John – the doctor – he'd made a mistake, in the ambulance. Everyone kept trying to get her to stop pushing, don't push, don't push sweetheart, but she wanted to go home and they had to come out if she was ever going home

Ah, well, it's too late now, he'd said suddenly. She panicked then, the shame and terror of what she'd done crashing over her. What if she'd killed them? What if she'd murdered innocent babies? Instead of trying to get them out she was trying to hold them in. If they didn't come out they couldn't die from what she'd done. Jesus, Lord Jesus, sweet Lord of mercy please please please—

Maybe that's why he'd put the first one on her chest, between her breasts, over her heart, its high thin cry vibrating against her skin.

"Her lungs are clear and she's pinked up nicely," he said. She put her hand on the sticky little back, head, bottom, stroking up and down and over the warm flesh. Alive, thank you, God!

She was barely through the hospital doors when a baby boy was plopped onto her belly next to the girl, and then a whir of midwives and doctors and afterbirth. Babies removed and returned to her all wrapped in blankets with little hats on their heads. She had tubes in her arms and she felt so weak, but they tried to get her to nurse anyway-

She wasn't even supposed to hold the babies! That was part of the arrangement. The dads were to be the first ones to handle their children, to cement the bonding experience. Dr Watson had told them about the tea. Surely he'd told them about the surrogacy. But he was gone now, and it was, truly, too late. She'd already kissed them on their heads.

The fierceness of her desire to keep holding them, to touch and stroke and stare at them and kiss them constantly – it was overwhelming. Knowing this was entirely due to feel-good neurotransmitters and a flood of hormones did nothing to diminish the desire. Reason had been fighting a losing battle with hormones for months and would soon succumb completely. Already she was thinking about what she'd need to do to raise them on her own. Which was totally out of the question. Her faith in God was predicated on the idea that, having blessed her with a good mind and a healthy body, she could make informed decisions about her life without coming to Him for help all the time. She was thankful for her good mind and healthy body and told Him so daily, but she only prayed for guidance when circumstances were beyond her abilities to resolve. Like her mother's recurring cancer. She'd prayed then and help came in the form of a gay couple who wanted her to have their children.

Her coat was on a chair next to the bed. The babies were in their cots sleeping and she steeled herself against looking at them as she fumbled the pre-paid phone from a pocket. It was the phone the dads sent to the hotel room when she'd first arrived in London, with a note explaining they didn't want her to accrue any charges on her own phone. How considerate that had seemed at the time. But in the past couple of weeks as she'd tried contacting them over and over, all she could think was that she was caught in a nightmare, that she was the butt of a huge cosmic joke. Her faith had been rode hard and put up wet.

The voice mail message for the number they'd given her was the same impersonal automated one that came with every service, except it had an English accent. "I've had your babies," she told it.. "I'm at University College Hospital in London. It's about 8 PM. We may not be here tomorrow if we don't hear from you tonight."

She got back into bed and prayed in earnest, fervently, silently. Four hours later she was being wheeled into a private suite at the Portland Hospital where she sank into a comfortable bed and a dead sleep.

At some point she heard men's anxious voices talking about her brother coming to see her, which she thought was awfully sweet of her brother considering she didn't have one. She couldn't quite wake up enough to tell them that at the time. But when did, when she finally regained consciousness enough do so her first coherent thought was the certain realization she'd been drugged. She leaned over the side of the bed and vomited into a conveniently placed plastic bin, then sat up and looked around. A small bedroom in a strange house. There were no windows. There was no door handle on the inside.

The day-planner Sherlock had confiscated from Amber's backpack and slipped into his coat pocket was the sort offered to students at universities in the US; spiral binding and the logo of the athletic department's mascot on the cover – in this instance, a cartoon dragon named Blaze spitting flames out of its mouth. In it, Amber had recorded every meeting, appointment, and visit related to her mother's cancer treatments, as well as her own department's lab schedule and meetings with her thesis adviser. There were no entries to indicate she'd met with prospective parents or their lawyer or that she was undergoing hormone injections for ovulation induction in preparation for IVF.

She may have worried the planner might be seen by her mother or a fellow student or perhaps even a member of her church. In fact, when he first glanced through it, he'd thought some of the entries were in code, which is why he'd pocketed it in the first place. But he proved to be mistaken on that account. He'd also been unable to find any sort of schedule maintained via her mobile. All of the message logs and several contact numbers had been removed permanently just days after her mother's memorial service. He'd discovered that after wasting too much time hacking into the device. Yet, she'd kept the planner. People so often committed nonsensical, unreasonable acts when grieving – and, apparently, when pregnant.

There were other things in the planner though, those very things he'd mistaken for coded entries, and these were not connected to her sorry situation and how he might rescue her from it. There were no clues that would help him locate her.

