Somehow, after all that, there remained a fair chunk of a workday to slog through. Sydney and Broots gave both their coworkers odd looks when they returned to the sim lab with puffy eyes and downcast expressions. Parker and Jarod looked at each other and made the unspoken decision to say nothing. Nobody but the three of them (now the two of them) would understand what had happened in the roadside copse off the west vineyard. Parker wasn't entirely sure she understood it herself.

She went over the logistics of their upcoming mission to Bolivia in a daze of grief. Their seventh field mission was to be the ultimate exercise in irony: they'd been assigned to track down an escaped political prisoner. Sydney kept casting Jarod uncertain glances, waiting for their resident ex-escapee to remark on how the tables had turned, but the reaction never came.

Angelo's body still hadn't been found by the end of the workday. After giving Jarod his shot, Parker headed for the parking garage, still mulling over Angelo's last moments. She remembered that brief window in time when she'd believed he could be her brother, rather than Lyle. Would she feel differently, now, if it had turned out to be true? If her reaction to Lyle's death was any indication, probably not. Her heels clicked against the concrete as she crossed Parking Garage G. Angelo's status as Schrödinger's twin brother had stuck fast in her concept of him, such that he was family in everything but blood. She fished in her pocket for her keys. Why did she have to wait to realize what Angelo meant to her until he was already gone?

Someone robed in shadow stepped out from behind the pillar next to her car. Parker crammed her keys between her knuckles and lunged towards her attacker, stopping just short of tearing skin when she recognized the silhouette.

"Brigitte?" She let her arm fall and swung the keys into her palm. "That's a great way to get stabbed. Warn me next time, Christ."

"I did warn you," said Brigitte. "Earlier today. Don't tell me you forgot? I said I'd wait for you at your car."

Parker winced. She had, in fact, forgotten. The encounter in the sim lab with her fingers around Brigitte's neck seemed a thousand years ago and a thousand miles away. That was before she'd heard anything about the plan to transplant the glands.

"Slipped my mind, yeah," she admitted.

"Hm. That's the second time today you've lunged for my throat," said Brigitte. "Good thing I don't hold grudges. Ready?"

Parker felt like she had her shoes on the wrong feet. It wasn't a familiar feeling. "For what?"

"Wow." Brigitte tittered. "Are we feeling a bit brain dead today, Miss Parker? A little discombobulated? Our talk. I said we needed to talk, and I plan to follow through. So, are we ready?"

"It's been a long day," Parker grunted. "Talk, but make it quick. I need to get dinner on the stove."

"Oh, no. No, we're not talking here." Her eyes roved over Parker's weary posture. "I'll admit, you do look beat to hell. Do you want me to drive? Here, give me the keys. You don't have to worry about dinner, it's on me."

This was shaping up to sound like another ordeal on top of a day of ordeals, but getting out of the obligation of cooking dinner was sounding pretty good right about now. If worst came to worst, she could always turn off her brain and let Brigitte's inevitable scolding wash over her in a torrent of unprocessed nonsense. She tossed Brigitte the keys.

The route was a familiar one, taking them west along the highway, just as Parker would do to get back home. Was Brigitte going to drive her home and order them both takeout?

"How's Daddy doing?" said Parker, for something to say.

"You'd know better than me. Didn't you have a meeting scheduled today? I haven't seen him in a few days. You tell me, how'd he seem?"

One word swam out of the gloom at Parker: days? Brigitte hadn't seen her husband in days? Weren't they living together?

"Better," she said. "Sharper. More…" … heartless. "… organized."

Brigitte hummed and pulled off the highway, parking in front of a very familiar establishment.

"I've never eaten here," she said idly. "Drank here a few times, never had more than a couple chips off someone else's plate. Plus the fried pickles, of course. Is it any good?"

"The Slippery Fork?" Parker hadn't been back since Brigitte's reveal that she knew the asset and his handler had patronized the place in an ill-advised bit of after-hours fraternization. Since then, of course, the fraternization had escalated spectacularly. "The chicken parm is a recipe for a morning next to the toilet. Any chicken dish, really. Other than that, it's fine. Why here, of all places?"

Brigitte shrugged. "Trying to stay in your comfort zone."

"I don't have a comfort zone," Parker grumbled, but she followed Brigitte out of the car all the same.

