Patterson was practically vibrating with excitement; whatever she had to tell him must be extremely important. Kurt smiled a little as he followed her, wishing he still had that much energy and enthusiasm after a long day at work. Nearly getting killed today by a crazy CDC scientist whose job it was to protect the public from the very disease he'd been trying to spread had left him wanting to go home as quickly as possible and wash this day away with some nice scotch. If it hadn't been for Jane . . .
His compliment to her had been right on the money, he thought. She had been brave. Brave, but stupid. His heart had leaped into his throat as he saw her hurdle that bench to take down the doctor without protective gear of any kind. Once again, she had rushed into danger to help him without the slightest consideration of the potential consequences to herself. He had been tempted to read her the riot act for doing so, but he hadn't been able to figure out how to do so without seeming like an ungrateful asshole.
It wasn't that he didn't appreciate her sacrifice. He was incredibly grateful to be alive. He just didn't ever want it to be at the expense of her well-being. He had lost Taylor once already. He didn't think he could go through that again, especially not with so many lingering questions he needed answers to. Answers he would likely never find without her.
"All right," Kurt said as he took a seat in Patterson's lab and glanced at the screens displaying interconnected spinning red and white balls that looked vaguely reminiscent of high school science class. Unfortunately, science hadn't been one of his best subjects. "What am I looking at?"
"Molecules of coltan," Patterson told him. "Which is short for columbite-tantalite."
"My favorite of all the tantalites," Kurt couldn't resist teasing her.
She smiled at him before turning serious once more. "They're trace isotopic elements I found in Jane's tooth."
Kurt couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You pulled one of Jane's teeth?"
"Well, I . . . I . . . I took the one that was knocked out in the fight at the safe house," Patterson hastened to defend herself.
Of course she had. Patterson was nothing if not thorough. "All right."
"I mean, it was too good to resist," Patterson rushed on. "The . . . the human tooth is a goldmine of genetic information. Besides, it's not like she can put it back in."
Fair point. Kurt laughed a little at her logic. "Yeah. What does this mean?"
Patterson felt her heart sink a little as she turned to him. "These elements would only be in Jane's enamel if she was from sub-Saharan Africa."
Kurt frowned. "Maybe she went there after I . . . lost touch with her." That lie wasn't getting any easier no matter how many times he told it. Especially not to the team members closest to him.
"Here's the thing," Patterson said gently, wishing she didn't have to be the one to break this news to him. She walked over to the screen, with Kurt following closely behind her, and brought up more evidence to confirm her findings. "Isotopes can be aged. Kind of like carbon dating. The markers in her teeth are from when she was an infant."
Kurt's brow furrowed. "So what are you saying?" Logically, he knew what Patterson was getting at, but his mind refused to accept it.
Patterson swallowed hard. "She was born in Africa."
"No," Kurt contradicted immediately. "She was born in Pennsylvania." Pittsburgh, in fact. He'd seen her birth certificate. Patterson was already shaking her head, but he ignored her. "I was there the day they brought her home."
"Kurt," his mother called. "Come over here; there's someone I want you to meet."
Kurt dutifully scampered over to his mom's side and smiled shyly up at the dark-haired woman holding a tightly-wrapped infant.
"Emma," his mom said to the woman, "this is my son, Kurt. Kurt, this is our new neighbor, Ms. Emma Shaw and her newborn daughter, Taylor."
Kurt gravely held out a hand to the woman as she knelt down to his level. "Nice to meet you, Ms. Shaw."
Emma matched his serious tone as she shook his hand. "It's nice to meet you too, Mr. Weller. But please, I'd really like it if you'd call me Ms. Emma."
Kurt giggled. "I'm not Mr. Weller; that's my dad. But okay, Ms. Emma." Baby Taylor squirmed in her arms, letting out a soft coo, and he stepped closer to get a better look. She was definitely better looking than his sister had been when his parents brought her home from the hospital. Not at all red and wrinkly, and she had hair too. Her eyes instantly fastened on him and followed his every move.
Emma smiled at him. "I think she likes you. Would you like to hold her?"
Kurt glanced up at his mom in mute appeal. "On the couch," she stipulated, and he nodded, suppressing his urge to run over there so Ms. Emma wouldn't think he was too 'bunctious to hold Taylor and change her mind. He didn't exactly know what that word meant, but that was what his mom had said most of the time when he asked to hold Sarah.
