Dear Rob, writes Claire Rutherford. She is sitting at the dining room table, a scattering of loose notebook paper and envelopes before her. Her blond hair is pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, and her eyes are red. Waterproof mascara is a blessing in an otherwise accursed existence.

Dear Rob,

I won't say I'm sorry, but I need you to know that this isn't your fault. The problem isn't that you don't love me anymore. It's that I still love you. If I lived forever—which, as my sorry luck would have it, is a definite option—I would always love you. That's something I just can't face. I love too many dead men already, fathers and uncles and brothers and friends. You'd be the icing on one god-awful joke of a cake.

Someone once told me that you would leave, that it was only a matter of time. He said the best case scenario was that I would wake up next to your corpse one morning. The worst case scenario, the more likely one, he said—was this. You'd leave me voluntarily, because you just couldn't handle my warped reality. There's so much wrong about the man who told me that, I wanted to believe he could never be right about anything. He was, though. Usually is, in his own terrible way.

So you're sick of me. It's okay. I'm sick of me, too.

Forever yours (no pun intended),

Claire.

That's the final letter. She saved Robert for last. A sentimental part of her hopes he'll discover it himself, that he'll have a change of heart and come home. More likely, the letter will be handed to him by some stoically sympathetic police officer. Not that it makes much of a difference. She won't be around to see.

In a ceremonial fashion, she drops the other letters one by one into the living room fireplace. Letters to people who still matter to her long after they ceased to exist. There's one addressed to Dad, to Mom, to Peter, to Nathan, and so on. Ashes to ashes, it makes sense.

Sylar, in his cynical manner, would say she's stalling. Claire scoffs slightly at the thought of him. He doesn't have a letter. She said everything she had to say to him on the phone. The only sentiment that will remain unspoken between them might be expressed in two simple words, the first beginning with an F and the second with a Y. And that never needed to be said.

Noah left Claire a gun, among other things, at the time of his death. For the protection of his precious Claire-Bear, as if she has ever really needed protecting. She holds it now, seated before the fireplace, staring at her letters curling into soot. Robert's letter is on the mantel, among their sunny photographs.

It's awkward, holding the muzzle of the gun to the back of her head. She's afraid she's going to screw it up, but what does she have to lose? She thinks she can pull the trigger with her thumb.

This has been a long time coming. A long long lonely lonely time, Claire quotes.

And it's true what they say—she doesn't even hear the bang.

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The first thought that enters Sylar's mind when he whips his rental car to a stop is that Robert Rutherford has more money than good sense. The house is a beautiful two-story affair, styled in a very woodsy way to match the estate. The porch wraps around, overlooking a lake. A lake, for God's sake! He wonders, as he gets out of the car, how many times they went skinny-dipping there in the dark. The ensuing mental images cement his belief that Rutherford is a common fool, and Claire Bennet is well rid of him. And if she didn't seem to suffer from the same shortage of intelligence, she'd know that, too.

He rings the doorbell. It's so polite.

"Claire!" He strives for a nonchalant tone, as if he just happened to be passing through Texas and decided to drop by and see if she was still kicking. Just on a whim.

His thumb punches into the doorbell several times in quick succession, the ensuing buzz getting a little more irritating with every moment that Claire's hands don't appear to brush aside the curtains.

"Claire!" Now it's a little less nonchalant, a little more You answer me right this instant, young lady. It reminds him forcibly of Noah. This is getting downright embarrassing . . . and frightening. He wants her to come out and yell at him, cry to him, threaten to shoot him if he doesn't get his sorry ass off her front porch. Something.

Involuntarily, he sends a nervous spark of electricity into the doorbell, and the resulting shock is painful enough to cause him to yelp and leap away, cursing loudly. He glares down at his hand briefly, watching the singed flesh of his thumb heal, then hauls off and kicks the door, hard. There are easier ways to get in, but he needs this violence. On the third kick, the door bursts open.

It's ironic, but when he sees her body, he feels like killing her.

"You . . . bitch!" Sylar spits. For a moment, he is truly convinced she did it just to spite him. When he kneels beside her—she's fallen over in an extremely awkward position, her legs still locked Indian-style—it's personal. He fumbles for the pliers in his pocket. Rakes through her blood-soaked hair to find the entrance wound. Practically hammers the pliers in.

Wishes she could feel it.

Sylar has some experience with Claire's brain. It doesn't take him too long to bring the bullet out. He smiles at it with grim satisfaction, then flips her over and waits for the haze of death to magically vanish from her eyes.

It doesn't happen as instantaneously as he would like, and that's troubling.

He stands, peering down at her, and he reminds himself that clearly she's been lying there for an hour or two. It might take a few minutes. Looking around to distract himself, the photographs on the mantel catch his eye. There's Rutherford and Claire on the fateful day of their wedding. She's wearing all white and smiling like the idiot Sylar had plainly told her she was. There the two are by the lake.

There's a suicide note from Claire.

Glancing down at her once more, Sylar tears into the letter and skims over it, his dark eyes growing increasingly narrower. When he's finished, he replaces it in the envelope and taps it on the brick, staring down at her pensively. He comes to a decision.

This is taking too damned long, he thinks, setting the letter down. If something's not right . . . well, I can fix it. But not here.

He disappears from the living room for a while. When he comes back, he has a suitcase. After he plants it in the backseat of his car, he returns and stoops once more beside Claire's unmoving form. Gazing closely, he thinks her eyes might be clearing, ever so slowly. But that may be wishful thinking.

Dragging a dead body would seem grotesque to most people. When Sylar drags Claire down the porch steps, the rhythmic thud of her sneakers fill him with nostalgia. He could carry her, but he's afraid that driving around with a bloody shirtfront will greatly increase his chances of being pulled over. With the same logic, he heaves Claire into the trunk and slams it shut.

Sylar has a single change of heart before he leaves. He removes the letter addressed to Rutherford from the mantel and tosses it into the flames.

He dearly hopes that Rutherford is so overcome with guilt and love for his wife that he returns home, sees the broken door and the bloody carpet—and is promptly scared shitless.