Thanks for the reviews. I was worried that the latest episode would contradict my plans for this fic, but it actually set it up quite nicely (if you ignore all the ambiguous quadrangle stuff ;)). I should warn you that this chapter has a fair amount of platonic Skate, but you'll see why when you read it. Like I said, this fic is definitely Jate/Suliet... ;)

Chapter 3.

"Married, Jack?" Kate repeated, bolting upright, stunned.

He grinned. "Why not? It's what was meant to happen anyway, right? Before all this?" He gestured around them, in the direction of the window that separated them from the rest of the village.

"I know it's the seventies, Jack, but I don't wanna be one of those women who only gets married because they're pregnant," she protested; more than that, she didn't want to feel like she'd trapped him into doing what he saw as the right thing.

"Trust me, that's not what this is," he assured her. He glanced down at their hands as he lifted hers off the mattress, weaving their fingers together. "I love you, Kate – I'd still wanna be with you even if you weren't."

She wished that he would at least give her time to think but she could see that he wasn't going to stop until he had her convinced as well.

"But since this is the seventies," he continued with a sly smile, "and we're all supposed to be keeping a low profile, don't you think it's best that we avoid drawing attention to ourselves?"

"Jack…"

"Come on," he insisted, bumping her shoulder with his. "It'll be great. We'll get our own place with plenty of room for a nursery, and a backyard for our kids to play in…"

She smiled despite herself, seduced by the picture of their future that he was painting. "Kids?"

"We don't want her to get lonely," he explained in a reasonable tone, but she could see the twinkle in his eye as he added, "I'm thinking two, maybe three, but I'll leave the final number up to you…"

He snuck a sidelong glance at her to see her reaction. "So what d'you say, Kate?" he asked, flashing her a lopsided grin. "Will you marry me?"

She should tell him now, before she let this go any further, but she couldn't, not with him looking so hopeful.

This was it, everything that she'd ever dreamed of: a home and family with a good man who made her happier than she'd ever thought that she could be. She'd lost that once before. How could she break both of their hearts again by saying no?

"Yes," she agreed.

His smile grew so wide that she was almost afraid his face would crack.

"Of course," she told him with more confidence than she felt.

He cupped her face in his palms, kissing her with so much love and tenderness that it made her heart ache to remember how she'd exploited it. "You won't regret it again," he whispered. "I'm gonna make it up to you – I promise."

"You don't have to make anything up to me," she assured him, not when she was the one who'd messed up this time.

He pulled her down with him so that they were lying together on the bed. "Who would've thought the right time for us would be in 1977?" he mused.

She laughed as a new thought occurred to her, one that she hadn't considered before.

"What?" he asked with a grin, shifting onto his side to face her.

"I was just thinking… It's 1977, so I haven't even been born yet. Not for a few more months," she explained.

"So that means in 2007, you and our baby will be almost the same age," he said, catching on. "It's a good thing it didn't happen sooner or she might actually be older than you."

Just the thought of it made her head hurt. "Weird, huh?" she agreed.

Almost as if he needed to keep reminding himself that what she'd told him was real, he pushed her shirt up, tracing idle patterns across her stomach with his fingers.

"Well, right at this moment, I'm in about the fourth grade, so I guess that makes me a cradle snatcher," he teased her, letting it fall back into place as he moved in to kiss her again.

For the rest of the evening, she forced herself to push her doubts aside and share his joy, but later, as she lay with him in the darkness, listening to the rhythmic sound of his breathing, they all came flooding back to her.

She had to get out of there, to somewhere where she felt less suffocated, so she waited until he relaxed his grip on her to slip out of bed.

"Hey. You're up late," a familiar voice greeted her as she sat one the picnic tables outside; she looked up to see Sawyer – she didn't know if she would ever get used to hearing people call him 'LaFleur' – coming towards her, still dressed in his khaki coveralls like he'd just come back from patrolling the area.

She could tell that he was surprised to see her there at an hour when most sane people would be in bed.

His voice dropped to a whisper even though there was no one else around to hear him. "Jack know you're out here?"