He climbed onto the couch with all the gravity he felt the occasion demanded and felt his chest swell with pride when Ms. Emma gently placed Taylor in his arms. He was just about to glance at his mom to see if she realized how wrong she'd been about him all this time when Taylor smiled up at him, and he promptly lost his heart to her. He reached out with one finger to touch her chubby little fist, just as he'd seen his mom do with Sarah, and Taylor instantly latched onto it, holding it as if she would never let go . . .
"Kurt?"
Patterson's voice recalled him back to reality with a start, and he realized she had been speaking to him. "Sorry. Could you repeat that?"
"I'm sorry," Patterson told him again. "That's not what the tooth says." Both his identification and her isotope test appeared to be conclusive, but since they directly contradicted one another, only one of them could be accurate, and as a scientist, she knew which one she would choose to believe. "I hate to have to ask this, Weller, but are you certain that Jane Doe is Taylor Shaw?"
Of course he was. He was hardly likely to misidentify his own wife. Ex-wife, Kurt corrected himself. And Patterson's question was ludicrous. There was no question that Jane was Taylor. She had the tattoo of her mother's initials on her wrist—and the scar on her neck. And he had felt the same surge of desire when she touched him as he always had with Taylor. "I'm sure."
His tone of voice indicated the subject was closed—at least in his mind—so Patterson let the subject drop for now. She could certainly understand why he wanted Jane to be Taylor—if she wasn't her, his friend was still missing and statistically had likely met an unpleasant end—but the evidence just didn't entirely jive with that conclusion. If he didn't revisit the issue with her in a day or two, she would have no choice but to bring it up to Mayfair. Perhaps their boss would have better luck helping him see reason.
Kurt headed straight for that bottle of scotch the moment he arrived home. As if Patterson's disquieting revelations weren't enough on top of the day he'd had, Sarah was eyeing him with a speculative gleam that in his experience didn't portend anything good. Hopefully whatever it was wouldn't be as bad as the smell of whatever she was cooking for dinner. If she didn't move out soon, his neighbors might well ask him to. "Let's hear it."
Sarah took a seat at the far end of the couch. "So I've been thinking about what you said last night. About Taylor wanting to meet me," she clarified when Kurt raised an eyebrow.
Oh, god. It wasn't going to be as bad. It was going to be worse. He never should have mentioned that to her, but she had asked him how things were going with Taylor, and he had blurted it out without thinking. "Sarah—"
"I think it would be a good idea for you to invite her over here for dinner."
Sure he would. When hell froze over. "Right. I'll do that sometime." Like never. Never was a good time. Hopefully Sarah would forget about it or change her mind before he ever had to issue the invitation.
"No, Kurt." Sarah frowned at him. "Not sometime. Tonight. There's no time like the present, don't you think?"
What he thought about the idea wasn't fit for his nephew's ears. "Well . . ."
"What are you afraid of, Kurt?" Sarah asked sharply. "That I'm inviting her over here in order to rake her over the coals about a past she can't even remember?"
Well, actually . . .
"Or that I'll mention something about your past that you don't want her to know?" Sarah rushed on, oblivious to the turmoil of her brother's thoughts. "Because I can be discreet, and no matter my personal feelings about Taylor, I would never mistreat an invited guest."
Kurt sidestepped that issue. As well-meaning as he knew his sister to be, she was extremely protective of him, and he knew all too well just how easy it was for a person to slip up and unintentionally reveal something while talking. He'd certainly done so last night. "I just think it's too short notice, that's all, Sarah. It was a long day, so she probably picked up something to eat on her way home."
"Well, we'll never know unless you call her and ask," Sarah pointed out practically. "You never know; she might jump at the opportunity. It's got to be lonely for her going home to a safe house night after night without anyone she knows to spend time with."
His sister was like a dog with a bone once she had latched onto an issue; clearly he wasn't going to get out of this. Kurt sighed. "Okay, fine. I'll call Jane and ask, but if she says no, you have to agree to drop the idea altogether. Deal?"
"Jane?" Sarah's brow furrowed. "Who's Jane?"
It had completely slipped his mind that he hadn't mentioned Taylor's request to her. "Taylor asked to be called Jane until she starts getting her memories back."
