When Regan hadn't come back to the office after two hours, McCoy tried calling her.

She didn't answer her cell. When he dialed Abbie's number, the machine picked up. McCoy called Tracey Kibre and got a brusque and slightly annoyed confirmation that Regan had come to find her after the court had risen, and the information that Kibre had left her with Mike Logan when she went to front the press.

Logan was slow to answer his cell.

"I hope I haven't caught you at a bad time, Detective," McCoy said.

"Well, I was just taking a statement from a lawyer who worked out recently that the young woman he gave a promotion to wasn't telling him the whole and entire truth about an evening they'd spent together," Logan said. "But, you know, nothing that can't wait."

"I'm sorry," McCoy said. "I'll let you get back to it. I was trying to track down Regan Markham and Tracey Kibre said you were with her at the courthouse."

"Yeah, I walked her out. Track her down? She's not answering her phone?"

"No," McCoy said. "How was she? When you left her?"

There was a pause at the other end of the line. "Mr McCoy, do I need to be calling hospitals and police stations?"

"No!" It was McCoy's turn to pause. "I don't think so. I hope not."

"What's her number?" Logan asked. McCoy read it to him. "Okay, let me call you back."

It was a long few minutes before the phone on his desk rang.

"Her cell's active," Logan said. "Port Authority. What the hell did you say to her, counselor?"

"It's what I didn't say," McCoy said, and cradled the phone.

It was the time of day when a taxi would be barely faster than walking. McCoy took the subway and then all but ran the last two blocks to the bus terminal.

The Port Authority was crowded. It was always crowded. New York was the largest and the most enticing and the cruelest city in the world, and every day an unimaginable number of people arrived with stars in their eyes and an uncounted number left with their dreams crushed. Those with money arrived or left through the airports.

Everyone else used the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The young, with stars in their eyes. The old, with moths in their wallets.

And tired ex-cops, with the romance of the open road in their soul.

McCoy hurried through the concourse. If Regan was here, he'd be able to find her. She was tall enough to see through a crowd, and god, he'd only need a glimpse to recognize her …

If she was here. If she hadn't gotten on a bus in the half-an-hour it had taken him to cover the distance from One Hogan Place.

There was a girl with a guitar, case open in front of her, asking the disinterested passers-by if she was ever going to get home tonight.

McCoy tossed a quarter into the guitar case and pulled out his cell phone, thinking to call Logan again and get another trace. He fumbled with the address book function, paged past "L" —

To "M".

He pressed dial and heard Regan's phone ring.

He would have been able to see her, just across from an au bon pain outlet, if she'd been standing, but she wasn't. She was close up to the wall of the terminal, sitting on her suitcase, hands folded in her lap and looking straight ahead as the phone in her pocket rang and rang.

And now he could see her, McCoy felt the sense of urgency ebb away. He kept her in view as he went into the bakery and bought two coffees and two bagels. He was ready to go after her if she made a move to one of the departure bays, but she just sat, staring straight ahead, as if she couldn't see the people hurrying past, as if she couldn't hear the girl telling her that red lights are flashing on the highway.

Until McCoy walked over and stood in front of her. "Hungry?"

Regan looked up slowly, and McCoy realized that she might not have gotten on the bus yet, but she had to come a long way back from where-ever she was going to answer him. "Jack."

"Scoot up," he said, and when she moved automatically, he sat down on the suitcase beside her and handed her one of the coffees. She took it out of the same reflex as she'd moved to make room for him. "Where are you going?"

"Wichita," Regan said. She looked at the Styrofoam cup in her hand, and then took a cautious sip.

"Do you have people there?" McCoy asked.

She shook her head. "I just like the sound of it. Wichita. Wichita. It was a toss up between Wichita and Albuquerque. But Wichita —"

"Sounds like car wheels over a road," McCoy said. "Albuquerque is more like a train going over the points. Albuquerque. Albuquerque. Albuquerque."

"I like trains."

"Not as much as you like the open road."

"No," Regan said softly. "Not as much as I like the open road."

"Leaving without saying goodbye? That's not like you."

"It's exactly like me, Jack," Regan said. "Are you going to eat both those bagels?"

He handed her one. "You were going to stand me up at the bar ethic committee?"

"Would it make a difference?" Regan asked. "I know you have an unbreakable case."

"It was a joke. I'm not going to take you to the committee," McCoy said, and Regan looked quickly at him, her expression hopeful. "Not that you weren't completely out of line, by professional standards."

"Professional…" Regan said. "That's something I've been having some trouble being, the past two weeks."

"You and me both." He took a bite from his bagel. "I owe you an apology. I owe you a thank you, too."

"You're not the first defendant to lie to his lawyer. You have a right to your privacy, and I —"

"I was angry," McCoy said. "I was angry because I couldn't – " protect my sister.

"I know," Regan said. "I have younger siblings, too."

