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Previously, on Mind Rain.

Catherine is still alive and is finally reunited with her daughter.

Jarod was shot by Lyle. 

Mr. Parker died and so did Lyle. 

Is Jarod going to make it?


KENT GENERAL HOSPITAL - DOVER
7.17 p.m.
Broots was pushing Sydney on a wheelchair to reach the room where he would finally meet the others.

The psychiatrist had two main whishes: seeing Jarod and holding Miss Parker.

The doctors had taken care of Sydney as soon as he’d reached the hospital, where they had stopped the bleeding and performed a blood transfusion.

Jarod’s condition had crashed down rapidly, instead. 

When Broots had told Sydney that the man he loved like a son was now in a coma, the technician had feared that this would worsen his health again.  

Sydney felt guilty for his protégées.

First Angelo had saved his life and almost died in the process; and now Jarod had destroyed The Centre and freed them all from the place that had kept them prisoners for decades only to get shot by the same crazy man who’d killed his brother.

Michelle and Nicholas had arrived as soon as Miss Parker had contacted them. The woman had proved to be interested in staying with Sydney for the time it would take for him to heal, and so had promised Nicholas. 

The acknowledgment of being finally free from the threats of The Centre made Michelle realize that she wanted to visit Sydney more, if he was still interested in spending some quality time with her. 

The man couldn’t help but being glad of that decision, also in the hope that Nicholas would like to spend some time with him too, now that he wouldn’t need to be afraid of The Centre.


Broots had immediately called Debbie and asked her mother to let her come back home. Needless to say, the woman had been very happy to get rid of her daughter, who would be escorted To Blue Cove by FBI.

Broots was still incredulous. For the first time in his life he was facing a scenario where he didn’t have a purpose anymore. His only objective had been to oblige to The Centre and Miss Parker’s orders for years. What would he do now? Could he adapt himself to a normal life?


While both Sydney and Broots were lost in thoughts, they reached Jarod’s room. All the people who cared for him were outside of his door.
Agent Zane had managed to postpone their statements, in hope that Jarod would wake up in the meantime. 

Major Charles had fetched Emily from the airport and taken her to the hospital, while Parker and Catherine had rejoined Ethan. 
Jesse stood by himself, still too shocked for what had happened a few hours before. 

Angelo, instead, looked calm and peaceful, as he had never been before in his life. As if, with the end of the Centre, his mind had been freed from a nightmare that had haunted the empath since Timmy had turned into Angelo.

Margaret sat beside Jarod, holding his hand. In spite of all these people’s presence, the pretender hadn’t given signs of recovery and the doctors weren’t very positive about his chances to wake up.

But they had noticed the large number of people who wanted to stay close to the patient, so they had required Jarod’s relatives to enter the room one at a time. 

All of them had taken turns in spending time with Jarod. 

Surprisingly, the only person who hadn’t found the courage to get inside his room was Miss Parker.

The former Centre operative had been obliged to get a checkup to evaluate her condition and her pregnancy. The doctor confirmed that the baby was fine.

But since then, she had witnessed the parade of people going in and out of Jarod’s room in the background.


As soon as she saw Sydney and Broots showing up from around the corner, Parker excused herself with the others and ran towards her colleagues. 

She hugged Broots first, shocking him with that sudden demonstration of affection.

“Debbie?” she asked him.

“She’s on a flight, she’ll be here tonight.” he explained her, venturing a smile.

“Good.” she nodded in response.

Then her gaze fell on Sydney; sure, he was on a wheelchair, but his skin was back to his normal tone and he looked more lively than the last time she had seen him.

“Parker.” Sydney sobbed. 

She squeezed his hand as hard as she could and bended above him to look at him. In his eyes, she noticed the huge abyss that was growing inside of herself, too.

Jarod was surrounded by his family: his father, his mother, his brothers, his sister. And yet, they were the two persons in that corridor who were connected to him the most, the only ones who truly understand him, the only ones that knew who the pretender really was and what he had achieved in his amazing life. They both felt that Jarod needed them, but they didn’t know what to do; they felt powerless and useless in front of the ineffability of Jarod’s fate.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Miss Parker acknowledged.     