That was utterly ridiculous in Sarah's book, but she held her tongue, knowing if she made any comment now, all bets were off. Kurt could do as he pleased, but she hadn't agreed to call her by that name. And she wouldn't. "Fine," she said, knowing he would misunderstand her meaning. "But when you call her, you have to make it sound like we really want her to come, Agent Grumpy Pants." She wouldn't put it past him to issue a half-hearted invitation that would have Taylor running as fast as she could in the other direction.
Kurt simply raised an eyebrow at Sarah as he turned away and reached for his phone to make the call.
Unfortunately, Jane hadn't yet ordered anything to eat, and she was thrilled to receive his invitation. Kurt's mouth tightened as he met Sarah's expectant gaze when he hung up the phone. "She'll be here in about half an hour."
"Great," Sarah said cheerfully. "I'll go check on dinner."
Kurt spent the entire time praying for a critical incident, a hit on one of Jane's tattoos, even a natural disaster (a small one) to require their immediate attention, but no such crisis was forthcoming. He took a deep breath when he heard the knock on the door but before he could even think of moving in that direction, Sarah raced past him and flung it open.
Sarah had expected to feel nothing but anger if she ever laid eyes on Taylor again, but to her surprise, she felt a grin splitting her face. Taylor had been her best friend for over half her life, and those memories were the first to come flooding back. "Oh my god, I can't believe it. It's you." Her gaze roamed over Taylor, seeing not only the tattoos adorning her chest but also the complete lack of recognition in her eyes. "It's like . . . it's like really you."
Who did you think it was going to be, Sarah? Kurt thought, draining his glass of wine in one large gulp before starting toward them.
"Come on in; come on in," Sarah urged.
"Okay," Jane said as she stepped over the threshold, relieved to see Kurt approaching. She was already feeling incredibly overwhelmed—several times on the drive over here she had almost asked her security detail to turn around and take her home—and Sarah's niceness only added to her anxiety, given how Kurt had said they parted. She probably should have thought this through a little better, but the invitation had been so unexpected that she had agreed to it before her brain had begun to process it.
"Oh my god, you're still so pretty. You don't look like you've aged a day since I last saw you. Come here." Sarah threw her arms around Taylor, ignoring the stiffness in her body as she hugged her fiercely.
Jane smiled a little as Sarah finally let her go, and the two of them stared at one another for a long, uncomfortable second before a timer went off. Thank god.
"Sorry," Sarah apologized, already turning toward Kurt, who nodded to her. "Umm . . . excuse me." She hurried to the kitchen. "Sawyer! Dinner time!"
Finally, Jane was alone with Kurt. "It smells good."
"No," Kurt contradicted. "It doesn't." He couldn't help the bittersweet smile that appeared on his face in answer to Jane's shy grin. Taylor had always been complimentary of Sarah's cooking, never failing to choke down a few bites no matter how terrible the results had proven to be, and many was the night that the two of them had left her place and headed straight for a nearby fast-food restaurant. It had become such a standing joke between them that the two of them had begun to take turns picking out where they would go for their "after-dinner dinner." It made him sad to realize he was the only one left who remembered those idyllic days.
"No. It doesn't," Jane agreed, blushing as she looked away from Kurt's intensely amused gaze.
"No." Kurt searched for another topic of conversation as Jane looked down at her feet. "Do you want a drink?"
"Okay," Jane agreed quickly. Too quickly, she realized as his eyes lit with amusement once more, but just as with his invitation, there was no taking back her acceptance.
Thankfully, Sarah got dinner on the table quickly, and in no time at all, they were seated around the round table, and Jane was being treated to Kurt's most embarrassing childhood stories.
"Well, where is your dad?" Jane asked as Sarah concluded her latest one. "I'd love to meet him." If he wasn't too angry to sit down with her, of course. Dinner with Sarah was going so well that she was daring to hope that Kurt's sister might be willing to set the past aside for now and be her friend once more. It would be nice to add yet another person who had known her in the past to her circle of acquaintances.
She realized she'd made a mistake as soon as the words left her mouth. Kurt's face darkened, and the silence that fell over the table was deafening. Her smile slipped from her face as she glanced from him to Sarah.
Kurt reached for his glass of wine again. "Uh . . . W-we don't talk much anymore."
Jane didn't know what to say.
"Who are you?" Sawyer asked innocently at the lull in the conversation.
"Sawyer, this is Taylor," Sarah told him.
