Part Two - The Lives that Never Moved on

Fourteen Months Later…

Golden Pearl Resort & Spa
Miami

The afternoon sun glared down at the pool, finally freed from the clouds that had floated over to obscure it almost an hour ago. The resulting flash on the rippling blue water was bright enough to hurt. Sam Axe grimaced, and blindly patted all over the table next to his sunbed, trying to recover the sunglasses he had discarded earlier to enjoy the unrestricted, undarkened view of the bikini-clad beauties.

None of them were anywhere near as lovely and wonderful as Elsa, of course, but Sam was just a man, and he only took simple pleasure in looking, not ever touching. He knew Elsa didn't mind. Otherwise, she wouldn't have permanently allocated a suite for him in this five-star Miami beach resort of hers.

"Another mojito, sir?" A cold, tall glass of mint and ice cubes graced his vision before the soft, accented voice of his regular server reached him.

Sam grinned and accepted the offering with a happy sigh. "You read my mind, Hector."

"Your sunglasses, sir." Hector flashed his set of pearly whites and plucked his glasses off the tiled floor.

"Thank you."

"A pleasure."

Sam was sure the extra sway to the latin boy's hips was meant for him to notice and possibly enjoy. But, unfortunately, it was completely wasted on him. Sam's libido had a one-track mind, and the only name it uttered these days was Elsa's. He was sure the boy would make someone very happy in the near future, someone who enjoyed everything he had to offer, not only his fantastic skills when it came to mixology.

The Cuban Punch was perfect, as always, and Sam let the cool, citrusy liquid run down his throat with a joyous little smile of satisfaction playing on his lips.

"Mr Axe, sir?" A quiet voice called out, hovering somewhere above him, jerking him awake. He had no idea when he had closed his eyes and slipped into a light nap.

"Javi!"

"Good afternoon, sir."

"Good afternoon, is everything okay?" Sam frowned at the slight man in the green hotel uniform jacket. Wasn't there something he needed to double-check with Javi? He snapped his fingers when the memory arrived with a jolt. "Oh, before I forget, did you talk to the caterer for Elsa's party for the birthday thing?"

The ever-efficient assistant Elsa had the forethought to assign to him, smiled confidently. "Of course, Mr Axe."

"Did you guys get the cake?" Sam had been very specific about it. Elsa was turning fifty, and it was a big milestone. Everything had to be perfect.

"Yes, they deliver it Tuesday."

He made a mental note to check it himself when it arrived.

"Okay, but she doesn't know, right?" He asked Javi, because that was very important. "I mean, look, I'm counting on you here, okay? This is a covert op, my friend. This is top secret."

"I understand sir," Javi nodded somberly, looking like a fresh recruit. "I'm on it."

"Good man."

"Sir, I just dropped by to remind you about your appointment for the spa treatment."

Sam thought about it. Elsa had been talking about something along those lines earlier before she had rushed off to work. He checked his watch.

"Ah yes, in an hour," he nodded to himself, humming. "Plenty of time to finish my drink." More than half the mojito was still there in the glass, which rested on the table next to him. Maybe he could have another to go before he had to lift his ass off its comfy perch?

"Last time you missed it, sir," Javi reminded him. "The spa manager wanted me to make sure you wouldn't a second time."

"I wouldn't dream of it." Sam grinned, and gave a half-hearted wave when the man took his leave.

At least, the covert ops he conducted these days had next to nothing mortality rates, Sam sighed. Arranging surprise birthday parties, showing up more or less on time for his goat yoga classes or Thai massage treatments never ended up with scumbags gunning for him while he scrambled around looking for decent cover.

Sam's life had been extremely quiet, boring, and dare he say it, peaceful since Mike was gone.

The man's unexpected arrival to the city all those years ago had taken Sam's uncomplicated existence by storm, turning it upside down and sideways until it had left him properly shaken. To say that it had been an adjustment to have that tornado of a man again in what should have been the golden pensioner's years of his life, was an understatement.

But, he had to admit to himself at least, that it had never been dull. Not even for a moment. Working with the impossible man had made Sam feel alive again, as if his life had once again acquired a purpose, something worth living for. He hadn't felt quite like that since he had retired from the Navy Seals.

Michael Westen had given him that.

He took a sip of his mojito absently, lost in the maudlin reminiscence. He hadn't thought about Michael in a while. The hole he had left behind in Sam's life had finally started to close a little, dulling away the tangle of grief, guilt and worry that perpetually lived there.

