Los Angeles, CA – October 2014

Henry squares up as his jaw sets. She watches his face redden with rage, a rage she's never seen on him before. Her instinct is to recoil. If he were any other man, she would. But she's not scared of Henry. Her body must remember the trust she once had in him. But that surprises her. She doesn't trust anyone anymore. George, yes, most of the time. But never anyone else. Not fully. Her ability to trust was taken from her long ago, and she's never fully regained it. It's an instinct now—the fight or flight reflex. But yet, she feels none of that as she watches the love of her life become enraged. She's always admired his self-control and the way his eyes never leave her, even as the people around them go about their business, and her co-workers stare as they try to decipher the lore of the mysterious man.

"Had to see it for myself." He spits, losing his sense of well-practiced fighter pilot self-control. She nods, her eyes filling with unwanted tears. She looks around the lobby.

"Not here. Please." Her voice, scared and low, makes him pause. He came here to confront her and possibly yell at her. But there is something in her voice that reminds him to breathe. She has a power over him he can't explain, but she is the only person on earth who can stop his temper in its tracks. His eyes soften, and he nods. He steps into her office behind her, and she shuts the door behind him.

"Henry…" She doesn't know what to do or say. Her hands feel heavy and awkward as she twirls the non-existent ring on her finger.

"Jesus, Elizabeth." He sighs and shakes his head. His anger isn't dissipating, not fully. "I mean, what the fuck?" He says, throwing his hands up. She only nods. She doesn't know what to say. She's had this conversation in her head a million times over, but now her mind is blank. She knows why he's mad; she understands his anger and his hurt, but she can't find the words to make it better. She knows no words can fix this. The room falls silent. The only sound is her heart thudding in her ears. "Are you going to say anything?"

She swallows, "I-I… I'm so sorry." Those are the only words that come to her. It's the only thing she can think of to say. And she means them. She means those words more than she's ever meant anything that she's said.

He huffs out a frustrated breath, and she can see the tears welling in his eyes. The anger is fading into something much more painful. "You're sorry?" He lets out a bitter laugh, "Well, that makes it all okay."

"No… I know it doesn't… I…" She stumbles over her words as she tries to unjumble her thoughts.

"You've been alive this whole time! While I grieved for you! While our precious children grieved for you!" He yells, and she flinches.

"I know you're upset, but please don't yell at me." something in her voice makes him pause to breathe. He collapses in one of her guest chairs.

"I need you to explain. Now." He says sternly. He doesn't mean to sound like he's talking to one of his children. But this is a tone he's used when disciplining them. And it seems to be the one that gets the most reaction out of her. Though he doesn't know her reaction to it is learned from her time in captivity.

She nods and takes a deep breath, trying to settle her racing heart.

"Yes," She nods and sits behind her desk, trying to place a barrier between them. But the words don't come. She looks at Henry. Her sweet, loving Henry. She opens her mouth to speak, but the words are lodged in her throat. Henry's face grows impatient. And he sighs. He runs a hand over his face and rubs his temples.

"Elizabeth?" Henry's voice is impatient and short. She understands, she does. Because he doesn't know any of it, and he can't possibly know how hard it is for her to speak about and how awful it will be for him to hear. She thinks about lying for a moment. She could tell him she left because she wanted to. She could tell him to leave and never contact her again. She could… but she looks into his eyes: the grief and the sadness– the hurt. The guilt she feels is overwhelming.

"It's not what you think." She starts not at all smoothly.

"I sure hope it isn't what I think. I hope you had a damn good reason to fake your death and leave us!"

"I didn't fake my death." Her voice is stern. That choice was made for her.

"Really? Because I'm sitting across from someone I buried."

She had not accounted for his anger in the imaginary conversations she had with him about this. She had imagined his hurt and his sadness. She had prepared herself for that. She was ready for the tears. But she wasn't prepared for his rage. When they were together, he hadn't ever looked at her with so much anger, not even when they argued. She doesn't know how to navigate this.

"I had nothing to do with that. I didn't know about it until much later." She says softly. He looks at her hard, his eyes boring into hers, trying to detect the lie. "Henry, I swear. I didn't plan on faking my death."

"Start at the beginning."

She nods, "I had the assignment in Iraq. I finished it and ended up doing small Intel gathering assignments for what was supposed to be the rest of my deployment." Henry notices the distance in her voice and body language. She is giving a situation report. It bothers him. Her distance. This isn't Elizabeth; this is Agent McCord, and he doesn't much care to talk with her at this moment.

