Miss Pearson,

I would like to thank you for allowing me the opportunity to continue at your firm. As you know from our dinner, being a lawyer was my chance to do something good. Not just for myself, but for my sister whom you thought needed to be mentioned in your letter.

Until I got this job, I could barely afford my grandmother's care, let alone Meghan's. I didn't tell anyone about her because I didn't want her to be used against me in any deals. Unfortunately, that didn't workout.

As of today, I, Michael J. Ross, formally resign from Pearson Darby.

Mike read and reread his letter of resignation. Was he really going to do this? He almost put it off to the side to continue his assigned cases when he looked up in time to see Harvey walk by. His mentor spared a glance toward his office before quickly looking away.

He looked down at his desk where the letter had once been to find it had returned to his hand. He signed and dated it before printing out another letter. This time, to Harvey and Donna. He wasn't sure if they were going to read it, but he had to at least try.

To Harvey and Donna,

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. The drugs and getting expelled were bad, but not the worst. And no amount of apologies can fix what I did. I just hope you'll understand the reason for what I did.

The two of you gave me the one thing I couldn't get for myself, or for my sister. Stability. When I said you weren't there, I was talking about who was used against me, not what. I couldn't care less if she followed through and had me arrested for refusing to betray you. But she brought my sister into this.

Donna, your search into Meghan scared me because of the article you found. We both thought you had uncovered something. I swear this is not to butter you up, but Donna, you are crazy intuitive. Yes, she is my sister. I've been her legal guardian for six years.

We grew up in witness protection because of something our brother's father did. What we know is what we were told which wasn't much to be completely honest.

To make a long story short, we've been hiding from the Marshal's for twelve years. Jessica's letter to the district attorney listed everything I've done since I started working here, including some things Trevor said happened before. She was going to alert the Marshal's.

It's no excuse but I did what needed to be done for Meghan's health. She was born three months early with a hole in her heart, a result of the accident that killed my parents.

I recently learned that Jessica's background check on my sister was a lot more thorough than it needed to be. And just a touch sloppy. Her investigator pretended to be Meghan's doctor. Meghan's prescription got changed. Until that happened, my sister hadn't experienced an episode in a long time. Now she's had two in the last month. The most recent one could have killed her.

She's the last living connection I have to my family, and I would do anything to protect her, just like you did for your brother.

Jessica saw this office as a reward for the things I accomplished from Folsom Foods to the merger. Said I could see it as a reminder of what I did to you or look to the future and the things I can accomplish.

As of today, I have resigned from Pearson Darby. I deserve the cold shoulder, but not the office. It wasn't earned. And I don't want to be here if the three of us aren't solid.

He signed this one as well. Only one copy of this letter was needed as it was a personal one, so he closed it up in his desk just in case the associates he used to share a room with tried snooping on him.

With the resignation letter in hand, Mike headed toward a file room to make copies of it. He stared at it again, knowing this was something he had to do. He just couldn't bring himself to set the paper on the glass.

"Oh, hey. Uh, go ahead," he said to Louis who had come up behind him to make his own copies.

"No, that's all right. You were here first."

"Why are you being so polite?"

"Come on, you have one stupid copy. You could've finished it already," Louis replied, taking the paper from Mike's hand to speed things along. He read it quickly to find out what was taking the associate so long to copy one sheet.

"Louis, I—"

"A letter of resignation? Why?"

"It's complicated."

"Well, simplify it for me, Mike."

"Harvey. He's the one who hired me. Now he wants nothing to do with me."

"What are you talking about? He just gave you a new office."

"No, Jessica gave me a new office. If it was up to Harvey, I wouldn't even have a cubicle."

"What happened? And what does this have to do with Meghan?"

"I was going to tell Harvey that Meghan's my sister. Then something happened to her... All that matters is that, uh, I can't fix it."

"He's not talking to you because you have a sister?" Louis asked, finding it hard to believe. The look Mike gave him held a different answer. "She's not the problem... You know, when we were in the bullpen, Harvey was like Superman. And then, one day, Hardman decided to just knock him down a peg. Gave him this bullshit assignment, undoable workload, unwinnable case. And I took it as a chance to break down his walls, offer my help. And I just thought, this just might be the chance that we could become—"

"Friends."

"Yeah. And he looked at me... how dare I?"

"I get it. He's alone. He always has been. He always will be."

"Always was. Harvey is not Superman anymore. He's Batman. And Batman needs Robin."

"And I just need to remind him of that."

"What's the one thing that Harvey values over everything else?"