Now, just the mention of a few joking words had summoned the memories of all those years and their unexpectedly abrupt end as if it all had just happened yesterday, not more than a year ago.

The cocktail was warm, despite the ice cubes that had hardly melted. The lime and sugar that had tasted divine earlier tasted nasty and bitter, and the rum seemed to have disappeared, vanishing into the air all together.

Sam let out a weary sigh and placed the glass on the table with a disgusted grimace. He would need a fresh drink. This one had taken a turn for the worse for some reason.

He pulled out the two phones he had in his pocket, the emergency one and the 'emergency' emergency one. He glared at them both when he was greeted by empty screens.

It was then that his third phone, the one he used for his day-to-day life, rang, jerking him back in surprise.

"Jesse, my man." Sam answered the call cheerfully, "Been missing me?"

"What can I say, Sam, I must be coming down with something," an exaggerated sigh greeted him from the other end. "Wanna go for a round at the range? I have a slot booked from four to six."

"Today?"

"Yeah."

Sam didn't even have to think twice about it. He hadn't seen the ex-CIFA agent for over a month. It would be good to catch up on how he'd been doing. Maybe he had some news about Michael's whereabouts.

"Since you put it out so nicely, how can I refuse?" Sam drawled. "I'll be there."

"Awesome," Jesse said, sounding elated. "See you later, then."

It was only after the call ended, that Sam remembered about the spa treatment. While having all the painful knots and kinks on the back of his shoulders expertly soothed by a pair of experienced hands had its advantages, he felt like he needed the outlet Jesse had just provided more.

Shooting a few rounds at a target always had a way of settling his mind, after all. Being Elsa's man-toy came with a few enticing perks, one of them being able to reschedule the massages the spa offered him freely without any hassle.

To avoid any lingering hard feelings, he would even drop by there at a later stage and apologise personally, and probably even throw in a few drinks for the staff.

With that solid plan in mind, Sam finally got up from his sunbed.

Gallagher Shooting Range
Westchester
Miami

Jesse Porter left work early to show up at the shooting range, which was located only a fifteen minute drive away from his office. He had good, talented people working for him, and they were more than capable of running the daily operation for a couple of hours without him hovering over their shoulders.

Being the boss of his own company came in handy at times like these.

The range was empty when Jesse got there, and he was waved in by the on-duty instructor who recognized him as one of the regulars.

He reached the staging area and took out his beloved P220R, and started going through the disassembly of the gun, a ritual that had become soothing, almost meditative. He laid each and every piece he took out carefully on the table's surface and began cleaning them one by one, slowly and meticulously.

The muscle memory took over while his mind wandered. Try as he might, Jesse couldn't suppress the frustration that cropped up along with the inability to find out more about Michael's whereabouts. It was as if the man had dropped off the surface of the planet since he had surrendered himself over to the Company a little over fourteen months ago. All of Jesse's inquiries had returned with apologetic head shakes and polite advice to let it go.

Which only led him to conclude that the worst possible scenario may have happened. Nobody ever acknowledged that black sites existed.

As always, Jesse's thoughts took him down the memory of the time he had hated Michael enough to actively plot his murder.

He hadn't known the ragtag team consisting of a retired SEAL, IRA-trained-bomber-turned-arms dealer and a burned spy - the team that had basically bullied Jesse into joining their tightly-woven family - were the same people who had been responsible for ruining his life in the first place. Michael's mom had even let him stay in her garage free of charge for fuck's sake!

Finding out that little fact about the very people he had started to treat as his chosen family had hurt like nothing had ever hurt before. It had been enough to drive him insane, and he remembered all those days stroking the same trigger he was cleaning now, imagining putting a bullet right between the eyes of the man who had betrayed him in the worst way possible.

Jesse still had pretty messed up feelings about the time he had pulled the trigger on a different gun – the time he had taken the riskiest shot he had ever taken in his life; not to kill as he had wanted for a long time, but in a desperate attempt at a Hail Mary rescue.

He looked down at his hands, as he always did when that particular memory played in his mind. They were sure and steady now. But they had trembled uncontrollably for a long while after taking that shot.

His mind inevitably started comparing the fates of the two brothers, in almost similar situations.

