I'm setting myself up for getting a lot of people upset with this chapter. I hope it explains a little of Carol's motivation—I mean, it's straight from the horse's mouth. Also, I tried to offer a little 'wait… what?' moment about Alice and JD before she and Hatter sort themselves out over it. It's not as bad as it sounds, but still. I'll be in my bomb shelter if anyone needs me.

o…o

"I just don't know why you didn't tell me about this when you were thinking of doing it," Alice said. "Or even a little after. Why did it have to wait until I figured it out for myself? It just makes me wonder what else you're keeping a secret from me."

"Well, you have a half-cousin somewhere from my sister's wild youth," she said with obviously forced humour thick in her voice.

"I know, you've told me."

"Well, then, I guess there aren't any other secrets."

"Will you please be serious?" She begged. "You said you wanted to talk and I'm here to talk, so stop making jokes. This is serious. I'm angry at you. I'm so angry I can't even think straight."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I was just trying to lighten the mood, I guess."

"Well stop it. I don't want any mood-lightening and I don't want any jokes and I don't want any side-trips down memory lane or family stories or anything like that. I want you to tell me why you never mentioned that you divorced Daddy."

"I meant to, Alice, I really did. I meant to, and I wanted to, but… but when I saw how much you wanted to find him so we could be a family again, and how that was everything you did, I just… I put it off. And then a few months turned into a year and then a year turned into three and then it was all just too late. I'm so sorry. I can't apologize enough."

Alice scratched at the grain in the kitchen table.

"Why'd you do it?"

Carol wouldn't meet her eyes.

"Because after a while, when things were changing, I realized that even if your dad did just suddenly come back, we would be so different than we were before and there was just no way we could just pick up the pieces and go back to being how we were. It was never going to happen. After a year or so, maybe, but after five years, no. It was time to move on."

She didn't say anything to that. She couldn't

Her mother was right and Alice knew it. She'd probably known it for a long time, but she never admitted it. Eventually it was only her, and her alone, who was keeping up the frantic search for Robert; everyone else had moved on, content or at least not as bothered as she was by all of the unanswered questions left in the wake of his disappearance.

Kidnapping, she reminded herself.

For such a long time she hated her father for leaving and never coming back—it was an automatic knee-jerk reaction to the subject of his disappearance, to be angry with him. Now that she knew the truth she had to amend her thinking and stop regarding it as something he did willingly and start acknowledging that he was taken from them.

But it was too late for that, she figured; it was so long ago that the damage had long since been done. It'd coloured her entire world, her perceptions of everything around her—that she wasn't good enough, was somehow inherently faulty and caused men, all men, to leave her in the end. Boyfriends all left, not because she pushed them away, oh no, but because all men left her in the end, just like Daddy did.

What a disaster it all was, she realized. What a colossal, enormous, stupendous mess it all turned out to be. Just for that stupid fucking Queen and so she could have a better way to drain people of their emotions and control Wonderland.

The fact still remained that her mother and everyone else moved on and it was just she, Alice, who was so fanatical in her search that she was unapproachable with the subject of maybe starting to go on with her life.

"I have to move on, too," she whispered.

"Are you all right?"

Alice wiped her teary eyes on the bottom of her shirt. She tried hard not to flinch when her mother took her hand.

"I know it's time to bury Dad and get on with life," she said. "I wish you would've told me you were planning that, too, that you wanted the world to think he was dead."

Carol squeezed her hand. "We've been over this, Alice. There's no other explanation. There's nothing. I've been in contact with police in every state since he disappeared and no one in ten years has found anything. Either your father really is dead, or he's going about his life quite happily under a completely different identity. However you slice it, the man we knew as Robert Hamilton is dead. It's time to accept that."

It felt like it was probably a good place to open up and tell her mother exactly what had happened to him, that he'd been taken to Wonderland and his whole past was erased and he worked as the Queen's pet scientist for years, but she didn't. She couldn't say it. Maybe one day she would tell her mother the truth—after all, she was being downright hypocritical in keeping this a secret from her when she was so angry that the divorce had been kept a secret from her—but such an immense information dump would require careful planning. This wasn't the right time.

Maybe it never would be, she mused. Maybe it was best to let her keep whatever peace she'd made with herself over the years, to let her maintain the reconciliation of her husband's disappearance. She was all right, after all, and it wouldn't feel right to take the peace she'd made—however tentative—and turn it upside down and backwards with stories of Wonderland and stolen people. It would open up a whole other entirely unnecessary can of worms and no one needed that right now.

