Drew gathered her stuff, went upstairs and checked on her dad. Bill Fayne never locked his door and Carson Nance didn't either - a habit he picked up from Andy's younger days, when the boy would wake up at night with nightmares or something, and he'd want to go to his dad.

Drew peeked in and looked in on her dad as he slept. She could hear the faint snoring, and would recognize it anywhere.

She stood beside her dad's bed and looked down. The face was somewhat changed from the face that she had known for more than eighteen years, but it was still her dad, and she knew that she'd do anything to keep him safe, and keep the both of them together. He was all she had now, but that was enough for her.

Smiling fondly, she touched his cheek lightly enough so that she didn't wake him, left the room and closed the door softly.

-----

She walked to her own room, put her backpack in its normal hiding place in her closet, and put the rest of her stuff on her dresser. She set her alarm clock for six. Knowing Dad, he was going to want to get an early start in the morning so it was best to wake up early.

She stepped out of her heels and deposited them with the rest of her three dozen shoes in the shoe cubby by her dresser. She then took off the sales tabs and hung up her new skirts and top in her closet, and then took off her underwear, dropping them in the clothes hamper. Naked, she padded to the tub in her en-suite bathroom to fill it up for her second, and last, bath of the day, pouring the usual amount of bath salts in.

As it gurgled and filled, she brushed her teeth. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and still couldn't get over how good she looked. She giggled in delight as she brushed, causing her to cough. She rinsed and then washed off her toothbrush, but she still couldn't take her eyes off herself.

She washed her face of the expertly done makeup, per the instructions of Sally, Doctor Joe's nurse, and looked at herself in the mirror again. She expected her babeliciousness to have been washed away as well but it wasn't. Probably because of the hair, she thought.

Ellen said it was okay to wash her hair so she felt okay sticking her head under the faucet and soaking her hair thoroughly. After a minute she turned the water off and looked at herself again. It didn't change much, except that she had a head of wet hair now. She couldn't figure it out. What was it? It was just a lousy haircut! Nothing should have changed!

Or, maybe, nothing did, and she was only now seeing what everyone had been seeing all along....

Dripping, she stalked to the bathtub, turned the water off and plopped into it, even though it wasn't completely full. There was just enough water to submerge her body though, if she laid down in the tub. Keeping Julian's injunction to minimize the shampoos to once a day at most (once a week if possible), she didn't get her hair wet with the soapy tub water. She stayed in the tub the requisite twenty minutes, washing her face with the bath water using a washcloth. She had half a mind to cut her bath time down but she stayed, occasionally rubbing her torso, arms and legs with the washcloth. However, she caught her... thing playing periscope. Goddammit!

It was close enough to twenty minutes so she sat up and pulled the plug. As the water drained, she showered and rinsed the soapy water off and then used the baby soap that was on the little shelf by the bathtub spigot and washed her face.

She used the water wand to rinse herself and the tub down, and then started drying herself off. She then went to the medicine cabinet, caught her reflection fleetingly but ignored it. She reached for the hair dryer on top of the cabinet, still unused and still sealed in its plastic wrapping.

Tearing the plastic open, she looked it over a bit to figure it out, and started blow-drying her hair the way Julian did. She had no choice then but to look at herself in the mirror as she styled her hair. Thanks to Julian's perm, her hair automatically fell back into the short bob. She didn't need to do much, except to tease it into place.

After moisturizing herself all over, per her regular skin-softening routine, she looked at The Babe again. The lack of makeup didn't take anything away from her. She was back. Or maybe she'd never really left and had always been there even before the haircut. Maybe Drew just never paid attention...

Drew stepped back and looked at herself in the mirror more fully. She saw the feminine curve of her torso and her breasts. But the mirror was too small.

She went to her room where the bigger mirror was, and looked herself over more fully.

Her face was the same - slim, surgically perfected nose with the barely-noticeable upturned tip, manufactured dimples, semi-prominent cheekbones courtesy of Doctor Joe's Gore-Tex implants, and large, enhanced eyes with the slightly-raised eyebrows. Doctor Joe, and the few people that knew, assured her the modifications were actually extremely minor, and she supposed it was her imagination that made them look extreme and therefore very different from Andy's face.

