"Please don't run Ethan." Bree folded her arms as she leaned over the railing beside the green-eyed man, her own gaze falling over the bucolic beachside view. Truly she took in precious little of the otherwise lovely scene before her, beyond the irony that here, where her strange, impossible search finally ended, there were so many happy families on these dark sands, so many laughing children and sweet young smiles.

This place, this beach, was pretty much the very last location in the world Bree imagined she'd find Ethan again - [i]if[/i] she ever found him, of course. But for the long stretches of beach, Bree did not care for Atlantic City in the least. Everything glittered and shone and begged for attention with sweet smiles and music, bells and flashing lights - but only ever on the surface. She could think of little else but the layers of vibrant cosmetics caked on an old whore, or a lovely, masterfully rendered vintage movie poster plastered over layers of ancient, torn bills and crumbling plaster walls. Every last thing was for sale it seemed, the sole reason this place existed, and Bree had never been enamored with the vice of gambling.

From the beginning, this search had not been much more than a half-assed wild hunch, not even worthy of the name "plan." The FBI had no way to find him, little Jacob. No leads, no tips, no evidence pointing any which way from analysis of the envelope or the thumb drive or the video it contained. 

[i]'Ethan... '[/i] That name began as a soft whisper in the back of her mind, easy to ignore and push away for a time when she finally stumbled from the office bathroom. But by dinner time, it was a full-blown drumbeat through her skull, ceaseless, relentless in its march through the battered halls of her brain with a racking, thumping pain that had her burying her head in her hands. 

Only when she was decided, irrevocably, to leave Richmond, to search for Ethan [i]this very minute[/i], did the agony suddenly and simply... [i]End[/i].

Bree tried the more conventional methods of finding him first, via identification and credit card and bank transactions. Unsurprisingly, "Ethan Sampson" played out pretty quickly, and had simply fallen off the radar soon after Ethan was swallowed up by the great wide world all over again. She had never believed he had given her his true identity of course, but at the time she had been content to let the charade go - not that it helped her efforts to find the green-eyed man today though.

She had closed her eyes with the frustration, stood from her desk with her head bowed with defeat - and that was when her own voice rang through her head. [i]'Drive. Get in your car right now, and drive.'[/i]

And she did. There was no sense, no rhyme or reason to her drive. Only hunches about where she ought to turn off, what exits she should take. There was only intuition and her own inner voice, whispering which highways would take her where she needed to travel, which streets she should stroll to get her to the best vantage point. 

 What she was doing made absolutely no damned sense in the least. 

No matter. She found him. Somehow, she [i]always[/i] found him. Bree had no name for the connection that seemed to bind her and Ethan. She saw no numbers in her head - hell, she'd been lucky to [barely] pass College Algebra. And yet here she was on this boardwalk, an impossible thing that, in truth, seemed damn near inevitable if she thought on it long enough.

"I'm not here to arrest you, or harass you," Bree said softly, her grey-eyed gaze torn with some effort from the ocean to the man beside her. "The reason I'm here isn't about you or me at all." 

Slowly, one hand reached to the inside pocket of her jean jacket, as if Ethan were some nervous deer she might scare away if she moved too quickly and frightened him away.

"Go on. Take it. His name is Jacob Gianetti." A little boy with laughing dark eyes peered up from the photograph, an impish little grin on his wide, freckled face. "He's four years old, and his big sister is already dead."

"I don't know how this works, these numbers you see in your head. But I need to know if there is a chance, any chance at all, that he is still alive - and if there is the remotest possibility you can tell me where he is right now."