"Winning," Mike gave the expected answer, not the real one.

"Yeah. You help him win, he'll remember why he needs you."

"I have to figure out what cases he's working on."

"The I.T. Department has access to every computer in the entire firm, syncs up every night."

"So, all I have to do is get access to Harvey's hard drive."

"Benjamin," they both said.

Meghan sat in the library doing schoolwork. Her eyes had been so focused that she didn't see Donna standing in front of her until...

"Ahem."

Meghan jumped in her seat. Her hand instinctively went to her heart. She took calming breaths while placing her finger against her wrist to get an accurate pulse reading once she realized the culprit was someone she knew.

"Harvey needs to see you."

"I have school."

Donna responded by closing the laptop. "Not today. Grab your notes. You'll need them." Then she walked away, expecting Meghan to follow her.

The teen complied, almost. She did follow, but she didn't bring her notes.

Donna led the way until she reached her desk, subtly telling Meghan it was okay to go in. Then she stopped her.

"I told you to bring your notes. Why didn't you?"

"I—" she didn't get a chance to reply. The door to Harvey's office opened and the man himself stood there waiting.

"Get in here."

She didn't know what was going on, but she followed the order anyway.

"You're working the Ava Hessington case with me," he said with no explanation. He gestured to a chair, but Meghan chose to remain standing. "We're going to start with—Didn't Donna tell you to bring your notes?"

"I can't work."

"I believe we've had this conversation before."

"My doctor hasn't cleared me, so it's can't. Being hospitalized twice in as many weeks for the same reason tends to put the patient on red alert."

"Then it's a good thing you won't be working. You'll just be watching. You're not working with Mike Ross anymore. You're working for me. If you can help it, keep your contact with him to a minimum. You need a better example. Be ready to go in five minutes."

She still had no idea what was going on as no one had given her any work to do. It seemed as if Harvey and Donna were the only ones out of the loop. And minimal contact with Mike? That wasn't going to happen even if she wanted it to.

Once she left Harvey's office, she slipped into Mike's to do as much research as she could in three minutes time. She'd even tried to take notes, but there was no loose paper for her to write on, so she opened the top drawer. The same drawer that held Mike's letter to Harvey.

Meghan saw the names of the recipients. Key words stood out. The most notable was Witness Protection. It told Harvey almost everything about them and why Mike betrayed him.

She quickly wrote a note for Mike telling him that Harvey was making her go with him to meet a client. Her brother's letter went directly to her pocket. She wasn't going to let him hand it over just yet. Not when there was a chance she could help fix the problem.

Mike had just come back from seeing Benjamin the I.T. guy. A file under his arm. He stopped by the library to check up on Meghan. She wasn't there, but her laptop was. He went over and picked it up, bringing it to his office with him.

There was a note on the desk. It was from Meghan. That explained her absence, but where did she... the letter. He yanked the drawer open to see it was gone. His cell phone was in his hand in less than a second.

"Hel—"

"What'd you do with the letter, Megs?"

Meghan held the phone away from her ear. If Harvey had been listening, he would have heard Mike's voice on the other end.

"I took it."

"Why did you take it?"

"Because if this thing can be fixed before you give Jessica the other letter, then what's the point in keeping it in the office where any busy body can find it?"

Mike had decided she wasn't wrong. For a business that was supposed to be built on client confidentiality, secrets and rumors spread faster than warmed butter on bread. And in the past, his co-workers had no problem invading his workspace.

"Just promise me you're only watching, not working."

"I promise, but it's a little hard to do when I have to leave the room just to take a call from you."

"What did Harvey say?"

"I'm to have minimum contact with you and I'm to look to him now because you're unreliable..." Harvey's voice came out of an opening door. "Gotta go. I'll see you when we get back."

She hung up and approached Harvey, placing her phone in a pocket that did not contain the letter.

He wasn't pleased with her absence during their meeting with Ava. The client was more important than whoever was calling.

"Never answer your phone in front of the client," he lectured. "What was so important you had to do that anyway?"

"It was my brother... I didn't exactly have permission to leave the firm, and he needed to know where I was."

"That's fair... We're going up against Richard Jensen. He's one of the best there is."

"Jensen?"

"Yeah."

"Isn't he running for office?"

"And what gave you that idea?"

"I read an article about it for school this morning before you had Donna summon me. If he really is in the political scene, he won't be going after her for money. In Ava's case, Jensen will be going for jail time."

Something Ava had said to him was starting to make sense. Why did Jensen seem to have a personal vendetta against her?

