I made myself comfortable, claiming Booth's desk chair as mine while Booth leaned on the edge and Brennan stood by the window. Abigail also had a seat, positioned across from me on one of the cushioned chairs. I'd still say that I had the best sent in the house - or office, as it were. The best part was that Booth wasn't demanding that l surrender his seat back to him.

"So," I began. Abigail had been looking around, unsure who was in charge, but she looked back to me as I spoke, her hair swinging around to frame her face. "Your alter ego is Blue Minnow?"

Abigail actually seemed nearly offended. "Abigail Zealy is my alter ego," she was very quick to establish.

I sighed but really didn't want to get into that again. "Ugh… sure, whatever."

Booth took over then, able to tell that I was both impatient and irked by Abigail's deliberate disconnection from reality. "Did you, Abigail, have a relationship with Warren Granger, or did the Blue Minnow have a relationship with Citizen Fourteen?"

"Or any combination thereof," I couldn't help but snidely insert.

She cast a mildly frustrated look in my direction while she replied to Booth. "Neither. Warren had a girlfriend at Capitol Bowl." Capitol Bowl is far from the city's best, but it is one of the city's most frequented bowling alleys, with a sort of American eighties' theme and an all-welcome atmosphere. The relatively low prices might have something to do with it, as well.

Booth pushed himself up onto the edge of the desk. "What was the girlfriend's name, Abby?"

If the nickname bothered her, 'Abby' didn't show it. "He never told us her name. It was just a physical thing, and it was almost over!" I noted silently that she sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than us. "Warren and I had a connection. He couldn't deny that. Before he disappeared, he gave me his entire Neil Gaiman collection - his favorite work, besides his own."

I nodded slightly to Brennan and she took a couple of steps away from the window and closer to Abby. "In his own work, he describes a woman known as the Opalescence. Do you believe that's supposed to be you?"

"What do you think?" Abby asked almost shyly, looking up at the taller woman through her black and blue bangs.

Brennan didn't hesitate before evenly stating, "We think it's another girl entirely."

Abby sighed, barely even loudly enough for me to hear, and she looked down to her clasped hands on her lap in disappointment.

"Does that bother you?" I asked, hopefully sounding more gentle than I had previously. It seemed clear that, even if it had been unrequited, Abby had been crushing on Warren - and crushing hard, at that.

Abby rolled her eyes and set her hands on her thighs. "Okay, maybe the others told you I'm obsessed, I know. Because they never got Warren like I did. He was right. They are posers!"

"Chill out there, Abby," I ordered, hearing her pitch go up. "You're not in hot water, and neither is Warren, so just calm yourself before you lose it." I watched her take a deep breath before I continued her questioning with, "So they are posers, but Warren wasn't?"

She shook her head firmly. "Warren believed. He believed in truth. He believed in doing what was right. He was Citizen Fourteen. Citizen Fourteen was real!"

"Warren didn't fit in with the others?" Brennan clarified, slightly surprised.

"I just said!" The teen snapped. "Warren was better!"

I know that Brennan could easily overpower the slight-framed girl but I still didn't like it that Abby was raising her voice. "What did I say about cooling your jets?" I rebuked sharply.

"Sorry," she apologized quickly. She sighed again and rubbed her knees. "Warren was a really nice guy."

"Speaking of nice guys," I said, trying not to seem to edgy. It's something that i need to work on. "Your friends really aren't. Did you know that Jeremy and his boys have police records on file?"

Abby gave a small, uninterested shrug. "Yeah. It's nothing interesting though. It's like vandalism and trespassing. You can't take them seriously," she warned us. Although I irritated her, it was nice to know she'd still give information to find a murderer. Unfortunately, not all people would do that.

"As criminals?" Brennan asked, intrigued that a police record wasn't considered interesting or serious during a homicide investigation.

