FOUR HOURS POST-SHOT: BARILOCHE, RIO NEGRO, ARGENTINA

The closest hospital was the Dr. Ramón Carrillo Hospital Zonal, a seaside medical facility guarded by lines of blossoming lapacho trees and decorated with cheerful graffiti. Brigitte was whisked onto a stretcher and out of the receiving area before Parker could say more than a dozen words in Spanish.

She and Jarod stayed out in the waiting room. The waiting room implied waiting for something, but Parker was damned if she knew what for. Jarod, she might say. I'm waiting for Jarod. This was half-true, since the side effects of the second shot had kicked in just as Parker pulled up to the hospital. He'd beelined for the public restroom and monopolized it for a good half-hour at least, emptying his stomach over the course of some brief, intimate acquaintance with the toilet bowl. A modest queue grew outside, and eventually he freed up the restroom for the next person. Once out, he shivered by the radiator, covered in orderly-supplied blankets, as they settled in to wait.

(Again, for what?)

At the peak of Jarod's post-shot misery, he lost consciousness mid-sentence, toppling from a standing position to a sweating heap on the floor by a water fountain. Parker dropped to her knees beside him, eyes blown wide in fear, and felt for a pulse. Five minutes later, he was up and smiling once more.

"Why are we waiting?" he said, when he was sure his voice would remain steady and the meagre contents of his stomach would stay put.

Parker gestured at him helplessly.

"You can't walk out of here like that," she said.

"I can when a team of sweepers and cleaners is less than an hour behind us." He fixed her with an inescapable stare. "Why are you waiting?"

You, not we.

"Brigitte."

He didn't look surprised. "What about her? She's in surgery. We can't help her, it's in the doctors' hands."

"I don't want to help her, I—" The protest died on her lips. "You can't expect me to just let her go. Not after what she's done."

"I do, and you should." His tone was firm, no wiggle room to argue. "I won't make excuses for her — no, I will. If this works—" He motioned to the spot on the inside of his elbow where he'd injected the therapeutic vector. "If this works, we're free. She did that. I'm not saying we should put that on a set of scales against everything else she's done, but it's something."

Freedom. Yes, of course it was something. It was everything. But—

"We don't even know it worked," Parker argued. She started to pace up and down. A mustachioed man with his arm in a sling sent her a weak glare each time she brushed past his knees. "She only told us she had it when I had the gun on her. More likely, she thought it up as an exit plan. 'Let me go, I'll give you this snake oil'."

"It's been hours," Jarod pointed out gently. "Hours, and no more signs of quicksilver madness. No headaches, no red eyes, no irrational irritation. If it was coloured saline again, I'd be in full-blown QSM mode by now, and you and I would be having a very different conversation."

"It could have been counteragent."

"It wasn't."

Parker's patience splintered under the strain.

"How do you know?"

"I've had counteragent shot into my veins many, many times. I know what it feels like."

"So it's an updated formula. An updated formula would feel different."

"Why are you so determined to be doomed?"

She'd said something to that effect to him, months ago. She understood, now. Funny how he didn't.

Her voice dropped low. "I can't lose you. I can't hope that it's over and then lose that hope all over again," she said. Quiet. In an uncharitable mood, she'd call it pathetic. She didn't notice that Jarod had drawn close to her until his shadow fell across her face. He wrapped his arms around her, and she buried her face in his chest.

They stood there like that until a rosy tint bled through the horizon.

Jarod's voice rumbled through her bones. "Let's leave," he said.

Parker nodded and swallowed until her throat became unstuck.

"They could be here any minute," she agreed.

She didn't head for the main doors, though. She headed down the hall towards the acute care patient rooms.

"Where are you going?"

Parker was so tired.

"Christ," she said. "I don't know. I — I'm going to say goodbye. She doesn't deserve a word of my thanks, but she'll get a goodbye."

She wouldn't, though. When Parker rounded the door jamb to Brigitte's room and pulled aside the curtain encircling her bed, the bed was empty. Brigitte was gone. In her place was a sticky note.

Don't let it go to waste. Run like hell. — B

FIVE HOURS POST-SHOT: BARILOCHE, RIO NEGRO, ARGENTINA

Hope bloomed as the minutes slid by and Brigitte's mystery remedy stubbornly failed to kill Jarod. Once they were sure Jarod wouldn't collapse mid-sentence again, he and Parker headed for the car. Overcome with delirious relief and exhaustion, they broke up into laughter, tears, both. The cure for all the above was to seek out the other and sink to the grass under their feet, kissing the life out of them.

