Nessun dorma... Nessun dorma...
Tu pure, o, Principessa,
nella tua fredda stanza,
guardi le stelle

1. Pavarotti's rich voice carried the tune seemingly effortlessly, accompanied by a full orchestra. Jarod smiled at the fierce beating of his heart. This seemed to be one of those dreams that you already knew were only dreams while you were still in the middle of them.

Puccini and the alluring scent of Miss Parker whose body was curled into his were a combination far too beautiful to be true.

che tremano d'amore
e di speranza.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
il nome mio nessun saprà!

He felt her warm flesh under his hand where that had been resting on her stomach all night and moved his head slightly to bury his face deeper in her neck. Pavarotti resumed his singing and Jarod couldn't help but marvel at the quality of his voice...

No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò
quando la luce splenderà!
Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silen...

"What the hell!"

Jarod snapped out of his dream with a start and noticed suddenly that he hadn't, in fact, been dreaming. There had been music and Miss Parker had been sleeping in his arms. Until a second ago, that was.

She had sat up and angrily reached for her cell-phone that was on the nightstand and had been blasting the tune for a while.

"What?" she barked into the phone and ran her hand through her hair. While she was listening to the person on the line, she surveyed the room and seemed to struggle to clear her mind.

"Broots, what part of vacation don't you understand?" she snapped. "I don't care whether you think you have got a lead on Jarod. Besides, I have a feeling he is not exactly in Florida." She snapped her phone shut with such force that Jarod winced.

There was an uncomfortable silence for a while, then Jarod smiled.

"Puccini?" he asked, pointing at her cell-phone.

Her yelling at Broots had fully pulled Miss Parker back into reality so that she wasn't as shocked by Jarod's presence as she had been upon initially waking up.

"It's such a beautiful song," she said defensively and gently placed her cell-phone back on the nightstand. Jarod stretched and looked down at himself. His clothes were crumpled and looked slept in. Miss Parker's make-up was smudged and she had somehow lost a sock during the night.

Jarod was a little taken aback at how the previous night had ended. After he had apologized to her, she had offered... no... asked him to stay. And then they had simply been sitting on the bed next to each other and had watched a movie in silence. After a while Miss Parker had obviously become tired and at some point her head had inavertently dropped to his shoulder and a moment later she had been sound asleep. So Jarod had taken her up on her offer and had stayed.

Miss Parker seemed uneasy at the thought that she had fallen asleep on his shoulder literally.

"It's eight o'clock already. Would you like me to get you some coffee?" Jarod asked and Miss Parker nodded absently. He decided that it would be wiser to leave her alone for a while to give her time to come to terms with he fact that she had allowed him close to her. When he walked out, he caught her staring down at her hand thoughtfully.

While he was waiting by the coffee machine, he thought back to how Miss Parker had calmed and comforted Amanda and had done what they had all failed to do all those weeks. It once again proved to him that she was very well capable of dealing with people. It was just that most of the time she didn't care to do so.

He felt a little ashamed that he had not remembered the incident with the elevator right away. How could he have failed to see her pain? He almost winced when he thought back to the haunted look in her eyes when she had confronted him with the fact that she had hurt herself on purpose because of what he had done to her.

He watched the black coffee drip into the jug and noticed that he was incapable of holding his hands still. Was he feeling guilty? It was a strange feeling for Jarod who had been on the receiving end of bad deeds far too often to acknowledge the fact that he himself could and did also inflict pain on people.

But although he hadn't meant for her to suffer like that, he couldn't deny the fact that he had done all these things with the intention to do exactly what she always accused him of: rub her painful family history in her face.

Of course he hadn't seen how badly she took it but he should have known, shouldn't he? It wasn't a secret that people who appeared cold and strong on the surface were often trying to conceal actual insecurities. Why had he not been able to anticipate that one day it would all be too much for her to take?

And he asked himself whether he had actually meant to hurt her. Had he? Had he secretly wanted her to suffer the way he had suffered?

He had wanted information from her, but he had also known that she was unable to give it to him. He had wanted to show her how evil the Centre was, but who knew that better than she did?

Suddenly he couldn't see his own reasons for doing what he had done and the uneasy feeling in his stomach grew.

Miss Parker brushed her wet hair out of her face and looked into her red-rimmed eyes that looked at her with stricken clarity. Why was she doing this to herself? If she called the sweepers on Jarod now, he wouldn't stand a chance.

