The last of the guests had climbed into their carriage and left well after sunrise. Kurt hadn't slept a wink, but not because his duties as a proper host forbade it. Blaine had not returned, and Kurt was starting to worry.

What if Brittany's note had been a reliable lead on Cooper's killers? What if it had been the answer Blaine was looking for this whole time? What if he went out alone to confront them and they wounded him – or killed him?

Too many what if's raced through his head for him to even consider getting a decent sleep until he knew that his husband was alive and safe. One more hour without any word and Kurt would have Sam send for the authorities.

Kurt paced by the door and would not leave it, holding vigil, needing to be on hand the second his husband came home. He had been wearing a path in the floorboards for over an hour when he heard the doorknob turn. Kurt pounced on it, turning the knob from the inside and pulling the door open wide. Blaine stumbled in, favoring his left leg so drastically that the limb looked completely immovable. Kurt was overjoyed, and he threw himself at the man, completely unaware that he had not come home alone.

“Oh, Blaine!” Kurt cried, burying his head in the crook of Blaine's neck before Blaine got a foot in the door. “I was so worried! When you didn't come home, I thought the worst.”

“Have you been up all night, my love?” Blaine asked, stifling a yawn.

“I have, my lord,” Kurt said. “I…”

A throat clearing behind Blaine, somewhere on the steps outside, interrupted Kurt.

“Are you…are you not alone?” Kurt asked, stepping back and giving Blaine room to enter the house. Kurt heard feet climb up the steps behind his husband, and he moved aside to greet the visitors when they entered.

After Blaine came a tall, thin, stone-faced woman, her salt-and-pepper hair tied so tightly at the top of her skull that it pulled open her eyes and stretched the skin of her forehead. She cleared her throat again but didn't speak, which Kurt found to be an odd and irritating habit. Beside her, hiding in the folds of Blaine's coat, walked a little girl – small and frightfully thin with big green eyes and dark colored curls framing her face.

If Kurt looked past the fragile figure and the dirty face, the child bore a remarkable likeness to Blaine – a likeness that made Kurt's stomach flip.

Kurt closed the door, giving himself a moment to think.

“Who is your company, my lord?” Kurt asked, praying that Blaine would say the child belonged to the surly woman, and that they were some previously unknown relation. That would explain the resemblance.

Oh, please, Kurt pleaded in his head, let that be the case!

“This,” Blaine said, indicating the woman with his hand, “is Ms. Hedgewitch. She is a nurse I hired this morning.”

“Oh!” Kurt said, turning to the woman and offering her a bow. “How do you do this fine morning, Ms. Hedgewitch?”

“Well, milord,” the woman said, curtseying but not even cracking a polite smile.

Kurt turned expectant eyes back on his husband, begging silently for an explanation that wouldn't tear his heart in two, and an exhausted Blaine sighed.

“And this,” Blaine said, “is Beth.”

The girl peeked out from behind Blaine's coat. She wore a thin gray dress that looked as if it had been thrown together from flour and potato sacks. Her hands were wrapped around the handle of a disheveled box, held together with thin rope and a prayer.

“And Beth is…” Kurt asked, leaving the question open-ended, waiting for Blaine to fill in the blanks.

“She is the daughter…of an acquaintance,” Blaine said lamely, his blood boiling at his own feebleness. “A Miss Quinn Fabray. The woman died about a month ago and left the child to me.”

“Why would she leave the child to you, my lord?” Kurt asked, his voice shaking progressively as he spoke. “What were you to her?”

Blaine ran a hand through his hair, worrying the back of his neck while he came up with an answer for his husband.

“I suppose because I was one of the few friends she had left in life,” Blaine said, his countenance darkening. “I do not know, and unfortunately, I cannot ask her.”

Kurt heard the girl squeak at Blaine's comment, and Kurt felt guilty that this conversation was taking place in front of her.

“Regardless of her motives,” Blaine continued, “the child is mine now, and I charge you with her care, husband.”

“Me?” Kurt sputtered indignantly. “Why---?”

“You said you wanted a child, so I have brought you a child,” Blaine said, touting his flawed logic in a frustrating and insufferably superior way.

