How do I talk to her about this.

Nancy sat in the front window of the ice cream parlor watching for Bess. She hadn't been able to wait; she dragged her spoon around in the remains of the scoop of vanilla, having scraped off all the best parts of the sundae. It felt unnatural to eat this slowly, without keeping one ear cocked for Jessie's temperamental cries or Sam's demands for a homework check. For twelve years, give or take the occasional weekend, she had only bolted down meals between chasing children down for naptimes and baths.

Bess was ten minutes late, but she came wearing fake rimmed glasses perched on the end of her pert nose, so that made up for it. She ordered a double cookie dough parfait, shrugging as she flirted with the cashier. "You only live once."

"God, I hope so," Nancy replied, as Bess pulled up a chair.

"So, why the retail therapy?" Bess licked the back of her spoon before digging back in.

"I can't think. And this always seems to work for you."

"Yeah?" Bess raised a shapely eyebrow, above the frames. "You generally like Ned as a sounding board. Or are you two having a fight."

"We're not." They did have their fights, and Ned carried the biggest, ugliest trump card, but she caved with even the threat of that nuclear option. He'd married her, after all. As far as she was concerned, when he'd put that ring on her finger, he'd forfeit the right to throw her infidelity back in her face. Especially given his part in the breakup of her marriage.

Not that she didn't sometimes, very quietly, in the back of her head, wonder if he was just saving it for the day when all the other straws utterly obliterated the camel she'd destroyed so many years ago.

Bess, who was watching her with narrowed eyes, sighed and made a dramatic gesture. "I'm not in the mood to play twenty questions," she said, but without an edge on her voice.

"I don't know how to talk to Sam about... before."

Bess nodded. "She's barely twelve. You feel like this is the right time?"

"I think Frank's kind of pushed the issue."

"Not Frank," Bess said, in feigned shock. Her spoon scraped against the styrofoam cup as she dug out another mouthful. "If he's started talking to her about it, then she probably should get a straight story about it from one of you. I have a feeling his version would be a bit... biased."

"Ear-scorching," Nancy nodded. "Hannah's always been so... well, she kept things close. We didn't talk about her life, not really, not when she was younger. Then she told me about Charles Ogden, and that was enough to shock me."

"It would shock anyone," Bess pointed out. "It looked like he'd killed Harrington, for God's sake. At least your story isn't going to end with 'and then I had to bake a file into a cake to break him out of the pen.'"

Nancy started laughing. "Ned would eat his way through half the damn thing before he'd realize," she said, and soon the two girls were laughing until their eyes were streaming and their bellies hurt, and the other patrons were starting to stare.

Bess calmed down first. "So just tell her the truth," she suggested, wiping her eyes underneath the glasses with a napkin. "The truth is romantic."

"To us," Nancy disagreed. "But about her own mother?"

Bess paused for a minute. "Yeah, I see what you mean," she said. "But what else do you have, really? You have the story, and her."

--

She should have been writing it all down from the beginning, she realized, staring blindly into the rush hour traffic on the way home.

Nancy had spent the entirety of her formative years greedily devouring any speck of information, anything at all, about her own mother. Anecdotes, clever stories, blurry photos of distant relatives, yearbooks signed with hearts and daisies, flowers pressed between the leaves of yellowing books. The hole of her absence had been perfect and unblurred in her family's life. Carson slept on one side of the bed that had been theirs, he kept everything that had been hers at the time of her death, and in the photo albums Nancy had studied a thousand times she had seen the woman who had been her mother, the innocence of her father's smile in that time when they had still been together and perfect, but it was like another universe, cleanly divorced and separate from Nancy and who she had become. Her mother hadn't been real. A thousand incomplete pieces weren't enough to make her that way, to reconstitute her as anything more than a suggestion of smooth flesh and a flashing grin. She couldn't imagine how many disparate ways it would have killed her, if she'd found something like her own story in the remains of her mother's life.

But Sam knew who her father was, and her mother, even if the way she knew them entirely ignored the convoluted triangle of their history. She was old enough, now, to dig through the photo albums and yearbooks, to add up the timeline, to figure out something was amiss. The evidence was everywhere. Frank's overheard comment just made Nancy all the more certain that he would break first, and use just enough truth to turn Sam against her.

Nancy's mouth tightened, her face red from the reflection of the brake lights.