I saw Abby's lips pull back in the beginning of a faint scowl. "As anything," I answered for her lowly. I knew and understood this, and what she meant, but I still wish I didn't. Knowing reminds me that that's what I'll eventually be going back to. "Anyone can draw the eye of providence on a building. It would be interesting if the crime took guts." I peered at Abby, who had gone back to looking at her legs."Isn't that right?"

She nodded mutely. "Like murder?" Brennan asked, exchanging a look with Booth.
Abby nodded with a resigned sigh. "Yeah. Like murder."

"Warren Granger on the night he died, wearing his costume," Angela very briefly explained, as her holograph machine lit up with the glowing orange pixels.

"Now this is the good part," I said, only half-joking as I rubbed my hands together. I love the holographs. I wasn't even entirely sure how they worked until I came here and met Angela.

"Start the sequence," Brennan told Angela. Angela pressed the start command and the orange figures representing Warren and 'the Twisted' moved fluidly. The Twisted pushed Warren around in front of him and brought his other hand down at the base of Warren's neckin a precise blow. Warren's figure crumpled.

"The cause of death was a severed spinal cord," I crossed my arms, closing my eyes for a moment. At least the actual death would have been fast. "I'm pretty sure that this means we can eliminate Abigail Zealy from the suspect list." Although the neck is a very delicate place to attack a human, the spinal cord would take a lot of force to sever. Abigail didn't seem that strong, and even if she did have the strength, she'd have to be a bit taller.

Booth looked at me through the holograph, making his face look orange. "How do you figure?"

"Abigail doesn't have enough strength to sever Warren's spinal cord with one blow," Brennan explained for me. I was a bit relieved that I had been correct. I knew that I was, but it was still nice to hear it confirmed.

"What about his stepdad?" Booth proposed after a moment of quiet thought while we all watched the holograph repeat itself. A shiver itched to run down my back as the golden form representing Warren collapsed. "Or the other kids at the comic shop?"

Brennan released a long breath as her head tilted. No one could bring ourselves to look away, even though it was morbid and upsetting. "Well… the physicality of the murderer is between five foot ten and six foot one. I'd say yes to them all, depending on the weapon."

Angela looked almost distant and definitely horrified. "What could he have done to make somebody so angry at him?" She asked with a mournful sigh.

Brennan and I shared a look. Of course, we wanted to know the same thing, but we also knew what Angela actually wanted to hear, and we also knew that we couldn't tell her that.

"Zach's cleaning the bones now," Brennan said, instead of answering Angela's open question. "Maybe we'll find something that we've missed."

Seeing the excuse to leave, I held up one hand and offered to go find out what state the bones were in to report to Brennan. Instead of stating the fact - that I wasn't comfortable with the atmosphere of the room anymore - it was easier to have a different motivation rather than to bring my emotions into light. I'm here to help the cases; if I'm not doing something useful to them then there's no point in me being here, and I'm pretty sure they all know that Warren Granger was not a very lucky person.

In the mad scientists' lab, Hodgins was carrying some Petri dishes on a tray across the room while Zach sat on a stool behind one of the counters, leaning over another of the bright-colored comic books. I stopped myself from smiling as I put myself into their line of sight and I looked over to the little 'oven' where the bones were being saturated with chemicals meant to preserve and cleanse the remaining tissue from the bones.

"The blue girl isn't the killer," I announced, assuming the role of messenger between the lab rats and field agents, as per usual. "She's not strong or tall enough." Unable to help my curiosity (and it's not like he was being that professional, either), I glanced over at Zach and pulled out a stool across the table from him so that I was looking at the page of the Loony Toonscomic upside down. "...What are you reading?"

"I'm doing research." He answered. I raised an eyebrow. Research by comics… seems legit. It was funny because it was so matter-of-fact.

An alarm beeped over by the incubational machine. Zach flipped the comic over so that it stayed open and got up to go get the bones before they were damaged by the chemicals. "By reading a comic book?" I asked, turning on the stool and sliding off to help him however I could. I had no problem with it but I really wanted to hear the logic behind that.