No. Instead, spiraling around and around within blank squares of the planner's pages were strings of chemical notation. Complex, intriguing formulas that tormented him with their seemingly casual elegance. Other things as well, more indulgent but no less revelatory. In subscript, the poetry of neurogenesis, between girlish doodles of spirals, dots, and flowers, a few thoughts about the motility of cancer cells, an analysis of compounds found in wild honey from the Ukraine, variations of gene expression in mountain lupine. It was mind-boggling actually. This wasn't even her serious work.

And now, the existence of her day planner, secreted away in his bedroom, buried in a drawer under neatly folded underpants as if it were porn, was starting to trouble him more and more. It wasn't shame he was feeling though. He didn't really do shame. This was more … covetousness with a sprinkle of envy.

He wondered if he'd been dragging his feet about her simply because he wanted to keep the book, maybe play with the ideas, perhaps expand upon a few and …well, possibly claim them as his own. He didn't need John to tell him how very very not good that was. The number of times the same sort of thing had happened to him at university was part of the reason he'd left.

This must be what his professors felt when dealing with him. God, it was horrible.

Amber Call, who had bemoaned the shrinking of her brain (with good reason), who had lied and then attempted to charm him using some sort of "southern belle" routine, who was naïve to the point of embarrassment regarding homosexuality (and likely, all sexuality), who (for some unfathomable reason) put faith in a Christian god, was also a genius chemist. Her mother's cancer had prompted her interest in the field and then her mother's recurrent cancer had forced her to decline a scholarship and a share in a fellowship grant that would have covered much of the cost of her graduate studies. Her withdrawal from the program had made her professors weep for the loss of her talent – or so her thesis adviser had claimed in an email to him.

At least her genius didn't appear to extend much beyond chemistry. He took some comfort in that.

John's assertions that Amber hadn't been interesting enough for him to bother with were well off the mark. Even so, it wasn't as if Sherlock had kept the day planner merely for nefarious reasons and then pretended its author no longer existed. John asked him to look into her whereabouts and he had done so – because John asked him to. He'd gone beyond the call he felt.

He'd followed a goddamned nappy trail looking for her.

John had decided to torture himself with dim sum and Soo Lin Yao. He'd usually tried not to think about Soo Lin Yao, and how he'd left her in the echoing dark, left her with an empty promise that she'd be safe, and how she was not at all safe and how she'd died terrified – in the dark. When he saw the dead woman in Amber's red coat it was Soo Lin Yao all over again.

It wasn't Sherlock's fault. It was his. He'd taken on the responsibility of Amber in the ambulance – sooner if he was honest and then he'd bailed, just as he'd bailed on Soo Lin Yao to hare off after Sherlock. Sherlock, who could bloody well take care of himself. Usually. Most of the time.

Except when he couldn't.

Harriet, bless her alcoholic soul, was right about one thing. John was a co-dependent enabler of the highest order - which is why he had to stay away from his sister lest he fall into old habits. He was doing the same thing with Sherlock now. Of course the rewards were greater for him. And Sherlock didn't get sloppy drunk, come over all weepy and then vomit on his shoes. Big plus there.

You're his friend not his conscience.

He stabbed a dumpling with the narrow end of a chopstick and stuck it in his mouth.

"That was the last one!" Sherlock slid into the seat across from him wearing a moue of disappointment.

John did not bother to ask how Sherlock had found him. He swallowed the dumpling and, without looking him in the eyes, said, "I'm sorry."

"That's all right. They're only my favorites."

"No, I'm sorry for what I said."

"When?"

John glanced up searching his friend's face for signs he was taking the piss. Nope. He apparently didn't know or had conveniently deleted from his organic hard drive those words John had flung at him. "I shouldn't have said that about paying you, implying that you do what you do for money. That was shit of me. So, I'm sorry."

Sherlock shrugged and looked out the window. "Do you want to join me at Bart's? I can prove that woman isn't Amber. Set your mind at ease."

"You've said it isn't. I believe you."

"But you don't. Or you believe something about me that you didn't believe before." Sherlock leaned in, peering at him. He looked …uncertain.

"Right, well, here's the thing. About me. When it's someone I know—"

"It wasn't anyone you know!"

"Let me finish. You don't see the life before the death, even when you're looking a bloke in the eye and telling him all about himself. I know that's you, how you are, part of how you do what you do. But. For me. Even someone I've only nodded to in passing, joked with maybe, or shared a pint with once, whatever. Maybe I don't know that person well at all, but it's not going to matter a few minutes later when I'm kneeling in the dirt trying to - trying to hold their guts in and they're going to die anyway or they're pretty much dead and I'm just holding guts. So however briefly I knew them, I've got them, all of that person in my hand now, slipping through my fingers, sliding away into death and it means something, that nod just before, that joke or swallow of beer, and you, you Sherlock, you have no idea."

