A/N: Thanks for the reviews. I love them! :D Hope you enjoy this update and like I said in the other update, I got myself a Twitter account (under DCFanatic4life) so you can check out what I'm doing over there, although I'm very boring so there's not much to see. Anyways, enjoy the chapter, I hope! :D

Stephanie was still a little shell-shocked from her conversation with Shayna. The two women had talked a little while longer after Shayna had told her she would be a character witness for them. It had turned out, rather surprisingly, that Shayna was actually not the whore Stephanie had really, really wanted her to believe. Once they got past the Hunter thing (which was hard to get past even now) Stephanie found that Shayna really was a decent person who’d gotten caught up with a married man and fallen in love with him.

It was hard to begrudge someone who just fell in love. Stephanie wanted to, but she was getting to the point in her life where she believed that she and Hunter were just not this idea of “meant to be” and never really would’ve worked out in the long run. Besides, everything that happened led her up to Chris and she wouldn’t trade that for the world. She’d given up on the idea of soulmates, but she could imagine growing old with Chris and that was such a pleasant thought.

She walked in the house and Chris had obviously been waiting for her because he showed up not a minute later, rushing into the hallway. “Hey, you were gone for a while,” he told her.

“Oh, was I?” Stephanie asked, looking at her watch and she had been gone for longer than she’d anticipated. “I guess I got caught up.”

“Did he take the deal?” Chris asked eagerly. He wanted this ordeal to be over with. He knew there was no chance Hunter was going to ever be completely gone from their lives. He loved Keagan more than he knew, but Hunter was her father and he was not going to deny him that opportunity, no matter how much he wanted to snatch up Keagan and adopt her and make her his. He just wanted to live without knowing there was this huge custody battle looming over their heads.

“No, he didn’t, he’s going to go through with the custody battle as far as I know,” Stephanie told her fiancé.

“Bastard,” Chris muttered. He couldn’t believe the childish behavior Hunter was exhibiting nowadays. Sure, there had been no love lost between them, but to stoop this low for a years-old grudge. There were times to hold grudges, but there were also times where people needed to step back, assess the situation, and then act like an adult. Chris was trying to act like an adult, but Hunter wanted to drag them all back to childishness.

Chris couldn’t change the past, he couldn’t go back and make better choices. Ferris was his daughter and he loved her and she loved him and yes, it must have come to a shock to Hunter and he knew that after going many years thinking this girl was his daughter to suddenly find out she wasn’t had to be a terrible, terrible thing, but to act like he was, to try and tear a little girl from her mother. How could anything, anyone justify that?

“How could he not take it? We’re offering him so much more than he deserves.” Chris would love it if Hunter would be an actual father to Keagan. She was a good girl and deserved a wonderful father in her life. They’d never wanted to deny Hunter his basic rights, but Hunter wanted all the rights and for Stephanie to have none of them.

“I don’t know, he just…he wants to hurt us,” Stephanie shrugged. “He does that to people, he wants to hurt them when they don’t give him what he wants.”

“He’s the lowest kind of scum. I don’t know what that is, but he’s it.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what this was about. It wasn’t what Shayna wanted to talk about,” Stephanie said, lifting her head to look into Chris’s inquisitive blue eyes. Beyond that inquisitiveness, she could still see the anger brewing and settling and she wanted that out of his eyes. She raised her hands, cool from the outside air and placed them on his hot cheeks, cooling them and making the redness of anger disappear, like she was transferring the anger from his cheeks to her hands and ridding him of it, a healer.

Chris closed his eyes a moment. Her hands were so cool and yet so warm on his face and his heart was beating faster just from the contact. Would there ever be a moment where his heart wouldn’t beat faster whenever she was near? He hoped not because this feel was so heady and a rush of feeling and emotion up to his cheek. Where once resided anger, there was only adoration for this woman and he often wondered how he had survived years without her touch and kiss and love, most of all love. There had been plenty of other women, but no amount of squinting could make any of them her.

“What did she want to talk about?” he asked calmly, opening up his eyes and seeing the eyes he’d wanted to see for so long. He counted his blessings everyday for the things he’d been given. It was like he had built up enough karma for two lifetimes and was being so richly rewarded and he wished he could go back in time and have someone outline what he’d done to be able to actually get all of this in his real, waking life.

“She and Hunter broke up,” Stephanie said plainly. “Last night, they fought and they broke up, well, he told her to leave and she wasn’t going to object to that because she was pissed at him too so they’re not together anymore.”

“Are you serious?”

He knew Stephanie loved him, that was not in doubt, but there was this kernel of fear. It was so small it wouldn’t even fit in his tiniest cell, but he could feel it there and he didn’t want to water it for fear that it would grow and overwhelm him, but that teeny-tiny part of him, that infinitesimal dot was crackling, wondering if maybe, just maybe, now that Hunter was free and unattached, that some part of Stephanie, maybe even smaller than the kernel that was asking these questions, making his mind sputter and turn and go places he didn’t want to go.