Let her keep Robert Hamilton the way he was. If she didn't have to know Carpenter, then, well, perhaps that was a good thing.

"If you need any help with it, you can let me know," she said finally, getting up from the table.

"Are you going to be okay, Alice?"

She shrugged. "Dunno. I'm still angry with you. I still don't understand completely why you did what you did, but I'll get over it eventually. I'll be okay. And I don't hate you."

Carol smiled a shaky smile; her lower lip quivered and her eyes started to tear. She stood up.

"I could use a hug," she said.

"Yeah," Alice agreed. "Me too."

The shaky smile got shakier.

"But not from you," she finished. "Not right now. I'm sorry."

She picked up her coat and left.

o…o

JD wasn't around when Alice went looking for him, but his oldest sister, Maggie, was. She was in her thirties now, and in the absence of Mrs Damm had become the family matriarch. Even though she was grown up and married and moved out of the house, she still came once a week to check up on everyone—occasionally she came around to see Alice, too, because sometimes even Alice forgot that she wasn't one of them. Except for the fact that she wasn't strawberry-blonde and freckled like all five of the Damm children were, she might as well have been.

Mag was good for conversation and advice sometimes, and Alice was glad to have someone to talk to. She was still too angry with her mother to be entirely comfortable discussing her personal relationship issues with her.

"I thought you'd be spending a nice day like this with your new boyfriend," Mag observed casually. "Jason told me."

Alice gave a noncommittal shrug.

"Problems already?" She asked.

Another shrug. "I think he's got some kind of stick up his ass about me and JD."

"Oh, no, not another one," the woman lamented with an enormous exasperated sigh.

Her head snapped up. "What does that mean?"

"Let's be honest here, it wouldn't be the first time one of your relationships was trashed because of what you have together."

"You think he's jealous, then."

Mag shrugged, too. "Who's to say? It wouldn't surprise me, for one. Look at how close you and Jay are. That can be intimidating. A threat. Remember how it was when you were in high school?"

She made a face. "But we're not in high school anymore. Hatter—David—is a grown man. He shouldn't be worrying."

"I'm sure he thinks that, too. But he still worries because… well, because whether you like it or not, Jay is still kind of a threat."

She snorted. "Some threat."

"Guy friends are always seen as competition because everyone in the world has a stick up their ass about mixed-sex friendships. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that's what most people are going to think. That's life."

"You make it sound so final," she groused. "Like there's no way anyone will ever see JD as anything but competition."

"Really, there's only one way you're going to know what's going on, and that's if you talk to him about it. The boyfriend, not Jay. He could sort it out on his own but maybe not."

"Why are boys so stupid?" Alice grumbled.

"I dunno," she answered with a sigh. "You keep on thinking 'oh, they'll grow out of it eventually!' and then the next thing you know you're my age, and you don't understand them any better at thirty than you did at thirteen."

She gave a weak laugh.

"Give it some time, talk to him. If he's worth keeping around, he'll work it out. But if he's not going to let it go, then you have to think—is he really the best choice?"

And then Mag had to go and JD came in and their conversation was over, but it still lingered over Alice's head like a raincloud.

The thought of Hatter never accepting her friendship with JD, and having to leave him over it—it made her stomach drop out and a sense of dread creep into her chest like she rarely felt in any situation that didn't involve great height or the possibility of death.

Losing Hatter? No. She didn't—she couldn't. She felt stupidly clingy but she absolutely did not want to let him go. Not over this—not over anything. With everything they'd been through together, to call it quits over something so stupidly simple was just ludicrous. He meant far too much to her.

How long had it been? A month and some? Two months? She hadn't really been counting. But he smiled and he made her laugh and she actually trusted him, and he came all the way through the Looking Glass and was prepared to make a life here in a totally different world for her, and… well…

Maybe it was love after all. She'd told Jack she loved him and he wasn't exactly a long-term boyfriend, though that relationship had sped along like a highway. Was it so absurd to think she loved Hatter? Love was a word she guarded, and guarded well. She never said it unless she meant it. It was possible, though. She could love him.

She sighed again.

Why was her life always so complicated?