"This isn't Afghanistan." Sherlock said in the quiet anxious voice of a person who thought his friend was about to have a psychotic break.

John emitted a harsh, short laugh. "You think I don't know that? I'm saying that I can't be like you. I'm going to feel things. I'm going to feel bad when I think I've screwed up and someone ends up dead."

"John. You didn't screw up. That woman is not dead because of anything you did. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good. Great." He leaned back in the chair again and glanced out the window. "I need a favor."

John's brain cautioned him to find out the particulars first but his mouth said, "Sure."

Sherlock struggled to get something out of his coat pocket, a fat notebook it looked like, but he shoved that back in, quick and deep with an odd guilty wince. Rooting around in the pocket some more he finally removed a slip of paper. "This is the address of Jason Le Beau, who has recently adopted twins with his partner." John raised a brow. Sherlock acknowledged his unspoken query. "Yup. Born on the same day, they were. The infants have not been seen as yet by the neighbors but Mr. Le Beau and his also rarely seen partner have been purchasing disposable nappies by the lorry load."

"Newborns go through a lot of nappies, Sherlock."

"Yes. One hundred and sixty-eight nappies a week on average. Research indicates infants will use fewer as they get older, but even so, that just seems to me an inefficient system for waste management. It's environmentally unsound, and, what's more, expensive. Do you have any idea how much those things cost? Yet, the manufacturers of disposables are already positioning their products for a newly affluent Chinese market – promoting a system that hasn't been used by the vast majority of Chinese parents in thousands of years of successful childrearing." He gestured grandly to the wait staff and proprietors acknowledging their superior methods of managing waste in infants and bemoaning its loss to inevitable Western consumerism. "I tell you John, this planet is clearly doomed. Not even Amber Call's future cures for cancer can save it." He gave John a tight smile. "But we can certainly save Amber Call."

John crumpled his napkin onto his plate and slapped a banknote onto the table. "What would you like me to do?"

"I'd like you to determine how many of the purchased nappies have actually been used."

"Of course you would."

"Could have been a commercial kitchen walk-in," Dr Molly Hooper suggested, "but the hypostasis just screams chest freezer. She was kind of, um, folded, like."

They were stood in the lab looking at the post mortem photographs on her computer. Molly took a bite of her sandwich and spoke around her chewing. "There's no way this woman gave birth six to eight weeks ago, or even six months ago. I doubt she's ever been pregnant. No skeletal lesions-" She pointed at an x-ray and then at one of the autopsy photos on the screen, her finger circling the area in question- "plus, the uterus looks pristine."

She swallowed and took another bite. Lestrade's expression had settled into a frozen grimace. The organs in question all had an unpleasant similarity by this point. "And which one is that now?"

"Right there," Sherlock said, stabbing a long finger at an image. "Small, fist-sized, scarcely any sign of decomposition."

"Well, if she was stuffed in a chest freezer like you said—"

"The uterus stays intact for a good long while after death, Lestrade. Even if it hasn't been previously frozen."

"Years sometimes," Molly said cheerfully, "Whereas external male genitalia is practically non-existent in as little as three months."

Sherlock heaved a sigh. "You feel the need to point that out every single time."

"Well, bears repeating. All hail the mighty uterus, engine of humanity."

"The prostate also stays relatively intact for months, I'll remind you."

"Is any of this relevant?" Lestrade asked. "I mean, other than to forensic geeks?" Sheepish expressions said no. "How'd she die then?"

"Cerebral embolism," Molly said. "Most likely from an atrial fibrillation she didn't know she had." She looked at Sherlock. "We both agree, it probably wasn't murder, just… really sad, you know."

"I agreed it probably wasn't murder," Sherlock amended in case anyone got the impression he was saddened in any way.

"And yet, someone went to all the trouble of shoving her into a chest freezer afterwards."

Sherlock pulled on his lower lip as he clicked back and forth through the photos, lab results, and the written reports. "The body was put on ice very soon after death, long before rigor could set in."

"It certainly shows malice aforethought," Lestrade said.

"Panic, then opportunity more like. Her sudden death derailed a plan already in motion. They had to improvise."

"They?"

"Bret Harriman and Jason Lebowitz. Husband and brother respectively."

Lestrade grunted, unconvinced. He flipped through the pages of his notebook. "Well, the grandmother, Madeleine Copper died Sunday last if that means anything. Eighty-one years old. Complications from a bone marrow transplant I was told."

"Bone-marrow transplants are supposed to be for people who have a chance at a full life afterwards," Molly said, radiating disapproval.

"Perhaps it was the promise of great-grandchildren to carry on the line that prompted her to purchase an agreeable oncologist," Sherlock said. "Eighteen months ago the Harriman's went to India for fertility treatments. Alison came back glowing with impending motherhood. But clearly she wasn't pregnant then and never had been."

