A/N: You all are probably not going to be super thrilled about this chapter, but I promise much better times are ahead for our lovely couple, so hang in there. I've already drafted the next few chapters and I'll try to get them up as soon as possible. :)

I also feel compelled to note that I have been really saddened by the real-life events in Paris lately. My thoughts are with the people of Paris and in France during these difficult times.

- Ana

"Where, exactly, do you want me to begin?" He asked her, eyeing her carefully, with desire and frustration and a hint of nerves. She'd been giving him the cold shoulder for days now, and he hadn't known why.

At least he knew why now.

Ugh, if only he'd told her more sooner… clearly, she'd run across something from his past that made him sound worse than he actually was.

Or maybe he was worse. He didn't know. She probably was too good for him. Part of him had known that all along… and so here it was, finally. His past had caught up to him.

He just wanted things back to normal.

"Just tell me who you are, Robin," sighed Regina impatiently. "From the beginning. Enough of this mystery man who has random friends who used to be bums in London, or the man who crashes in random apartments in Paris. Tell me who you really are."

"It's really not all that exciting," he grumbled, though shifted nervously, eyeing her carefully.

"Good. But I still want to know."

He sighed, and began.

..•..

As a young boy, Robin had had a comfortable life. His parents clearly took care to give him everything he needed: a house, larger than most had, a prestigious private school education, fine and tidy clothes and opportunities to play cricket and rugby, lessons to play the cello and guitar, summer camps where he mastered archery, summer trips to Continental Europe.

"You will be someone someday, son," his father had told him, dressing him in suits and ties and taking him with him to social events, dinners, introducing him to his friends' sons, who were similarly as bored and unimpressed by the fancy events as the young Robin was.

His parents had both come from humble backgrounds near the area of York, England: his mom had been a teacher before she'd met his father, and his father had worked a number of odd jobs from car repairman to office clerk until he finally started a small business selling rare car parts online in the early days of the Internet.

That business idea had paid off. As a teenager, Robin watched his parents grow wealthy… and with it, increasingly self-centered. They began to pay for elaborate vacations to the Maldives or the Caribbean, sometimes taking him, other times leaving him behind with his stuffy old Great Aunt Berta. They sent him to a better private school in town, more prestigious than the humble village school he'd attended as a child outside of the city of York. At the private school, the other boys ostracized him for wearing his hair the wrong way or speaking with a an accent that wasn't acceptable (it was one that he'd inherited from his days growing up in the country and listening to his mother's native Irish lilt).

He began to feel increasingly isolated from everyone: his parents and his elite prep school peers alike, and although he fit in with his school's rugby team and briefly tried to start a band with a few friends from his old school, he eventually was given a computer for Christmas… and he sat at home, alone, and taught himself to code.

"As I entered my teenage years," explained Robin to Regina over their lunch of salmon on a bed of arugula and lemon dressing, "I became really good at coding. It was something I loved to do. I started feeling like I could only be included by friends I'd met online. Some were great, brilliant geniuses. Others were also brilliant, but maybe not the most… well, responsible about it. We started to play around, for fun at first, hacking websites, not doing anything that bad. But at the same time, I was watching my father get rich off of these web-based businesses, and he began to use his earnings to invest in other businesses that had been started or funded by his new posh circle of friends, and eventually, I discovered that my group of online friends and I… we could hack into their websites."

"Again, we did nothing at first, it just felt like an achievement to be able to infiltrate this stuffy old businessman's website, you know? Like, as kids, we finally had power over these people because we knew a thing or two about computers." He shifted in his seat, waving his hand absently. "I was fourteen, maybe fifteen at the time. Some kids do dumb stuff like drink or run off to foreign countries and get laid… I was coding recklessly, and hacking."

Regina lifted her eye brows. "I have to admit, I really wasn't expecting you to say that's how you rebelled. By being an incredible computer nerd. So, how did you wind up in jail?"

"It doesn't happen overnight," Robin said, taking a sip of sparkling water and pausing as a couple sat down at a table next to them. "One Christmas, I learned that one of my father's friends worked at this bank. So I was off of school for a while, had a lot of time, so my online friends and I, we decided to see if we could hack into that site. And you know what? It was a bank and everything, but we did it, by hacking the list of usernames and passwords and being able to log into the account."

"So you were playing with fire by then," Regina commented.

Robin nodded. "That winter, my father was saying I should have more responsibility, so I wouldn't spend my whole time just wasting away on the computer. He said that this very friend had a job opening, needed a student to do some extra work with the computers at the bank. Nothing major, just some upkeep of their machines, and a bit of routine data entry at a local branch. I could get experience, learn a few things. My dad forced me to take the job."