And it was his right. His right to tell Sam what happened. At the most basic level, stripped down to the barest facts, the story alone was enough to crucify her.

When she finally made it home, Nancy went straight to their bedroom, past the bathroom and the sounds of Ned and Jessie splashing each other, past Sam's bedroom with the pale light under the door, past Cole's bedroom and the hundred-and-seventh battle of the faceless army men, and found a box shoved deep in the back of her closet. Actually getting to the box took thirty minutes of rearranging. She found books she'd thought were lost, earrings given up for dead without their mates, jeans she'd worn in high school, her first baby fingerprinting kit. She went through all of it slowly, dreading the moment, the act of unearthing the beginning of it.

At the sight of the patch of white she had to stand up straight and very still and actually will herself, direct every contraction of muscle and ounce of strength, to kneel back down and pull it out of the box.

Her wedding album.

Her first wedding album.

--

"We're going to have a day together," Nancy told Sam, over breakfast. "Just you and me."

She kept her voice steady, even though she was watching Ned in her peripheral vision, waiting for his reaction. He made none, not to her. Jessie, who always wanted to be with her older siblings, both if she could, would go to the park with her brother and father, and play on the slide, and then after she would see Hannah while Ned took Cole for some male bonding, probably over baseball. Nancy had drawn the line at teaching him poker.

Sam looked up from her cereal, her eyes widening. She looked surprised, happily so, and pleased. Nancy's heart tightened a little when she thought that maybe this would be the last time Sam would be happy at the thought of spending time with her.

"What are we going to do?"

Jessie looked back and forth between her sister and mother, a tiny frown on her forehead.

"Girl things. Lunch and shopping and movies and a makeover."

Cole looked almost relieved, the tiny frown on his own forehead disappearing. He wouldn't have wanted to be left out, either. Now it was something he would never have wanted to do in the first place.

Sam grinned. "This weekend?"

Nancy nodded. "Yeah. We'll have a lot of fun."

--

The night before, she lay with her hand flat on the sheet, between their bodies, turned on her side and facing his back. She kept almost touching him, but he needed his sleep.

Then he turned over, facing her, and his eyes came open, and her breath caught. At first there was no recognition in his eyes, but then he blinked and his expression changed slightly and she felt her heart fall a little.

"Go to sleep, Nan."

She gave him a weak smile and ran her fingertips over the sheet. "Yeah," she replied.

He studied her face, and then slid closer and put his arm over her. "Staying awake worrying about this won't help," he said, kissing her temple.

"Doesn't seem to matter whether it helps," she murmured. "I don't know what to say."

"So just have a nice day with her and wait a while longer," he said, nestling in closer to her. "Wait until you know what to say."

"You mean wait until he's already told her what he wants her to think?"

He sighed. "Is that what's got you so scared?"

She opened her eyes wide in the dark. His skin was bare inches away, she could feel the heat radiating from it, but she couldn't see him. "I don't want her to hate me."

"Do you really think that's going to happen."

"She's going to be a teenager soon," she reminded him. "And this... I keep going over and over it in my head and there's no way to make it sound good."

"So maybe you should let me talk to her."

"Much as I'd love to just let you handle this... I think if she's going to hear it, it needs to come from me." She kissed his chest. "We can rearrange things, and you can be there, if you want to be..."

"It's whatever you want," he said, softly.

She nestled in closer, and sighed. "Take Jessie and Cole and give them a good day," she said. "And then come back with a bottle of wine and pick up all the pieces for me."

"That's what I'm here for," he replied, and kissed her again. "Now go to sleep, babe."

--

"Sam, I wanted to talk to you."

Sam looked up. They had been to the mall, had facials done, and Sam was the owner of a brand-new pair of sky-blue sneakers and the newest album of a band Nancy had never heard of. For lunch Sam had wanted pizza, so they went to a buffet, and they had made cookies together when they came home, and eaten them all while watching a movie, curled up on the couch.

"Okay," Sam said, cautiously.

"Wait right here," Nancy said, forcing herself not to look back as she went upstairs. Once she was out of Sam's sight, she stopped, scrubbing her damp palms on her jeans. She felt sick, sicker by the minute. She and Sam had had a good day together. Except that Nancy had been acutely aware, the entire day, with each of Sam's smiles, of what was going to come later.

I don't have to do this.