"We still don't know this is Alison, Sherlock," Lestrade reminded him. Sherlock huffed in irritation. Lestrade said, "We'll need DNA to prove it. Don't suppose we can get that without raising suspicion. Or without a warrant."

"If you alert Bret Harriman to the fact that we suspect he stuck his wife's body in a freezer you'd be putting Amber in more danger than she's already in."

"If she's in so much bloody danger than why don't you tell me where she is?"

"Because I don't know exactly! There, are you happy?"

"Why would that make me happy? I actually want to find her alive! Jesus."

"But you can get a warrant quickly once he knows, right?" Molly asked.

"Depends on the evidence backing up his certainty. Anyway there's a major kink in your theory about this being Alison Harriman. According to hospital staff, she and the babies had been visiting her grandmother two or three times a week before the old lady passed."

"Not in person. Never in person. The risk of infection with a bone marrow transplant would be too great. I'll wager all the visits were conducted via Skype or a web cam that afforded no cross communication. The woman was drugged for pain. She was partially deaf and likely had trouble focusing for any length of time. Three minutes at most per visit." Sherlock, who'd been pacing back and forth between the lab tables, stopped abruptly and stepped into the DI's personal space. Too close as usual. "She was never talking to her granddaughter, Lestrade, even when she thought she was." He turned abruptly and began to pace again. "Alison's husband probably did most of the talking, held the infants up for her to see, or may even have had Amber hold them as he waved a digital camcorder around. There's a family resemblance that would have easily have fooled Mrs. Copper in her condition."

"Why would there be a family resemblance?"

"Amber is Alison's cousin. Didn't I mention that?"

"No."

"So you see how Amber's children could easily pass for Alison's. And Bret Harriman is the father in any case so if it came down to a question of DNA they'd have it covered."

"Goes to motive. But this is still a hell of a lot of speculation –" Sherlock opened his mouth to protest, but Lestrade held up a hand. "Yeah, I know you don't like to hear that word, but that's what a judge will say. I need a bit more to justify search and seizure."

"Wouldn't matter with the video Skyping. It isn't saved or monitored."

"All right, well, here's what I think needs doing right now. I think we ought to contact local and international databases and let them know we might have a body matching a missing person's report. If your man thinks we believe we've recovered the body of Amber Call—"

"Brilliant! Yes. Good idea, Detective Inspector!" Sherlock exclaimed.

Lestrade waited for the sarcastic punch-line. It didn't come. "Really?" he said.

"You've got a body recovered from the sewers and it hasn't been picked up by the press yet. That means they're not likely to run with it unless your lot asks them to."

"Should we give them the photo ID or just a sketch?"

"Description only in case any of Bret's neighbors have caught sight of the real Amber. We wouldn't want to force his hand."

"Is he likely to murder the poor girl Sherlock? Because I'm pretty keen on preventing that."

"Never part of the original plan, I'm certain. Keep in mind he didn't actually murder his wife. He's trying to stick as much to the original plan as possible. Amber's only involvement would have been to carry and give birth to twins which would then be passed off as Alison's own little miracles. Alison's death was terribly inconvenient. It's why they broke off contact with Amber for so long. They were scrambling to come up with another plan. They're trying to pass off Amber as Alison right now. But Bret Harriman's been letting on to neighbors and shopkeepers and anyone who'll listen, that his poor wife is suffering from post partum depression. She's even on medication. I'm afraid that if he feels pressured in anyway, she'll tragically succumb to suicide sooner rather than later."

Amber told Bret and Jason about her brother, the one her mom had given up for adoption at fifteen, and how he'd ended up tracking her down a couple of years ago and how happy her mom had been to have him in her life again and how great it was to have a brother, because family was so awesome and wasn't it great that Nicola and Nicolas (who she'd secretly named Piper and Henry) had each other?

She saw from their reactions that there had indeed been a person visiting the hospital who'd claimed to be her brother. She suspected she knew who'd played that part. She hoped so anyway. She wanted the men holding her to know she wasn't as alone as they'd assumed and that she'd be missed if anything happened to her, even if it wasn't entirely true.

She'd erased so much of her past when her mother died. The thought of having to explain a pregnancy she wouldn't be able to hide any more was too much, so she'd cut off all ties, stopped answering calls and anxious emails, stopped going to labs or to church. And now she was locked in a room in a basement.

Bret and Jason assured her that as soon as a few financial situations were in order they'd pay her what they owed and send her on her way. Trying to convince themselves they wouldn't do what they'd inevitably end up doing.

There was no way she was leaving her kids with the likes of them. Her fake brother was a message from God, a lifeline. Her babies were hope in the face of hopelessness. So she played the game, played dumb, and waited for her chance.