"Intensely allegorical modern myths," he corrected me, not unkindly, getting a stainless steel tray and handing it over to me to hold. I only blinked once but assumed a position at his side, holding up the tray at about the height of his elbows.

Hodgins shelved his Petri dishes up high in a storage cabinet. "You're reading Bugs Bunny," he snorted.

"On, the surface, yes." The grad student pushed the incubator's top up and leaned it against the wall so that it wouldn't close. A puff of half-steam, half-chemical content rose from the chamber. "But if you dig deeper, the subtext becomes apparent." He got a pair of medical steel tongs and reached in, moving the bones out of place and making sure that they were clean. "The conflict is representative of the Darwinian struggle between avians and mammals for dominance."

Hodgins' skepticism was audible in his tone. "Based on Bugs giving Daffy Duck a cigar made out of dynamite?"

"Well, if you think about it," I began to reason. "It does have the underlying scientific side. Both sides of the animal kingdom were struggling to come out on top. The mammal giving the avian a dynamite cigar that would, under ordinary circumstances, have killed him demonstrates the primitive desire to undermine and defeat the opposition."

Hodgins just gave me this long, disappointed stare. "Xena," he whined. "You're supposed to be half normal, at least."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm a seventeen year old catching murderers with the Jeffersonian Institution and an FBI agent who thought I was a murderer less than two months ago. Normal clearly isn't my thing."

Zach pulled one of the bones out and set it on the tray gently. "Yeah. And then next, he explodes. But not really." My lips quirked in amusement. He explodes… but not really. I never thought I'd hear him say something like that.

I narrowed my eyes at the bone on the tray, my slight smile slipping into a frown. "I think we have a problem," I said, moving back into the light and carrying the tray and the periosteum bone onto the table next to Zach's loony Loony Toons comic. "It looks like the chemicals degraded the bones." I sounded calm but I was actually pretty alarmed. Zach knew what he was doing - he's like a more empirical Jimmy Neutron.

"Impossible," Zach said quickly, while I looked at the almost bubbling look of the bone and the pitting running along the ridges. It looked like a sort of osteoporosis, but Warren Granger had been too young for that. "It's only a four percent peroxide solution."

"Then what's this bubbling and pitting on the periosteum?" I asked with a raised eyebrow. I wouldn't have questioned him, but I've seen several skeletons since I met him so I think I know what the ulna of a young adult is supposed to look like, and that is certainly not it.

I heard the sound of a slight thud and clatter as Zach closed the incubator and set the tongs on top of it. A moment later, I felt the brush of Zach's lab coat against my side as he leaned over me, looking over my shoulder. For a moment I just stood there uncomfortably. "A four percent solution wouldn't cause that," he breathed in shock.

As his breath brushed over my cheek, a few strands of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail moved in front of my eyes and I freaked out a moment at the close contact. Touch = trouble. The instinct was so solidly engrained that I jumped to the side, letting him look at the bone himself without obstruction, and glared when Hodgins whistled at the moment of awkwardness. "Do you think it's some sort of systemic deterioration?" I asked, gathering my wits again.

Zach swept the tray along the table with his arm and moved it under one of the magnifying glasses with a light. "The intertrochanteric crest is almost totally eaten away," he noted uneasily.

"Whoa!" Hodgins, both interested and excited by the thrill, moved over to the table on the other side of Zach, while I waited for the qualified scientists to make a decision before coming to any of my own. I'd never seen deterioration like that in any sort of context before, other than a textbook. "What do you think it is?"

Zach looked up from the microscope. "This kid was sick."

"How sick?" I asked with a frown. "Sick, as in, 'really-bad-cold' or sick as in, 'dead-in-less-than-a-year?'"

"I can't tell from this," he decided with a shake of his head. "I'll need more time to ascertain what the disease was and what it had been doing to the victim."