There was something very comforting, in knowing that, but Nancy only hesitated for a second before gathering the box into her arms. If not here, if not now, then she would keep putting it off, keep hoping, and it was no way to live.

Sam came over when Nancy brought the box to the kitchen table, making a stack with a heavy photo album on top. Nancy motioned for Sam to sit down, before she went to the kitchen and made her daughter a glass of strawberry milk with shaking hands. When she came back, Sam had the photo album open in front of her, her fingers tracing the edges through the plastic.

"You wanted to tell me about pictures?"

Nancy waited a beat, then nodded. "Yeah," she said softly. "Something like that."

They sat down together and Nancy started with the easier pictures, the pictures of her and George and Bess mugging for the camera, Hannah with her face lit by birthday candles, Carson with his shirt sleeves pushed up and his hair falling over his forehead, shooting a weary smile. Then she saw the first picture of the cabin, and her heart skipped a beat.

"Your grandfathers were friends," she began. "So I met Frank when we were children. Very young. I can't even really remember it. We would play together, but then we didn't see each other for a while, and then the summer I was fifteen, we, Dad and Hannah and I, went to Fox Lake."

She turned the page, and she knew every picture by heart. The first picture of Ned she had ever taken. His face was open and honest, his eyes warm.

"Frank was there. Ned was there. I met him for the first time, and I realized I liked Frank, and that I liked Ned. By the end of the summer, I had chosen Ned. He asked me to be his girlfriend. I said yes."

Sam nodded. This, although they had never been this explicit about it, was old news to her.

Nancy flipped through the rest of the book without seeing it. Seeing herself, seeing Ned in these pictures, felt like looking at someone who didn't exist anymore, someone more innocent and clean than she had been in a long time. And for this next part, there were no pictures. She had never wanted it documented for posterity. So she dug out Sam's baby book, and that first, still clean-white, wedding album.

"When I was nineteen, Ned and I were having a fight, a lot of fights. He knew that I had been seeing Frank, for cases, and he wasn't comfortable with it. And I kept seeing more and more of Frank, and..." Nancy put her hands flat on the tabletop, palms damp. "And then Frank and I slept together."

Sam wasn't nodding now. She had gone pale to the lips, unable to look away from her mother.

"I was still Ned's girlfriend," Nancy said, her voice getting smaller. "For a long time after that, I didn't see Frank anymore. I knew that I wanted to be with Ned, even after what had happened with Frank. And then I found out that I was pregnant with you."

Nancy smiled, but it almost hurt, and Sam returned it only weakly.

"I told Frank," she said, and looked down at her hands. "We decided to get married."

Nancy had never looked through the wedding album, after she had received it and checked it over. That entire day had been a blur, to be honest, and she hadn't even wanted a wedding album. It had seemed so pointless. A wedding album was meant to commemorate a joyful event, not the legitimization of a mistake. Turning the pages gave her something to do, gave Sam a way to focus on something other than her mother's face, as they went through the pictures. She hadn't even looked that pregnant, Nancy realized, looking back. Not the way she had at the end of her pregnancy with Jessie.

"I never told Ned what had happened," she said. "I knew it would hurt him, and he and I had been fighting, and it was just easier, that way. I wanted to tell him. I thought about calling him almost every night, at first, because for a long time he had been my best friend, but I was married."

Nancy closed the album, sighing.

"When you were three years old I ran into him again, entirely unexpected. He was in the city on a business trip and I was taking you for a walk. After that, I just kept seeing him, and all I wanted was my best friend back. But I had hurt him so much, doing what I did, and for a long time he couldn't handle it. And then."

And then, the night of the reunion, the morning after, looking at herself in that dressing room, knowing what she wanted and knowing that she could no more resist it than the tide.

"And I had never wanted to hurt your father, and Ned had never wanted to come between us, but then he and I both realized that we still loved each other."

Nancy stopped and made herself look over at her daughter, at the color just beginning to stain her cheeks. She could soften this, tell some sweet lie, make it sound like something it had not been.

"I couldn't stop loving him," Nancy said, and when her eyes started to burn she swallowed hard, waiting for the sting to go down, but it wouldn't. "I was happy when I was with him. Before, I had been so unhappy, baby... you don't remember. I just couldn't do it. I loved you so much and you were the only thing that mattered to me, and we were together all the time, you and me, and I couldn't do it anymore. So I left your father."

Sam released a breath and looked down, and her entire body was coiled tense.

