"Most people live life on the path we set for them. Too afraid to explore any other. But once in a while people like you come along and knock down all the obstacles we put in your way. People who realize free will is a gift, you'll never know how to use until you fight for it." -The Adjustment Bureau

She can still remember the first time she ducked out of a car and felt the weight of the world's eyes on her every movement.

It had been a state dinner at the White House, shortly after Lucas had been elected into office and she'd felt naked against the flashes of light. She would have been blind if it hadn't been for Lucas's steady hand on her back, guiding her up the steps and through the door, as though the entire moment wasn't marking a significant change in the life they had been leading.

Their quiet life in Texas was decidedly over and every moment from then on would be a part of a chapter she wasn't sure she was ready to embrace.

She'd done it a million times since then, with and without Lucas, but she still can't shake the surrealism of stepping out of the dark car and onto the sidewalk, while being watched like she was doing something truly remarkable by entering a building.

"Just ignore them and don't say anything," Josh advised, as Savannah stared wide-eyed at the sheer volume of spectators and reporters that had turned up to stake a glance at the funeral proceedings.

The entire street leading up to chapel was filled with people holding signs with words she wouldn't let herself read. It was better not to know; not to get caught up in the chaos and intrusion on a day that was supposed to be peaceful.

"Mom used to love this," Savannah offered; her voice quiet, "That moment when every eye was on her, trying to piece together what was going on in her head."

Riley figured that she probably loved it and hated it equally, but Maya had always loved a good contradiction.

They'd already discussed what order they would exit the vehicle. Riley would go first in order to draw most of the attention away from Josh and Savannah, whose entire objective was to get inside with as little fuss as possible.

But she hadn't anticipated the pure fear that was coursing through her veins. There were too many things that could go wrong with today; too many narratives she didn't want to see in the evening news.

And, there was the Lucas of it all.

But, there always was.

There was something about being in the same city; the feeling of knowing how close they were after all this time, that had her on edge. She'd been relieved when she'd managed to get her divorce without having to face him, but in the back of her mind she'd always known that she was just prolonging a moment that was a long time coming.

The car pulled up as closely to the front doors as they could manage and Riley waited for her door to be opened; before she twisted in her seat, keeping both knees locked together as she slid out of the vehicle and onto the sidewalk.

For a second, the crowd seemed to go silent; leaving nothing, but the sound of the car's engine to echo in her ears. And, then, the volume increased ten-fold; screams, voices, and camera flashes pushing in on her, until she couldn't breathe.

It was muscle memory alone that forced her to rise to her full height and straighten out her shoulders, before she started her trek; counting down every foot until she reached the front door.

Her fight or flight response was on overdrive and from the way the crowd seemed to be surging forward and the security was struggling to hold them back, she couldn't help wondering just how close they were to being overrun.

"You always knew how to command a room, but this is just ridiculous," Isadora Smackle offered from where she'd been hiding behind a mass group of security at the front doors.

She was leaning against the front wall; counting on the sheer size of the Secret Service agents to keep anyone from snapping a photo of the Vice President's Chief of Staff's dirty secret. A half-smoked cigarette hung between two fingers, smeared in lipstick, though her face appeared to have avoided the accent taupe color that the dark-haired woman had been sporting for over a decade.

"They're not here for me," Riley corrected her; struggling against the purely emotional response she'd been unaware the presence of Isadora Smackle was capable of invoking in her.

"My mistake," Isadora took another drag of lung cancer and Riley used the distraction to make her way through the front doors and away from the million eyes trained on her back.

She can't remember the last time she'd felt so out of place in Lucas's world. Maybe, when they'd been newlyweds and she'd been stuck feeling like an intruder in his family's home and walking on eggshells, but they'd worked through it.

She'd never thought there would come a time when her mere presence in Lucas's office would be viewed as an invasion.

"Lucas is on a conference call, but I've alerted Ms. Smackle of your presence and she's willing to see you in her office," his secretary offered; looking flustered over the top of an unorganized desk piled high with memos and reminders scrawled across sticky notes.

