The lights glitter from far below, like diamonds bathed in candlelight. Memphis? Jackson? She's not sure what city it is, but from here, it's beautiful, reminding her of J.R.'s strong hands fastening a string of diamonds around her neck from behind, his breath hot in her ear as he tells her they pale in comparison to her.

A brief shining moment in their miserable marriage, but these days everything reminds her of him.

She never could sleep on a plane, but Christopher seems to be managing just fine. Somehow it's just the two of them, off to meet with some pseudo-important energy committee in DC, flying in former Barnes Global jet, newly repainted to Ewing colors. She never thought she'd be this involved in the oil business again, especially not at her age, but then, what else does she have to do? And anyway, not much in her life has turned out how she thought; why break with tradition now?

On the other couch, Christopher shifts in the semi-darkness and she can see now that his eyes are open. Not asleep, then. Just quiet.

"Aunt Sue Ellen?" he asks, his voice startling her. Aunt. The word sounds strange on his lips, the cadence a little bit off, like it's something he's just trying out. He hasn't called her that in many years, maybe not since before she left Dallas for London. She wonders if someone, J.R., or Cally, or even John Ross in a fit of possessiveness, had told him she wasn't his aunt anymore. It wasn't true, of course; their relationship was one of blood, not only one of marriage, but a young Christopher wouldn't have known that. Then again, maybe no one told him anything of the sort; maybe he just stopped all on his own. After all, she'd left him behind, hadn't she? She hadn't made any attempt to maintain a relationship with the little boy who looked up at her with such sad eyes the day she went to tell him goodbye. He wasn't her son, wasn't her responsibility, and anything else was just too hard and she was just too weak.

She clears her throat and answers, just a beat too late. "Yes, Christopher?"

He doesn't continue right away and she begins to wonder if perhaps he's asleep after all. But then the words surge forth in a reckless torrent. "What was she like? My mother?"

So quickly does he speak, that she has to silently repeat his words back to herself in order to decipher their meaning. When she does, she's surprised. They've had this conversation already, and recently. But people grieve in different ways and since grief is something she knows a bit about these days, she answers from the beginning, as though she's relaying brand new information.

"Pamela? Well, the whole family was certainly shocked when your father brought her home, her being a Barnes and all, but after a rough start, she and I became great friends. I…"

"Not Pam," he interrupts her, an unspoken apology slipping into the air between them. "I mean...I meant my biological mother. I meant Kristin."

"Oh."

And there it is, at long last. The question she's been waiting for since that day many years ago when Bobby called to warn her it might be coming. Or, truly, the question she's been awaiting Christopher's entire life. She'd almost convinced herself that after all this time, maybe it would never come.

"I've read the court records from when Lisa Alden was trying get custody of me," he continues. "I've talked to my dad about her. I know she did some horrible things. But she was your sister; you must have known her better than anyone. Was there any good in her?"

His tone holds little hope for anything positive. She imagines Bobby told him an edited version of the story, but he would've had to include J.R.'s role in it. It was public knowledge after all: her husband's affair with her sister and the resulting pregnancy, miscarriage, and blackmail attempt with a different child, with Christopher. It's indefensible; she can't pretend otherwise, but that's not how she likes to remember her. They did love each other once, long ago, before either of them had ever heard the name Ewing.

"Yes," she tells him. "You're right; she did some horrible things. The last few years of her life she was very troubled. I… I don't know what happened to her; she had already changed a great deal from the child I knew by the time she moved to Dallas. Maybe she was taking drugs, maybe it was some kind of psychological issue, maybe that's just who she was destined to be; I don't know. After I married J.R. and left home… Well, I wasn't a very good sister to her, I'm afraid. She was still just a child – we were quite a few years apart, you know – and I was so desperate to be out from under my mother's influence... I didn't make much of an effort to see her. She probably thought I'd abandoned her." A long second passes as she considers this. "She may have been right about that. And I…I do believe she hated me for it."

