I’m no good at being noble,

but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people

don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. 

Never again. No matter what happened she had promised herself she would never run away from Holly ever again. No matter how much it hurt, Holly deserved to have her stay and try to work it out.

When it came, it was worse than that, worse than she thought it ever could be, worse than all of the crazy heartbreaking scenarios she had imagined when she had braced herself to tell Holly about Sophie. Somewhere the gods of cruel fate were laughing at her, this she knew for sure. Of all the things her mind had come up with, this certainly was not one of them. Before it happened she would have been shocked, overwhelmed and overjoyed to find out that the person she was still so deeply, painfully in love with not only returned her feelings, but wanted her enough to ask her to run away with them. Just eight days before it all went so terribly wrong, she had finally opened up and told Holly how she felt. But Holly had been seeing someone else, and with “Goodnight Gail” had walked away and out of her life, for good, or so she thought. And now there were other things to consider.

Holly had made her want to be a better person. When Holly had come striding into her crime scene and into her life, suddenly she had started to feel things again. Feelings she thought had died long ago. She wasn’t sure when it had started, when she had first laid the mortar and brick and reinforced steel walls of her fortress, but there were certainly benchmarks. When Nick had left her standing at the altar in Vegas, she had added another layer. When her mother blamed her for driving him away, another wall. On the day her classmates at the academy discovered she indeed came from Toronto Police royalty as her mother arrived one day and put her painfully on display before them, as they accused her of not earning her place, of being there because of her name not her abilities, making her feel like she didn’t belong, she surrounded herself with a mine field. After Perrick she shut down completely, closing the gaps and resigning herself to being numb and feeling dead on most days. She still didn’t know how, but Holly simply waltzed through her minefield, and penetrated her fortress, and cracked open her doors, letting in light and sound, letting all of those imprisoned feelings escape, and bringing her back to life. Now that had happened, she knew there was no going back. Traci always said that when Jerry had sacrificed his life for hers he had died for something important. She didn’t like to talk about it, but she lived with the guilt of that every day. And now with Sophie, she had the opportunity to start to make good on repaying that debt.