Jesse had been staring at Michael through the scope of his sniper rifle that day, feeling utterly helpless when Barrett's thug had wrapped an arm around his neck in a headlock. He had hesitated for a fraction before taking the damned shot, praying to high heaven that he wouldn't kill the man by accident.

He still remembered the look he had seen in Michael's eyes as if it happened yesterday.

It was as if the man had seen the trajectory of the shot by some inane miracle, or a mysterious sixth sense. Michael had stared down at the bullet that had flown at Mach 2.5 towards him, daring it to kill him.

The bullet never stood a chance.

Nate, Michael's baby brother, had died the same way Barrett's guard had died - by a bullet that had been meant to kill someone else.

The kid never stood a chance.

Ironically enough, it had been Nate who had found Jesse later that day, lingering at the reception area of the hospital where they had taken Michael after retrieving him from the car wreck that had killed Barrett on the scene.

It was a memory Jesse knew he was never going to forget until the day he died:

The kid walked right up to him with a smile that had seen better days. "Hey, Jesse, right?" he said, sticking out a hand in introduction. "I'm Nate, Michael's brother."

Jesse shook the offered hand warily. "I know who you are."

"The doctors are still working on him. We're not going to get any news for a few hours yet," Nate said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be talking to the man who had planted a fucking bullet in his brother's chest. "You wanna hit the bar?" The sympathetic look he flashed was, incredulously, genuine. "Drinks on me? Honestly, man, you look like you need it."

Jesse stared at him, blinking uncomprehendingly.

"Come on man, let's go." The next thing Jesse knew, he was being guided gently out of the hospital with a firm hand wrapped around his elbow.

He had no clear recollection of the walk they took until the moment he found himself sitting on a bar stool at a pub a few blocks down, holding on to a glass of whiskey with both hands as if it held some sort of salvation.

"Why?" He hiccuped somewhere between the second and third glass of the burning liquid. "You know what I did, don't you?"

"Sam and Fiona let you live," Nate said easily, sipping his own drink. "I figured that's as good as any indication that you didn't mean to kill my brother."

"I didn't. Was trying to save him," Jesse mumbled, concentrating with everything he had to keep the damned glass from shaking too much as he took a sip. He wasn't entirely successful. "Didn't go down as planned."

Michael had looked dead, lying in the pool of his own blood outside the upended SUV. Jesse fought the bile that rose in his throat at the image he saw in his swimming vision.

"I've come to realise that's usually how things happen around Michael. He has particularly shit luck."

Jesse almost choked on his whiskey. Nate slapped him on the back helpfully. When his scrambled mind managed to focus again, Nate was talking about their shared childhood.

"... the thing with Mike is, he's absolute garbage at communicating, you know," Nate was saying, his faraway gaze locked onto a spot on the wooden bar counter, his mind lost somewhere back in time. "I used to hate him when he sent me away to our neighbour. Loony Laura always fed me her over-burnt cookies whenever he did that and I hated it. I hated the fact that I got sent away like an unwanted package while Mike got to stay home when dad came back from work. I thought he wanted to hang out with him without me, you know? 'cause he was the cool kid out of the two of us…"

"What happened?"

"I never realised he was shielding me from our deadbeat dad's fists. It took me a long time to find out where those black eyes and bruises came from."

"Fuck."

"Yeah." Nate's words were quiet. "Before he left to join the army, he told me he was going away for a while. He said he wanted to find a way to get a little stronger, and better at protecting me and mom. He wanted to learn how to hit back without hurting himself–"

"Nate," Jesse was a little too drunk to feel embarrassed by the sob that escaped him then. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," the kid said kindly. "I know Michael. He'll pull through."

Jesse knew he said some things to Nate then, about what Michael had done and his anger at learning about it much later. He was honest about the pain it had caused, the betrayal from someone he had come to admire a lot. Nate listened without interruptions or complaints, generously refilling his drink, glass after glass.

"But deep down, I knew," he said at some point, his words slurring. "I knew he didn't burn me on purpose. He was going after a very bad group of people. What happened to me was collateral. He could have left me to fend for myself. None of them had to take me in like a stray and make me join their bandwagon, but they did… Jesus–I'm so sorry, Nate. Fuck."

"Hey, take it easy man," Nate patted him on the back consolingly. "It'll be okay. Just avoid my mom until he's back on his feet and you'll be fine." He added with a hint of a smile.

"Thanks, man."

