fic: The Kelpie - Part II Chapter 1

[readingrat]

Part II: Philadelphia

Chapter 1: On the Doorstep

March 2015

A steady ringing pulled her out of her sleep. She squinted at her clock; it was 2 a.m. Heaving a deep sigh, she reached for the phone. Her job in 'Family and Community Medicine' had any number of downsides: it boasted neither the salary nor the clout that being dean of a well-placed teaching hospital brought with it, and she'd had to fight hard to gain some sort of standing at the hospital, but one of the upsides of being head of a department that dealt mostly with prevention, education, etc., was that emergency phone calls were a thing of the past. Till tonight.

"Hello?" she said sleepily.

"Dr Cuddy, it's Allison Cameron."

Cuddy frowned. She swatted vaguely at the lamp on her bedside table and propped herself up on one elbow. "Dr Cameron, what ..."

"It's Wilson." The steady throb of an engine accompanied her words. Cameron must be calling from a car.

She leaned back against the backboard of her bed, closing her eyes again. "I haven't spoken with Wilson ever since I left Princeton three-and-a-half years ago."

"Dr Cuddy, I need your help."

Oh, no! This was why she'd left Princeton - to get away from this madness. "What has House done this time?"

"House?"

"Yes, House! If this is about Wilson, then House must have done something."

"House left three years ago," Cameron said flatly.

"Oh. Where is he?"

"I have no idea," Cameron said somewhat impatiently. "Dr Cuddy, it's about Wilson, not about House. He needs to be put on psych watch."

Cuddy digested this. "Suicide attempt?"

"Yes."

She didn't need to ask what Cameron wanted. Wilson was head of oncology. Putting him on psych watch in his own hospital or anywhere where he'd be recognised at once would not improve his standing. House's department had only mastered his various crises so well because it was small and its members were fiercely loyal to their boss. Wilson, however, had a true behemoth of a department, and his authority depended as much on his aura as an unassailable rock as on his competence as an oncologist. A melt-down like this, if publicly known, would cause rumours, minor uprisings, and possibly the one or other coup attempt.

"Where are you?"

"We've just left Princeton. We should be in Philadelphia in about half an hour."

Cameron must have been pretty sure of her assent. "Are you arriving in an ambulance? Does he need to be admitted to the ICU?"

"No and no. He OD'd on sedatives, but I found him before any major harm was done. He's stable."

"Okay, I'll alarm our admissions office and the psychiatric ward, and I'll meet you there." She put down the phone, swung her legs out of the bed and went to the bathroom. By the time she was dressed, ten minutes had passed. It took a further ten minutes to wake her neighbour, explain the situation to her and get her to move herself from her warm bed into Cuddy's spare bedroom, and another twenty to reach the hospital unit that harboured the psychiatric ward. Cameron was in the waiting area.

"He's in already, talking to the psychiatrist on duty," Cameron said in hushed tones.

"What happened?" Cuddy asked more brusquely than she intended. Something about Cameron had always rubbed her the wrong way, and being called out of bed in the middle of the night to help someone who in her mind was associated inseparably with House was not likely to improve her attitude towards the person who had called in this favour. Her personal attitude stood in stark contrast to her professional respect for Cameron - one of her last administrative acts before leaving PPTH had been to appoint Cameron head of Diagnostic Medicine, to Foreman's chagrin and Chase's dismay. Foreman, thwarted in his ambitions, had left PPTH to go west; Cameron's only stipulation on taking the job had been that Chase leave the department, a condition Cuddy had been willing to fulfil, transferring Chase back to surgery without batting an eyelid.

"I needed Wilson to sign off a procedure. When he didn't answer his phone, I drove over to his place. His neighbour has a key and she let me in. I found him in his bedroom. I made him vomit, and most of what he took came out again, so I decided to risk bringing him here. He was adamant about not being admitted anywhere in the Princeton area."

"Since when does Wilson sign off other departments' procedures?"

"Rosario is gone on a conference," Cameron explained. Rosario was Cuddy's successor as dean of PPTH. "Richardson is responsible for medical issues when Rosario isn't there, but Richardson was - still is - in the OT, and Wilson is next in line, so I tried to contact him."

It sounded like solid reasoning, but it wasn't, as Cuddy well knew. If a procedure was so urgent that it couldn't wait for Richardson to come out of the OT, and the next in command didn't answer his phone, then one didn't go chasing him through the bars of Princeton. One either checked who was next on the list or one did the procedure at one's own risk. Given that Cameron was head of a department, the latter would definitely have been defensible. She felt tempted to ask Cameron whether she had gotten Wilson's signature before rushing him off to Philadelphia - it's what House would have done - but she was sure that the oh-so-urgent procedure had been forgotten over Wilson's needs.

