a/n: I'm aware that I'm cheerfully wading into what is probably the most controversial issue in the House fandom so a little disclaimer is in order. I don't know whether Stacy made the right decision, so I've tried to leave it ambiguous as it is in the source material. The characters are speaking what I imagine to be their own views, not mine. My views are nice and neutral.

I hope you enjoy the chapter!

"Stacy?"

It wasn't possible: what was she doing in Princeton? Anna must have got it wrong: Stacy couldn't be here, except she was. Live, in the flesh, exactly how she remembered, even wearing that same crucifix, even smelling the same. Anna hurled herself headlong into her- it was pathetic, she's pathetic. She was exactly the same. Like nothing ever happened.

"Hey, Anna Banana," Stacy said into her hair, "Long time no see."

Anna held on tightly, as though worried that she would slip away.

"Look how big you are!" Stacy's voice cracked a little. "You've grown up."

Anna's hands scrabbled for purchase on the back of her pantsuit, clinging on monkey-like. She hoped Stacy wouldn't let go too soon. She had been aching for a hug for so long.

Stacy, spotting something over Anna's shoulder, pulled away quickly. A moment later, Anna heard her father's voice.

"I didn't mean to break up The Railway Children," he said, approaching from behind. There was an unusual note of uncertainty in his voice, and his face was soft and open with shock.

"Hi, Greg," said Stacy. "How are you?"

He looked at Anna harshly. "Send the squirt away and I'll tell you. Go on," he turned to address her, "scram."

Anna looked closer at Stacy like she was trying to memorise every detail. House's hand took her shoulder.

"Anna."

The surprise at being addressed by name caught Anna's attention. House rarely did that: she was "squirt" or "kid" or "girl". She looked up at her father: his face was unreadable but grim.

"But..." she protested, glancing between House and Stacy.

"Go on, Honey," said Stacy encouragingly. "I promise we'll catch up properly before I leave."

Anna kept her eyes on Stacy and until the pair of them disappeared through the doors of the clinic. Walking up the stairs towards the fourth floor, Anna rubbed her eyes. She felt like she'd just seen a ghost.

Dazed, she stumbled up to the DDX room and took a seat at the table. Three heads turned to face her expectantly.

"So?" demanded Foreman. "Does House want us to do this lecture or not?"

"What lecture?" Anna mumbled, laying her head down on the table. She was getting a headache. Why on earth was Stacy here?

"It's unprofessional," Foreman complained. "If he doesn't come and get us, we have no responsibility to go."

"It's the least we can do…" said Cameron.

"No," Chase corrected, from behind his newspaper, "the least we can do is nothing."

"He won't care," said Anna. "Not today. Stacy just showed up."

None of the fellows reacted to the dramatic name. Anna rolled her eyes. "None of you knows," she said with a touch of superiority.

"Who is she, then?" asked Chase with some interest, though not quite enough interest to put down his paper.

Anna propped herself up on her elbows, enjoying having something that the fellows wanted. "His ex-girlfriend."

Foreman snorted. "I'm surprised there isn't one of them in the ER every day of the week."

"Didn't you listen? His ex-girlfriend. They dated for five years. They lived together. They would have got married."

"House? Get married?" dismissed Chase incredulously.

"Why don't you believe me?"

"Well..." said Chase.

"You have a history of lying for attention." Foreman put it more bluntly.

Cameron looked at Foreman disapprovingly. "She's telling the truth."

"Yeah," mocked Foreman, "Just like she was when she told that senior citizen she was a Harry Potter character."

"No, House mentioned, once... He said he'd been in a relationship, that they'd lived together."

Chase and Foreman looked more interested.

"He's pulling your leg," said Chase after some deliberation. "House couldn't hold down a relationship. With a woman."

"You are talking about my dad, you know?" Anna piped up.

"I don't think he was always like this," Cameron speculated. "Something must have made him this way. Maybe it was a heartbreak."

Foreman shook his head. "Some people are just born assholes. Real life isn't a rom-com, Cameron. He doesn't need the love of a beautiful woman to fix him."

Chase chuckled and Cameron shot him a hurt look. He hurriedly turned his chuckle into a cough.

"Well, forgive me for thinking there's some shred of goodness in our boss," said Cameron.

