A/N: Thank you for continuing to read! Let me know what you think and make sure to follow 'Lilies' to keep up as I post each chapter. Again, if you haven't already, make sure to check out the post-script in Chapter 1 for the context of this story. I can just hear the song playing, like a soundtrack, as I read and write this.

Chapter 3

As far as airports go, the Darnell Municipal Airfield was tiny. The entire complex consisted of one terminal, a single ticket counter, a luggage belt, two flight bays and a hangar. So when Eric disembarked from the singular plane arriving at 10:20pm, Derek Duquesne had no trouble spotting him.

Making his way around the only other people in the terminal—two grandparents awaiting their young family— Derek made eye contact with Eric and the two men met half-way.

"Delko, it's good to see you again," Calleigh's brother said warmly as he shook the newcomer's hand.

"You too," Eric returned the greeting. "Wish it was under different circumstances. Nice shiner."

Derek took after his father in his younger days: handsome, barrel-chested, and as tall as the Cuban man before him. His vicious black and blue eye and the grimace that crossed his face at Delko's words combined to tell a story Eric knew he needed to understand, but was sure he didn't want to hear.

"Yeah, well…" Derek trailed off as they approached the luggage carousel. Eric snatched his suitcase off the belt and the pair turned toward the airport's exit.

"Any sign of Calleigh?" he asked carefully once they reached the parking lot.

Luckily, Derek answered in the affirmative. "J.J. found her about a mile from the house. It wasn't too hard in the end; he just listened for the gunshots."

Eric couldn't help but chuckle. Of course Calleigh would seek comfort with some kind of deadly weapon. He could always find her on the firing range after a stressful day at the lab, and he had to admit, there was something cathartic about shooting the hell out of a target at fifty yards.

"We romped around in those woods from the time we could walk. Hunted, played, snuck off with our dates," Derek continued with a smirk.

He left out escaped. From the various conversations Eric had held with Calleigh about her childhood, the three Duquesne kids did a lot of that growing up. The woods surrounding their home provided the perfect safe haven.

As they drove, the two men fell into companionable silence, and Eric went over in his head anything Calleigh or Duke ever told him about their family.

Kenwall Duquesne never laid a hand on any of his children, or his wife. He did drink, copiously, and so did Calleigh's mother. The arguments escalated in volume and severity over the years, and eventually Duke and Caroline realized they couldn't live under the same roof anymore, for their own sakes and for the sake of their children. They separated, endured a nasty, year-long divorce, and Duke moved to New Orleans.

Calleigh was a daddy's girl through and through, and the last two years she spent with her mom in Darnell were torture. The two women couldn't have been more different, or more alike—a fact which created regular havoc in the big white plantation home.

Besides the usual antics of two teenage boys, there wasn't much chaos in that house after Calleigh left it for college, a new life, and New Orleans. Caroline seemed to lose some of the sparkle in her eye when her daughter moved away, because no matter how tempestuous their relationship, she loved Calleigh.

Eric knew Cal felt the same way, although her childhood memories were more bittersweet than the happy ones her mother recalled and retold. As a true Southern matriarch, Caroline never let society see the gritty bits of her family's affairs; unfortunately, they were messy and, inevitably, relatively impossible to hide.

The older woman was stubborn, a trait she passed on to her daughter. Calleigh inherited that characteristic from her father, as well, and the result was a young woman who fiercely guarded both her pride and her heart growing up.

She still does, Eric thought. Thank God she left when she did.

In Calleigh's absence after high school, Caroline devoted herself to her sons, but not with the same gusto. The boys grew older and moved on, too, and she stayed in the house that had been in her family for generations. Years later, the entire family still gathered there every year or so for holidays—even Duke, because even if "Mr. and Mrs. Duquesne" no longer existed, their love for their three kids did.

According to Calleigh, the house was big enough that the two parents could maintain plenty of distance, each occupying their own side of the home at Christmas, and that was a very good thing…

As Eric's thoughts had turned to his best friend's family, his eyes wandered unseeing to the landscape which blurred outside his window. For several minutes, the only sound in the car was the lull of the tires beating rhythmically down the interstate. The silence settled surprisingly well between the two men, and Eric had the fleeting thought that Derek reminded him a lot of Calleigh.

The contemplative mood quickly shifted, however, when Derek pulled his truck off the road and came to an abrupt stop. Eric looked to the driver's seat and saw a very conflicted man.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

Derek waited a beat, seemingly debating his next words. "What are you doing here?" he finally asked, pointedly. His voice held a slight edge, but no animosity.

Eric recognized it as a show of uneasy suspicion, the kind he'd first shown to Horatio when his boss announced his pending marriage to Marisol.

But he wasn't quite sure what Derek was asking. "Your dad called," he answered plainly, as if it was an obvious fact. To him, it was.

"So you drop everything and rush to Louisiana?" Derek pressed.

As perceptive as he was as a CSI, Eric Delko was truly at a loss. "Derek, I honestly don't follow," he said. "Her mom died. Your mom. That's what friends do."

Calleigh's brother shook his head in frustration and stared out the front windshield and into the darkness ahead.

"When my sister came home yesterday," he said thoughtfully, "we could tell something was wrong the instant we saw her. She squirmed out of my hug, barely touched my dad. She'd lost weight. She's exhausted."

Eric listened intently as Derek told his story. "Last night…" he paused, and a haunted look flashed briefly in his eyes. "Last night J.J., dad, and I woke up at three in the morning to the sound of Calleigh screaming."

"What?" the Cuban man interrupted, a sick expression on his face.