"She's got you screening my husband's visitors, huh?" Riley questioned; leaning forward just enough to watch the truth play across the secretary's face, "Where exactly is my husband?"

"On a conference call," Isadora Smackle's voice rang out from behind her, "To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?"

"I'll wait," Riley suggested, well-versed in a power struggle. Her career in journalism may have been short, but that didn't make the tactics she'd learned for getting what she wanted any less relevant.

"He's booked all day. We're trying to get donations secured. Obviously, we won't announce anything, until further in the race, but campaigns live and die on who's footing the bill," Only the slightest twitch of her mouth gave an indication that there might be any weakness in the impenetrable wall that was Smackle.

Not for the first time, she can't help finding herself comparing the woman standing in front of her to the girl she'd been fairly good friends with in her youth. Isadora Smackle, the adult, who'd been left by Farkle right before graduation and attended Princeton on her own, was cold and withdrawn in a way that her younger self had never been. Where the Smackle of high school had been soft, this Smackle was hard and where the younger Smackle had been willing to let people in, this Smackle kept to herself in a way that had Riley wondering if anyone really knew who she was.

She'd never expected to find themselves at odds, fighting for Lucas's attention. Though, she knew that Smackle placed her career above all else and happened to have attached herself to Lucas's coattails.

"I want to talk about the naval base," Riley informed her; watching as the direction the conversation had just turned too registered in the brunette gaze.

"The funding has already been put into the budget. It's a done deal and whatever you think you know, I suggest you keep to yourself," Smackle's voice turned to ice and Riley felt the familiar satisfaction of knowing that she was on the right track.

"I asked Lucas to look into it," Riley glanced once at the cowering secretary and couldn't help feeling like, maybe, it was a good thing that she had a witness to this conversation.

"And he delegated the assignment to me. There is nothing there, Riley. Whatever line he fed you, James Crista is in the country to chase women, take illicit substances, and probably gamble his inheritance away. He is not here out of some altruistic need to look out for his country and, if he were, he would hardly be looking to a senator's housewife for help. If you are looking for a cause to champion; I'll have someone draw you up a list that lines up with Lucas's political strategy. I know you get bored skulking around that big, empty house with nothing but your alcohol for company."

"What are you suggesting?" Riley felt the air leave her lungs and, for the first time since the conversation had started, felt genuine hurt at something Smackle was trying to poke at.

"Lucas mentioned that he was worried about your drinking. I know you took it hard….accepting, your situation. But there are other options, other ways of dealing with your disappointment," Smackle's words were dripping in over-the-top concern and the betrayal pulled at the numbness she'd been trying to incase her heart in.

"Lucas told you that?" Riley questioned; unable to avoid letting Smackle know that she had landed a punch.

"He tells me a lot of things, Riles," the affectionate nickname was anything, but affectionate and Riley found herself retreating so deeply into herself that she could barely register what her initial purpose of the visit had been.

Her wounds were private; something she'd trusted him to keep within the confines of their marriage and the idea that he was confiding in the people at his office; that all of them were staring at her and knowing what was going on.

"Do you want me to tell him that you stopped by?" Smackle questioned, as Riley made her way woodenly towards the door.

She looked at the dark-haired genius; searched for any hint of the person that had once been her friend and, then, left, with the feeling that she'd just been defeated in a battle that could decide the entire war.

"Are you okay?" Josh's hand on her arm, pulled her directly from her thoughts and she looked at him with surprise to find herself in the church, in the present.

A somber melody was being played by an organist at the front and Maya's casket was closed and placed in front of a podium where Katy was standing and flipping through a pile of papers. She was going to bury her best friend, today and all she could think about were the events leading up to the dissolution of her marriage.

"I just need a minute. I'm going to the bathroom, save me a seat," Riley requested, struggling to string her thoughts together, before she forced herself to walk measured and unhurried to the restroom that she'd located the minute that she'd walked in.

She slipped through the dark wooden door and was relieved to find the stalls empty, after a cursory walk down the row. She paused at the sink to splash to her face with water and stare intently into her own hollow eyes, as she tried to pull herself together.

