Alice could count on one hand the times when she had fallen into the grip of insomnia. In only two months, she would be seventy.

For the past week, whatever it was that lulled her to sleep and knocked her out like a rock had taken as much of a holiday as any other good and steady thing. Every night since meeting the woman in the park, she had climbed into bed, as normal, with or without Robert (depending on Robert’s normal), and fell half-asleep for half an hour before waking and repeating.

Tonight she had climbed out of bed entirely. The excuse was Tate’s cries from her crib, and they provided a weak cover when instead of sitting in the overstuffed nursery chair and rocking the infant back to sleep, Alice took her downstairs into the sitting room, blocked off the entrance with the gate, and let her crawl around.

( She was ruining the baby’s sleep pattern, but her own eyes were wide open and barely managing to blink, let alone anything more permanent. )

"So what are you doing all the way out here?"

Dagan Chase was talking to a ghost. This was only sort of unusual – he talked to the ghosts in his parents' house all the time, having grown up in a haunted house that normally kept its hauntings relatively harmless and quiet – but normally those ghosts weren't quite so real as this one.

He hadn't even realized she was a ghost at first, and when he did, he was subsequently lost as to why she was out on the Cheviots, wandering the hills, instead of – well, instead of where a ghost should be. Not that he knew exactly where a ghost should be. He wasn't, for example, Tarquin Ramsey. Dagan of course barely knew Tarquin Ramsey, but he knew enough to know that everyone said he talked to the dead. Could either work his way into the afterlife or summon ghosts from objects or – something like that, Dagan didn't exactly remember.

When he'd come out to the hill, though, to read, because that's where he chose to do his reading when he was back home from school. Coming back on weekends was a long trip, but his father was ill, and so more often than not Dagan did so, leaving as early on Fridays as he could. At least they had a long leave coming up on the 13th. He took his sketchbook and his textbook and something else for entertainment and wandered out, and that's where he saw her.

( Golden curls down to her back, a very thin frame, an oversized sweater and a pair of tattered jeans – she had to be freezing in this weather, Dagan thought, as he walked up to the girl he'd never seen before (a girl who only looked a little bit younger than he was), and discovered that the closer he got to her the more chilly it seemed to be. )

The little infant had been lifted from her mother’s lap and taken to her bed. The parlor was now dark and quiet, a fire going in the grate and the curtains drawn to reveal the frosty gardens lit by vague winter night light. Alice could see her reflection in the windows, and her mother’s reflection, too. Her mother was thinking, or perhaps trying not to think, because no one quite knew what was best to think at all. There were ghosts in so many places.

“Did I tell you what happened in the park today?” Alice asked, speaking in hushed tones that barely escaped the crack of the fire.

“Mm? No.” Isabella looked at her daughter. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine! It wasn’t—it was rather strange. I had Tate with me, and we weren’t around anyone at the time, so I held her hands and let her walk a few steps.”

“She’ll be walking before the end of the month if you’re not careful.”

Alice smiled and looked down at her lap long enough to notice and fix a piece of wayward fuzz. “She does get a kick out of it.” A quick adjustment to better settle into her seat signaled the switch from one topic and back to the original. “Anyway, she’s babbling up a storm and I hear this elderly woman—oh, I say elderly and she mustn’t have been much older than me. When she died, I mean, because I looked up at her—she said something much like, ‘What a sweet little girl.’ I’m used to seeing them but here she was, nearly lost in the greenery, sitting on a park bench with nothing at all to do.”

( 'I wonder what happened to her,' Isabella murmured, her face taking on a look of shock. )

How could she put into words the crushing disappointment? She hadn’t expected to feel anything more than relief if her luck held out, but now the luck that presented her an empty house—so empty—felt like the worst luck imaginable.

Isabella didn’t know what possessed her to return home, but a day in London with Alice inspired her adrenaline to pull her west, and she found herself in a white-knuckle grip on the motorway that didn’t let up until her joints were burning and the house was looming above her in the winter gloom.

( She was focused as she approached the front door. )

"Well, I just don't know either."