They got in the car and left the hospital. Where to? They hadn't the first clue. Away from Bariloche. Anywhere else but Blue Cove, Delaware. That was two locations ruled out, with an infinity of choices left over. They were following Brigitte's advice: run like hell.

"I don't know how long we'll be running for," said Jarod between mouthfuls of popcorn. He was still trying to fill his stomach after emptying it into the toilet. "Might be weeks. Might be for the rest of our lives. You're sure you're up for this? You could go back to Delaware with an excuse—"

Parker yanked Jarod towards her by the collar and kissed him hard on the mouth.

"Shut the hell up. You think I'd leave? You think after all those years chasing you, I'm going to start over from scratch?"

Jarod grinned.

"Just making sure. Now you can't say later that I didn't give you an out."

It was near impossible for Parker to concentrate on driving. Jarod was there beside her, and loved her, and had been granted an escape from under the Centre's thumb. If she looked away, he might vanish in a puff of improbability and unearned good will. She couldn't quite believe their luck. What if this was another false promise, in the vein of that new counteragent formula that had sent Jarod into QSM on a packed railcar? She wasn't sure if they could weather the disappointment again.

"Look at me?" she said as they rounded a bend in the road.

He did so with a quizzical expression, his mouth still full of popcorn.

"Hm?" he grunted.

"Nothing. Just checking."

His eyes were clear for now. No sign of red. But how long would it last? Forever seemed too much to hope for.

EIGHTEEN HOURS POST-SHOT: STILL BARILOCHE, RIO NEGRO, ARGENTINA

The cabin was dark when Emily reached the summit, and her hopes dimmed at first glance. There was nobody here. Still, she went through the motions and jimmied her way into the front room, stumbling as the door gave way.

Sure enough, not a living soul was there. Emphasis on living. Two dead souls lay abandoned in the main bedroom — sweepers? She wouldn't spare them any tears, but nobody deserved to be shot in the back of the head like that. Emily could only guess at what had happened here. Jarod, maybe? But from her brother's descriptions of this chemically induced state of madness he occasionally entered, head shots wouldn't be his style. So maybe not.

There was food in the fridge and dust on the TV screen. A stampede of broad-toed footprints polka-dotted the floor.

She cursed under her breath, and then again over her breath, for good measure. Missed them again. It was her second failure in a week, after coming up against a wall on Monday, trying and failing to con her way into the vault at the Wilmington Financial Reserve Fellowship. The staff had thrown her out, but she hadn't given up.

Worst came to worst, maybe she could escort Jarod's handler in at gunpoint. It was worth a shot.

(Ha. A shot.)

She left shortly after. The cabin in the foothills had nothing more to give.

THREE DAYS POST-SHOT: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Three days later, Parker and Jarod were still celebrating. And who could blame them? Three days and the Centre still hadn't caught up to them. Three days and Jarod still hadn't gone into quicksilver madness; before Bariloche, they'd been down to twenty-odd hours between shots, so three whole days (four, when you counted the day prior to Brigitte's arrival at the cabin) was something to celebrate.

After a long, long string of shitty motel and hotel stays throughout their history of working together, they splurged on a fancy hotel across from the train station — no great sacrifice, as the money came straight from the Centre's coffers. Just now, they were down in the restaurant adjoining the main lobby, sharing an elaborate French dessert, the elaborate French name of which had long since been flushed from Parker's memory by copious amounts of alcohol.

"Bee-yoo… hm," said Jarod into Parker's ear. She snickered. "Beautiful. Yes. You're so, so beautiful… is the thing. And I'm not just, just saying that… becauseIloveyou. You would be beautiful even if you were, if I, huh. Lost m'sentence. But you're love-ly. Lovely."

Parker shrieked with laughter. Guests from two of the nearby tables glared; an older woman at the bar pressed her lips together to keep from adding her own laughter to the din.

"I'd be beautiful even if you hated me, d'you mean?"

Drunk Jarod was a new and wonderful discovery, and happily, one didn't have to plumb too deep to find it, since Jarod couldn't hold his liquor worth a damn. She'd seen glimpses of drunkenness before — the Slippery Fork sprang to mind — though never quite to this extent. She wasn't exactly sober herself, but Jarod was on another level of inebriation entirely.

Jarod choked on a bit of pastry.

"Hate you? No no no. Nonononono. Wouldn't, couldn't. Well. Maybe on a bad day, back in ninety… six. Ninety-five? When did I escape the…?"