This day was about Maya. It wasn't about her and it definitely wasn't about Lucas.

As if merely thinking his name, somehow, conjured him, Riley's eyes flickered up at the squeaking of the main door opening and she found herself meeting his gaze for the first time in over two years.

It was like coming home and realizing that someone else lived there now.

"The men's room is next door," Riley offered, pointedly, her gaze dropping back to the blindingly white sink. She could still smell the faint scent of cleaning solution under whatever floral scent they'd tried to cover it up with.

"Riley," he breathed her name and the memories came, so quickly that it took her breath away.

3 Years Earlier

Riley Matthews surfaces after ten years of marriage in the form of a signature, used on a motel room receipt, only four hours after she packs a single duffle bag and hops into the passenger seat of a taxi that was, also, paid for in cash.

She enters the motel room dressed in a pair of sweats that have managed to avoid all photographic proof of their existence in that same ten years and leaves the motel dressed in dark wash jeans and a pair of over-sized sunglasses that cover some significant bruising on her face.

Her hair is seven inches shorter and significantly more auburn then when she walked in, but the man at the front desk was paid well enough not to notice those kinds of things.

She leaves in a non-descript car that had been parked in the lot the night before by another man who'd paid for his room in cash and hadn't been seen since, though the maid would later claim that the room didn't look like it had even been touched in the night that the man had rented it for.

Riley only knows this because she would read it across the pages of Zay's magazine from a leaked police report nearly a year later.

The fact that Zay was the man who dropped off the car was conveniently left out.

But, Zay's stories are convenient like that.

"I know what I'm asking you to do, Zay," Riley informed him, her head pressed against the cool tile of the shower, as she sat on the lip of the tub with the water blasting behind her.

She's not sure when the paranoia set in, but she can't help thinking that there has to be a reason beyond what they're giving her for why she's no longer being allowed near a phone and why she hasn't been allowed to talk to Maya since the accident.

She still only can remember pieces of the night; dulled, blurred images that could have come from trying to drink herself into oblivion, but that don't make sense stacked up together. She can remember the anger and the desperate need to get out of the house. It had been snowing and she'd left without shoes or a jacket, hopping into the driver's seat of the car, as someone screamed things at her from the front door.

They hadn't tried to stop her, that much she could remember. Someone should have stopped her from trying to drive.

The snatches of time that she's managed to snag with Zay since the accident are few and far enough between that she knows they're trying not to leave her alone at all. And, there's this feeling in her gut that's telling her to get out; telling her that something is horribly wrong with her current situation.

"I know things haven't been great with Lucas. I understand you needing some time away from him, but you're asking me to book you a ticket with your maiden name and to leave you a car. Do you really think that you should be driving?"

"No, I don't think that I should be driving. The idea of getting behind a wheel again makes me feel physically sick, but you can't be seen dropping me off at the airport and I don't want any public record or video of me going there. The only way that this works is if I get a good head start and then blow everything apart before they get any chance at following me," Riley explained; her eyes dropping to the bandage that was carefully wrapped around her wrist.

She had a permanent branded reminder of what had happened the last time she'd gotten behind the wheel on her wrist, she had the awful bruising of her face, and the physical pain that she carried in her entire body. She knew better then anyone else the dangers of letting her behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.

"I promise you that I will be off all of my pain meds when this goes down and that I will be able to responsibly drive this vehicle the twenty minutes to the airport."

"You're an addict, Riley, your word doesn't mean anything," Zay sighed; leaning his head back against the wood of her vanity and staring intently at the wall in front of him, "And you're probably crazy, all your paranoia. Helping you; believing you makes me crazy, too."

"Lucas is going to run for Vice-President and convincing the police to bury the charges against me is just the tip of the iceberg in things they could use against him, but all of them start with me, Zay. I'm his loose cannon, addict of a wife and if they want him to win, then they have to bury me, too. I will never be allowed out alone, again. I will smile and stand next to him and slowly suffocate under the scrutiny, while I watch Isadora Smackle at the helm, and I will not spend the rest of my life that way."

