Hello Everyone!

When I finished up Best Is Yet To Comein August I mentioned that I was already working on a new story based on the Gilmore Girls Netflix revival, A Year In The Life, and here we are at the start of my brand new story: Ever Changing Life. We pick up the story just a few days after the end of the revival and those now infamous final four words. While working on Ever Changing Life I re-watched large chunks of the original series and almost all of A Year in the Life, and I really tried to make what and how I've written this story fit together as cohesively as possible. Some details - little and not-so-little have been 'creatively interpreted' so they make sense within the world I'm writing. BUT I tried very to keep the spirit of Gilmore Girls as accurate as I possible could.

I hope you enjoy my story and as always: I do not own or hold rights to Gilmore Girls or it's characters, unique settings, or established storylines. I've borrowed these without any intention or desire to offend the creators.

Chapter 1: The Consequences of Vegas

"Not that I'm not happy to see you again," Chris commented into the quiet of their dinner at a restaurant in downtown Hartford, "but I assumed when you left last week without saying anything that you were going to ignore my suggestion for dinner."

"I wouldn't have just ignored the suggestion." She denied. He raised an eyebrow at her but voiced no argument. "Well I wouldn't have ignored it. I would have at least made up some excuse for why I couldn't come."

"Uh huh. Well I guess I can't complain."

"You shouldn't." She agreed.

He smiled at her with appreciation. "After all, I get to have dinner with the most beautiful woman in the room." His smile and love for her deepened as she blushed at the compliment.

He'd been watching her throughout the evening and it hadn't taken long for him to realize that her mind was frequently somewhere else, her thoughts far from the meal on her plate and the conversation that was for the most part simply casual between them. She was one of his life's great regrets - not the existence of her, he could never regret her creation or her presence in his life. But he had always, would always regret the distance in their relationship. He knew the fault was his. For so many years he'd linked his interactions with her to those with her mother, the result of course being that every time he screwed things up with Lorelai and took off, he was leaving behind his little girl.

They'd found a semblance of a good relationship during her later years of college but even that had been marred by his and Lorelai's eventual marriage and divorce. Oh, they kept in touch with frequent emails, especially during her time on the campaign trail, and phone calls from time to time as well. Unfortunately by then the damage had been done and a precedence for distance between them had been set. He could probably count the number of times they'd had face-to-face meetings during the past few years on his fingers. The fact that this was their second meeting in a week only peaked his curiosity.

"Well however you want to put it," he started drawing her attention back to him. "I was surprised when you called to set up dinner."

She met his eyes with her own wary gaze. Last week he'd thought her nervous due to the changing nature of her career and what his reaction might be to her book, and to her mother's marriage. Now, seeing that expression still in her eyes he wondered at the cause.

"I assume everything went well with the wedding?" He asked and she nodded but offered nothing more. "And you're still writing the book?" He continued trying to get a gauge of that situation.

This time, praise God, she gave him more than merely a movement of her head. "Yeah, I'm writing. I finished the first three chapters before the wedding and since then I've been focusing on outlining the story and really nailing down what I want the end product to look like. You know, deciding what to put in, what to leave out, which periods to really dig in to and which, I guess you could say, I'll gloss over."

"And Lorelai is really good with the whole thing?" He asked again because though it hadn't really stood out to him in the moment, he had eventually realized that when he'd voiced that question to her in his office last week, she'd more or less side-stepped the answer. Now he saw the slight grimace.

"She wasn't." Rory admitted and focused her gaze on her water goblet while the fingers of her left had worried at the utensils still lying beside her plate.

"She wasn't?" He repeated when she paused.

"I gave her the first three chapters when I finished them and told her to read them. To read them and if she still had major issues with the project then I would let it go." She paused again but only briefly this time. "The day before the wedding she gave them back to me and told me she wasn't going to read it until it was finished. She said that if she hated it at that point she'd just sue me."

Christopher smirked. "I'm going to assume she was joking."

"It's Mom, only time will tell." Rory said with a small, barely there smile.

"True." Then he watched as that small bit of humour faded from her face, her eyes still locked on the water. "You're killing me here kid." Her eyes flew to his, startled, and he raised both eyebrows at her in question. "Seriously, what gives?"

