Lee looks thoughtful, and alt-Charlie asks if they're just supposed to stand there and watch him think. "It's pretty rare finding one of these just lying around," says Lee, and Olivia thinks maybe the old guy bent down to pick it up, causing the bike messenger to swerve and hit the stand. "Like the pen started some kind of ... chain reaction," says Lee.

Suddenly, Olivia sees Peter across the street. Just standing there looking at her, with a half-frown. She stares across the street long enough for alt-Charlie and Lee to ask her what's up, by which point Peter's gone, and she just says she thought she recognized someone. She shrugs it off, and they get back to brainstorming. "So... Fringe event or not?" says alt-Charlie, holding the pen. "Not sure yet. But something weird definitely happened here," says Lee. Olivia agrees, but she's NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT THE PEN, guys.

So over at Fauxlivia's apartment, Frank is making supper and watching television, which is running some story that there's fear the smallpox outbreak in North Texas is spreading (remember, Texas is two states in this universe). He looks at a dry-erase schedule on the fridge and notes a week that he's on call -- wait, so is it just ballpoint pens that are rare? But the usefulness of some sort of WRITING IMPLEMENT is still acknowledged? Come on.

Anyway, Olivia comes home and thanks him for making supper, and he wants to know how things were today, and she says they were pretty good, and then she asks about the smallpox outbreak (twenty-two cases), because she heard things were pretty bad, and she wants to know if "Atlanta called," and Frank says no one has assigned him yet, and Olivia reminds him for some reason that he's a virologist and smallpox is one of his areas of expertise, so he may as well start packing. But he wants to talk about her and what it was like for her to be back at work. But she's kind of cagey about it, and finally explains about seeing Peter.

"Do you remember the Secretary's son -- the one who was kidnapped when he was a boy?" she says, and Frank does, so Olivia says it was him: "But it wasn't really him. It was -- it was like I was hallucinating or something," she says, and maybe Olivia and Frank should be questioning how she knows that it was the Secretary's son, given that adult Peter doesn't really look like the kid who played Peter as a boy, but anyway Frank asks if she told Broyles (no) and he suggests that she shouldn't be on field duty, and she says she needs her life back, and he says, "and I love your gung-ho attitude," I mean, he actually speaks the words "I love your gung-ho attitude," and he says it's fine if she needs help, and she reminds him that it was just her first day back so it's not surprising "that there's a trace," and he says he can take himself off call, but that's not what she wants.