What caught her was the silence. It seemed out of place, in a small apartment with a baby and noisy neighbors on either side. Silence was something she hadn't experienced, truly, in almost ten years. Mulder used to tell her that it was a good thing; silence was unnatural, silence was always a harbinger of doom. Mulder was fond of being overly dramatic, and usually she would laugh at him in a way that was slightly patronizing and mostly loving-but his words made her shiver now. She rubbed her hands up her arms and felt her fingertips rise and fall slightly with each goosebump. 
	Scully rose to close the window, wondering if her newborn was cold, also. With the awkward anxiety of a new mother, she quickly made her way to the nursery at the end of the hall. Her mother had helped her set it up as soon as she began to show, in all blues and greens and yellows. All Scully could think about then was that it was a very girly way to decorate a baby boy's room-Mulder would have insisted, had he been there, that there be old baseball cards thumbtacked on the walls and a small, infant basketball hoop attatched to the corner of the crib. 
	Leaning over the baby, she stroked his small, soft forehead lovingly. He looked so much like Mulder, even at his minute age. She could see, when he laughed, the sparkle of Mulder's eyes. Blinking hard, she tried to hold back the tears that had threatened to burst out since Mulder left that morning. 
	Softly, so as not to wake him, she said to William: 
	"I shouldn't feel ashamed to cry in front of you. You know how I feel." Putting her pinky in his loosely balled fist, she allowed the seas of her sorrow to drop onto her son's soft down blanket, a muffled pitter-patter that banished the silence and broke her heart.
**********************************************************************
	She woke up in the rocking chair with William dozing lightly on her chest, his thumb hidden protectively in the warm, gummy refuge of his baby mouth. She wondered if she could ever again be as content as her son was now, sleeping while the world tumbled into an ocean of chaos and crumbled around her like a sandcastle swept up in a high tide.
	The phone rang, distance separating her blissfully from its piercing shrill. She hestitated, contemplating letting the machine get it, but she thought of the tremble in her mother's voice when she had explained, as vaguely as possibly, the circumstances of William's birth. Reluctantly, she pulled herself out of the chair and settled William carefully back in his crib.
	"Hello?" She must have sounded upset or very tired, because the person on the other line was immediately alarmed.
	"Dana? Are you all right?"
	"Yes, Mom, I'm fine," she sighed, sinking into a kitchen chair. Her body suddenly felt so heavy, like the places where her tears had been had filled back up with lead.
	"You're lying," her mother accused.
	"No, I'm not," Scully insisted. "I'm just really tired."
	"Has Willy been keeping you up?" It amused Scully that her mother had already developed a nickname for her son. 
	"No, not really," Scully replied honestly. She wondered why she hadn't just answered in the afirmative; it would have been easier to hang up on her mother soon. But the truth was that she really needed to talk to someone, and it seemed that she had no real friends left. She closed her eyes and put her head back, ready for the verbal assault.
	"What's wrong, Dana? Is something the matter? Is Willy sick? Are you sick?" Her mother's genuine concern made Scully smile. Although only a very new mother herself, she now understood the anxiety that Margaret Scully had felt for her and her siblings over the years. Only now she was more scared for Mulder than for her son.
	"Mulder's gone, Mom," Scully told her, her voice shaking with emotion. When she awoke she had felt as though she could cry no more, but suddenly she began to feel the tears flow. She reached for a box of Kleenex and dabbed at her nose quickly.
	"What do you mean, he's gone?"
	"I mean he's gone," Scully said. "He's not here anymore."
	"You mean he's left you? That doesn't sound like Mulder."
	"Oh, Mom, it's not like that. He had to go away. He isn't safe here."
	"So where did he go?"
	"I don't know." Scully could no longer bear it. She began to sob, long, silent sobs of frustration that rocked her body. For once her mother remained quiet as her daughter broke down. When Scully felt as though she had pulled herself together, she took a deep breath and turned her attention back to the phone.
	"I don't know where he went," she repeated. "He just had to go-far away."
	"Well, is he ever coming back?"
	"I don't know." She hiccuped softly and sniffled into a tissue.
	"Will he call?"
	"I don't think he can. It might-it might be too dangerous."
	"He should do something to at least let you know that he's safe," her mother said.
