assertion. It was a juvenile pride, but it took hold of Maura anyway.

"And I'm Angela. I'm Jane's mom," Angela said, her hand much more soft in Hope's. Hope smiled brightly at her.

"And this," said Jane, words sweet and reverent, "is Dr. Maura Isles."

"What a pleasure," said Hope, facing Maura and clearly taken with her, "I am flattered that you would want a consult."

Maura took shelter in science because it had always given it to her. "I've tried so many formulas: tetrodotoxin, glucose, methylene-"

"Dr. Isles, are you all right?" Hope interjected, concern in her voice, as she pointed to Maura's neck. Hives quickly spread across her skin.

"Why? Because I'm talking too much, too fast, and not making any sense?" Maura asked.

"You're showing signs of urticaria," Hope responded.

"Oh! You have hives!" said Angela.

"Oh shit, Maura," Jane slipped back into herself for a moment, hand firm and repetitive across Maura's back, not sure how the strokes would help the reaction, but trying it anyway.

"It must be because you, uh, you ate the brazil nuts," Angela said, rather unhelpfully, but valiantly.

It took everything within Jane not to roll her eyes. "Yeah, Dr. Isles. How many times do we have to tell you to avoid brazil nuts?" Detective Rizzoli was back again.

"Do you have your EpiPen?" Hope asked a very common sense question, but because Maura had such trouble lying, she could only point in the vague direction of downstairs. "Alright," said Hope then, "I would very much like to see your victim, so we should head in that direction."

"And I, uh, I have a lot of work to do upstairs. So I'm gonna go," said Jane. Maura begged her silently not to go, not to leave her, but Jane really did need to work. She squeezed Maura's elbow one more time. "I'll call ya later," she said quietly, almost privately, in an easy North End accent, and then winked as if to wish Maura good luck.

Maura was petrified instead when Hope walked next to her and they took the other elevator down. "It's quite something, isn't it? The accent here?" Hope asked probably to pass the time. "To be back in Boston after over twenty years, after having lived in London for so long, has been quite the homecoming. Something I just accepted as the norm when I was growing up, as how people talked, becomes fascinating when you can trace it from its roots. When you can hear its ancestor and then compare the two."

"Jane code switches," Maura spouted, almost as a confession. Her compulsion to state anything about Jane when nervous, or scared, or excited, or aroused, reared itself. "Here, she rarely falls into her more comfortable regional variation."

Hope nodded as the elevator dinged and Maura showed her the lab. "It's hard for women in the workplace for many reasons, but we are not afforded the same luxury as some men to be perceived as working class."

Maura let the conversation take its course because it felt benign. "Yes. And yet, if she's perceived as too affluent, that could mean loss of respect and therefore loss of safety for her, too. It's an unfair double standard."

"Well said. Should we start?" asked Hope, her smile bright.


"And I came up with this rehydration technique because we were so desperate to identify the bodies," Hope, after an hour of creating and explaining, and then demonstrating, the chemical solution used to rehydrate the tissue of the victim's digit, began to narrate its origins.

"After the genocide in Sarajevo?" Maura asked, rapt with attention.

"Yes. And then we had to use it again to identify entire Kurdish families slaughtered by Saddam Hussein," Hope said.

"So, what made you go from your medical internship to Sarajevo?"

"Maybe I was punishing myself. Maybe I didn't believe that I could save people, but I knew that I could speak for the dead," Hope uttered wistfully.

The sentiment rattled in Maura's soul. "Well, I wish that I could speak for her. She's someone's daughter," she added poignantly.

"That's what drives me. Everyone is someone's child," said Hope.

"You… you said you were punishing yourself. For what?" Maura hoped that her question wasn't as obvious as it sounded to her own ears.

"Something stupid I did when I was eighteen. I hope my daughter has better judgment than I did then."

"What did you do?"

"I… got pregnant and the baby died at birth," Hope said with a broken pitch, "It was terrible and traumatic. But… maybe there was a reason that she didn't survive. Her father was, well, an evil man."

Maura bit the inside of her lip until she tasted blood to keep from crying. "I'm sorry," she said once she had regained decorum, "I didn't mean to pry."

"I never talk about this," Hope confessed. "I spend so many years trying to forget. Maybe it's because you're a doctor, but I feel a strange kinship with you."

"Me too," Maura whispered, not trusting her vocal folds to stay loyal. Luckily, before she tested them even more, Jane burst in from upstairs.

"I got nothin' up there," she said, nearly breathless, eyes only on Maura. Her arms were wide to accommodate her badge and firearm, and her hair was clearly just rustled through because it looked wilder than usual. It was a moment of disarmed and desperate Jane, one that usually only Maura got to see. When Jane noticed Hope there, remembered who she was, she blushed. "Tell me you're seeing whorls and ridges," she said, now a good professional woman and remembered to say all her Rs and nasal velars.

"We are," Hope said to her, glasses halfway down the bridge of her nose and with a knowing smirk. "And there is excellent ridge detail."

Jane glanced at Maura for permission, and as soon as it was granted to her, she took the finger. "Ok, let me see if it scans," she said, and it did. "That's a good print. Well done, doctors."

Hope turned to Maura and hugged her in celebration, tightly and with several pats to her back. This proved overwhelming, and Maura let go of the tears she had tried so hard to hold in moments before. She cried openly on Hope's shoulder. "Oh my," exclaimed Hope, pulling back in concern, trying to read Maura's grief-contorted features.

Jane herself broke at the sight. "She uh, she gets very emotional when we break a case wide open," she lied for Maura, restrained herself from going to her.

"Yes, I do," Maura affirmed the lie through a wet sob, reaching out for Jane unconsciously, and Jane supplied her with a tissue. "Thank you," she said, both for the Kleenex and the save from collapsing rather gracelessly into the arms of her new lover in front of her stranger of a biological mother.

"How lovely," Hope commented as she removed the white coat Maura had let her borrow and redonned her scarf. "Well, I'm sorry, but I have to go pick up my daughter."

"Thank you so much, Dr. Martin," Jane said.

"You are very welcome," said Hope, turning to Maura. "Dr. Isles, I would very much like to have lunch some time."

"Of course," said Maura politely when she had recovered. "You have my information."

"Let's make it sooner rather than later. I really, really enjoyed it," and with that, Hope departed.

Jane, as soon as she had rounded the corner, bounded over to Maura and gathered her into her arms. One hand stroked her shoulder and the other thumbed circles on the small of her back. "Maura," she cooed, "that was so beautiful. When are you gonna tell her?"

Maura unraveled at the way Jane felt against her, like safety when her words nestled deep into the hair just above her ear. "Never," she sobbed. "Never ever, never ever, never ever."