When Saturday afternoon arrived, Stef eagerly put on her running clothes and headed out for her weekly jog. She tried to keep her pace even, running more for the pleasure of it than the workout. This time alone had become an opportunity to either think about positive things, like her children's successes or a good day at work, or a chance to simply empty her mind. It helped her be in the right mental space when she and Lena met up on the beach. She could focus on what the book directed, rather than hanging onto unrelated stress. This week's session was certain to be a difficult one, so she did her best to empty her mind of any other concerns or distractions.

Lena worked in the garden and gave into the cliched thoughts that accompanied it. She thought about the metaphorical seeds she and Stef had planted in their children and the work they had put in to help them grow into healthy young adults. Sometimes one or the other needed more water or sun, or to have the weeds around them pulled, but she and Stef always found a way to take care of them.

But she and Stef hadn't given the same care to nurturing themselves or each other. Was it possible that paying more attention would be enough to make them healthy again, or was the damage too deep in their roots that no amount of effort could save them? It felt like they were doing the right things to at least give their relationship a chance, but Lena knew there was still so much unresolved.

She was so engrossed in her thoughts she lost track of time and realized when she finally checked her watch that she was going to be a few minutes late meeting Stef.

Stef stood, facing the water, in her running clothes. Lena hadn't arrived yet, and Stef's anxiety grew as the minutes passed. The relaxed state she had achieved with her run was ebbing away. She turned to scan the parking lot for Lena's car one more time and saw her wife was already walking towards her. Lena was carrying her sandals, and her long skirt blew around her legs. The sun was still high enough to catch Lena's hair in its light, and Stef was reminded of the day they met. She thought Lena was as beautiful as an angel then, and time had only magnified that belief.

The urge to move towards Lena, to take her face in her hands and kiss her lips, overwhelmed Stef. When was the last time they had kissed? It was the day Lena confessed her kiss with Monte, Stef realized with a pang. They had managed perfunctory pecks since then, but there had been no intimacy of any kind. There was a wariness they hadn't been able to work around.

She was still so in love with her wife - did that mean she would let her go, if that's what Lena wanted, or that she would fight to keep her? Stef sent a fleeting prayer to a God she sometimes still believed in that Lena would simply want to stay.

Lena arrived in front of Stef and dropped her shoes. The naked desire on Stef's face surprised her. Stef had been so guarded since they began their sessions, even more so in the past week. But for just a moment, Lena could see again how intense Stef's feelings for her were.

Without another thought, Lena pulled Stef into a tight embrace. She could feel the dampness of Stef's sweaty tank top, but she didn't care. Stef reciprocated the hug, burying her face in Lena's neck. They stood that way for a long minute, silently communicating, as they had twelve years before, not far from that spot, how much they loved each other.

"Are you ready for this?" Stef asked, as they finally pulled apart.

"As I'll ever be," Lena replied.

They sat in the sand, this time facing each other, and Stef opened to chapter six. "'Grounded in Conflict. Conflict is healthy, when expressed appropriately. You and your partner will not always agree on everything. Fighting fair, using the ground rules we outlined in chapter one, is key. Our goal is not to help you eliminate conflict, but to get to the root of it. Often, what you fight about on the surface isn't the true source of your struggles. This chapter will walk you through an exploration of what you and your partner have conflict over and what its roots are. If you can get dig deeper and find the seed, we hope you will be able to nourish it so that it grows into something healthy. As we have in previous chapters, we encourage you to look to your history to understand your present. What was your first fight about?'"

Stef looked at Lena and smiled. "Whether or not sushi was actual food?"

Lena laughed, but then sobered. "We may have had joking disagreements early on, but our first real fight came a few months after we got together."

Stef nodded. "When I ditched you to take care of Mike when he fell off the wagon."

"When that phone call came, you ran out the door with barely a word to me, other than to ensure I could stick around and take care of Brandon," Lena remembered.

"He's my son's father, and he was in trouble." Stef's voice was weary - she had defended herself about this enough times.

"And you felt guilty, like his choices were your fault."

"Yes."

Lena wanted to say more, but they had been through all of this. "What's the next question from the book?"

"'What was your most recent fight about? Choose the one closest to the point at which you decided to utilize this book, not any disagreements you have had as you worked through these exercises.'" Stef was already flinching internally, knowing this was an opportunity for Lena to rehash all the bad decisions she had made lately.

"I guess that would be you bringing home Ana without giving me a heads-up," Lena answered.

"You wanted to adopt Ana's baby, so I was doing my part to protect our family," Stef retorted.

"Right, because it's your job to do that by yourself. I'm just a helpless damsel in distress?"

"You're putting words in my mouth, and that's not fair."

"Fine. What's the next question?" Lena decided to let the individual incident go, in favor of tackling the larger problem.

"'What do these two have in common?'"

"Mike," was Lena's instant answer.

"Mike?" Stef was confused.

"If you hadn't meddled in his life and made sure Ana moved out of his apartment, she wouldn't have needed rescuing from the terrible place she landed in afterwards."