Anna sprung up from her seat and ran her fingers through her hair. How rude, to talk about her dad like she wasn't there! Maybe she and House didn't always have the best relationship, but he was her father, after all. And as for the lying: well, she'd apologised for that, hadn't she?

Her feet found their own way down staircase after staircase. Why would Stacy turn up after all this time? Why hadn't she contacted Anna earlier? She shook her head. There must have been a good reason that Stacy hadn't been in touch. She was everything House was not: organised, responsible, affectionate. Surely she wouldn't have forgotten about Anna.

Pausing at the foot of the stairs, Anna considered where to go next. She was right next to the back doors of the lecture theatre where doctors sometimes spoke for the med students. Most of the time, however, it was empty and Anna enjoyed sitting alone with her feet on the back of the seat in front, doodling in the silence. She approached the door and laid an ear to it.

"Three guys walk into a clinic. Their legs hurt. What's wrong with them?" said House.

Anna's eyes widened as she listened to the students make a few suggestions. Legs. Typically a loaded subject when it came to House. Her heart began to hammer. She felt sort of intrusive as she pressed her ear closer to the door. House spoke about the common causes of leg pain. (Leg pain? Such a weird topic! It was almost banal. So unlike his prefered fields of exotic diseases and bizarre neurological problems and undiagnosable puzzles.) Eventually, he outlined three hypothetical patients. A volleyball player. A man who was bitten by a snake. And "Carmen Electra", who was golfing when her leg pain started.

Golf. Anna sorted through her fuzzy memories. Despite her youth at the time, those last troubled summer days in America were lodged firmly in her mind. She was sure she knew what he was talking about. Feeling nervous and excited, Anna pushed open the back doors as quietly as possible and took a seat behind the rows of students where she was sure House wouldn't spot her. He seemed serious, playing with his cane and speaking quietly, so the whole room had to strain to hear every word.

Anna was right. He was talking about himself.

"You've been lying to me! All this time!" Anna skidded around the corner, nearly knocking over House as he exited the lecture theatre.

"Watch it!" House said angrily, regaining his balance in the nick of time. Anna tried to hide her embarrassment with a surlier glare. "What are you talking about?"

She ticked it off on her fingers. "You've been lying, Cuddy's been lying…"

"Oh, stop it." House began to limp away speedily. Anna followed him. "You're not at the centre of some-" he waved his free arm to demonstrate "-great conspiracy. This isn't an episode of General Hospital. Your life isn't as interesting as you think it is."

"That's rude," said Anna ruefully.

"Welcome to the show. Rude is what I do. Will you leave me alone now?"

"I'm talking about what you said in the lecture."

House stopped in his tracks. Anna walked into the back of him.

"What lecture?" he demanded. "You were in there?"

"At the back."

He hadn't meant to tell the story so... truthfully. He wanted to teach about infarctions but he had planned to chop up the story a bit more, disguising names and faces and circumstance. But halfway through the lecture, he had stopped seeing the audience. He realised they weren't going to guess the diagnosis. Between their ignorance and his brief collision with Stacy, his storytelling had given way to the story in an almost naked form.

Fuck. Last time he was doing that.

"What has someone got to do for a bit of privacy 'round here!"

"It was a lecture! There were a hundred med students. What's private about that?"

Heads were turning in the hall. House yanked Anna down into a little side corridor with a vending machine and a few benches.

"Carol Electric-" Anna began.

"It's Carmen Electra," House corrected.

Anna got more worked up. "Well, I don't know who she is, but I'm guessing that was some sort of stupid reference. She was obviously you. So kudos for preserving patient confidentiality."

"You got me." House held up his hands "It was me. Fine. Why are you so angry?"

"Because of Stacy! She did this to you?"

"Shh!" said House. "Tell the whole damn hospital, why don't you?"

"I can't believe it," muttered Anna. "Stacy! Why on earth would she do that without your permission? Or knowledge!"

"Shh!"

"It's wrong, House!"

"You know what else? It's none of your business. You shouldn't have been there. You shouldn't have heard it. Forget about it and move on with your life."

"I can't!" hissed Anna. "Stacy manipulated you! And now your leg…" She had the sense not to finish that thought at least. House glared at her and she changed tack. "It's her fault!"