Sydney smiled, “It wasn’t yours either, Parker.”

Miss Parker smiled with tears at the corner of her eyes, noticing again how she and Sydney needed just a look to understand each other.

“Have your heard about Lyle and my father?” she demanded the psychiatrist.

“Broots told me. I must say, I wasn’t very upset for their untimely death.”

“Ditto.” she agreed.

“How is he?” he asked, hitting a nerve. 

Parker sighed, her look back on the others, “Stable, comatose. His condition is worse than Angelo’s was, the doctors don’t talk, but you can see they aren’t very confident about him waking up.”

While a tear streamed down that brave woman’s beautiful face, Sydney squeezed her hand, “He’s gonna make it, we must have faith.”

Parker sniffed and shook her head, “I can’t.”

Sydney used his other hand to touch Parker’s belly delicately, “You got to be strong, for her.”

Parker smiled, finding that touch comforting. 

Her daughter would love to call Sydney Grandpa.

“Uhm, where is Michael?” Broots asked her, interrupting their tender moment.

“He’s upstairs, at the nursery. I don’t want his first memories about his father to be of him lying in an hospital bed.”

“What did they say about the kid?” Sydney asked.

“He probably won’t remember about the Centre, he’s too young.”

“That’s good news.” Sydney thought out loud.

“Yeah…” Miss Parker agreed. “Wanna see him?” she asked, knowing that Sydney couldn’t think about anything but Jarod.

The psychiatrist sighed and nodded.



When Sydney entered Jarod’s room his eyes immediately fixated on his beloved pretender who was sleeping with Margaret at his side.

“Sydney.” she stuttered, almost surprised by his arrival.

“Should I come back later?” he asked.

“No, please, stay.” Margaret pleaded him. Sydney nodded and pushed the wheels of the chair so that he could reach for the bed.

“He looks so helpless. He reminds me of when he was a kid.” Sydney confessed, glancing with one eye at Margaret as he smiled for that tender memory. 

The woman just sighed.

“Maybe I won’t have another chance to say this to you, so I’d rather to do it now that you’re both here.”

Margaret looked up, giving Sydney her attention.

“It’s very unfair that I got to spend so much time with Jarod while you and Phillip weren’t able to see him grow up.”

“Sydney, don’t – ”

“No, let me finish.”

Margaret nodded.

“He was an extremely intelligent and sensible boy, he asked about you almost everyday. The Centre lied to me; they made me believe that you were both dead in a plane crash. I didn’t want to see the truth, even if my brother Jacob tried to convince me that there was something wrong in our jobs.”

Margaret was speechless.

“Even after my brother’s accident, I kept serving my master. I never asked the right questions. I was blind.”

Margaret shook her head. “Jarod was lucky enough to be assigned to you. You’re a good man, you shaped him in your own image, and you gave him the means to distinguish good from evil.”

Sydney stared at her with curiosity.

“Phillip told me everything about your relationship with our son, Sydney. It's nobody’s fault if extraordinary circumstances produced this weird situation. You’re a father figure to him, you’re the man who’s always guided and advised him.”

“Surely, Major Charles –”

Margaret interrupted Sydney, “That level of confidence will never exist between Phillip and Jarod. The trust you both have in each other is unmatched.”

Sydney half-closed his eyes, remembered a conversation with Jarod of little more than a year before. He was struggling with the tormented relationship with his mentor because he had just found out about the drugs experiments that Raines had performed on him. 



Alone in a phone booth, Jarod dialed the number and waited for Sydney to answer.

He wasn’t sure he would find him at the office, but he had to give it a try. He really needed to speak with him.

“Sydney.” he answered, knowing that only Jarod could call at such late hour.

“I didn’t think you’d still be working.” Jarod muttered. 

“Good of you to call. I was getting really worried.” the psychiatrist admitted.

Jarod was very upset, so he let his resentment surface without stopping it. “Because you thought I might have slipped back into my childhood drug addiction? Just tell me why. Why did you let them do that to me?”

Sydney didn’t know where to start “Jarod – ”

“You’re the only person that I trusted. You were like a –”

Pronouncing the word out loud would have been too painful, at that moment. 