"And I didn't have enough strength to tell him what had happened until after the papers were signed and we were through, and Sam, he was so mad at me, for what I had done, when he found out. He thought I had betrayed him. And maybe I had."

Nancy closed her eyes. Her face was hot.

"And that's why when he looks at you he sees me and he hates it," she finished, and her voice was just the suggestion of breath now. "And I can't lie to you, because you're the most important thing in my entire life, Sam."

Sam cleared her throat. "So you never loved him," she said. "My father."

Nancy's hands tried to twist in her lap. "The way I loved him was different."

"How is love different."

Sam's voice was rising and starting to shake and Nancy didn't cringe back, because she owed her child this. "I never felt about Frank the way I felt about Ned."

"Then why," Sam said, but she couldn't finish, her fist closed hard on her thigh.

Nancy propped her head on her hand and gazed at her daughter. "If you're asking why, why I slept with him... I don't know. I had always felt that level of attraction to him, I had always been attracted to Ned in the same way, but I didn't know that that attraction wasn't love. I didn't know that we were too close to being the same person, to have a life together. I thought we could work. I thought you were the sign and the reason that we could make it work."

"But you didn't love me enough," Sam said.

Nancy flushed. "I loved you too much."

"If you loved me too much then you could have stayed," Sam said, and she had her palm flat against the edge of the table, braced, ready to push herself away. The expression in her blue eyes was familiar, if only for its intensity, but unfamiliar in that face she loved so much.

"If I wanted to raise you alone, then yes," Nancy agreed. Her voice was still somehow steady. "Sam, he... we were together and then I didn't see him for months, and that was how our life was going to be. He wanted me there when he needed me, gone when he didn't, invisible. To keep his home and raise his child and be grateful for the crumbs I did get. After three years I saw that was never going to change."

"But you don't know that," Sam insisted. "You didn't... you just saw what you wanted and now my father hates me because of what you did to him."

"Frank doesn't hate you," Nancy said, putting all the conviction she could muster in her voice.

Sam bit her lip, and her own eyes were wet. "He called you a whore," she said, and her voice was shaking. "A bitch whore. And he said I looked like you."

Nancy put her hands over her face, nails digging into the skin, into the yield of her scalp. "I know," she said, her voice hoarse.

Sam broke, and burst it out, her cheeks wet. "Why did you do this to me," she said, screamed, her voice rising, anguished at the end. "Why did you even have me if you didn't love him, if you were going to betray him to be with someone else?"

"Because I," Nancy began, but she was shouting in return, and she had to take a breath before she could continue. "Because no matter how this happened, I love you, and I have loved you since I knew that you existed."

"And this is better?"

"You don't remember how it was, Sam," Nancy said, and pushed her hand through her hair. "Please, please, baby, you have to understand. You said, you told me once that Ned was the best father, the only father you had ever really known."

And Sam's eyes widened, a little, and she looked away, and Nancy knew that she had managed to touch her through the hard veil of her anger, however briefly. "But he isn't my father," she said softly.

"He wants to be."

"He has real children," Sam replied, and for the first time, the very first time, Nancy heard bitterness in her voice when she referred to her half-brother and sister. "He can't love me as much as he loves them."

"But he does," Nancy said, and she wanted to touch Sam's shoulder, reassure her, but Sam looked poised and ready to run. "I would never be with him, I would never have married him, I would never stay with him if I thought that wasn't true."

Sam looked up, her lips parted softly, and through the anger and pain on her face Nancy almost saw the beginnings of understanding, of reconciliation, but then Sam closed her mouth again. "I want to go over to Tara's house tonight," Sam said, her voice small and tight.

Nancy looked down at her left hand and the rings and the gleam of the white album beyond it, and sighed. "I'll call her mother," she said.

--

She had the bottle of wine open a minute after Tara's mother picked Sam up. Her eyes were burning and she felt like she was made of old brittle glass until the wine swelled warm in her belly, and then it didn't matter so much. She filled the glass to the brim and put the albums back into the box, and shifted all the box's weight into one hand, the wine glass in the other.

"Romantic," she snorted to herself. "Right."

The cookie sheet was bare. Sam had shoved the new sneakers and the new album into her backpack and Nancy almost opened the door of her older daughter's room but she didn't want to know if Sam hadn't taken her yellow dog with her.