"It's not that simple!" called House as Anna ran off into the crowd, too fast for him to follow.

House groaned. He didn't need a thirteen-year-old smashing a delicate situation like a bull in a China shop.

When Greg wandered off, Stacy was left at a loose end. She suspected he'd be back, and maybe more willing to talk things out once he had taken some time to calm down. Besides, there was Anna to think about. After all the promises Stacy had broken over the past few years, she couldn't stomach the idea of breaking another. She thought about the hospital canteen, with its acrid, vinegary salad. For old times sake, she supposed.

Taking a seat, Stacy put on her reading glasses and started to skim through documents. Emails to doctors, insisting they check out Mark just one more time. Expenses that the insurance was refusing to fork out. Stacy was confident that she could squeeze the money out of them. In fact, money wasn't a problem, not really. She just needed someone to listen to her. To take her concerns seriously. She knew that she was right.

She felt awful to return to Greg with her hands outstretched. A mixture of shame and anger had meant that they hadn't spoken since she had walked out on him five years before. Where it was necessary, Wilson had acted as a go-between. A good clean break was the only way for her to move on.

She wouldn't have done it if she wasn't desperate, but she was. And worried. Horrible feelings that brought her right back to her last few months with Greg.

Before his infarction, it had barely occurred to her to worry about these things. Sure, some people get sick in their thirties and forties, but not normal people. Not her, or anyone she cared about. Now she lived with a touch of paranoia that illness, like some great godly lightning bolt, could strike out of the sky at any time.

Only this wasn't paranoia. It was real. She just needed someone to listen to her. So what that she had to get over her silly embarrassment? It was worth it, anything was worth it, to save Mark.

After all this time, after all this effort, trying to get away, trying to move on. And here she was again back to Princeton, back to Greg as her last hope for Mark. Everything was almost the same as she remembered. Greg was the same. PPTH was the same, even Lisa was the same. Anna, on the other hand-

The thing which really got her was the accent. Anna spoke like a Brit: sharp t's, long vowels. As a little five-year-old it had only been a few weeks before she started talking like the other New Jersey kids at her preschool. There was no memory of that in her voice.

She wore glasses, now, and braces. Her hair was cut short and she was dressed with the exuberance of an early teenager. Stacy realised how much time she'd missed.

Anna had been born way before Stacy even met House. Stacy always knew he had a kid. On the other side of the Atlantic, a kid he'd only met three times, or was it four? Stacy thought it was sweet. She had to nag him a lot to wheedle out a name ("Anna? That's cute.") and it took three months until he relented and showed her a picture. He had rolled his eyes, dragged out the stepladder and pulled a shoebox off the top shelf. He complained that her mother sent him a few pictures every month.

"Must cost her a fortune in airmail," he pointed out.

But Stacy got the sense that he was fond of the pictures, despite his brash attitude. They were kept wrapped in tissue paper and he picked out a selection to show her with false nonchalance. A cute, ginger two-year-old reached towards the camera on the beach, showing off a shell she'd found. A baby with her mouth open in an infant smile. A three-year-old frowned at her puzzle blocks at daycare.

"You pull that face!" Stacy said, astounded.

"That's just a concentrating face."

"Your concentrating face."

"I call confirmation bias."

"She's adorable. She looks like you." Stacy handled the photos gently, by the edges.

"Like a middle-aged man? I pity her, in that case."

"Shut up. You know what I mean. She has your eyes." And she did, even then.

Stacy didn't want kids, not then, not with Greg. She knew Greg wasn't interested either. And Anna didn't count- Greg and Sarah, the girl's mother, had come to an arrangement that suited everyone just fine. He sent her a bit of money and popped in whenever he visited Europe for work. She sent pictures, even though he didn't ask for them. That was it.

Until Greg got a phone call. It was in the middle of the night, as these things always are, clipped and short because of the cost to ring transatlantically. Sarah was sick and she couldn't cope. She had no family in the UK. Could he help? Could Anna stay for a while, maybe just a few months, while she finished her treatment?

