APRIL, 2001, LOS ANGELES, LA

            REAGAN SAT CROSS-LEGGED in front a spread of prints on her living room floor, chewing the cap of a pen between her teeth as she inspected them. The images blurred together in a swirl of colors and it took many times of re-focusing her eyes to get her attention back on track. Chewing on the pen was becoming more entertaining and that mildly concerned her.

She heard the front door open and it wasn't long before Dave strolled in, flicking shaggy pieces of hair out of his face.

"Hey baby," he greeted her, wasting not a second of the time it took him to stoop over and plant a kiss on top of her head.

"Hey," Reagan said around the cap of her pen, which was then angled at the corner of her mouth. She was finally getting used to Dave letting himself into the house (albeit without Gracie there) with his key again. It had taken some getting used to, as she'd been at first stunned into thinking a burglar was barging in the first few times, but it was very welcomed now.

"Whatcha' got there?" he asked, stretching his neck out to catch a glimpse of the glossy pictures she had scattered in a half-moon around her. She heard a crunch and when she looked up, she saw a greasy brown KFC bag dangling in his hand. The other held a half-eaten drumstick.

"You-," she began, accusation laced in her voice. Dave rolled his eyes and dropped the bag into her lap.

"Don't worry. I got you mashed potatoes."

"Thank god. I haven't moved from this spot in over an hour."

Reagan abandoned her pen and traded it for the plastic container of mashed potatoes she pulled from the bag. Her stomach snarled, no doubt starved from all the half-assed concentration she'd been putting into working.

"When you said you were working from home today, I thought you meant business calls and other shit like that," Dave said. As he sat down next to her with his legs bent at the knee, she saw how shiny his lips were with grease and it almost made her laugh.

"You missed the conference call. I brought all this back from the office," she said, gesturing to the prints. "I'm looking over the shoot for that one girl's second album release."

He stuck out one hand to snag one of the prints and she slapped it away, weary of his oily fingers.

"Shouldn't your team of lackeys be going over this? Not you?" he asked.

Reagan shrugged. "The art department called. They wanted me specifically to look it over."

"Makes sense. You know, being how all-mighty and powerful you are."

He was teasing her, trying to coax something akin to a proud smile onto her face, but the quip only made her want to cringe. What she really wanted to tell him was that she was being handed responsibilities that she didn't give a damn about. It wasn't important to her whether or not an album cover had doves being released on the front of it versus no doves featured at all.

"Want my opinion?" Dave offered casually.

"Don't even. I know what you're going to say. It sucks."

He broke out into a loud peal of laughter. "Yeah, it sucks. It sucks really fucking bad." Making a show of zipping his lips, he pretended to flip the key over his shoulder. "But you didn't hear it from me. You can be the one to drop that bomb."

"I'm not doing anything," she said, pushing the pictures away. "I'm completely okay with declaring it out of my hands."

"Eat your potatoes and cry on my shoulder in peace, then."

Dave patted his shoulder and Reagan happily fell against it, letting out a sigh that lasted forever as she unsnapped the lid to her mashed potatoes and dug into them with a fork. He chuckled and rubbed her arm, alternating between soft caresses and gentle squeezes that felt incredibly good after how long she'd sat stiff.

"I'm assuming your day has been better than mine?" she questioned after swallowing a bite. "Dicking around with Taylor in Topanga?"

"It was most definitely not dicking around," he countered with a pretend look of disdain. "There were zero dicks involved."

"I can think of two that were probably present. One of which I've been well-acquainted with."

"Look at you, rolling out the pervy jokes," he taunted, nudging her in her side right where he knew it would tickle. He got the reaction he wanted when she giggled and squirmed away from him, only to lean back against his arm.

"Nah, we got some stuff done," he continued. He fiddled with the lace of his shoe as he spoke. "The demos aren't so bad. At least so far. We're definitely ahead of the game before Europe in the fall."

Hearing him remind her out loud of what awaited her in the coming months made her muscles grow taut. A splinter of ice zinged a chilling path up her stomach, through her chest, and all the way to her throat where it gagged her. The mashed potatoes in her mouth suddenly took on a glue-like consistency.

