Someone's been at our house to clean up, probably JJ at some point earlier this morning before she showed up again at Rossi's house. She and Will are the only ones with the keys and the alarm codes that could do this.
I expected to see the aftermath of the crime scene unit being in the house, but it's like they were never here. Where there should be fingerprint dust on the doors and door frames, they've been wiped clean. All signs of struggle have disappeared. The urine puddle and Leon's book are gone from the stairs, as is the throw rug that once sat in our entry-way - a rug that had my mother's blood on it. I walk upstairs and see that even Leon's screen is back in place on his window, slightly bent, but there. A quick glance out that window shows my mother's illuminated porch light, and a wooden board nailed between my mother's doorway and door, keeping the busted hinges in place.
In my mind, I can see JJ here before dawn broke, cleaning up our shattered home instead of taking a few hours for sleep. I can see her coming here before going to her own home. And I can see her leaving this house and going back to Will and Henry and Zachary, kissing them and hugging them, reveling in their intactness for a few minutes before saying she needed to leave again. No longer a member of the BAU, her bonds were held by love more than a badge. She was at Rossi's house this morning an hour before Hotch asked everyone to return, her tired eyes masked by caffeine intake.
I appreciate the effort that went into putting our house back together, a gesture from a friend who cares about us. But it still feels like three thousand square feet of quiet devastation in here. I close my eyes and imagine Leon at his desk looking out his window at my mother's apartment. If I concentrate, I can remember what Rory's unsteady footsteps sounded like on the hardwood floor in our hallway, and how when she first started walking, her excited voice echoed in the halls.
I walk to our bedroom and lift Emily's pillow from the bed, pressing it against my face and inhaling the scent of her that still lingers there on the cotton.
Any minute now, Emily is going to bound through the front door with the kids.
Any minute now, I'll hear my mother banging around our kitchen and Chris's voice will fill the living room as he helps Leon with his homework.
Any minute now, laughter is going to fill this house again.
I'm distracted from my fantasy world when Rossi clears his throat. He stands in the bedroom doorway, his eyes sympathetic and sad and scared, and probably a pretty close reflection of my own, minus the total desolation that I'm sure shows on my own face.
"We should get you packed up, Derek." It's said in a soothing whisper, a voice I've never quite heard from his mouth.
I nod and put the pillow back on the bed. I blink back tears at the memory of Emily's lips turning up in a sleepy smile every morning when the alarm goes off, how happy she was just to start her day – any and every day – with me and our family.
I go to the hallway and open the large storage closet, retrieving two suitcases and a small duffel bag. Last night, I hastily grabbed a change of clothes for me and the kids and Emily, along with some diapers. Tonight, I need to pack for the potential of a longer time away from home, and the clothes I pack for Emily will be pretense, smoke and mirrors to make it look like she's with us.
I hand the duffel bag to Rossi, along with the key to Chris's cabin. "Can you make sure to grab the books from his bedside table? Those are the ones he hasn't read yet. And his reading glasses."
Rossi nods and heads downstairs. I go into Rory's room and try not to think too much as I grab her favorite blanket from her crib, placing that in the suitcase first. There's not an incredible rush here, but we don't have much time to waste. From here, we're going to the hospital to pick up Chris. Then we're going back to Rossi's to get Leon and Rory. And then we're driving to Delaware.
This plan hinges on the two newest members of the BAU buying into the fact that Hotch has placed our entire family in protective custody, when in actuality we won't be in a safe house, but in a mansion on the water in Delaware. The safe house is only a measure of security, just in case the people who have my mother are more sophisticated than we believe they are. The family who owns the home in Delaware, where Andrew, Chris's best friend, is the groundskeeper, has gone back to their regular home for the fall and winter, and he's agreed to help hide us.
The plan is based on deceit and breaking a hundred different laws and getting our family out of town before anyone realizes Emily isn't with us. It's not that the BAU's newest members aren't talented and trustworthy; they're just not family the way we all are, and our plan is for family only.