"I know that look," JD said. "Something's badly wrong with you. You only look like that when you've got boyfriend problems or a pet died, and since I know you don't have any pets that can't be it."

She rubbed her forehead—headache.

"Let's go for a walk or something," he offered. "Then you can tell me what's bothering you."

They were quiet for a long, long time.

"It's Hatter," she said finally.

"Not taking too well to your dashing, sexy male best friend, huh?" He ran a hand theatrically through his long hair.

She shook her head, not really in the mood for amusement right now.

"You think you'll break up over it again?" He asked, more seriously now.

"I really, really don't want to."

"This guy's really important to you, isn't he?"

Nod.

"How long've you known him, anyway?"

She shrugged. "Sometimes it feels like forever—other times it's like he's a total stranger."

"Nice dodge. I won't press it—you'll tell me when you're ready," he said with a shrug. "You said he wasn't the jealous type, though."

"I thought he wasn't. I think he thought he wasn't, too."

"You know," he began like he was going to reveal something significant. "You've scared more than a few of my girlfriends away. A couple of boyfriends, too. They see what we have, you and me together, and they don't think they can compete."

"I know that," she snapped. "That's nothing new."

"Look at it from his point of view," he offered. "What if a friend of his turned up, hm? Someone from his past, someone he knows really, really well? It doesn't have to be a woman, it's just someone he talks to so easily, someone he knows. He laughs with them, he cries with them, you know he's been through a lot with them. It seems like he's so easygoing with that person and you realize just how fresh and new and uncharted your relationship is. How d'you think that'd make you feel?"

She opened her mouth to make a smart remark but then closed it quickly. How would she feel? There was still so much about Hatter that she didn't know, and so much about her that he didn't know. What if he had someone who knew him, and his past, and everything about him the way she and JD knew each other?

Even if it wasn't a woman, it would be something that could spark jealousy. In her it probably would spark jealousy because her usual reaction to things like that was to assume that a guy would leave her. Because all guys left. And Hatter, with his comment on chocolate and cream cake, must've had a trail of relationship trainwrecks behind him. He was enough like her that it wasn't a stretch to think that maybe, just maybe, he was thinking the same thing about her—that she was going to abandon him for someone she knew better.

"And you know, we don't have exactly a normal friendship, at least not since high school. Perceptive people can figure that out. Hell, even airborne bacteria can figure that out. He doesn't know you like I do. He hasn't been around for as long as I have. I'm a threat, even though he doesn't wanna think of me like that."

Without warning, she lurched forward and threw her arms around his waist and hugged him tightly.

"Hurk! Oh, god, shit, be careful, Alice! Not so tight, I don't wanna puke in your hair. Once was enough."

She laughed wetly into his chest.

"I'm gonna tell you something, but if you repeat it to anyone I'll deny I said it," he warned.

She nodded wordlessly against him.

"Guys are incredibly insecure creatures."

She laughed again, and this time it wasn't quite so wet. It felt good to laugh after spending the last few days in a funk.

"He might know, realistically, and he might accept the things you tell him, but he's not really gonna believe it until you reassure him. We play tough, but at the end of the day it's nice to have someone to put all your fears to rest."

"You play tough?" She asked teasingly. "Where was I when this happened?"

He smiled and kissed the top of her head.

"You've gotta tell him—remember, he's just one dangerously sexy man-shaped mound of insecurities wearing a hat."

"Do I have to tell him everything?" She asked pointedly.

JD nodded slowly, fair eyebrows raised; Alice winced.

"Look at it this way," he offered. "What if you don't tell him and he finds out himself from somewhere else? That won't do much for all those insecurities. Best if it comes from you. Then he can ask all the questions he wants."

She stepped back from him and sighed, rubbing her suddenly-teary eyes on the sleeve of her jacket.

"Thanks," she said. "You're a good friend."

"I know," he said back. He leaned forward and gave her a quick little peck on the lips. "I've gotta go. I've still got some boxes coming in from California—I mailed half of my possessions back to myself so now I've gotta sort 'em all out or my dad says he'll put them all up on Ebay. Good luck."

She nodded, taking her phone out of her back pocket. When JD was gone, she dialled Hatter's number and hoped desperately that he'd pick up.

"Hey, Hatter? Are you home? We need to talk."

o…o

Bear in mind that if you kill me for writing this, I won't be able to post the next chapter! Someone give me a nudge when it's safe to come out of this shelter.