It was a slow night, being a Monday afternoon in mid-winter. Inside, the comforting darkness and the familiar, mute nods of the staff welcomed Miss Parker back. She shouldn't have let Brigitte scare her away from this place. They were shown to her usual booth, and Parker ordered a lager. Brigitte ordered a cranberry juice.

"Right, you're not drinking," said Parker after her double-take. "I should warn you, if this is you plying me with alcohol for information, you picked the wrong member of the QS-9300 field team. Broots would have been better. He, apparently, can't keep his mouth shut."

Right then, there was nothing Parker would rather do than raise a glass to Angelo's memory and down a couple more just for her. She was resolved to enjoy herself, if only until morning hit and she remembered what had happened.

"Not what you're here for," Brigitte assured her. "Pinkie promise."

The lager was delivered with shocking efficiency. It wasn't Parker's usual drink; that usually came in thumbs rather than pints, and was served neat.

"Alright," she said once the server was out of earshot. "Suppose I believe you. What are we here for, then?"

"To catch up! We're family, though we haven't always enjoyed the fact. How are you? How has Broots been doing? I notice you don't talk as much as you used to."

Parker sputtered a laugh into her drink.

"What happened to the pinkie promise? That was fast."

Brigitte pretended honest bafflement, but with deliberate lack of finesse. "What, that's privileged information? I thought it was work gossip."

Parker set her drink down and leaned back. She wasn't sure what to make of Brigitte. From the first day they'd met, there had been one guiding principle to Brigitte: she did as the Triumvirate told her. This principle explained the lengths she went to to scoop the Jarod collar out from under Miss Parker and her team, and it explained the attempted hit on Mr. Parker. It might even explain why she'd married a man she'd once been contracted to kill. But there were a few choices that didn't make sense under that paradigm, and Brigitte had made most of these anomalous choices in the past six months or so. Asking Parker to stalk Jarod without making it an order made no sense. Gunning for Raines back when Raines had been in the Triumvirate's good books, that made no sense. Vouching for Jarod and keeping him out of room six after the Tower attack, that made no sense. And those were just the highlights in a long list of little decisions.

Parker made a decision of her own.

"It's a little of both. Broots… disapproved of a choice I made and broke my confidence. That's all you're getting."

Brigitte grinned. "Oh, but that's not fair, that's teasing! Now I'm more curious than ever."

"Tough," said Parker, but she was so relieved to be talking about something other than the quicksilver glands and the medically assisted suicide they'd precipitated, she felt her mouth fight against a smile.

Talking with Brigitte was easier than it should have been. That almost certainly had something to do with the fact that she was buying all the drinks, but it might also have to do with the change Parker had noticed since the beginning of Project Quicksilver. In view of security cameras, Brigitte was still gung ho about the Triumvirate's bottom line, but glimpses of the real her seemed to show through at odd moments.

(Brigitte flagged down the server for another round. Two drinks in, Parker noticed nothing amiss about her drinking companion ordering beers for both of them.)

Brigitte tapped her fingertips against the rim of her glass and turned a careful gaze on her stepdaughter.

"I figured it out, you know," she said. "Or, I thought I had. Then, seeing the two of you earlier today, it really clicked."

Parker swallowed a too-large gulp of beer.

"Figured what out? How to fake an accent without letting your diphthongs slip?"

"No," said Brigitte, with a deliberately American-sounding O. "You and Jarod, sleeping together."

If the comment didn't quite sober Parker up, it did the job of a quick splash of water to the face.

"I'm not sleeping with Jarod."

"No, not anymore," Brigitte agreed. "I saw that, too. There's a story there, I'm sure. Gotta be."

Parker pinched a scallop from the platter between them and chewed it with relish.

"You and I, we're not pals, Brigitte. Especially not as long as you report to the Triumvirate. You know what I allow you to know and no more. There's no story here."

"No?" Brigitte pouted. "Fine. I know how to barter." She leaned in close. "I tried to get him into bed, too. Gave it my all, but he turned me down. There, now you know something about me. Quid pro quo?"

Another scallop stilled on its way to Parker's mouth.

"What?"

Brigitte made a face. "Oh, don't get territorial about this. I didn't know you two were sleeping together at the time. Besides, Jarod said no." She waved a hand dismissively, as if to show how it hadn't touched her. "I've always been good at handling rejection."

He'd said no. Brigitte, the person to whom Jarod reported, who held his future in the palm of her manicured hand, had propositioned Jarod… and he'd said no.

