She’d known who it was from the moment her eyes alighted on the neat capital letters on the envelope.  Formal, formal, she’d chirruped in her head.  Miss Parker, Director, The Centre, Post Office Box #1672, Blue Cove, Delaware, the envelope read.    It had been almost fourteen years…   Fourteen years since the day that had changed her life.  The day she finally had him in her clutches, back to his place in the Centre—and fourteen years since she’d let him go.  Fourteen years since he’d contacted anyone at the Centre, even Sydney.  So long, since anyone had seen him at all.    Fourteen years during which she’d built a whole life for herself, one that didn’t factor in an experiment running away from the corporation from Hell.    And then, he sends her a letter.  He knows her title.    Pretender, experiment, lab rat, fugitive.  Jarod.  Call him what you will, the little bastard always caught up with you eventually.  But even as she thought the words, she couldn’t say them in her head without a touch of playfulness.  That, at least, hadn’t faded.  She’d chased him with a ferocity that stemmed from her life as a Parker and her early, early career as a cleaner.  She’d released him from her life, not to mention the prison of the chase—for both of them—when she was thirty-six.  She had forgotten him easily enough, in the flurry of work and politics and maneuvering, seeing him only in those rare moments when everything was done and the night was clear, and the windows were open, breathing warm, Blue Cove summer air into her office, and she closed her eyes, and was at peace.  Then, she didn’t feel wounds, didn’t feel the ache or the deep, fluctuating, passionate emotions that had threatened to drown her when she was a young woman.  She just felt content. She could remember Jarod then.  The sound of his laughter.  The feeling of his small, light hand on her arm, when they were both children.   How his brown eyes glistened with despair when she’d looked down the barrel of her gun at him for the last time.   Hell, maybe she’d loved him.  Once.  Maybe she’d even loved him then, when she sighted slow and prepared to shoot him, if it came to that.  Now… she was familiar enough with his mind to call her, in some twisted and bizarre way, a friend.  No, they had never had a moment of companionship after they’d both grown.  Jarod played mind games and she hunted him down, and neither effort had more than a touch of fun in it. They were comrades-at-arms, two strangers who were too tired from the battle to hate each other, to familiar with each other’s psyches to make words much of an issue.   And that had been more than a dozen years ago.  She wasn’t that woman anymore.  Lyle, Raines, her mother, the ghosts of her past, dead memories, only one of which she remembered with fondness, and none of whom she had nightmares about anymore.  Angelo—sent to a nice, cozy, hometown Centre satellite, if there was such a thing, in Oregon, where the worst sin committed was loosing the paperwork on the way in.  Sydney, noble doctor, trusted friend, living out his last years in his cabin, with Melissa.  She visited them for a week every summer.  Broots’s daughter had gone to medical school, and was now working at one of the world’s top ten research hospitals, right in Dover.  Parker had insisted on paying for it, though Broots certainly made enough money as head of the tech department.   Her father.  That still hurt; she felt it now in her chest and stomach.  He was dying of Alzheimer’s.   She’d refused the world-class facilities at the Centre for him.  Though Parker had made many changes—beginning with returning all the children, and setting up a renowned adoption center, and ending with cutting the ties with the Triumvirate, a project she was still working on—there was still treachery here.  He was at Debbie’s hospital, guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by a security team assigned to the purpose.  She’d cried for hours, every week, at his bedside; now there was only waiting, and the thick-headed feeling of grief anticipation.   Jarod, a ghost himself, just who happened to be living.  Another face she no longer saw in her dreams.   She didn’t even feel guilty to think it:  her father’s death, a relief as his mind slipped away, was the last threshold.  And then all her memories would be dead.  Her life would be her own.  She would grieve, and then she would be happy.  She would remember fondly, and that was contentment.  To think that once she’d believed, with all her heart and soul, that the only path to happiness was a life without the Centre.  Now, she couldn’t imagine leaving.  She’d finally turned this place into something that was just as much her mother’s as her father’s.  She loved what she’d created, and she was married to this job just as surely as she would have been if it was a living person.   No more trickery.  No more secrets and lies.  She was vindicated, and freedom was sweet.   She should just throw the goddamn letter in the trash can and get on with it.   Parker placed it on her desk.  She stared at the lettering.  She picked it up again, twirled it in her fingers.   Looked at the trash can.   Glanced at the stainless steel letter opener that flashed in her pen cup.  A gift for her ten-year anniversary, inscribed with the Centre logo and her name.  A terrible gift, especially in a business world forged on the instantaneous electronic transmission, but then, she’d gotten a matching pen and a mug, too.   Screw this, she thought.   She grabbed the letter opener, wrapped her fingers around it, inserted it into the paper, and pulled it gently open.  The sound seemed to echo through her office.  She dropped the opener on her blotter with a clink.  Then, she reached in, pinched the paper with her fingertips, and drew it from its envelope.   There was the security issue, she thought, but she guessed, too, that she just plain old liked paper letters.  They were a lot more real.  A lot more convincingly human.  Maybe Jarod had remembered that; there were certainly a dozen ways he could have left her a message on Centrenet, the corporation’s internal network, though it was already sprayed with enough electronic graffiti that it would take Broots years—well, at least six months—to clean it all out.   She was delaying.  Because there was only one reason Jarod would contact her.  And if she read it, she guessed she would have to go.  One more night that she couldn’t visit with her dying father. Parker lifted the edges of Jarod’s letter.  It was handwritten, too, on a piece of copy paper with a faint corporation watermark.  Part of her wanted to call analysis and have the watermark traced, put the Jarod-team, the no-longer-existent Jarod sweeper team, on alert.  Old habits die hard.   She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath in order to gain control of all the emotions that had risen up in her.  Nostalgia, her old wistful companion in still moments.  Yeah, a bit of annoyance, too; the cold bitchiness, she thought with a smile, that had wrought her this job had been dulled, not killed, with her newfound peace.  Must be a natural part of my personality, after all.      Maybe even a little anticipation.