"Ninety-six. Not since then?" Oh, he'd sure hate her in the morning for this, but she was having too much time playing in the sandbox that was Drunk Jarod.

"F'course not." He set his glass half-on, half-off of a coaster. It promptly spilled wine across the table in an expanding halo of deep red. "Ohshit. Um."

A waiter came bustling up, armed with two rolls of paper towels. He had to wrestle one of the rolls away from Jarod, who kept trying to help.

"Sir and ma'am are disrupting the other guests," said the waiter stiffly, once the contents of Jarod's wine glass had been absorbed into several pink wads of paper towel. "Perhaps you would be more comfortable upstairs, in your room?"

"We can take a hint," said Parker imperiously. "You want us to go away and go to our room! Well, that's easier done than said."

"No, no. Backwards. Other way. Easier… said."

"Maybe for you."

Jarod pulled out the roll of twenties he'd taken from the ATM earlier that day, counted off five of them, and crammed them into the waiter's breast pocket.

"On the house!"

"No, it's—"

"No, you're right. The opposite. I was thinking of when I was a fake bartender. On me! And a round for everybody on our bill. Sososorry."

They fell into a gilded elevator, humming and giggling all the while. When the doors opened on the eleventh floor, they had each other's shirts unbuttoned to the navel.

"What is it about… elevators," Parker muttered against Jarod's throat as they stumbled out into the hallway, leaning on each other for support.

"Dunno. Hm." Jarod frowned and leaned his forehead against her shoulder. "I had too much, too much. V'got a headache now."

"Headache?" Parker abandoned the task of nibbling a trail down the line of Jarod's throat and jerked her head back, the better to see the whole of him. The mention of a headache sobered her better than a greasy sandwich and a four-hour nap. "Show me your eyes. When did your head start hurting?"

Jarod looked up blearily. The whites of his eyes were just that: white. As she searched them for telltale tendrils of red, Jarod's gaze sharpened. He, too, had sobered by several degrees.

"It's the drinks — I can tell the difference. Please, don't worry."

She let her worry linger a few moments longer, searching his expression for the inevitable honesty there. He wouldn't hide this from her, not this. If there were reason to worry, to act, he'd tell her.

To quiet her mind, she pushed Jarod against their hotel room door and busied herself with sorting out his fly. He grinned and unlocked the door behind him with a deft swipe of his key card, and they staggered through into the opulence beyond.

They weren't thrown out of their room, not that night nor the next, but only because their neighbours were wonderfully patient and had brought ear plugs.

SEVEN WEEKS POST-SHOT: ELY, NEVADA

When Parker got home, Jarod was baking his eighth cake.

Nevada was the first place they'd called home since leaving Argentina. It couldn't be more different from Blue Cove while still being within the boundaries of the contiguous United States, but maybe that was the point. The bone-dry mountains of Nevada evoked nothing of the briny coasts of Delaware; not that they were trying to avoid reminders of "home". If anything, the contrast was a constant reminder that they were not yet free. As Parker had pointed out months before, if you have to run, you aren't free.

They were renting a skinny town house not too far from the downtown centre, such as it was. Jarod had stolen a few familiar doodads from Miss Parker's place in Blue Cove to make each resting place feel more like home, but they hadn't put down roots. There was too high a chance that they'd have to pull up and move out at a moment's notice.

Speaking of which —

"I baked seven cakes today," said Jarod cheerfully, by way of greeting. He leaned over and kissed her on his favoured spot, just below the earlobe. "This is my eighth."

"That's wonderful, that's — seven? Shit, that's a lot. Listen." Parker wanted nothing more after her hellish morning to curl up around Jarod, perhaps with a sliver of cake, and lose her corporeal self in his arms and his warmth and the rumble of his voice. She settled for winding her arms around his neck, pulling his attention from the task of greasing a baking tin. "We have to go."

There was no question of what she meant. Jarod sighed and bent his arms around his back to untie his apron.

"What happened?"

"I saw two black SUVs outside City Hall."

"That might've been—"

"Sam was behind the wheel of one of them, I saw him. I think he might've seen me, too. I did a heat run on the way back, but he could easily be right behind me."

Jarod's brow creased in frustration.

