As Lee and Jennie entered the small house together, Lee soon understood what Amanda had meant about it being dingy and exactly why she'd wanted his mother out of there. "So," he began awkwardly. "This is where you've been living all this time," feeling overwhelmed by the thought that she'd been just a few miles away from the home he shared with Amanda and yet had been so out of reach.
"Not all this time, no," Jennie answered. "Due to the danger I was believed to be in if it were to become common knowledge that I was not killed in the horrible car accident that took your father's life, I've been moved constantly. I've only been here for a few months."
"That makes sense, I guess," He replied feeling like an idiot. Of course, she wouldn't have stayed in the same place for very long. He'd worked enough witness relocation cases over the years that he should have known that, but his mind was such a jumble at having her back in his life that he was finding it hard to think straight.
"It shouldn't take me too long to pack my things," Jennie said as she made her way into the bedroom her son following behind her.
"I'll help," he said. "The sooner we get done, the sooner, I can get home to my family."
"You're really quite the devoted family man, aren't you," Jennie commented beaming with pride in her son and how very like his father he was and not just in his looks. "You should know, now that we've met and I see the dedication you've shown to your wife and children, I...I'm extremely proud of you."
"Thank you, but it wasn't always that way," he said guiltily. "There was a time a few years ago when I would do anything to keep from forming any kind of solid bond with anyone. I doubt you'd have been very proud of me then. In fact, I think you'd have been downright ashamed of me. I'm ashamed of myself for some of the rotten things I did in my past before I met Amanda. Particularly in how I treated women."
"Oh?"She said curiously, as she pulled her suitcases from the closet.
"Listen, I don't really want to get into all that. It's a long, painful story and we should get you packed so we can get out of here. Where should we start?" he said with a glance around the room.
Jennie bit her lip thoughtfully as she thought of Amanda's lecture to her earlier about how her son needed to be gently coaxed into revealing his feelings and tried to figure out how best to accomplish that goal without it seeming like she was pushing. When her eyes traveled to the dresser and the framed photographs that droned it's surface, a thought struck her. Brilliant, she thought. "Would you mind terribly collecting those for me?" she asked him as she gestured toward the dresser.
"Sure, I can do that," Lee answered as he crossed the room to do that. He couldn't help but look at the black and white photos as they were all of him or his parents of some combination of the three of them, some of which he'd never seen before. He picked one up of his father cradling and infant, turned to his mother with it in his hands as he gazed at it. "Is this me and dad?"He asked as he walked to her side angling to photo just enough to show it to her.
"Yes," she answered with a warm smile. "That was taken the day you were born."
"The smile on his face...it...it looks so much like a picture that Dotty took of me, the first time I held Matthew," he said getting choked up as he spoke the words.
"Your father loved you very much, as much as you love your children. I'll never forget the look on his face the first moment he laid eyes on you."
June 17, 1950
Jennie sat up in her hospital bed, exhausted, but elated as she held her newborn son in her arms and gazed down into his tiny face, his bright eyes staring up at her. She tore her gaze from his when she heard a soft tap on the door. Her smile widened as she saw her husband standing in the doorway hesitantly. "Matthew, my love, come in and meet your son," she said.
Matthew entered the room and sat gingerly at the edge of the bed. "He's perfect, My Jennie," he said grinning from ear to ear. He bent slightly to place a tender kiss to his wife's lips then gazed down at the tiny bundle in her arms.
"He is, indeed," she agreed as she stroked her son's head. "You should hold him," she said as she nodded with her head to his arms. When her husband obeyed, she transferred their son to his waiting arms positioning the baby's head it the crook of her husband's arm. "It's imperative to support his head." She smiled at the look of pure joy on her husband's face as he cradled their newborn son, the giddy smile never leaving his face.
"He's incredible," Matt gushed.
"Yes. Now, the question is what are we going to call him? I was thinking we'd name him after you, my husband, since he looks so much like you," she suggested.
"No," Matthew said as her looked from the baby to his wife. "The fact that he looks so much like me it the exact reason we shouldn't name him after me. I wouldn't want him to grow up believing that he should be a carbon copy of me. I want him to learn to think for himself. He should have a name that's all his own. The way he's gripping my finger so tightly, the way he's looking at me so inquisitively, I can tell he's going to have a strategic, military mind."
"All the more reason to name him after his father with his brilliant, strategic, military mind," Jennie said.
"No," Matthew said firmly.
"So, how about we call him Robert, for your brother? He's a military man as well."
"I don't think Bob would ever let me hear the end of it," Matt said with a chuckle. "But we could give him his middle name, Lee. How does that sound?"
"I never have understood why your mother named your brother after Robert E Lee," Jennie said.
"His father was a military man, as well," Matthew answered. "As was mine. So, what do you think?"
"Alright," Jennie conceded. "But on one condition. We give him your name as his middle name."
"Lee Matthew Stetson," He said with a nod. "I like it." He then looked down again as his son and said with a warm smile, "Welcome to the world, Lee Matthew Stetson, my son."
Lee found tears once again forming in his eyes at hearing his mother recount the story of how he got his name and of the first time that his father had held him. He blinked them back, to proud to let them fall in front of his mother. He cleared his throat loudly. "So, you didn't have a name picked out for me before I was born?" he questioned.