Robin paused, finished the last of the salmon and salad on his plate, then continued. "I was resentful, as all teenagers probably are when their parents force them to do something that takes them away from what they enjoy doing most - in my case, sitting around, hacking into websites and not doing much. But at the bank, I had access to more… resources, should I say? And I figured out, with the assistance of these other kids I met online, how to get in and transfer small bits of money, here and there, from one account to another."

"Don't have banks have better security than that?" Regina said.

"Remember that it was the earlier days of the internet, back in the 90s, security wasn't quite as sophisticated as now, and online banking, and working at a branch, there were back end ways for me to obtain what I wanted."

"Okay," Regina said. "So let me guess, you started stealing money?"

Robin shrugged. "Basically. We stole small amounts, here and there, only from the banks' customers that I knew had tons of money and would never notice anything missing. And the excitement wasn't getting the money, but the process of getting it. I had no need for the money; my parents had enough money, and gave me everything I needed or wanted. I didn't want this money that I stole, I wanted to have the perverse pleasure of taking it."

"I see. So, then you were caught?" Regina guessed.

He shook his head and laughed slightly. "Not right away. The excitement wore off quickly, to be honest. And we could have probably stopped, and moved on, and maybe I would have never gotten in trouble. But one night I was walking home from work later than usual 'cause I'd stopped at a pub with friends, and I got mugged. It was nasty; I was punched in the gut, and in the eye, and these guys, just punks really, worthless scum, took my wallet. It wasn't a big deal, I could go home and cancel my cards, and I maybe only had 30 quid in the wallet. But I resented the feeling of being robbed, and it hurt."

"And you didn't see the irony in that?" Regina asked.

He laughed nervously. "I did. But the thing was, after I was punched and had the wind knocked out of me, I sat on the dark, dingy sidewalk for a bit, and then I noticed that there was this guy, not far from me, also doubled over, lying in a dark doorway. He was this kid, looked in terrible shape, and I asked him if he was ok, and what had happened, and he explained that the same group who'd mugged me had also nabbed him a little while before. And then there were just these tears streaming down his face-"

Robin paused, swallowing heavily, and took a sip of water. His face began to contort strangely, and Regina had the sudden realization that he was fighting the urge to cry.

She took a nervous bite of a piece of bread while she gave him a moment.

"Anyways," Robin said, choking back his thoughts, and continued in a quieter voice, "He told me the story of how the guys had stolen all of his earnings for the past two weeks. He'd just cashed his paycheck earlier that day, and was taking it home. And he needed that money. His whole family depended on him, his mom was sick and his two siblings, two younger sisters, depended on him for food and to pay the bills. He had been hurt by those meatheads who'd mugged him, yeah, but he had just stayed in that doorway, crying, not knowing how he'd go home and face his family and tell them they'd have no money for food for the next two weeks."

Robin took a deep breath. "So I took him home with me, my parents had gone on one of those big vacations, he slept on the couch, and the next morning I left for school, but not before I'd left an envelope filled with money in his pocket."

"I got home from work, and the envelope was still there on the couch. All the money still there. But he was long gone. Guess his pride didn't allow him to take it from me," he said, shrugging, shaking his head. "I spent days trying to locate him in that area, but nothing, no one knew him, the kid with a sick mother and two sisters. Never did find him, or his family. But I was angry. I spent weeks, just angry at it all, watching my parents enjoy their middle-class, 'nouveau riche' lifestyle, blowing their money on furniture and clothes and jewelry and trinkets and trips and dinners with their new friends… I was fuming. So I started stealing from the bank, from my father's rich friends' accounts… and I gave it away. To charities, food banks, anything that would help poor families like that guy's family."

"So. You're a regular modern-day Robin Hood," observed Regina in a quiet voice. "Stealing from the rich to give to the poor."

Robin dropped his eyes and shrugged.

"THen you were caught, and went to jail?" asked Regina.

"Not quite," Robin said.

"See, this is where you know that the world doesn't have any justice in it. Not really. So I was caught, eventually. But by my father's friend, the one who ran that bank branch. Knowing how the story would ruin my parents' beloved spot amongst the movers and shakers, he kindly agreed to keep it hushed up, as long as we paid him back. My father, bitterly angry, paid the amount of money I'd stolen then sent me off to another school, it was a boarding school. My parents seemed to think that would keep me on the straight and narrow: but it was worse."