She looked down a little further and traced the line of her torso with her eyes. She took in the inward curve of her waist and the outward curve of her hips. Again, she recalled Doctor Joe's words - minor enhancements only, courtesy of some mild liposuction.

She looked at her legs. They were still under-muscled, but that was deliberate. She had deliberately avoided muscle-building exercises or activities, making do with yoga and aerobic exercises, otherwise she'd end up with arms and legs like some amazon weightlifter. That's how she managed to remain long and lean and smooth enough to be outrageously sexy. It was also probably the lack of hair anywhere, and the breasts of course, that accounted for her female appeal.

That was one surgical procedure that Doctor Joe didn't minimize - the one responsible for her c-cups. Drew originally chose that size because Jane used to be a c-cup, and Jane was her template. Drew knew C's weren't really large, but for her, it was more than large enough. Perhaps when she got out of high school she wouldn't stand out as much. But she shied away from thinking that far ahead. For the moment, though, Drew Nance was the owner of the best-looking pair in her class - perfect, conical breasts that had no hint of sag, and just large enough to make her stand out amongst all of her less-endowed peers. Actually, even with the more endowed ones. She was built like the proverbial brick, yet she still looked natural. It was all thanks to Doctor Joe's skills and the TUBA procedure.

She ran her hands over herself, marveling at her skin's softness, thanks to her recent bath and the constant moisturizing. She cut it short, though, as she felt slightly naughty doing these things, and thinking and feeling this way.

She went to her dresser and picked out a pair of sheer white briefs, eschewing, for tonight, her usual Liz Claiborne boy-style briefies. She was relieved - her erection had gone down enough that she wouldn't peek out of the briefs. She was about to select a sleep shirt, as usual, but she changed her mind at the last moment and picked out a powder-blue embroidered babydoll. She hadn't worn it before, though, and didn't think she ever would. She only bought it (and a couple of other things) to get Iola and Callie off her back. After putting it on though, she felt the chiffon-nylon material rub her nipples so she thought of wearing a white t-shirt bra as well.

She eventually decided to skip the bra. Instead she got the matching diaphanous jacket that came with the babydoll and draped it over the back of her dresser chair, just in case, and slipped under the covers with a sigh. She felt tired but happy. She didn't really know why she was so cheerful since nothing had changed, really. After setting her clock, she sharply clapped her hands twice and the lights switched off. Her tiredness came over her and she fell into a deep, tired but happy sleep in just five minutes - the first truly peaceful sleep she'd had since all of this started. It was the first day of Drew finally accepting herself, and of Andy finally being okay with it.

-----

Typically, she hardly ever remembered her dreams, but tonight was different. In the morning she recalled a lot of it, and it was a little disturbing.

She recalled, in her dream, she was walking with Iola and Callie in some field, or maybe it was a park. Other than that, it was like any other day when they were together, laughing and joking about nothing at all, and in moments talking in low, serious tones about the latest school news or neighborhood gossip, or in moments arguing some point of view or disputed fact, and at times just walking companionably together.

Maybe the reason she could never recall her nighttime dreams was because of their mundane nature. But the difference with this one was that they, all three of them, looked radiant, more beautiful than they ever were, especially Callie, and they were sneaking kisses, or rather Iola and Callie were sneaking kisses with her. Sadly, that was all she could remember.

She woke up to her alarm clock ringing. Reaching over, she shut it off, yawned and stretched languidly. Sitting up, she tried to recall more of her dream. Many of the details of the dream were fading, but she recalled the strolling, the bits of conversation, and the many butterfly kisses. But it felt incomplete. There was more to the dream, she could tell, and she felt devastated that she couldn't remember. She smiled, though. It must have been a really good dream.