The psychiatrist on duty came up to them. "Dr Cuddy," he nodded in greeting. Cuddy rose, as did Cameron. "Dr Wilson has agreed to be admitted, which simplifies our formalities. I've sent him right on up to the ward." When Cameron opened her mouth in protest, he added pacifyingly, "Dr Wilson is exhausted and doesn't feel up to any more interactions. I'm sorry, but I'm sure you'll be able to visit him soon."

Cameron's mouth drooped. Then she took a deep breath and asked, "Did he mention any of his ... other problems?"

The psychiatrist gave her a reassuring smile, the kind reserved for over-protective family and friends. It was intended to convey that their loved one was in caring, capable hands. "My conversation with Dr Wilson was short in view of the lateness of the hour and his exhausted state. But we'll talk more extensively tomorrow, when Dr Wilson is rested, and I'm sure ..."

"There's a risk of DT," Cameron said hurriedly.

There was a short silence. Then, after a glance at Cuddy, the psychiatrist said, "Very well. Thank you, Dr Cameron, we'll keep our eyes open." A quick tip of his upper body, like a short bow, and he was gone.

Cuddy was less discreet. She turned to Cameron, her hands on her hips. "Wilson is an alcoholic?"

"Depends on whom you ask. He says he has his drinking under control," Cameron replied, her thinning lips indicating what she thought.

Cuddy looked at her watch and made a quick decision. "There's a mean coffee machine in the doctors' lounge."

Cameron tipped her head in assent.

A few minutes later they were seated on the shabby, but comfortable couch in the doctors' lounge, each nursing a cup. Cameron postponed talking by sipping her coffee. Cuddy waited patiently, knowing that Cameron would have refused her invitation had she wanted to evade this conversation.

Cameron exhaled in a long breath and said, "It started after House left. Wilson continued as before, but ... he wasn't really there. He isolated himself, came in to work hung over, forgot appointments and meetings, ..." She shrugged. "The usual reaction to bereavement, I guess. I've been keeping an eye on him." At Cuddy's look of mixed amusement and disapproval she added, "I have the office next door - it's not a big deal, really."

Cuddy remembered with a feeling of melancholy when the 'eye-keeping' had worked in the opposite direction, from Wilson's office to diagnostics.

"It's been a steady decline really," Cameron continued. "I have no idea what alerted me this evening, but I had a bad feeling when he didn't answer his cell or his pager. And I don't think seventy-two hours of psych watch will solve the problem."

"What do you want me to do?" Cuddy asked directly.

Cameron looked straight at her, the serious, adjuring look that made lesser mortals buckle and do her bidding. "I want you to persuade him to get admitted to Mayfield. It did House a world of good."

"Excuse me?" Cuddy thought she wasn't hearing aright. "I understood that you believed that House was a corrupting influence, even after Mayfield."

"Well, yes. Anything other than that and Mayfield would have had to answer charges of brainwashing. But they got House to cooperate and stay in for three months of treatment, and that's what Wilson needs. A time out to recover and get his priorities sorted."

"And those are?"

Cameron looked down at her coffee. "He has to accept that House is gone for good, but that there are ... other things in life worth living for: his job, his friends, ..."

"He has friends other than House?" Cuddy couldn't help asking.

Cameron stared at her. "Yes, of course!" At Cuddy's piercing gaze, she flushed slightly, but then she braced herself. "He could have friends, if he'd get over House and accept that although others can't fill that particular gap, he can live quite well with it if the rest of his life is full enough."

Cuddy chose not to comment that. Instead she asked the question that had occupied her mind ever since Cameron phoned her. "What happened to House?"

"No one knows, and Wilson is absolutely tight-lipped about it. After you left, we'd see him around occasionally. He was persona non grata at the hospital, but we'd catch glimpses of him with Wilson or in the park." Cuddy didn't bother to ask what Cameron would have been doing in the park. "Then, about three months after you left - and this was really odd - Wilson had him admitted for detox. There was a huge ruckus; Rosario blew his top, and he and Wilson had it out in the lobby of all places, with Wilson yelling that Rosario could hardly refuse a patient in need and a former employee, and that you'd have given House the chance to detox even though it was your place he wrecked, and so on."