Well, of course he had. Put that way, it seemed the most obvious thing in the world.

"Did he—" No, her first reaction couldn't be about Jarod. She wiped the draft clean and started from scratch. "You're married to my father."

"Well spotted," said Brigitte with a roll of the eyes. "We also haven't slept in the same bed in months."

Though Parker had enough dignity not to ask outright, she got the scoop anyway. Apparently, Brigitte and her father hadn't been intimate since well before the Tower bombing. They attended functions together as expected and owned keys to the same house, and Brigitte had helped out in the early days of her husband's recovery. No, they did not have "an agreement". Yes, it would have been adultery. No, she didn't care.

Brigitte punctuated each of these statements with a sip from her glass. In a brief flash of clarity, Parker eyed her own drink — she'd upgraded to a scotch neat — then Brigitte's, following the frosted glass up and down.

A puzzle piece fell into place.

"The baby's gone, isn't it?" said Parker quietly.

Brigitte's perky disposition crumbled, and she looked down at her glass.

"About time you figured that one out," she said wryly, though there was little humour in it.

Parker searched her stepmother's face. There was grief there, but resolve as well. She examined her own feelings at the news — so, she didn't have a little brother or sister on the way. Was she disappointed? Relieved? It was like trying to pinpoint the scent of a candle in the midst of a wildfire, drowned out by the much starker, more detailed grief of Angelo's loss.

"What happened?"

"I terminated it months ago. First trimester. You were still in the hospital at the time, not long after that whole thing with Raines's attempted coup. That's the upside of the estrangement between your father and I — the man still hasn't noticed." She snorted, then sobered. "Although, I don't know. Sometimes he gets this look in his eye, like he's remembered all over again what I did, but he can't pin down the details. I'm not a neurologist, I don't know what he understands."

Parker stayed quiet. Brigitte seemed to want to talk. Questions like why seemed irrelevant.

Brigitte frowned down at the tabletop. "I have a condition. If I give birth, there's a nine in ten chance I'll hemorrhage and bleed out on the table." She laughed dryly. "Sound familiar? Most of my adult life, that never made a difference to me. I was a little more careful with birth control than the average twenty-something, but I wasn't up at night crying that I'd never be a mother. It just wasn't on my list of things I wanted to do. That changed when I married your father. Hard to wrap my head around now, but there was a time when I truly loved him and loved the baby inside me and would have done anything to protect either of them. I never told him about my condition. As nuts as it sounds… I was ready to face death to bring that kid into the world." She shook her head ruefully. "I blame the hormones."

She stalled out, staring into the middle distance with a bitter expression.

"Something changed," said Parker, to fill the silence.

Brigitte laughed humourlessly. "Yeah, you could say that." She nibbled at a scallop. Her mouth puckered and her words became staccato as the bitterness seeped out. "I never told him about my condition. But then I found out: he already knew. He already knew, he'd known all along, since the early days of our relationship. He didn't care. He wanted a baby from me, and he didn't care that it would almost certainly kill me. I was just a receptacle for his legacy."

"Receptacle," Parker murmured. Where had she heard that word today? Her father. Talking about Angelo and Jarod.

"Yeah. Right? A walking womb. So, I acted as fast as I could. He wasn't going to get what he wanted out of me. The doctor said if I'd left it a week later, I'd have faced the same consequences as a natural birth — bleeding and dying on the table."

"And, what, since then… creative work with pillows under your shirt?"

"Not exactly, but on a practical level? Yeah, more or less. I stopped bothering with all the props after, as he says, 'the sky fell'. If he's noticed my stomach has stopped growing, he hasn't come out and said it." Brigitte gave Parker a scrutinizing look. "You know, I've always thought one of your more infuriating flaws was the rose-coloured glasses you wear with respect to your father. Yet, you don't seem all that surprised. You're not defending him at all."

Parker threw back the remaining dregs of her whiskey and signalled the server for another.

"No," she said. "After today, I'm not."

Brigitte knew how to listen, too. When it counted. Her eyes turned sympathetic, and she raised her brows in a silent question. This many drinks in, Parker's lips were as loose as they'd ever been.

"Our meeting earlier today," she said. "He called me in to brief me on the future of Project Quicksilver."

She stared at the platter of scallops, not seeing them, not hearing the buzz of patrons around them. Seeing her father, hearing her father talk about people like they were things. Jarod, Angelo… Brigitte. He'd always treated people like things, like chess pieces, like machines on a production line. Why had it taken her so long to see it?