Stacy and Greg had a long conversation over the kitchen table, clutching coffees to keep them awake. Neither of them wanted it, but they both came up with lots of reasons that they should do it anyway: because they didn't have a choice, it was better to pretend they did. She would get to know her father properly. It was less disruptive. It would put her mother's mind at rest. A little kid shouldn't have to see her mother being ill. It was better, better for everyone, she was protected. Besides, it was only for a few months.

Anna stayed for two years.

And Stacy fell in love. Not at once, certainly not at first sight. It's hard to love a child who cries all evening and wets the bed every night. They dealt with it because they had to. They bought a rubber sheet and hugged her and comforted her and let her speak to her mother on the phone. They felt like they had a newborn baby, and Greg, who barely slept through the night anyway, went to work with dark circles under his eyes. They were kind, they said the right things, and they stopped mourning for their date nights.

But something started to change, slowly. Stacy kind of enjoyed the kids' movies that Anna wanted to watch. House woke up half an hour early to braid Anna's hair before school because Stacy couldn't ever get the parting right. House liked explaining the world to her. He could always make her giggle. And when she graduated first grade and clambered up on stage to collect her laminated 'diploma' wearing a cardboard hat, Stacy and Greg were there, beaming, in the audience.

"Look at you, all domesticated," Stacy had teased him that night.

She was a handful, no denying it. She got that from her father. She climbed on things and made flour castles on the floor and rocket ships out of tongue depressors. Stacy wasn't even that angry, she was more proud that she was acting like a child again.

And her mother wasn't getting any better, and there was no expiry date in sight. They stopped talking about her going back to England and they painted the spare room green and bought kiddy furniture. Stacy thought- and Greg said bluntly- that Sarah might die. Which would make them parents for real. Which would be... fine. It would be fine, after all.

And then the infarction happened.

Stacy emailed Sarah a few days later. She explained about Greg. She wrote about how he was sick, how Anna wasn't speaking, what life might be like if he woke up. And then she found herself confiding more: explaining the impossible choice she had made and how scared she was for her relationship. The result was rambling, semi-coherent and betrayed the fact that Stacy hadn't slept a night in over a week. She pressed send anyway.

Sarah emailed back with her sympathies. She was so sorry to hear about Greg. She shared in Stacy's worries about Anna. If things were difficult in Princeton then maybe, she suggested gently, maybe it was time to talk about sending Anna home.

Stacy and Greg splintered apart. Four months later, it was almost even worse. There was her job, there were all of the appointments and PT that Greg needed driving too, the sleepless nights and the constant worrying. Stacy was half-dazed when Anna's elementary school teacher pulled her aside and asked why her student was suddenly so withdrawn and quiet. It was suddenly too hard to imagine things returning to normal.

When Sarah emailed again and announced she was in remission, Stacy knew there was only one thing that could be done.

She booked plane tickets and explained the situation to seven-year-old Anna as best as she could. Then she returned her like a package to a mother that she could only just remember.

A week later, Stacy and Greg broke up. She hadn't seen either of the Houses since.

Anna ate her pasta a little aggressively.

"Everything alright, honey?" asked Stacy with a voice that was slightly too high in pitch.

Anna had filled her in on her schooling and her new life with House for the last twenty minutes, and then the conversation had run dry. But rather than being awkward, the silence contained a definite tension.

"Oh, I'm fine," said Anna, waving her fork vaguely.

"Are you sure-"

"I spoke to House," Anna interrupted as though she could not keep the burden inside any longer and placed down her fork. She tried to look as anxious and upset as possible. "He let slip some things about… you know." She gestured. "When you-" she appealed to Stacy's guilt here "-sent me back to England."

The guilt showed clearly on her face, but Stacy was not emotional enough yet. "What things?" asked Stacy evenly.

Anna took a moment to answer. She picked at her food, looking nervous and reluctant. Then she cast a timid little look over in Stacy's direction.

"I know you probably don't want to talk about it," she said coyly.

"No, it's alright." Stacy sighed with obligation. "You can talk to me about anything that's worrying you, Anna, you know that."

Score! She'd basically handed over the keys to the castle. Still, Anna tried not to exhaust Stacy's goodwill. Softly, softly…

"It's about House's surgery. He said… well, he said he didn't consent to it."

Stacy looked grim.