Kurt shook his head.

“This is not the way that works, my lord,” Kurt argued.

Blaine ignored his husband, not in the habit of having his decisions questioned, especially in front of the help. He made a dismissive motion to the nurse holding the child's hand.

“Take her upstairs to the nursery and have a bath drawn,” Blaine commanded. “I know very little about orphanages, but that hovel I picked her up in was atrocious.”

“As you wish, Lord Anderson,” the equally insufferably superior woman said. Kurt's maid squirreled ahead of the pair to lead them to the proper room – a room that Kurt had only been in once and hated devoutly.

Kurt watched the girl go, led up the stairs by the newly acquired nurse, who held onto the child's hand as if she were a rabbit that might bolt any second. Though the stern woman seemed adept at exercising control over the child, she did not seem at all attentive or sympathetic to the pathetic creature.

The child was frail and underfed - that Kurt could see for certain through the frock that she wore. But more than that, Kurt appraised the child by her looks – her all-too familiar shock of dark curls, her lightly tan skin. The only feature unfamiliar about her was her green eyes – eyes as frightened and lost as Kurt's were after his mother's death.

Kurt's mouth dropped. He waited till he heard the door upstairs shut before he spoke.

“That child is no acquaintance, my lord!” Kurt hissed. “She is your child, to be sure!”

Blaine's face hardened. To Kurt's accusation, he had no reply.

“You told me that you did not have a child,” Kurt argued, trying to make sense of this rude revelation. “You were adamant about the fact.”

“Well, here she is, isn't she?” Blaine bellowed, not emulating Kurt's care to keep from being heard.

"But you were so certain,” Kurt said, still struck dumb by disbelief. “Or did you say that to spare my feelings?”

Kurt looked to Blaine for an answer, but he had none.

“Why would you not tell me?” Kurt persisted as tears fell down his cheeks. “Did you not trust me? Could you not warn me, at least? Don't I warrant that little bit of respect as your husband? Every tongue between here and Timbuktu will be wagging once news of this gets out. Maybe you need not love me, but you could at least respect me!”

Blaine was flummoxed by Kurt's reaction to Beth. He had considered the possibility that Beth would not be well received by Kurt, but he hadn't expected anything close to this. The anger Blaine had felt for himself for putting this responsibility on Kurt with no explanation immediately turned on the man in front of him, the man whose opinion Blaine thought had changed. After everything they'd been through, Kurt still thought that Blaine had no respect for him, and with every misstep he took, Blaine would be seen as nothing more than a fairytale villain, no matter how hard he tried.

“I am sorry that you didn't have sufficient warning, husband, but your warning comes only twelve hours short of mine,” Blaine said. “It is my want that she live in my house, so she will live in my house. End of discussion.”

“I will not be burdened with the care of your byblows, Blaine!" Kurt cried, the heart in his chest weathering away. "I cannot."

“Then you may consider your position as guardian in title only,” Blaine said. “I have made accommodations for her, hidden her away to keep her out of your hair. You will not be bothered by her.”

Blaine brushed past Kurt and reached for the doorknob. With a jerk of his chin toward the door, he summoned his servant to follow.

“Wh--…where are you going?” Kurt stumbled through the words as he watched Blaine open the door.

“I am removing myself from your hair as well, husband,” Blaine answered curtly. “For the time being, I have need to be far from you.”

“My lord, you only just returned home. Do not leave me,” Kurt implored, but his pleas fell on deaf ears, sealed shut by Blaine's wounded pride.

Blaine didn't offer any token of affection to his distraught husband as he limped out the door with Sam on his heels. The door shut behind them and Kurt was left alone.

Again alone.

Much like that poor girl upstairs was alone.

Kurt did not like her living with them. He did not like her presence in Blaine's house – their house. He did not like a reminder of Blaine's past life tormenting him. After everything Blaine had said, after denouncing the possibility of a child so expressly, apparently the fickle finger of fate had pointed his way, it just hadn't let him know its designs till now.

But as much as Kurt did not like her, there was something wanting about the small girl, and Kurt could not abandon her to the will of one particularly uptight and fearsome nurse.

