The journey to the Mall took about a day and a half on horseback, and the best place to spend the intervening night would be Alice's farm. It was high time for a visit anyways, it had been Alice who had made the trek out to Ellie's place the last two or three times they had seen each other, and Ellie felt she should have returned the favor long ago. It had been years since she had ventured that close to the city, always half afraid that she might run into him.

Night had already fallen when Ellie led Delilah into the farm's stable and unsaddled her. After she'd fed and watered her horse, she went and knocked on the farm house's door. It only took a few seconds for Alice to appear and yank her into an enthusiastic hug.

"Ha! So I was right after all, I thought I'd heard hooves! Ryan was just telling me I was being paranoid. It's so good to see you, sis! What are you doing here?" Without waiting for an answer, she ushered her younger sister into the kitchen, where the fire was burning low in the grate and Ryan was sitting carving some wooden toy by candlelight. He smiled and rose in greeting, giving Ellie an awkward one-armed hug.

"All right, all right, Alice, you were right. Definitely hooves. Welcome back, Ellie."

In no time at all, Ellie found herself installed by the fireside, a bowl of soup in one hand and a hunk of fresh bread in the other. Alice had settled back down next to Ryan, in that comfortable companionship they had developed over the past few years – two people who enjoyed each other's company without feeling the need for any kind of romance after both of their less-than-stellar experiences in the past. Farm life had done Ryan good, Ellie had noticed it before. The timid boy who had always doubted himself and had always believed himself a little stupid had grown into a man who felt that he was good at what he was doing, and that even though farm life might not be a particularly demanding job – intellectually speaking – it was exactly what he ought to be doing. After all the time he had spent being shunted around from mine to mine and camp to camp, first by the Chosen and then by the Technos, it didn't seem surprising to Ellie that he liked a nice, quiet life now that he had the choice. Alice, on the other hand, hadn't really changed all that much. Life with Ryan might have made her a little quieter, but that was about it.

"So where's everybody else? Lex and KC and the girls?"

Ryan and Alice both laughed, but it was Alice who answered first.

"Lex and Tai San are in their bedroom, probably doing what they do best together. As for KC, Cloe and Patsy, believe it or not, they shacked up together in the old summer cottage down by the river."

Ryan chortled. "We think they have a sort of ménage à trois going, but we haven't really asked them about it. We just joke about it behind their backs."

The idea of Ryan using an expression like "ménage à trois", coupled with the mental image of little KC, Cloe and Patsy (who, all at about 20, weren't all that little anyways) in a three-way relationship, set Ellie off into a burst of laughter, and Ryan and her sister soon joined her.

When she had caught her breath, Ellie tried to steady herself, only to resolve into another fit of giggles. Finally, she managed to choke out: "Ménage à trois? Seriously, Ryan?"

He nodded, quite soberly. "Well, at any rate, they seemed to feel like they didn't need to live with us old folks any more, so they went for some independence. They seem to trundle along quite nicely by the river, though, and that's all that really matters in the end." He gave her a small smile. "And how about you, Ellie? It's been years since you've come to the farm."

She fidgeted, unsure as to how much she should tell them – but Alice's eyes zeroed in on the movement straight away.

"Ellie, what's going on?" she asked in her stern big sister voice.

The blonde turned the soup bowl round and round in her hands. Alice made a move as if to take it away from her, but out of the corner of her eyes, Ellie saw Ryan give a minute shake of his head that clearly said give her a minute. Finally, she looked up.

"I need to go see Jack. I have to clear up our baggage."

Alice's voice was suddenly sharp. "Which part of it? The one where you dumped him for a Chosen lieutenant or the one where you left in the middle of the night with your baby?"

"All of it" Ellie snapped. "And you know I didn't leave in the middle of the night and it was a whole lot more complicated than that anyways."

This time, Ryan actually laid a calming hand on Alice's arm. "Why now?" he inquired. "It's been years."

She could feel her sister's eyes boring into her head, and her voice was steely. "Ellie, what made you want to 'clear up' things with Jack?" Alice knew Ellie too well not to notice when there was a big something that her little sister wasn't telling her.

Sighing, she met Alice's gaze full-on. "It's been six years, and not a day has passed when I didn't think of what I did. And it's been worse, lately. I can't look at Murron without feeling guilty about how things ended with him, and I can't live like that any more. So I came to talk things out." She took a deep breath, preparing for the explosion, and plunged on. "Also, Luke turned up."

"WHAT?" She knew Alice had jumped up, she heard the chair topple over, but her eyes were already back on her hands, turning the bowl in her lap. But she wasn't prepared for the deep, calming breath that her sister took and for the noise of the chair being righted and the sound of Alice's large form settling back down. Ryan must have mellowed her down much more than Ellie had realized.