"I mean, I'm sure I got the wrong end of the stick. It's fine," she said in a tone which made it clear that it was not.

"Well, that's more or less what happened," Stacy admitted.

Anna frowned. "But… but you wouldn't have signed it off without his permission, though?" she wondered innocently. "I just don't understand why you would do that…"

"Because he needed the surgery to save his life, and he was too stubborn to agree to it himself. So I did what I had to," said Stacy bluntly.

Anna shrugged slightly. "Sounds like a difficult decision," she said, giving Stacy a way out.

"But it wasn't. It wasn't for me." Stacy looked up from her food and met Anna's eyes. Anna squirmed under her gaze. "I wanted House to live. Everything else could be his decision but I wanted him to leave the hospital through the front door. He could have decided to amputate the useless thing. He didn't. Fine, his decision. But I was going to do whatever it took to keep him alive."

"But he did make his own decision!" Anna protested.

"He was sick."

"He could still decide things for himself!" Anna's voice came out louder than she intended.

"That's what he told you?" said Stacy hotly. She shook her head, seeming to be speaking more to herself, or to an invisible House. "I bet he did. I bet he painted it like he was sitting up making reasoned arguments and weighing up the pros and cons of the procedure."

"Well, not exactly sitting up…"

"He was groggy from the kidney damage and there were the painkillers…" Stacy remembered who she was talking to, and stopped herself. "He was hardly conscious," she summarised. "He had lucid moments…"

"And he communicated what he wanted!"

"No," said Stacy raising her voice with frustration. "You don't understand. He would have died!"

"Truly?" asked Anna, hoping the answer was yes.

"Yes." Stacy looked her straight in the eye and spoke without an ounce of equivocation. "He would be dead. And look at him now! Yes, he's in pain, but it's manageable. He's got a life and he's got a job and he's got you. He has a purpose. And I'm telling you that I don't regret a thing."

"So you're saying you saved his life?" asked Anna sceptically.

"I guess I am. Somebody needed to make that decision. And maybe he hates me for it." Stacy smiled sadly. "But I loved him, and that means I'd rather he's alive than he's with me. "

Wilson paced up and down his office like a cornered animal.

"Listen, Anna," he said. "I'm not sure I should be having this conversation with you."

"I'm just asking a question…"

"This is very… it's very delicate. And I don't want to… influence you."

"Influence me?"

"You know, turn you against anyone…"

Anna seized. "Oh! So you do blame Stacy, then?"

Wilson blew out some air and massaged his forehead. He was about to start talking. Almost there….

"It wasn't necessary," he blurted.

"Stacy said it was!" Anna countered immediately.

"Well... I won't…" Wilson held up a hand and exhaled. "I know you look up to her, Anna. But she knew House's wishes. And she ignored them."

"But he'd be dead," said Anna.

"It was a gamble." Wilson began to pace again. "A better quality of life versus the risk of losing his life. It's the sort of choice my patients make all the time. And it is for the patient alone to make that decision."

"I'm confused," Anna complained honestly.

"Stacy is a great woman. She was a loyal partner to House. But she didn't have the right to make that decision- you can like her and respect her as I do and believe that." He added hastily. "She was unused to these sorts of dilemmas and she panicked in the face of losing him."

Anna nodded mutely.

"But I don't think it was right," Wilson added quietly.

Cuddy looked like Anna had given her a headache. "I don't know," she confessed.

"Is that you don't know if it was right, or you don't know how to answer my question?"

She leaned her head in her hands and looked at her desk while she spoke. "I believed it was the right thing to do at the time. But it was different in the moment- there was a good chance he would walk away from debridement surgery pain-free."

"But he would have died otherwise." Anna pointed out quietly. Cuddy looked up at Anna, her curly hair mussed up. "His life isn't so awful now, is it?" Anna asked.

"No, no, no of course not," Cuddy said reassuringly. She stepped out from behind her desk and started to walk around the office. "I believe a patient has a right to determine their own care, of course, I do." She stopped moving. "But I also believe House would be dead due to sheer pig-headedness. I made the decision at the time, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel guilty, sometimes. What I'm saying is…" Cuddy approached Anna, who stood up to meet her. She rubbed Anna's shoulder. "What I'm saying is... there's isn't a right answer. That's what a dilemma means."