Kurt climbed the staircase, lugubriously tromping up the long flights till he reached that horrible nursery. He still didn't understand the room - hadn't from the start. It was gloomy and foreboding - not at all the kind of place where children should play.

Blaine played here once, and even that bit of history made the room no fonder for Kurt.

When he walked into the room, the sight that met him nearly ruined him. The girl was huddled in the corner, curled into a ball with her eyes squeezed shut, while Kurt's maid tried to coax her into the tub, with the nurse standing disapprovingly nearby, her arms crossed, doing nothing to assist. The girl wore not a stitch of clothing (how they had managed that much, Kurt couldn't even imagine) and Kurt could see every rib, every bone.

As soon as he stepped foot into the room, Marley rushed over to him.

"Oh thank heavens, milord!" she said with a sigh of relief. "We tried to get her into the tub, but she will not go. She will not let us touch her. She only wants you."

Kurts eyes opened wide.

"Me?"

The maid nodded gleefully. The nurse, by comparison, looked extremely cross. Kurt wondered where Blaine had found her, because for a woman who was employed for the care of a child, she did not seem to like children at all.

Helping the child bathe was more hands-on than he had wanted to be for the moment, but he couldn't leave the child shivering in the corner. Kurt approached the girl slowly, cautiously, like he would a frightened animal.

"Hello, my dear." Kurt kept his voice soft and even as he spoke. "Why dont you want to take a bath? The water is warm and you must be freezing."

"I…I dont want them,” the girl whimpered. “Those women. I don't like women.”

Kurt's brow furrowed.

“Why in heavens would you not like women?” Kurt questioned kindly. “Someday you will become a woman. There is no reason to be so critical of your own sex. You are only a child.”

The child swallowed lightly and her face relaxed a bit, but she did not uncurl from where she sat in the corner.

“The-the women…at the place I was staying…they were mean to us. They bathed us in cold water, and they fed us very little…” The words choked the girl, as if they were a sin to speak them out loud. Kurt dropped down to his knees and crept forward to speak to the girl at eye level. “And I know...I know you dont want me,” she said over a sob, “but you remind me of my mother."

Kurt didnt know what to make of the girls comment. He looked up at Marley who shrugged, then he turned back to the girl.

"How do I remind you of your mother, child?"

"Your voice,” she said without hesitation. “Its so beautiful - like an angels. My mother had an angels voice, too."

Kurt felt his heart skip in his chest. He missed his mother's voice every day. He had long since forgotten what it sounded like. He would give all that he had to hear her say his name – just his name - one more time.

“Marley?” Kurt beckoned. “Bring forth a towel.”

Marley rushed forward with a towel for Kurt, and Kurt wrapped the girl securely in it. He picked her up, stumbling backward when he over-anticipated her weight, for she weighed next to nothing.

Kurt smiled down at the child cradled in his arms, and she tried to smile back.

“What is your name again, dearest?” Kurt cooed.

“M-my name is Beth, milord,” she stammered. “Beth Fabray Anderson.”

The addition of the Anderson surname pinched around his heart, but he forced the feeling aside.

“Well, Beth Fabray Anderson, my name is Kurt Hummel Anderson,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “and I have a feeling you and I are going to become the best of friends.”

The girl giggled. It was a hollow, rough laugh, but it sounded musical to Kurt's ears.

He approached Marley and the cross nurse with the girl cradled in his arms.

"Have the bath brought downstairs,” he commanded, “to the room adjoining mine."

“Yes, milord,” Marley said. “Right away.”

"But, sir," the nurse interrupted, stepping in Kurt's way and addressing him for the first time, "Lord Anderson gave strict instructions that the child should be stationed here, and after all, the nursery is the place for children."

"Yes," Kurt said, "but I am his husband, and if you remember, he put me in charge of the care of this child. Since you are her nurse, you will take orders from me. Am I clear?"

Marley stood ramrod straight with pride for her master.

"But Lord Anderson..."

"I will handle Lord Anderson," Kurt said, and he was surprised that for the first time, he meant it.