"Right. Okay, we'll pack the bare bones. Travel bags plus mementos. Damn." He looked around at their sunlit kitchen, regret puckering his mouth. "I really thought we'd have more time to rest here. I'm sorry. Are you sure you don't want—"

"Don't finish that sentence. Yes, I'm sure." She tugged his face to hers and kissed him. The kiss was longer than they had time for, and quicker than she'd like. "I want you. Everything else is trivial. Besides, they're chasing me, too. It's not all about you, Jarod." Her tone was teasing. "It's time to talk about leaving the country, though. That should give us more buffer time."

"I was thinking the same. What do you figure — Europe?"

She nodded, mulling it over as she lowered one of her mother's paintings off the wall in the front hall. "Maybe. Prague? Doesn't have to be Europe. I haven't been back to Cairo since before the Centre reeled me back in."

Jarod jogged to the bathroom and swept their assorted toiletries into a plastic bag.

"Cairo…," he mused. "Yeah, let's do it."

Just like that, Parker left frustration behind, making way for excitement.

Jarod brushed past her with their prepared travel bags, always ready to check out at the first sign of trouble. She caught him by the arm.

"Hey — eye check," she said, in a sharp monotone which suggested an established routine. Jarod dutifully levered open first one set of eyelids, then the other.

"No signs?"

"No signs."

"Good. I love you." He kissed her quickly and made for the kitchen. "I'll call the airline."

SEVEN MONTHS POST-SHOT: CARDIFF, WALES

Parker and Jarod ended up living in Cairo for two months before pulling up roots again. When they left, it had nothing to do with the Centre. Cairo had been beautiful, though it hadn't held the same charm to a thirty-something Miss Parker as it had to her twenty-something self in her pre-Centre days. Plus, it turned out that Jarod was awful at Arabic. While this was a source of endless amusement for Parker, it did tend to hamper his usual capacity to slip into whatever job he wanted.

So, they had hopped over to Wales on a whim and found it good. Three months now in a house on the outskirts of Cardiff, and not a whiff of Centre presence in the area.

Seven months after that night in the cabin in Argentina, Parker was on the phone with Emily. It was after dinner, a shepherd's pie sitting heavy in her stomach, and they'd been doing the dishes when the call had come in from Emily. Parker found Emily difficult to talk to; even seven months post-defection, Jarod's sister still harboured a few trace suspicions that Parker was one bad day away from calling in a cleaner team to haul Jarod back to the Centre. Men repelling down ropes off helicopters, sleek black guns and barked orders, some engineered arson on the way out. Apparently, it had never occurred to Emily that any betrayal on Parker's part would involve throwing herself on the flames as well.

"Yeah, if it makes you feel any better, you can pick the location," Parker was saying. "Sweep it for bugs if it'll loosen your sphincter at all, I'm sure your colon will thank you. Jarod just wants to see you, he hasn't seen you in months. The location doesn't matter." This was what she had to keep in mind, to stay sane while talking to Emily: they both loved Jarod, both wanted to see him happy. Some days, it didn't feel like enough to dissuade her from reaching through the receiver and shaking Emily by the shoulders.

An irritable pause stretched out on the other end of the line. Outside, wind slapped rain against the window panes. When Emily spoke again, it was with deliberate patience, an evident attempt to seize the moral high ground.

"This isn't about you, Marcelle. It's for all our benefit. Flying into Cardiff will make me very visible. Visible enough to compromise all of us, and no one wants that. I'm sorry if being prudent offends you, but I can't help that."

Here was another thing. Parker was slowly acclimatizing to the use of her first name; it still didn't feel very natural, but it was improving day-by-day. Marcie was better than the whole Marcelle shebang. Back when they'd reconnected with Emily for the first time since the mission in Baltimore, Parker had introduced herself using her full name, as a show of trust. Emily had not taken it as such. Instead, she'd used the name as low-grade ammo ever since.

Emily had been the one to pull the trigger on the contents of the vault in the Wilmington Financial Reserve Fellowship. She'd been steaming mad when she found out Parker had been sitting on the key for months and not done anything with it. Considerations like it'll send my father to prison had sailed over Emily's head.

Parker took a deep breath to brace her temper. "As I said, you can pick the location, just let us know. Jarod is looking forward to it. I… am also looking forward to it."

Emily laughed. "Right, of course you—"

And nothing more. Parker took the receiver away from her ear and stared at it. Had Emily hung up?

"Emily?"

