Okay, you guys win. The favorites, the follows, the incredible reviews. I'll keep going. Should only be three more chapters after this, though.

If you think I didn't notice you're avoiding telling me your call sign, you really have been away too long. Can you even remember my face?

If I ever forget what it looks like, I can just go peek at my chest tattoo. Your face, right over my heart.

I'm guessing that avoidance wasn't part of your officer's training. If it was, they weren't very good at it. I'm asking for a refund on my tax dollars.
Is your military nickname something embarrassing? Nugget? Nose Dive?

My call sign is Skywalker. Want to try Skype again tonight?

Yes, but only if you're going to finish that story. I'm telling you, Logan, you need a remedial class from the Veronica Mars School of Avoidance.

We're not doing avoidance anymore, remember? Maybe your school needs to be renamed the Veronica Mars School of Pestering.

That's the subtitle.

If we're not doing avoidance anymore, spill it.

Fine. Stop it with the interrogation, J. Edgar.
The first time I did air-to-ground bombing in flight school, I showed off the best video game skills a man can have, and the guys took me out for a beer afterward. We're three or four in, and someone asks me how it felt. And I made the mistake of telling them that it was just like shooting womp rats in Beggar's Canyon back home. It just would have been just a weird, drunk thing to say, but this one dude knew Star Wars and I haven't been able to shake it.
9 your time?

Yeah, okay. I'll have a magazine ready, though. It gets boring staring yearningly at your blurry, frozen face. The Navy realizes it's now possible to Skype from space, right? The ocean shouldn't be that hard.
Is it worse that they found out that you're a closet nerd, or that you led them to think you're Luke Skywalker when you're obviously Han Solo?

Hey, you and I'll know the truth. It's kind of a pride moment for me, actually, that I've managed to conceal the fact that I'm a scoundrel for this long.

It might be hidden under the uniform, but the scruffy-looking nerf herder I've always known is still there.

If you're calling me scruffy-looking, say it to my face.

If you actually manage to get online, I will.

That wasn't terrible, although you have grown fuzzier than I remember. Must be all that California sun. I'll have to amend my tattoo accordingly.
I forgot to ask how your dad is.

He's doing better. He's finally coming back into the office with me tomorrow.

Sure you must be psyched about that.

Well, you know what they say: more Mars, more fun.

There's apparently a reason that no one actually says that, though. When her dad enters the office, she feels almost like a kid who threw a big party when the parents were out of town, anxiously checking to make sure that the broken vase has been swept up and the beer smell has been aired out.

"I think I've finally found the right Frank Williams for the Crawley will, and I have some pictures that will make Mr. Carmichael either very, very happy or very, very sad. And I'm starting to work on the Braverman fraud thing, so I think we should be-"

"It looks good," he interrupts, wincing just a little as he sits in his chair. She makes a note to order him some kind of cushion off of Amazon. He swivels gingerly, looking around the room. "Ah! And you file, too."

"Even used the alphabet." She almost adds, "Something you seem to have forgotten," but considering his recent concussion, the confusion he still sometimes falls into for a minute, it is too close to home. "Without being fooled with breakfast, so take note for the future," she adds instead.

"Speaking of fooling, tell me about the Melville case."

"Right, so these two crazy kids are arguing custody…"

She goes out to do some of the footwork for the Braverman case, whatever she can do without Mac, who is stopping in later in the day. She pauses by the door, turning with a hand still on the knob. She can see her dad's shadow through the window of his reclaimed office, leaning toward his computer. She glances at the other desk, clear of files but obviously the receptionist space, and knows that it's not going to be smooth sailing.

She brings back wraps, sitting across the desk and starting in while her dad finishes up a call. 'Ten years? It feels like I'm going to have to go do my history homework in a minute,' she thinks.

Keith finishes speaking and hangs up, settles back with his lunch. "I miss the good old days of cheese and sauce atop some sort of wheat-based product," he mourns, holding up his turkey sandwich. The doctor has put him on a diet which has eliminated most of the enjoyable food from Keith's- and by extension Veronica's- life. At heart she doesn't mind, though. She'd rather keep her dad in her life than junk food.