Cuddy frowned. "Why did he detox at PPTH? Why not at Mayfield? The last detox at PPTH really didn't go well."

Cameron shrugged. "I have no idea, but I do know that this time Wilson supervised the detox. He checked who'd be on duty and he vetted some of the staff. It didn't go down well with psych."

Cuddy chuckled drily. "Rosario probably didn't know what hit him. He must have had Wilson down as harmless and good-natured till then, only to discover that he was the real boss at PPTH." She scratched her head contemplatively. "I should have warned Rosario, but I was too pissed at the way things had gone in the end to feel charitable towards my successor. So what happened after the detox? Do you think House relapsed and OD'd?" she speculated.

"No. I think Wilson and House were planning his departure. Foreman also turned up a few times during that period, and he hobnobbed a lot with Wilson. Considering they weren't exactly best buddies before that, it was pretty obvious. After the detox both Wilson and House disappeared. Wilson returned about two weeks later and wouldn't say where he'd been or where House was. I'm assuming that he and Foreman built up a new existence for House somewhere under a new identity, but insisted that he be sober before they left him there."

Cuddy puzzled over this. "What good would a new identity have done him? It wouldn't have gotten him his licence back."

Cameron leaned back and sighed. "I'm sure there are hospitals that would baulk at employing the world-famous Dr Gregory House when it's a well-known fact that he lost his licence, but that won't look too closely at credentials presented by an unknown physician who bears an uncanny resemblance to a well-known diagnostician." At Cuddy's disbelieving look she added, "Oh, not here, where the chances of someone recognising him are too great, but what about some sunny Latin American republic with an acute shortage of well-qualified medical personnel and a lax attitude towards political correctness? They wouldn't be the first ones to jump at the chance of getting Gregory House cheap," she quipped with a side glance at Cuddy. "Does that sound so unlikely?"

"No, not for House," Cuddy agreed, "but Wilson as an accomplice in something that goes totally against the grain of what he believes in?"

"When Wilson started drinking I cornered Robert," Cameron said. "He refused to tell me what had happened, but he was in the know. I demanded to know what they'd done and he reassured me that he wasn't part of it. He said that no matter what I believed, there were some deeds that he wouldn't lend his hand to."

She and Cuddy exchanged significant glances. If Robert Chase, opportunist par excellence, had refused to participate in a plot devised by his former boss, then that plot had to have had some major moral hitch in it.

"Whatever House persuaded Wilson to do, it's breaking him. He needs help; he needs to get away from Princeton and stay away. Sometimes," she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, "sometimes I think even the air there is poisoned."

"But you returned," Cuddy pointed out.

"Yes," Cameron said slowly. "I thought that with House gone, ..." She trailed off, rotating her cup nervously in her hands.

Cuddy rose. "It's a pain, isn't it, when you can't blame House for your misery anymore," she said without a trace of sympathy.

---

Cuddy is there punctually at ten a.m. to pick him up. The nurse on duty hands him a small plastic container with pills in it.

"Here's your medication for this afternoon, Dr Wilson. Dr Cuddy, you'll be bringing him back this evening before eight?"

"Yes, of course," Cuddy murmurs, giving him an apologetic smile.

It's awkward, being released into the care of a babysitter who once used to rely on him for guidance and advice.

"Great! Well, have a lovely day, Dr Wilson. And don't hesitate to come back early or give us a call if there's any problem." This last is aimed at both of them.

"There won't be," he says grimly.

He picks up his bag and follows Cuddy out of Mayfield's heavy doors into the parking lot. This is the second time he's leaving Mayfield since he was admitted. The first time out on a day pass was a fiasco, leading to an extension of his stay and very strict conditions for future excursions. There's no doubt that Cuddy will see to it that those conditions are met.

"So," he says as Cuddy guides the car out of the parking lot, "what's the plan for today?"

"Nothing much. Just a regular Sunday," Cuddy says with studied casualness. "Rachel's at the soccer field. We'll pick her up, and then we'll have lunch. I thought we'd play it by ear after that."

He nods, trying to hide the slight unease that the prospect of an unmapped afternoon causes him. Once the initial humiliation of being admitted to a psychiatric institution had faded - a matter of hours - and the routine there had become familiar - a matter of a few days - he had derived immense comfort from not having to plan his own day, make his own decisions, deal with his own failures. Every minute is charted; if his schedule says 'leisure time', then it means leisure time. It means he's free to enjoy every moment of it in any way he likes without feeling guilty about the things left undone, because others decide for him what he has to do and when he has to do it.