I nodded slightly to myself, taking note of that. "I'll tell Dr. Brennan."

"Holly!" I spun around to look down the hall leading into the lab. Booth was walking backwards and clapped his hands together once he had my attention. "Let's go!" Brennan was walking facing front ahead of him.

I looked over to the other scientists. "Go, Xena," Hodgins said, dismissing me with a wave. "Your royal escort awaits."

"I hate you," I groaned, beginning to walk backwards towards the door.

"No, you don't," he sang, entirely too smug about it.

I looked around Capitol Bowl, frowning slightly at the mixes of noises. There were a lot of clinks and bangs from over by the pool tables, a lot of beeping and rattling from the arcade section, jumbled voices from the bar, and of course, the cheers and crashes from the alleys. Don't forget the music from the intercoms. For someone who spent the majority of her time in a quiet bar, a near-silent apartment, or a government laboratory, it was nearly overwhelming for a few minutes before I managed to 'acclimatize.'

A good thing was that the aisle was wide enough for me to walk in between Brennan and Booth. Brennan and I were dressed in our normal styles - Booth, however, couldn't have the same said for him. He wore a red, orange, and white bowling jersey. "Do you smell that?" He asked us, pleased as he looked at the people bowling down the lanes.

I looked up to the ceiling briefly, wondering where this was going. "Yes, I do."

"Do you know what that is?"

"Wax," Brennan answered with a frown of distaste, looking around uncomfortably. Neither of us particularly liked being in big, rowdy crowds.

"Popcorn," I added.

"Feet."

"Deodorant."

"Sweat."

"The chemical polish from the bowling ball rack we just passed."

Booth wasn't in the least deterred by our unenthusiasm. "That is America, Bones, Holly."

I couldn't stop myself from taking the shot he'd just allowed. "America needs stronger deodorant," I commented wryly. "Why is there a bowling ball in your car, anyway?"

"Oh, you know." If I knew, I wouldn't be asking, I thought, but wisely decided not to interrupt with that snippet. "I figure we ask a few questions about Warren Granger, maybe bowl a few frames…" I would have stopped walking if I hadn't been trying to stay between them and in the loop. "What? There's nothing like a little sport to take the edge off of-"

Brennan burst out in laughter, looking around the lanes and covering her mouth. She was smiling, now entertained. "This is not a sport!"

Booth frowned in disappointment like a kicked puppy. "How do you figure?"

"There's no physical benefit," Brennan explained. I heaved a miniscule sigh. I do understand what she means, but at the same time, Booth clearly liked bowling, so this probably won't end too well. In my head, I calculated the chances of disappearing into the floor. I didn't really like my odds. "So it's really like golf. It's not a sport, it's an activity."

As I'd predicted, the reaction was not exactly pleasant. "You know, could you please, Bones, maybe just for once, try not to piss everyone off around you?" Booth snapped in irritation. At the harsh tone, Brennan blinked in surprise and I flinched slightly, crossing my arms.

We moved past the lanes and towards the front counter, where a man was providing change for a customer who had a pair of rental shoes in one hand. "Yeah. Sorry…" Brennan murmured, taken aback still by the sudden explosion that she hadn't counted on. Still, she moved past it. "Are you good at this…" She looked like she was having an internal struggle before she finished with, "Sport?"

Booth decided to let it go, as well. He rolled his shoulders and smirked with a very masculine pride, making me roll my eyes. "Well, my average was over two hundred, less than two opens per game. One match, I had two hundred eleven strikes out of four hundred thirty-one shots. Twenty-nine opens in thirty-nine games."

"What does that mean?" Brennan asked me in a quieter voice, apparently not really intending for Booth to hear, which made me smile slightly. She was trying to seem interested and like she understood what he was talking about to get along with him, a big step higher from how she'd acted towards him when I first met them.

"It means he's good." I shrugged, having done the rough translation. I'm not a bowler, but he seemed awfully proud, and those were some high numbers.