"Well, if you want to stick it to the man," Veronica says, lowering her voice and leaning in, "I'll take you out for low fat, low sodium pizza. I've heard there's even a place that will put on fat free pepperoni." She nods at him significantly. "How's that for a Friday night?"

"You live for my suffering, don't you? Is this still because I bought you the wrong Polly Pocket for your seventh birthday? Because I apologized for that multiple times." He bites into his wrap, asking overly casually as he swallows, "I guess your offer means that you don't have plans?"

"My best friends are a high school teacher and a software nerd, and my boyfriend is halfway across the world. I'd say," she looks up, pretending to contemplate, "World domination and then maybe a milkshake are in the cards for tonight."

Keith looks down, picking out a piece of tomato. His voice bland, he asks, "So Logan is your boyfriend?"

She snaps the word when she says, "Yes," but only because it's something that she sometimes wonders herself. She thinks he is, but they've never had a discussion about it. She softens her voice, trying to recall after three months the feeling of his body beneath hers and the security that he was there for the long term even if not physically. "I refuse to wear the letter jacket, but I do have his pin if you want to see."

"You don't need to show me proof of relationship, Veronica," her dad says dryly. "I'm just making sure that you know the choice that you're making."

"Hello, I'm Veronica. We met one fine August day at a time when your locks still flowed in the wind." He snorts. "I always know the choices I make."

It is a while before he speaks again. Keith must have gotten new chairs, because Veronica does not remember the old one being this uncomfortable. "You've made this choice before, more than once, and it's only ended in you being hurt."

Her blinking seems, very suddenly, slowed and significant. "That was ten years ago, Dad. Logan's changed since then."

"You've said those words to me before," Keith says, gentle and compassionate like he's breaking terrible news to her. "And we lost a lamp, and Logan broke your heart. I just don't want it to happen again."

Veronica studies him. She doesn't know how he can look at Logan and see only his damaged child self. She doesn't know how to explain this to him, how to make him understand how different Logan now is from Logan then, how much more settled he is, how much more satisfied and comfortable and controlled. How much more she trusts him now, because all her evidence to the contrary has grown a decade stale. She opens her mouth to try. "Dad, he saved your life-"

"And I'm grateful. Of course I'm grateful for that. I can see that he's trying to turn his life around. But that doesn't erase the things he's done. The way he brought you back to Neptune-"

"Stop, Dad."

"Logan has instincts that don't go away. And some of those instincts are dangerous and-"

"What? He's dark?" Logan's spoken to her a little about his officer's training, about how there were bullies among the sergeants and he had needed to learn to breathe through anger, to let it go, to choose his fights. She tries to do that now, because she loves her dad. She understands why he is saying these things. She understands how much he has wanted to protect her, and how much he regrets not being able to, whether he knows about it or not. "Dad, I'm not Sunshine Mary. I'm more like Typhoid Mary. I've made mistakes. There are things I've done that I can never take back. You've seen the things that I've chosen to do."

There is a moment where she thinks that he is going to get up, that he is going to come around the desk and rest a serious hand on her shoulder. But she sees the stiffness in his movements, the pull of pain on his face, and leans across the desk toward him instead. "And you chose to get out, honey. You chose to do something different. And now you're back in Neptune, living that same life, solving cases with the same boyfriend."

"I didn't come back to Neptune for Logan, Dad." Her voice is harsher than she thought it would be. It startles her. "I came back because this is who I am. This is what I'm good at. This is what I love doing. Solving crimes, finding out the truth, making sure the people in power deserve to be there. I didn't come back here to be Logan's girlfriend or your secretary, and I didn't come back because I was afraid or because I failed at being a lawyer. I came back because this is the family business."

"I wish it weren't, sweetie." He grasps her hands.

"Not as much as Neptune does. And that's why they need us. Someone's got to try to get this town on the straight and narrow."

She avoids her dad for the rest of the afternoon. She thinks she got through to him, but she knows that normalcy is a hard ghost to give up. She's still edgy when she gets home, but she hasn't emailed Logan all day. She debates: she tries to keep her emails to him light, knowing that he has enough drama without hers, but she knows that he gets uneasy when he doesn't hear from her. She opens up a new email.