The sight of his older sister twisting in her drenched sheets, the sounds of her screams, would be forever burned in Derek's memory.

'Don't touch me! Please, stop!'

"I've never seen her like that, Delko," he shuddered. "Cal was terrified. She said she was fine. Brushed it off and forced us out of her room. But I doubt she slept at all the rest of the night. By the looks of her, I think it's been going on a while."

Eric's heart sank. He should have known. He should have recognized the signs. He'd been through it himself after his shooting.

"Then today, I lay my hand on her shoulder and she knocks me out." His left temple was still pounding. He was angry at Calleigh, but his anger paled in comparison to his concern for her. "Our mother dies, she freaks out and punches me, and then she disappears? That is not my sister."

"No," Eric said quietly. "It's not."

"Calleigh wasn't gone half an hour when my dad called you. So I asked myself, 'Why?' Why would Dad call you when Cal takes off? After twenty minutes?"

"Did you ask Duke why he did it?" Eric asked, his voice taking on a slightly hard quality in response to the growing tension inside the cab of the truck.

Derek met Eric's gaze and matched the intensity he found there with his own fiery glare. "Yeah, I did."

"And what did he say?"

"I didn't think he should have involved someone outside the family. And he said you were Calleigh's family."

Somehow Eric kept the surprise from showing on his face. He'd met Derek Duquesne once, two years ago, when he came to Miami to visit his father and sister. He barely knew the man.

Duke, on the other hand, had been a semi-regular presence in Calleigh's life since he moved to Miami six years ago, especially since he stopped drinking. Their contact had been limited, but Duke and Eric inevitably built a goodhearted kind of friendship. Apparently, Calleigh's father had been paying closer attention than Delko thought, and his heart swelled to think he'd earned the respect of a man so dear to his best friend.

"You wouldn't be here if you didn't care about my sister," Derek stated. "But I need to get a few things straight."

Eric nodded warily, not sure where this was going.

"She's hurting. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but she is," Derek said. "According to my father, you know what happened. You know what happened, and you're going to tell me."

Eric's eyes met Derek's in disbelief.

"No, I'm not," he declared resolutely. "You're her brother. You of all people should realize how unfair that would be to Calleigh. She deserves the opportunity to tell you herself."

"She deserves not to wake up in a panic in the middle of the night!" Derek responded heatedly, his voice rising in pitch to match Eric's firm tone.

The beginnings of a temper started to flare in Eric. "Yeah, she does. So there's your answer. That's why I'm here, Derek. Because she's not okay, and she needs me."

"She needs her family!" Derek said vehemently.

"Cal needs someone to hold her at night and tell her that everything will be okay, even when he's not sure it will," Eric countered, with a little more fervor than he really intended. But he needed to make this point clear.

"She needs someone who knows what it feels like to be scared the way she is. Calleigh needs her best friend, and someone who loves her. She needs me."

Eric's heart was tight in his chest. In this moment, he was angry with Derek Duquesne, angry at himself, angry at the whole world. He didn't want Calleigh to be hurting so much, didn't want there to be a reason for her to hurt.

"Okay," Derek said with a shrug of his shoulders, and he pulled the truck back onto the road. A half-cocked grin splayed across his face.

Eric was confused..

"What the hell just happened?" he asked, annoyed and feeling a bit like he'd been hit and run.

"You pass," Derek simply said.

"I pass? Are you out of your mind?"

"I'm sorry, Delko," he said sincerely. "I had to make sure."

"Make sure of what?"

Derek's half-grin turned into a satisfied but grim smile. "I wasn't lying when I told you about the conversation with my dad. I mean, he didn't even hesitate. Calleigh splits, and five seconds later he has his phone out ready to dial your number."

"You were upset."

"Of course I was upset! I was out cold for almost five minutes after Cal rounded on me—"

"Speaking of which," Eric interrupted with a crooked smirk and a retributive gleam in his eye, "you really shouldn't be driving."

Derek genuinely did take after his sister, and he accepted Delko's sarcasm in stride with a grin of his own. "I'm telling a story here."

"By all means," Eric smiled and gestured with his hand. "Continue."

"Thanks. Where was—oh yeah. Before I knew it, Dad's on the phone and you're on your way here. He knows you better than I do, so I trusted his judgment. Then I got to thinking about what he said, that you were Calleigh's family."

"Thinking, how?"

Derek took time to mull over his answer. "We have our issues like anyone else, but family is everything to us… Dad meant that you were Calleigh's everything, and I didn't like that."

Her everything.

Kenwall hadn't spent enough time with Calleigh and Eric together to see that. Any conclusions he drew about his daughter's feelings for her partner and friend came straight from the source. Eric never once doubted in the last year that Cal felt strongly for him, even when she ran to another man. To hear confirmation that he was right, from her father no less, bolstered Eric's resolve: he would help Calleigh if it was the last thing he did. He would love her.

"I have—I had— four sisters. It's not easy, man, but you learn to let them go. They'll always be my sisters first," Eric responded wisely.

"I'm not worried," Derek admitted. "I had to make sure you wouldn't hurt Calleigh, so I tested the waters. You refused to tell me what happened, so you passed."

"You're glad I didn't tell you?"

"Absolutely. I know my sister. No man could ever steal that woman's heart if he didn't understand it first."

Eric nodded. "She's private."

"Exactly. Dad said you were the only one who could get through to her, and now I see why. You guard her heart as much as she does."

"The street goes both ways," Eric said quietly. "So are we good?"

Derek smiled. "More than good. Let's go find Calleigh."