That was when Nate's entire demeanour changed. As drunk as he was, he still noticed how stone-cold sober Michael's brother looked right then, as if he hadn't been drinking a single sip of alcohol during the few hours they spent there.

"You should go home now, Jesse," he said, leaving no room for argument. "I called you a cab."

"Huh?" Jesse blinked, feeling stupid and slow and exhausted.

"You're drunk enough you wouldn't even know if someone decided to spike your drink with - I don't know, drugs or fast-acting, untraceable poison… or something–" There was a look in Nate's eyes that had frightened Jesse then. "What with all the alcohol running in your system, you wouldn't even stand a chance."

The threat had been clear enough to sober him right the fuck up. It was then Jesse had realised that with all the Westens - be it Michael, Madeline or Nate - all that mattered were intentions. They were an incredibly forgiving bunch to people who made mistakes - people who had their hearts in the right place.

Nate had gotten Jesse drunk, and then made him talk. That had been his method to find out that Jesse hadn't meant to hurt Michael for the sake of revenge. That had been enough for him to forgive him. Jesse knew that the younger brother would have killed him then and there if he had revealed different intentions.

It had taken an accident, lies and deceit for Jesse to get there, to that inner circle of theirs, but they had all shown him a whole new dimension of loyalty and a sense of family throughout that journey. Then, it had been his sincerity that had let him stay there.

Card must have holstered his gun with the intention to deceive Michael, Jesse realised with sudden clarity. Michael - with that complex mind of his that saw hundreds of possibilities in seconds - must have seen right through the facade, driving him to deliver his own version of swift justice to end it all for good.

"Are you trying to put the damned thing together with your mind or what?" Sam's booming voice snapped him back to the present. He hadn't realised he had been staring at the half-assembled gun for some time.

"Sam, you're here," he said with a grin that fooled no one.

"Yeah. You invited me, remember?" Sam frowned. "You okay?"

"Yeah, yeah," Jesse said, hastily putting the gun back together. "Wanna shoot a few rounds?"

"No, I came to help you paint your fence," Sam snarked. "Of course I want to shoot. What's up with you?"

"Nothing," Jesse said, avoiding Sam's all-too-knowing gaze and moving around the table to get to the slot.

Sam didn't push, as if he had instinctively understood that Jesse wasn't particularly in a talkative mood. Instead, he went right for the throat. "Any news on Mike?"

"No, man. Sorry," Jesse admitted, sighing. "I guess that's what's been bothering me."

"Yeah, tell me about it." Sam agreed quietly, joining him on the adjoining slot with his own handgun. Jesse didn't need to explain to him what the lack of information meant.

"But it's Michael," Jesse said, repeating the same thing Nate had told him all those years ago. "I'm sure he'll find his way back, one way or another."

"You got a point there, brother," Sam said, lifting his gun in a two-handed grip. "Best out of three?"

Jesse smiled. "I don't need three rounds to beat your ass."

"I'm going to make you eat your words, wonder boy." Sam challenged, grinning.

"Bring it on, old man."

Jesse imagined Tom Card's face on the target, and suddenly, beating the ex-SEAL felt like the easiest thing in the world.

114
Hanover Crescent
Glenvar Heights
Miami

Fiona Glenanne stared at the white-washed ceiling, her gaze roaming over the black lines that separated it into neat rows of squares, her mind too preoccupied to fall asleep even after the long session of love making she had just enjoyed.

It was hot and humid, and the air conditioning hardly made a dent in the sweltering heat. She never could fall asleep easily when sweat clung to her like an unwanted second skin. Or when the sheets that should have felt like clouds from heaven for the ridiculous amount of money she had paid for them, felt like sandpaper rubbing against her instead.

Carlos mumbled something in his sleep and turned to his side, facing her, and wrapped a heavy arm around her waist. Fiona grimaced and wriggled, moving it slowly back away from her. The man was heavy, sweaty and too-freaking warm, and she definitely didn't want a limb akin to a tree trunk resting on her middle when she was already irritated with the night.

Phantom sensations and memories of a different body rose in her mind then, unwanted and unbidden…a body that had always felt cool and smooth when she had felt too warm, and turned warmer when she had needed to shy away from the cold…a body that had always perfectly synchronised to her movements even in sleep, and turned as one with her whenever she did, never too heavy, never too far and somehow always exactly what she wanted. Even those fucking snores of his had had a way of lulling her to sleep.