Harvey opened the door to outside, allowing Meghan to walk through first. He was very different with her than he was with Mike. Not once did she strike him as the type to have a secret big enough to follow in Mike's footsteps.

"Just out of curiosity... Why is a US attorney prosecuting her? I thought this pipeline was in another country. Shouldn't they be the ones holding the trial?"

"Doesn't always work that way, Kid."

It was dark out by the time they returned to the office and Mike was waiting for them in the lobby. He had to hide the relief in his eyes as he watched Meghan walk through the main door behind Harvey.

Keep walking and don't stop until you get home. I have to talk to Harvey, he texted her.

She was okay. That was all that mattered, but he had an agenda as well.

"How long you been waiting here?" Harvey asked without sparing a glance toward Mike.

"Since I found out what you need."

"What I need is for you to leave me alone."

"No, what you need is information on Ava Hessington. In 2008, her company tried to destroy evidence—"

"Of an oil spill?"

"Okay, well, in 2010, they—"

"They bought off a whistle-blower. And if the next thing you're gonna tell me is about an environmental impact study in 2006, don't. You think you're not replaceable? I got all that from an associate I picked at random. I've been doing this before I met you, and I'll be doing it long after I've forgotten all about you. You had enough?"

"No. No, you know what, I haven't, because you haven't." Mike's observation made Harvey stop in his tracks and turn around.

"Excuse me?"

"You haven't said whatever you have to say to rip me to shreds enough so that you can start to forgive me. So go ahead. Whatever it takes, I can take it... Harvey, I'm sorry, all right? But I need you to listen to me now."

"Listen to you? You know when I would've listened to you? That night."

"Jessica threatened me!"

"I don't care. Anyone comes at you with any threat at all, you come to me. I don't give a shit if it's the Queen of England. You come to me. You tell me! You tell me everything! That's what goddamn loyalty is." Harvey turned back around and headed toward the elevators.

"Jessica threatened me," he said again, only this time it was a whisper because the ears it was meant for were physically and emotionally out of earshot. "And she used Meghan to do it."

Meghan had done as he said and kept walking to a cab on the other side of the building, so she was long gone. She had an extra bottle of meds at the apartment, so he didn't need to be as vigilant as he had been, which was why he went straight to Rachel's after watching her leave.

His knocking was impatient this time. When the door opened, it was clear Rachel hadn't been expecting him to be on the other side. He walked in without even giving her a chance to register what was happening.

"Okay, you're right. You don't know who I am or what I've done to deserve anything. So, here's what's gonna happen. I am gonna tell you everything, and when we're done, either we're gonna be finished, or we're gonna go back there," he pointed to her bed," and we're gonna do exactly what we should've done the other night."

He was true to his word. There was no need to ask Meghan because she wanted this from the beginning.

He told her about Neal and how he wasn't really dead, but that was all he could tell her about him. He told her about WITSEC and what he and Trevor did as kids to get his family out of the program yet make it look like they were still participants. Meghan's medical issues, and why they had a hard time getting her on a transplant list. Her school records. When he said everything, he meant everything.

Now he really was free to be with Rachel. They had been up all night, not talking. Upon her request, Mike replayed how he got hired, using her body to tell the story.

While at work, Meghan was doing Harvey's bidding as Mike had asked her to do. He hadn't given up on secretly helping a man he still considered his friend, but he couldn't go through his sister without turning Harvey against her as well.

She passed information along while doing her printer rounds. It was the only way to be in her brother's office without drawing Donna's attention.

"You didn't come home last night," she said during one of her trips.

"Sorry about that."

"Why are you apologizing? I haven't seen you this happy since your first time with Tess."

"Yeah, I'm not sure how comfortable I am talking about my sex life with my kid-sister."

"Does this mean you and Rachel are officially an item?"

"I think it does. She knows everything and didn't kick me out last night."

"When you say everything, does that—"

"Everything, Megs. I told her everything. She even knows about Danny and WITSEC."

Being Harvey's unofficial community service associate gave Meghan access to more case files than before. She couldn't access all of them, but it was still more.

"Speaking of Danny... I think I'm going to need your help on one of Harvey's cases. It's old, like when Big Brother was around eighteen old, but the description and pattern fits his MO."

Mike considered it, but he knew Harvey was never going to knowingly accept his help on any of his cases, no matter how old they were.

"I know what you're thinking, Dad. But you and I are the only ones who know Danny. And you know him better than I do. We're the only people who can work this case even better than Peter."