Jarod’s heart was broken because he was sure that Sydney, the only person he could trust back then, had betrayed him.

He'd left him to Raines, a lab rat ready for his experiments. 

“You should have stopped them, Sydney!” Jarod had a huge lump in his throat that made tears appear in his eyes. The overgrown and scared child that still was inside him took over, at that moment.   

“Jarod, I couldn’t.” Sydney explained.

“Why not?” the other demanded, incredulous and upset.

“Because –” now it was Sydney’s turn to get angry. “I was a test subject myself!”

Jarod stood in silence for a few seconds, “What are you talking about?”

Sydney sighed, “I asked Raines, rather, I demanded…that you be left out of the drug testing and that they use me instead, and Raines agreed. It was only when I came out of detox that I realized what had happened, that he’d lied.”

Jarod couldn’t believe his ears. 

So, Sydney hadn’t really abandoned him.

“So you sacrificed yourself to protect me.” he almost stuttered.

Sydney shook his head, he would have never wanted to be obliged to reveal Jarod that piece of information. 

The pretender, on the other hand, felt the lump in his throat getting more and more oppressive.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” Jarod asked, sure that many things would have been different, had Sydney found the courage to tell him the truth before. 

“I never wanted you to feel obligated to stay here at the Centre, if you had a chance to get away. I’m sorry, Jarod. I’m really sorry.”

So said, the psychiatrist hung up. For the first time in his life, he’d been the to interrupt the communication.

Jarod would have loved to say many other things. He wanted to confess how much he loved Sydney, how much he appreciated that paternal affection that he almost never showed while they were at The Centre. 

Instead, he found himself alone and dejected. As usual.



“We’re grateful that he had you, Sydney.” Margaret continued. “Kyle wasn’t as lucky. My poor son.” Margaret sighed, thinking about the boy she never even had the chance to know.

Sydney felt he could ease the pain of that woman, “Jarod once told me that Kyle repented for what he had done. He didn’t want you to know what Raines had turned him into. His last act was saving Jarod. Eventually, his heart saved somebody else’s life.”

“I know.” Margaret replied, almost smiling, “And I’m very proud of him. But now I-I can’t stand the idea of losing another son before having the chance to know him! You were right. This isn’t fair!” she cried her eyes out.

Sydney looked at Jarod, lying in his bed unaware of what was happening around him.

“Nothing in Jarod’s life has ever been fair, Margaret.” Sydney concluded.



When the Major got back to the hospital with Emily a few hours later, she finally had the chance to speak with the woman who had pursued his brother for years.

At the beginning, Emily tried to keep her distance from that femme fatale. She sat next to Jesse, oddly the brother she had the strongest relationship with.

It didn’t take the kid long to tell his sister how Miss Parker had risked her own life to save him, how she had offered herself as hostage to protect him. 

At that moment, Emily realized that maybe Jarod and her father were right about Miss Parker. She was special.

While said woman kept watching the man that she loved from behind the glass, Emily approached her in silence. They were alone because the others were elsewhere. The major and Sydney were having a coffee, Jesse, Angelo and Ethan were taking some air, Broots was fetching his daughter.

“Jesse told me what you did for him. Thank you for saving him. I guess it wasn’t to stand up against your own brother.”

Parker grimaced, “Lyle was just a mad psychopath. You should know, seeing that he tried to kill you once.”

“I thought you were twins – ” 

“Just because we came from the same womb, it doesn’t mean that we have anything in common. I’ve never had a relationship with him. The day Jarod told me that Lyle could be my twin brother was one of the most terrible of my life.”


“I've narrowed your brother's identity down to these two files.”

Jarod was showing the red files to Miss Parker, who had found them with Davey Simpkins. The boy was still afflicted by the effects of Raines’s torture.

Parker was dying of curiosity, but at the same time she was afraid to know. Among those files, there was also Jarod’s. This meant that he could actually be her brother?

“One of those belong to you?” she asked him, hiding her anguish.