Her stomach churns with thirty-year-old emotions. She remembers clearly the day she first realised her own sister hated her. It was during her pregnancy with John Ross. Kristin had come to Southfork for a visit, at J.R.'s invitation if she remembers correctly. She had obviously set her hat for Bobby, but anyone named Ewing would have done just as well, and neither woman had missed J.R.'s interest in his young sister-in-law. I'll have everything you have and more. Those were her exact words, uttered as casually as if she were commenting on the weather. But the hatred had been naked in her eyes and she knew then that her baby sister, the little girl she used to read to by flashlight under the covers when they were supposed to be sleeping, was lost to her forever.

But no. That's not how she wants this conversation to go. She's trained herself over the years to remember a different Kristin from the one she last saw. It's that girl she wants Christopher to know. And as the only link between them, it's her duty, her responsibility, to help him see her.

She forces a smile to her face, though he probably can't see her in the dark, and continues. "But what's important to remember, for both of us, is that where she ended up is not the whole of who she was. Kristin...Kristin was strong, and she was fearless. Even as a small child. She was very different from me; I was always a people pleaser, did everything my mama wanted, but Kristin was different. She was headstrong and stubborn, and she knew what she wanted. I remember one time when she was maybe seven. Mama was out for the evening and I was babysitting. It was eight o'clock or so, and I had just put her to bed and was on the telephone talking to my beau when I heard a door slam. I should have put the phone down and gone to see what was going on, but I didn't. You see, Mama didn't approve of my young man – his family didn't have a lot of money, so in her mind he was unworthy of me – and I rarely got to speak to him outside of school. I didn't want to interrupt the story he was telling me, so I ignored the door."

While she speaks, Christopher moves from his supine position on the couch to sit with his feet on the floor and his elbows on his knees, watching her with rapt attention. The thin swath of light shining into the cabin from the cockpit illuminates his eyes and his thick dark hair, and just for an instant, she's back reading Nancy Drew by flashlight to her sister once again.

She coughs to cover the crack in her voice. "I don't know how long it was from the time I heard the door until I heard her scream. It could have been five minutes, it could have been twenty. I dropped the phone and ran out the back door. Kristin was crumpled in a heap on the ground under a big, old magnolia tree. She was lying on her side, curled up like a baby. One arm was tight against her body and the other one was…" She cringes, remembering the unnatural bend in Kristin's little arm. "Well, the other one was clearly broken. I ran over to her and that's when I saw it. She was cradling a tiny white kitten up against her chest. She told me later that she had seen him stuck up in the tree from her bedroom window so she went outside and climbed up to rescue him. When I knelt down beside her, she wasn't even crying. I guess she was in shock; she was as pale as a ghost, and all she kept saying was, 'Sissy, can we keep him?'"

"Did you?" Christopher asks.

She shakes her head. "Mama said no. She said that pets cost a lot of money and we needed every penny we had to pay my pageant expenses." Digging her nails into her palms, she remembers the little girl's anger and despair. I hate stupid pageants, she had cried. She hadn't yet seemed to resent her sister, but perhaps that was the beginning of the end.

She finishes the story, detailing Kristin's bravery in being transported to the hospital in their neighbour's old pickup and how she had broken up with her boyfriend the very next day, too guilty to ever speak to him again. There are more stories like that one, decades old, half-forgotten memories from the childhood of two fatherless girls and their mama. They weren't a perfect family by any means, but then again, who was? They had loved each other though, each in their way.

Someone should know that.

"Thank you," Christopher says when she finishes speaking. "I'm glad I asked you about her."

She nods into the darkness. "You're welcome, sweetheart." She'd like to think that maybe somewhere, a little girl with a kitten in her arms is smiling.

Silence envelops the cabin and she turns back to the window. They've moved past the lights of the city; now she sees nothing but darkness. Hopefully, they're almost there.

A/N: That's all for now. Thanks for reading my little attempt at addressing the Sue Ellen and Christopher issue. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks everyone who reviewed. I truly appreciate it.