It was the answer they had both been expecting, and yet not an answer either wanted to deal with. John and Olivia Capio looked across the table at each other, fleetingly concerned, and their expressions weren't missed by the third member of their party.

( The third member of their party had been there for about a week, and yet they hadn't told anyone about her.  )

“She wasn’t really our aunt,” Ainsley said in a pointed tone, and Aidan recoiled a little as his sister seethed.

“Just because she wasn’t really related to us doesn’t mean she wasn’t really family.”

“Perhaps,” she conceded, pursing her lips as she paced around the room. Ainsley hadn’t known anyone who had died, and her step-aunt was the closest she had ever come to a death in the family.

“I’m going to miss her,” Aidan said quietly, fiddling with the seam on his T-Shirt as he spoke. Ainsley didn’t want to acknowledge that he had said anything, and continued to pace.

“I really hope Mama doesn’t start to ... you know, you know, with Ciaran again. I mean, sure, his sister might die and his sister-in-law is dead, and he might have to look after his niece and nephew, but I don’t think that’s a reason for them to get back together.”

( I don't think Mama stopped loving him, Ains. )

Alice was sitting at the bottom of the stairs as Tate made a shaky climb from one step to the next. The baby had a tendency to stop and look behind her as though she knew she shouldn’t go so high, and Alice would fix her a look that would make her smile and exclaim. Then she would stop and sit down and try to stand up using the railing, but every time she was foiled by the reach of her mother’s arms.

Tate was on her fifth journey to the fifth step with Alice’s hands reaching out to catch her while her grandmother watched and thumbed through a photo album of the last twenty or so years. Times she missed. There were pictures of Fabian doing exactly what Tate was doing now, but his black, wavy hair was nothing like the sparse blonde curls of his sister. But their similarities were still there. He seemed to have the same habit of turning around and reaching back. Isabella couldn’t remember any of her children caring quite so much about permission or reassurance. Save for Alice, who liked to have someone with her whenever she did anything.

Alice must have loved the way her children focused on her when they were young. It made Isabella smile just as it made her wish she had been there, like now, when Fabian was this age.

( These were such good distractions to have, but they weren’t quite able to cover everything that was happening around them. )

Adele couldn’t remember the last time she had had sex.

She hadn’t shared this fact with anyone. Ainsley had begun to have her suspicions, but she wasn’t spending enough time with her mother to have any real grasp on what she was up to.

Adele couldn’t really work out whether the lack of sex bothered her or not – some days it did and some days it was the last thing she was thinking about. She only saw Ciaran on the days he came to pick up Murphy for the afternoon, and he barely spoke a word to her when he did show up.

One afternoon he came round to collect Murphy, she managed to get more out of him than a simple ‘Hi’, and ‘He’s already had lunch’ or ‘I haven’t had time to cook, just get him some McDonalds or something’ (the latter of which Adele found incredibly frustrating). The doorbell rang at exactly 1pm, which was the time Ciaran was supposed to pick him up. Murphy was more than relieved at the fact his father had shown up, for he was now ‘Nine’ as he proclaimed to everyone, and was certain this made him eligible for fighting with his mother when he didn’t get his own way.

( Adele didn't bother to fight with him too much. )

Saoirse had spent the better part of a year in London, and even to her own surprise, she felt it would soon be time to go home. It wasn’t really that she wanted to go home, nor did she even have any interest in what was going on at home, but her lease was coming up for renewal on her place in London, and both her and Ness were growing slowly tired of the small amount of space they had to call their own.

More importantly, though, was that Saoirse was starting to wonder what her family were up to. Not her father, per se, but her younger brother and sister. Though she had barely spoken to them in the last year or two, Brigid would now be 16, having only had her birthday a few weeks ago. Martin would be 19 – and Saoirse would be lying to herself if she hadn’t felt a pang of guilt when his birthday passed in August only a few months earlier.

Saoirse’s loathing at the thought of moving home had lessened significantly over the last few months, and when she finally brought the topic up with Ness, a brief and rather to the point conversation was all that followed.

“Hey, Ness?” Saoirse asked, muting the TV that Ness was clearly watching.

( Ness made a small noise that Saoirse pretended to ignore. )

The drive out to Papillon from the hotel in Paris was surprisingly peaceful.

