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Greer looked back at him. She had tears in her eyes. So did he, he realized.

“Jack, please.” That note of desperation again.

“No, Greer, listen. I love you. I do. I think you’re clever and brave and stronger than I could ever be. I love having you in my life and I never want to lose that again. And I want you happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. It doesn’t have to be with me, but I’d like it to be because of me as much as I can swing it. Because I love you, as a person, as a friend, as a you. And I’d like to continue that, if you’ll let me.”

“Just like that?” Greer was all narrowed eyes and skepticism. “Even knowing I won’t change my mind?”

“Yeah,” said Jack. “Just like that. Just like it always used to be. It was enough for me then. It’s more than enough for me now.”

She raked a sleeve across her face. “I am sorry, you know. For leaving like that. After Jules, I just couldn’t. You were a reminder. You were the reason we’d all been there, the reason it all…and I just couldn’t. But I should’ve talked to you.”

A familiar pain ripped at him. One he’d so often inflicted upon himself over the years, when he actually let his mind wander unrestricted to the past. He was the reason she was dead. But this moment was not for that thought. This moment was for Greer. And so, like he’d done every time this old wound opened, he slapped a Band-Aid on top and pretended he couldn’t feel it at all.

“We were kids,” Jack said, as if he’d grown since. As if he’d changed. As if the Jack McCoy of those long-ago days was in any way different than the one standing there on the lawn, beyond the differences in appearance.

“We were.” She sniffed. “And I do too, for what it’s worth. Love you, I mean. Not, you know, like that, but you were my childhood. When I left you all, I left that behind, and some days I really miss it. I miss you.”

“I’ve missed you too.”

Another sniff. Greer looked down at the elderly woman housing her oldest friend and extended a hand. “Friends?”

Jack wrapped a liver-spotted grip around it and held tight. “Always.”

They shared a smile that felt like breathing.

Jack had been in love with Greer since the first day they’d met, and that love had become one of the things that made Jack, Jack. But as they stood there in the golden light of sunset, tendrils of fading warmth wrapping around them in a soothing embrace, that part of him inhaled a final breath and moved on to wherever it was the rest of him had been meant to go the day he died, leaving him a little less Jack than he ever had been. And a little more of something new.

35

The rest of the You Agains turned up less than an hour later in response to Jack’s SOS text. He’d need all hands on deck if The Eagle’s information was to be believed.

Once his team had assembled, Jack relayed the so-called intel he’d received that afternoon.

“You sure we can trust this guy?” Carter asked.

“No idea,” said Jack. “But if anyone knows what’s going on in that office, it’s him. He’s always in everybody’s business. It’s really made possessing someone more difficult than it should be.”

“What does he think the archivist has to do with anything?” Dale asked. “I dunno, Jackie, if he’s that nosy, maybe he knows what’s going on and wants to get to the list before you do.”

Jack hadn’t considered that possibility, and it took him a double take at his right-hand man to process the fact that Dale actually had. Still, it felt unlikely. The Eagle seemed to live for his job, if for no other reason than it provided an endless supply of strange deaths and stranger souls to keep his curious nature satisfied. Jack had trouble imagining the man risking all that for monetary gain.

“It’s still an avenue worth investigating,” Jack decided aloud. It wasn’t like they had much else to go on at the moment anyway. He swiveled to Eli. “Anything on Greta Summers yet?”

A flicker of sheepishness passed over Eli’s stoic face. He shook his head. “I just keep getting that older lady every time I try. You sure her last name is ‘Summers’? Could she have gotten married recently or something?”

Jack tried to picture the kind of person who’d willingly walk down the aisle with the animate ice sculpture that was the new archivist. Stranger things had certainly happened; he was nonliving proof of that. “Good thought,” he said. “All right, try searching Gretas with other surnames working in the transportation field and see what you find. In the meantime, I’ll head back to the archives tomorrow and see if I can sniff out anything new.”

“You sure that’s a good idea, Jackie?” Dale asked. “I thought you were worried she’d start catching on.”

“It’s the best we have to go on right now.”

Dale nodded at that. “Maybe I should come with you.”

“Absolutely not,” said Jack, more harshly than he’d meant to. “You know what happened last time I brought you to the office.”

“Yeah, sorry, Jackie. I’m just getting a little bored here, I guess.”

For the second time in one conversation, Dale’s words gave Jack pause, a wave of guilt splashing him in the face. All this time he’d been so consumed with making his own afterlife as full and satisfying as it could be without giving any thought to Dale’s. While Jack had the luxury of a body to move around in and two jobs—one paying and one scheming—to keep him occupied, Dale only had the couch and television for company. There were still two weeks before Dale would need to move on to processing in order to avoid being trapped on earth as a ghost forever. With any luck, this archivist lead would bring the You Agains to the Master List with enough time left over for Jack to make Dale’s last days on this plane special. He owed him that at least. After all, Dale had been the one to come up with this plan in the first place.