When Rachel stepped inside the Richmond field office and made her way back to the conference rooms, she felt like someone was walking on her heels. There was no one there, of course; it was merely the secret she was keeping. Having not told Peter, the tumor now seemed as if it were an actual person, shadowing her wherever she went. She did her best to shake it as she hurried into Conference Room A. Someone had already started a pot of coffee and she was not at all surprised to see Jack Rivers standing by it, filling a cup.

She and Jack had been partners for a little over a year now and had met the same bureau milestones at roughly the same time. Theyd barely known one another during the academy and training but when they had been partnered together out of the Richmond branch, it had seemed like a natural fit. Jack was the sort of thirty-three year old that you could just tell was a geeky guy in high school and college, just now starting to understand that he was a rather good-looking man that people were starting to respect. It did not mean, however, that he had dropped the comic banter that Rachel had come to rely on to keep her in a good mood on even the toughest of days. The slight pudge in his cheeks suggested hed once bene overweightsomething he always poked fun at himself about. He referred to himself as a former fat kid that had left the weight behind, but not the sarcasm-as-a-defense-mechanism or his love for obscure music and sci-fi movies.

He looked to her as she came to the coffee pot and grimaced. You look like shit, Gift. You just wake up?

Rachel showed him her middle finger just as Chief Director Anderson came in. He was looking over a printed out report as he walked to the front of the room. He was very good at his job and treated all agents under him with kindness and respect, but he was not the sort of man to waste a single second of time. Even before he had sat down and taken his eyes away from the report, he was talking. Rachel and Jack sat down right away, Rachel not yet having time to doctor up her coffee. She sipped from the bureau brew totally black, and thought it might be the equivalent of sipping jet fuel.