She pulled the bedclothes back and stood up. She felt the babydoll fall into place, never even noticing how it had ridden up while she slept. She got the diaphanous jacket from the back of the chair and pulled it on. She had to go whizz really bad and as she made her way to her bathroom, she felt something wet and sticky in her briefs. She stopped.

Frowning, she went to the sink, took the briefs off and washed them. That hadn't happened in a long time. Dammit! "It must really have been a good dream," she thought, feeling embarrassed, Too bad she couldn't recall the best part of it.

After slinging the briefs on the shower curtain bar to dry, and rinsing herself off with the bidet, she went through her usual routine - bathroom, bathtub and the usual ablutions (except for a few modifications - she didn't shampoo her hair for one, because she was going swimming later, and she knew she'd be washing it then).

She finished in time and moisturized heavily afterwards, as usual. She walked to her dresser and went through her meager selection of swimsuits. All she would really consider wearing were the one-piece suits, eschewing the others (she had only bought the bikinis because Iola insisted), but she only had three of the one-piece ones to pick from.

Eventually, she selected the skirted navy-blue halter-neck backless maillot with the swim-skirt, instead of the electric-green one. She, in fact, bought them only because they were skirted. Before stepping into the maillot, she fished out one of her flesh-colored thong gaffs.

She didn't like gaffs, but what could she do. It was her fault, actually, for agreeing to go swimming.

She followed the instructions that she had memorized months ago when she first wore a gaff. It was scary the first time she tried it, but she found out it wasn't as painful as she thought it might be, though it did make her walk a little more carefully. She avoided wearing gaffs as much as possible.

When she had the gaff on, she then put the maillot over it. The tiny, token skirt of the swimsuit was just there for accent and didn't really hide anything... except maybe the line the gaff made under the suit, which was the whole point of getting it. She turned in profile and no telltale bumps could be seen, the modest bottom of the suit hid the gaff completely: the skirt obscured the lines the gaff made and the gusset covered everything else. Turning around, her bootie was as gorgeous as usual, with the definition clearly seen, making her cheeks stand out in the tight suit. She turned around again, looking every inch the girl she wanted to be seen as... except if someone should look closely between her legs from underneath while she was doing the splits - which was highly improbable to say the least.

She put on a pair of white pom-pom shorts (the maillot's little skirt did not bother her and didn't show), and a pastel-yellow swing tank top over the suit, and matched them with her brand-new white platform rubber high-heel flip-flops. (Before, she thought there were no such things - high-heel flip-flops? Really? But she had seen the pair that Iola had, so she got her own just for the heck of it.)

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

She got her big canvas poncho bag with the button-down flap, put in a bottle of sunscreen lotion from the medicine cabinet, a fishnet pouch for putting the shower stuff in, an old pair of skinny flare jeans and a loose powder-pink crop that she and her dad bought at that thrift store months ago (both woefully, but fashionably, beat up), a t-shirt bra, another gaff in place of panties, and two towels.

Instead of her usual ones, she got the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner from Julian's, as well as the lipstick and the perfume, and she added her regular girly deodorant. (She made a note to herself to buy regular-size bottles of her new shampoo, conditioner, perfume, makeup et cetera, as soon as she could.)

She also put her vintage wayfarer sunglasses in the bag as well, and since she wasn't wearing the wig, she also put in a brush. She got her little ivory clamshell clutch with the detachable chain and put in her IDs, wallet, phone, keys, a little comb and a little packet of tissue in it. And then the clutch also went into the poncho bag.

She couldn't believe all the paraphernalia a girl had to lug around.

She thought of showing her dad the note she'd found last night but she didn't want to chance spoiling the day. In the end, she decided she'd show it to him later tonight instead.

As a final touch, she lightly spritzed herself with her new perfume, put it back in the bag, and went downstairs.

"Hey, Pop," Drew said as she traipsed down the stairs. "Good morning."

Carson looked up and saw Drew in her summer outfit. He knew enough about today's teen fashions to know that her clothes were acceptable and well within current standards of decorum. But still... God, I'm getting old, he thought.

"Good morning, Honey," he said. "Isn't that a bit... extreme for a Sunday morning outing with your old man?"