When Ned came back, finally, he came in with Jessie wrapped around him and Cole loud with happiness, and Nancy struggled up in bed and smiled, but when Ned saw the half-empty bottle of wine standing on the bedside table he vanished, taking their children with him.

"Are you all right."

"She thinks I didn't love her enough," Nancy replied. "That if I'd loved her, I would have stayed with him."

Ned sat down on the edge of their bed and looked away. "Oh."

Nancy felt her chest constrict hard as she rested her palm against her husband's back. "She knows you love her," she said softly. "She knows that."

"She's angry," Ned said, and turned to Nancy. "But she'll stop being angry."

"Maybe," Nancy replied.

--

Sam stayed over at Tara's house for as long as she possibly could, and when she came home on Sunday night it was already her bedtime. In the mornings Sam came downstairs just in time to grab her breakfast and lunchbox and go, and kept herself locked in her bedroom after school, leaving it only for a silent dinner and shower. Twice Nancy tried to talk to her, but Sam never replied; she just turned her blandly hostile gaze on her mother and remained mute until Nancy gave up.

When Friday afternoon came Nancy could imagine the nightmare of the weekend, and the way all the other weekends would be. Sam would not look at her, barely acknowledged her, obeyed anything Nancy was brave enough to ask of her with thinly-veiled contempt. Every time she did, Ned always glanced at Nancy, ready to step in and talk to Sam. But Nancy always shook her head, because she was afraid that if she ever did try to use Ned's authority to bring Sam back in line, it would prove just as useless as her own.

At dinner Nancy served herself little, knowing whatever she put on her plate would be thrown away. Sam was her usual quiet self through the meal, avoiding eye contact and speaking only when spoken to, until she pushed her plate away and Nancy felt the weight of her baleful gaze.

"I want to go see my father."

Nancy felt nauseated. "I'm going to have to check," she said, pushing her chair back.

Ned looked back and forth between the two of them, folded his napkin and put it down. "Sam, I need to talk to you."

Sam turned toward her stepfather, her mouth set in a stubborn line. "Right now?"

"After we clear the table."

Ned's tone meant that he would brook no argument, so Nancy's last glimpse at the two of them was of Sam gathering up the plates. Nancy headed upstairs, shutting herself in their bedroom, taking long enough to breathe a wish before she dialed the number she hated knowing by heart.

"Hello?"

Callie's answer meant Frank wasn't home, and Nancy's heart beat a little harder before slowing. "Callie, it's Nancy."

"Hi," Callie said, cautiously. "He's not here."

"I thought as much," Nancy replied. "Do you know when he's going to be back?"

"Well, business is pretty intense right now," Callie said. "He's working on two or three big projects. I can give him a message, though."

Two or three big projects meant a month, probably more, and if Callie was the one who could give messages... Nancy sighed. "I've been talking to Sam about some ancient history and I think she wants to hear the other side of it."

Callie's voice lost its faint, stiff tone. "He's not here to defend himself," she said wryly. "No offense."

"I actually protected him as much as I could."

"More than I would have done," Callie chuckled. "Did you want me to talk to her?"

"She wanted to go see Frank. I can ask if she wants to go see you, but if Frank has that many projects in the works, maybe I should get her to wait until she'll have his undivided attention."

"Nan..." Callie blew her breath out in a short burst of a sigh. "I know you and I are okay, but he's never been rational when it comes to you."

Nancy closed her eyes before she could make herself ask, "I know he's mad at me, I know he's been mad at me for a long time, and I probably deserve whatever he says about me, but when it comes to Sam... if he's starting to look at her the same way he looks at me now..."

Callie didn't respond for a long moment, and Nancy wondered if she'd upset her. "Is it possible... that Sam belongs to Ned?"

"He's been saying that."

Nancy's voice was flat, barely a question, and Callie rushed in to fill the silence after. "I think in his head that would make everything easier, because that way he would never have to think about you again. She reminds him."

"Do you actually think Frank would take my word for it, if I told him who Sam's father is?" Nancy sighed. "It's him. And trust me, I know how much easier it would make everything. Ned would adopt Sam in a second."

"I didn't know that," Callie said. "That Ned would do that."

Nancy held on for another moment. "I'll give you a call back if anything changes," she said. "If I'm going to be sending Sam your way anytime soon."

"Yeah," Callie said, still distracted. "Thanks."