	"Mmhmm," Scully agreed vaguely. She suddenly felt the great urge to go to her son and hold him close. "I can't talk anymore, Mom, the baby woke up."
	"Dana, do you need my help? I mean, I could come over there and help you take care of little Willy if you want. You could sleep . . . "
	"I'm sleeping okay," she insisted. "But thanks anyways. I'll call you if I need you, Mom, okay?"
	"Okay." Her mother sounded unconvinced, but if there was one thing Margaret Scully had learned over the last year was that her daughter would do whatever she thought was best, no matter how much coaxing and cajoling she herself tried. "I love you, Dana. Tell that baby I love him, too."
	"I will, Mom. I love you, too. Bye." Dabbing at her eyes, Scully put the phone back in its cradle and walked back to the nursery. The baby really had woken up, and he was smiling in a way that seemed to Scully to be reassuring. She took him in her arms and began to sing, in a voice that was far off tune . . . 
	"Jeremiah was a bullfrog . . . was a good friend of mine . . ."
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The clock read 1:13 a.m. in pulsating blood-red letters. She shifted in bed, not wanting to disturb William, who slept beside her. On her back now she stared at the ceiling, folding her hands over her abdomen like a corpse in a casket. She blinked hard once or twice-she shouldn't be thinking things like that.
	She turned over and gazed at the telephone on the nightstand, willing it to ring. Of course, it didn't, and after a while she realized that she wasn't going to get back to sleep. Cautiously, so as not to wake the baby, she slipped out of bed and crept to the closet to grab her robe. It was brisk in the room because she liked to leave the windows slightly open-without fresh air she always felt stifled. William was wrapped in a warm cornflower-blue PolarTec blanket to keep out the chill, but she liked to feel the breeze.
	She left the room quietly, switching the baby monitor on and leaving the door slighly open so she could hear him if he cried.
	Closing her eyes, she could almost see him standing there, ready to leave. She could almost hear his voice weaken as he spoke his last goodbyes. His last kiss had been tender, on the forehead, reminiscent of all those they had shared before they had acknowledged the truth, about their feelings, and about William. Now her son lie sleeping in the next room, and she wished more than anything that Mulder could have been there, asleep beside him.
	She sat down on the couch and spread out over its length. From that vantage point she could see the entire living room and kitchen sprawled out before her. She knew every inch of this apartment, every crevice, every niche, every crack. It was all empty without Mulder, without the possibility of his presence in the room, without the probability of a phone call or an email. The laptop on the desk was shut, a thin black rectangle that had ceased to be of any use to her. 
	Mulder's last email had come a week ago, warning her that, from now on, she would hear nothing from him. The danger had increased, or so he had written, and he was forced to cut off all contact until it was safe again. "I don't want to put you and William in harm's way," he had said. But it was Scully's suspicion that communication, when it couldn't be done in the flesh, when he couldn't touch her or their son, or hear her voice, had become too painful.
	So she had taken to writing him letters. They were short, at first, like the emails, but soon they lengthened significantly, filling dozens of pages with her steady, even script. She entered tiny tidbits from her daily routine, William's fondness for the doll Mulder had given him, a conversation with her mother, getting the car washed. The last letter had addressed her decision not to have William baptized until Mulder returned, whenever that might be. He was William's father-she needed him there.
	She needed him everywhere. She felt his absence in every aspect of her life. Her job at the FBI was lifeless now, without the X-Files and without Mulder it had become nothing more than a nine-to-five. Doggett and Reyes often consulted her on cases, but her interest in the X-Files, in their X-Files, had stagnated and then disintegrated soon after Mulder's departure. Even the X-Files that she and Mulder had shared were fading from her memory; soon, she feared, she would lose all the passion she had once felt for the work. Even greater was her fear that, soon, Mulder would, too.
	Scully read over her last letter carefully, checking for spelling mistakes and other errors in a manner that she had already recognized as slightly obsessive-compulsive. She wanted him to understand every line, every phrase, every word that she put on those pages-she wanted him to know her, even though he would never, ever receive the letters.
	She put the pages into the three-hole punch and then into the binder she was keeping of all the letters she composed. She hoped, someday, to be able to hand them to him as evidence of her undying devotion, her unfading love. And she hoped, someday, that William would read them and understand what his parents had gone through, what his father had gone through, to keep them both safe. How much his father loved him, and how much she needed him.