She bit at her lip and glanced around the room. Finally she brought her eyes back to him. "You said that Mom raising me alone was how it was meant to be. Her and me. You said she was a force of nature and that you simply couldn't, and so didn't compete with what she wanted."

He frowned slightly. "Yes," he paused. Debated. And sighed. "I'll always regret not being there for you Rory. I'll regret not being your dad the way you deserved for me to be your dad. But of all the possibilities that were in front of us at the time, everything happened just as it should have."

"Do you ever wish mom hadn't told you about me? Do you think your life, your relationship with your parents, even the way you held on to your relationship with mom for so many years, would have been different or better, if mom had simply left Hartford before I was born, and before ever telling you that she was pregnant?"

"Rory." His frown deepened. "I don't—"

"Please," Rory said softly but there was a sliver of desperation suddenly in her tone that begged him to carefully consider his answer. So he started with the easiest part of her question.

"I think that my bad relationship with my parents had very little to do with Lorelai and even less to do with you. We were like oil and water from the time I learned to talk. My father wanted everything his own way. Everything. I could never accept that and he could never accept me." He stopped for a moment and thought before continuing. "You coming along honestly just gave them something to blame my failings on. Whether those failings were real or not they, as I'm sure you've been told hundreds of times before, had nothing to do with you."

She gave another of those small smiles of acknowledgement at his assertion and he continued. "And I loved your mom. If she had just disappeared I don't know what I would have done. I don't know if I would have hung on to those feelings for as long as I did, or whether they would have simply faded away. There still wouldn't have been a natural end to the relationship, so you know, it's highly likely that I still would have dug in my heels and hung on to that." That garnered yet another smile from across the table, bigger this time.

"Or I could have reverted to form for the typical Hartford elite male and forgotten her in a moment because of that ole 'out of sight, out of mind' adage." He added lightly with a shrug and smirk. Then his features sobered and he finished off the scotch that remained in his glass before finally addressing the last of her questions.

"But if she hadn't told me about you and I found out later? And unless she moved a hell of a lot further away than Stars Hallow and never had any contact with her family ever again, I would have eventually found out." He paused and frowned. "Finding out about you later, finding out that she'd kept you a secret, it would have been devastating. I was never a good dad but you, Rory, you were everything good to me. If she'd hid that from me, it would have absolutely destroyed me."

He watched her as he answered, watched the changing expressions and emotions flow over her features, watched the impact of his final statement as it hit her, and he knew, knew that whatever the reason for her questions it had nothing to do with her book.

"Rory what's going on?" He questioned quietly. "It's obvious that something is going on inside that brilliant mind of yours. And it's just as obvious to me that whatever it is is weighing heavily on your heart too. You've come to me, twice now, and you've danced around this, whatever this is. What is going on?"

She swallowed and then spoke in soft tones that wavered under heavy emotion. "I'm pregnant."

To say he was stunned would be an understatement. He was simply and completely blown over. A baby. He'd never actually imagined Rory with a baby before, never thought of her having one as a possibility that needed to considered. At least not at any point thus far in her life. There may have been a moment or two, years ago, when the thought had vaguely crossed his mind, but to actually hear her say the words—well it defied explanation. And then there was the look on her face, the one that said she expected some kind of explosive response and was bracing herself for the attack. It was the expression that pulled him back to another time and place when he'd heard those words.

"Wow." He softly exclaimed on a rush of breath and reached across the table to touch her hand. "Is it, uh, Pete's?"

"Paul. His name is Paul." Rory snapped and her hand tensed under his. "And no, it's not his. He broke up with me on the weekend, by text, because we hadn't seen one another in nearly 7 months."

Her admission was swift, like ripping off a bandaid, but his mind quickly connected bits of information he'd been told over time and he gripped her hand under his so that she couldn't pull away as he asked gently, though it came out more as a statement than an inquiry.

"It's Logan's?"

Her gaze jerked to his and he tightened his grip more as she tried to slip her hand from under his. "What? How do you even know..." but her question trailed off as she realized the answer herself. "Mom." She muttered.