"Ummm," Drew said, "I'm wearing a swimsuit underneath - I promised the girls I'd meet up with them in Central Park after lunch for a swim. Callie was feeling blue. We thought it'd cheer her up."

"In which case, I'll come by and pick you kids up after. Honey, it's New York. You shouldn't take walking around in the city so lightly. Especially dressed like that."

Drew scrunched her face in irritation. "I can take the X1 or the X10 bus. I can take care of myself, Dad."

"I know you can," he responded. "If I didn't, I wouldn't allow you to walk around dressed like that in the first place. It's just that you're also in charge of the girls' safety. You know that. And you being dressed like that might just attract too much attention and you might find it hard protecting your friends."

Drew was taken aback - there was a bus from Central Park South going to Staten Island - an easy commute, even if it was by bus. Or they could take a cab. Why all this? But Dad had a lot of old-fashioned chivalrous notions, and Drew, in her old life as Andy, tried to live up to them, such as "protecting the girls" et cetera. She never realized that it still applied even in her Drew persona. She thought that over and eventually came to the conclusion that, to her dad, it was logical since she was still the same person underneath. She also took it as a compliment of sorts, that Dad still thought of her that way with such things. "Well... okay," she said eventually. "But me being dressed otherwise might raise Iola's and Callie's suspicions."

Carson thought that over and nodded, acceding to Drew's outfit decision. He met her at the foot of the stairs and handed her something that looked like a little toy gun attached to a key ring. It was silver, with the word "Mace" printed on the pistol grip.

"What's this?"

"It's a pepper spray. Keep it with you all the time."

"I can take..."

Carson raised a peremptory hand.

"Yes, I know you can take care of yourself, but this isn't River Heights anymore. It's just a common-sense precaution. I even got one for myself." He pulled out an identical sprayer from his pocket attached to his keys, this one in black.

Drew relented. "Okay, Dad."

With her gadget-radar primed, she looked the little gun over curiously. It had a round barrel with a toggle below it near the trigger. She moved the toggle and the barrel broke open the way a shotgun does, and she saw the pepper spray cartridge - roughly the shape of a small shotgun cartridge but smaller. She snapped it closed and looked over the high-tech sprayer some more. There was a safety switch in place of a hammer. She switched it to "fire" and a red laser pointer winked on. She aimed it experimentally and switched it back to "safe."

"Cool," she said. "A laser sight."

"I thought you'd like that," Carson grinned.

Drew put the Mace pepper spray/gun in her bag. "Thanks, Dad. Sorry for being difficult." She had half a mind to tell him about the collapsible baton that Lieutenant Hardy gave her for protection when they were still new in New York but decided not to. The Mace sprayer gave her some other ideas, though. Maybe she'll go shopping for some kind of high-tech Taser or stun gun next.

"No worries," her dad responded. "I'm used to it." He grinned.

She stuck her tongue out at him.

Carson turned sober, turned to her and put his hands on her shoulders. "Listen - I'm gonna start the ball rolling tomorrow to get a job in one of the three companies you identified. That means, starting tomorrow, we will have to be Carson and Drew, twenty-four seven. For real."

"I already thought we were," she said.

Carson nodded. "Yes, but this time really real, one hundred percent. No breaking out of character EVER, in case we come under surveillance. Especially you." She was about to say something but he interrupted her. "You should know - you were the one who planned this out, and you were right. I'm willing to go on doing this to catch Dave's killers, but not at the expense of safety - not mine, and most especially not yours. One hundred percent, twenty-four seven. If you can't promise that, then we quit this now."

She paused and then looked straight into his eyes. "I know, Dad," she said seriously. "You can count on me."

"Okay," he said. "Go get your backpack and wigs. We better put them in the safe."

"The safe!" Drew thought. "Finally!" Carson had held off telling her the details about THE safe, so that there was less danger of it being found out.

She dropped her poncho bag on the dining table and went back up. She came back down with three Styrofoam forms with wigs, and the backpack slung on her back.