Brennan moved her hands into her pockets, speaking louder again and trying to compare situations to connect. "I won the Marshall H. Dixon award for my paper on George John Romanes and physiological selection." She grinned in pride.

I smiled at her in acknowledgment, but I couldn't say anything that would actually be comparable to that one. "I got the highest district score on my eleventh-grade English finals," I offered weakly, and nearly laughed at how unremarkable it was in relatability, and how different all of our claims were.

Booth just groaned and muttered, "My God. It's like we lead parallel lives."

We got to the counter and I pushed some hair behind my ear, still smiling in mirth at the strange conversation when the man attending the rental counter smiled at us all in welcome. "Need shoes?"

Booth nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah!" I did a double-take and gave him a look and he hastily added, "Uh, we're looking for the manager." He got his badge from his pocket and showed it to the man, who didn't bother holding it up to the light to check for the authenticity seal.

The man just pointed at his own name tag. "Ted McGruder," he introduced. He was… tall and wiry and the kind that seemed deceptively strong. While now he was smiling, I could easily imagine him angrily leering. I barely contained a shiver and I involuntarily took a short step back, moving very slightly behind Booth to an almost unnoticeable degree. He reminds me of them. The men that hit me when they were mad. His short black hair was combed and managed neatly and his checkered button-up didn't seem very threatening, but it fit the alley well. "FBI, huh?"

"Yeah." Booth nodded, pocketing his credentials. "We're, uh, investigating the death of one of your employees."

"Warren Granger," Brennan specified.

"Warren?" McGruder repeated, blinking. He frowned quickly. "When he didn't show up for his last paycheck, I thought he just found another job, and didn't want to give notice. He was weird like that… a cool kid, though," he reminisced. I noted that he kept one arm on the register steadily through the conversation.

You don't seem very distraught, it made me want to say. But something about this man just made my mouth stop doing what my brain ordered, and I only swallowed, blinking and breathing normally. And then I realized why - I was actually afraid of him. I've been afraid before, of the mercenaries less than two days ago, but this was different. I fought them. This man I just wanted to get away from, like I'd learned before that it wasn't possible to fight.

Knowing that I was afraid made me want to run even more, but I held my ground. I can't explain an irrational fear to Brennan and I don't want Booth thinking that I'm shaken up by Donovan Decker's rescue mission. Besides, if worse comes to worst, Booth can just shoot the man.

Trying to focus on something else that would let my body start obeying me again, I looked over to the arcade as yelling caught my attention. "Bye-bye, Lucy!" One of the boys over there jeered rudely.

"Come on. Don't pout!" Another taunted. I recognized Jeremy's voice and although he wasn't dressed like Yasutani the Terrible, he was wearing ridiculous makeup. His lackeys all laughed loudly at a blonde woman's expense.

I didn't speak to say where I was going, but I moved wordlessly around the countertop to the arcade. The blonde was an adult. She was somewhere in her twenties and she wore a half-sleeved blue sweater and jeans. She was pointing to the door with one arm and kept the other cradled to her side like she'd been hurt. She had a simple silver wedding ring on one finger. She seemed almost desperate to make the boys leave.

"Hey!" I barked, knowing that Jeremy would recognize me. The woman jumped as I was suddenly at her side. "Yasitaki!" If anything aggravates him, getting his costume identity wrong will. "You heard the lady. Scram."

"I didn't know you worked at the alley," Jeremy sneered at me, not as impressed now that I didn't have an FBI guy behind me. "What happened to your pretty science girl and brawn boy? Did you ditch them?"

I raised my eyebrows solemnly, unamused by the immaturity. "I see Abigail had the sense to ditch you," I retorted. "Good for her. Now, I said to scram."

Jeremy didn't have a witty reply prepared for my comment about Abigail. The other boys looked around themselves curiously, wondering whether or not to obey me. I took a sudden step forward, stomping the ground and shouting, "Get lost!"

