Later that day they let me go home. Gramps was driving his SUV. I was surprised he was allowed to drive himself, but I suppose he made a fuss for me. I was in the front, and Jamie and Jewls were in the back. "We'll spend the night at your place, but I'm going back to the apartment tomorrow." Jamie snickered. I turned to look at him, but hissed when my stitched protested. Everyone looked at me, "I'm fine." I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat. I hadn't taken the last dosage of pain meds, and the ones from before were making me nauseous.

"Well I was going to say that you're just like my dad. Anytime anyone of us gets hurt, he wants us to spend the night at his place."

Gramps laughed, "Your old man may be a pain in my ass half the time, but he's right. Even when Emily was in the army, I made her stay at my place on her leaves."

"How many years were you in the army?"

Before gramps could give me crap for not telling Jamie that, I interrupted him, "I've told him I was in the army. I don't think I ever told him how long though, so hush up." He just snickered. "I was in for almost three years. You know I was in Nate's squad. He got promoted to our squadron leader."

"How long was that before you were kidnapped?" It was Jewls who spoke up this time.

I sighed. "Not that long before. Probably no more than two months." I clenched my right hand, remembering what they did to my arm and shoulder. I sat up a little, "It still gets to Nate sometimes. There was nothing he could have done; we were ambushed. I wasn't even supposed to be there; women aren't allowed in combat. We were just traveling to a different city to help clean up an abandoned girls school. We got out of the convoy because the road was blocked from a bombing few days before, and it was a trap."

Jewls always got excited when I talked about my time in the army. She loved hearing the stories, no matter how bad they were. "How many were captured?"

I shook my head, "You're such a pessimist."

"Guess who I got it from Mom?"

I chuckled, "Hush up if you want me to finish the story." From how long we had been in the car, I could tell Gramps was taking the long way so I would finish my story. "Sarah and I were cornered. This was right around the time when she and Nate moved in together."

Jewls interrupted me, "So you sacrificed yourself to save her?"

I laughed, "I tried. Sarah knew immediately what I would try to do. She took her gun out, and just started shooting everything that moved. Little did we know, the building behind us was not abandoned. They snuck up behind us."

I could picture the whole scene.

Sarah was shooting everything that moved. "Stay behind me Emily, and watch our six!"

I turned around, and jumped when some people came out of the building. "Sarah, we're not alone!"

"Shit! Shoot anything that moves! We're too far away from the group."

I knew that meant that we may not survive. I just started shooting, hoping to draw attention away from Sarah. She moved a little away from me to get some room to maneuver. I moved a few feet forward to get on more solid ground. The next moment I turned around, and she had somehow made it all the way down the alley, and I had barely moved. Nate ran over to her, "Where's Emily?!"

He looked around and saw how far away I was. I turned around, and saw four people right next to me, holding guns. I knew I would not be able to shoot them all. I looked back at Nate and saw him screaming for me to run. He was running towards me, but I knew the people around me would start shooting if he got any closer. I felt a tear slide down my cheek as I dropped my gun, and held my hands up. All I could think about was the last time I was tortured. The people around me jerked me back into the building, and fired warning shots at Nate and Sarah.

Sarah pulled Nate to cover. She looked up at me right before I was pulled completely inside the building, "We'll find you." She mouthed.

I nodded, and closed my eyes. Maybe if I didn't see my captor's faces, they would keep me alive.

Jamie reached over the seat and squeezed my shoulder, "How long until they found you?"

I coughed, "About four days. The were shoving a knife into my shoulder blade right when Nate stormed in." I was screaming in pain right as Nate ran in. "He shot the man who was wielding the knife, and left the others for the rest of the team. He even let Sarah come with. I have to say, I think that is the only time I've ever seen Nate break the rules that bad without a second thought."

Jewls laughed, "How did they get the knife out of your back?"

"Sarah had to pull it out. I'm very glad Sarah had at least some of her med school training done by then."

I opened my eyes and saw gramps looking at me, "Let me guess, Nate was in front of you?"

I nodded, "They hadn't let me sleep at all. I almost passed out from exhaustion and pain, I was delirious. It's the only time I've had to be fireman carried out of a building." I looked at Jamie in the rearview mirror, "That's why Julia got a little freaked out when you told her I couldn't walk out of the building on my own."

He nodded, "I had figured that."

"The knife hurt worse pulling it out than it did going in." I gulped and flexed my arm again. "Nate undid the ropes that held me to the chair beforehand, and gripped my hands. It was about the only thing that kept me from puking."

At some point we had arrived at gramps' house. Jamie came around and helped me out of the car, so I wouldn't pull my stitches out. He helped me into the kitchen. He sat next to me while gramps grabbed me some water. He put a pain pill in front of it, "Take this." He glared at me, "I don't care. You take this one, and when it kicks in you can go sleep. You'll be sore for the next few days."

I shook my head, "No. You know as well as I do that it's not good for me to take those."

He looked me in the eye, "Yeah, and your sponsor has told you that taking medication that is prescribed and monitored is okay. Shut up, and take it."

I paused for a second, "Only half of it."

He sighed. "Fine." He cut it in half, and put the other half back in the bottle.

Jewls came back from her extra bedroom, "Finish the story."