She wondered, despite herself, where Micheal was now, whether he had any trouble sleeping on nights like these… whether he was still alive at all.

That was not a thought Fiona wanted to entertain right then, possibly not ever. She turned on her side with a sigh, drawing away from Carlos' body heat as far as she could get without falling off the bed. The room was dark, and the digital clock on the table next to her said it was well past midnight.

And sleep, as it had been lately, was nowhere in sight.

It had been more than a year, and Fiona wondered why she still couldn't move on from the fact that Michael was gone. It had hurt at first, so badly that she had felt like setting fire to everything in sight. She had been an unpleasant presence to be around for everyone for a long time, until the pain and grief had slowly started to morph into reluctant acceptance.

She had met Carlos seven months after Michael had surrendered himself to his agency and faded out of existence.

They had both been after the same bounty:

She prepped the small charge of C4, confident that the resulting blast and the flying door would create enough of a distraction and panic in her target, making him an easy catch.

It had been a little over twenty-four hours since she had enjoyed the echoing, satisfying noise of a proper explosion, one that had been created by her own hands.

Lost in her musings, which could have been a fatal error on her part, she never heard the slowly approaching footsteps until the man spoke from right behind her.

"What are you doing?"

She was so badly startled, that she almost dropped the charge. Whirling around to confront the owner of the voice made her realise she knew the man who had snuck up on her. She had seen him a few times back at the station. He had caught her gaze due to the colour of his hair, the way he had looked a little like Michael in his profile.

Carlos Cruz was his name, and he was another bounty hunter.

"What does it look like I'm doing, you idiot?" she murmured through clenched teeth, keeping her voice low to avoid letting the bounty holed up inside the abandoned house become aware of their presence. "Who told you sneaking up behind a woman handling explosives was a bright idea?"

Carlos' eyebrows climbed high up in his forehead in alarm when he finally saw what was in her hands.

"What's that?" He frowned at the grey lump.

"C4."

He swallowed visibly. "C4 as in explosives?"

"No, as in the main ingredient of chicken noodle soup," Fiona snarled. "Of course, it's explosives!"

"Why?"

"Why?" She hissed back incredulously. "So I can blow up the damned door?" 'You, dumbass' went unsaid, but heard clearly by the dumbass nevertheless.

"Darren Walt is only twenty-three years old, and he's a half-starved addict," Carlos said in a tone that sounded like something you used on injured, cornered animals. Fiona bristled. "You can probably sneeze at him and he'll keel over. Are you sure C4 is the appropriate response to someone like him?"

"C4 is the appropriate response to everything," Fiona bit back haughtily. "I never met a problem I couldn't solve with a well-placed brick of moulded explosives."

Carlos, to her surprise, smiled. It was a smile that made him look the tiniest bit more attractive. "You should…I don't know, try words, maybe? The polite ones?" He drawled playfully. "And maybe practise knocking?"

Fiona, however, wasn't about to give in just yet. "Why should I do that when I have this?" The urge to create an explosion of any kind was a fucking need by then.

"I checked through the window when I did a perimeter check now," he said in a reasonable tone that almost reminded her of Michael. It also reminded her that she should have done the same in the first place. "Walt's passed out in the front. We could just pick the lock, get to him and carry him out without him noticing."

Fiona huffed, but returned the C4 back to her purse. "What's the point in that?" she complained just for the hell of it.

"Well, that way we can avoid the neighbours calling every cop in the area on us for starters," Carlos chuckled. "And avoid spending a perfect day like this in a holding cell at the precinct."

She didn't have the heart to tell him she had been there and done that, and hadn't really faced anything she couldn't handle either. It really didn't take that long for the two of them to wrangle the half-unconscious body of Walt to the station together, after that. Carlos graciously allowed her to collect the fee, on the condition that she took him to dinner.

He hadn't left her side, ever since.

It had been Carlos' presence, his patience and stubborn perseverance that had gotten through to the out-of-control, self-destructive force Fiona had become, and guided her back to something resembling her old self.

Sam and Jesse were indebted to Carlos for that minor miracle alone. They had both said so to her later in those exact words.

Finding Carlos, and settling into this life with him was nowhere near enough of a distraction to keep those volatile, stubborn parts of her wandering back to the thoughts and memories of Michael, however.