For a moment, Jarod contemplated the possibility to lie, or to make her struggle to discover the truth. But he couldn’t treat such an important information like they were playing a game. Their childhood was based on a tender friendship that had even leaded to their first kiss. They had unfinished business to clarify, feelings that none of them could give a collocation to. Not yet.

Parker was worried. She looked at Jarod with anxiety, hoping not to hear a positive answer to her question. Why was she hoping? 

Because they had trained her to hate Jarod, to capture him and bringing him back to The Centre, or because…she knew that, deeply inside, she still felt strong feelings for him? 

Conflicting feelings, yes, but feelings. 

Affection, camaraderie, even passion. 

Angelo observed the scene in silence, his mind still clear and aware of what was going on.

Jarod, eventually, smirked. “No. I'm not your brother.”

Parker sighed in relief. She couldn’t help but showing her joy for removing the doubt that she had felt, that she was still feeling…something…for her brother.

But when she realized that she was showing her weakness, she put on the mask of the Ice Queen.

“But one of these files does belong to him.” Jarod continued, nodding at Angelo.

“Him?” she asked, surprised and incredulous.

“And the other to a boy named Bobby. But you know him better as…Mr. Lyle.”

This was too much, even for Miss Parker. 

She burst into laughter. 

As he watched her letting go of her tension with a sarcastic laugh, Jarod realized how beautiful she was. 

He hadn’t been the receiver of Miss Parker’s laughs for years and it was a sight to behold.

“So you're telling me that my brother is either a psychotic killer or Mush Head?”

“It's unmistakable.” Jarod concluded, ignoring her comment about Angelo.

Parker tightened her held on the gun while she kept holding the red file given to her by Jarod. 

She felt like she could pass out at any moment.

“I need a drink” She complained. “A big one.”



Emily smiled after listening to Miss Parker’s tale. 

Parker immediately noticed how that smirk made her look like Jarod.

“I really wanted Angelo to be my brother.” she continued, looking at the empath that was coming back with Ethan and Jesse. 

Noticing that she was getting sad again, Emily changed the topic. “You’ve been through a lot together, I mean, you and Jarod. You met him often, even if he tried his best to run from you.”

“When we actually met it was usually because the genius set me up.” she explained. Catherine and Margaret chose that moment to come back from Jarod’s room and approach their respective daughters.

“One time…” Parker told them all, smiling at the memory. “He dragged me to a bank to meet Mr. Fenigor. Five minutes that we are together in that building and two thugs get in for a robbery. We got stuck for hours!”

“But you also saved the day, or so I’ve been told.” Margaret intervened.

Parker continued her list, “What about that hurricane in Bahia Grande?”

Catherine smiled, eager to know where her daughter was going with that.

Emily waved her hands in the air, “But there wasn’t always a natural catastrophe when you two met. Was it?”

“I don’t know, Em –” and Jarod’s sister appreciated the abbreviation used by Miss Parker. “When we got on the Island of Carthis the devil’s storm almost killed us.” 

Emily, Margaret, and Catherine burst into laughter, which was absurd, given the circumstances.

Parker sighed. “Whenever we were together something huge happened. Even explosions!” she continued, thinking about the time they almost died in SL-27 or in the subway.

Emily was becoming more aware of the reason why her brother had fallen in love with that woman. She was strong, intelligent, charismatic, and surprisingly funny. Emily felt bewitched by Miss Parker’s words. 

Any man would fall at her feet. 

“Mom.” Parker changed the subject. “Fenigor told us that Major Charles killed you. Why?”

Catherine sighed, “Fenigor never knew that I faked my own death. Raines was the only one to know, back then. The only thing he saw that day was Phillip’s weapon on the floor next to the elevator; he knew that I was trying to save Jarod. He drew a conclusion and he probably convinced himself that Phillip had shot me.”

Parker grimaced, “I’m so ashamed that I believed him. It was just another Centre lie. Jarod tried to warn me, and yet I chased him. I tried to shoot him!”



“Jarod!”

Parker was aiming her gun against the pretender; she had chased him through the SL-27 corridors. At that moment, all the anger she felt was directed to Jarod, even if he had nothing to do with her mother’s death.

“Looks like another dead end!” he snarled at her, furious.

“I know all I need to know.” Parker responded; her hand tightened on her gun.

