The sun was shining on the day of her father´s funeral.

Her father would have liked it. 'Don´t mourn for the dead, but for those left behind' had been one of his favourite bits of wisdom and it would have elicited a small smile from him that at least Mother Nature didn't seem to mourn him.

Every now and then a small breeze would run through the trees outside and sway their leaves back and forth. Scottie could even hear some birds chirping happily, bouncing from one branch to the next while they sang their songs. They, at least, seemed to have nothing to mourn.

Scottie sat on her father´s chair, holding a hot cup of coffee as she heard Mike pounding down the stairs. She had offered him their guest room and he had happily accepted, completely drained from the long journey up here.

It was a comfortable feeling knowing that she wasn´t alone with her memories in the house. Helen from across the street probably thought that Mike was her twenty years younger lover from New York, whom she had hidden from her father and who was now comforting her in her hours of need.

The thought elicited a small smile from Scottie. Helen was a nice woman, who had always kept an eye on her when her father had been a work, but she probably was the whitest suburban wife to ever have graced American suburbs.

"There´s a pot of coffee on the stove!" Scottie called after Mike when she heard him rummaging through the kitchen cupboards.

"Thanks!" Mike called back. The next thing Scottie heard was a sound that you could reasonably describe as ecstatic moaning.

"This coffee is the greatest brew my tongue ever touched," he declared when he entered the living room. The suit from yesterday had been replaced with a loose t-shirt and sweatpants.

"It´s a special blend from Brazil," Scottie explained. "It was one of the few luxuries my father indulged in."

"Well, it´s definitely worth it," Mike agreed wholeheartedly and then took another sip from his fuming cup. "Definitely worlds better than the stuff they served at Harvard." He grimaced. "They were lucky that they never had a health inspector dropping by." Scottie chuckled.

"It´s still that bad?" she commented. "When I was at Harvard we used to bring our own coffee."

"You went to Harvard as well?" Mike asked. "I didn't know that!"

"I didn't know that you went to Harvard, too," Scottie replied. "Small world, after all." It brought home the point that Scottie and Mike didn't really know much about each other. Or at least nothing superficial. Scottie didn't know where Mike came from, but she knew how hard his parent´s death had been for him and how he had tried to work through the grief, the fear and the anger that came with it. And somehow that was worth far more than being knowledgeable about the other´s favourite movies, at least in her opinion. It was a deeper connection.

Everyone at Pearson Hardman knew that Scottie loved Legally Blonde. That didn't make them friends.

For a few moments there was silence between them as both Mike and Scottie sipped at their coffee.

"I should make myself ready," Scottie commented after a while. "We need to be at the cemetery in three hours." Mike just nodded and didn't say anything further as Scottie rushed out of the room.

Scottie stared at her reflection in the mirror and saw a stranger looking back at her.

She had pinned up her hair, only allowing a few strands to frame around her face. It accented her sharp cheekbones and made her look even more aristocratic. The last few days had left her skin pale – like porcelain – which, together with the dress she had chosen, only helped to further emphasized her paleness.

The woman in the mirror looked regal and composed. She looked like there was nothing in the world that could crack her façade. She stood above everyone around her. She was untouchable. Unchangeable. Unbreakable.

It was all a big lie.

Suddenly there was this hot, burning fury within her. This anger at the world, at herself, at her father, all flowing together and forming this ball of rage within her chest that just needed to get out. She needed to destroy something, to make something shatter like she had been shattered, just to make herself feel something different than this despair.

Without thinking, Scottie took the vase – a beautiful thing, blue with delicate patterns of pink flower pedals – and with a scream she threw it against the mirror.

It shattered. Thousands of glass shards falling to the ground, reflecting the light like diamonds, making it look like fairy dust from the fairy tales that had been told to Scottie by her father when she had been a young girl.

It was beautiful. Now she no longer had to look at herself and see the false woman starring back at her.

"Dana?" Mike exclaimed hesitantly from behind the door. "Everything alright?"

"Now it is," Scottie replied back. "Now it is." She waited for Mike to open the door, but he didn't. She let out a breath of relief. Mike probably knew how she felt, seeing as he, too, had had to go through the same thing, and could guess that she just had to do it. And that she didn't need any company, but someone who would give her space.

Everyone else would have rushed into the room and would have smothered her with compassion and pity. The poor girl who shattered the mirror because she couldn't cope with her father´s death. How horrible that would have been.

"I´m ready now," she said, more to herself than to anyone else. "I´m ready."

The mirror´s shards gleamed in the sunlight.