Where had her cell-phone come from in the first place? She vaguely remembered Jarod placing it on the nightstand upon coming back from getting them a sandwich the past evening. She had been too distraught to think about the implications of that. Had he tried to show her that he trusted her now? And why would he? Everybody knew that she was even more unpredictable than usual when she was suffering.

Wounded animals did curious things- and so did she. Jarod knew that, and he had still returned her phone to her and had thereby reinstated her only possible connection to the outside world and the Centre.

He had probably tried to tell her, that she was free to go if she wanted to, that he would not keep her in this place full of memories that hurt her.

The temptation to just run away from it all, from Thomas' house, from little Amanda who reminded her of herself was almost too much to bear, but on the other hand Jarod had apologized to her and he had truly looked shocked and conscious-stricken when he had realized what he had caused.

Well, and she hadn't been the gentlest of persons towards him either. While he kept showing her how evil her little world was, she had thrown numerous insults at him. But had she also rubbed his sad history into his face? She couldn't remember. It seemed that most of her days were filled to the brim with insults and slights so that she didn't remember exactly whom she had snapped at or who had hurt her feelings in turn.

Those were the days at the Centre. What was the point in being friendly when you were in a cage of lions?

Strangely enough she remembered every time when Jarod had hurt her feelings. Maybe it was because despite the fact that he had kept winding her up all those years he was the only person around her that she never actually expected spite from.

When Miss Parker arrived in the kitchen, Jarod had set the table already. The room was filled with the comforting smell of fresh coffee and bread.

He handed her a cup of steaming coffee and gestured towards the table.

"I remembered you liked honey and wholemeal bread," he said. "Just so you can have some breakfast instead of stuffing yourself with calories."

If she had noticed that he had quoted her previous words, she didn't show it, but smiled. When she sat down on the chair opposite him and reached for the bread, he couldn't help but remember her warm body in his arms.

He watched her eat and drink her coffee while neither of them tried to make any conversation. Maybe he was just waiting for her to announce that she would leave today. She picked up on subtle hints quite well and the cell-phone had been a not so subtle invitation to leave whenever she felt the need to.

But sitting there in a black skirt with elegant boots and a light blue sweater she didn't look as if she was going to go out into the rain that was still falling tirelessly outside the windows.

"I will have the window repaired," Jarod finally broke the silence.

"You'd better." She looked up from the morning paper for the first time. "Have you made any enemies while you were here?"

He shrugged. "Not that I knew of."

She folded the newspaper and put it aside. "What about Amanda's father?" she asked.

Jarod felt a pang of guilt inside his chest. It was something he had resolved he would be keeping from her for as long as possible. But since she had asked him now, there was no way back. It was just an inconvenient coincidence that she had asked in this very moment.

"His trial is set for next week," Jarod said and Miss Parker cocked an eyebrow.

"Trial?"

"He killed his wife."

"You said that a colleague of her had done it." Miss Parker sounded like a prosecutor in front of a grand jury and Jarod was warned. Her temper was so explosive that it was well able to blow up a building. Let alone an adversary.

"She worked in a hospital in town as a nurse and she was married to a surgeon. So I told you the truth..." Jarod began.

"Half of the truth is as good as a lie," Miss Parker objected icily, but her infamous temper did not burst. Maybe she did acknowledge the fact that he had not told her to spare her the analogies to her own life.

"So what about the stalking part?" she asked.

"They had been divorced for a while and she had custody of Amanda. He did not seem to approve and one night when he returned the girl home after the weekend he shot her mother."

Miss Parker sighed. "You should have told me."

"I was afraid you'd back out because..." she cut him off before he could say any more.

"It's okay. Let's forget about it."

Now it was Jarod's turn to be stunned. Miss Parker wasn't exactly known to drop things like this one so easily. Maybe she was just not ready to be faced with all the drama in her life again already.

"Are we going to see Amanda today?" she asked after a short period of silence during which she had been fumbling with her slice of bread aimlessly.

"The children are going to the aquarium with Jenny today. We might see Amanda tonight if she is not too tired. Unless you would like to go along with them..."

Miss Parker snorted and pursed her lips. "All day? With kids? Are you nuts?"

"Wow! Sharks!"

Miss Parker trailed behind the children and realized that her first impression hadn't been too wrong. Accompanying kids to the zoo wasn't exactly what she'd profess to be a perfect afternoon. Interestingly enough, the kids weren't the actual cause of her dismay.