This plan relies on Leon keeping up a lie if anyone ever asks, that Emily was with us the whole time. I'll be the one to break that news to him in a little bit. Emily and I hated the decision, but the alternatives weren't much better; separating who was left of our family any more was unconscionable. She's trusting me to keep Rory and Leon and her father safe, and I'm counting on her to bring my mother and herself home.
It sounds like a simple division of duties of husband and wife when I think of it that way, but it's not simple at all. It's gut-wrenching and anguishing; I'm angry enough to punch a hole in the wall of our perfect home, and sad enough to curl up on Leon's bed instead of packing his clothing, broken enough to cry until this is all over.
Four days. Emily's given herself four days. I wanted to be the one who went, but it wouldn't have worked. She's the one with connections in Europe, and I'm once again sitting this out. I stuff Leon's clothing in the suitcase and try to rationalize a way out of this one, finding nothing to grasp onto.
Last night, or rather, very early this morning, Emily and Hotch showed up at Rossi's. The first thing I noticed was one of my old gym bags on her shoulder, the indicator that she'd gone home before returning here after being at the hospital with Chris. The second thing I noticed was her hard exterior and the seriousness on her face – a look I hadn't seen her wear in over two years.
When she caught my eyes, she visibly tried to soften for me, to relax her shoulders, to tell me she loved me with her eyes.
On my part, I was emotionally lost by the time she arrived, feeling so much grief and fear and anger that I didn't know how to feel anything at all. I couldn't believe my mother was gone, couldn't believe this had happened at all. This has to be a nightmare. I'm not sure how many times I said that in my head over the course of several hours, as Penelope set up her laptops on Rossi's kitchen table, as the team converged around and started talking, as JJ barreled through the door with tears in her eyes, as I hugged Leon to my side with one arm and swayed Rory back to sleep with my other.
I'd gotten Rory and Leon settled and asleep again on the pull-out couch in Rossi's den about two hours before Emily returned from the hospital. I didn't want them upstairs without me; I couldn't bear to be more than a couple of feet away from them. I laid there with them, Rory between me and Leon, my arm around both, until they settled into sleep. Then I eased myself off the bed, lined a couple of pillows down the side of the bed so Rory couldn't roll off, and walked quietly back into Rossi's kitchen where a full blown investigation was underway.
We knew some things at that point, and we had deductive guesses for the things we didn't know. Much of the early investigation had been lead and predicted correctly by Emily via the phone while she was at the hospital with her father.
The rapid DNA test results came back from the scraping they'd done under Chris' nails, and Emily was right – the DNA matched the DNA found on the body of two little boys who had been murdered two years before in New York. We deduced that it was likely the same man who helped hold and transport me to Europe two years ago – the younger man who was with Robert Daniels.
It seemed improbable that not a trace of Patrick Joyce's DNA was found in that bathroom in a courthouse in London. Improbable enough to presume he had escaped a few days prior with help.
The two matters – the DNA found on Chris and Patrick escaping prison - were too much of a coincidence to dismiss. And regardless of how scared he was or how dark it was outside, I trusted Leon when he said that the man he saw in the driveway of our home looked like Patrick.
We hadn't located the blue van anywhere yet.
At the time, we believed my mother to be in the air somewhere. Four private jets with flight plans left the DC area within two hours of my mother's abduction, but none of them seemed a likely candidate for carrying my mother off to another place. When we started expanding the search for airfields outside the DC area, the list got long and complicated and impossible. We didn't know the resources these people had, we didn't know if they were jet hopping, we didn't know their final destination.
About an hour before Hotch and Emily showed up at Rossi's, Hotch called and ordered the BAU home to get a few hours of rest. He stated we didn't know enough yet to delve further at the time, and we needed to come back with fresh eyes in the morning. It was out of character for Hotch at this stage of an investigation, but his tone and his order at this crucial moment spoke volumes. At least it did for our BAU family, but not for the two newest member. The team hung around me as the two new members headed out the door, giving everyone the time to say their private "Goodnights" to me.