"One of those assignments was to meet an informant about twenty Klicks outside of the city." She pauses and looks away from him. She doesn't want to tell him. It feels selfish to tell him everything she's been through when he is still clearly so angry at her. She wants him to have that anger because her story will rob him of it. It will fill him with guilt, and that seems so unfair. The weight of this is not his to carry.

He watches as she breathes in deeply, and her shoulders deflate ever so slightly.

"There was an explosion, and suddenly I was on my back staring up at the sky… There were two men… I remember being picked up and thrown into a car…" she subconsciously massages her bad shoulder. For a fraction of a second, she swears she feels the warm, sticky blood that was once there.

"Wait," Henry says, and she looks at him. She watches his brain search for answers, "They found your body outside of Bagdad."

"Yes, there was a body. They took that poor woman out of the same trunk they put me in and left her there with my dog tags." For the first time, there is obvious emotion adorning her words. Noticeably, the emotion isn't for herself but for the nameless woman.

"So I didn't bury an empty casket?" He asks because the thought has bothered him—the thought the box he cried over was empty.

"No, you buried Nicolette Lambert. A French woman who looked enough like me and was in the wrong place at the wrong time." She says. She has never quit feeling so guilty about Nicolette's murder. She knows it wasn't her fault, but yet she can't help but feel that it was.

"Jesus. Who were these guys?" That's his first question. He has so many more. He knows they are going to have to talk for a long time to get them all answered.

Elizabeth gets quiet. She doesn't know what to say. Once the truth is in Henry's hands, she won't be able to stay on the down low. She will have no choice but to stand up and fight. She knows that once Henry knows, Conrad will go down one way or another. And an image of Henry McCord, Presidential Assassin, enters her mind.

"At first, I thought they were terrorists. Al Qaeda." She pauses to swallow her emotions. She doesn't want to cry. She's given the man enough of her tears.

Henry studies her. He really studies her for the first time. Her hair is dark now, and she's thinner than she used to be, tanner too. She's still incredibly beautiful. But her eyes… She can control her every last microexpression, but she can't control how well he can read her anyway. And he's surprised by it, but reading her is like riding a bike. And she's in pain– a tremendous amount of it.

"What…" he clears his throat, "what did they do?"

She opens her mouth to tell him, and Conrad's threats invade her thoughts, and the terror returns, "I can't… I'm sorry… I can't do this. You need to leave."

"No. I'm owed an answer. Your children are owed an answer, Elizabeth." He makes no effort to stand from his place in the chair. He can be stubborn when he needs to be.

She stands and begins pacing the office. She rubs her hands together nervously. She needs to think. "Henry," she sighs, "it's complicated."

"It's not. It's really simple. Tell me what happened. You can do that, I'm sure."

She stops pacing and looks at him, "I know you are shocked and hurt and confused... And I know it is my fault... But it is better for everyone for you to leave. Go home to the kids... And your wife... and forget I'm here."

Henry is taken aback, "Forget you're here?" He says incredulously, "Is that what you think I can do? Just forget that you are alive? Forget that you left me alone to raise our kids?" He hears his voice rising, and he sees her shrink the louder he gets, but he can't stop the flood of words pouring from him.

"You can't ask me to forget this! You did something unforgivable, and now you can't even explain it to me?" He's yelling by the time he's done, his chest heaving. He looks at her, and for a split second, his heart sinks. She's standing in front of him, her body trembling and her arms wrapped around herself. Her eyes are cast down at her shoes, and her bottom lip is between her teeth.

"I didn't do this." She sniffles, "Believe me when I tell you that this happened to me as much as it happened to you. And it's not fair. If I could tell you, I would." She says, on the verge of letting her tears fall.

"Bullshit. You could tell me right now, and you choose not to. You choose to be selfish, just like you chose to disappear for ten years."

"You're right." She says, trying to get him to leave. It's for his safety. If Conrad finds out Henry knows, he will hurt him. He'll hurt her family to make her suffer. And she won't let that happen.

"I'm right?" He laughs bitterly, "You are unbelievable." He runs his hands over his face and through his hair, "I can't believe you. Who have you become?" He sounds so disgusted.

"Who I have to be." She whispers.

"No, this isn't on anyone else. This is your fault. Your choices." He snaps, "I can't believe I'm looking at you. After all this time... How can you look at yourself?"

"I can't!" She snaps, "I can't look at myself. And I don't sleep at night. I hate this... I hate this life. But for a lot of reasons, it's necessary." The pain she's displaying to him is raw and real. He can't ignore it. And he believes her. He believes in his bones that she has a reason. He doesn't want her to. He wants to be able to be mad at her and hate her. He can't, though. He knows she would have never done this if it wasn't necessary.

"Tell me. Please. Tell me." He's pleading with her, his voice desperate. He is desperate, and it hurts.