Aaron sat in the back, between the twins, who were utterly thrilled at the whole adventure, and getting to spend so much time with their brother. He, in turn, was talking to them – teaching them a whole host of things that Pierrick would never follow, he was sure.

And Pierrick, well, he kept holding on to Estee's hand, unwilling to let it go. She seemed to sense that, or at least to forgive him his foible.

They turned off the highway, heading north through fields, until they passed through a forest and wound up on ever-narrowing roads on the other side, eventually pulling to a stop in a small village square surrounded by picturesque stone buildings. A swarm of people boiled up out of the buildings, surrounding them.

Most of them looked, to one degree or another, somewhat like Pierrick.

"So," he said, giving Estee a tentative smile, then turning in his seat enough to sign into the back. "We're here."

[It's still November 20th.]

About an hour after they left the piano bar, having two to five sandwiches each, and everyone except Kita drinking a little, they settled into a hotel suite with three beds and a nice big TV. Finding a good movie took a little while, but nobody quite wanted to sleep yet, and so they piled into various seats and watched whatever it was was on. Kita was leaning backward against Lindsey on the bed, playing idly with his hair while typing something-or-other on her Treo and paying attention to the film at the same time.

And then the movie ended.

Kita, for her part, was still awake. "Okay, so now that we've looked at a house, eaten and then watched a two-hour long movie and still nobody looks tired – midnight snack?"

"Well, I'm feeling a bit tired," Lindsey mumbled into Kita's neck, still leaning his head into her hand.

Marisa, leaning against Jess, sat up a little and looked at Kita. "What would you like?"

"Oh, I don't know, I had a feeling everyone else would want to eat." She usually wasn't wrong about it.

Jess and Marisa both chuckled at that. "I think you aren't wrong," she answered, and went to their bags to see what was still available as an option.

"We're just still on Mexico time," Mina tossed out, paying more attention to her nails and the television than the others in the room for the moment.

"I'm always confused about when it is." Kita had to travel for work too much, and felt buzzed and sleepy at once, all of a sudden. That, she knew, wouldn't last, and she kept running her hand through Lindsey's hair, wondering how long it would take him to pass out.

( The answer, as always, was 'not much longer', not if she kept up what she was doing. His eyes were already drifting closed, even with the promise of food. )

Things were getting weird.

That was easy enough for anyone to figure out, and for Elijah, it had been a little bit too bizarre for his liking. He'd been in Scotland, just wandering around, taking pictures, visiting the descendants of old, old friends – and then he'd found himself feeling sort of ill, and then he'd found himself walking alongside a woman who had died fifteen years ago.

They walked and talked for hours before he realized she wasn't the only ghost around, and for that matter that she didn't know why she was there and hadn't been there for very long. But that it had happened to her before. That confused him; he tried not to think about it and they went back to telling stories.

But the next morning, when he still felt a little ill, and got tired of exchanging stories with ghosts he didn't know, he decided that Izzy might not be doing so well, and maybe he should go see her. And a train to a rental car got him to Wiltshire, where he found that Isabella wasn't there.

Unsure of what else to do, he drove to a certain house in Manchester, walked up to the door and knocked. Then remembered there was a doorbell, and rang that as well.

Funny thing about headaches. One moment Isabella wanted to relieve the tension in her temples, and the next moment she was grinding her teeth to aggravate the strain. Hating the pain and wanting it to linger. Sometimes wanting it to get worse.

She wasn’t at home. She was in a dark bedroom in her youngest child’s home, listening to the sound of sleep. Her son-in-law had come home beaten and exhausted, and the house was quiet for most of the day. Especially quiet so far into night. Even the youngest member of the household, the eight-month-old daughter, was silent.

Inside Isabella’s head, a war was raging fast and furious. The same war that had carried on from one battle to the next for two long years. The loss of her husband and the inconsolable grief in knowing that he wanted them to be apart. He was dead, and she was living—capable of being both but told to be here. To be among the living, to be a part of the living, to be living, though she had failed at this last request. Tried and failed.

( Andy didn’t understand how the world had changed. )

[Note: Italics are French.]