Robin shook his head, remembering his first days at the prep school, filled with kids with trust funds and parents who vacationed in the Maldives, who had owned land for generations, fathers and grandfathers in government. He was a puny kid from a backwoods town, with parents who thought they were bigger than they really were. He spent the remainder of his high school years roaming the halls of some sort of hellish version of Hogwarts, with stern teachers and a cruel headmaster. Definitely no magic there.

He'd struggled not to be bullied: going from one class to another, boys would trip him, tease him because of his glasses (he wore contacts nowadays, but glasses back then), tease him for everything, he spent his days and nights ducking punches thrown by the boys who didn't like him. He was scrawny and scruffy, and tried ignoring everyone at first. After a while, he learned to swing back. He signed up for archery because he hoped it'd make him stronger, more intimidating. He started to work out, lifting weights, building muscle. But the boys didn't care. Those posh boys with their butlers when they went home, their cars and first class vacations… they couldn't care less that he was the best at archery in school, the smartest in class, quickly becoming one of the strongest, too. That only made it worse. They stole his clothes, shoes, books, hid them around the school. Mocked him when he got answers right when the teacher called on him, and mocked him worse when he (purposely) gave the wrong answers in class when the teacher called on him. He could do nothing right. He hated his classmates. Absolutely despised them.

"Months into that wretched prep school, I finally pulled together a small group of tech nerds, those who'd existed on the fringes of that elitist social group of that school. We managed to fly under the social radar eventually, which made my life better. We resumed our hacking activities. This time, our focus wasn't on stealing money, although we did that, too. Our main thing was infiltrating the school's records systems, messing with grades and stealing students' confidential information and files. Since I couldn't completely shake off some of those guys, I ended up trying to ruin their lives the only way I knew how - by screwing with their files. Unfortunately, online security had gotten better, and we made a few mistakes, didn't quite cover our tracks so to speak, and we were discovered, and of course expelled, and legal charges were pressed."

"So you were sent to jail for, essentially, standing up to bullies? And not that time you stole thousands of dollars from a bank?" Regina laughed, despite herself.

"Like I said, the world doesn't make sense," Robin said, rolling his eyes. "At any rate, I didn't exactly spend long locked away, but even my father's lawyers couldn't get me out of it completely. I spent two months there, and then was released a bit early for good behavior, still had to do community service. Which I quite enjoyed. That's when I worked in London, with Emma, and taught classes, and met people like Will. Needless to say, it was a much healthier - and far less illegal - way to channel my impulses for helping."

"Then what? How did you get back into computer engineering - considering your dubious history in the field?" asked Regina.

"Right. Well my father had a friend who had heard of my story. Although my story had made the local news at that point ('Prep School Hackers Land Themselves in Jail…' what a fun little story for my hometown newspaper, to properly shame my parents who had grown too big for their breeches), one of his friends was duly impressed at all of my criminal computer activities and he offered to hire me at his company to protect against idiots like me after I finished a bachelor's degree in computer engineering. So I went to school, studied engineering. Didn't love it, to be honest. By then, I had spent time in jail reading, and started to nurse this interest in history… but my parents coerced me into finishing my computer engineering degree, and I went off to work for my father's friend's company as promised, which is where I've been ever since. And no, these days I never do anything sketchy. Roland changed all that. It's not worth it. Instead, my job is all about keeping little gits like myself out of the system."

"So, your illegal activities nowadays are limited to squatting in apartments," Regina said tersely.

"I will never live that up, will I?" Robin asked her incredulously.

She laughed, despite the tension that hung in the air between them. "No. I'll stop. But going back to when we first met - why did you have to crash in my apartment? Or, as I suppose it was then, Henry's grandparents' apartment? Especially if you had a good job. Emma said you were in a rough place, and I assumed that meant you were financially not well off."

He shrugged. "Whatever money I make that doesn't go to Marion and Roland, and Roland's savings accounts, I give away to some organizations, like that one I worked with in London, and some here as well, because I have never found that guy that was beaten up and mugged just before I was. But I like to imagine that somewhere along the line some of my money has found him, and helped him out. I hate to pay for an apartment for myself when I don't really need one. When I know my money could go instead to a family, to buy their food, instead of to some wealthy real estate agency."

"But you rented an apartment recently."

"I guess there was no away around it. I was kicked out of the flat where I was squatting, by a beautiful woman," he looked over at her, his icy blue eyes meeting her deep chocolate ones.

They stopped talking then, digging into their small pots of crème caramel that had been brought to them by the waiter as the dessert.

"It's not wrong to take care of yourself, before you take care of others, you know," Regina said quietly.

He sighed. "I suppose. I just… don't want to. I don't want to rent an apartment one day, and become the greedy consumers my parents became after they fell into money."

"It sounds like your dad worked hard for his money," she pointed out.