He was the one man she had ever truly loved with everything that she was, and she had fallen for him even before she had known his real name.

She still remembered those quiet words Michael had uttered, the day she had asked him what it meant for him to be what he was. He hadn't said anything for a long time, but when he had, she had felt as if she had been allowed a glimpse of something truly rare and precious. It had drawn her to him with a force so powerful it had left her reeling:

"Spies…we live in the shadows, but we dream of the light…" he said, running the tip of a finger softly along the nape of her neck down the ridges of her spine, his face hidden behind her back. "When working under the conditions we do, covert ops for low pay and life-threatening conditions, what actually keeps us going is the idea that our work won't remain secret forever…that one day, the results of the work we do will make this world a little bit better."

"Michael–"

"One day, the world will learn what you've done even if your name is never known, and that knowledge is a powerful motivator," he continued, sounding a little distant, lost in his own reflections. "Some of the sweetest moments come when the job ends and the bullets stop flying." He said, before chuckling ruefully. "That is unless one of those bullets rips through your chest."

Sometimes, you kept on going, even then, didn't you, Michael? Fiona thought, casting her mind back to the time they had all feared he had died during the debacle of that cursed Bible.

Carlos grunted, smacked his lips and moved again, his unruly limbs stretching and folding, as if he was searching for her. Fiona stayed where she was, not wanting to be tangled up in those. After a few seconds, he settled on his stomach, wrapped both arms around his own pillow and sighed. Fiona listened to the sounds of his breathing evening out, which told her that he had finally drifted into a deeper slumber.

The bounty hunter was nice, she sighed again, trying to figure out why it annoyed her. Carlos' kindness was an inherent, painfully sincere and all-encompassing thing that felt almost tangible at times. For some unimaginable reason, there were times Fiona wanted to slap him for it.

Maybe because it makes him different from Michael, a vicious part of her - the part that firmly believed Carlos Cruz was just another pale imitation she had found to keep herself occupied until the real thing returned - mocked.

She wanted to slap that part too, even while another part started to compare the two men, inevitably arriving at the same conclusion it always did, no matter how hard she tried to deny her own feelings.

Carlos, despite being more muscular than Michael, undeniably lacked the deceptive strength that came into play through Michael's much leaner body when he truly fought. While intelligent in his own way, Carlos was nowhere near sharp or quick-witted like Michael, and Carlos' entirely too expressive face hid nothing of his thoughts or emotions. Micheal, on the other hand, was like a chameleon who effortlessly hid behind a carefully crafted placid outlook and demeanour, which often led to his enemies underestimating him to their own detriment.

What she missed most was the inner core of Michael she had only ever been allowed access a very few times, the parts where his raw passion, undying loyalty and a love all-consuming, lived - the damaged, fractured, patched-up human parts he never ever showed to the rest of the world. There were even times she had discovered other layers of the complicated man, limits she had managed to push to make him outright mean and wicked. She had loved those layers and the man behind it all with a visceral passion that scared her out of her mind most days.

Now, he was gone. Had left them all behind, thinking he had done the right thing. Or maybe it was the other way around. He was stuck in some unimaginable hellhole while they all moved on.

Fiona had Carlos, a man who finally put her before anything else, like she always wanted. She cared about him a lot, and he got along well with little Charlie and Maddie as well. He even tolerated her occasional jobs with Sam and Jesse. And turned a blind eye whenever she dabbled in her other less-than-legal trade of moving a gun crate or two around.

Maybe, given enough time, there was a chance she could even fall in love with him, the part that liked to lie to her, whispered.

The saddest thing was, that none of those contradicting parts of her knew how to stop her from missing Michael like an amputated limb.

The Westen Residence
South Miami

"Grandma, look! I drew a dinosaur!"

Charlie's excited voice snapped Madeline out of the mental fog she had lost herself for a moment. The PB&J sandwich she had made for him sat patiently on the plate resting on the kitchen counter, while she had been thinking about possibly the millionth useless call she had made during the course of the past fourteen months.

Charlie, Nate's three-year-old boy, sat by the dining table, his face hidden behind the piece of paper he was holding up for her to see. On it, he had drawn a blob of blue and green, which he was confidently declaring a prehistoric creature of the wild.

"Oh, Charlie, he's very pretty," Madeline smiled, and walked over to the child. "And he also looks a bit hungry, don't you think?" Charlie frowned at his drawing for a second, and nodded.