"But your job – your job wasn't to try and do my job. I'm her big brother. You're my lawyer. You broke about fifteen clauses in the code – but I'd be in jail if you hadn't."

"Nah," Regan said. "Jailbreak, remember? Cowboy boots, Stetson hat?"

McCoy smiled. "I wanted you to do what I couldn't," he said. "Protect Lisbeth."

"You protected her plenty," Regan said.

McCoy shook his head. "Not enough. Not from everything."

"You were just a little boy," Regan said.

"You were just a little girl," McCoy said. "Does it make a difference?"

Regan looked away. "I guess we're all fruit from the same poison tree." The girl with the guitar had moved on to walking the wrong way down the highway and Regan winced. "You ever notice how all the songs are about leaving? No-one ever writes songs about coming home."

"Make my bed, and light the light," McCoy said. "I'll arrive late tonight."

Regan smiled. "Blackbird, bye bye. Do you think if I gave that cut-rate Sarah McLachlan ten bucks she'd go bye bye?"

"I have a better idea," McCoy said. He stood, tossed his half-full coffee cup into the bin, and held out his hand. "Let's you and me go."

Regan didn't move. "Where?"

"The nearest place we can get a drink," McCoy said, "First off. After that?" He shrugged. "Maybe Abbie's. Maybe Wichita. It's open to negotiation."

For a long moment he held his breath as Regan looked up at him.

The she gave him her hand and let him help her stand. "You are such a liar, Jack McCoy. As if anything is ever open to negotiation with you."

He picked up her suitcase at the same moment as she reached it for herself. There was a short battle of wills with both of their hands on the handle.

McCoy won. He steered Regan out of the bus terminal, reasonably certain that she wouldn't change her mind so long as her suitcase was in his custody but keeping his other arm around her shoulders just in case.

He knew an Italian restaurant on West 39th with a well-stocked bar and a firm policy against angst-ridden teenage girls with guitars, and McCoy steered Regan in that direction. It wasn't until they were through the door that he remembered just why he knew this particular restaurant: Claire had dragged him to some god-awful concert at Carnegie Hall and afterward they'd had to walk fifteen blocks to find a restaurant with an open table. He'd been in a foul mood about it, thinking about how early he had to be up the next morning to get through the day's work. Claire had refused to humor him, determined to have what she called a normal night, like normal people.

It hadn't been the worst fight they'd ever had, but it had certainly been in the top ten.

"Tablecloths," Regan said quietly, and McCoy saw the restaurant through her eyes for an instant. Small, candlelit, exposed brick walls and a steel-topped bar with vintage bar stools lined up beside it. An old-fashioned produce scale gestured at an original identity as a delicatessen and the blue-and-white Chinese bowls filled with olives on the bar announced that faux-nostalgia had well and truly crept over the bridge from Brooklyn.

It looked more like a "New York restaurant" than any of the places McCoy usually found himself, including one or two that claimed to have been in existence when New York was the national capital in fact as well as in popular imagination.

"Tablecloths," he agreed, held up two fingers to the waiter, and steered Regan to the bar when the waiter nodded. "Scotch," he said to the bartender's raised eyebrow, and then paused. "No, champagne. Your best bottle, two glasses."

"We're celebrating, Jack?" Regan asked as the bartender nodded and turned to make it happen.

"Of course we are. You won, didn't you?"

"Did I? It didn't altogether feel like it, at the time."

McCoy waited for the bartender to fill their glasses. "Regan, if you're looking for another apology —"

Regan picked up her glass and drained it with a sad lack of respect for the quality of the vintage. "Jesus, Jack, I'm not that stupid."

He ignored her. "Then I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't say what I should have in the courtroom today. I'm sorry I put taking care of my sister ahead of your hurt feelings. I'm sorry I wanted to keep at least some part of my personal life private."

Her mouth thinned. "You need to work on the concept of apology."

He took her badge out of his pocket and set it on the bar. "This is yours. If you still want it."

She picked it up and turned it over between her fingers. "In Fraud?"

McCoy ignored the pang that gave him. "If that's what you prefer."

"If that's what I prefer?"

He shrugged. "It won't be easy to fill my second seat, if you go back downstairs. I'm sure I'll manage, though. Mike Cutter could use a little more seasoning."

Regan snorted. "The two of you would kill each other inside of three weeks," she said. "Connie Rubirosa, though — if she can work with Cutter, she can probably handle you."

"Am I such a handful?"

Regan laughed hard enough to choke on her champagne. "Are you such a handful? Jesus, Jack, you're a handful on your good days."

He stared at his glass. "So that's why you're leaving."

"No, that is not —" She set her empty glass down hard enough to make it ring. "Fuck it. And fuck you."

She was reaching for her suitcase and turning to the door and McCoy took her arm. "No."