“Yeah, she said that she’s done with him and she was sorry that she broke up my marriage to him and everything, it was pretty wild,” Stephanie said, unaware to the turmoil that was festering in Chris’s mind.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know, I guess when someone breaks up with you and leaves you and cheats on you, I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one that really thinks this, but it’s like, I want them to stay with that other person, marry them, live their lives with them forever because then it’s like, well, they were looking for their one person and that person was found and it just happened to be when I was with him, so I guess it just eases that pain a little, very little.”

“That makes sense,” Chris said and it did. “You just don’t want what you had to have ended in vain for stupid reasons that didn’t last.”

“Exactly,” she told him, “see you get me.”

Her smile was wilting that kernel, starting to make it turn inside itself, but he had to ask, he had to know. “Now that he’s free…I mean, you know…he’s free.”

“Yeah, he’s free,” she said. Then she added, “To go terrorize the other women of the world, I’m sure. Thank God I’m away from him for good.”

The kernel was gone and he grinned at her, taking her hands off his face and leaning down to kiss her. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t terrorize you, I promise.”

“You’re good at making those,” she said, but then remembered herself, “but that’s not the news!”

“Wait, so all of this was just the lead up to the big news?” he asked her.

“Yes!” she exclaimed, her eyes dancing with excitement, her pupils resizing themselves. “There’s much bigger, much better news.”

“I’m listening,” he told her, staring and studying her eyes so much that she almost started to feel uncomfortable under his close scrutiny. She often did feel uncomfortable when he would study her like that, like a painting whose swirls and curves were hard to distinguish and needed close inspection. She was hardly a work of art.

“She’ll testify against him,” she said with a deep breath and he watched as that deep breath turned to a deeper smile, one that reached every part of her, flushing her face in happiness and warmth.

“She’ll testify?”

“Yes,” Stephanie nodded. “She doesn’t think that he would be a good single parent to Keagan and she doesn’t really even think he’s in this for Keagan at all, but more for revenge because I finally managed to move on with someone I love. That’s what they were arguing about.”

“What were they arguing about exactly?”

“Well, it’s not like she gave me the play-by-play or anything, but the gist of it was that she thought the deal we proposed was more than fair and thought that Hunter should take it because it would allow him time with Keagan and that’s supposedly what he wants, right. Anyways,” she continued, not letting him get a word in, “he didn’t want that, he wants full custody and she started calling him out, telling him he wasn’t in this for Keagan at all and he got pissed and that’s what led to them breaking up.”

“Wow,” Chris said, pretty speechless. He’d never talked to Shayna properly, but she seemed the type to just go along with what was said, do as Hunter wanted, but it turned out she had a brain after all. One she used even!

“Yes, so she doesn’t want him to have Keagan. She doesn’t think it’s right what he’s doing and if it were for Keagan and Keagan only he would see that the deal we offered was great and gave him and Keagan time together.”

“So she’ll testify.”

“Uh huh, she could be a key character witness for us. If someone who has lived with him and been with him and took part in the destruction of his marriage will speak out against him having Keagan, I mean, how do you think that would look to the judge?” Stephanie asked, her voice hitching at the end.

“It would not look good,” Chris said, “It wouldn’t look good at all.”

“I agree,” Stephanie said. “We’re going to keep her.”

Meanwhile, in another state, Hunter was sitting with his mother. He was stewing, she could tell. She hadn’t raised this man not knowing his moods. She’d made him a cup of tea, but he’d had yet to even touch it. He was staring at it though, just staring at it, like he could make it hotter with the blazing fire of his eyes. He’d shown up the night before and hadn’t spoken a word, just going through the motions and it didn’t take a second glance to know something was wrong.

“Hunter, talk to me,” his mother said. She may not agree with his decision to abandon his…daughter now (she’d read the article and talked to Stephanie, who apologized so profusely Pat had to be the one to comfort her), but Hunter was still her son.

“She left me.”

“Who? Shayna?”

“Yes, Shayna,” he said hoarsely.

“But…I thought you two were doing well. What happened?” she asked.

“I’m suing Stephanie for full custody of Keagan.”

“You’re…what?” Pat asked, wondering if she had heard correctly. Full custody?

“I don’t want Chris around my daughter, I don’t want him around her at all. He already took one daughter from me and he’s not taking another so I’m suing for full custody and Stephanie thought she was doing me a favor by giving me some idiot ‘offer’ and Shayna thought I should take it.”

“What offer?”

“Visitation or some bullshit like that,” Hunter said. “Visits and whatever.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“It’s not!” he raged. “She’s my daughter and she is going to come home with me.”

“Hunter, I’m not sure I like this tone,” she said calmly.

“I don’t care, I’m not letting him take my daughter. He’s not going to take her. He already took my wife and one of my daughters!”

“She’s not your wife, Hunter. You left her.”

“I don’t care, she was mine first!” he cried petulantly and Pat had never quite seen her son so…disturbingly childish.

“Hunter, stop this now.”

“No, Mom, I’m not stopping until Keagan is mine and away from that asshole!”

“Has he really done anything wrong?”

“He’s taken away everything that’s mine!”

“Hunter…”

“No, she’s mine and I’m taking her back!”