"He's asleep," she explained. He used to toss and turn all night, keeping her awake too, but she'd noticed that he seemed to sleep better these days without the weight of the world on his shoulders.

"You two have some kind of fallin' out?" Sawyer asked with a concerned frown.

"No. I've just got a lot on my mind," she confessed.

"Oh yeah?" He glanced back at the house he shared with Juliet; seeming to decide that home could wait a little longer, he lowered his gun and slid onto the bench across from her. "Like what?"

"Like the fact that I just found out I'm pregnant," she told him. He would find out eventually. They could only keep it quiet for so long.

He was silent as he processed this information. "That's… Congratulations, Kate," he said after a moment and she knew that he was being sincere, even though the words were hard for him to get out. After all, he loved her once. Maybe there was some part of him that still did. "I know how much you wanted to be a mom."

She flashed him a weak smile, but couldn't bring herself to thank him.

"Lemme guess – Jack is pissed because it wasn't in the plan. Thinks y'll should've been more careful," he tried when she didn't answer, seeming to sense that it was more complicated than that. He'd always been too good at reading her.

"Jack couldn't be more thrilled," she corrected him. She couldn't help the small, affectionate laugh that escaped as she added, "If he wasn't so afraid of jinxing it, I think he would've already started picking out names."

This seemed to confuse Sawyer. If she was honest, it confused her too. Why couldn't she just be happy, like he was? "So what's the problem?"

"The problem is that he thinks it's fate," she told him, fighting back another wave of misery as she stared out into the darkened jungle.

His breath hitched; she recognised the sound: shock. "You're saying it wasn't?"

She pressed her lips together, shaking her head. "After I lost Aaron… I felt like I couldn't breathe," she explained, swallowing against the lump forming in her throat. Of all the bad things that she'd done in her life, this had to be one of the worst because for once, she couldn't say that he'd deserved it. "I thought if I had a baby that was really mine – one that that no one could take from me – maybe it wouldn't hurt so much. That I could breathe again. I knew we were coming back here – I figured it was my last chance…"

She was so sure at the time that another day could mean the difference between living and dying.

"So you conned him?" he insisted; she was surprised to hear the disapproval in his tone when he was no stranger to using people to get what he wanted.

"Yes," she agreed. "No." She choked back a sob as the magnitude of what she'd done washed over her again. "God, I love him so much."

Sawyer turned away from her as she ran the back of her hand over her eyes, wiping away her tears. "You should've seen him with Aaron – he's gonna be a great father," she told him. It was still no excuse for forcing the role onto him, but it made her feel better to know that, whatever else happened between her and Jack, her baby wouldn't suffer because of her mistake.

"You mind if I ask you a question?" he said after a long moment.

She nodded to tell him to go ahead, still trying to get her emotions under control.

"If we were still together, would you've wanted me to knock you up?"

It wasn't what she'd expected. "I don't know," she confessed. She'd never asked herself what would have happened if Jack hadn't been around.

"My point exactly," he continued, a defeated note in his tone. "You could've picked up some other sucker, but you didn't, even though you knew it meant getting back with the doc. You didn't just want a kid, Kate – you wanted his kid."

As soon as he said it, she knew that it was true. She'd driven over to Jack's place on autopilot. There was nowhere else that she wanted to go. At least she could take comfort in that.

"How do I tell him?" she asked him. She could just see the look on his face when he realised that he'd been played: that combination of hurt, indignation and pity. She didn't know if they could ever come back from that. Would he ever be able to trust her again? "I mean, shouldn't he know?"

His eyes widened with alarm at this suggestion. "Tell him? Are you crazy?" he insisted. "You wanna ruin the nice little set up you goin' here?"

What she wanted was to go back in there and fall asleep in his arms and forget that it wasn't the happy accident that he believed it was.

"No, but we're supposed to be starting over," she explained. "I don't want our relationship to be built on another lie." That were where it had all gone wrong the first time.

"The way I see it, you're giving him everything he's ever wanted – you, a kid…" He let out an ironic chuckle, "Hell, we find Vincent wandering out in the jungle and you'll have the whole package."

He softened as he went on, "My whole damn life is a lie and I ain't ever been happier. Some lies are better than the truth, Kate…"