A/N: Thank you all for your responses to the last chapter. I was really nervous before I posted it. I enjoyed seeing your hopes/guesses for future chapters; hopefully you'll like how things eventually turn out.

A/N 2: There's more mature subject matter in this chapter dealing with self-harm. Read at your own discretion.

Back in San Diego, Stewart and Lena returned to the house a half hour after Stef and Sharon did. Dana had made food for all of them, but Stef was just picking at her sandwich. The other kids were sitting around the kitchen, anxiously waiting.

"Anything?" Stef asked her wife when Lena came in the back door. She shook her head. "So they never gave the school another address?"

"Unfortunately, it's worse than that," Lena replied with a sigh. "Wyatt got pulled out of school on Friday; he's moving out of state."

"Do you think Callie could be with him?" Dana asked her daughter as she handed her a plate.

"I don't know. If she is, we have no idea where he's going; there wasn't any information on where he'll be enrolled in school next."

"You need to file a police report," Stewart told the moms.

"We can't," Stef replied.

"They can look for his car, put out alerts. If she's run off with this boy and left the state - "

"We don't want that to end up in her CPS file if we can help it," Lena told her father.

"What happens if her social worker finds out you didn't report it?" Dana wondered.

Lena glanced over to where Jude was sitting between Mariana and Jesus. Keeping this from Bill could jeopardize their ability to adopt the Jacobs siblings, but she still was unwilling to do anything that could make Callie's life even harder - at least not yet. She and Stef couldn't choose to protect one child at the expense of another. "We'll cross that bridge if we come to it."

"She's on probation," Stef added, sharing a fact that Lena's parents hadn't been aware of. She saw Dana's mouth fall open slightly. "The situation wasn't what it looks like on paper, and Callie got the short end of the stick. But if the police are the ones to bring her back home, they'll be taking her back to juvie. So we can't do a report. Not yet."

Stewart finally nodded. "Okay, then. Where do we look next?"

As afternoon turned to evening, Wyatt and Callie entered New Mexico. After a little bit, she started to notice that Wyatt was wiping at his eyes a lot. "Are you tired?"

He shrugged. "Yeah, kinda."

"We should stop, then." Earlier in the day, she had volunteered to do some of the driving, but he insisted that he could handle it.

Wyatt finally nodded. "Yeah, probably. Find some food, too."

He pulled off of Interstate 40 at the first small town they found. On their meager budget, junk food from a gas station convenience store was all that they could afford to eat. "I don't have money for a hotel or anything," Wyatt confessed as they got back in the car. "I was just going to sleep in here."

"That's fine," Callie told him. "I've had worse."

There was a gravel lot down the road from the gas station; Wyatt parked the car toward the back, away from the road. They opened the hatch of the SUV and sat back there to enjoy the evening air. The sun had recently set and the sky was still colorful.

"You want some Twizzlers?" Wyatt asked, offering the package.

"Sure. Want a peanut butter cracker?"

"Okay."

Callie's eyes turned back toward the sky once their trade was complete. "I wish I had a camera."

Wyatt pulled out his cell phone and gave it to her. "You'll take a better picture than I would anyway." She snapped a couple shots of the sky and the landscape, then handed it back. Wyatt thumbed through them while eating some chips. "These are nice."

"Thanks... Do you think anyone's going to care that we're parked here?" Callie asked before taking a sip of her soda.

"Nah, it'll be fine."

"Okay... I didn't say it before, but thanks for letting me come with you."

Wyatt shrugged. "Keeps me from being bored on the drive."

Once they were done eating and and doing a little stargazing, Wyatt stuffed all their trash into one bag and stashed it in the back to throw away later. He then grabbed a couple blankets out of one of the boxes and they settled back into the front seats. "Have you ever been camping before?" he asked Callie.

"Um... well, one time, my last foster father locked me and Jude out of the house for the night, so we had to sleep in the backyard. Does that count?" Wyatt just gaped at her. "Sorry. I guess that's a little dark for our normal banter, isn't it?"

"N-no, no. I mean... that's horrible, but... I'm not sorry you told me."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. I want to actually get to know you."

Callie shook her head. "No, you don't."

"I do," he protested, but she shook her head again.

"Nobody wants me once they actually know me."

"I'm not like everyone else," Wyatt pointed out, but Callie didn't respond. "You want me to tell you something about when I was a kid? Trade stories?"

"I'm kinda tired."

Wyatt slowly nodded. "Yeah, okay. Me, too. Goodnight."

"'Night."

But Callie wasn't actually ready to go to sleep; her mind was still too active. She quietly waited for Wyatt's breathing to even out, to make sure that he was asleep. After carefully pulling up the edge of her shirt, she prodded one of the cuts she'd given herself earlier in the day. It stung badly.

It had taken a few months after everything with Liam before she'd no longer felt the need to hurt herself. Of course, that was because her and Jude's foster father had started doing it for her. She'd taken every punch, kick, and belting believing it was what she deserved. She'd been so stupid and cost her brother the best home they'd known. Jude was the innocent one and she was the perpetual screw up. And now, because she'd started to forget that fact, she'd almost ruined things for him again. Jude had been right; she ruined everything.

Callie tried not to shift around too much as she pulled her knife out of her pocket. She couldn't see much in the dark car, but she ran her finger across the initials that were carved into the wooden handle. Normally, she didn't like thinking about her parents or the night that they'd both been suddenly taken away. Her self-destructive streak had definitely come from her father. He'd taken the first steps to rip their family apart, and she'd now been forced to finish what he'd started.

She opened the knife but just held it at her side for a long moment. She didn't want to have to do this. She didn't want to feel this way anymore. Why couldn't she just be like everyone else? Why couldn't her first family have lasted forever? Why couldn't someone have found her worthy of loving sooner? Why did it always end in disaster when she tried to keep from feeling so freaking alone?

The blade suddenly broke through her skin without her even realizing it. She gasped in surprise before clapping her free hand over her mouth so she wouldn't wake Wyatt. Tears were stinging in her eyes but she wouldn't let them fall. She wasn't allowed to cry now, just like she'd never let Phil or the kids in the group home or the girls in juvie see her cry. She'd left behind the only people that she'd let see her tears, and it was her own fault. And now she had to figure out how to live with that.

TBC...