	Closing her eyes, she drifted into a thing like sleep, a fitful and restless state of unconciousness.
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	The clock read 1:13. Slowly he rose, unwilling to stay another minute stationary on the lumpy motel bed. He could no longer entertain the pretense of sleep; he was too worked up, too jumpy. 
	He grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds and picked up yesterday's newspaper, but its contents interested him even less than they had yesterday. He always scanned obituaries (morbid, he knew) to see if anyone he knew, anyone connected with the X-Files, had died. There was no way anyone could really contact him anymore-for all he knew, Scully had died, or possibly Doggett or Reyes, or Skinner. It wasn't good to think that way, he knew it, but he still paid extra special attention to the obituaries, not wanting to miss it if something had gone horribly wrong.
	As of yesterday, everyone was safe, or so he could ascertain from the limited information at his disposal. At least, he was convinced of Scully's safety. He had called yesterday from a pay phone ten miles from his motel just to hear her voice. It had been late at night, ten thirty or something, and when the phone kept ringing and ringing he thought he was going to go out of his mind with worry. She should be home, he thought frantically. 
	But then she had picked up the phone, sounding breathless, as if she had run from doing something else. Probably taking care of William, he surmised later, a thought which made him smile, but also pained him. Since their son was born he had not really been able to care for him at all like a father should, and his heart ached for that sort of opportunity. 
	"Hello?" Her voice was so familiar that he almost collapsed out of relief. She revived him just by being alive, just by saying that one word. She was his elixer of life, his cure. Sometimes he could fool himself into thinking he didn't need her as much as he did, but he was always wrong. He knew that every time he heard her voice.
	He hadn't answered. After some silence, she whispered, "Mulder?"
	He yearned to tell her it was him, to ask how she was, how their son was, but he couldn't. He really shouldn't have called at all. Unwillingly, he hung up the phone.
	When he returned to the motel that evening, he began another letter. He had fallen into the pattern of writing Scully letters after he had resolved to cut off email contact. His access to a computer had been severely limited, and he felt himself too conspicuous now to enter the internet cafes. He had considered starting to go to a local library, but, since he moved around from town to town, it was difficult to gain access.
	And so he wrote her letters. He couldn't, of course, send them to her, but he wrote down his thoughts anyways. He hoped that one day he could give them to her. They were all in a file folder he had stolen from the FBI after he was fired, in chronological order. He told her about his fears and his anxieties, about how much he missed her voice, about how every time he read a long medical term in the newspaper he thought of her, how he always thought of her no matter what.
	His hand trembled; he couldn't write anymore. If he did, he would certainly begin to cry, but he refused to do that. Every time he cried he felt as though he were letting someone else dominate him-the devil who had wrought this terrible sentence on him. He felt as though he were letting Scully down by being weak. He needed to be strong for her, even if he couldn't tell her so. Sometimes, though, he felt as though he could cry the ocean dry with his sadness.
	To alleviate his sorrow, Mulder drew out the picture of Scully he had taken one day in the office. It was completely natural. She was bent over a file, a pen draped naturally over the fingers of one hand, her other hand tucking back a strand of hair that was obstructing her view. When she had noticed him with the camera, she had glanced up slightly and her lips had formed a sweet, innocent smile. Everything was perfect about that picture. It was the essence of Scully. He only wished that he had had the opportunity to snap one of her in full medical scrubs, with her hair pulled back in a low pony tail and her feet in blindingly white tennis shoes. 
	He lightly drew his finger across the picture and lifted it to his lips to kiss it. It was already showing signs of wear. There was a bend on one corner where it had creased in his wallet, so he had taken it out and put it in one of his paperback books (a medical thriller, as a sort of homage) to keep it flat. He was mad over that picture, and he had no idea why. It sometimes disturbed him to think that he would kill to protect it. It was the only thing he had to remember her by. She tried to convince him to take her cross as he had the night before he had been abducted, but he had staunchly refused. He didn't know why now, but at that time it had seemed appropriate. Right now he wished had that cross, he wished he had her. 
	He leaned back and closed his eyes. As he drifted to sleep, he imagined her leaning over their son's crib, stroking his face carefully, singing him their song . . . 
	"Jeremiah was a bullfrog . . . was a good friend of mine . . ."