Will was the first to get a call on that cold, bleak winter morning. He was leaned against the door that led to the balcony on his apartment, his arms wrapped around his sweater-clad torso, forehead pressed to the glass as he observed the grey sky.

He licked his lips as his fingertips danced lightly across the bulge of his biceps under the cashmere of his sweater, tracing each thread meticulously. But his mind was far away as he contemplated the city in front of him.

It was usually so busy and palpable - coursing with the lifeblood of the country, filled with the eager hopes and dreams of the next generation. It was rare that he saw people his age on the streets, much less living in high rise apartments in the young and trendy Upper West Side. He thought of Vince and his aching back, how he would grimace each night as he climbed into bed after a long day of work patrolling the streets or working on a case. He thought of his own frustrations with the young tenants of his building who would impatiently sigh when they were behind him on stairs and decided he was moving too slowly for their strides.

A stringy cloud passed in front of the already dim and hazy sun, and perhaps, Will thought, it was time to move on. Things were changing.

The phone rang behind him, but he didn't move. Vince was at work, so Will was alone in the apartment, but he had no intention of answering the phone. They didn't get phone calls very much anymore, and for a while now he had been dreading that ringing sound, afraid that it might be announcing the one call that he wasn't sure he could bear to get.

"Hi, you've reached Will and Vince," the machine picked up after a few more rings and Will shifted his weight, the glass of the door cold under his forehead. He watched it fog up and quickly de-fog under his nose with every breath he took. "We can't come to the phone right now; please leave a message and we'll call you back as soon as we can."

Karen's voice filled the empty apartment, shaking and fragile. Will closed his eyes, and the glass in front of his face clouded over in a hazy ellipse with his heavy sigh.

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Laila handed baby Jack over to her mother. He giggled and snorted beneath her tickling fingers as she accepted him into her arms.

"Gramma," he babbled, and Grace laughed, nodding her head in encouragement.

"That's right, Jackie!" she cooed, kissing his rosy cheeks as he tried to pull at her hair. She shifted his weight onto her other hip and grunted. "You're getting big, aren't ya?"

"Big! Big brother!" Jack exclaimed. Laila and Grace both laughed.

"Yep," Grace affirmed, "you're going to be a big brother." Grace beamed at Laila as Jack nuzzled into the crook of her neck. Laila rubbed his back tenderly as she passed across the room to pull open the blinds in her parents' living room.

She squinted as the sun hit her eyes, illuminating the Brooklyn cityscape in front of her in a dizzying concrete pallor. She shook off a chill as she pictured her son running across a concrete playground, reaching desperately for some soft, natural plaything - a patch of grass, the branches of a climbing tree. But they weren't there - and they never would be. Did she really want her children to grow up in this concrete jungle?

Over her shoulder, the phone rang and she heard her father answer it in the other room. She turned back to regard her mother interacting with her grandson; her gently-lined face radiant and warm.

"Grace," Laila heard Leo's voice at the top of the stairs before she saw him appear. Grace looked up and watched him as he slowly descended, one hand covering the receiver of the cordless phone he was holding. Laila noticed right away the distress on his face, the look in his eyes. If she hadn't known any better, she would've called it hopelessness.

Grace turned towards Laila as Leo extended the phone to her, and Laila scooped Jack out of Grace's arms and into her own.

"It's Karen," Leo told Grace softly, as she reached a hand out to take the phone from him. Her face fell immediately.

"Is it…"

Leo nodded, and Laila didn't miss the sparkle of tears springing to her mother's eyes as she turned away from her family to accept the call.

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It had been just like any other night. Karen had gone through her evening routine, and after donning her night gown and unpinning her hair, climbed into bed with Jack.

She cradled him in her arms and he rested his head against her breast. His hair was thin, and when Karen kissed his head she could feel his scalp on her lips. He shivered under the heavy blankets and scratched at sores that weren't actually there.

Every night Karen would take Jack in her arms and sing to him until he fell asleep. Tonight was no different, except that he just wouldn't fall asleep. Instead, he would fade in and out of consciousness; just when Karen was convinced that he had finally drifted off, he would shift in her arms and begin to babble incessantly about something that happened twenty years ago.

"Karen!" Jack called out to her at one point during the night. She had dozed off, sitting up with her back against the headboard, and she started at the sound of her name.

"I'm right here, Jack," she told him, cradling him closer to her body. She felt his frail body trembling in her arms.

"Oh Karen I'm so sorry," he sobbed, tears flowing freely from his eyes now. "I was so selfish."

"It's alright," she assured him, trying to comfort him despite the fact that she had no idea what he was talking about.

"I do want you as my co-host," he sobbed into her shoulder. "You can play your guitar and everything just please don't be mad at me." At this point his weeping overtook him, and he struggled to find his breath as he wailed against the silk of her nightgown.

"Shhh," she told him. "It's OK Jack, it's OK. I forgive you."

It was the fourth of fifth time he had burst into a fit of hysterics over an argument or situation from decades past, and Karen was starting to become used to it. She had found that instead of trying to talk to him about whatever relic of their past that would arbitrarily spring to his mind, consoling him and assuring him of her forgiveness proved to be the best tactic to get him to calm down.

It still hurt, though, every time he would dig up something from their past - old parcels of pain and tarnished feelings that had been buried deep inside of them. These were things that hadn't crossed Karen's mind in years, and the memory of each one cut through her like a knife.

There was the loss of their baby in 2006, the fight over Jack's divorce from Rosario in 2000, the hurt he had felt when she told him they couldn't be friends anymore after she married Lyle Finster in 2004. And although he was delirious with fever and hallucinating each time he cried out in the dark of the night, his emotion was still a direct echo of what it had been all those years ago when these incidents were actually occurring.

After this last outburst, when Jack stopped crying and fell silent once again, Karen couldn't keep her mind from racing through every memory she possessed that Jack was completely tied up in. He had been so much a part of her life. And as she remembered, she wondered - where was the man with the big blue eyes and the childlike demeanor that she had fallen for all those years ago? As she ran her hands through his thin, silver hair, she remembered running them through it when it was thick and dark as they made love for the first and only time. Where was that man, the one that had been so full of vitality and energy? Who was this delirious, fragile body in her arms now? It couldn't be Jack - her Jackie - but of course, it was. She clutched him tighter to her breast and rocked him gently.

At 5:14 a.m., Jack McFarland took his last breath.

Karen wouldn't have even known that he had passed, except for the fact that she was holding him so tightly that the ceasing of movement in his chest was painfully obvious. Karen felt him take three shallow breaths, then after that last inhale - nothing. She waited and waited for his lungs to deflate, sinking him back closer towards her so that he could inhale once again, but it never happened.

Stillness filled the room as a sob escaped Karen. She shook him gently, calling his name over and over, but there was nothing within him any longer. He wasn't there anymore.

A wave of panic coursed through Karen as this realization hit her, and she gripped his lifeless body even harder, as though attempting to trap his soul within it. She shook as she sobbed, rocking back and forth and clutching him, a look on his face so serene that he could've been in the midst of a lovely dream. She closed her eyes and tried to picture his face the day they first met. It came to her quickly and clearly, as though it were only yesterday that they were bumping tummies in Grace's office.

"I love you, Jack" she whispered, kissing his cold cheek. "I love you."

She repeated it until her tears ran dry, until her arms hurt from grasping his body, and until the sun came up, casting a yellow/grey glow throughout the quiet room and illuminating the tear-soaked sheets they laid in.