"Or you could leave with me right, now. You could pack a bag and I could have my plane ready to go in the next hour. We could do this together," Zay turned the full force of his gaze on her and, for the first time, she felt just as dirty as an outside observer would find her.

Manipulating someone to get exactly what she wants, leaving her husband without a word, and meeting with his best friend in the bathroom, of all places, while he isn't home. Add it all up with the alcohol and the car accident and she's the poster child for the death of a marriage.

But, even if Lucas did know everything she was planning, everything that she was thinking, she still thinks that he might forgive her and that scares her more then anything. She might be trapped in a world of destruction and misery, but he didn't deserve to be stuck there with her.

He didn't deserve to have his career burned to the ground in the wake of all of her poor decisions.

Smackle's words from the hospital run through her head; her anger and accusations enough to make Riley feel physically sick. She was never cut out to be anyone's wife…to be anyone's mother.

"I can't be with someone, right now. I'm a mess; mentally, emotionally, physically. I need some time to find myself again, to figure out who I am and what I want out of my life. And, you can't leave, now, anyway. You've got your kids, Zay," she reminded him; struggling to get the words out without dissolving into tears.

"I've almost lost you twice, now. And I just keep thinking that if I don't get you out of here, you're going to die for real and I'll always look back at this moment and think that I could have done something. But, you have to promise me that wherever you end up you're going to get help, you're going to take care of yourself because I can't watch you continue to fade away like this. It kills me," his voice trembled with the words.

"I will. Just help me do this. Help me to leave him; to make this clean break and I'll pull myself back together again," she knows in the moment that she would have said anything, would have done anything to get him to agree with her. There wasn't a single card she wasn't willing to play and the knowledge of her own ruthlessness just feeds the self-hate that's been waiting to consume her for years, if not for her entire life.

They don't talk that morning; just brush passed each other in the bathroom as they're getting ready for the day. He stands in front of the mirror; shaving his face in the single circle of glass that he's wiped of condensation and she's getting into the shower that he's purposefully left on for her.

There's no real need for words. They've done this routine a million mornings before and are sure to do it a million mornings after.

But sometimes she wishes that they had said something. That there was something significant about that morning that might have warned her that everything from that night on would mark a drastically different world then the one that they'd been living in.

He's got a toothbrush in his mouth when she gets out of the shower; droplets of water running down her legs and hitting the mat under her feet.

She shrugs on a white bathrobe and wraps her hair in a towel and, then, she presses a kiss to his shoulder on her way out.

This is the last time they're Lucas and Riley without a label; a family without something missing. This is the last time they have a real normal and Riley wishes that they would have appreciated that moment just a little more, instead of taking it for granted.

There are so many steps to escaping Washington that she doesn't feel anything until she's seated on the plane watching the United States disappear through her window. Everything up until that moment had been about getting out before anyone could stop her and making sure that she wouldn't be found, but what she was supposed to do, now, was the one thing she hadn't planned for.

She had money and an endless amount of time, but all she felt was a crushing loneliness and the agony of what her life had become; the million tiny moment that had led her here.

It starts with one drink. She lets herself indulge in the familiar sensation of her throat being scalded from within and her mind being blurred and incoherent. There's no one to hurt, anymore, and she feels reckless in a way she's never managed before this moment.

That doesn't stop her from staying well outside of the range of drunk. The plane ride is just long enough that she's sure she could be walking off with a decent hangover if she allowed herself to go overboard.

She waits to let the regrets set in until she's checked in to a hotel room; sprawled across a carefully made bed and staring up at a smooth, white ceiling. She has a view of the coast outside of her window and no plans for the discernable future, but there's a part of her that expects she'll just fade into the bedspread and everyone will forget she ever existed.

The idea isn't as terrifying as she once thought it would be.

She doesn't get long to contemplate, before the shaking starts. Her throat feels dry and her vision blurs; as she bunches herself into a ball in the middle of the bed. The convulsions spasm through her body in pulses and soon she's lost control of it altogether.