Carson took one of the stands with a wig and led Drew to the kitchen. She was finally going to see where the safe was!

In a secluded spot beside the dishwasher was a big dish drying rack sitting on a freestanding table with castors. Carson unlocked the castor wheels and pulled it away from the wall, revealing a part of the stucco-surfaced kitchen wall. Part of the wall was sticking out a bit, like a pillar embedded into the wall. It was a structural load-bearing pillar that stuck out about four inches. At just below waist-high, Carson grabbed both sides of the embedded pillar and pulled hard.

A catch seemed to give and a section of the embedded pillar was pulled out. Along with the rectangular piece of concrete rolled out a heavy-duty safe that slid on little rollers underneath. The concrete section of the pillar that came with it was like it was glued or riveted to the side of the safe.

"I had to cut into the load-bearing support pillar," Carson said, "but our house isn't gonna fall anytime soon. I used the safe itself as a load-bearing component, not to mention the extra-thick metal rebar I had welded to the inside steel support." Drew looked into the cavity and there were indeed several hefty-looking metal posts on either side, each the diameter of a silver dollar. She wondered how he was able to weld them to the rebar inside the concrete. Where did he even get the rebar, not to mention the welding equipment?

Drew looked over Dad's handiwork. He had always been good with his hands, and was the best DIY carpenter/builder/Mister-Fix-It she knew. When she and her cousin Jane were four or five, they called him Tim, after Tim Allen of the syndicated show, Home Improvement. Looking over his work, Drew was amazed, as usual. Her love of mechanical things and of doing things with her hands was due to her dad's influence and his love of building things. In a way, her fondness for working on puzzles, poring through bits of information and solving "mysteries," was part of that, too.

She looked at the safe. According to the label, it was an "AMSEC Burglary Rated Fire Safe." It was a combination safe, the door with the locking handle and combination dial facing to the side since the side-facing front was covered by the concrete slab.

It looked pretty substantial.

Her dad demoed how to open it. "It's mechanical, not electronic. The combination is eleven, twenty-eight, twenty, and two," Carson said as he demoed dialing the combination. "And, voila!" He turned the handle and opened the safe with a flourish.

Drew thought of the combination numbers - 11-28-20-02. Not likely Drew would forget those numbers - November 28, 2002. That Thanksgiving weekend was a memorable day for the both of them - their first ever out-of-town Thanksgiving trip, which became a yearly family tradition over the years. Father and son both looked forward to those trips and never missed any of them. Even their housekeeper, Marie, looked forward to them because she said it was the only time she would have the house all to herself. Drew was sure she would have wanted to join, but she understood that was special father-son time and didn't push. Drew missed Marie.

It remained to be seen if Carson and Drew will continue the tradition, but Thanksgiving was comfortably several months away. They'll cross that bridge when they get there, as they always do.

Drew looked the inside of the safe over. The inside was roughly three feet high by two feet wide by two deep, subdivided by two removable shelves. Pretty roomy.

"Let me move my stuff to the top shelf, and you can have the other two," Carson said. He put in another divider, and there were four now - the top ones less tall than the lowest one.

Before putting away his papers, he showed them to Drew. "Best you knew what's inside here," Carson said.

Drew saw the sheaf of stock certificates and bonds held in a clear plastic envelope, another plastic envelope that had all the original "papers" that they found in her Uncle Dave's box, a big accountant's ledger that Carson used as a notebook, filled with notes Carson had taken - based on her research, true, but with a lot of additional important details about the companies that Carson had researched on his own - things like stock positions, market performance, current projects and connections with government claims or cases, a list of their officers and other commercially vital information, notes on job openings and employee hiring requirements, and then there were a lot of sheets of loose notepaper with her dad's lawyer review notes on them. There were even some printed sheets from practice New York State bar exams (just the multiple-choice portions only), with her dad's scribbled-in answers. Dad was clearly working as hard on this thing as she was, maybe even harder given the quantity of notes.

"Can I look over your notes later?" she asked.