Nancy headed down the hall, her mind still with Callie and hundreds of miles away, and pushed open the door of Sam's bedroom. Sam and Ned both fell silent on seeing her, Sam's face flushed, Ned's jaw set.

"So I can go?"

Ned shot Nancy a glance she didn't even bother decoding, because it didn't matter. "Your father is gone right now, probably for a month or more. If you want to see him, you're going to have to wait. Or you can go see Callie."

Sam considered for a moment, then shook her head. "You didn't answer my question," she said to Ned.

Ned looked down. "Biologically, no, I'm not your father."

Sam nodded, and Nancy caught the faint fall in her expression. "But Mom loves you. And she never loved my father."

Ned half-glanced in Nancy's direction, but didn't catch her eye. "I loved your mother for a long time."

"So you took her away from him."

Nancy's heart clenched once before she spoke. "I made the decision to leave Frank. Ned didn't make that decision for me."

"You took my father away from me."

At the naked, savage hurt on Sam's face, Nancy felt something snap, and her control was gone. "Your father took himself away from you," Nancy said, her voice rising. "Remember when you had your solo at the spring concert? Remember who was there? Not Frank. Your tenth birthday, remember?"

"If you'd stayed with him he would have been there," Sam said, rising, her voice matching her mother's.

"No he wouldn't," Nancy said, deliberately, almost pleading. "He loves Callie, he's probably loved Callie longer than I've even known Ned, and he's not home with her right now. Your little half-sister, the one you play with? That would be us. That would be us waiting in that house on the lake for your father to come home, and your life with him would be forced into weekends and split holidays anyway, God, Sam, you don't understand."

"But at least then he would love me," Sam yelled back, and she was crying hard now, harder than she had in a long time.

Nancy went over to her daughter and wrapped her arms around her, and for a second Sam still stayed tense, ready to fight back, but then she let herself relax into the hug, crying harder. "That is not the way he loves," Nancy said softly. "You want Frank to love you the way Ned does, and Frank... he just can't. Whether I left him or not. I found someone who would be there to see your life instead of waiting for the pictures. And baby, I'm so sorry."

"It's not fair," Sam said, into her mother's shirt, her voice choked with tears.

"It isn't," Nancy agreed. "It's not fair. The only thing I know is that if I could go back and change anything, Sam, I wouldn't change having you. No matter what. I never wanted you to hurt like this, and I wish you could have the kind of relationship with your father that I do with mine, but... but I did the best I could. Ned might not be your father, but he loves you."

"I know," Sam said, reaching up to swipe at her wet eyes with her sleeve.

"Sam, I do love you."

"He wouldn't be here?"

Sam sounded so heartbroken that Nancy felt tears rise to her own eyes. "When you were a baby and we were still trying to make this work, he would leave me for weeks, a month at a time. He left me with you and he wouldn't let me have a job or any way to distract myself. I just had to sit at home and wait for him. I wasn't made for that kind of life or that kind of relationship. I don't know how Callie handles it."

Sam was slumping in Nancy's arms, and Nancy sat down on the edge of Sam's bed and lifted her into her arms like she was still a child, and Sam rested her head against her mother's shoulder. Ned, when Nancy caught his eye, was studying the two of them, still a little pale and tense, but he was more relaxed than he had been, at home, all week. She hadn't realized until just now that hers wasn't the only heart being eaten from the inside, since this had all begun.

Nancy tucked Sam's hair behind her ear. "I had to tell you the truth," Nancy said softly. "I understand if you still want to talk to him about this..."

"You told me everything, though," Sam said, swiping at her eyes again, and Ned caught Nancy's eye with what was almost an accusation in his face. Almost. Except that he wouldn't have had the strength to say it either, and she knew that.

Then Sam looked up at her mother and her eyes were clear. "You knew whatã what I didn't tell you."

"I told her," Ned said quietly, from the corner, and Sam turned to look at him. The tension of the entire last week had drained away, and while it didn't quite feel the way it had, Nancy still was washed in relief. Even if it didn't last, at least for tonight they would be all right, the three of them, united in this knowledge and understanding that she prayed Jessie and Cole would never have.

"I didn't want to say it," Sam said, and Nancy wasn't sure who her daughter was talking to, and then Sam brought her thumb up to her mouth. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have anything to be sorry about, baby."

Sam closed her eyes. "I was wrong," she said, her voice trailing off, her pale face streaked with the remains of tears, her limbs going slow and heavy with exhaustion. "You loved me and that's why you gave me another daddy."