Her legs create waves in the covers and her shoes fall to the floor in separate, violent movements that have her hands struggling to try and hold her entire body in one vibrating piece.

She doesn't notice the tears falling; until the sobs are choking their way out of her throat and her every breath becomes a struggle over the mixture of emotional and physical torture that has launched an assault against her.

Riley knew pain; was on an intimate, first-name basis with every form and phase of it, but this is something altogether different.

Her fingernails bite into the flesh of her ankles and all she can do is wait for death.

Her period starts shortly after a morning meeting with her editor and she, briefly, stops in the bathroom to insert a tampon and feel a moment of disappointment. She'd gone off her birth control, after landing a job with her finished journalism degree and they'd finished unpacking boxes in the home they'd built on a piece of Pappy Joe's property.

They were close enough that Lucas could continue to be there for his family, but, finally, had some of the distance that she'd been craving, since they'd been newlyweds living down the hallway from his mother and little sister and sneaking around like they were still teenagers.

She'd started to hope when her period was late, but, really, she knew that things like that took time and her doctor had suggested that it could take three to six months for the hormones to really leave her system and allow her body the right environment for sustaining a pregnancy.

So, she doesn't give it all that much thought.

She makes it through her work day; takes a couple of ibuprofens when the cramping starts and powers through the same way that she's always done.

It's not until she's home that she starts to feel lightheaded, which quickly progresses to dizzy. The room starts spinning around her and she sits down in the middle of the kitchen; forcing herself to take even breaths through her mouth in an effort to find some kind of equilibrium.

She wakes up in the middle of her hotel bed feeling an ache in every muscle of her body. Sunlight streams in through the partially closed curtains and it burns her eyes, though she can't convince herself that the discomfort of the sun is worth risking the discomfort of trying to make her limbs work.

She can't remember the last time that she woke up alone in a bed and it feels overwhelmingly large with just her occupying the space. She's used to navigating around another body; listening to another set of steady breathing.

Missing Lucas isn't a new feeling; she's lived with it for a while, now, even when he was laying right beside her, but there's something definitive about waking up alone in a strange city. She could always go back, try and put the pieces back together again, but she gets the feeling that they're never going to fit the same way that they used to.

It's a reminder that she's put the final nail in the coffin all by herself, but the enormous amount of effort in moving forward feels exhausting.

So, she retreats under the covers of the bed and watches the coastline through what she can see out the window.

She wakes up in the hospital; blood hanging from an IV pole directly over her head and a wild beeping coming from the machine next to her. She immediately tries to sit up, but finds her body uncooperative, as she looks wildly around the room for anything that might give her some context.

"It's okay, Mrs. Friar," a woman in blue scrubs hits a button on the machine and the beeping instantly stops, "You're in the ICU, we just transferred you over from surgery."

She struggles to open her mouth against the fog that hovers over her brain but concedes defeat when the effort proves too much for her body. The nurse squeezes her hand, adjusting the blankets that were wrapped around her and Riley, suddenly, finds herself aware of just how cold she really is.

It's a kind of chill that has seeped all the way into her bones and she fears that she might never be warm again.

"What have we got?" a voice came from the doorway and she turned in time to see a man in lime green scrubs.

"Blood pressures better, but we still have sixties over thirties. Heart rates been up in the one-thirties. She's been in and out of consciousness. I've called the blood bank, but they're having to borrow platelets from another facility. As soon as they get here, we can initiate Mass Transfusion Protocol," the nurse listed off.

"Do we have someone that can run the Level One?" the man questioned, as Riley struggled to understand the jargon that was being thrown passed her.

"We're borrowing Doctor Kelly from Trauma. He's grabbing one from clean supply and, then, he'll be down."

"I'm not running a Code, tonight. Susan's the House Supervisor and the last time she wrote me a ten page debrief on how I could improve my performance. So, do me a favor, Katie, and let's keep her blood pressure from getting any lower," he suggested, stopping at the sink in the corner to wash his hands.