"The . . . festivals," she said uneasily, forcing the words out as she wiped her mouth. "That's right."

Dave advanced on without noticing the change in her body and voice. He cocked his head to the side thoughtfully, rambling without pause.

"Things could be better. I mean, it's a lot, but it's good material and I'm glad some of it is out of the way before we're overseas otherwise I'd be stressing. But that's not until July, really, and besides one gig this month I've got time . . ."

He finally noticed the shift in Reagan's demeanor when she sat up, setting her food aside and tucking her arms around her abdomen. She rocked back and forth slightly, a now instinctual reaction that she couldn't subdue whenever the subject of the Foo Fighters touring occurred to her. She'd always had a knack for hiding the emotions that she didn't want people to read, especially when it came to Dave, but too much had changed for that to still be true.

Touring. Overseas. Him, alone except for the companion of his bandmates. Women.

Lots and lots of women.

"Reags?" he asked, clasping his fingers over her shoulder to steady her twitching movements. "You okay?"

You could at least try not to let him see that you're falling to fucking pieces, her ego hissed.

"Yeah, I'm fine." Her voice was too pitchy, falsifying a sense of reassurance that nowhere near matched the anxiety brewing inside of her. She could feel her mind drifting, taking her away from the present moment.

She was no longer in her living room. She was in the hellish memories of her imagination, revisiting the scenarios she'd tried to conjure after he'd cheated on her. Even his voice tried to find its place in those vague versions of reality. She could hear him assuring another woman that she was out of his life — she was a regret.

Regret. A regret. You are a regret. He regrets you.

"Reagan." Dave's voice was more anxious now, his grip firmer on her arm. She felt his fingers dig into her collarbone. "Breathe, baby. Breathe."

She listened to him and sucked in a gasp of air, the relief flooding her lungs. She hadn't even realized that she'd been holding her breath.

"Jesus. You were turning fucking blue!" he cried.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry," she chanted, hurriedly getting up from off the floor and wiping her sweat-slicked hands down her pants. She made a move to exit the room, but knew he would only chase after her, so she instead paced in tight circles, her vision swimming.

As if that looked any better.

"Can you tell me what's wrong?" he asked. He still sounded anxious, perhaps even more so now that she wasn't near him. He got to his feet too and reached for her, but thought better of it when she just barely flinched.

"It's just . . . the Europe thing." She slid one hand across her forehead and back through her bangs. Through that small touch of her fingers against her own skin, she felt the pulse of her heartbeat and it made her more nervous. Her entire body was throbbing with the cadence of it, so much so that she wondered if her heart was going to defy biology and burst from her chest.

Reagan watched as Dave changed. It was a subtle change, but she knew him well enough to identify the tightening in his upper body, the hands slipped into his pockets and the shift of his weight on his feet, all characteristics that pointed to his sudden discomfort.

"Reags . . ." he began.

It was sad knowing how badly she wanted to reassure him, yet couldn't. She couldn't ignore the way the subject made her feel when the trauma of it continued to keep her fastened in its chokehold. There was no nice way to express that she didn't trust him. Her fears that had come alive in the past prevented it.

He'd promised her everything, so many times that it had become commonplace to hear him say it. But there was one thing he couldn't give her. One thing that would have ripped his soul at the seams to offer, and that was his permanence with her. In Los Angeles, or wherever they wanted to go.

It was a conundrum that even Reagan struggled to accept. She wouldn't ask him to stop touring, to effectively dismantle his career, but she couldn't withstand the anxiety it gave her. Once upon a time it had been bearable.

But that was before what he'd done.

"It's hard for me," she explained, refusing to meet his eyes. "I don't . . . like it."

"I know you don't like it," he sighed, sounding as if he was talking to Gracie rather than another adult his age. "But you know I have to do it."

That wasn't what you were saying when I served you divorce papers, she almost said. She caught herself though, in one tiny breath that entrapped the reminder behind her lips.

