Oddly enough, it wasn't the years of Mulder's belief in extraterrestrial life or the things I'd seen with my own eyes and tried to rationalize away that finally pulled me over the line into accepting the probable reality and gravity of the alien threat, but rather what had happened to Tracy and something I'd seen in the urgency and determination of Alex Krycek. For all his sincerity, Mulder had been prone to flights of whim and wild hoping when chasing leads that related to his sister, but I knew Krycek would never spend time pursuing a fantasy.

I woke at four a.m. from a dream in which my implant had taken control of me and left me in a barren landscape with no memory of how I'd gotten there. Mulder and I talked for a long time, too shaken to hide behind pretenses or to hesitate, as we often had in the past, waiting for the other one to finally verbalize something we both felt. We'd each reached the conclusion that many of the cases that would be offered to us for investigation--fringe groups, the supernatural, people exhibiting odd physical phenomena--would only be of academic interest to us now, and that where we needed to be was together and working to find out what we could about what had happened to Tracy and the group that had manipulated her, and then to do what we could to counteract the threat and to help those we could along the way. I knew, too, that Mulder needed to investigate whatever leads Krycek might be able to give him about Samantha. After all his years of faithful searching, Mulder deserved closure and perhaps, in the process, we might come across another piece to the larger puzzle.

Mulder's mind had continued to return to the man in the hospital hallway. We agreed that whoever had tampered with Tracy would be anxious to keep their work from being discovered or analyzed; Mulder's guess was that the gray-haired man had been sent to retrieve Tracy's body, and in the morning when I called Dr. Wykoff, he confirmed that her body was missing, replaced by that of a girl of similar age and build whose identity remains unknown.

For quite a long time there had been, in the back of my mind, a longing for a normal life, by which I suppose I meant the things we are brought up to expect--a home with a yard, a mate, a child, a secure circle of family and friends. I realized now that it was unlikely I would ever live a normal life in the traditional definition of that term. But it also struck me that the essence of that fulfillment was a sense of belonging and safety, a mental and emotional sanctuary, if you will, that Mulder and I had, in actuality, established for each other long ago and that would continue to sustain us as we went forward into the uncertainty that lay ahead.

I swear it wasn't the money, though it had something to do with the thought behind the money. My first reaction, there on the stairs, was to drop that card; I was just so totally overwhelmed. Never in a million years would I have expected anything like that and if you'd told me, I wouldn't have believed you. My next thought was that Cy and Roddy's lives couldn't be compensated by any number of dollars and I wasn't ready to let this guy clear his conscience with money. But eventually a little tickle inside me got me to thinking about the man I'd seen in the hospital that morning--actually seen with my own two eyes--and the fact that he could easily have taken off without making any effort at all. I mean, who was I to him besides a bad reminder? It would've made more sense for him to keep the money himself; I'm sure he could've used it. But instead he'd offered it to me.

I thought about what Ben'd said, that he might never understand or trust this Alex, but that he'd done something he couldn't just explain away--taken a wild chance and saved Ben and Annie and his mother from Mr. High-And-Mighty when it looked like all he'd get for it was killed. And no matter what'd happened to me, who was I to reject the idea that something in him could change? What good would it do me and did I want it to be the concrete fact, that he couldn't? And then I thought about Tracy. Maybe, in the end, she wasn't his blind spot. Maybe she was just a girl with the courage to offer a cold, hard man the gift of her faith that he could be the person she saw, when everybody else was only willing to give him what he deserved.