"That's the goal," the nurse, Katie, agreed.

It takes her three days to find the strength to get out bed.

She'd been so desperate to leave and, now, she has nowhere to go, nothing to do. It's just her and an endless amount of time.

She sits on the balcony of her hotel room for awhile and lets the sun sink into her skin and, then, she goes back inside and goes to sleep.

Lucas is covered in blood when he's escorted back to see her. His eyes are bloodshot, and his clothes are wrinkled from a night spent sitting in a waiting room hoping for news. Though, what really sticks out to her is how terrified he looks. She's not sure that she's ever seen her husband with that particular level of fear in his eyes.

"Hey," he leaned down to kiss her forehead, before settling in a chair that was pulled up next to her bed.

"I'm so tired," she murmured, as he dug through the pile of blankets to find her hand.

"The doctor said that's normal, that it will take you a little while to regain your energy," he explained, his fingers threading through hers.

"I don't remember," the lure of sleep pulled at her again, but she forced it back in an effort to get answers, "What happened to me?"

"I came home from work and you were passed out on the kitchen floor, covered in blood, like something straight out of a horror movie," he paused, looking everywhere, but at her, "I got you into the car and drove straight to the ER. They started a blood transfusion, while they were running tests. You lost so much blood and you were so pale."

He paused as his cell phone started ringing and he immediately dug it out of his pocket, "It's your Mom. I'm just going to step out into the hall for a minute."

He answered the phone and she watched him pace back and forth through the glass of her ICU room. A new woman in the same shade of blue scrubs, slipped through the partially open door, pulling it closed behind her and pulling the curtain that ran along the outer wall.

"How are you feeling?" she questioned, logging into the computer that sat next to the bed.

"Tired," Riley admitted.

"That's normal, you'll probably feel out of it for a few days."

"Lucas said that I lost a lot of blood," Riley pressed for answers, wishing that someone would just come out and say what had happened.

"We had to transfuse almost twelve units of blood. That's not entirely unheard of, but you're lucky that your husband found you when he did," she replied, scanning a syringe, before turning to face Riley, "This is a blood thinner, our biggest concern after a mass transfusion is blood clots."

"I want to know what happened," Riley pushed, as the woman fastened the syringe onto the end of Riley's IV and pressed the fluid into her arm.

"Sometimes, when you get pregnant, the egg doesn't implant in the uterus the way that it's supposed to. It gets stuck inside of the uterine tube, where there's not enough room for it to grow. They call it an ectopic pregnancy. Yours implanted right next to your ovary and when the embryo got too big, it ruptured both your uterine tube and your ovary, causing a massive hemorrhage."

"And the baby?" Riley sunk back into her pillows, as the weight of what the woman was saying sunk in.

"It was never a viable pregnancy," the nurse replied, looking incredibly uncomfortable, "Your doctor should be in to round sometimes in the afternoon and he can talk to you about your options and where you go from here."

"Am I going to be able to get pregnant again?" Riley ignored her words; blinking back the tears that were gathering in her eyes.

"You still have one ovary and one uterine tube, which means you still have a chance of getting pregnant," the nurse assured her.

"But half the chance I had before," Riley finished.

"They did everything humanly possible to save your life. You need to just take this one step at a time and the first step is getting you feeling better."

The ice clinks inside of the glass and she stares down into the amber liquid daring herself to walk away.

If she doesn't have a problem, she'll have no trouble leaving this glass on the edge of the bar and going back to her hotel room.

If she does, this drink won't be her last.

There's nothing waiting for her at the end of a bottle. She's known this the entire time, though it had never been enough to stop her from looking. There was never an answer to the endless fights with Lucas over fertility treatments, the hours he was putting in at the office, the way she was losing herself in being exactly who she had to be to further his career.

So, she logically knows that she's not going to find the answer to who she is or what she should do now at the bottom of that glass, but, for a while, it could make her forget the questions.

"Those look like some heavy thoughts," a familiar voice offered, settling into the seat beside her.