Two seconds later, all the lights went out, plunging everything into darkness. All the various electrical hums, ticks and buzzes — the refrigerator, the lamps, the distant thump of the washing machine — all stopped. So did Parker's breath, for a long moment. In her imagination, a sweeper team cut all power to the house and put vehicles on every road out before, yes, men repelling down ropes off helicopters, sleek black guns and barked orders, some engineered arson on the way out. All this ran through her head in the space of a shaved second, a flicker of barely detectable panic.

A flashlight beam panned across her knees, and Jarod's silhouette appeared in the doorway, only just visible against the far window.

"Power's out," he murmured.

"I noticed," said Parker, washing away a sudden stab of foolishness with irony.

"The wind must have knocked a branch down on a power line. The lightning's not nearly close enough to strike anything important."

He delved into the closet by the front door and pulled out a raincoat.

"What do you think you're doing?" Parker asked, though she knew the answer.

Jarod was a raccoon caught red-handed rifling through the trash. "Fixing it?"

"No." Parker took the raincoat from his unresisting hands and hung it back up. "Not your job. Just because you can do every job, doesn't mean you should. What you can do—" Here a mischievous smile bloomed on her lips. "What you can do is build us a fire. I'll grab the kindling."

Five minutes later, a fire roared in the hearth, sending dancing patterns of rosy orange across the walls. She sent him upstairs for blankets — she always insisted that the stairs were fine, were manageable, even when her leg had bad days, but she'd jump at the chance to avoid a trip if she could. He returned with everything from their bed, save for the fitted sheet and mattress cover.

The wind outside was cold, but the nest by the fire was warm. As the temperature rose, articles of clothing were shed and, one by one, joined the tangled mess of blankets and pillows and socks and everything else.

The pair fell into their fireside blanket cocoon, laughing at nothing and all tied up in one another. They lost each other in the flickering dark and the layers of linen and found each other once more, inch by novel inch of fire-warmed skin.

This is what it was like, now that they had properly fled. Losing entire nights and days and nights to each other, unhurried, unworried about who might find out or how much time they had left. Slow, luxuriant, grateful, and awestruck by the wholeness of time before them.

Parker was all these things — unhurried, etcetera, all the way down to awestruck — as she closed her lips in a perfect seal around him and eased down with even pressure. Muscle memory took control of her fingers. It had taken longer for her to learn his body than it had for him to learn hers, but the knowledge had come with time. Jarod, when he could be as loud as he wanted, was loud; Parker, for her part, only egged him on. Each building groan, each ecstatic shout was another reminder that their love could make as much noise as it damn well pleased, and she'd do anything to chase that. She batted away his attempts to reciprocate. No, she'd be selfish for a moment, indulgent in her delight at the noises she could draw out of him with her mouth and sliding hands alone. With each twist of her wrist, each murmur of reassurance, each curl of her hooked fingers, she said, so there, I love you — what do you have to say to that?

Jarod had quite a bit to say to that, as she might have expected. He fought through the post-orgasmic soporific and pulled her towards him, both hands spanning her hips. Sliding her across continents of blankets, kissing his way up the inside of her leg.

One of Parker's favourite things about Jarod's hands was how the pads of his thumbs were smooth with just a slight border of callusing around the edges, just enough to make her whine when the hint of rough grazed her. Another of her favourite things about Jarod's hands was the talented work his fingers wrought when teasing her, when lavishing attention on well-chosen places within and without, one hint-of-rough thumb anchoring her in place and, yes, making her whine. Her back bowed and her hips left the floor, the movement accompanied by a helpless, high-pitched sound.

Nothing like a mouth, though. Not a damn thing in the world like his mouth.

"Jarod," she did not say but mouthed, and on and on in a similar, silent vein, and she could swear he heard her anyhow. Would she ever grow used to the slide of his tongue? Would the sweet suck of his lips ever become something everyday and expected?

Well, maybe. She could even hope for it, if it meant they'd live so long, safe and together, that this level of joy would be a matter of course.

Parker tugged gently at a lock of Jarod's hair, summoning him from between her knees, up, up to meet her face-to-face. She had set a modest goal for herself and it was high time she got around to it. She hadn't written it down anywhere or even told Jarod. It was just lurking at the back of her brain, unarticulated but fervently held.

"Something in mind?" he said, more than a little breathless.

"Yeah," she said, just as so. "Let me try—"

With an attitude of practiced ease that belied her uncertainty, she pushed him back against the pillows and straddled his hips. She sat back, using her hands to guide him, to guide them together, and Jarod's lungs emptied in an abrupt, pleased exodus.

His attention flicked to her leg.

"Don't do anything that will—"

"I want to."