"Your mother called me one day in the spring. She kept going on and on about a one-nighter with a Wookiee, about how Deedee in London was really Logan, and how once again you were the other woman. Obviously I didn't understand everything she was going on about but I got the general overtures of her ranting and let her have her head. It was illuminating but at the same time it was sort of refreshing too." He paused and when he loosened his grip he was pleased when she didn't immediately withdraw. "I know your mother would like to believe that since she and I made so many mistakes in our own lives that you can simply learn from them without making any of your own. And while doing that would certainly allow you to avoid a certain degree of suffering, making mistakes is how we learn. It's how we learn that we made the wrong decisions, it's how we learn what's bad for us, or what is actually good for us. I know most people wouldn't agree with me, but I think it's the mistakes we make that shape us in to becoming better people. After all, how can we ever truly change if we don't understand that who and what we are needs changing."

Rory frowned as she considered her father's words and realized there was truth in them. It wasn't necessarily the whole picture of any situation but he was right. Wasn't it sort of like what Jess had told her during the summer when he'd essentially said that you had to fall in order to get back up; that without failure there was no true measure of success. She wasn't going to think about the fact that she could have missed some essential life lessons by not taking more risks when she was younger, by over-thinking things with pro/con lists and endless debates with her mother. There was no denying that she'd made mistakes in her life, she'd long since left the princess-on-a-pedestal of her youth behind, but didn't she still judge herself by that gauge? Wasn't it true that others in her life continued to do the same?

"Granted," her father continued drawing her attention back to him. "There are some experiences of our lives that we can wish you wouldn't have to face yourself."

"Such as becoming a single parent?" she wondered aloud.

"Such as that," he admitted. "But Rory, Logan-"

"Is engaged." She interrupted.

He nodded. "He's engaged. But then he always was, wasn't he?"

"Dad," she started in a guilty tone of voice and bit her bottom lip, except then she stalled out.

Now it was his turn to frown as he considered the change in her expression at his words. And he wondered... "Exactly how long have you and Logan been seeing each other Rory?"

"It doesn't matter." She replied simply.

"Let's just say I'm curious." He suggested. "How long?"

Rory finally pulled her hand from under his and tapped her fingers on the table a couple of times before stilling them. "We first ran in to each other in Hamburg about five years ago."

"And I know, because I remember the gossip at the club, that he only became engaged maybe a year and a half ago." He commented after a moment. "So it sort of begs to question, which of you was the other woman?"

"Since Hamburg, he and I have been just casual. A casual lover has no claim." She argued.

"Yes, yes, I heard all about the 'Vegas' agreement from your mother. Which is stupid. You and Logan were never casual." Chris told her. "I know that's how you two started things at Yale, but even then it was never really casual."

She sighed and seemed to shrink in her seat. "It doesn't matter, Dad, because he is engaged now. Whether he was when all of this started, he is now."

"Did he hide his relationship with her from you?" He asked.

"No," she replied and her brows furrowed. "No, he told me when he was first introduced to her, and when they started seeing each other. I never really let him tell me much, I never wanted to know more. We were just—Vegas."

The sat in silence for a few minutes and Christopher considered all she'd said, all Lorelai had told him earlier that year, and all he remembered of Logan and Rory's relationship a decade earlier. He thought about everything he knew of Rory over the past few years. And he thought about the pregnancy she had announced only minutes earlier.

"Well kid, this time Vegas has consequences."

She snorted but said nothing in response.

"Have you told him yet?"

She swallowed. "No."

"I hope you know that you need to." He commented lightly though he wasn't feeling particularly light hearted at the moment.

"If I didn't before, I definitely do now. Especially since you and Mom, and Luke have all said so." Rory answered sullenly.

"Rory," he chided in an increasingly serious tone. "Whatever he decides to do, that's on him. But you owe him the truth and the opportunity to make his own choice."

"I know," she sighed. "I just don't know what I'm going to do yet." She focused her gaze on his once again. "Shouldn't I know that first?"

He nodded then, again, he laid his hand over hers and kept his eyes on hers. "Just don't count him out quite yet, Rory."

So, tell me... What do you think?

And just so you know - the next chapter will be published within the next day or two. :-)