"What are you doing here, James?" Riley questioned, drink momentarily forgotten.

"I remembered our conversation about the giraffes," James returned, signaling the bartender, "And, so I took a chance. It isn't my fault, you chose the hotel I recommended and the bar right next door."

"There's nothing I can do for you now. I'm done with politics and things are over with my husband," she found herself choking on the words, but forced them out, anyway.

He twisted the cap on the bottled water that he'd ordered and stared intently at the bar in front of them, "I don't think you're done. I know I haven't known you very long, but I like to think that I have some idea of the person that you are. You're, at least, the kind of person who was willing to take up a cause with no personal benefit because it just might be the right thing to do and people like that just don't exist in my world."

"I got drunk and drove my car off a bridge," Riley pointed out.

"Nobody's perfect," he offered, and the corners of her lips pulled up into a smile.

They don't talk on the car ride home, though the silence holds a million words between them.

He pulls into the driveway and is halfway around the car to open her door, before she can even get her seatbelt unfastened.

"I'm fine. They wouldn't have let me go home if I wasn't fine," Riley reminded him, as he slipped an arm around her waist and guided her towards the front door.

"The doctor told you to take it easy," he reminded her, pulling open the screen door and using his free hand to unlock the door, "I haven't had a chance to clean things up, yet, between being at the hospital with you and work."

"I'll take care of it," Riley offered, as she followed him through the front door and paused to survey the puddle of blood that had dried on their brand-new hardwood floors, "Do we still have bleach in the closet?"

"We don't have to do this right now," Lucas argued, "Why don't you lie down, and I'll figure out something for dinner?"

"Because this is going to stain. It's already been sitting for over a week, Lucas. We might have to have it sanded down and refinished," Riley listed, running a hand through her hair and getting it caught in the tangles.

"I'm sorry that I was a little more focused on keeping you alive, then on the state of our floors," Lucas's voice was filled with sarcasm and she closed her eyes as she struggled to shove down the anger and despair that had been weighing on her chest, since she'd woken up in that hospital bed.

"You signed a consent for sterilization," Riley's voice sounded dead even to her own ears.

"They didn't know where the bleeding was coming from, until they got in there. So, they had me sign a lot of things that were a last resort in the effort to save your life," he went on the defensive, his hands bunching into fists at his sides, though his voice remained even.

"It's my body. You had no right to sign my reproductive rights away," she felt something inside of her snap.

"I had every right to tell them to do everything physically possible to keep you alive. When you married me, I got the right to make decisions for you in the event that you couldn't make them yourself. And anything they had to do would have been worth it to have you here yelling at me, right now," he countered, "You almost bled to death. For a second, I came home and thought you were dead. I can live in a world without a child, Riley. I refuse to live in a world without you."

"We didn't even know that I was pregnant. We didn't get a chance to get excited or plan or fight over the directions for a stupid test," she felt tears build in her eyes and Lucas, hesitantly, bridged the gap between them, seeming to sense that the storm was over.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, gently pulling her against his chest, "I'm so sorry, Riles."

Present

"Riley," his hand gently cupped her face and she found herself pulled from the memories that had trapped her.

"It's Maya's funeral, Lucas. We're burying her, today," Riley took a step away from him, wrapping her arms around herself, "My best friend, our best friend, is dead and you want to sit here in the bathroom and talk about what went wrong in our marriage?"

"Am I supposed to believe that you're going to stick around after all of this is over, so that we can talk?" Lucas returned, "You don't exactly have a track record for having difficult conversations."

"There was nothing left to say," Riley offered; knowing the words were just as cheap as they felt coming out of her mouth.

"There was everything left to say. We weren't done and you wouldn't have taken off without saying something if you didn't know that," his eyes blazed with barely controlled fury and she had to shut her own against the intensity of his gaze.

She let his anger radiate through the room for a minute, before she forced herself to open her eyes, "I couldn't be what you needed me to be. You wanted the White House, the title, and the influence and I just wanted to go home. I wanted our life back, but you were never going to forgive me if I made you give all of that up and I couldn't cope with being the drunk, sterile, housewife that had to schedule her appointments through your campaign manager to even get to you."