She didn't move at first. At first, sitting there was enough, feeling the fire's warmth on her bare back, a heat like a physical, corporeal force leaving red and orange and pink on her skin. Feeling him, feeling so gorgeously close to him. Then, sitting there was not nearly enough, so she returned to the task at hand.

It was a small goal, a modest one, but she wanted it. If she braced her calf like this and shifted her hips like that and… and moved. Perfect, yes, okay. She waited for the pain to blossom, to radiate up and down her leg.

It didn't.

With each rise and fall, her grin grew wider and her breath quickened. Jarod smiled, too, though hesitantly at first, still watching her expression carefully.

When she came, she did so with a laugh of triumph. Again, he joined in. On both counts.

Still later, they lay twisted in an exhausted heap together, both nodding off but determined to outlast the other. The lights had come back on twenty minutes ago, but they'd turned them back off, too comfortable to cart everything back to bed.

Jarod mumbled nonsense against her temple, sweet words of gibberish. She looked up and caught his eye… and as she did, just for a moment, the red-stained light of the fire hit his eye at just the right angle.

"I saw that," he said, a rumbling laugh underscoring his words. "It's the reflection."

"Hm?" she said, feigning ignorance. "What's the reflection?"

But she'd been checking. Seven months and she was still checking, waiting for the second shoe to drop.

They were safe, they were in love, they were comfortable. But they weren't free, not yet. If you have to run, you aren't free.

EIGHTEEN MONTHS POST-SHOT: ALEXANDRIA BAY, NEW YORK

They didn't go so far as to move back to Blue Cove. If they had, they'd be doing it purely for the sake of flaunting their freedom in the faces of every extant member of the Triumvirate, if such a thing could still be said to exist. Parker couldn't live purely to be contrary. Neither could Jarod. New York state was close enough to make their point, yet far enough to allow them to live on their own terms.

They weren't running. They were free.

Parker had visited her father once since moving back to the States, and not since. As of a couple of months previous, he was spending his days in a minimum-security correctional facility in Pennsylvania. It wasn't a visit she enjoyed replaying in her head if she could help it. Jarod had waited in the car at her request. A sheet of plexiglass had prevented her from touching her father throughout the visit. When he spat at her, his saliva spattered against the plexiglass and warped his expression.

The doorbell rang at a quarter past six. Jarod opened the door to reveal Sydney and Broots, as well as their familial hangers-on.

"I wasn't sure whether to believe it until I saw your faces," Sydney gasped. After a beat of further disbelief, he barrelled over the threshold and seized Jarod around the shoulders in a bear hug. Broots hovered behind them, arms swinging, telegraphing awkwardness. With a small smile, Parker slid past Sydney and ambushed Broots with a hug of her own.

"Is… what's going on?" Broots chuckled nervously and patted Parker on the arm, loudly unsure what to do with his limbs. "You're hugging me. You're hugging me? Is everything okay?"

"Don't get used to it. It's just… it's been too long," she muttered into his ear, then mercifully released him.

Theoretically, it was a housewarming party. In practice, it was more of a class reunion. Debbie had tagged along with her father, and they'd both brought bathing suits for swimming in the river. Sydney had persuaded Michelle and their son Nicholas to attend, and Nicholas had brought his own plus one-point-five in the form of his new wife and unborn child.

Most things were still in boxes, including everything moved from Miss Parker's old house in Blue Cove. Jarod had unpacked enough dishes for wine and barbecue and ice cream, at least.

Broots held up his glass and rattled it against Parker's. They were out on the back lawn. Broots sat on a lawn chair; Miss Parker, on a towel.

(Lawn chairs were enough of a bitch to get out of without a bum leg to work around.)

"You're happy," he said, in a voice threaded with wonder. "I mean. I don't mean to sound surprised. I've seen you happy before, Miss Parker, just not… not for a long stretch at once, and not when you knew I was looking. You're happy, aren't you?"

Parker looked across the lawn at Jarod, who was holding a discreet conference with his pseudo-father by the back door. As she watched, Jarod showed Sydney something small and round and glittering in the palm of his hand.

"Yeah," she whispered. She cleared her throat. "It's been a long time coming, but yeah."

The party lasted into the wee hours of the morning, until both hosts were dead on their feet.

It didn't occur to Miss Parker once to check for signs of madness.

END NOTES: Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. And thank you in particular to you gorgeous regular commenters Juliette45 and eitann, as well as the recurring guest commenters! You made writing this so rewarding! 3