He'd been desperate, then. So desperate that his claim that he'd give it all up, give up his life's work, for her had likely been a lie told for the sake of drastic measures.

And she wouldn't have let him do it, anyway.

"It scares me. It really freaks me out to think about what you're . . . capable of when I'm not around."

The word 'cheating' was one she'd been trying to avoid since their last argument over Louise.

Dave kept his face composed, though Reagan saw the twitch in his eyes.

"You know I wouldn't do it again," he said. "You trusted me going away way before that ever happened. I know you can do it again."

"That was before it happened."

"And it's not going to happen again. Like I said."

He spoke with a note of finality, as if that alone would get her to move on and drop the conversation, but Reagan cringed away from him as her face twisted in pain.

"How do I know that?" she asked quietly. "What if you get mad at me again? What if we have a fight?"

"Reagan, the last time wasn't like that, I thought that you were le-,"

"I know. And what if you think that again? You honestly believe that there won't be hard times, harder times than before, ahead? How do I know you won't guzzle a whole shelf of liquor and make the same mistake twice based off your assumptions?"

He inhaled deeply and briefly closed his eyes before opening them again.

"Nothing would ever make me do that to you again," he said, framing the reassurance with an absolute certainty that Reagan couldn't buy into.

"Really? Because I told myself that. You know how low I was. After everything I — we — went through." She was hinting at January of ninety-eight, a painful memory for them both. "And you still did it. You didn't even . . . truly consider what my end game was. You made the choice for me while I was going through hell."

"That's not fair," he said, his voice sharper than before. "We've been through this. I wasn't a mind-reader. I'm still not."

She jerked back, momentarily stunned by the flash of his obvious annoyance.

"Why are you like that?" she whispered. "Why are you suddenly so hostile with me all the time whenever this comes up?"

"Because I want it to be solved. Over and done with. I need to know that you can trust me and that we can move on."

"What if I can't trust you?"

Dave blinked at Reagan. The fluttering of his eyelids went on and on until hurt turned his brown eyes glassy and the irritation he'd been posturing with faded away, leaving nothing except his raw, exposed vulnerability.

"You don't trust me?" he asked softly. "After everything we've been through?"

"That's my point, Dave. After everything we've been through, it still happened. What hope do you expect me to still have?"

He opened his mouth to protest and she knew what he was going to say before he even had the chance.

"Don't say what you're about to say," she pleaded. "Don't start with the whole 'I'll quit the band' thing. Please. You know that I don't want that for you and I'd never ask you of that."

"What do you want me to do, then?"

It wasn't a real inquiry for a solution. Reagan knew that what he was really asking was, where do we go from here? He wouldn't ask, though, not when her answer would surely be the defining moment of whether or not they stayed together.

That was too much for even her.

They'd added nearly four more months to their eleven year shared history together. Four months that had undeniably filled her with hope while she'd been too careless to actually address the problems that came with her and Dave reuniting. It had been effortless for her to slide right back into loving him with her whole being, even when she'd known there were things she hadn't solved, kinks in her emotional stability and trust that she hadn't worked out.

For a fleeting moment, he'd just been Dave again. He'd been alone in the spotlight of all of her most precious memories, embodying the person she'd first fallen in love with. The lure of that had put a stopper to the concerns that she'd temporarily buried, regarding if and how she'd ever trust him again.

Now they were overflowing, pouring out of her with uncontrollable speed.

Her throat closed up and the very last bits of hope that she had glimmered, much like a flame about to be extinguished in the wind.

Maybe Kate had been right all that time ago, back when the divorce had been filed. She'd told Reagan that it was possible, even if it didn't seem believable then, that she and Dave just weren't right for each other. As hard as they loved each other and as tightly as they held on to what they'd had, they were on two separate ships being shot into space. She couldn't hang on to the worn out, beat down, disbelieved version of what had once been, especially not when it drove her mad trying to withstand it's weight.

The only thing left to do now was let go.

Dave was waiting for her to speak. His face was ashen, his mouth only slightly parted around every baited breath that he took. He was waiting. Time was ticking. Reagan was shaking.