"Sure," he replied. "Which reminds me..." He picked out two of the certificates from inside their "portfolio" of stocks. "Time to encash a couple of these."

"Why?"

"So we can deposit them into that double-blind account Lieutenant Hardy set up for us. Starting next week, we can't have mysterious sums of money popping up in our bank account, right?"

Drew nodded.

A double-blind account was what Lt. Hardy called a type of account that allows certain individuals to deposit amounts of money into them, the transaction dates post-dated to earlier dates, and cumulated with the current balance. In this way federal "payoffs" to people in the witness protection program could be hidden. Such "deposits" were totally untraceable, so long as the deposits were real deposits, backed by real money. It was like money laundering, but for the good guys.

However, Carson explained that, to avoid anomalies, he would need to contact Lt. Hardy soon and ask him to freeze the account and turn it into a regular account. After that, he would be given a normal bankbook. Otherwise, if anyone checked, they might see that, even with withdrawals, the Carson Nance account might not have been decreasing enough despite them.

-----

After Carson took out the certificates, Drew put her backpack with the netbook and other stuff in the middle shelves, and the three wigs in the lowest one. The wigs with the forms wouldn't fit so she took out the forms. Without the forms, the wigs fit comfortably, with room to spare.

"Any other things that we need to put in here?" Carson asked.

"No," Drew said, and then... "Wait." She thought over everything she had, and she couldn't think of anything that wasn't Drew-like... Except for the gaffs... She made a mental note to get rid of the little instruction sheets for the gaffs (she had already memorized them anyway) and the packaging, and to cut out the label-tags. Without the tags, the gaffs could easily pass for regular underwear.

And she couldn't easily buy any new ones anymore after her dad got his job. Best to buy a few more soon.

"I have some, I think, but small stuff. And I can throw them away. Do I need to throw them away?"

"Even if they're small stuff, I think we need to burn them instead of throwing them away, just like we did our other old stuff."

"'Kay. I'll get 'em tonight, and we can burn 'em all up along with the wig stands."

Carson nodded.

Drew volunteered to push the "load-bearing safe" back into its hiding place. She shut the safe door, spun the combination lock and pushed the safe back into the wall. Clearly, the safe was tightly wedged in, as should be expected from something holding against downward pressure from the pillar, but it rolled smoothly on its fixed rails. Her dad really knew his stuff. She experimentally pulled it out. Feeling the resistance, she pulled harder and then, after that initial hesitance, it smoothly pulled out. Clearly, whatever kind of catch Dad put in would prevent anyone from accidentally pulling it out.

She then pushed it back in again, and it rolled in very easily. Pretty cool. She pushed it all the way in one last time so the catch clicked and the concrete facade was flush against the pillar and wall. The uneven line and face of the stucco hid the dividing line between pillar, wall and movable concrete, and it made the hidey-hole invisible. She experimentally knocked on the wall, pillar and the concrete facade of the safe and all she could hear and feel was thick cement.

"Cool hiding place, Dad," she said, and fist-bumped Carson.

"Oh, wait!" She reached up and pulled a strand of hair from her dad's head.

"Ow! What was that for?"

Drew giggled. "I saw something like this in an old James Bond movie. You'll see."

She pulled until the catch gave again and the safe's facade was out a little bit, put her dad's strand of hair in the resulting jamb and pushed the safe back, pinning the hair in the unseen crack of the concrete facade.

"See?" she said, with Carson looking on curiously. "If no one's opened it, the hair will just be stuck there, but if someone did..." She pulled the safe back out a bit. The hair promptly fell out.

"Hmmm..." Carson said. "That's pretty good." He then reached out and pulled out a hair from Drew's head.

"Owww! Darnit..."

"If we use your blonde hair," Carson said, smiling, "it'll be more difficult to see." Her dad was right - it was more difficult to see than Dad's black hair. He then pushed the safe back in, with Drew's hair trapped in the jamb, and put the table with the big dish drying rack back in its place.

Carson walked back out to the living room, still smiling.

"Coming?"

"Darnit..." Drew said again, rubbing her head, and followed.