There's a rule at Mayfield that released patients may not come to their ward as visitors, too great is the danger that they'll relapse just to return to the comfort of clearly structured life with no responsibilities. He himself was hesitant about giving the day pass, also known as 'stress test', a second try after the initial disaster, so hesitant that Darryl suggested that he might have sabotaged his first trip outside on purpose so as to extend his stay. He denied it hotly at first, but now, trying to get his agitation under control, he has to concede the point to Darryl. If Cuddy weren't driving the car, he'd be heading for the next bar, not so much because he needs the drink, but because having the drink will ensure that he won't have to deal with the decision 'To Drink or Not to Drink' for a long time.

He looks out at the landscape to distract himself. It's about a twenty minute drive to the soccer field, Cuddy says.

"The one at the park?" Wilson suddenly says. "What's she doing there?"

Cuddy's smile is half a grimace. "Her best friend has an Important Soccer Match and Rachel wants to cheer her on."

"That's ... great."

"I suppose so. I'd rather she lived her own life than live it vicariously through others, but that's a concept one can't really explain to a seven year old."

"Friendships are also important," he suggests.

Cuddy snorts. "Do you think her friend will come to watch Rachel if she ever decides to take up a sport?"

"Why not? Besides, friendship isn't always a tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye sort of arrangement."

Cuddy gives him a you-should-know sort of look before turning her gaze back on the road. He sighs and stares out of the window.

At the soccer field he waits at the car while Cuddy goes to find Rachel. Small talk with the soccer moms is not on his agenda for today; besides, he wants to spare Cuddy the embarrassment of explaining who he is. ('No, he's not my boyfriend!' with an amused laugh. 'He's just a friend who - needs help.') She comes back with an excitedly jabbering Rachel who has to recount the entire game in detail.

"Mom, the referee was totally against our team. It was so unfair. He had no idea what he was doing! He should have called at least three fouls on the other team, but he just ignored them!"

"Rachel, the referees do their best. I'm sure ..."

"No! The other parents said so too! Ciara's dad was yelling at him."

Wilson smiles, amused at the dilemma Cuddy finds herself in. She can now either criticise the other parents' behaviour (not really an option) or abandon the poor referee (not really an option either). He steps forward to rescue her.

"Hey, Rachel!"

"Oh, hi, Wilson! You should have come earlier. You missed a really good match."

"Did your friend - Emma, isn't it? - shoot a goal?"

"No. She plays defence," Rachel explains. "But she's really, really good. She's the best in the team. That's why she plays defence. You need a strong defence, because," she stops to recall the pearl of wisdom she must have gleaned from a grown up, "it doesn't matter how many goals you shoot if you let the other team shoot even more."

Wisdom from the mouth of babes. "Quite right," he says.

It's only a ten-minute drive from here to Cuddy's place, thank goodness, because if there's an off-switch to Rachel, Cuddy hasn't found it yet. As they get out of the car Cuddy whispers to him, "Don't worry - she'll come down again. She's always excited like this after social occasions, but she's fine once she's had a little quiet time with her books."

He looks up at the house, an apartment block in a quiet residential street in Germantown that reminds him of the one he lives in.

"Our apartment is on the top floor," Cuddy says.

"So you finally got your loft conversion." It's about the same size as his, but with an additional bedroom ('so mom can stay the night when she babysits for me') and without the open layout ('when you have a kid, you want a few doors that you can put between yourself and her!'). Furniture-wise, it's uncluttered. Cuddy must either have abandoned a lot of her things or they didn't make it through the double calamity that hit her house. He supposes that she must feel safer in an apartment than in a house, after what happened.

Lunch is a quiet affair. Rachel, who disappeared into her room while Cuddy got the food ready, reappears for the meal a lot calmer than before.

"So how's school?" he asks her, valiantly trying to make conversation.

"Boring."

O-kay. "But you meet your friends there."

"Only Emma. The others aren't my friends. They're stupid."

He glances at Cuddy to see how she'll deal with this, but Cuddy isn't bothered. She catches his glance and interprets it correctly. "She can think what she likes about other people as long as she doesn't say it to their faces." At his doubtful look she adds, "Tell me, did you ever change your opinion on someone you disliked because your parents told you they were nice? Especially when your parents didn't even know them?"

He thinks, but doesn't say, that House must have rubbed off more on her than she knows.