"Gosh! Look at those teeth of them! Aren't they huuuge?"

Miss Parker rolled her eyes, but Jenny didn't seem to notice anything except her forged excitement. Other than that, Parker was almost sorry that she had snapped at Jarod for talking her into exchanging her skirt and boots for jeans and a sweater because Jenny had stuffed the kids with french fries and burgers at lunch which made for twelve pairs of dirty hands that kept reaching for her arms to pull her towards the windows that lined the long corridor and presented to them sharks, fishes and rays.

The worst of it was that she could not, as she would have usually done, simply scare the children away but had to pretend to be an understanding, patient psychologist who liked kids. (And it sucked.)

Amanda was lingering behind them as usual and her eyes weren't shining with excitement as those of the other kids were. She looked very pale and only took slight glances at the creatures of the sea that surrounded her. Other than that she looked lost inside herself.

Miss Parker paused for a moment and allowed the other kids to run towards Jarod and Jenny, who clung to him like a bee stuck to a pot of honey.

"How pathetic!" Miss Parker thought while she was trying to come up with yet another insult disguised as mixed-up vocabulary. Actually the German part had been quite some fun. Especially when Jenny had been bragging about her great German marks at high school and Miss Parker had pretended to take interest in her (probably poor) language abilities. She had then smiled brightly and delivered a bunch of meaningless syllables that sounded remotely German to her own ears as if it was a speech.

Jenny had looked completely lost and then nodded and smiled nervously. "I nearly got everything," she had beamed with fake pride and Miss Parker had almost started retching at her attempt to be cute.

Due to her lingering for a while, Amanda had managed to catch up with her and now stood next to her, looking up at her with her huge sad eyes. That was the moment when Miss Parker realized that Amanda had not been following the group, but her.

Gripped by a sudden surge of solicitousness, she crouched down in front of the little girl and cocked her head.

"Don't you like sharks?" she asked, as usual not really sure what to talk about to a child.

As usual, Amanda didn't reply but simply shook her head, avoiding Miss Parker's gaze.

Miss Parker usually avoided contact with children as much as possible and consequently didn't know much about them, but even she noticed that Amanda looked younger than her years which was probably due to her suffering and eating so little.

"I'm not a fan of them either," Miss Parker tried, but trailed off because she had no idea what else to say to the silent little girl.

For a moment they simply looked into each others eyes as if to search for the connection they had established when Miss Parker had comforted Amanda yesterday. She only broke eye contact when she felt something brush her hand. Looking down she discovered Amanda's hand that reached out for hers as if she wanted her to hold it.

Despite her initial fear of any kind of contact with children, Miss Parker felt involuntarily touched. She gently wrapped her hand around Amanda's and pointed towards the door to the next room where the noisy group had already vanished.

"I prefer the fish from Finding Nemo," she said. "Less scary."

She winced inwardly since her only contact with the movie had been Broots' impossible video ringtone on his cell-phone, but at least Amanda's face lightened up every so slightly and she nodded.

Feeling a little weird because of the fact that she was walking hand in hand with a child, Miss Parker guided Amanda through a group of people and stopped in the next room, right next to an excitedly yelling group of kids who were competing for the shrillest voice with Jenny, who sent fleeting glances towards Jarod as if she was checking whether he was looking at her.

But Jarod was really looking at Parker who had first sneered at Jenny's demeanor and then had turned back to Amanda whom she was now pointing the fish out to.

"Hey Jar!" Jenny said and playfully slung an arm around his shoulder. "You gonna find Nemo?"

Over her shoulder he could see Miss Parker's eyebrow that was raised as a sign of extreme annoyance. He grinned to himself and placed his arm loosely around Jenny's shoulders, too.

Since they had arrived at the end of the last one of the corridors, the group had gathered around another one of the inevitable little shops that sold candy. Miss Parker hoped that Jenny would stuff herself with even more Mars bars and turn fat and ugly, but she knew that even if that happened, she would sadly not be there to witness it.

Amanda didn't seem interested in food and since Miss Parker wasn't used to the concept of comfort food herself, they simply sat on a bench and watched the other kids compete for their guardians' attention and ice-cream.

Amanda had gripped the edge of the bench and looked down at her legs that swung back and forth while Miss Parker narrowed her eyes as Jenny "accidentally" brushed Jarod's arm, then giggled loudly.