"Who else is hungry?"

"Me."

"Here you go, sweetheart." She placed the plate on the table before him, and settled on the next chair.

Charlie was a quiet, well-behaved and reserved child, and he started eating his sandwich without any complaints. Madeline watched, letting her mind superimpose the image of a three-year-old Nate, sitting in the same chair, eating a bowl of cereal with the same, determined look that was on Charlie's small, round face.

The kid looked a lot like his father. But, for some reason, the all-too-sombre look in his baby-blue eyes reminded her of Micheal. It was not a gaze that belonged on a three-year-old, for it spoke of horrors a child should never have been exposed to.

Charlie and Michael both had that in common, she supposed, even though their experiences had been vastly different. But the impact shown in the weariness of their gazes was almost exactly the same.

She rubbed the nicotine patch stuck on her inner elbow absently, wishing she had a cigarette…or fifty.

"Grandma?" Charlie spoke again in between bites.

"Yeah, Charlie?"

"When is uncle Michael coming back?"

Madeline felt the smile on her lips wobble a little. It was like clockwork. The kid always asked that question once a day, always with so much hope blooming in his expression, it broke her little every day at her inability to give him the answer he wanted.

"I don't know, sweetheart," she said softly, "Hopefully soon."

Charlie, as always, accepted it with nothing but another small nod, and resumed eating. He had asked the same question about his dad too, and it had been one of the hardest questions Madeline had ever had to answer. Once she had managed to explain the concept of death to him in a way he would understand, by telling him that his dad was in heaven with the angels, and that he wasn't coming back, the boy hadn't bothered to ask again.

She found it particularly curious, and a little alarming, that he never ever mentioned his mother. It hadn't taken long for Ruth to fall off of the wagon and start using, and then abusing substances again, soon after Nate's passing. Charlie had ended up in the system soon after that. Madeline didn't even want to imagine what the boy must have witnessed for him to completely cut himself off from his mother like that. It made Madeline realise that the kid was too mature and intuitive in a way that shouldn't have been possible for a child of his tender age.

Yet, it was another trait he shared with her oldest.

She wanted to do right by Charlie, to avoid the mistakes, all the wrong decisions she had made raising Michael and Nate. She wanted to do better, to nurture Charlie the way the child deserved. That was why she had given up smoking, and was doing her damned best to win over the custody of him.

That was also why she made call after call to all the government offices in existence, looking for any scrap of information on Michael. She knew deep in her soul that the presence of him was a vital need for the child's well-being and growth. Charlie looked up to his uncle already, loved him and missed him every day in a way only a child could.

They both needed Michael back in their lives, period.

That was when the familiar, old guilt crept in, as it had been doing for the past year. Even though she knew blaming herself led her nowhere, it was hard to ignore her own inner demons. Some of them insisted that it was her inability to forgive Michael for Nate's death, her uncompromising withdrawal from him, that led him to go down the path he had.

The others reminded her of that day, the memory playing as clear as day in her memory even after all those months…the day Michael had visited to tell her about his plans to bring Nate's killer, the monster, to justice.

She had, in return, told him about her decision to leave Miami for good. She hadn't wavered, even in the face of the desperation he had revealed by saying that he needed her. He had spoken those words in a heartbreaking tone she had never heard coming out from him before.

It still hadn't been enough for her to give in.

I'm still here, he had said.

I don't know about that, she had countered.

She wondered guiltily if it had been her demeanour that had led him to believe that removing himself from the rest of them was the best for everyone. She hadn't known, hadn't imagined it in even her worst dreams, that her own grief and the self-recrimination she assigned herself for Nate's death which she hid, and the fury and blame she assigned Michael which she cruelly left out in the open, would somehow lead Michael to that terrible conclusion.

How did he not know that it was him who was at the centre, the glue that held their dysfunctional family together? All those demons raged and wailed as one.

A small, clammy hand wrapped around the back of her hand, bringing her back to the present. When she looked down, she saw Charlie's expressive face staring at her somberly.

"Grandma, don't cry." The child mumbled.

"I'm not crying, sweetheart." Madeline hastily wiped her face and lied.

"Uncle will be back soon, I'm sure." Charlie nodded with such innocent conviction, it was almost enough to break her all over again. She hugged the boy closer, finding as much comfort from his presence as much as he did from her, and prayed with everything she was that it would happen soon.