"Oh, we tried, but we could never agree on names that we both liked for a boy. We had no trouble deciding on a girl's name. We agreed on that right away, but obviously, you were not a girl. If you had been, your name would have been Elizabeth Lorraine."
"Well, I'm not sure how well that would have gone over in the intelligence community," he said with a chuckle.
"So, how did you and Amanda decide what to name your children?"
"Well, it was a little easier for us. Modern medical technology being a lot more advanced that it was in 1950, we knew ahead of time that we were having a boy and a girl. Amanda and I agreed that our son shouldn't be named after me. She never did like the idea of juniors. That's why neither of the older boys is named after her ex. She suggested that we name them after you and Dad since you both died as heroes serving this country and that's what we try to do in our jobs. Or we thought you both died." He paused for a moment. "I thought it was a nice idea and was very touched by the thought. Then I thought that since Amanda's dad wasn't with us anymore and since Dotty had been so great in welcoming me into the family in spite of the fact that I helped her daughter continually lie to her, that there should be some respect paid to her parents as well. So, their names became Matthew Carl and Jennifer Dorothea Stetson."
"That's lovely," Jennie said.
"Well, it wasn't so lovely about a month before they were born. They gave us a hell of a scare on our wedding anniversary."
"How so?"
"Amanda went into labor six weeks early and doctors were worried because twins tend to be smaller in size than single babies even when they go to full-term."
"My goodness," Jennie said. "That must have been terrifying for you,"
"It was," Lee said with a nod. "It was the scarier than any terrorist or KGB agent I've ever faced. It worked out ok. The agency had some of their best doctors helping out and they were able to stop her labor, but the doctor ordered her on bed rest through the remainder of her pregnancy just to be safe, which was sheer torture for both of us. Amanda hated being confined to bed because she's used to being so active and she drove me crazy because she didn't want to stay put. At one point, I had to threaten to get out my handcuffs to get her to stay in bed."
Jennie laughed and said, "I can see that. Amanda seems to be very a strong-willed woman."
"You don't know the half of it," Lee said with a chuckle. He then looked back toward the photos on the dresser and said, "So, some of these pictures I've never seen before. How did you end up with them? You said you never went back to the house because it was too dangerous."
"I didn't, but Agent Carpenter did. He was the one responsible for investigating Blackthorne's reports on us and was later assigned to investigate the accident. He knew that I had survived the accident, but without the benefit of my memories. The doctors had told him that familiar things, familiar surroundings might help me to recover my memories and because he knew that I couldn't go home, he was kind enough to use his status as the investigator on the case to bring some of my home to me. Seeing the photos of you and your father and of the three of us together did help immensely in regaining some semblance of who I was. It was a long, slow, painful process."
"I imagine it was," Lee said with a hint of sadness in his voice. "I remember almost two years ago when I was investigating Blackthorne, I kept having this recurring nightmare about you and dad, but for the longest time I didn't know what it meant. It was one of the few times that I ever voluntarily talked to an agency shrink and he told me that it was probably a repressed memory trying to work its way to the surface and he offered to try to take me through some kind of regression therapy, but I didn't let him. I didn't want him probing that deeply into my mind. I've never trusted doctors of any kind. Instead, I had Amanda help me. She...she was a real trouper through the whole thing. God, I loved her so much even then. I just hadn't quite gotten up the nerve to tell her that yet. She told me months later that when I was under the influence of the drug she used on me to get to the truth that I called her "My Amanda."
"Hmmm, I heard you call her that earlier when you first came home," Jennie acknowledged. "Your father used to do the same."
"Really?"
"Yes, he very often called me, "My Jennie."
"I wonder if that's where I picked it up from," Lee mused. "Maybe I heard him do that when I was a kid and just never remembered it. A lot of my memories from that time are still kind of fuzzy."
"I suppose it's possible," His mother said. "So, you obviously finally did gather the courage to tell Amanda how you felt about her."
"Yeah, I did," He said with a smile. "I asked her to marry me a month after we put Blackthorne down. I was amazed when she said yes right away after all the hell I put her through for the three years prior to that when I was trying to hide my feelings and pretend that I didn't give a crap about her when in reality, I couldn't ever imagine my life without her in it."
"You're really in love with her," Jennie commented.
"It shows, huh?"
"Very much so," She replied. "I'm glad, very glad that I got to see you happy. That is all that I have ever wanted for you."
"I know the feeling. That's what I want for my kids more than anything," he glanced back at the array of photos and picked another one up. "What's this one?" he asked as he held it out to her. "It looks like you holding a baby in what looks like a hospital, but it doesn't look the same as the one of me and dad. It doesn't even look like the same place."
Jennie sighed and fidgeted nervously hoping it would be a while longer before she'd have to answer a question like that. "That's because it's not," she answered quietly.
"I don't understand," Lee said.
"The child in that photograph isn't you, my boy," she explained.
"Not me? How is that possible? I'm the only child you and dad ever had."
"No, Lee, you're not," she said leaving him standing there in open-mouthed shock.