As soon as they pulled away from Rossi's house, Rossi and Penelope and JJ sat back down at the kitchen table as if Hotch had never given an order at all.
Several video files came through from Marcus Klaus, and we spread out the laptops and watched.
"There," JJ said as she watched footage at the courthouse. The woman was barely on the screen, just a glimpse of profile and red, curly hair as she bent forward clutching her stomach and then nodded slightly at the bathroom door nearest Patrick Joyce as he entered the courthouse. Once Patrick was let into the bathroom, the woman slid out of camera view and disappeared.
That one was an easy find. But we all had to scroll through separate footage at double speed for nearly forty minutes - footage of when Adrian Stancu was in a hospital for surgery on two occasions, after being beaten and gang raped in prison - before the next find. It was Penelope who spotted her. The red hair was tucked into a surgical cap, and she was wearing a nurse's uniform. She walked confidently in the hallways and entered Adrian's room. It was on her exit, right by the elevator that she made the mistake of turning her face to the side. The upturned nose, the jawline, the eyebrows and shape of the eyes - they were the same as the woman in the courthouse right before Patrick exploded.
Penelope called Hotch, Reid and Emily on speaker phone, quickly blurting out our findings. Hotch cut her off with a somber, "We're almost there," before disconnecting.
We were discussing the possibilities of Hotch's tone when he and Emily arrived. Rather, the team was discussing the possibilities and I felt like I was floating away from it all, wishing for the nightmare from which I would soon awake.
Then Emily was there, but she was also gone. I could see it in her eyes, and I must have reflected something similar back to her, because her eyes darkened and she blinked in a way that seemed like an apology. An apology for what was lost, or an apology for what was to come, I didn't know at the time.
I know now - it was both.
Emily wanted to look in at the kids before joining the discussion swirling around Rossi's kitchen. I took her hand and guided her the few feet to the den. She glanced at Rory and Leon sleeping peacefully next to each other on the bed and bent over to brush barely-there kisses on their cheeks that wouldn't wake them. She stood and faced me and I searched her eyes again.
Her lips on mine were a soft benediction. The way her hands curved around my cheeks were a brief reprieve for my heart that was in shreds. The way her arms squeezed around me were a reminder to not let go. So I didn't. I held her. I held her and we comforted each other quietly while our children slept on a sofa bed right beside us.
"What's in the bag?" I whispered in the ear of my beautiful wife. Those were the desperate words that escaped my mouth in the moment, even though a part of me already knew the answer.
She pulled away from me slightly, her eyes meeting mine, answering me without words.
"No." It was a vehement whisper, a desperate attempt to cut my losses.
But how can anyone really play the game of picking and choosing in a situation like this? I tried though. I tried to lie my way to keeping Emily safely with me. "My mother would tell us she was old. My mother would tell us she had a good life, and the past two years had been the best ever. She would tell us to protect the kids, to not negotiate, to run and never look back."
I didn't realize I was crying until Emily's hands were brushing my tears away. "Could you live with that?" she asked.
Her tone said she was leaving it up to me and at that moment, I said nothing at all. The lump in my throat was nearly impossible to swallow past, and I wasn't ready to make a decision. I kept quiet in that moment and so did everyone else.
But it felt like something had already been spoken to the team while Emily and I were in the den.
The only person who left Rossi's house that night was JJ. It was nearly four o'clock in the morning when she departed and Rossi headed up to his bed while Hotch and Penelope found places to sleep in the living room for a few hours. I quietly handed Emily her pajamas I'd grabbed from the house and took note of the grass stains on her knees as she stripped off the dark purple dress she'd worn at her birthday dinner. We completed the mundane routine of getting ready for bed in silence, both of us searching the bathroom mirror for the people we were less than twelve hours before.
