"I want to change my name."

Kurt doesn't take his eyes off the road, but Jane still catches his look of alarm. Too abrupt, she thinks. She's been checking herself like this a lot lately. It's been mere days since she came unsettlingly close to death, and she doesn't want to admit how much it shook her; she wonders if Kurt can see it in her anyway, just as she can see it in him. He's become so quick to jump to the worst conclusion.

"I'll stay Jane," she clarifies. "I know everyone's used to it. I just want to change my last name."

"You didn't want to take my last name," Kurt says after a brief pause. And he's right. She'd held on to Jane Doe for so long, rejected so many opportunities to change it. But she thinks she finally understands why.

"I still don't," she tells him. "I want my original name back. My parents' name."

Kurt's grip on the steering wheel loosens a fraction. "Oh." Ahead, a traffic light blinks to red, and he brings the car to an unexpectedly gentle stop. "Kruger?"

Jane nods. "Yeah. Kruger."

She had a lot of time to think, in the hospital, and her mind kept returning to them. Her parents. For years, Jane only remembered them as corpses. That seems incredible to her now; but to Kurt, to Patterson, to Reade and Rich and Zapata, that's still all they are.

"My mom painted," she says suddenly. "She showed me how to mix colors, but Roman was too impatient to learn." Jane stops for a moment, surprised by herself, but the memories keep spilling out. "She stopped painting, near the end. But she liked portraits. She wanted to paint my dad, but he brought his papers and he wouldn't stop working. You couldn't even see his face in the portrait because he was bent over the whole time."

Kurt chuckles lightly. If he's thrown off by the anecdote from out of the blue, he doesn't show it. Jane finds herself smiling too. It feels good, showing Kurt more of her. It feels good to give voice to those memories.

"I wonder what happened to her paintings," she wonders quietly.

Kurt glances over at her, and his eyes have softened. "Do you—" He clears his throat. "Do you want to be called Alice, too?"

Something flutters in Jane's chest as the car starts moving again. "No," she answers immediately, honestly. "No, I like being Jane. I just don't want to be a Jane Doe anymore." She turns her hands over in her lap: the tattoos that belong to all of her, the skin she was born in, the wedding ring she chose. "I know who I am."