Jane dropped her fork onto her plate with a clatter, and Kurt shot his sister a furious glance. He should have known they wouldn't be able to get through this evening without some remnant of the past being dredged up.
Sarah met Kurt's gaze evenly before continuing on. "Umm . . . we were all friends when we were little kids like you, but then once we grew up . . . well, she was gone a long time, but now she's back."
"Where did you go?" Sawyer wanted to know.
She felt as if she had descended into the very mouth of hell itself. The smoke around her was so thick she could scarcely breathe and even though she couldn't see the fire, she could certainly feel its heat. What had happened? she wondered, but she didn't spare another moment to try to figure it out. The rubble was probably still unstable, but she didn't care, didn't hesitate as she began inching forward, because nothing mattered except getting to . . .
Jane stood up so abruptly she rattled the plates on the table. "Excuse me." She rushed out the door and down the hallway to the elevator, pressing the button over and over in a desperate attempt to make it arrive before Kurt could reach her.
No such luck. "Jane. Jane. Hey," Kurt said as he hurried after her.
"I'm sorry. Okay? But I just . . . I can't do this. I thought I could, but I can't."
The look of desperation in her eyes broke his heart. "It's okay. We might have rushed it a little bit. No one expects you to become Taylor again overnight."
"Yeah . . . that's just it," Jane responded. "I don't . . . feel . . ." Like Taylor, she wanted to say, but she couldn't bring herself to do that to him. She'd already seen how losing her had hurt him; she wasn't about to rub salt into that wound.
"What, Jane?" Kurt asked, wishing she would tell him what she was feeling. Wanting her to talk to him as Taylor once had about anything and everything.
Wanting her to be Taylor again, in spite of what he had just told her.
The elevator doors opened and Jane rushed inside. "I-I'm sorry. I . . ."
"Talk to me, Jane," Kurt pleaded as the elevator doors began to slide shut.
Instead, she pressed the button for the ground floor and closed her eyes as Kurt's anguished face disappeared from view, feeling hot tears begin to trickle down her cheeks.
Kurt remained in the hallway long after the elevator had reached its destination and its occupant had left the building. He stood there and wondered how an evening that began so well had gone wrong so quickly, leaving him standing here staring at his reflection in the shiny metal.
Wondering how many times he was going to be forced to endure Taylor walking away from him.
xxx
Kurt slept only fitfully the next few nights. He had engaged in a heated argument with Sarah after Sawyer went to bed after Jane left over her decision to call Jane Taylor, and though they had apologized to one another, things still weren't quite back to normal between them. His mood wasn't improved when he walked into work on the third day and received a summons to his boss's office. He had a feeling he knew what this was about.
"Why am I learning about this from Patterson and not you?" Mayfair demanded as she walked in, tossing the file on the desk in front of him.
"It doesn't change a thing," Kurt retorted. Jane was Taylor. There was no question about that in his mind. He had intimate knowledge of her, for god's sake. There was no way he could be mistaken.
"This isotope test on Jane's tooth stands in direct conflict with the history of Taylor Shaw that you yourself provided us," Mayfair pointed out.
"Which means the isotope test is wrong," Kurt fired back.
"Which means one of them's wrong." Mayfair walked around her desk and took a seat.
"Look, I'm not talking about some mineral that found its way into her tooth somehow." Kurt leaned forward in frustration. "I grew up with Jane. I—"
"You grew up with Taylor Shaw," Mayfair interrupted. "It seems to me that there's now reasonable doubt that she and Jane are one and the same. They say everyone has a twin out there somewhere, Weller."
"And . . . what? You think that someone out there searched the world over for the twin to my ex-wife just so he could wipe her memory and send her to me at the FBI? That's pretty farfetched, don't you think? I mean, if that's the case, why go to all that trouble rather than locating my actual ex-wife and using her?"
Maybe they couldn't. Mayfair didn't speak the thought aloud, but it hung in the air between them.
"You think she's dead," Kurt surmised. "You think they did get their hands on her, but she refused to cooperate, or something went wrong, and they killed her. And that's why they went looking for a look-alike to substitute." There were several things wrong with that theory, but also one very big factor in its favor: Taylor would have died before agreeing to participate in a plot against him. Or anyone.