Not now, she thought. Don't let it be now.

The silence between them was interrupted by her cellphone, trilling from her pants pocket. It was loud and obnoxious, but it was something of a distraction that delayed the decision she was abruptly being forced to make.

With a trembling hand, she pulled it out and answered, raising it to her ear.

"Hello?" she asked in a throaty whisper.

"Reagan." It was Kimberly's voice that answered her, sounding panicked. That alone snapped Reagan to attention.

She'd heard her mother angry before. She'd heard her while she was careless, annoyed, even sad. But she'd never heard her ever sound as panicked as she did then.

"Mom?" Reagan pressed her phone closer to the side of her face. "Are you okay?"

"It's your father."

____________

Dave had always made a meaningful effort to be grateful for the plentiful things in his life. He'd been raised that way, but it was more than that. It was a personal moral that he'd gained after those handfuls of years in the music industry, witnessing the lowest of the low when it came to the nature of human beings.

He'd promised himself he would never be like that. It would never matter how much authority he held, even the sheer amount of it that was likely concentrated in one pinky finger. He'd never sincerely gloat about the privileges that came along with being who he was.

Any desire to brag on his success, no matter how small, had completely vanished as he sat in the waiting room of a hospital in Olympia with his head in his hands. All he felt capable of was throwing himself down to the floor and thanking his lucky stars that the money he'd spent in a flurry of emergency to fly Reagan, Gracie and himself to Washington hadn't left a dent in his bank account.

He barely remembered how he'd ended up there, surrounded by the sterile smell of death and chemicals and heartache. All he could recollect was that phone call Reagan had received from her mother, that fucking phone call, that had made her collapse into him like a rag doll. He recalled flashes of how he'd sprung into action, pushing aside the misery and fear he'd been previously drowning in at that moment to push Reagan out the door and to the car. It was a daze trying to remember the rest, from pulling Gracie out of school and driving eighty all the way to LAX.

Looking back on the murkiness of it all, Dave wondered if he should have waited. Reacting calmly would have perhaps been better for Reagan's sake, but his instinct to panic had come from that look in her eyes. He'd never seen the color green, his most favorite shade that was contained to her irises, look so horrified.

"My dad," she'd choked out. "He's hurt."

Those were the only four words he'd needed to slip into autopilot. He'd abandoned all of his practiced reasoning skills to make it better, make it right, for her. Anything that caused her to look like that — like she'd just witnessed an on-site execution — was enough to make him act irrationally.

"Dad." The sound of Gracie's voice, so small and uncertain, forced him to look up. She was seated in the flower-patterned waiting room chair beside him, pulling on the sleeve of his Bad Brains shirt.

"Is Grandpa going to be okay?" she asked.

It was the fifth time she'd asked in an hour. Dave had been counting. And every single time she asked, he knew in his heart that it wasn't up to him to tell her what he already knew to be true.

"We have to wait and see, G," he answered hoarsely. "Mom will tell us."

The lie in what he'd said laid in the fact that he already knew what was going to happen to Richard Abner. He understood bits and pieces of it, exchanged in a quick conversation between him, Reagan and Kate.

Richard had been fine. That was according to Kimberly. He'd been fine as they'd embarked on a routine trip to the grocery store together, him behind the wheel of the car and Kimberly in the passenger seat. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary until he'd forgotten.

Forgotten how to get to the grocery store.

The details blurred from there, though Dave knew Reagan had the rest of them. What he was sure of was that Richard had panicked, distraught over the sudden missing link in his memories, and he'd gotten out of the car in a haste to inspect what street he'd been on. He'd tripped. Hit his head.

That's why they were all there — he'd split his forehead open pretty badly. Kate had said the wound would require a multitude of stitches.

Despite how out of touch the pattern of his life outwardly seemed, Dave had been able to draw a conclusion for himself after Reagan had gone into Richard's hospital room to see him and Kimberly. He wasn't so far removed from the cruelty of the world to understand that Richard, Reagan's hero, was never going to be the same again within a few short years.