"Yeah," Nancy managed, and pulled Sam into a hard hug, and she could see the sympathy in Ned's eyes.

--

He had been doing it for almost nine years now. On Saturday morning Nancy barely stirred when he left their bed, and he made his way down the stairs without feeling them. Cole was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the couch, head tilted back, watching two primary-colored robots beat the hell out of each other on the television screen. He already had a bowl of dry cereal in front of him. Ned ruffled his son's hair and swung into the kitchen, belting his robe a little tighter around him.

He had just finished the first set of pancakes when Sam came downstairs, in a tank top and long striped pants, so long that they tucked under her heels with every step she took. She poured herself a glass of orange juice and sat down, and Ned put the plate in front of her with a smile.

"Good morning."

"Morning, Dad," she said, sweeping her hair out of her face, and Ned hated how she could make his heart rise with just that one simple phrase, the one she had been saying to him practically her entire life. He hadn't realized how that simple affirmation of his place in her universe had grounded him, until the past week.

He finished the next set and put them on a plate to cool so that when Jessie came down with him they wouldn't burn her fingers or mouth, then sat down across from his stepdaughter.

"Is everything okay now?"

Sam drizzled syrup over her pancakes and took the first bite, closing her eyes. "I didn't know," she said. "I thought there was something wrong with me."

"The only thing that's wrong is him," Ned said, knowing as he said the words that he shouldn't, but he couldn't stop. "This has never been about you."

"Or it's always been about me," Sam said, looking down at her plate. Then she met his eyes. "So Mom would never have married him if not for me."

"No," Ned admitted. "Probably not."

Sam nodded. "She would have married you."

Ned opened his mouth, but he realized that whatever he was about to say would be a lie. "I don't know," he said. "From the time I met her she was the only one I ever wanted. I couldn't have... been with anyone else."

Sam propped her chin on her hand. "It's so unfair that you aren't my father."

Ned smiled, at that. "Yeah," he agreed. "But I'm as much your father as you want me to be."

"You're the one who's here," she said. "Like Mom said."

"Like you said."

Sam smiled at him then, a broad, genuine smile, so like Nancy's that for a moment Ned could feel himself back in bed with his wife, his palm curving to mold against her hip, his face buried in her hair.

"I'll always be here, Sam."

When she finished her pancakes, Ned and Sam went upstairs, and Sam went straight to her younger sister's room while Ned vanished back into his bedroom, closing the door behind him, sliding into bed, facing his wife.

"Nan."

She didn't open her eyes immediately, just nuzzled into the cup of his palm for a moment. "Morning," she murmured, brushing a kiss against his skin.

"You're happy," he said, his eyes sparkling. "Suits you."

"And you're happy," she returned, stretching. "On a morning of banana pancakes, no less."

"I have my eldest daughter back."

His voice was so low she almost had to strain to hear it. "So it wasn't a dream," Nancy said, and her eyes went distant for a moment. "I didn't want knowing to do this to her."

"She's like her mother," Ned said. "And I think in a way she has known, all along. It just hurts, to know... to have what she believed about Frank, proven so wrong."

Nancy sat up and put her arms around him, and Ned closed his eyes as he embraced her in return. "It does," she agreed, under her breath, then kissed the flesh just behind his earlobe. "I feel a thousand times lighter."

Ned kissed her forehead. "And hungry?"

Jessie ate with her fingers, in the highchair, and Cole even tugged at his father's robe, asking if he could please, please, despite the bowl of sugared cereal, have some pancakes, and Nancy smiled over the rim of her cup of coffee at the scene. Sam went to the refrigerator for some more milk for Jessie's cup, and when she fastened the lid on and handed it to her sister, Sam caught her mother's eye, and smiled.

Nancy, without thinking, opened her arm and Sam came over to her, returning her mother's hug just as fiercely. Before Nancy knew it Cole was at her other side, and Jessie was frowning with dismay from her highchair before Ned swept her up on the way over, and then they were all joined, all five of them, for that moment.

"Love you, Mom," Sam said, and her siblings chimed in, and Nancy closed her eyes.

"Love you too," she said. "All of you. Every single one. So much."

Sam kissed her briefly, swiftly, before they parted, and Nancy knew that it wasn't going to be the same, but maybe it would be better, this knowing.