"I think it's a possibility we at least need to consider," Mayfair told him. She rattled off the elements in Patterson's report. "These elements at these ratios put Jane's place of birth and early infancy in sub-Saharan Africa, which makes it extremely difficult for her to have been living next door to you in Clearfield, Pennsylvania at that time."
Kurt met Mayfair's gaze without blinking. "Jane has the scar on the back of her neck from falling out of that tree when we were kids. She has the tattoo of her mother's initials on her wrist—"
"Which Patterson said was brand new," Mayfair interrupted. "But even if she got that wrong as well, it brings up another matter." She had been debating whether or not to mention this to him, but given his questionable state of mind at the moment, perhaps it would be just the shaking up he needed. She opened her desk drawer and withdrew the file containing the background check she had run on Taylor's mother. "How well did you know Emma Shaw?"
"Emma?" Kurt's gaze flickered to the folder on Mayfair's desk. "Emma was like a second mom to me." Had become his mom, in fact, for an all-too-brief period of time. "Why?"
Mayfair slid the file across the desk to him. "Because she wasn't Emma Shaw."
If she had expected surprise, she didn't get it. Kurt merely raised an eyebrow as he opened the file and read it without comment. The real Emma Shaw had been born in Philadelphia in 1962, just as his Emma had always claimed, but her life had been tragically cut short at two years of age when her entire family perished in a fiery car crash while on their way to visit relatives in Colorado after skidding off an icy mountain road and plunging several hundred feet into a ravine below.
After that, the next time Emma Shaw had popped up on the government's radar was when she had given birth to Taylor in a hospital in Pittsburgh and subsequently purchased the house next door to theirs in Clearfield. Where she had lived out the remainder of her life.
"You don't seem surprised," Mayfair commented as he finished reading and handed the file back to her.
"No," Kurt admitted. "I can't really say that I am." His boss looked at him steadily, silently requesting clarification on that statement, and he took a deep breath before continuing. "Look . . . Emma was one of the best people I've ever known in my life. She was hardworking, compassionate, and absolutely devoted to Taylor."
"But?" Mayfair prompted when he paused.
"But . . . I realized by the time I was a teenager that she had her secrets. She never talked about her life before she moved to Clearfield. I overheard my mom and dad once speculating that Emma had been in an abusive relationship and fled when she got pregnant with Taylor, and given how gun-shy she was about dating and how vigilant she was about Taylor's safety, I always figured they were right."
And what he had just learned only solidified that theory in his mind. The easiest way to assume a new identity was to obtain the birth certificate of a person around your own age that no one was likely to come looking for. The real Emma Shaw fit that description to a tee.
"You know who else tends to live under assumed identities?" Mayfair pointed out. "Criminals."
"Emma wasn't a criminal," Kurt said hotly. He didn't think he'd ever even seen her jaywalk across a street. "She dedicated her whole life to raising Taylor and caring for others as a nurse in our local ER, and she did a bang-up job at both. And the moment she saw a person in need, she always jumped right in to help them. I never met a more selfless person in my life."
"And how many times have we seen that exact same scenario played out?" Mayfair asked patiently. "Criminals—even murderers—fleeing from law enforcement and integrating themselves into little towns like Clearfield, and their neighbors being shocked when they get caught years later, and swearing up and down that they were some of the nicest people they ever met."
Kurt shook his head stubbornly. "That wasn't Emma. I'm telling you, she was a genuinely good person."
"We don't know what she was. Or even who she was," Mayfair shot back. "Just as we don't know who Jane Doe is. Kurt . . . you can't pick and choose evidence to suit your preferred narrative. I shouldn't have to tell you that." She gathered Patterson's report up and returned it to its folder. "Have you told her yet?"
"There's nothing to tell," Kurt responded just as his phone buzzed. He glanced down at the screen, relieved at the interruption. "Patterson."
"This matter's not closed," Mayfair warned him.
Kurt left without another word. Nothing would ever convince him that Emma had been anything other than the warmhearted woman who patched up his scrapes when his mother wasn't available and fed him chocolate chip cookies by the bucketful, and he was equally certain that Jane was Taylor. He knew her body as well as he did his own, and he simply couldn't be mistaken about this. He wouldn't feel this way about another woman he had no history with just because she looked like one he'd loved with all his heart. That was crazy.
No, just as he'd told Mayfair, there was nothing to tell. Jane was Taylor. End of story.
But a tiny seed of doubt had been planted.