A great iron hate barred the entrance to the graveyard. A slight breeze ran through the trees that stood at the side of the street, their leaves swaying back and forth. Scottie looked outside the car´s window and even though the sun was shining she found the world to be grey. Lacking. Devoid.

Maybe it was because today was the day where she had to finally say her last goodbyes to her father. Scottie had never been one for farewells.

"The funeral is always the hardest," Mike said from beside her. He didn't look at her with pity, but rather with understanding that stemmed from having lived through the same ordeal by himself. "When my parents were buried the sun shone as well. Spring had just come around, the first flowers blooming, birds returning from the south." He shook his head. "It was terrible. I thought that the world didn't deserve to have any beautiful day ever again. Ah, the wrath of an eleven-year-old." He chuckled.

"The attendants are the worst," he continued. "The funeral is more for them than for the actual family. I didn't care for the funeral and neither did my parents. They were dead, after all. But people needed to go to church and stare at their coffins. Needed to unload their useless condolences on grieving relatives, so that they would feel better. And then the priest! Had the gall to preach about an almighty Lord and his son, the Saviour, to a child who just had lost his parents."

Scottie had to agree. She didn't really want the funeral at all. It was of no use to her. She needed to find closure on her own terms, not in a church-mandated social gathering disguised as remembrance for the dead. But other people needed it in order to pay her father the las respects and she wouldn't take away that from them, not even if it meant nothing to her.

"Isn´t it comforting to know that there will be a place where you can come to and find solace?" Scottie wondered out loud. "A physical remember that the people you loved did indeed exist?" Mike looked at her with a thoughtful expression.

"I wouldn't know," he admitted. "I´ve been to my parent´s grave maybe twice in my whole life. It isn´t a location I like to spend my time in."

"Then where do you go to when you want to be near them?" Scottie asked.

"My grandmother still lives in the house where I grew up," Mike replied. "My old room is on the second floor. There´s a loose floor board under which I hid a box full of pictures of me and my parents. I did it shortly after they died. I was somehow afraid that I´d forget them – that someone would come and take away all the pictures and leave me with nothing – so I took countermeasures. And whenever something big occurs in my life I come back to that room and look at these pictures. I need no gravestone to have my parents with me."

"I like that," Scottie said. Her fingers found her necklace and her grip around the pendant tightened. She inhaled. And then she breathed out. "We should go now. No need to delay it any longer." Without waiting for Mike to reply, she opened the car´s door and gracefully exited the vehicle. The gravel creaked underneath her heels as she and Mike made their way to the chapel situated in the middle of the cemetery.

They passed long lines of gravestones, inscribed with the names of hundreds of people long dead, who once had been all loved ones of people Scottie would never know. It made her feel insignificant. Who would dare to assume himself important when the perishability of human life was laid out before him? A life was just a mere flicker in eternity.

Finally, they reached the little chapel in the middle of the cemetery where most of the guests had already arrived. Some old friends of her fathers', neighbours and her co-workers from Pearson Hardman. What an illustrate company.

"Harvey, what are you doing here?" Mike exclaimed suddenly. Scottie looked up to see both Mike and Harvey starring shell-shocked at each other.

"You said you were on the funeral of a friend´s father," Harvey stated. "You cancelled our date for this."

"I didn't lie," Mike replied. "I´m right where I said I would be."

It then hit Scottie like a train. Mike – Mike Ross – was the man for whom Harvey had left her. The man who was sleeping with her strongest competition in the firm. And who had conveniently appeared after Harvey had ended what he had had with her.

The man to whom she had poured out her heart. To whom she had exposed herself, made herself weak. Oh, how could she have been so oblivious – so stupid and naïve?

"Dana, are you okay?" Mike asked. He looked worried and apprehensive. But now that Scottie was aware she wouldn't fall for his mask. She wouldn't be fooled again.

"Was it all fun to you?" Scottie whispered. She didn't have the strength to shout. It had all but left her. She could feel the tears starting to flow and she hated herself for it. For falling to such an obvious plot, for opening up to another person, for being weak in front of half of the Senior Partners of Pearson Hardman. "Did you have a great laugh with Harvey? 'Oh, poor Scottie, crying over her dead father. So desperate that she would cling to the next best stranger?'" She turned to Harvey, her voice raising. "And you! You´re probably already planning how you can use it all to take me out of competition!" Her voice had taken a hysterical edge the more she screamed, which only further increased the rage she felt at Mi- Ross and Harvey. How dare they to reduce her into this crying mess? How dare they?!

She looked Ross straight in the eyes.

"I hate you," she said, her voice as cold as ice. "For doing this to me. For ruining my father´s funeral. But most of all I hate you for making me trust you." She didn't bother waiting for any kind of reaction, instead turning on her heels and walking away as fast as she could without making it look like she was running away.