After lunch, Cuddy suggests that he and Rachel watch television together while she tidies up the kitchen, but he insists on helping her. He needs to keep busy, and doing the dishes is as good a task as any other. Not that he's jittery; he's getting calmer and more assured as the day progresses. If anyone's nervous, it's Cuddy. She jumps when he accidentally drops a spoon, peers out of the window at every odd sound from the street below, and freezes when the doorbell rings.

"Want me to get it, Mom?" Rachel calls from the living room.

"No, it's okay, I've got it," Cuddy shouts, defrosting and rushing to the door. She's back a moment later. "Only the neighbour," she says reassuringly. The thing is, he isn't the one who needs reassurance.

Interestingly, it's Cuddy who brings up House first.

"You disapprove of the way I let Rachel talk, don't you?" she says, as they sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee once the dishes are done.

"It - doesn't seem like you."

"I'm not soft on her because her life is tough in other respects." She stares into the distance before she focuses on him again. "I want her to respect me the way I respected House for his absolute integrity. Telling her lies about her classmates or asking her to pretend to feel something for them when she doesn't isn't going to make her look up to me."

"They can't all be stupid," Wilson feels forced to interpose.

"They aren't - when we moved here I made sure to place her in a school where she'd be challenged." There's a glint of the old Cuddy in her eyes, the one who is convinced that only the best is good enough for her daughter. "She doesn't mean they're stupid, she means that she doesn't like them, and informing her that they're as intelligent as she is or that they have other wonderful qualities isn't going to make her like them more. Yes, I could point out that there's a difference between not liking someone and considering them stupid, but again, that's a concept a seven year old doesn't really grasp. So I just try to limit the damage she does when she interacts with her classmates. You should sympathise," she adds, "since your patience with stupidity is limited, too."

"Excuse me?"

"Oh, come on! You were House's best friend for over twenty years, a colossal jerk and ass whose only mitigating qualities were his sticking to his somewhat skewered principles - which you certainly never admired - and his genius. You were attracted to him because you found anyone else who might have made a good friend too boring in comparison."

"Umm, I've been told that I had a parasitic need for his neediness."

"Oh, crap! Okay, yes, there may have been that too, but if you're looking for crippled addicts, my clinic is full of them. You could easily have found someone just as needy who was far less able to fend for himself, but you chose the most brilliant, witty, meddlesome ass around because of the entertainment value. The only two women who stood a chance with you against House, Amber and Sam, weren't exactly dumb either."

He considers the subtext. She has mentioned House, not once, but twice, and she's as edgy as an addict on the brink of cold turkey. Or as a PTSD sufferer on the verge of an anxiety attack. "You're in contact with House," he says, his emotions doing a wild swing between frustration at her foolishness, satisfaction at being able to read her so well, and bitterness at being left out of this.

She flushes as she looks down into her coffee mug. "Yes," she admits. "After I met him in Bristol I friended him on Facebook, and ..."

"Cuddy, are you crazy?" He can feel his anxiety level rising. "Forget it," he says carefully, slowly. "I don't think I want to know." That's a lie, but if he doesn't want to fall apart and return to Mayfield early in disgrace, he's going to have to await another day to explore this.

He gets up to find Rachel. "Hey, would you like me to show you how to do felting? We made flowers in my creative arts group, and I brought some wool along to show you."

He and Rachel spend the next hour in the kitchen immersed in a bowl of soap suds, while Cuddy looks on incredulously.

"They make the guys make felt flowers," she asks, "and there's no uprising?"

"We were also allowed to make hearts," Wilson deadpans. Then he explains, "Flowers are dead easy - even a guy with underdeveloped fine motor skills can do those - and felting, if it's done with soap water, doesn't require any sharp tools. That makes it ideal for therapeutic purposes."

"What's wrong with sharp tools?" Rachel asks.

"People could hurt themselves. You aren't allowed to use sharp knives or needles all by yourself, are you?" he evades.

"Aren't you all grown-ups at your hospital?"

Cuddy comes to his rescue. "Some of the people at Wilson's hospital might try to hurt themselves," she explains.

"Why?"

"I've told you about the stuff in our brains that makes us feel happy, endorphins," Cuddy says. "Some people don't have enough of that, and then they feel sad all the time. Pain makes your brain produce endorphins, so some people hurt themselves, hoping that that'll make them feel happier for a short time. But it's dangerous."

Rachel nods sagely. "If they hurt themselves too hard, they could kill themselves, and then they'd be dead."

"Yes," Wilson agrees, "that tends to be the consequence of killing yourself." He decides that if explaining self-harming and suicidal tendencies to a primary school kid is an example of adherence to House-ian principles of openness, then he is right to view them with distrust.

