Thank you to everyone who has put this story on Alert and/or has left me a review. It's nice to know that you are curious to read more. It's something that wouldn't get out of my head but I understand that it is very different from what's usually on here.

Again, please keep in mind that I haven't seen season 9 yet (except the wedding part of the series). So anything that might come in conflict with the series wasn't done intentionally.

Her studio was small but welcoming. Several paintings were hanging from the wall. I congratulated her on becoming an increasingly popular artist and even told her about Sally's passion for her work. She simply smiled.

"I've wanted to paint all my life," she replied. "But instead, I became a forensic artist. It's only when Brennan disappeared that I changed career paths. I just got sick of the whole crime scene."

I understood how she must have been feeling at that time. I, myself, had lost a partner while working as a police officer. When Thomas died, I refused to work with anyone else. We had been partners for close to 8 years and working with someone else had felt wrong. Weeks after his death, I was promoted to detective.

I went straight to the point.

"Do you think Dr. Brennan disappeared because of her job? Do you think someone was after her?"

Angela set down the paintbrush she had been using and turned to me.

"Who knows?" she replied, a certain wariness in her voice.

I was guessing she had asked herself that same question over and over again for the past 10 years.

"Can you tell me about the last time you saw Dr. Brennan? Tell me everything you remember. Did she seem nervous? Scared?"

Angela shook her head.

"No, she was just herself. "

"What does that mean?"

Angela chuckled.

"She was… special. She didn't think the same way we did. She used her logical side all the time. To her, things were black and white; never gray. That's why Booth and her made such a great couple. They balanced each other out."

"I see."

She then continued to tell me about their last night together. It was the evening she disappeared.

"We had been working very hard on solving this case. It was finally over but Brennan was convinced that we had missed something. Booth tried to explain to her that the murderer had been caught, that we had done our jobs, and yet she focused on that girl for hours. She just couldn't accept the conclusion of the case. She wanted to find the cause of every broken bone in her body which would have been nearly impossible. The girl had been beaten with several different objects and her killer, her next-door neighbor, had confessed to it. To us, it was enough to know that this poor girl's killer was finally behind bars and would remain there."

"Why was Dr. Brennan so intent on finding every torture weapon?"

"The girl was adopted at 15 years old. I think Brennan just related to her since she'd been in foster care at the same age herself. The girl was 16 years old when she died. She had only been with her new family for about three months."

I didn't know what else to say. I urged her to say more about their last night together. She smiled as she realized that she had got sidetracked.

"Well, after hours of persuading, she finally agreed to have some dinner. The compromise was that she'd come back the next day to work some more. I didn't say anything about that. I knew she'd do whatever she wanted anyway."

She paused, a smile tugging at her lips, as she remembered something that would remain a mystery to me.

"We went to dinner, some place new. She wanted to try something different. We drove there in separate cars. I joked that she only wanted to take her car so she could go back to the lab to work on Sofia's body but she said no. She said she just wanted to go home and spend time with her children and her husband."

"How old were the children then? I understand she had two."

Angela nodded.

"Yes, they had a girl and a boy. Christine was the oldest. She must have been 7 or 8 when they disappeared. Jackson was much younger. They adopted him after both his parents died in a fire four years before they disappeared. He was just a baby then and Brennan just fell in love with him. They took him in a foster family and when no one claimed him, they asked the court to adopt him. It took two years before he was officially theirs. He was 4 years old when it happened."

"Tell me more about the children. How were they like?"

Angela's smile grew warm as she recalled the children.

"Christine was more like her father. She liked science like her mother, but she preferred sports. She played soccer during the summer and took swimming lessons during the winter. She was very good at both. I think that bothered Brennan a little bit at first. But the fact that Christine was also very smart and was a straight-A student eased a bit of the pain that she would never be entirely like her mother. She was a caring and compassionate child and she loved her younger brother. As a baby, whenever he would start crying or fussing, she would be by his side in a heartbeat."

"How about Jackson? What was he like?"

Angela chuckled.

"He was something else, always doing things he shouldn't have been doing. He was grounded more times in a year than Christine had been since she'd been a baby. But he was always polite and nice to others. He was active, but didn't like playing sports. He preferred to run around the house, instead."

"Did he know he was adopted?"

"I think so. I don't think Booth and Brennan kept it a secret. After all, he looked nothing like them. Christine still had blonde hair at that point and Jackson's was all black. I think he would have been too young to understand anyway but I know Brennan believed in honesty. That's why I'm assuming that Jackson knew."

"During dinner, did anything peculiar happen?"

Angela shook her head.

"No, nothing out of the ordinary. We talked about our families, our children, our marriages, our job, and the latest case. She seemed relaxed, so unlike how she had been when we left the lab. She had put Sofia's case out of her mind as soon as we'd finish talking about it. We stayed maybe three hours in the restaurant before she told me she needed to go home. By then, it was 7 o'clock. It was close to my son's own bedtime so we paid the bills and went our separate way. The next thing I know, it's the next morning, a Friday, and Bren isn't at work. I called her cellphone, but it was off. Hodgins, my husband, drove to their house. Both their cars were still there. He knocked a few times but no one answered."

"Is that when you called the police?"

Angela shook her head.

"We waited a few hours, at first, thinking that maybe they had overslept. It wasn't in their habit but it can happen to everyone once in a while. It's only by lunch that we really began to worry. I drove over myself, with Cam and Hodgins. Again, their cars were in the driveway. We knocked for several minutes with no answer. I had a spare key, for emergencies. I took it out and unlocked the door. The house was empty."

"Did you look through the house?"

"Of course, but we didn't find anything. The dishes had been washed. The beds were made. We found Christine's schoolbag beside the front door. Only their shoes, their coats, and Brennan's purse were missing. Their car keys were still on the coffee table. Both their keys."

She paused, grabbed her paintbrush and resumed painting. I assumed this helped her calm the anxiety she still felt over her friend's disappearance.

"The house is still untouched, if you want to look through it. Parker still hasn't sold it. He can't bring himself to. He feels that the missing clue is in that house and that, if he sells it, we will lose it for ever."

"The house has stood empty for ten years?"

Angela nodded.

"Parker pays the electricity and the security system. He goes over once a week to clean the house himself. He still believes his father will come back and he wants the house to be in perfect condition."

"Do you think they are still alive?"

Angela let out a long sigh, her paintbrush stopped in mid-stroke.

"No. I think they're dead."