"Dana, wait!" She heard Ross shouting behind her. She didn't heed him. Like on autopilot she started the car and drove away, as fast as possible, while the tears started to flow again.

Mike started at Dana´s retreating figure – one arm still stretched out – and wondered why everything had gone wrong. He was aware of the people around him staring at him – judging him, making up their own version of events – but right now he couldn't care less what those people were thinking about him.

She hadn't even given him the chance to defend himself, to explain to her that he would never misuse her trust like that. That he truly had wanted nothing more than to be her friend because he knew how hard it was to lose the people you loved more than anything in the world.

He liked Dana – in a platonic way, as nothing more than a friend. Underneath the grief he had seen glimpses of an intelligent, strong willed and compassionate woman. She had reminded him of an older and more refined version of Katrina and if Mike had learned one thing in his life than that you never let pass by a chance at making friends with such woman.

How could he have known that she was the Scottie Harvey liked to complain about? How should he have deducted from the few bits of knowledge he had that his boyfriend was the person Dana felt most strongly about? He couldn't have.

Mike wanted to go after Dana, to explain and to apologize, but as much as he loathed it, he knew that now wasn´t the time. Not while her emotions were running high. Not when her father´s funeral was still about to take place.

"Mike?" Mike turned around to see Harvey looking at him undecipherable expression.

"Not now, Harvey," Mike replied. "There´s a funeral I have to see through."

It didn't turn into a complete catastrophe. The pastor obviously had a lot of experience and was able to gloss over Dana´s absence with much rhetorical skill. Yet, Mike couldn't help but blame himself for how the events had turned out. Her own father´s funeral and Dana couldn´t even be here because he involuntarily had hurt her so much that she couldn't stand the sight of him any longer.

She couldn't even say a last goodbye to her own father. How she must loath him. Mike would have felt the same if it had happened to him on his parent´s funeral.

"What was this?" Harvey asked him after the guests, save Jessica Pearson and a few others, were gone. "How do you even know Scottie?"

"I met her by chance," Mike replied without paying much attention. "We struck up a friendship. And I intend to make it up to her."

"You met with my biggest rival at the firm and didn't even tell me?" Harvey exclaimed and now Mike was angry.

"Yes, Harvey, I did," he shot back. "Because I have a life beside you, in which you get no say whatsoever." Her knew that it was the wrong thing to say the moment the words left his lips as Harvey´s expression completely shut down.

"How can I trust you when you consort with the enemy behind my back?" All strength left Mike when Harvey uttered those words.

"'Consort with the enemy'?" Mike repeated incredulously. "Are you even hearing yourself? This isn´t about you; it has never been. It´s between me and Dana, so stop trying to make it about yourself!" He was so angry that he had to struggle for air.

"Well," he spat, "if your trust is such a breakable thing that I can´t even befriend people you don´t approve of, maybe you should have kept it to yourself from the beginning."

"Well, Harvey, any less grace and you could give Donald Trump lessons," Jessica commented as both of them watched Mike angrily making his exit from the cemetery. Jessica had known from the beginning that Harvey was inexperienced when it came to all matters of emotions, but this display was had been truly awe-inspiring…in a negative way, of course.

"I gave him the chance to explain himself," Harvey defended himself weakly. Jessica just arched her eyebrows at him. Sometimes she wondered why she had to fill in as parental figure for both Harvey and Louis.

"Harvey," she said deliberately slow so that he knew how stupid she thought he had been acting. "You just indirectly accused your very much in love with you and gay until the seventh level of Hell boyfriend that he cheated on you with an emotional instable woman, whom, as far as I can tell, he just tried to help through a very taxing phase of her live because it reminded him of the time when his own parents died."

Jessica just kept on starring Harvey straight in the eyes in order to properly convey how utterly stupid and insensitive Harvey had been and from the dawning and horrified realisation that slowly crept into his gaze she had been successful.

"Shit," he cursed. "Shit!" In his anger he kicked against a nearby stone. It must have been hurt like hell, but Harvey showed nothing.

"What should I do now?" he turned back to her, pleading desperately. Jessica suppressed a sigh. Maybe she should add a compulsory psych evaluation to their hiring practices, so that she wouldn't have to deal with full-grown man-babies the whole day with – as one of her favourite heroine would call it – 'the emotional range of a tea spoon'.

She should bring it up on the next Senior Partner meeting.

"Grovel," Jessica replied curtly. "Grovel until the floor is your second home. Grovel and pray that he is more forgiving than I´d be if I were in his shoes."

She really wasn´t paid enough for this.