"Sorry about that, sis. I didn't think I'd ever hear his name again from you, much less that you'd actually seen him. Start from the top."

So Ellie told her – about Luke's unexpected reappearance, about not wanting him to know about Murron at first, but deciding to tell him after all, about the reunion of father and daughter and the bliss that seemed to have come from it, and about the tangle of guilt and regret and uncertainty she felt about Jack whenever she so much as looked at Luke and Murron. She told them about how Dee had made her come, and how she'd realized on the way there that her friend had been right, she could not move on either way without clearing this up.

Afterwards, she sat for a long time in a silence that seemed to expand and fill the room until it was suffocating, but she hadn't expected Ryan to be the first to break it. His voice was very gentle, as if he were speaking to a hurt animal or a child that needed comforting.

"Ellie, did it ever occur to you that Jack might not feel as strongly about all this as you do?"

"What do you mean?"

"All of this happened years ago. He might have just, you know, moved on."

"But I was awful. I ruined a perfectly good relationship by being stupid and thoughtless and immature and-"

"And Jack knows that you were young. And he was young himself. And men don't tend to dwell on the past so much anyways."

"How do you know that I didn't screw him up for life?"

"Well first, he didn't look screwed up to me last time I saw him, a few weeks ago. Second, if something in his youth screwed him up, it was the virus, and that screwed all of us up. Third, even though I'm not saying that what happened between you and him wasn't a huge mess and a lot of it was your fault, it doesn't mean it's scarred him for life. Men get through things like this. Some better than others. If I were to compare him and me, I'd actually say he got through his first big fuck-up a lot better than I through mine" he closed and gave her a little self-deprecating smile.

She tried to believe him, but it was near impossible after all that time she had spent feeling guilty. She wanted – wanted oh so much – for him to be right, but she didn't believe he actually could be.

"So what do you suggest, Ryan?"

"I suggest that by all means, you go see him. But don't run him over with your feelings. For one, guys don't like being cast as the victim – 'I've been so mean to you, I'm so sorry' – and for another, it's more likely you'll both be able to leave with your dignity intact."

"Which means...?"

"Go for the more casual approach. 'Hey Jack, it's been a while. Wanna have some coffee and catch up?' Something of the sort. Make it possible for him to, you know, be casual about it too. If you steamroller over him with your guilt trip, it's bound to explode in your face, because too many emotions will be involved."

Ellie nodded pensively. It did make sense, sort of. And at any rate, it sounded much more appealing than the approach she had been envisaging – casting herself at his feet and begging for forgiveness.

Alice had been sitting by (uncharacteristically) quietly until now, but now that Ryan seemed to have finished giving out his pearls of wisdom, she fixated Ellie again with her concerned big-sister look.

"And what happens then, Ellie?"

"You mean, after I've gone and seen him which may or may not lead to him forgiving me, which in turn may or may not lead to me forgiving myself?"

"Yeah. After all that."

"I don't know. I go home, I guess. See what happens."

"Yes, but what is it that you want, Ellie?"

"I want to be free. I want to be able to look at my daughter without thinking about Jack, or Luke, or the past. I want to be able to think about something that isn't related to love, for once. I want to be able to figure out what it is that I want, since I have no fucking clue what that might be, because I haven't been able to think straight for more than a month."

With that, she got up and went outside, to sit on the porch by herself in the cool night air. Winter was coming, but it was still far away.

Ryan found her there a while later. He sat down next to her, and she gave him a friendly bump of the shoulder.

"When did you get so good at giving advice?"

"Oh, you know. Here and there. Watching people. Thinking a lot. I know nobody really expects me to do that, but I do. And I know you, and I know him." He paused, thinking. "Also, I've spent the last five or six years living with Tai San. I guess she rubbed off on me." Ellie couldn't help but smile at that. "Look at it this way. Yes, you messed up back then. Yes, you hurt him. But it's not as if a single action or event defines a person forever. Just because he was fucked up back then, it doesn't mean that he's fucked up now. And just because you did some stupid things back when you were young, it doesn't mean you have to regret them for the rest of your life." He gave her a final pat on the back and went back inside the house.

She knew she ought to go to bed, too, but she couldn't face it. Not yet. Going to bed would mean she'd be that much closer to tomorrow, and that, in turn, would mean being closer to going and seeing him. She didn't know how she was supposed to do that. The two halves of her mind were still arguing about what would be the better option, the casual approach or the groveling one. And she wasn't certain whether his forgiveness (if there was forgiveness – which was a big if) would actually help. She had a wicked feeling that she might continue to blame herself for everything that happened no matter what Jack said to her.