Disclaimer: There would not have been a cliffhanger if I owned the characters and/or the TV show.

Spoilers: Through 7 x 23.

Author's Note: I have written a lot of GSR fics, but none of them have really captured the reason why I'm so intrigued by the pairing, why I squee every time they bless us with a GSR moment, why I melted in a puddle of goo when Grissom said she was the only one he ever loved. So this is my attempt to capture that feeling. It's going to be a long one, and I'm looking forward to it. I mean, we all gotta do something to keep ourselves busy until September, right?

Much thanks to GSFanatic for the beta.

The first time Sara read the letter, she couldn't stop smiling. The second time she read it, she was still smiling, but she was also searching for some kind of clue to what it all meant. She loved the sonnet. She loved how perfectly Shakespeare seemed to summarize Gil's feelings for her while he was away...

Thyself away art resent still with me

For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move.

The third time she read the letter, she was kind of annoyed. He wrote it months ago, why was she just now reading it? He obviously meant for her to find it or it wouldn't have been in her book on the bedside table.

I don't know why I find it so hard to express my feelings to you, it said. Even though we're far apart, I can see you as clearly as if you were here with me.

She was definitely moved by the words. He could be so sweet when he wanted to. But would it have killed him to maybe have called her while he was at Williams? It's true there was a little distance between them before he left. The miniature killer got inside his head and he spent many sleepless days and nights trying to figure out the reasoning behind it. When Wendy asked Sara a few weeks ago if the miniature killer was keeping him up at night, Sara had been quick to say, "How would I know?!" But what she really wanted to say was, "You have no idea, lady. If I didn't have a dog to keep me company, I might as well be alone." She loved Bruno, but it was also nice to have a conversation with the human she pretty much lived with sometimes.

It's not that she minded being alone. Hell, for years, that's all she wanted - to be left alone. She liked to read and sometimes she liked to write. She had journals full of poems and half-written stories. She liked to draw. She liked to watch the Discovery channel. But when she and Grissom started seeing each other, they both slowly let down their walls and allowed each other in. They were both introverts to the core, so it was hard at first. But they were learning how to let each other in while maintaining their desire for alone time. It worked well. But when they were together and he couldn't seem to tear himself away from something or other, whether it was building his own miniature or reading psychology textbooks on serial killers...it was getting to her.

Now, as she waited for him to come home from his house call to Lady Heather, she looked at the letter again, trying to find anything she might have missed. Bruno lay beside her as she read the letter again; snoring peacefully, oblivious to the fact there was anything wrong.

It's not quite that she needed the reassurance, really. She understood her boyfriend's need to be the knight in shining armour. She felt the hint of a smile as she thought about how he came to her house the day Ecklie threatened to fire her, how Grissom probed her for the reasoning behind her blowing up at Catherine in the hall. She told him about her parents, about her mother, about the abuse. It was the first time she told anyone since she left foster care for college. She remembered how, not for the first time, he held her hand for comfort while she cried. It was something she loved about him, the way he wanted to be there for the people who needed it the most but sought his help the least.

But the way Catherine had gone on and on about Heather earlier, and the way Grissom was so intent on helping Heather, and the look in his eyes when he muttered, "Why didn't she fight?" ...Sara was a strong woman. She knew that, everybody knew that. She didn't doubt Grissom's love for her. She made him happy; didn't he just tell her that? But no matter how strong she was, she still had the same kind of feelings any woman would with the knowledge that their lover was spending the night at the house of a dominatrix -- frustration, curiosity, and just the hint of a feeling Sara had no use for -- jealousy.

She put Grissom's letter back in her book and picked up the other letter. The letter that came in the mail for her just a few days ago. She'd gotten letters from her mother before; they came about once every 4 or 5 months. She never answered them. In all the therapy she received over the years, not one person could tell her what she should say to her mother next. Not one person told her how she could look in her mother's eyes again and not see what happened so many years ago.

Her mother, Laura, was released from prison a few years ago. In her letters, she'd tell Sara how she was adjusting to society, or more likely, how society was adjusting to her. She tried living in San Francisco for a year or two, but the public had not been kind. So she moved to small town in Florida where no one knew her, and she was trying to make a life for herself.

The letters were mostly the same, probably written to make sure Sara was still thinking about her. But this newest letter was different. Something was wrong, and Laura wasn't saying. She mentioned something about a nurse at the hospital, but didn't elaborate any further. As an investigator, Sara knew her mother didn't just mention that as an aside. She was trying to tell her daughter something without really telling her, Laura Sidle's usual maddening way of communicating.

She'd never considered visiting Laura before, but maybe now was as good a time as ever. Maybe she needed a break; a break from the lab, from Vegas, from...Grissom. Their relationship was fine, they were happy. But she sometimes felt like the last thing on his mind; an afterthought. She had fought long and hard for this relationship to happen and she wasn't about the throw it all away on some depressed dominatrix or some wacko miniature maker, but she felt like her mother needed her. And after all this time, after so many years of turning her back on the woman that raised her, she was ready to face her past.