Written in 65 minutes.

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Morgan Penthouse: Master Bedroom

Jason kissed Elizabeth’s forehead, holding on one more moment. “We should—we should go downstairs. Spinelli is on his way home. I don’t know if we—” He didn’t even know why he’d called him back to the penthouse. It was nearly eleven. What did Jason think he or Elizabeth could do at this time of night?

But maybe he just wanted Spinelli where he could see him, and now he wished he’d sent a guard to collect the hacker, even though there didn’t seem to be any threat to young college-age boys.

Elizabeth nodded, keeping her eyes closed. “Yeah. I—I’m sure someone is telling M-Monica a-and I don’t know. Maybe you want to just—” Her hand fisted in Jason’s shirt. “Maybe just sitting together will help. I don’t know,” she repeated.

Jason thought about the Quartermaines, the family he had pushed and shoved away for a decade now. There weren’t nearly as many anymore, he thought. Justus had died the year before. Alan. Lila. And now—

All that remained were Monica, Edward, and Ned. And he knew every single one of them had adored Emily. They all had. She and Lila had been the glue for the family, and now—

“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see.” He rubbed her shoulders. “If they call, we’ll go.” He released her, then went to scoop up his phone from the night stand. “Let’s go wait for Spinelli.”

“Jason—” Elizabeth looked at him, and his breath caught because her gaze was so shattered, he wondered if it mirrored his own. He certainly felt that way. His thoughts kept scattering and he didn’t know why. He was usually focus — able to push things aside. Compartmentalize—but right now— “I don’t—” She swallowed hard, closed her eyes again, took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. I’m okay.”

She wasn’t, but he knew what she meant. “We’ll check on the boys one more time,” he promised her. “It’s—it’ll be okay.”

Her lower lip trembled, and she took another breath, but it was shaky. “Yeah. Okay.” But her feet remained planted in the carpet. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just — if we go out there—” Her eyes focused on the door. “If we go out there and Spinelli comes home, we have to tell him, and it’s real. And neither of us—we haven’t said it. I haven’t—we haven’t said it. And we have to, I think, or it won’t be real, but I don’t want it to be real, and I’m—” She released his hand, raked her hands through her hair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m trying not to do this.”

“Not to do what?” he asked, softly.

“I just want to stand here, and I want to scream, and I want to cry, and I want to hit something, and to—to—destroy something. I want to hurt someone, something—I don’t know, but I can’t do any of that because, well, I can’t, and I don’t know how to breathe. I should know how. I’ve done this before. I’ve lost people before, I know it gets—the day comes when you don’t choke on the grief anymore, but it’s different. It’s Emily, and it’s all the thousand things we don’t ever get to do. She never gets to be a doctor. Never gets to get married again and to laugh and drink hot chocolate with me or—” Elizabeth sucked in a shuddering breath. “And it’s all the ways she’s supposed to be here and just won’t. And it’s so selfish to think about any of it, and I keep putting it away, but it keeps spilling out, and I don’t want to be someone you worry about, and I know that’s how you process when things hurt too much. You lock it all up and focus on someone else and I just—”

She sat on the edge of the bed, dragged in a bracing breath. “Okay. Okay. I can do this. I’m sorry.”

He knelt in front of her, his hands on her knees. She lifted her tear-stained face to look at him. “We’re going downstairs,” he told her gently. “And we’re going to tell Spinelli. And then we’ll go out on the bike if no one else calls. We’ll both feel better.”

“Better.” She sighed. “Yeah, okay. Let’s try that.”

Quartermaine Estate: Foyer

Dillon swallowed hard when a pair of headlights turned into the drive just as Spinelli’s car had disappeared. He waited for the car to reach the house and park.

He knew, of course. He had watched enough television and film to know how this night would end. He’d lost someone essential to his existence, and the world had kept spinning somehow.

And now, Mac was stepping out of the car. The commissioner coming personally. Dillon swallowed hard.

“What are you doing out here this time of night?” Mac asked.

“Lulu, Spinelli, and I were down at the pool house, but Lucky called Lulu and Jason called Spinelli.” Dillon’s eyes burned into Georgie’s stepfather’s. “It’s bad, isn’t it? It happened again.”

“Yeah.” Mac exhaled. “Jason called? The rumors are starting to fly,” he murmured. “Let’s go inside.”

Dillon shoved the front door to the mansion open. At eleven, he knew that there wouldn’t be many people up — was this the kind of thing you woke people up for? “Wait here,” he mumbled at Mac. “I’ll go find someone.”

He found his brother in the family room, pouring over ELQ reports. Ned glanced up briefly at his entrance, then down again—but Dillon’s expression must have registered. He got to his feet. “Dillon. What’s wrong?”

“Um. Monica. We need to—We need her.” Dillon’s fingers felt too big. His head was throbbing. It had happened again. Whoever stole Georgie had taken someone else, and it hurt more now for some reason, because he was already living with the pain, and now—

Ned narrowed his eyes, then strode towards the foyer, Dillon following. He stopped when he saw Mac. Swallowed. “Christ. Mac. You’re here—” He looked back at his brother, then at Dillon. “Say it. Just say it quickly.”

