She stepped into one of the smaller dance studios and eyed the already changed and giggling girls in the corner, all around 13 years of age and at their beginning of puberty. Some of them would, as Miss Parker very well knew, leave soon, because either they lost interest or lost the figure for a ballerina.

She wondered why Tom had been allowed to teach a group of girls' ballet. Normally parents would go crazy if they knew a man was alone with their underage daughters, but she soon realized that they weren't afraid, because they were present! As the minutes ticket closer to 4 p.m., more and more proud mothers entered the studio and took their seats along the sidelines. Great, now she would be scrutinized by a dozen mothers, as if doing her first pretend as a dance teacher wasn't enough. Miss Parker took a few steps in the middle of the dance floor and caught the girl's attention by clapping her hands twice.

"Hello everybody! Mr. Gallagher is ill today, so I will be filling in. My name is Miss Parker. Now attention." Miss Parker looked closely at the girls in front of her and tried to imagine what they wanted or needed to hear. "Now each of you will tell me her name and we can nearly begin."

"You won't remember our names anyway if we tell you, MISS Parker." One girl in the front said and the others snickered silently. Miss Parker was already annoyed by the little brat.

"Let's make a deal, if I remember all of your names on the first try, you'll drop your little act and if not, you can find a new name for you to call me today." Miss Parker said with a lot of self-confidence.

"Deal." The girl answered happily and jumped up and down a bit, already thinking of new names to give her. This deal meant all or nothing for Miss Parker.

"Now, line up and révérence!" she said and curtsied. The girls followed her word.

"Now please tell me your names one after the other." She asked and stood in front of the first girl.

"Marie!" she stepped to the next one.

"Carly!"

"Jenny!"

She repeated each name aloud and continued on like that for 17 girls. She rerun the names trough her head once and started again at the beginning, pointing at each girl while naming them.

"Marie, Carly, Jenny, Francis, Connie, Brooke, Sandra, Julia,…" she finished them all off without being wrong once or faltering. That would shut the little devils up.

"Now that we have straightened that out, you will be nice."

The mothers on the sidelines talked the whole time through and a couple of times she was close to screaming at them to be silent, but she knew that the real customers were the mothers. If they felt mistreated, they would pull their daughters out and change the studio.

After about 30 minutes of Grand jetés and Passés on the barre, Miss Patty entered silently on the sidelines, but Miss Parker noticed her immediately. She gave the girls a new exercise and went to talk to her.

"Hello Miss Patty!" she said and stopped in front of her.

"Hello Toni, I just wanted to see how you were doing, these girls can be hell to work with."

"Thank you, but I'm doing just fine. These girls are nothing compared to me when I was that age."

She glanced back at the girls and saw two of them just standing around.

"Carly, Julia, quit talking start working or you'll have to spend the rest of the hour on the sidelines, but not together."

The girls thought about it shortly and then complied without talking back.

"Well done Toni, you're doing just fine as I see, too bad you came too late for the full job." Miss Patty said, patted her on her hand and left the room again.

As the lesson was coming to an end, she dismissed the girls to change in the locker rooms and sat down to take a sip from her water. She was pretty exhausted as well, because she had participated in all the exercises.

She packed up and shortly talked to a concerned mother who asked if Tom, the regular teacher, was alright. So that was the reason the mothers all hung around here. They had the hots for Tom. She had yet to meet him, but if the men here all looked as good as Daniel, she understood them.

She grabbed her bag and exited the small dance studio and walked to the entrance, when she was stopped by a voice.

"Stop, wait!" she turned around and saw Daniel running after her. "So I guess today I will get the same answer as last time I asked you out, but maybe we can arrange a play date with the kids? That way we can still talk." Miss Parker had no intention to get involved with anybody, but Elias would surely like somebody to play with. He was on the verge of walking and got really annoyed when he fell back on his bud again and again.

"The play date is a good idea, but it can only be between the kids, I'm sorry, but I'm not at a time and place in my life, where I have any room for romance. That sounds so cliché and like a really bad lie, but it is not. If I change my mind to date, you'll be the first to know." She said and winked at him, before walking through the door into the crisp, cold air.

It was nearly always cold in Hamburg, but she liked the city a lot. The beautiful harbor, the Rathaus, the Michel Kirche, the great cultural events the city had and despite the Germans bad reputation for not being very nice, she had no complains whatsoever. She decided to run some errands, after she had picked up Elias from daycare.

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Broots sat in Miss Parker's former office, sorting out her stuff, as ordered from the Centre, for any sign as to where she had gone. Of course he knew that they would find nothing of her anywhere. She had covered her tracks well. He could probably trace her steps if he wanted to, but he would never put Miss Parker in that kind of trouble, she was too important to him. He knew she had not told him were she had gone to protect him and Debbie, but at the same time he would have been happy to help her flee this place. Sydney had told him nothing as well, even though Broots knew he was in on some of the secrets.

He attempted to open one of the desk drawers, but it was locked. He opened it with force and went through the contents. Mainly he found bills and little notes she wrote, but nothing to indicate her whereabouts – luckily. On the bottom of the drawer he found a picture of Miss Parker as a young girl, looking up to her mother, Catherine Parker. He turned the picture around and it read 'Mommy and me', written in a children's handwriting. She must have had this picture since she was a little girl. He was a bit sad for her knowing that she didn't have it with her, wherever she was.

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Sydney slowly entered Miss Parker's house. He immediately saw that Centre Sweepers had ransacked the place to every last corner. Chairs were turned over, drawers were left wide open and a carpet was rolled up on the side of the room. He grabbed a fallen newspaper from the floor and decided to clean up a bit. He put all the chairs back in their place, straightened out the tablecloth, put the trash bags into his car to dump them later and as he went into her bedroom, he stopped in his tracks.

"Jarod! What the hell!" he exclaimed.