Cooper sat on the edge of the bed, staring through heavy-lidded eyes at the spot recently vacated by Annie. Absently, he picked two strands of her kinked blonde hair from the sheets and thumbed a smear of dark mascara or eyeliner near the open end of the pillowcase. Remnants, he thought, letting the golden strands fall to the floor from between his thumb and forefinger. An afternoon's indiscretion.

It hadn't been his aim to bed the recently un-nunned Annie, but her words and her voice and the delicate slope of her jaw worked in concert to change his mind, and with surprising alacrity. He had to remind himself that she wasn't a virgin, that an ill-fated romance had led her down the path to the convent in the first place. He was not surprised that she knew what she was doing, that she seemed to enjoy it.

If only their afterglow pillow talk had remained on point.

Cooper sighed, remembering the details of their post-coital conversation, about how she got the idea to become a nun from The Sound of Music playing in the hospital where she was convalescing following her attempt on her own life. She spoke of being a lapsed Catholic, begging to be let into the care of the Sisters of Mercy convent upon her release from the hospital. She recounted conversations she'd had with the Mother Superior, about her goals and dreams outside the convent's walls and whether or not a cloistered life was the answer.

"In the end, I realized there was too much to like on the outside to shut myself away inside," she'd told him with a blush that radiated from the apples of her cheeks to the barely concealed tops of her breasts.

That was when he put his shirt back on. And within minutes, Annie was dressing too; she left with a chaste kiss to his cheek, and Cooper, through the wall of curious detachment he'd been building since he first began to move within her, let her walk through his door again.

Now, a full hour after she'd first arrived, Cooper was tired. Finally. The effects of the lack of coffee and the copious amounts of pharmaceuticals consumed had worn off, leaving fatigue in its place. But you can't discount the effects of sexual congress, he chastised himself, looking once again at the pillowcase beside his.

With a deep sigh, he ran his hand back through his hair and grabbed the tape recorder, which he lifted to his lips as he pressed the Record button.

"Diane, it's 2pm. I haven't had much luck working today—too much…excitement, I think. However, the roller coaster of my emotional and mental state has left me rather mercifully exhausted. I may try to carve out some time for shut eye," he sighed. "Before I do, however, I wish to elucidate, if I may, the details of what I saw last night, of the Giant and his message, which I have been trying to work through unsuccessfully since then. I have been plagued by doubt about the very nature of what I saw, but I think it will help to talk through it, commit it to tape, and offload it from my subconscious before I rest. Perhaps then my mind will have the room it needs to figure it out."

Cooper sat on the edge of the bed, listening as the springs in the mattress groaned in deep and weary protest. He cleared his throat. "Last night, Annie Blackburn and I were dancing—she had asked me for a lesson—when I became acutely aware of the dilation and slowing of time in the room around me. This continued until time ceased to move forward—or, more correctly, everyone around me ceased to move through time. It just…stopped. This is not the first time a vision has appeared to me in this manner, and my conditioning was such that I was immediately primed for what was to follow." Cooper scratched his upper lip and, with his hand, swept down and across the shadow of stubble on his cheek and jaw. "My attention was then summarily drawn to the stage, where Mayor Milford was practicing his speech for the pageant. He had in this span of time metamorphosed into The Giant, whom you'll recall was a fixture of two of my last visions. Voicelessly he gesticulated at me."

Cooper took a deep breath, pulling the tape recorder away from his lips. "Diane," he started, "I am familiar with but a few hand gestures in American Sign Language, but it would not have taken fluency to understand what The Giant's message was: a warning, urging me to stop doing what I was doing." He sighed. "And what was I doing?" He paused again, longer this time. It nearly turned into a full stop; he shook his head and continued. "The moment the world was set to rights again, I kissed Annie Blackburn. Not for the first time, mind you, but now that I look back on it, I wonder if the Giant's message was a warning directed at me to cease contact with Annie. But why?"

Cooper waited for a moment before clicking off the recorder and, again, running his hand over the stubble on his chin. What more could he say anyway?

His eyelids dropped down, heavy, as he felt the pull of sleep overtake him. But the sudden knock at his door shook him violently awake. He rubbed his face again and smoothed down his shirt before standing up and padding to the door, stifling a yawn as he opened it wide.

He was half-expecting to see Annie standing there again, so his surprise was genuine when Audrey's form filled the gap between the door jambs. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks flushed; Cooper immediately felt the FBI Agent in him rear up as he ran through a terrifying list of reasons why Audrey would be standing agitated on his doorstep.

"Audrey! What's wrong?"

She sniffled. "Consider this my check-in," she managed a half-smile.

"You're seven hours early," Cooper said, checking his watch.

"Or five hours late," she shrugged. "I didn't check in this morning. But I swear I was out with Pete Martell all night." She looked down at her hands, wringing circles around themselves in front of her. "We went night fishing."

Cooper took a long, hard look at Audrey, head to toe; it was hard to imagine the woman in front of him sitting in a boat, fishing in the middle of the night. Clad in crimson, her hair neatly pinned back at the sides, she seemed older than he might have guessed had he not known better. Still, the fresh tear tracks on her face and the way she bit her lip belied her age as well as her fear. Cooper stepped aside. "Would you like to come in?"

Audrey nodded and shushed into the room. "John Justice Wheeler left," she said.

Cooper remembered the hasty departure from the lobby one night—or was it two?—previous. He hoped his leaving wasn't why she was crying. "Did he?" Cooper asked, managing to sound both interested and unaffected at once.

She sniffled. "Before he told me all about his partner, a man he respected, and how he'd died or something. Probably murdered. And it reminded me of your partner, and then I got worried and—"

"Audrey, is everything okay?"