We crawled into the small sofa bed with Rory and Leon. It was a tight fit with me against Leon and Emily against Rory and our arms reaching out to touch each other and surround our children. The faint light from the kitchen was enough for us to see by, to stare at each other and try to communicate a litany of fear and sadness, understanding and a confusing future, without saying any words at all.
Our eyes never drooped or looked away from each other. We didn't shed a tear. We held our children and we stared and we thought, suspended in a space together that was so wholly shattering that there weren't words in the dictionary that could possibly encompass our emotions.
I think she knew when I came to the same conclusion she'd been at for several hours. When Rory started fussing just as dawn was breaking and Leon was still sleeping soundly, Emily lifted her pajama shirt and pulled Rory towards her. Rory latched on and quieted immediately and every single second of the past two years played behind my eyes.
I finally glanced slightly away from her eyes to catch a glimpse of mother and daughter. When I looked back up, tears were rolling down her face, and we shared a look of understanding. I was almost there, but I couldn't let go yet.
Thirty minutes later, when Rory was back asleep and Emily and I still hadn't exchanged a word, my cell phone buzzed. I reached over and grabbed it off the floor.
The message was a short, "In a few days we'll request our ransom in exchange for getting her back alive. Don't involve the police or the FBI."
The picture attached told a thousand words. She'd only been gone for ten hours at that point, but my mother more closely resembled a prisoner of war than Fran Morgan in that first picture they sent us. Against a dark, obscured background, tied up and naked, with a nasty bump and dried blood on her head and frightened eyes, she seemed to be telling me anything but, "Just let me go."
I rolled from the sofa bed, phone still clutched in my hand. I landed on plush carpet and I couldn't even walk from the room; I crawled quickly before the sob in my throat could wake and frighten Rory and Leon. Between the kitchen island and a cabinet, I came to a rest, Emily right behind me and Penelope already at the kitchen table on her computer, crying and searching, because our phones had already been synced to her equipment and she'd seen the picture, too.
In two years of living together, Emily and I had never even had so much as a simple tiff. That fight could have been epic, but I think we both silently acknowledged the inevitable through our grief. We could have exchanged harsh words we'd later wish we could take back, or we could hold those back and reach our conclusion lovingly.
She glanced at the picture on my phone, she moved herself and seated herself on my legs, she wrapped her arms around me. Penelope muttered, "This picture bounced all over the place before getting to your phone."
My shouted, "There's no way in fucking hell you're leaving us!" came out as harsh fingertips digging into Emily's back.
"It won't be like last time," she whispered back with actual words. "They're small, maybe only three people, likely no more than five. They aren't hanging out in clubs. I'm not going in to go undercover with them or to arrest them."
My chin dug harshly into her shoulder as I nodded. I knew this wouldn't be a standard arrest, and wouldn't be by the books. She wanted our lives back without having to be scared anymore. People broke out of prison or got released on technicalities all the time. She was going for no loose ends. The last time she tried something like that, she'd ended up nearly dead with a stake in her abdomen.
"Take someone?" I whispered desperately. Even then, I knew it couldn't be me. We couldn't both leave Rory and Leon. It was impossible to even think of.
"They can't," she whispered back, gripping me harder.
"They would."
"There would be no way to cover them being gone from Headquarters without implicating all of us when this ends. I need to be a ghost. I have Clyde's list to help me be one. I'm not sure if I'll be able to find her, but I have to try. They didn't want her…"
Her whisper trailed off in my ear, and I didn't need her to finish; I'd already written the story in my mind while staring at her eyes over our children while laying on an uncomfortable sofa bed. Whatever their original plans were for Rory and Leon, they've been altered now. If emotional duress and torture were their intended goal, the torture portion with an elderly woman would change, the timeline would be shortened, and they wouldn't just let her come home. They'd presume she remembered too much, heard too much, knew too much.
I was maybe out of my mind in that moment, or I was desperate, or just crazy and grief stricken.