"Keh. Whatever," Jeremy muttered, shooting me a loathful glare before moving to go towards the door.

Problem resolved, I looked back to the blonde and shrugged. "With them, you have to get rude," I explained. If she hadn't tried it before and they came back, at least she'd have the tip on how to deal with them. "They don't respect you enough to take you seriously if they don't think you have backbone."

"Thank you," she said, abashed. Her cheeks colored a faint pink and she brushed a few stray curls behind her ear. "I'm Lucy."

"Holly," I replied. "I'm here with the FBI. I was just asking those douches some questions earlier. Do you know them?"

"Not well," she replied with a nervous laugh. She started to slowly walk and I followed her, my stomach twisting for a minute when I found that we were going straight back to the counter. Oh, joy. "They come here a lot, but they just won't listen."

"They have this club," I said, automatically feeling sympathetic. She seemed frail and quiet. While she spoke at a normal volume she seemed jumpy. "They call themselves the Doomsday Club. They meet every Thursday at Karma Comics. They like to pretend they're the protagonists from graphic novels. Just make fun of the name 'Yasutani' and they should leave you alone," I suggested.

"Oh, thank you," she said with a sigh of genuine relief. We reached the counter again and I got a questioning look from Brennan, but just shook my head slightly. I'd tell her later why I walked off - well, I'd simplify it so it seemed like I'd just wanted to get rid of Jeremy. "Ted, I talked to them, but they just kept giving me lip!"

At the new angle, I could see the matching wedding ring on McGruder's hand and I sighed. Just my luck that I ran off to hide from McGruder with his wife. I felt like faceplanting the countertop. Good going, Holly, I mentally applauded. "Luce, these people are with the FBI. They're here about Warren Granger." As Lucy slipped behind the counter, her husband wrapped his arm around her waist, his hand landing on the swell of her hip with a possessiveness that made me want to gag.

"Warren? What about him?" She asked, looking over at me in confusion.

I opened my mouth to say something tactful (I wasn't sure what, but it would have come to me… probably) but Brennan beat me to it with a very tactless, "He's deceased."

"You said he quit!" She whimpered to her husband before ducking her head, presumably to try to blink back tears.

"I was wrong," McGruder told her softly. He looked back up. "Th-This is my wife, Lucy."

"Sorry," Lucy excused quietly, trying not to let emotions overwhelm her.

I wanted to tell her that it was okay. But again, I couldn't bring myself to speak without some snide or cruel tone. I don't want to aggravate anyone. I'd much rather shut up than get that man to glare at me.

"That's okay," Booth said gently, soothing her himself. "How often do those kids come in here?"

"Those jokers?" I noticed McGruder's fingers curled against his wife's hip. I looked to Lucy's face immediately, searching for any sign of discomfort. For a split second, I detected a trace of pain but she looked down and didn't pull away from her husband. I frowned to myself and inclined my chin, surveying McGruder in a new light. Someone who gets hurt by something like that would probably forgive and forget, but they wouldn't just stand there while they were being hurt, like Lucy was. "Weekends, mostly. But they used to come in a lot more, in these crazy costumes. I told them I'd allow it on Halloween, but that's it."

"Is Warren's girlfriend here?" Booth asked. I really hope that they don't ask why I'm not asking questions. "We were informed that she worked here."

"Well, if you ever met Warren, you'd know he's not the girlfriend type of kid," McGruder told us, sounding sorry that he couldn't actually tell us who his girlfriend was.

Lucy looked at her husband briefly before looking back to us. "There was a girl who came by to see him sometimes."

Booth and Brennan both exchanged a knowing look and Booth produced a picture of Abigail Zealy from his pocket. He slid it over the countertop for the McGruders to see.

"Yeah." Lucy nodded, slowly at first. "Th-That's her." She spoke with a slight stutter. "I don't know her name, but I-I don't think Warren was all that pleased to see her. If she called, he would ask me to tell her that he wasn't here."