"I just had to see you," she said, her voice wavering even as she stood to her full height. "To make sure that you were all right. I don't know what your partner is capable of, and maybe my imagination got away from me but—"

Fear and regret clutched at Cooper's heart. "I wish I had never told you any of that."

"No!" Audrey shook her head. "You absolutely should have told me. I should have known everything, right from the start! It's the not knowing that drives me crazy. I can't act on things I don't understand," she set her lips in a firm, unbroken line. "And I can understand a lot more than you or anyone else gives me credit for."

"Audrey—"

"Agent Cooper, are you going to catch him?"

Cooper looked down at his hands for a moment before looking back up into her eyes. "I hope so, Audrey."

She nodded. "Daddy asked me to enter the pageant tonight. He thinks it will be good publicity for the Stop Ghostwood campaign," she shrugged, biting her lower lip. "Do you think that's okay? I mean, with your partner running around and the letters and all—?"

He cut her off. "You have nothing to worry about."

There was such trust in her eyes as she looked up at him, her open face revealing everything, entirely incapable of deception, her smile genuine and her relief evident. "You think so?"

Cooper nodded. "I promise."

She nodded, shutting her eyes, forcing the last remnants of a tear to squeeze through her lashes. She laughed a little and swiped it away, "Well, that's good," she said. "I know it's a big deal for the community. It seems like just about every girl in town has entered the contest. Donna and Shelly and—well, I just ran into Annie, too, getting on the elevator. I think she's entered as well and—"

Cooper could pinpoint the moment her eyes registered his partial state of undress, and his stomach pitted with guilt. Wide-eyed, as a blush crept up her throat, she turned and regarded the bed behind her, both sides of the bedspread turned down, indents on both pillows. The heat in her cheeks glowed; she stood rooted to the spot.

"Oh," Audrey mouthed, a voiceless sigh escaping her lips.

"Audrey, I—"

She shook her head and turned back to him. "No, I mean—it's fine," she laughed. "I—I mean...Me and Jack and you and—"

Audrey straightened her shoulders, her face flushed as red as her dress. She smiled, sadly, and pointed to the stack of files and folders on the table. "Looks like FBI work."

"It is," Cooper nodded.

"I should let you—"

"You can help, if you'd like."

He had no idea what possessed him to say it, but whether it was his true intention or not, he was glad to have said it. It changed the subject, gave them something else to focus on, but more than that it was the first time all day that something was happening to him that he actually wanted to happen.

Audrey seemed shocked; whether still from her earlier realization or from his offer, he didn't know. She opened her mouth to speak and for a moment nothing came out; then she lifted her hand to her chest. "You want me to help you?"

He shrugged. "I mean, if you'd like to…"

She considered, carefully—her eyes focused almost too much on the documents, stiffly avoiding the mattress-shaped elephant in the room—before nodding. "Okay."

"Aces," Cooper smiled. He walked to the desk and grabbed roughly half of the files, which he handed to her. She accepted them before sitting in the chair beside the window.

"What is it you're looking for?" she asked.

Cooper's mouth was set in a firm line. "I'm not entirely sure. You see, there's this petroglyph…"

He explained the investigation and his attempts at decoding mounds of local legends and reams of pages on symbols and signs from various sources, careful not to get carried away and reveal pertinent information but open enough that he believed she might actually have enough information to help them; a fresh set of eyes and an investigative mind.

By the end of it, Audrey seemed to have forgotten her earlier awkwardness and was ready to jump in—she had the crude facsimile of the petroglyph in one hand and a stack of symbology notes in the other—but Cooper's yawns had deepened and strengthened as his explanation rambled on, and the more he tried to hide his fatigue from her the more obvious it became.

"Agent Cooper?" she asked him. "When was the last time you slept?"

Decently? he thought. When was that last time you were here with me? Instead he shrugged. "I'll be okay. I'm actually trying to reduce my dependence on coffee and it's been a tough go, but—"

Audrey sighed and smiled as she stood up from the chair. "Come on," she said, grabbing him by the elbow and leading him around the side of the bed. "You need to rest."

Highly suggestible, Cooper sank to the bed. For a moment he was motionless; but then he kicked off his shoes and felt Audrey's small hands against his knees. He swivelled and leaned and deposited his head on the pillow. Audrey then tossed the quilt up from the foot of the bed to cover him.

"You're wonderful," he said, quietly.

Audrey had moved to the window and was drawing the curtain when his words reached her; she slowed down, considering him, as she moved to the next window nearest the bed and loosened the drapes there, casting the room in a diffuse glow that reminded Cooper of sun tea in a jar made in his backyard as a child…

"You get some sleep, Agent Cooper."

Oh how I wish you'd call me Dale again…he thought. But he didn't say it; heavy lids and tongue and limbs rendered him sightless, voiceless, motionless. He was aware of her presence at the other side of the bed, watching him. "Thank you," he managed.

"I'll see you tonight," she said, and within moments, she had left the room.

Later on, Cooper would wonder if he'd dreamed it or if it had actually happened that Audrey's last task before retiring from sight was to flip over the second pillow beside his head, or whether she'd just smoothed out the indentation carving out its middle. All he knew for sure was that he woke up four hours later holding it, tightly to his chest, wishing it was her…

COOPER: Diane, I have to wonder if the old maxim is true, because I fear I've made more than a few wrongs and have yet to hit upon a right…(long pause; deep sigh) Maybe the Giant was right, and none of this should be happening at all. If that's the case, Diane, then I don't know how I got so far off course, without compass or sextant, adrift in the moonbeams of a starless night. (Sigh) We're no closer to figuring out the meaning of the petroglyph. I'm heading into the station to get an update and put in a few hours. But the pageant is this evening, and I made a promise now—twice—that I would be there. And so I will be.