Mac hesitated. “About an hour ago, Emily was found in the parking garage. She’d been—she’s gone, Ned.”

Ned flinched, then looked down, trying to gather his thoughts. Dillon knew his brother took his role as the family gatekeeper seriously. He would absorb the pain, put it away, then be the strong one for Monica and their grandfather. “Okay.”

“We need—I mean, we know who it is,” Mac said, almost awkwardly. “But we need—”

“An official identification,” Ned finished. “Right.” He took a breath. “Let me tell the family—”

“Jason knows,” Dillon said almost immediately, and Ned stopped. “I mean, I think he knows. Lucky called Lu to come down to the pier, I guess to go to tell Nikolas. And Spinelli talked to Jason. Jason wanted him home. I guess maybe someone else called him. Maybe—I mean, maybe he can do it. So that you can stay here. With Monica and Grandfather.”

“Yeah.” Ned rubbed his chin, looked at Mac. “I’ll have someone down there, but if Jason already knows — okay. Um, where?”

“The hospital. I’ll let the front desk know someone will be there. Ned—”

“Just—I’ll handle it from here.” Ned paused. “Mac, was it—was it like—”

“Yes. We suspect it’s the same.”

The same as Georgie. They couldn’t speak her name, but Dillon knew. Mac left, and Ned stared up at the darkened second floor, and Dillon didn’t envy his brother.

“Losing Alan nearly broke Grandfather,” Ned murmured. “But this? Emily? I don’t know how he’ll survive it. And Monica, Christ. How do you do this? How do you destroy someone’s world?”

“By remembering you’re not the one who did it,” Dillon said roughly, and Ned met his brother’s gaze. “You’re just telling someone what happened. But you didn’t do it. The sick son of a bitch who murdered Georgie and Emily and Chelsea—he’s the one that destroyed it.”

“It’s not going to feel that way in a few minutes. I’ll be—” Ned just shook his head and went upstairs.

Dillon waited in the foyer, and what felt like an eternity later, he heard a scream followed by sobs. He sat on the bottom step and put his head in his hands.

Spoon Island: Pier

There was an advantage of having a quick and clever little sister, even though it occasionally gave Lucky a headache. He’d met Lulu at the pier, relieved when Spinelli had been with her, not wanting her to be alone.

She’d known — he could tell in her eyes, because Jason had called Spinelli, and who else did Jason and Lucky have in common? Why would they need to meet at the pier?

He didn’t have to say it, which helped, but the trip over to the island was a quiet one. The launch pilot had been irritated at being dragged out of bed, but he’d taken one look at Lucky’s face and fallen silent. When they arrived at the pier, the pilot tied up the boat and headed over to the gatehouse where he lived, and Lucky and Lulu made the trek up to the main house.

Nikolas kept late hours, and was sipping a whiskey in the study when they arrived at the house. He frowned when the butler announced them both. “What’s wrong? Did something happen to Mother? Or Luke—”

Lucky took a deep breath, squeezed Lulu’s hand. “Nikolas. Tonight, in the parking garage at General Hospital, two bodies were found.”

Nikolas’s eyes darkened, and he shook his head. “Don’t say it. Don’t.”

“Emily was one of them.”

“Don’t—” Nikolas’s voice broke. “Don’t say it. It’s not—it’s not. I won’t let it—No!” He gripped the glass in his hand, then threw it at the wall where it shattered. “Don’t say it.” His voice broke. “Please don’t say it. It’s not—”

Lulu went to her brother, embraced him as Nikolas slowly slid to the floor, tears streaming down his cheeks. Lucky stood there, in the entrance. Frozen. He’d said it. It was different now than it had been in the garage. That had been his job. He was on duty. He had an obligation to be cold, to be functional.

But standing here in a room, in a house where Emily had once lived — he could see her now, sitting on the sofa or leaning against Nikolas’s desk, smiling back at them, with that wicked smirk and glint in her eye.

The disappointment that had dulled her gaze when he’d seen her last. He’d never reached out after the custody trial, still ashamed at how far it had gone—

And now there would never be another chance.

Patrick’s Condo: Living Room

Patrick silently slid home the bolt in the door as Robin drew off her coat. He’d wanted her here where he could look at her and keep reassuring himself that she was alive, that she wasn’t lying in a morgue, not like—

His mind skittered away from that—from thinking about who was actually gone and who’d they lost because how did you wrap your mind around something that couldn’t be true? He’d just seen Leyla—she’d been one of the nurses on his patient’s case, and they’d exchanged greetings. And Emily—

How were they gone? How could it be possible—

Robin sat on the sofa, her eyes staring ahead, still somehow unseeing. The silence in the room felt like it would choke them.