(Easy: because he was her father, and she loved him.)

She cleared her throat. "He plans to salvage and transplant the glands to other hosts. Which means he plans to kill Jarod. And Angelo," she amended, because although her mouth was running amok, her alcohol-addled brain still knew enough not to self-incriminate. To betray that she knew Angelo was already dead would look suspicious when his body was found.

God, they still hadn't found him.

"The good graces of your father had you chasing after Jarod for years," Brigitte pointed out. "Now, a threat to Jarod's life has you turning on your father. Things sure have gone topsy-turvy the last couple of months. That must have been some damn good sex."

Damn good sex. Parker's lip curled and she fought the mad urge to lash out — but wait, why should she react like this? She glared at Brigitte, all the while looking inward at the irrational hurt incurred. Sure, yeah, it had been good sex. God, had it ever. But to imply she'd just experienced such sublime dick that it'd turned her against her father? That was missing the forest for the trees.

She'd pulled Jarod into bed and unwittingly created a new vector from whole cloth, an excuse for everyday closeness, for exploring each other's entire beings under the guise of mindless entertainment and dependable orgasms. Parker had made a point of it from the beginning that their romps in the sack were about fun, not romance, yet along the way she'd been treated to wonderful, dazzling glimpses at what she could have had if she could only let herself. It was those glimpses that had become addictive, even as the fact of their false, diluted nature corroded her from within.

First she'd shoved the memory of Thomas in the way, which was less than his memory deserved. It would be an insult to him to move on so fast, her brain had insisted — and to Jarod, of all people! From there, the excuses mounted. She'd let Jarod's terrible mortality scare her, for one. For another, she'd tangled herself in knots over the power she had over him — but now this new, disorienting revelation from Brigitte, that the threat of quicksilver madness was apparently not enough to coerce him into bed, tempted her to downplay her own undeniable recklessness and myopia.

Now, it was too late. They had weeks until the man she knew would be gone; sealed up in a box or dead on the operating table, gone was gone was gone.

Scraps of rumination tumbled out of her into words, little bits of nonsense that, with time, pieced themselves together into something coherent.

"I lost Thomas," she said. "I loved him and I lost him. That was… impossibly hard. The only bearable thing about it was that I didn't know it was coming. And now…"

She trailed off. Why was she saying this to Brigitte? Brigitte, who'd tried to kill her and her father. Brigitte, who'd been the bamboo under her fingernails since she'd first stepped over the threshold of Centre headquarters. Brigitte, who was giving her an odd, uncomfortable look from across the booth. Looked at another way, though, Brigitte was the perfect confidant. She had no reason to care about Miss Parker's business, and she had no power to tell anyone anything now that she'd spilled her own secrets.

"And now?" said Brigitte, visibly reluctant.

"Now it's happening again. But worse, because I know it's coming. I'll lose Jarod. I've been scared of losing him for months, convinced it'll hurt less if I keep him at arm's length."

The server came by to top up their drinks and left a tense silence in his wake.

Finally: "Did it work?"

Brigitte sounded as though she already knew the answer.

"No."

"You love him," said Brigitte, like an accusation.

Parker could feel the words in her throat, taking up space. She felt them as they slid up into her mouth, flicked off the tip of her tongue, escaped through her lips, like an act in itself.

"I love him."

Admitting it aloud when she hadn't even admitted it to herself in the privacy of her own head was equal parts a relief and an awful burden. She knew it was true, though. Jarod had occupied his own reserved spot in her heart since she was a little girl. She hadn't been able to shake him out even when he'd become the bane of her existence, dancing just out of reach and dropping mocking hints all along the way. And then these past few months, seeing him every day, working alongside him, falling into bed with him, her feelings had overtaken her like a growth of stubborn weeds. The more she ignored it, the more it grew.

"Oof," said Brigitte, with tipsy cheer. She shook her glass. It tinkled. "Bad timing, huh? Bet you wish you'd realized that a couple months ago."

"Yes, thank you, Brigitte," Parker growled. "Your tact continues to impress."

Her drinking partner belched delicately. "So. You love a man on death row. What are you going to do about it?"

Parker laid her forehead down on the cool wood of the table. She was getting too old for a night out drinking. At her age, two times out of five, a premature hangover hit her before the buzz kicked in.

"I don't know," she told the table.

And she didn't.