"I can't."

"If you can't talk to me... Why did George have me call you? What was the point of letting me know you're alive?" He asks.

"George did that on his own. I didn't know he was going to." She replies, her voice steady again.

"Did you ask him?" his impatience isn't leaving. The pressure mounting on her makes her heart beat faster and faster. She feels her shoulder start with its ever-present spidey signal, and pain shoots down her arm.

She nods, "Yeah, I did."

"What'd he say?" He prompts.

"That it was time." She uses his exact words, not that Henry would understand their context.

Henry nods, "So I'll ask you again. What happened to you in Iraq?"

She rolls her shoulder through the pain and wishes she had a pill to chew on. And that thought snaps her back to the present. She had fought so hard for her life. And yet, she's only living half of it. George was right. It is time. She can do this. Henry has a right to know. Conrad has kept her under his thumb for far too long. And maybe Conrad will finally leave her family alone.

"Just tell me." He says, "Please."

"I was in Iraq for another year and a half." She leaves out every detail of the things that happened. She's not ready to have that conversation. "And when I got back to the States... Umm, you were already with your wife."

He nods. He doesn't want her to know just how happy he was… is? It only took him the last twenty minutes not to know.

"It's okay, Henry. It's okay that you moved on." She says softly.

"How did you find out I was with someone?" He asks.

"I went to Pittsburgh, and I saw... And I just... I wasn't okay." She pauses, "I... I just thought at the time it was better to stay away. It was easier. And you were happy, so... I didn't see the harm."

"You didn't see the harm. Really? You didn't think about telling me and the kids you weren't dead?"

"I was broken... I was a hurt, broken person, and I know it sounds like I'm trying to justify the unjustifiable..." She wipes a tear, "I wasn't okay; I was in a bad self-hating, self-harming place for close to five years, and by the time I got better... Your twins would've been four and... I felt like you were happy, and it would've ruined that. And you were better off. And the kids were better off. And I knew you all were okay."

"Don't you think we should have had the chance to decide that we were better off without you?"

She hangs her head. She hadn't thought about that. She had just thought that dead people should stay dead. The second time she decided not to go home, she was freshly sober and brand new to healing in a healthy way… she didn't think about them.

"I'm sorry." She lets out a small sob, and it breaks through his anger. His heart breaks at her pain.

"What happened to you?" He repeats, "You keep saying you were broken and that you weren't okay. Why? What happened?"

"Everything." She whispers before completely breaking down. She's surprised she's held it together for this long. She had no idea she would react this way to seeing him.

He stands and rounds the desk. He's not sure if she will want him to touch her. He wants to hug her and hold her, but he doesn't think she will let him.

"What do you mean by that?" The images flashing in his head make him nauseous.

"Everything. Every. Single. Thing. You can imagine happened to me." She can't look at him; her heart is aching, and her breathing is labored, "I was broken. Mentally and physically."

"W-wh... I... Why..." He takes a breath to try and gather his thoughts. "You went through that alone? Why didn't they tell me they got it wrong when they found you? I'm so confused."

Elizabeth nods and wipes her face. "I can... I have the proof of everything... Of... I have your answers at my apartment."

"I want to see them. Can you show me now?" He gets a little restless. His mind is filled with so many things all at once. He wants to solve this all at once.

"Yes, but if I do. I'm putting you in danger."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not supposed to see you. You're not supposed to know I'm alive."

"Babe, if that's true, I'm already in danger, and so are the kids. I need to know everything now. I need to know."

"Okay." She breathes, "I'll show you."

"Okay."

They stand in the office together. The air is thick and awkward. She feels the weight of her words settling on his shoulders. He grabs her a tissue.

"You have makeup." He states, and she lets out a small laugh. But when he goes to help her wipe the running mascara away, she flinches hard, almost jumping away from him. He backs up quickly.

"Sorry, I'm not used to being touched." She tells him, her cheeks red. She takes the tissue and cleans her face.

"Better?"

"Beautiful." He breathes the word without thinking about it. He can't help it; even though he's furious and hurt, he's still… still what? In love with her? No? But is he attracted to her? Yes. He is angry that she's alive, but the anger doesn't outweigh the relief and joy of knowing she's alive. She breaks the intense eye contact. She's not ready to heal the fractures in her family. She's only ready to share the information.

"Let's go."

He nods and follows her. He watches her carefully. There is something different about her, something other than the obvious. It's her energy. He remembers her presence. She was a force to be reckoned with in the best way possible. She was never shy about opinions or actions. Now, though. Now, there is a darkness around her. There is a hesitancy, like she doesn't want to be herself. OR maybe, this is just who she is now.