"I'm tired," Gracie sighed. The book that she'd brought with her, taken from her backpack after she'd been ripped out of school, nearly slid off her lap as she leaned into Dave's side.

"You can close your eyes," he murmured, tucking her under his arm.

"Not until we know Grandpa is okay," she replied sleepily.

The sound of a throat being cleared diverted Dave's attention away from his daughter and into the threshold of the hallway that led to the hospital rooms. Kate was standing there, her arms crossed and her eyes rimmed red.

She was staring directly at him. He knew immediately that she wanted to speak to him. Privately.

He gestured to Gracie and Kate gave a small shake of her head. It wordlessly assured him that she'd be alright in their line of sight. They weren't going far.

He patted Gracie's knee and told her he'd be back — he was going to talk with Aunt Kate. Gracie understood by then that the conversations between adults that night were not intended for her ears. She'd given up trying to listen in once Robbie had left the hospital with the twins and Kate's husband.

As Dave walked over to Kate, he couldn't help but to feel painfully out of place. Reagan was the love of his life, still so much of a wife to him, and yet he felt awkward standing on the sidelines of her family's grief. He hadn't seen most of them in awhile and he wasn't surprised that some of them had held fast to their resentment. Robbie had hardly spoken to him that night.

He knew what they were thinking. Go pick up your fucking guitar and get the fuck out of here like you always have and always will.

"How is he?" Dave asked under his breath. He'd forgotten how tiny Kate was. Far tinier than Reagan, with her dainty crop of brown hair that only came up to the base of his throat.

"Embarrassed. Mostly confused," Kate replied. She scrubbed one hand at her eye, smearing more of the mascara she'd been wearing all around it. "He's scared. The doctors already told him it's going to get worse. Nothing will stop it. He'll forget pretty much everything in time."

"And Reagan?" It hurt to say her name when he was trying to grasp the pain he knew she must have been in.

Kate's lips pursed, like she was trying to stop herself from crying.

"She's beside herself. She's mad at our mom. Looking for someone to blame, you know. She wants to know why she didn't pick up on it sooner."

"And?"

"It didn't seem as severe as it is. Dad isn't young anymore. When he forgot things, Mom assumed it was his age. She didn't realize it was this bad until today."

Dave reached both hands behind his head and clasped them together. It wasn't only the loss that he was feeling for Reagan, but for Richard. He'd always been the coolest guy with his shabby drum kit and love for music. The nicest guy, too — Dave recalled many times that he'd wanted to grow old the way his father-in-law had, with an easy kindness about him that never wavered.

What was going to be left of that within the next few years?

"Reagan . . . she can't handle this right now," he mumbled.

"I kind of figured, with you being back in her life and all."

Ouch.

The brutality of what Kate said made him momentarily forget the sadness of the night. He looked up at her incredulously.

"What?" he asked. He'd never received anything less than ultimate praise from Reagan's little sister's.

She frowned slightly, clearly regretting her choice of words.

"I don't mean it the way you think. I like you, Dave. I liked you for my sister . . . at one point."

Now she was just rubbing salt in the wound.

"Kate, I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'm saying that you confuse her. She loves you and you love her, I get that, but you get her all mixed-up trying to jump through hoops to get past what happened."

Dave swallowed, suddenly feeling like a wriggling specimen under a microscope.

"She knows there's no rush," he said. "She can take her time."

"You don't get it, though. There's no time left. You're going to live your life, and rightfully so, but she'll never be at peace with that. She's fucked up no matter how hard she tries to hide it."

"Do we have to do this now? Right now, when your dad is laid up in a hospital bed down the hallway figuring out that he's got fucking Alzheimer's?"

Kate sighed, and Dave didn't neglect to notice the sheen of tears that suddenly glazed her eyes.

"You're right," she said. "I'm sorry. I just . . . Dave, this is going to kill Reagan. Maybe not tomorrow, but one day when our dad isn't our dad anymore . . . it's going to kill her."

She locked her tear-glistened eyes with his eyes and whispered out her plea, so soft that he barely heard it even through the dead silence of the hospital waiting room.

"I'm asking you not to kill her, too."