Archie Simpson returns home to find that his wife's gone out to dinner with Caitlyn Ryan. Emma's still home – enlisting baby Jack's help in making dinner – but nevertheless the house feels empty, unsettled, off. This is nothing new. Things have been off since – the almost-affair? No, since before that, he thinks. What happened with Daphne was a symptom, not a cause. He'd made an attempt at regaining normalcy, thought it had worked for a time, but then things started changing again.

His biggest ally at school used to be Daphne, but she's lost to him forever. His biggest ally in life, Joey Jeremiah, took his daughter and followed his young beautiful fiancée to Calgary. Thinking of Joey makes him think of Diane, twenty-two to Joey's thirty-five, and is that so much of an age difference? And from there it's natural to think of the age difference between twenty-two and seventeen, thinks of Darcy, and realises he's blushing.

She trusts him. He would never take advantage of her, he tells himself, and yet he still catches himself calculating age differences, remembering her flower-scented hair, trying to figure out what it would take to make her smile. All he really wants, he thinks, is to find a way to make her smile. To have her think so highly of him as he thinks of her, he realises, and he wonders if such a thing is possible. It probably isn't.

"Emma," he says, a bit too harshly, a bit too desperately.

His stepdaughter looks up at him. "Snake? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he lies, fakes a smile. Joey. He needs to talk to Joey. Joey will be able to help. Joey can make sense of this. "How soon is dinner?"

She looks at the clock, winces. "Give us half an hour."

Plenty of time to make a phone call. "Perfect," he says, "I need to go call Joey," and vanishes from the kitchen into his bedroom, where he picks up the cordless phone, dials Joey's phone number, and waits. He's greeted only by Joey and Diane's answering machine, and he realises that he forgot to factor in the time difference. It's only four o'clock in Calgary; Joey and Diane are still at work.

Shutting the cordless off with a single tinny beep, Archie sighs. He just sits there in the growing darkness, waiting – for it to be time to dinner, perhaps, or perhaps just waiting for something indefinable, something to happen, something to change his life.

Across town, two sisters are doing their homework in their shared bedroom, like they've been doing for as long as they can remember. Claire's having trouble with her math; out of habit, she peers over at her sister's paper. And then she frowns. "Darcy? I thought your boyfriend was called Peter."

"What?" Darcy's startled out of her daydream. "He is. So?"

"So, who in the world is I Archie /I ? You've got his name written here over and over," she accuses, and Darcy is left with only a blush for an answer.

Archie and Darcy; two names intertwined in a calligraphic heart, and Darcy's pretty sure she's being stupid and even more sure that there's nothing she can do about it.

Author's Notes:

I was torn between making this a one-shot and extending it. I ended up writing another chapter, so I guess you can see which decision I made here!

Big giant thanks go to mellifluous cloud for being the only person to review the first chapter of this. Thank you so much; you really made my day. This is the first fanfic I've written in over a year, and I'm paranoid that it's made of suck.

Thanks also to the 53 people who read this, the five people who put this on their favourites list (!!! What an honour!) and the three people who have an alert for new chapters of this. Hope you're liking it.

Cheers, elske