Anna felt guilty herself as she walked up the stairs to House's office. Maybe he didn't need the debridement surgery. He'd be able to walk up these stairs as easily as her- but what if, without it, he had died. She could imagine that wide, gaping hole. She'd felt it before. To be an orphan...

Anna slunk through the doors. House glanced up from his work to give her a brief, resentful look.

"What's the verdict?" He said coldly.

Anna feigned innocence. "Verdict?"

"Sneaking around and poking your nose-"

"-I was just asking questions-"

"-Cuddy and Stacy and Wilson-"

"-Well excuse me for wanting to find out why I got abandoned!-" Anna whined.

"It's not your business!" House yelled over her. "What about a bit of privacy, huh?"

Anna sat down surlily and picked at the cushions of the Eames chair.

"Don't do that," House snapped. "You'll damage it."

When six o'clock rolled around, Anna met House at the car glumly. He didn't acknowledge her. He stared out of the windscreen, his jaw set and his expression blank.

"Put your seatbelt on," he told her.

"I was getting to it!" Anna protested.

House slotted his cane beside the stick shift and began to drive.

After a few miles in stony silence, Anna noticed they had missed a turn.

"You're going the wrong way," she told him.

"No, I'm not."

"You're supposed to turn there."

"I can turn off wherever I like."

"No, you can't."

"We're taking a short cut," he said finally.

Fifteen minutes later, Anna said: "This is not a shortcut."

"We're going on a field trip."

They pulled up in front of what looked like a building site. The tip of a large, squat house peeked out from behind temporary fencing. A banner, half falling off from the fence, promised: "brand new apartments from spring 2007".

"Do you recognise it?" House prompted.

"No." Anna looked harder. "Yes. Yes, this is where we used to live, isn't it? Wait, what are you doing?"

House had begun to disentangle himself from his seat. "We're going in."

"We can't!" said Anna.

"Can't is such a restrictive word, don't you think? Can't, shouldn't, won't."

"House, stop!" Anna pleaded. "We'll get in trouble."

"Get out of the car," he snapped.

House limped around the perimeter thoughtfully, before finding a suitable gap in the barricades and sliding through. He waved to Anna to follow.

"Let's go back," she proposed.

House rolled his eyes.

"The place is still caught up in legal disputes. Nobody is here. Nobody cares. Come on."

Anna followed him reluctantly. She felt sticky with guilt as House picked the lock with ease and entered the lobby. He reached for the light switch and long fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life. Hundreds of individual memories overwhelmed her.

House made an optimistic jab at the elevator buttons, but they were unresponsive. He looked up the stairs with a little sigh.

"You're right," said Anna eagerly. "We'd better go. Good try and everything."

"How many times do I have to tell you that I can do stairs?" House muttered. "You go up, I'll follow."

"Go where?"

"You know where." House indicated with his cane. "The third floor."

"What if I get caught?"

"You won't."

"But what if…"

"Then they'll blame me, won't they? Go on."

Anna gave in and walked up the stairs, very conscious of her movements. She normally took stairs two at a time, but that would definitely be insensitive. Was she walking too slowly? Maybe House thought she was mocking him?

"Get on with it!" House called.

She remembered racing House up these stairs as a child. He would take the stairs, she the elevator, and they'd see who won. A thick layer of grimy dust rubbed away as she touched the handrail. House was right. Nobody had been here for ages.

The door to apartment four was still blue. Anna touched it gingerly and it swung open. Here it was: half empty, a ghostly imprint of her old home.

Anna approached the fireplace gently, scared of disturbing something. The paint was blistering off the mantlepiece. She could see three pin marks where they had hung their Christmas stockings once. The cast iron hearth still had a poker in it. Piled against the walls were boxes of belongings. There were even a few books on the shelves.

Anna ran out to the landing in disbelief. House was working his way up the stairs.

"Everything's the same! The flat, it's just how we left it."

"This place had been condemned for years. Only nobody could figure out… whose responsibility it was to knock it down," he said breathlessly. "Now shut up, I'm coming."

Anna touched the green walls of her old bedroom. This was a proper bedroom, not just a closet with a bed. And there was her bed: a sad steel bed frame without a mattress, and a few boxes of stuff. She tore at them like a kid on Christmas morning, pulling out old picture books and drawings and dusty toys and child-sized clothes.