Rachel continues along her own train of thought. "Cedric Diggory is dead," she announces triumphantly, beaming at her mother. "Is that the sad bit in the story that you were warning me about? It wasn't really sad."

Cuddy lets out a sigh. "Harry Potter," she explains to Wilson. "Cedric's a student in the fourth book who gets killed by Lord Voldemort."

Now he remembers. He watched the movie with House in the theatre. "You're letting her watch the fourth Harry Potter movie? It must be PG-13 or something!" Despite years of dealing with House's convoluted logic, he can't even begin to fathom how this fits the category 'Teaching my child to respect my honesty and integrity'.

"No! Of course not!" Cuddy rubs her forehead. "Rachel refuses to read anything the school sets her as a task."

"They just give me boring stuff to read!" Rachel interjects.

"She's obsessed with Harry Potter. I figured it didn't matter what she read, as long as she learned to read somehow."

"I suppose not," Wilson says somewhat uncertainly, although he's reasonably sure there is a good reason why school reading assignments for the second grade don't include texts from Harry Potter.

"So, I dumped the books in her room and told her she'd either read her homework assignment or a chapter of those every day, thinking that after one look at the first chapter of the first book she'd cave and return to her simple homework assignments. ... and I freely admit that I underestimated Rachel's drive when baited with Harry Potter. "

"Seems she's finished the fourth book," he says drily.

"Almost," Rachel confirms. "So can I read the fifth book now?"

Cuddy face palms. "This is crazy! Those books aren't meant for children her age."

Wilson refrains from pointing out that she gave Rachel the books in the first place. "Shall we play a game together?" he suggests, taking pity on Cuddy.

"Oh, yes!" Rachel speeds away to her room to find one.

Cuddy leans her forehead on one hand. "I guess empathy isn't her strong point," she says.

No, despite being adopted, she seems to have inherited a goodly portion of her mother's ruthlessness and singular dedication to reaching her aims.

At seven Cuddy packs Rachel off to the neighbour's apartment ("I don't want to go to Louisa! It's boring there!"). Then she takes him down to the car. He notices that before she gets in, she scans the street in both directions. Her paranoia is beginning to rub off on him, for he starts observing the cars behind them in his side mirror and soon singles one out that could be following them. (Never mind that almost every car is going the same way they are, because they're heading straight for the Interstate.)

"What's up?" Cuddy suddenly asks him.

He's too caught up in this now to lie convincingly. "Oh, your jitters are contagious," he tries to laugh it off. "I'm starting to believe that someone may be following us."

Cuddy doesn't laugh with him. "Which car?" she asks, scanning the cars behind them in the rear-view mirror. He's silent - there's no sense in feeding her anxiety. "The blue one?"

How the hell does she know? Has she been observing the cars, too? "I'm sure I'm just imagining it. It's been a long day for me."

She glances at him, then back at the road. "Yeah," she says neutrally, "that's quite likely."

But her fingers tap the steering wheel impatiently at the next red light, and when it turns green she accelerates faster than is good for her tires. She takes the next turn-offs rather abruptly, without signalling her intentions, and on the I-76 she performs some interesting weaving manoeuvres that look like they are a lot of fun when they are shown on TV, but really aren't when experienced live. Her exit from the interstate is accomplished by slamming on the brakes and changing lanes just a few yards before the exit. The driver behind them honks and sticks up his middle finger. She's silent and tight-lipped until the guard at Mayfield waves their car through and lowers the barrier behind them. After a last glance in the rear-view mirror she stops the car in the parking lot and kills the motor. There's a long silence.

"Will you be okay on the way back?" he finally asks.

"I'll be fine," she says curtly. She doesn't pretend not to know what he's talking about. "I got us here in one piece, didn't I?"

Now that they're not driving anymore, he can risk talking about what is happening. "Cuddy, you're falling apart. You've been seeing and hearing phantoms all day, staring out of the window every time a car drove along the street, jumping when the doorbell rang, thinking that that car was following us. You've got House on your mind because you're in contact with him again - which is insane, totally insane, and you can see what it's doing to you. But he's not here. He's not waiting outside your house. He's not following your car. He's not observing you. He's in Bristol, thousands of miles away."

Cuddy leans her head on the steering wheel for a long moment. Then she lifts her head and turns to face Wilson.

"No, he isn't," she whispers. "Oh, God, Wilson, I've been so stupid! House is here."

---

	Chapter Index