"Fine, so we fight about Mike. What's underneath that? Jealousy?" Stef asked.

Lena wanted to immediately deny it - she wasn't afraid of Stef and Mike getting back together - but there were other kinds of jealousy.

"Maybe in some way," she admitted. "He's still such a high priority to you, sometimes more so than I am."

"He's still family."

Lena knew what that meant to Stef. She would do anything to protect the people she loved, who she considered part of her family, even if her methods were frustrating to that family member or, apparently, illegal.

"It's not fair for you to use that as an explanation and think it means you can do whatever you want. You said to Callie that the ends justify the means, but there are limits to that." Lena kept her voice as neutral as she could.

"I know," Stef agreed. "I've shut you out, and that's not okay. I see that now. But it's not just that. What's underneath?"

Lena took a moment to consider why Stef's relationship with Mike was such a source of conflict over the years.

"Sometimes it feels like I'm on the outside of the family. That I'm not included in that group you'd work so hard to protect. Mike was there first." She paused, then went on. "So was Brandon."

"You resent having come into an existing, if fractured, family, rather than building one of your own." Stef rubbed her hand over her face. "I always worried about this. When we first got together, didn't I ask if you were sure you wanted to take on the issues that came with dating a parent? And you always said it was fine."

Lena shrugged and gave Stef a small smile. "I was already so in love with you. I thought that was all I needed."

"And what do you think now?"

Lena's answer was halting - she knew they were getting to the heart of things, but she didn't want to hurt Stef any more than she already had. "We moved in together so quickly, in part because of Mike."

"Dating a single mom wasn't so easy when she suddenly had full custody." Stef remembered the struggle of those first few months when Mike was no longer able to care for Brandon because his drinking was out of control again. She and Lena could no longer enjoy weekends alone - suddenly the only way for them to spend time together was at Stef's house, with Brandon.

"It was the end of the bubble for sure." The time they spent alone together in the beginning had been magical, but it wasn't grounded in day-to-day reality. "We made the practical choice - everything was easier if we just lived together."

"Are you saying you wish you hadn't moved in with us?" Stef asked.

"Maybe not so soon," Lena acknowledged. "Maybe if we'd had more time before then -"

"Maybe you would have decided against it at all." Stef didn't like where this conversation was going. Did Lena regret their entire relationship? Were the cracks in their foundation this deep?

"I'd like to think I would have still moved in eventually. But, looking back, it feels like I didn't have a choice." At the time, it felt like the adult thing to do, like they were a team working together to make decisions. Now, she wondered how well they knew each other - or themselves - back then.

"A choice of what? When we made things permanent? Or who you were in a relationship with?" Stef tried to keep the panic out of her voice.

Lena tried to explain something she was only beginning to understand. "You had a family before you met me, and I never got the chance to start one the way you did. At the time, I thought I was okay with it. But we were never not parenting. With Mike unreliable for a few years, we didn't have a chance to build a life just the two of us. Then we brought the twins home so soon after I moved in, and that felt good. They were ours in a way Brandon would never be. And then Callie and Jude came into our lives, and it seemed crazy to want more kids, to want one who was biologically mine. But I did."

"Why now? Why, after all these years, is this coming up? Coming between us?"

Lena still wasn't sure. She thought about the past few months and all that had happened. "Brandon's always had you and Mike, and that was okay. But then Ana came back into the twins' lives, and she was actually getting it together. And there was Robert fighting to take Callie away, and even Jude's dad is in the picture, if on the edges."

"All those kids, and none of them was truly yours." Stef didn't believe this, but she realized now it was how Lena saw it.

"It seems so selfish to want someone who's mine. Especially when we've told the kids so often how it's love and not blood that makes a family."

Stef put her arm around Lena and pulled her close. She kissed the top of her head and took a moment to just offer comfort to her wife. "I understand. There's part of you that wishes you could have started a family on your own terms - not inheriting a pre-existing one that had all these complications."

"Am I a terrible person if I say yes?" Lena looked up at Stef, surprised by the sympathy she saw in her eyes.

"Of course not. You don't think I've ever wondered what it would have been like to have dated more than one woman?" Stef smiled.

Lena wasn't sure where Stef was going with this, but she had to admit she hadn't thought about it. "Do you really wish that?"

"Hell, no! Dating is terrible and terrifying - the beauty of our courtship notwithstanding - and I never want to have to go through that ever again. But that doesn't mean I can't be fleetingly curious in the confines of my own imagination. What if I had come out sooner? What if Mike and I had never gotten married? Would I have dated someone else before I met you?"

"Then there would be no Brandon - I know you'd never wish that."

"But that's just it - I can't actually change the past, so there's no harm in thinking about how things might have gone differently. Not in an obsessive, unhealthy way - just for the mental exercise of it. You don't think I've fantasized, especially in Mike's bad years, that Brandon was yours and mine from the beginning - that we were an uncomplicated family, just the three of us?"

Lena was touched. They had gotten to the root of things, and Stef understood. Was that it? How did they move forward from here, now that they had uncovered everything?