"Why—"

"It took three years for Peter to even figure out Danny's name and another year to catch him. All I did was look at the sketch and the MO. The sketch was poorly drawn, but everything else fit."

"I'll look into it if he let's you bring it home. Right now, you've been in here a long time, and I can see Donna getting curious."

She nodded and left quickly, moving on to the next office.

Harvey had left her behind this time. It wasn't because he didn't respect her work ethic, or that the client did or didn't want her there. It was because he and Ava were meeting with the prosecutor, and he was going to be gone for a while. He also didn't need a man he once worked with thinking he was unprofessional for allowing a child to work the case with him.

Another paper round had informed Mike that Harvey was out of the office for the rest of the day. All he had to do was figure out a way to distract Donna. That turned out to be easier than he thought with her love of theater actors.

Nine copies of the same file were hidden in and around Harvey's office. One was on his desk, and another was in Donna's bottom drawer. He wanted those to be the first ones they saw. And his plan was working when Donna came to him with both files.

"I put that on Harvey's desk for him, not you."

"Maybe," Donna began. "But I know what you don't seem to get. Harvey didn't value you for your help on cases. He valued you for your loyalty, which he told you last night."

"Yeah, I know that. I'm trying to get it back, and this is the only way I know how."

"By sending Rachel to distract me and sneaking into his office? Oh, by the way, you think I don't know about you two? Took me one look... You wanna know how to get Harvey's loyalty back? Get in a time machine and undo what you did with Jessica. Oh, shoot, you can't do that."

"You know what, I figured you'd bring this file back. There's also one in your bottom drawer. You might wanna grab that too. And just in case of that, I put seven other copies in his office. 'Cause whether he forgives me or not, he's still gonna need it. Some random associate gave him all that information on Ava Hessington? No way. It was Scottie. Yeah, I found the ticket to Trinidad-Tobago. It's not a giant leap. The only problem is Scottie's not here. She's in London. And Harvey... he is still gonna need this."

"How did you know?" Harvey asked the moment he saw Meghan the following day. That was after he confronted Jensen's motives, using Mike's work to do so.

"Know what?"

"Jensen."

"Oh that... I already told you. I had to read a current events article... Well, that and the fact that any other time he had a similar case he went for the fine... And I only found out about that part after you brought me onto the case.

Harvey accepted her answer and sent her on her way through the firm. She was back to work but only as needed. Her printer rounds brought her around to Mike's office. She stopped in whether or not he needed refills to give and receive information.

Mike had told her what Donna said, even showed her the time machine Benjamin had helped him with... the letter Jessica had written and saved to her computer the day Trevor outed them.

"I'm giving the office back tonight. Something I should have done the second Jessica gave it to me."

"There were a lot of things that should have been done before the merger," Meghan said.

"Don't start with that. I regret not listening to you enough as it is. I don't need you piling on. Now, go do your schoolwork."

It was already getting dark out and he didn't want her in earshot of his office while he confronted his blackmailer. She left, though not without complaining that he kept treating her like a porcelain doll.

She had missed Jessica's appearance by two minutes.

"What was so important that I had to come down here right away? Don't tell me you want a bigger office." The woman thought she'd made a joke.

"You told me that I can think of this office as a reminder of what I did to Harvey or as a symbol of what I can do at this firm. But the thing is I don't wanna be here if I'm not solid with Harvey."

"Well, that's between you and Harvey."

"It's between you and me. You put yourself between us when you used my sister to blackmail me."

"Well, the word you're looking for is extortion, not blackmail, and I'm not going to comment on that accusation. But as for your choices, you made those all by yourself. So don't come crying to me."

Mike gestured to a sheet of paper on his desk. "This is a copy of the letter you wrote to the district attorney when you threatened to expose me."

"Expose you? For what? I never wrote a letter like that."

"I'm not recording you. I don't need to record you. This letter was printed from your hard drive, which has your computer's digital signature."

"What do you want?"

"I wanna know, if you had the chance, would you have traded that car to get your parents back together?"

"That's a stupid question, and you know it. I never had that chance, so what does it matter?"

"Because I do. What do I want? I wanna give this office back. I didn't earn it, I don't want it, and if there's a chance it'll help Harvey forgive me, I'm gonna take it. Oh, and, uh, if you ever do send that letter, you're in the same boat as me."

Mike left Jessica to her thoughts as he went to collect Meghan and bring her home. He was going back to the cubicle the following day, voluntarily returning to the toxic environment of the bullpen.