Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters!

And I'm going to miss them all - I'm so sad.

Thanks to royalty09, emptyvoices, and everyone who reviewed.

Epilogue

It is Saturday, nearly a week since I left home, and for now, I am coming to the end of my journaling. I suspect I will have much more to wrestle with in the days to come. I am on a commercial flight from New York to Miami, the one I was originally scheduled to return home on, and we are set to land in about half an hour.

With the time change, it was mid-morning on Friday when Jackson and I landed in New York City. Before we landed, Jackson reserved a suite online at the Lux New York and offered to send me home on the next available flight to Miami. After a brief internal debate, I chose to stay with him.

We spent a little more than twenty-four hours together there. Jackson left our rooms just long enough to get my original luggage and my I.D. back from the woman, Marty Hall, who successfully posed as me here in New York all week. I opened my suitcase, looked at the clothes I'd packed there, and felt they belonged to someone I no longer know.

"So now what, Jackson? Where do you go from here?" I said this to Jackson this morning, in the last hour I hadn't wanted to ask; hadn't wanted to face any of this, but now it couldn't be avoided.

"Back to work."

"How can you go back there? They offered to give your job to Rade if he killed you!"

"It's the nature of the business. I took out the competition, so I get to keep the job. I won."

"So you're going right back to being who you were. You don't have to do this, you know. There are other … vocations."

"This is who I am. I can't be anyone else."

"You could try."

"If I could, I would; for you."

"You made me care, Jackson." And this seemed to me the cruelest thing of all.

"I care, too. You know that. And it doesn't have to be this way. I want you with me."

"We can't be together." In the end that is what it came down to. "Our lives don't fit."

"We can make them fit, Leese. Stay with me."

"No."

This spiral notebook is tattered and worn now, as am I. I feel very alone, very fragile and I miss Jackson terribly. I don't know if I will ever see him again. It is best, I believe, if I don't, and he has agreed to respect my feelings on this. This is a private grief; I can tell no one, not even Dr. Finch, about it. But I will survive it. I have survived much worse.

The plane is circling now for its final descent. Through the window, Florida looks hot and sunny. Although it is still spring, after the chill of Prague, it will feel like full summer to me. Soon I will see my father and Cynthia. I have my lies ready, for I know I will have much to explain. I will have to see Matthew, too, at some point, but I am going to plead exhaustion tonight. I need to be alone.

I feel claustrophobic when I think about going back to work on Monday, back to the civilized, customer service driven world of the Lux Atlantic. I'm sure Dr. Finch would put a label of some kind on this feeling, but I'm not sure it needs a label. I'm not sure this is a bad thing. I'm thinking I may have outgrown my former life, and that it would be somewhat dishonest for me to try to step back into it as if I'd merely been out sick with the flu for a few days. I'm thinking that after I've had a chance to rest and recover, I might pursue a career change. Maybe Mr. Keefe is the person I should talk to about this.

For now, though, it's time to put this notebook away.

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I downloaded a song just now. It's a song I'll always associate with Lisa, the one about the black horse and the cherry tree. I can't seem to get it out of my head, so I thought about Lisa, and how 'journaling', as she called it, seemed to calm her troubled mind. I'm not a big fan of self-analysis - I don't read Dr. Phil (not often anyway) - but my plane doesn't land for another three hours and I have a lot of time to fill in so I thought I'd try it myself.

I guess this is about Lisa. She's been in my head now for months. I thought taking her along on this little trip with me would cure that, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.

I have never allowed a woman to interfere with my job before, but Lisa changed all that the first time we actually met. (I don't count those weeks before, when I did the footwork for the Keefe job, because although I thought I knew her by then, it became clear that night on the plane just how wrong I was about that.)

After she nearly killed me, I thought I hated her, but I guess I was wrong about that, too. I have to admit, she's not the kind of woman I'm normally attracted to. I usually like (and get) my women super-model gorgeous and malleable. I'm not bragging (well, maybe just a little bit), but they need to know and accept their place in my life. If they don't, then it's over. It has to be that way because of the business I'm in. I can't afford emotional involvement. It could get me killed. And that is exactly my point about Lisa Reisert.

The night Rade Vaschenko sent me home with his woman and took Lisa with him, I should have let him indulge his ridiculous obsession with her. It was clear by then that our deal was going south. I should have just taken my weapons and faded on out of there – alone.

Instead, I took her with me. I told myself it made sense, that it would give me time to re-organize, and give her a chance to put another one of her little escape plans into effect. It would have been convenient for me if she had done that, actually, since by then I didn't need her at all.

Of course that didn't quite work outeither, andneutralizing Rade became the only valid option. So I used her as bait. That was cold and calculated on my part, but that's how I operate. I was completely unprepared, though, for how hard it was for me to leave her side early that morning while she slept peacefully, trusting me. I almost didn't go, but I knew I had to.

The next time I saw her, her face was all battered and she was sitting on Rade's bed counting out sleeping pills. All I wanted to do was to hold her and make it all right. I couldn't. I couldn't afford to. I had to be cold, and force her into action to save her life (and mine).

It really wasn't until after the firefight, when she walked back into that prize mansion of Rade's, thoughthat I knew I loved her. She was barefoot and wearing my sweats and tee shirt. She had blood on her face and a gun in each hand and she looked more beautiful to me than any woman I've ever known.

Well, I think that's enough introspection. And I also think that after I wind things up at the home office, I'll fly out to Miami and drop in on her. I promised her I wouldn't, but I lied. I only lie when it serves me, and in this case I think it will serve both of us very well.

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A/N to Deepy: I actually finished something! You can, too.