Stef went on, "It's okay to have conflicting feelings - to wonder about what might have been without it undermining your current reality." Here, she became tentative. "It's when it goes beyond imagining that it becomes a problem. If your reality doesn't satisfy you anymore - if you wonder if it ever did."

She took a deep breath and let it out. "Lena, having Brandon, having been married to Mike, these aren't behaviors I can change. They're immutable facts. Can you accept them, or do you need to go off and start over with someone else - someone like Monte?"

Lena looked at Stef, who held up her hand. "Don't answer that yet. I want you to take your time. This is twelve years of huge, and I need you to be sure when you tell me what you want." She held back tears as she continued, "I want to fight for you, to beg you to stay with me, but if I do that, and if you say yes, we'll just be putting a band-aid on things. So you need to decide if we're enough - if I'm enough, just the way I am." She managed a smile. "I don't mean I won't try harder to talk to you more and stop going off and making rash decisions - I mean can you be okay with who I am fundamentally as a person?"

They sat for another moment, shoulders touching, not speaking. It had gotten fully dark, and the only sound was the waves crashing against the sand.

Stef stood up. "I'm going to run home and give you time to think. I have one more question I want you to consider - if Frankie had lived, do you think we'd be here now, questioning our future? Would she have fixed things?"

Lena watched Stef jog off before she stood up and walked along the shore. She finally understood it wasn't even Stef she was mad at - it was just their circumstances. She had blamed Stef for so much, and while Stef was far from perfect, Lena had allowed her own dissatisfaction push her away from her wife. She hadn't tried all that hard to communicate with Stef when Stef's behavior became more extreme. She hadn't tried to understand what was causing it because she was caught up in her own issues. They were both grieving, and they left each other to do it alone. But it was deeper than that. Stef was right - Lena had to figure out if she could come to terms with never having the life she might have wanted.

Having a baby now wouldn't change the past, and it was the past that Lena was stuck on. Nothing, not even Frankie, could turn back the clock and give Lena the experience of that phase of couplehood that preceded parenting. It would never happen for her. At least, not with Stef.

Lena pulled out her phone and dialed. When she heard her mother's voice, she couldn't speak. She tried to hold it back, but she began crying, finally letting out the emotions she had kept at bay while she and Stef talked.

"Oh, honey," Dana's voice was sympathetic. "What's happened? Are you okay?"

Lena sniffed and wiped her eyes. "I don't know. Stef and I finally got to the heart of things tonight."

"And what did you find there?"

Lena didn't answer directly. "Do you think it's selfish to want a biological child, someone who came from your body?"

"Is this about Frankie? Is it your grief that drove a wedge between you and Stef? I know the death of a child can be devastating to a marriage."

Lena considered before she answered. "It's not just about losing Frankie. It's about the entire life I didn't get to have. I never got to be with Stef without any kids. We never got to raise an infant together, to go through all those milestones as a family."

Dana paused before she responded. "My situation wasn't so different from yours, you know? Oh, I know I had a baby of my own, and it's not like Nathan lived with your father and me full-time, but I married a man with a child."

"Was it hard? Do you regret not being able to experience things together for the first time?" Lena hadn't thought about the similarities between herself and her mother.

"My only regret is that our relationship with Nathan is so strained. I know he said an awful thing, but he's your father's son, and he's your brother. Was it hard? At times, yes. Your father was recently divorced when we met, and Nathan was very young. He spent time with us regularly, and it wasn't easy to navigate the step-parent role. I know there were bumps for you and Brandon as well."

"Nothing like with you and Nathan," Lena interjected.

"But there were times when Brandon struggled with having three parents, as did you."

"True. When I moved in, it changed things between Brandon and me. I had been a visitor, and now I was taking up his space and his mom's attention even more. And I was the one driving him to school and picking him up. I think he felt a little weird about getting a ride with a staff member. It was a lot of change all at once"

"But you adjusted. Even biological parents go through challenging times with their kids. The points of contention might be different, but it's inevitable."

"I know," Lena laughed, remembering her own conflicts with her mother. While it took various forms over the years, it still happened on a semi-regular basis. "I still think about what a different path would have looked like. One that included me having a baby."

"Lena, you have done a beautiful, admirable thing all these years. You have loved five children exactly as though they were your own. You have loved them when their biological parents failed them, and you have raised them to be delightful young adults. I understand, especially in the wake of Frankie's loss, that you would still feel on the outside, but I'm here to tell you your family is remarkable, and you are an integral part of it."

Lena's eyes pricked again. Hearing such sentiments from her seemingly-difficult-to-please mother meant the world to her. "Thanks, Mom. That helps. A lot."

"There are no guarantees in life, honey - there is no normal. I know you lament that there are experiences you'll never have. You have to decide if the possibility of those are worth leaving behind what you do have now."

"Part of me realizes how insane it seems for me to even be considering this. But the rest of me know if I don't face this now it'll always loom over my relationship with Stef, even my relationship with my kids."

"I know, baby. I love you. Call me any time you need to."

"I will. I love you, too. Thanks for listening."

"Always."