Last chapter! It came on kind of quickly, but I think I'm done! Thank you so much to all the people who left reviews, and everyone who added this and/or me to their alerts or favorites. And as always, let me know in the comments what you think!

And Christmas came. It was a foggy memory in Rachel's brain already. There was the explosion of presents, then the enormous dinner that managed to stress her mother out even though there was nobody eating with them. Rachel's father finally managed to calm her down by taking over the cooking, and Rachel breathed a sigh of relief as he did—her mother's cooking tended to be less than stellar.

They ate roast beef, but though it tasted wonderful, it didn't taste much like roast beef, and Rachel's father refused to disclose his seasoning secrets. There was cranberry sauce, which also had a funny taste to it, as well as a wide variety of vegetables with specks of dark, unidentifiable spices on them. Rachel marveled at how her father used the same dishes that they used every year, but somehow managed to make the meal taste absolutely nothing like Christmas dinner.

After dinner, her mother decided that the three of them alone in the house was gloomy, and instead of inviting someone over—which Rachel thought was the logical place to go, from that reasoning, even if nobody would have come on Christmas—she decided that Christmas music was the logical solution.

"No…" Rachel's father moaned as "Santa Baby" came on. "Change the song," he whispered conspiratorially to Rachel. Rachel did, and a choral version of "Joy to the World" replaced it.

"Did you just recruit our daughter?" Rachel's mother's back was turned.

"How did you—" Rachel began.

"Yes," he said. "Which means I win, unequivocally, forever and ever, no tagbacks."

"I like that song," her mother muttered petulantly.

And now they were sitting in the wreckage of the Christmas explosion the morning after. There were scraps of colored wrapping paper all over the floor, and one of the older strands of lights on the tree had gone out. The angel at the top of the tree, made by five-year-old Rachel at Sunday school (when her mother had run completely out of childcare options), was looking distinctly lopsided.

Rachel's mother had pulled them both up to clean the house, because apparently that was a time-sensitive activity or else they would "lose their momentum", but there had been no momentum to begin with. Nothing much had gotten done, and they were all sitting languidly in the living room. Rachel was playing absentmindedly with her new cell phone, her mother was reading a book, and her father was compensating for his handheld game system's broken speakers with aggressive sound effects. Eventually, her mother stood up to go clean up the kitchen, and it was just Rachel and her father sitting there.

"Dad?" Rachel said suddenly.

"What?" asked her father, breaking off of his sound effects but still pressing buttons forcefully.

"How often—you know, when you solve a case—how often is it genetic?"

He paused his video game and looked up. "I know why you're asking."

"So what? Just answer, please."

"No."

"Why not?" Rachel put her phone away for fear that she might break it in frustration.

"Because you're asking the wrong question."

"It's just a question!" She almost stomped her foot. "It can't be right or wrong."

"It's wrong," he assured her.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "So what's the right question?"

"The right question is"—he put on a revolting, sappy kind of face—"'Do you really love me, Daddy?'"

"What—but—" Rachel blustered and tried to cover for herself. "That doesn't even have anything to do with—"

"It's what you've been trying to ask me for months now. You did ask me, and I didn't answer right."

He had lost his sarcasm, he had lost his bravado, and all of a sudden he was just a man—just like anybody else's father, sitting there in his big gray chair.

"You want to ask Lisa, too, but you won't." He took a slow breath and said, "She loves you more than she loves me—more than she loves anything." He looked her in the eye. "And—you asked me if I wished you were really my daughter." He took another breath, and Rachel thought suddenly that he seemed almost self-conscious. "I love you more this way."

Rachel closed her eyes and let the words echo in her head. I love you more this way. When the words had sunk in, she stood up, slowly, and went over to his chair. She sat down on his lap, careful not to put any weight on his bad leg, and hugged him.

For a moment it seemed like he didn't know what to do, but then his arms found their way around her back.

"I love you more this way, too," she giggled into his ear, but they both knew that she didn't mean it in a particularly giggly way. She accepted him, more completely and purely than anyone ever had. "I like the cane, too," she added. "It makes you look mysterious." And she grinned.

"Why, thank you," he said, in a snobbish accent. "I do endeavor to cultivate an air of mystery."