"I didn't accept the campaign proposal, until you agreed to it. I never would have gone forward if it wasn't something that you wanted," Lucas argued.

"And we would have, what, gone home to Texas? You could have taken your job back at the investment firm, I could have gone back to journalism, and we could have pretended that the house wasn't emptier then what either of us had planned on? I couldn't ask you to give up everything that you worked for, anymore then I could be the wife that you deserved."

"I wasn't the one who was desperate for a baby, Riley. I was happy with what we had, you were always enough for me," Lucas spat, his hands fisting at his sides, "I watched you destroy yourself with all of the shots and the medications and the failed attempts and it killed me, not because you couldn't get pregnant, but because our marriage without a baby was never enough for you."

"Well, I'm glad we got that out of the way," Riley offered, leaving a wide berth of space between them as she headed for the door.

"Do you love him?" his voice held none of the anger from his previous statement, though, she knew, from ten years of marriage that Lucas was the most dangerous when his voice went cold.

"I'm marrying him, aren't I?" she returned, refusing to face him.

He'd know the evasion instantly. It's not the first time she'd used the tactic, it's a favorite of hers. But, when the immediate attack doesn't come, she finds herself slowly turning around to gage his reaction.

His face is blank, his eyes watching her with a level of intensity she hadn't managed to attract in close to a decade. You stop watching someone so closely when you have them, when they're a surety, instead of a possibility. It's easy to become complacent with a sure thing

"I still think about that morning in Switzerland, I dream about it," Lucas started, as though they were in the middle of an entirely different conversation, "We should have stayed. It was all so simple, then."

It didn't surprise her that they shared the same dreams; they shared so many of the same memories that were built out of more years spent together, then apart. For so much of her life she'd believed in soulmates, believed that her and Lucas were meant to be together.

Fate and destiny and free will had become all tangled up in her mind, until she wasn't sure what she really believed, anymore.

But, inevitability, that she knew.

"It wasn't one thing that ruined our marriage, Lucas. It wasn't just the infertility, or just the hours you were spending at work, or just the way I was crumbling under all of the expectations there were for us and the future. It wasn't just that I was unhappy and that I didn't see any future that included any kind of happiness. I woke up from the accident and I, finally, realized how far I'd gone from the person that you married, and I realized that there was no chance of getting that person back. And I felt like this imposter in a life that wasn't meant for me."

"I would have walked away from everything if you'd asked me to," the fact that he still would is left hanging in the air between them and the diamond of her engagement ring bites painfully into the skin of her palm, as she rolls her hand into a fist.

And, then, she asks the question that has the power to change everything.

Here is a massive chapter to make up for the time it has taken me to update. In theory, I knew exactly how this chapter was supposed to look, but trying to balance everything was a nightmare and, then, I decided it needed to be reformatted halfway through and ended up rewriting a lot of it. I had a teacher once tell me that, "Writing is never finished, it is only due," and that's exactly how I felt trying to write this.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed last chapter! I was blown away with the support and it really does motivate me to sit down and force myself to write. I tried to respond to as many as I could, but if I missed you, thank you for continuing to read and for taking the time to write out your thoughts on the last chapter.

Right now, my life is insane between going to school and working a full-time job. Flu season is our busy season at work and, now, we're shifting in to Detoxer season, where everyone is trying to drink the hand-sanitizer, pull out their IV's, and get out of bed unattended (I had a confused patient pull my hair, while six of us were trying to hold him down to put in an IV), so no promises on when I'll get another chapter up, but I promise I'm still around and none of my stories are abandoned. This story just happens to have the most already constructed for it. I'm literally going through a word document of prewritten scenes, stringing them together, and editing them, which makes it a lot easier to write for. I have a pretty detailed outline for LOT, which, I think, is actually making it harder to write for and Heat Stroke has a very generic outline with a bunch of ideas for ways that I could take it written in the margins.

Thanks again for reading and I would really love it if you left a review!