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the bartender reflected in the big mirror behind the bar, moving toward the phone. Jesus fucking Christ, he thought, and then —

If someone had picked up the phone in the 1950s, this would be an entirely different conversation.

He let go of Regan's wrist.

She'd seen the bartender reach for the phone at the same moment McCoy had. "It's alright," she said to him, showing her badge in a quick open-and-shut movement that was guaranteed to leave the bartender thinking he'd just seen a police shield. "If anyone is going to get their arm broken tonight, it's this jackass, not me."

The bartender nodded, and Regan put the leather bill-fold back in her pocket.

Back in her pocket.

"Regan," McCoy said, certain of it now, "you're not leaving."

"I've missed my bus," Regan said, stretching to reach the champagne bottle and carefully filling her glass to the brim.

"You could catch a different one tomorrow. To Wichita. To Albuquerque. To Cheyenne."

She smiled. "Cheyenne sounds nice."

"Augusta. Boise. Tallahassee."

Regan shook her head. "Still Wichita."

"But not until tomorrow."

"Or the day after."

"You're not going to run out on me," McCoy said. "That's not who you are."

She snorted. "How the fuck would you know that?"

"Because —" It was hard to say, harder than anything he'd ever said before. "Because that's who I am. I ran out. On Beth, on our mother. I got a scholarship and I left for college and I never looked back. So I know what it looks like, Regan, and it doesn't look like you."

"Jack. You did the best you could."

McCoy shook his head. "It wasn't enough."

"You left to save yourself. Sometimes that's the best we can do."

"I left because I would have killed the son-of-a-bitch if I'd stayed. That's the truth, Regan, even if I never admitted it to myself at the time."

"These terrible old men," Regan said softly, and McCoy swore softly to hear his own south-side rasp in her voice. "These terrible old men who shape our lives. Men we can't live up to and can't live down. You couldn't turn yourself into him? Maybe that's because you were stronger than he was."

Of all the times for her to learn the tricks I've tried to teach her …

"You couldn't tell me you were afraid you'd turned into your father because you were ashamed you hadn't turned into your father," Regan said.

"That's about the size of it," McCoy said. "Crazy, huh?"

"Makes perfect sense to me," Regan said.

Thinking she was being sarcastic, McCoy opened his mouth for a sharp retort, and then saw her eyes, steady and calm.

He imagined sitting at this bar with Claire, telling her what he had just told Regan. Claire had loved him. She would have been understanding. She would have been sympathetic.

But there was no way in the world he would have made perfect sense to her.

Claire had loved him for the man she believed he could be, the man he had tried to be for her. It was possible to imagine he might have succeeded. But she was gone, and the man she had loved was gone. And here he was, the man who had loved her and been changed by losing her. He wondered what Claire would have thought of Jack McCoy if she'd met him today, with all his dark corners, with the anger and the fear and all the rest, if she would still have seen the man she believed he could become.

He'd like to think she would have, but he couldn't be certain.

One thing was certain – he had never made perfect sense to her.

"Penny for them," Regan said, and he looked away from the past and met her gaze. Regan, who wasn't waiting for him to become anything. Regan, who knew all his dark places and didn't back away.

He leaned over and kissed her.

Her mouth opened against his without hesitation. She tasted of expensive French champagne and cheap coffee . She tasted of promises. McCoy braced himself against the bar to draw her closer, all lean limbs and muscle and god, it was beyond time for him to get her clothes off and admire her rangy body with eyes and hands and all the rest of his body.

Regan leaned back from him a little, her hand still clutching his shirt, just over his heart. "Do you think maybe we've pushed Arthur far enough this week?" she whispered.

"Perhaps," McCoy conceded. "Are you going to tell me again that we need to be 'just friends'?"

"We're never going to be 'just friends'," Regan said, smiling, her eyes full of tears. "But we need to think about this. I need to think. I need – I'm going to need to find another job."

He put his hand over hers where it rested on his chest. "I like working with you."

"I like working with you too, Jack," Regan said. "So what are we going to do?"

"Arthur doesn't need to know."

"That's unrealistic." She pulled her hand free from his and turned back toward the bar.

"Regan?"

"Did you tell Sally that Mr Schiff 'didn't need to know'?"

"I … I might have. Jesus, Regan, don't go and join the public defender's office! I like a good fight, but I prefer to stick to my own weight class."

"Then what? What happens now?"

The waiter signaled unobtrusively that their table was free. Jack nodded acknowledgment. "Now we have dinner. I recommend the spaghetti alla puttanesca —"

"Of course you do."

"And then …" He paused. "Then you go home. And I do."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow … is another day."


.oOo.


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A/N: In this chapter, at one point there's a reference to s girl with a guitar singing a song. The song she is singing is "When It Don't Come Easy" by Patty Griffin.

And that's it, folks! Sorry it took so long, and thanks for sticking with it.