“She was the sweetest kid,” Robin murmured. “I forget sometimes that we’re close in age because I feel like I watched her grow up.” She looked at him. “She moved in with the Quartermaines just before Jason’s accident, around the time Stone’s health started failing, so I don’t think I really got to know her before that. Jason tried like hell to distance himself from anyone with the name Quartermaine, but not Lila, and not Emily. You couldn’t stop yourself from loving Emily.” Her voice trembled. “Lila was grace personified, you know. Elegant and lovely, and warm. That was good for Jason, but Emily — Emily was light and air and sweet. She was silly and—” Robin squeezed her eyes closed. “She made Jason laugh which was so hard back then, and it’s how I met her.”

Patrick sat next to her. “Hard to think about him smiling or laughing.”

“He doesn’t show that side to many people. He learned how to guard himself after the accident. But Emily — he could never hold himself back from her. She struggled so hard. She  had a pill addiction, did you know that?”

“No.” Patrick frowned. “No. When?”

“Just a teenager. She started using drugs, God, when she was just fifteen. She tried to fly off the Quartermaine roof, but Jason and Ned stopped her—we were all so scared. But she got help, and she got clean, and then—” Robin’s breath was shaky. “I keep thinking if I had gone, maybe we would have been late. Maybe Emily could have waited for me to run my tests, and we wouldn’t have been there. And Leyla could have gone on with her night. But I—”

“You know better.”

“I do. I do. But I just—I also think maybe I would have been in that parking garage at the wrong moment, and it would be me there.” Robin met his eyes. “But I stayed behind. I didn’t feel up to a girl’s night. Not after I realized—” She swallowed hard. “I stayed behind, Patrick. To run a test.”

He frowned. “You said that before. What test?”

“You’re the reason I wasn’t in that parking garage,” she murmured. “A choice I made to make the world stop. And it’s why my world keeps going. It’s so odd.”

His heart began to pound. “Robin.”

“I’m pregnant.” The words escaped her lips in a rush that he almost couldn’t hear, but he did. “That night. You, um, you need to get a blood test. We should be fine because my viral load is—but I’m pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” The blood pounded in his ears, and he stared at her. “As in—”

“Sometime in June, I think, we’ll—well I’ll have a baby. You—I don’t know what you want. But—” She met his eyes. “I’m pregnant, Patrick. I was running those tests in the lab when Emily and Leyla died. It was supposed to be me, but it wasn’t. And now I get to keep breathing, and they don’t, and I feel so guilty, but I don’t know how to stop being happy and sick all at the same time—” She closed her eyes. “Can you say something that’s not repeating the word pregnant or my name?”

He so badly wanted to say something profound or useful or happy or just something, but the words—he’d forgotten every word in the English language that wasn’t Robin or pregnant. He licked his lips. “I—you’re pregnant.” When she just shook her head, Patrick tried again. “No, okay, let me—okay. This is okay. It’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” Robin repeated. “Are you—”

“Yes.” Patrick took a deep breath. He didn’t know if he’d be any good at this, hadn’t been entirely sure he wanted it, but somehow it was here. And if Robin hadn’t been running tests, she’d have been lost to him forever, so — “Yeah, this is okay. I’m okay. And you’re okay. And we’re going to be okay together. That’s what I got right now.”

“Okay,” she repeated. “Well, that’s something.” She leaned against him and he stroked her hair. “I’m going to miss her.”

“Me, too.”

Morgan Penthouse: Living Room

Spinelli unlocked the front door, and went inside, finding Jason and Elizabeth sitting on the sofa, both fully dressed. Elizabeth’s eyes were rimmed with red, swollen, and Jason—

Oh, it was something interesting to see Jason’s eyes nearly as red as Elizabeth. “The Jackal apologizes for his delay. Fair Lulu needed to meet her brother and he did not want to leave her alone. Not when he suspected—” He swallowed hard. “He suspects bad news. Noble Emily?”

Elizabeth’s lips parted, and she closed her eyes. Jason nodded swiftly. “Yes. It’s—yes.”

“Okay.” Spinelli swallowed hard. He quite liked Jason’s sister, and she’d been so kind to him. “Okay. How can the Jackal be of service?”

“We need you to stay with the boys,” Jason said roughly. “Ned called. He needs—” He faltered, and Elizabeth touched his arm.

“Ned asked Jason to identify her,” Elizabeth said. “So we need to go to the hospital. You’ll look after them? They should sleep until the morning. I don’t know how long we’ll be.”

“The Jackal will see it done. Whatever you need. He is—” Spinelli fisted his hand. “Is it—it’s the same? It has happened again.”

“Yes,” Jason managed. “They think it’s the same. We need to—we need to go.”

“Of course. Take your time, Stone Cold. The Jackal will defend the castle.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, squeezing his arm as they passed. “We couldn’t do this without you.”

He watched them go, thought of the terrible task they’d been asked to do, and hoped that somewhere, the villain who had stolen those sweet lights from the world was counting his days.

There wouldn’t be many of them left.

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