I know I owe you, but I kind of got into a thing with my dad and I don't want to put it on you. Just know that I'm fine and I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Twenty minutes later he writes back:

You never owe me anything, Veronica, and I want you to put it on me.

She has done enough research about the realities of flying jets, about the difficulty of landing, about the likelihood of injury from one wrong move, to know that it wouldn't be fair.

Not if you and Lola were out today, she writes.

She's still recovering from last time. Tell me.

And so she does. It's not a script of what happened, just the gist, but she doesn't edit it.

If I saw my relationship resume, I'd tell you to run in the opposite direction. Your dad isn't wrong, he writes back, slightly later than normal.

About who you are now? I thought you military guys had to be sensible and clear thinking. I trust you, Logan.

I trust you too.
Now let's put trust into action: tell me what you're doing in your mission to clean up Neptune.

When they were going out, Logan had generally been okay with her working cases. He had even asked her to a few times. Knowing what she did and how good she was at it didn't make him feel less manly. But there's something different now that he's thousands of miles away. He can't interfere, can't try to get her to leave it alone with anything more than words blunted by screen and distance, but then again, he can't interfere, can't play backup with an unloaded gun or be called to the rescue with a forwarded text.

She doesn't realize how long she's been staring until her blinking cursor fades into a black screen. 'Gird your loins, Veronica,' she thinks. 'Trust. Communication. You can do it.'

I started by looking into the developer who seems to think Neptune is the Promised Land by the way they're buying up property. Shell companies like nesting dolls, obviously, but Mac and I think we've followed the breadcrumb trail.
The thing is that it looks like a dead end. I've been visiting the facilities of the different corporations, looking into their business dealings, even talking to employees, and I have no idea why what looks like your run of the mill property management firm is suddenly interested in taking over Neptune.

I'm no expert, granted, but maybe it's not something nefarious about the developer. Maybe it's something special about the land?

She's thought of that, has looked in the official county records and had Mac check to make sure that nothing had been tampered with or deleted. Everything looked clean, the purchases still inexplicable. But there's something about his sentence that bugs her. She reads it over twice more, and her brain catches it. Granted. She frowns and opens up her files on the case. And there it is. A midlevel software firm called WinTech Solutions that they had assumed was only hiding bigger fish up the chain. But she pulls up the list of their executives, and right on the board of directors, like he doesn't even care that she found him, is the name Grant Winters. 'There's a reason I don't believe in coincidences.'

Veronica?

She shakes herself. She'd forgotten that he was probably waiting for a reply.

Sorry. Doesn't look like anything to do with the land, but I might have found something. Junior year, I worked a case for this girl Wallace liked who fell for an email scam. Turns out that it was run by these computer geniuses who were using the scam money as capital to create some kind of revolutionary super-game. I left an anonymous tip with the FBI about it, but it looks like at least one guy, Grant Winters, didn't get the punishment he so richly deserved. He's got his own company that's somehow related to the people who are snapping up Neptune and the little integrity its public servants had along with it.

I'm guessing you didn't part as friends, so…be careful, Veronica. Do you have a concealed carry permit?

No, but it's just surveillance and computer stuff. I shouldn't need one.

It's just computer stuff now, but eventually it's going to escalate. You're smart and resourceful and great at what you do, but this guy has had ten years to build up a grudge and apparently some power to go along with it. Take care of yourself, okay?

Veronica thinks of literally catapulting from zero to a hundred and sixty-five miles per hour, of the one in ten aviators who die from ejecting from falling, burning or malfunctioning craft. She knows how he feels now when he thinks about her doing her job. You take care of yourself too. If you're returned to me in less than pristine condition, I'm going to be having a stern word with your CO.

He's already quaking.

Good. Then my work is halfway done. May the Force be with you.

Damn it. I should have just let you think I was called Nose Dive.

Hey kid, don't get cocky. You really have been away too long if you forget that I would have found out anyway. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can never fool me.