As Hotch and Rossi emerged in the kitchen, over an hour before the two new members of the BAU arrived, and while Reid was still at the hospital with Chris, I pushed Emily until she was standing, then stood myself. I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the small half-bathroom we'd changed in a few hours before.
Among a bed of towels on the floor, I found solace in her arms. It was terrible and necessary at the same time. The two of us had found peace in our skin against each other before, and I needed it again before she left. I needed to remember what I'd already memorized - the slope of her shoulders and the curve of her hips; the hollow on her throat before it met collar bone that I'd spent hundreds of moments with my lips against over the past two years. I needed to feel her lips soft and pliant under mine and breathe in her sighs and sorrow.
I needed to be inside her when I made her look me in the eyes. "Promise me we'll have tomorrow," I demanded with a whisper that was demanding if barely audible.
And she met my eyes and held them. "Tomorrow and next week and next year and forever. I promise..."
Tomorrow and next week and next year and forever. I promise. That's what she'd said to me as her head rested against ridiculously expensive towels on Rossi's bathroom floor. Not an ideal place for a private goodbye, but it was what we had in the moment.
I remember and hold onto the conviction in her voice, cradling my ear slightly for a moment, like if I let go I might lose her forever. I throw Emily's favorite sweater on the top of the pile of clothes in the suitcase, and then stuff her pillow in there for good measure.
As I zip the suitcase, Rossi appears in our bedroom doorway again, the duffel bag now full and over his shoulder. He grabs the suitcase containing the kid's clothing, and I grab the one containing mine and Emily's. I reach my hand out towards the dresser and grab Chris' journal that he gave Emily over a year ago.
"One more stop," I say as we descend the stairs.
I stop in the kitchen and set the alarm. I use all of the sixty seconds I have before I have to get out the door, inhaling the scent and the memory of our home, and then we leave, locking the door and descending the front steps.
I head towards the garage while Rossi takes the suitcases to the Suburban.
I grab an ice chest and open the freezer out there. I grab ice packs, and then I take as much breastmilk as I can fit, knowing that Rory could never possibly go through it in a few days. I don't care. It's a tangible part of Emily that will be with us, and I'll take every ounce I can.
"Are you okay?"
The voice from the garage door startles me even though I recognize it immediately. I take a deep breath and turn to face our neighbor, Rick. Just four days ago, he and his wife and daughter were in our backyard with us, celebrating Emily's birthday.
I smile convincingly. "We are. Someone attempted to break in when the kids and our parents were home last night. The police are investigating. We're all a bit shaken up, so we're going to head to Chicago to visit my sisters for a few days to regroup. But we're okay. We'll be back on Monday."
Rick nods, buying my lie hook, line and sinker.
"Holy shit. I'm so sorry that happened. We saw the police cars last night and the ambulance and didn't know what to think. The police wouldn't let us near the place."
I nod, just wanting him to go. "Chris fell. He's okay."
I manage the small talk, accept the condolences and wishes of good will from our neighbor for about two more minutes before Rossi appears in the garage. "We need to go get the rest of the crew and head towards the airport if you're going to make your flight," he says casually.
I nod. Rick shakes both our hands. And we're in the car heading towards the hospital and Chris.
I sink my head back against the passenger seat and close my eyes.
Any minute now.
Any minute now, I'm going to gasp awake from a nightmare with my heart thudding and find Emily in bed next to me.
Any minute now, Emily's going to wake up and wrap her arms around me and soothe and reassure me back to sleep.
Any minute now.
I open my eyes and blink out the car window, acknowledging this isn't a nightmare I'm going to wake up from any minute now.
My fingers reach under the collar of my shirt to clasp onto the platinum necklace that holds the the pendant I gave Emily for her birthday, along with her wedding and engagement rings. I finger the metal and precious stones while my other hand reaches into my back pocket to retrieve the burn phone. It's a phone identical to the one every member of our family has now.
"I'm going with her," is the simple four-word text message on my screen that I've read several times in the past few hours. I find a bit of relief and consolation, along with a measure of additional gripping fear, at those words.