"There's not much left to tell. I couldn't walk because we didn't know how close the knife had gotten to any nerves, and the fact that I was so tired I could barely stand. The day before they had dug their fingers into a different wound on my shoulder, and had tried to grab my muscles." I shivered to get the feeling out of my mind.

It was then that I knew what Jewls wanted me to say. "This was the point when I started abusing drugs. Jamie, you know I started drinking when I turned eighteen, but this was when I started to use drugs. During that time in the military, the medics main goal was to get you so drugged up that you couldn't feel a thing; even for the weeks after in the hospital before you were sent back to the states." I looked back at Jamie and couldn't tell what he was thinking. "When my injuries had healed, I met Angie and Kristi on the streets. We would party together occasionally. Angie got hooked on drugs, but Kristi and I only used them recreationally." I looked over to Julia, "The army figured out Sarah was pregnant, so they gave her an honorable discharge. Nate's time was up, so he left the army too. They helped me through the depression, but stopped when they realized your mom was pregnant. They had helped me, but managed to keep the drugs and drinking away from their kid. They knew your parents wouldn't be able to handle me, so I would be at their house all the time."

Jewls looked up from her glass, "Then how come there are baby pictures of me, where you're holding me?"

I shook my head, "Your parents didn't have enough sense to keep me away from you. I babysat you all the time." I sighed, "I'm ashamed to say that a lot of the time, I was drunk. But slowly, the more and more I watched you, the less times I came drunk. I would wait until after I watched you to get drunk."

She smiled, "So you started to stop drinking before 9/11?"

"No." She frowned, "I don't want you to have any illusions about who I was. I just learned how to hide it better. When 9/11 happened, I was more drunk than hung over that day. I shouldn't have been there in the first place, but I should have also been in the building." I looked back to Jewls, "You were the reason I quit drinking, not that day, that event. I realized that to take care of you, to keep you safe and out of foster care, I had to stop immediately. I got Kristi to stop not long after, and we sent Angie to rehab. She joined the force about eight or nine months after 9/11."

Jamie looked at me, "How much of your team did you recruit?"

"Nate joined to keep an eye on me. Sam was on our team for a while, but went back to school to become a social worker. That's how he met Damon."

He nodded, "Wow. No wonder you all are so close."

"Yup. I didn't recruit Jack, he was already a paramedic, I just got him to come to our team. Then he eventually took the firefighter test, and joined in." I yawned and shook my head. I really hated these pain meds.

"Come on, show me your room. I'll come back tomorrow for dinner."

I smirked, "Are you that afraid of gramps that you won't stay the night?" Thankfully gramps and Jewls had left the room when I started talking about who I recruited. They already knew all that.

"No. I just think that when a girl brings a boy home for the first time, the boy should be dressed nicely and actually have gotten sleep the night before. Besides, you have to decide which weekend you're coming over to Sunday dinner."

I frowned; I had forgotten about that. "Fine. Tell your family that I'll bring dessert."

Jewls walked back in, "Mom, where's my insulin?"

Before I could answer Jamie spoke up, "What? Are you sick?" He looked panicked.

Shit. I rubbed my eyes. I forgot Jewls hadn't told him yet. I looked up at Jamie, "I'm sorry. This was hers to tell. I couldn't tell you. She needed to be the one to tell you."

Jewls walked over to him, "I'm diabetic. I forgot that you didn't know. With you being around so much, I guess I thought you already knew."

I looked back at Jamie and silently pleaded with him. Then I spoke up, "Don't be mad at her. She gets so comfortable with people that she forgets they don't know. She doesn't have to take insulin a lot, just once a day or so, if that. Sometimes she can go a week or two without taking it."

Jamie gave us a half-smile, "Well I guess it's a good thing that you're that comfortable with me." He ruffled her hair, "Right?"

She nodded, "That's how I meant it. I promise that if I had remembered that you didn't know earlier, I would have told you."

"So me asking if there were any other secrets you two had didn't trigger that?"

She shook her head and hugged him, "No. I'm really, really sorry Jamie. I didn't mean it."

He kissed the top of her head, "It's ok squirt. No hard feelings."

I looked at him and kissed him on the cheek, "I'm sorry too. I should have made her tell you."

He smiled, "It's fine, I promise. Now let's get you up to bed before those pain meds take full effect. You being this touchy is a little weird."

I laughed, "You don't like it?"

He winked at me, and leaned in to whisper in my ear, "I only like it in bed, and on the floor, and against the wall."

I blushed. I had never heard him talk like this. I cleared my throat, "Ok, my bedroom is this way," That just made me blush more. I really needed to sleep off these pain meds.

Jamie laughed and wrapped his arm around my waist, keeping clear of my stitches. He opened the door, and walked me to my bed. Jewls had stopped at her room, so he leaned down and kissed me; and this was a full-out kiss, not just a peck on the lips. When we had to breathe he pulled away, "I'm glad you're okay, I'll see you tomorrow."

Jamie POV

I pulled away from her, and saw her goofy smile. She really wasn't good at hiding her emotions while taking pain meds. "I'm glad you're okay. I'll see you tomorrow."

What I didn't let her know was how bad that phone call had scared me. Hopefully I could hide that from her. If I couldn't quit the force for her, I couldn't expect her to quit the department for me. I needed to let it go. Her team would keep her safe.