"He did. But they forgot, so quickly, how hard it can be to make ends meet. They lost touch with reality, and they got swept up in the glamor of it all and forgot about... how to be real, and I just…" he sighed. "I just don't want to become them."

Regina reached for his hand. "I can see that. But you're not. At all."

He smiled at her and reached over to squeeze her hand.

"I wish you would have told me sooner," Regina said, still not over all of the revelations, pulling her hand away and sighing heavily.

"I'm sorry," he said, looking into her eyes and holding her gaze. "Truly."

"It was awkward, with Marion… I don't want it to be that way. I care for you. And Roland. And the last thing I want to do is make enemies with her."

"She said she liked the write-up you did about her. The article," he commented.

"Did you read it?"

He nodded, as the waiter arrived and cleared their plates. "I did. Although I do find it highly coincidental that of the millions of women in Paris, and in France, you decided to profile my ex."

"It was an article I saw in the newspaper, one day a few weeks ago, when we were having lunch. You must have been reading about her before I arrived."

Robin squinted, trying to remember. "Oh, right," he said, as it dawned on him. "I did. I mean, I was. I suppose I left the newspaper on the table. So that's how you learned of her?"

Regina nodded. "Yes. It's okay. I mean, at least we didn't start completely on the wrong foot, I think we have a good professional relationship. I just don't… want her to be uncomfortable with me being around her son."

He paused for a moment at that. "She's not. She was just stressed and upset the other day, and surprised to see you. I promise you, it's all blown over, and I'll be seeing Roland again soon enough."

Regina didn't say anything.

Robin looked over at her nervously. "And more importantly, what about us? Are you… how do you feel about all of this?"

Her deep eyes met his.

"Honestly? I don't know, Robin," she sighed.

"I know I shouldn't have kept all of that from you, at least not for so long," he said, dropping his eyes.

"I have a son. I have to think of him. I can't be … having strangers around him," she stammered.

"We're hardly strangers, Regina. We haven't been, especially these past two weeks," he said somewhat bitterly.

She shot him a glare. "We're strangers if there are important parts of your past that I don't know," she said bitterly, delicately wiping the corner of her mouth with the smooth cloth napkin, then setting it on the table, her lunch now complete.

Robin shifted uncomfortably. "Regina," he whispered in a low voice. "I had a ridiculous past, but ultimately, I have learned from it. I especially learned a lot from Marion, to be honest with you. She made me see life completely different. Then I really saw things in a new way when Roland was born. He's… everything to me."

Regina nodded, understanding the feeling. Henry was everything to her, after all. She wanted to protect him from things, too. But she especially wanted to protect him from people who didn't deserve to be in their lives.

"I should have known more than to get sidetracked by a man who broke into my apartment and kept things about his past from me."

"And yet, here you are," he said out after a moment.

She sucked in a breath. "Here I am."

She thought of Henry. About their little home. He deserved better. She didn't distrust Robin, not really, but his story had made her uneasy. He seemed too much like a wild card, too errant. Too risky. Too many unknowns for her and Henry right now.

Her expression grew solid, stoic. She blinked a few times, then looked at him.

"I all in. For a few weeks, I was into this, Robin. Truly. And thank you for being honest with me. But it's my responsibility to keep a stable life for Henry, and I must prioritize that. You understand."

"Regina, wait -" Robin began to protest, sensing where this was going.

She took another breath to steady her voice.

"No," she said gently. "Thank you… I… you made me believe in things, Robin, these past few weeks, that I didn't feel were possible again. And I really, really, do like you. You might have 'stolen' my apartment, but you also, well, you kind of stole my heart. But I'll need it back now. I need to care for my son, and focus on my work. You need to sort out things a little more, with Marion, and Roland, and your work. I'm sorry, but, I don't think we'll have any more lunches."

Robin looked at her, sadness in his eyes, looking as though he were choking back emotion that was bubbling to the surface. She expected him to protest, even whine, beg her to stay, but instead, he swallowed, nodded, his jaw setting firmly.

And she gained even more respect for him for not protesting. For letting her go.

He stood up as she stood up, brushed off her offer of money to pay for her half of the tab, insisting this one was on him, that he owed her that much at least. She stuck out her hand, and he shook it. He then hesitated briefly, but squeezed it a bit, and took her hand, raised it to his lips, and kissed it gently.

Regina let her hand linger there for a moment, but eventually pulled it back. Without saying anything else, she left, departing into the busy city on that cloudy summer afternoon. He watched her go, walking for a block or two, until her figure was eventually obscured behind the other anonymous people walking along the sidewalk and he could no longer see where she was.