“Do you? After all the deceit and all the betrayal we've both experienced how do you know what the truth is?”

“Fenigor had no reason to lie.” and she truly believed that.

That man was dying, why would he need to waste his last breath in lies? 

No, Jarod’s father had murdered Catherine, maybe in an attempt to save his son. 

Thus, it was Jarod’s fault, too.

“Then you're going to have to shoot me, because I'm going to find out the truth!” Jarod challenged her.



“That was the only time I actually wasted a whole cartridge on him.”

Margaret and Emily looked at her with shock, at least until she said, “I did it just because I knew I couldn’t get him; he was running, and my shots carefully missed the spot.” she reassured them.

“For such a long time I’ve been convinced that Major Charles actually shot you. I wanted revenge.”

“But why blaming Jarod?” Emily asked.


Parker smiled with sorrow in her eyes. She shrugged.

How many times had she blame Jarod during the years of the pursuit? 

She looked again through the glass door.

“Because hating Jarod gave me an outlet. He was like a human punching bag. Jarod always managed to concentrate all my anger against himself. 

He sent me stupid presents and puzzling clues, he put me on his trail with subtle hints and at the same time he helped me discover the truth with his annoying mind games.”

“Why do you think he did it?” Margaret questioned Miss Parker, curious about that extravagant side of her son.

“To allow me to survive. Jarod knew that my job was to catch him. The deal with my father was that I could go back to corporate, once I
brought him back.”

“He also knew…” Sydney stepped-in at their backs, “that neither Parker nor I had the guts to do it. We had more than once chance to capture Jarod, but we never succeeded.”

“What do you mean that he helped you survive by being hated by you?” Emily asked her, totally confused.
Sydney smirked. As a very good psychiatrist, he had understood Jarod and Parker’s rules of the game since the first day of that six-years-odyssey.  

“With every new piece of truth, I distrusted Mr. Parker a bit more. I realized what kind of man he really was. Should I have trusted my instinct, I would have stopped chasing Jarod after a few months. I wouldn’t have been able to work in a place that had exploited brilliant minds for power and money.”

“Jarod made Parker blame him.” Sydney went on. “And that’s what saved her. She kept hunting him because Jarod made her believe that the reason why she was chasing was that she hated the pretender so much that she really wanted to bring him back to The Centre. Her father and Raines were satisfied because she kept pursuing her prey. So, she didn’t run the risk of becoming a target for the Tower or the Triumvirate.”

“I’m getting a headache.” Emily complained, not understanding the twisted relationship among those three people.

Sydney smiled, glad to use his psychiatric skill, “Jarod’s plan failed just on one occasion.”

Parker sighed, “Tommy.”

Catherine and Margaret looked at each other. None of them knew who they were talking about, and Emily didn’t know much either. She had just overheard Jarod talking about that man with his father, once.

“Jarod had decided that if we couldn’t be together, maybe he could give me another way out. He asked a man named Tommy to meet me, he put him on my way. We fell in love so easily.”

Sydney was relieved to notice that Miss Parker could talk about Thomas Gates so easily; she had never done that before.

“Tommy and I had planned to move to Oregon.” she explained, looking at her mother, who nodded. “But daddy ordered him killed so that I couldn’t leave The Centre. Brigitte was the one who actually shot Thomas, she was daddy’s –”

“Second wife, I know.” Catherine informed her.

Parker nodded, sighing. 

Even if time had passed and that wound didn’t hurt like before, her father’s betrayal still did.

“Did you ever get evidence that Mr. Parker was the one who ordered Thomas’s murder?” Emily asked her.

Parker scoffed, “I didn’t need it. I’ve always known it was him. And Jarod helped me exposing him. Even in such a grievous moment, he stood by my side, like nobody else did. He helped me discovering who was responsible for his death.”



Parker had just finished her toast above Thomas’s grave; she was putting her sunglasses on when she heard a familiar voice behind her.

“Beautiful words.”

When she turned around, she saw Jarod. 

He was wearing a long black coat. She hadn’t been at his presence in a while, and she noticed that his hair had grown a bit. 