In the living room, House threw himself down on the torn couch, still catching his breath. His fingers found his jugular and started counting with absent-minded curiosity.

"House!" Anna waved an old drawing in his face. "All my old stuff is here!"

"Yeah, I guess the house clearance never turned up."

"Do you think it's okay if I take it? That's not stealing, is it?"

"If the FBI ever come looking for you, I'm sure Wilson will take the fall."

Anna had only been allowed one suitcase of things from her home in London. So much had been left behind. Pictures, stuffed animals, drawings and videos. Sometimes it felt like her whole life kept being erased. And there were boxes and boxes of proof that there had been a time before this.

"Look at this!" she smoothed it out on the coffee table. "I remember this picture! I remember drawing it."

"No, you don't. You saw the picture and you made up a memory to go with it. It's a common phenomenon."

"No, I remember the day. It was snowing, and school was cancelled, and the roads were too icy for you or Stacy to go to work, so we made a snowman, and you tried to make it anatomically correct so Stacy and I started throwing snowballs at you and then we had a snowball fight. And after my fingers were so freezing cold and we ate canned soup- we were sitting right here!- and my fingers hurt as they warmed up and then I got out my crayons and I drew the snow outside. The view from that exact window. Cos I didn't want to forget." Anna turned the picture so it caught the light to reveal shiny asterisks. "See- it's white crayon."

House stared at the wall. He remembered that day too. And just through there was where he and Stacy had slept. House used that rusty old coffee maker to make Stacy a morning cup whenever he woke up earlier than her- something which won him serious kudos. And this very sofa, underneath him, was where he had spent three days convincing himself that the pain in his thigh was just a sprain. And there, out of that window, was where he had watched Stacy's retreating back as she got into the cab that took her away for the last time. Yeah, there was a reason he had moved out, and it wasn't just the temperamental elevator.

Anna smoothed out the picture on her lap. She looked emotional. House was worried that she was going to cry. She did that sometimes and he always felt like an asshole for ignoring her. If there was some other way to deal with a crying girl, he had yet to figure it out. To his great relief, she tipped back her chin, inhaled and cleared her throat. Crisis averted.

She retreated into her old bedroom and emerged a few minutes later with a bulging backpack. House took a few more Vicodin and stretched his leg gently, trying to prepare it for the walk back down. As soon as he could, he was getting out of here.

"Isn't it funny," began Anna, sitting down next to House, understanding without asking that they would leave as soon as his leg let him, "that when we leave this place we'll never come back?"

"I don't know about you, but I was planning on working a bit of light housebreaking into my weekly routine."

"House." Anna wanted to take this seriously. She was no fun. She shook her head and started again. "It's only that we spend so much time in these places, but then one day we walk out of the door and we never, never, go back. not once in our entire lives. It's so… final."

She was talking about her apartment in London, he supposed.

"No. It's not strange," House decided.

Anna looked at him accusatorially. She thought he was being facetious.

"When I was your age-"

With a grunt, he heaved himself from the sofa and limped over to the door. Anna followed.

"When I was your age I had moved twelve, fourteen times. Different countries, different states. There's a knack to leaving things behind."

They were standing side by side in the threshold.

"You walk outside, you shut the door and you don't look back. You certainly don't brood over what you had and what you've lost. You don't think about it. That's the key."

Anna looked up at him sharply, understanding his point.

"I'm sorry," she said. She really was going to cry now. Her blue eyes -his eyes- were brimming with tears that were only just caught behind those ugly glasses.

House hesitated. He extended his hand, almost pulling back as he was overcome by sudden awkwardness. Jesus Christ, stop acting like an asshole. Steeling himself, he placed his hand on Anna's head. She looked up at him, surprised by pleased by the contact. Most people could just do that, without thinking about it. Affection came naturally for them.

He would always be able to forgive a bit of curiosity and he told her so. "Let's get pizza," he said.

"I love pizza!"

"I know."

"House?"

"Yeah, Squirt?

"It was a mistake coming here, wasn't it?"

"Maybe."

"Can we go home?"

"Yeah, let's go."