Brennan's cell phone beeped with the generic ring I was learning to recognize. She nodded slightly to the McGruders in apology, turning around to answer the call. "Brennan."

"Maybe he was just trying to dodge her," McGruder suggested.

"Excuse me." Booth held up one hand to stop them, beginning to move over towards Brennan as she walked away from the counter and towards the lanes again. "Just one moment, please. Thanks."

"Okay," I heard Brennan say quickly, probably interrupting someone. "Slow down, Zach, and repeat that." There was a long moment where Zach was speaking. I looked back over to the McGruders darkly. McGruder was talking to Lucy with a quiet tone for several seconds before she said something in return and he nodded before nuzzling her hair in a show of affection. Either he really, really loves his wife (which isn't a bad thing), and he honestly doesn't realize that he was hurting her earlier, or he was consoling her about something. I could go for both, if I didn't nearly freeze when he looked up at me. Our eyes locked for several seconds before he looked back to the lanes.

"Okay. Good work, Zach. Keep working on the weapon I.D.." She closed her phone and slipped it into her pocket.

Booth sighed in disappointment. "I take it we're not going to be getting any bowling in tonight, huh?"

Brennan shook her head to him, saying that no, he would not be going bowling tonight. "Zach said that if Warren hadn't been murdered two months ago, he'd be dead by now."

Making up for the lack of participation at Capitol Bowl, I sat down with Warren's parents downstairs in the main public area of the FBI. They both held steaming hot beverages. Brennan had relayed what Zach learned to me to use in the secondary questioning and Booth went upstairs to his office with her while they looked further into Abigail Zealy's history.

"When you said that Warren was sick as a child, you meant that he'd had leukemia," I stated bluntly but quietly out of respect for that we weren't completely alone in the lobby. I could understand that they'd want to keep Warren's health a more private matter.

His mother nodded, closing her eyes for a long moment. "Yes. But by the time he was eleven, he was in remission."

This just keeps getting better and better, I thought to myself sarcastically. A teen murdered while he was dying of the same cancer he'd formerly beaten.
I spent a few seconds trying to think of a tactful and simple way to say the state of the bones before deciding I couldn't do both at the same time. I went with simple, so that I didn't have to explain the terms. "The hypercellular activity we saw is only present in advanced cancer cases. He must have been very ill. You really didn't notice?"

His stepfather shook his head, mournful but more collected than his wife. "We tried to be there for Warren, but he wouldn't let us in." You let him shut himself out, I thought, anger beginning to build. "Right when you thought you'd built a bridge of trust, he'd quit on you. He quit trying to face reality."

This nearly made the mother cry again and having been disgusted once by the stepfather's tactlessness, I sent him a very stern look. "Maybe your son didn't want you to have to deal with it, too," I suggested gently to the wife, while I met the stepfather's gaze steadily. "He knew that his cancer was terminal and he decided to tough it out rather than let it hurt you, too."

I didn't say what I really thought - that the only reason anyone would be that selfless was because they didn't trust their confidants to be strong and/or supportive. Warren might have just not wanted to be in and out of the hospital before he died. Maybe he just wanted that freedom. Or maybe he didn't trust his parents anymore. But that wouldn't help and I hate tears.

But Warren's mother took that thought and she clung to it. "Yes," she said, nodding, touching her cheek softly with the hand not holding her drink. "He saw what it did to me the first time. It's not that he quit. It's that he didn't want me to suffer."

And for the first time, I really understood how devastated she was.

A/N: I'm sorry to say my updates are going to start slowing down. I was intending to update a chapter for every three days, but now I'm getting caught up to what I'm currently writing and with school and my other commitments, I'm not sure I could write at the speed that I used to. I'm still uploading chapters from my other fanfiction website ( ), but I learned the hard way that it's better to stay on top of my writing rather than to post it necessarily right as I finish it. I should still be updating at least once a week!