He wanted to place a bouquet on the grave, but Parker was still mad at him for the model of her first meeting with Thomas. 

She took him by the collar and pull him to herself with rage.

“What, no confetti gongs, joy buzzers, squirting flowers?!”

“None of this is a laughing matter.” he replied, feeling six feet under. He missed Thomas very much; he had been a good friend. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell Miss Parker, yet. She wouldn’t understand.

“Yeah. No, you really caught me in a mood, today.”

Parker pointed her finger at him and then took her gun, aiming it straight to Jarod’s chest.

“I'm real tempted to put a cap in you, wipe the slate clean on my life and take off without ever looking back!”

Jarod was disappointed and pained by her reaction. 

All he wanted was to share his pain with her, to help her overcome it. 

But Parker never lowered her guard with him. 

So, he gave her what she needed: someone to blame. 

Once again, he had to be what she hated the most, what allowed her to go on, to survive.

“Your gun won't work.” he challenged her, slightly amused.

Parker took off her sunglasses, looking at him angrily.

“I took the firing pin out last night.”

Parker sneered, with incredulity, “I sleep with this under my pillow.”

“And you drool out of the left corner of your mouth.” he mocked her, moving his finger around his mouth.

Parker lowered her gun and tried to shoot at the ground, realizing that Jarod was telling the truth.

As always, the genius was a step ahead. He had expected her reaction and he had taken the only thing she could threaten him with. 
But she wasn’t in the mood for that either.

“What the hell are you doing here, Jarod?!” she huffed, now very close to tears.

“It's time to take care of some unfinished business.” Jarod stated solemnly, then he glanced at Tommy’s grave. “To find out who killed the man you loved and why, and to pay respects to a man like Thomas Gates, because he deserves it.”

Jarod tried to place his flowers on the grave again, but Miss Parker stole them from his hands, and she replied to the pretender with a rage. 

She wasn’t really angry at him, but she needed to pour out on someone, and Jarod was always the perfect target.

“Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you know what he deserves.”

Parker stopped, feeling tears coming again. She couldn’t breathe well. 

Noticing her despair, Jarod felt like he was dying inside and understood that was the moment to disappear, if he didn’t want to show her all his vulnerability. 

At that moment, the only thing he would love to do was hugging and console her, but he knew she would never allow him to. 

She hated him, after all.

“Why are you tormenting me, Jarod? Why do you even c –” 

Parker suddenly turned around, waving the bouquet in the air, but Jarod had already disappeared. She made a few steps “ – care?”

As always, Jarod had vanished with a coup de theatre. 

But he had left something behind: Tommy’s business card, which reported the words, “Rumor 58259”.



“Good Jarod. He just wanted to help me coming to terms with it…but I treated him so bad.” she explained to her listeners.

“And how was that different from any other day?” Sydney asked, easing the tension and making all the women chuckle, even Parker.

After a few seconds of silence, their expressions got tense and serious.

“Miss Parker, I still have one thing to ask you.” Margaret intervened, grabbing her hand.

“What?” she questioned.

“Why don’t you go in there?”

Parker sighed, and she cried her heart out, smiling while tears streamed down her face. Sydney put a hand on her back.

“Because it’s my fault if he’s in there.”

Parker was sobbing. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the moment when Jarod had gotten in the way between Lyle’s bullet and herself. 

He had saved her, but now he was dying, all because of her.

A weeping Emily took Miss Parker in surprise and held her like a sister. 

Margaret looked at the scene, touched. 

“Jarod needs to feel your presence, sweetheart.” Catherine cheered her up.

“Cat is right.” Margaret agreed. “I haven’t known my son for long, but there’s one thing I’m certain of: you, Michael and your unborn child are the most important thing, to him.”

Parker touched her belly, remembering the happiness Jarod had showed when he had found out that she was pregnant. 

She thought about Michael, still entrusted to the care of the upstairs nurses.

“Syd, would you come with me?” she asked, desperate for the older man to be by her side.

“Of course, Parker.” he answered, his eyes filled with unshed tears.




Chapter End Notes:

Sorry for the typos, mistakes, errors, misprints, grammatical disasters. But if you like the story, please let me know.






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