When she looked next to her to check for Amanda, the girl's eyes caught her and she found herself the object of a quizzical stare. Amanda narrowed her eyes in an imitation of Miss Parker, then looked quizzical again.

"Oh just look how she tries to impress him," Miss Parker said defensively. "It's pathetic."

There was a very small but knowing smile tugging at the corners of Amanda's mouth.

"You're too young for this," Miss Parker decided and folded her arms in front of her chest although she knew that at ten years she had also realized what was happening between people.

Now Amanda was watching Jenny, too, as she was half-dancing, half-walking around Jarod with the kids who were happily playing along.

Miss Parker looked back at Amanda who caught her gaze and- for the first time- smirked slightly. Well, at least this was interaction and a little girl wasn't old enough to wrongly assume that Miss Parker was jealous or anything.

"Would you like ice-cream?" Miss Parker asked half-heartedly and to her surprise Amanda nodded. When they got up she held her hand out for Miss Parker's again and she felt a warm feeling spread inside her chest. Was she beginning to develop feelings for this child? Oh no, she was probably not. After all that had happened she wasn't capable of feeling anything else than pain and fury anyway. But why scare the girl?

She walked over and bought an ice-cream which she handed down to the kid.

"Is your daughter a little shy?" the woman at the counter asked with a good natured laugh and reached down to stroke Amanda's cheek. The girl retreated immediately and Miss Parker shot the woman a glare that was so dark that she gasped.

"I'm... I'm sorry."

"You'd better be," Miss Parker replied sharply, then gently ushered Amanda away. The girl seemed to have relaxed visibly. Her skin still looked pale and her eyes haunted, but her posture had already changed slightly. It looked as if she wasn't as much on guard as she had been before. She looked nearly at ease which filled Miss Parker with a strange sense of pride because the girl felt safe with her.

"And here I was thinking you didn't like ice-cream."

She turned her head at Jarod's deep voice that suddenly sounded next to her.

Amanda had returned to her usual indifference and simply walked next to Miss Parker, her hand safely inside that of the older woman and looked down at her feet.

"She is warming up," Miss Parker whispered into Jarod's ear and earned herself a wide grin.

"I'm proud of you," he whispered back.

"I don't give a damn what you think," she answered, but softly.

They couldn't say whom of them had stopped in their tracks first, but suddenly they stood in the middle of the atrium with masses of people walking past them, but somehow they still felt alone with each other.

Miss Parker hadn't realized how close his face was to hers already and she wanted to pull back to not create the illusion for him that she allowed him anywhere near her space, but then she wondered whether she actually wanted to do that.

None of them moved either away from or towards the other and they didn't need to. She realized that, curiously enough, she was perfectly content with the feeling of his slow breath on her skin.

"How's your lip?" he asked so softly that she almost didn't hear him over the noise that the other people made.

"Why?" she asked back.

"I think I would..." he hesitated, then swallowed as if he was suddenly nervous. Realizing that talking was not what he wanted to do, he slightly leaned forward towards her.

The bang was so loud that Miss Parker felt Amanda's hand first close around hers firmly, then squirm as if to pull free. Her first reaction was to crouch down in front of the girl and pull her towards her.

Voices were rising all around them in confusion and she felt Jarod's hand on her hip to usher her aside, then he ran towards Jenny and the group of kids that stood a few meters away.

"What happened?" she could hear him yell while she tried her best to keep Amanda from shaking.

"There was this man who threw something!" Peter, one of the louder boys yelled. "He was at the door!"

Jarod turned towards the door, but there was noone there anymore and with the hundreds of people who were hurriedly heading for the exit, there was no way to find out who it had been.

He threw a look at Parker who was holding a rigid and uncontrollably trembling Amanda. Then he directed his attention at the source of the noise. Someone had thrown a rock much like the one that had destroyed the window at their house against the plexiglass behind which some fish were now swimming around in confusion.

Of course the tank had been designed to not break easily, but there was surely some damage done. And if he hadn't begun to lean into Parker that very moment, he might have been hit badly...

"Jarod!"

He swung around at the worried sound of Parker's voice. She was still holding Amanda in her arms, but the girl wasn't just trembling now. She was downright shaking in a very unnatural way that made the hair stand up on his back.

"Call an ambulance! I think she had a seizure or something. Hurry up!"