Pierrick had had a headache all day.

He had toddlers, and they were feeling playful. He spent time on a construction site. Both of those tended to be incredibly noisy, and so – for the most part – he'd chalked it up to that, and ignored it as best he could.

And he'd been home, in the middle of the afternoon, when the telephone rang. Home, to find the ring excruciatingly loud and painful, reminding him just how much his head hurt – ( home, to answer the phone, because he recognized the French phone number. )

Whatever Robert had expected when he went into the hospital Monday morning, it wasn't what he got. The splitting headache had begun to come back as he drove, but he kept trying to push it back and force himself to believe it wasn't there – until he walked in the door.

And there were too many people in the foyer.

Most of them weren't people.

He'd groaned to himself and tried to ignore them as they talked to him, asked for help, and he apologized in a low whisper on occasion, since he felt bad he couldn't help them. But he couldn't exactly talk to them, either. Other people might see. And other people might ask.

But it was too harrowing, and after only a few hours of feeling disheveled and having a headache, being too jittery to get anything done, accidentally writing on his hands, dropping things, spilling water on his feet, getting his tie and coat caught in a door – Robert gave up.

At lunchtime, he went home.

The drive wasn't long and as he let himself into the house, he wondered if anyone was even home to notice him. Just in case: "Alice?"

[ Takes place November 20th, 2009. ]

The plane from Dulles to Heathrow took off on the other side of the presumably-bulletproof plate glass window, but none of them were at the gate to see it go. Lindsey was still being held in Customs, while Kita argued with the FAA's representative and Mina, Jess, and Marisa stood by and watched the show without any comment. They probably enjoyed it more than Lindsey did; with a window blocking them from Kita's ire, they lost most of the sound, but were free to make up their own conversation. Lindsey's ears had long since wilted by the time Kita finished arranging an overnight shipment of highly flammable spirits-of-tequila to Lydia, complete with orders not to open the box, free of charge. The only penalty, by the time she was done, was the loss of their flight, the last one of the night.

( In Lindsey's defense, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. )

"So you're sure we're not going to get killed for this," Anna asked, adjusting the large courdoroy bag flung over her shoulder and trying to stop it from catching her earring. "Because Alan might be almost as mad as the last time I tried to paint his toes."

"Nope." Her cousin Fabian, who was carrying an even larger bag of takeaway food, shook his head as he swiped a card to let him in the door of the office building in question. "He'll think it's funny. Him and anyone else. And he'll appreciate it, it's a great idea."

They were bringing Alan Sullivan, mutual relative, takeaway Chinese.

( Alan and anyone else in his office. )

Estee was nearly asleep on her desk.

Her hair was pooled all over her paperwork, having mostly fallen out of its ponytail, and she kept one eye open, staring off into space at nothing. Maybe at the wall. Maybe at the clock. The clock was ticking, wasn't it? She blinked.

She hadn't meant to be so tired; she hadn't meant to put her head down, hadn't meant to dose off like that. Wasn't sure how she became so comfortable on a pile of papers. Maybe it was the leather binder.

The leather binder was nice.

Estee began to dose off again, but almost immediately was disturbed by a sound. Of – a bell? No. No, a telephone, the telephone was ringing –

She jumped up with a start as the fact the phone was ringing (very loudly) fully sunk in, and, flustered, leaned back on her chair and picked it up, gasping out, "Hello?"

When Fabian and Anna returned from having taken Ilaria and Rosie sledding (and the dog for a walk), they found that something had gone amiss in the house. Neither was quite sure what it was, but they felt unsettled equally – the girls seemed fine, and settled into their rooms as the two adults tried to figure out the problem.

It was Charis, the dog, who discovered the actual problem first, and alerted the humans by barking. And barking. And barking and barking and barking.

They ran to the kitchen, the source of the noise.

( They both stopped dead in the doorway. )

Hannah's head was pounding. She decided it was quite likely that she had the headache of the century, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life in bed, not moving, and never making a sound. "Fuck Christmas," she groaned, despite herself, and then she felt something move beside her. "...huh?"

( Not So Merry Afterall )