Shiloh hated when her boyfriend went to conferences. After living together for eight years, she knew when she saw that duffel bag in the living room, it meant one of two things: Either they were going on vacation together or Grissom was going away for something work related. If it was work related usually he took that little cockroach gang of his – Gonzales, Pygmy, Pancake, Dory and King Julian, who called themselves 'C-Unit' – and they'd brag about their travels and how they were nationally renowned athletes; when they came back, it all she could do to not squish each and every one of them. Those conferences where they went with him meant Shiloh had run of the house and get to do all sorts of things she'd normally never get to do if he was there: eat junk food, sleep till noon, watch TV. And while she enjoyed those times of indulgence, she missed her silver-haired sweetie. She'd instinctively tuned her senses to listen for the hum of the engine when his car pulled into the driveway. The moment he walked in the door, her eyes would gleam with excitement as he immediately dropped his keys in the dish and come over to greet her.

"Hey cutie," he'd say to her with his clever smile. "Did you take care of the phone bill like I asked?"

Shiloh would give him her demure half-nod and smile to herself as he watched him pick up the phone and call her, letting that boyfriend-stealing humanoid know he was home safe and sound.

"Yes, I'll be back for work tonight, Sara…and Shiloh says hi as well…no I don't think it's weird…she's my pet…some people have dogs, I have a Guyana pink-toe tarantula…love you too…bye."

Grissom hung up the phone, looked back to his terrarium, where his spider had burrowed back into the earth, which he interpreted as a nap. The reality was it was the cold-shouldered jealousy of Sara and how she'd also come to be the other love in his life. He went to the cupboard, picked up a jar of crickets and deposited a few into the tank.

"Little treat for you."

Shiloh knew this game: it was his appeasement to give her favourite snack to her after being away, and Shiloh would creep back out to select the nearest one. From Shiloh's perspective, eating it was her way of apologizing to him for being jealous; after all, he was a human and needed a female who could actually talk back to him, and didn't have eight eyes.

This was their routine and it was one Shiloh liked it. She'd roam around the house – after all she was quite intelligent and had figured out how to unlock the door of her terrarium – and explore the different rooms in Grissom's absence. The most fun one had been the room he called the 'office' where the great humming machine he called his computer lived. It definitely lived; it made just as many squeaks and hums as she did, but what fascinated Shiloh the most was the board of buttons with the letters and numbers and some other squiggly thing she couldn't quite make out. She knew its proper name was a 'keyboard' but Shiloh preferred 'buttons-board', since keys were the things that Grissom turned in the lock to come into the house and Shiloh could see none of those metallic sticks with teeth anywhere on here. The screen was too bright and Shiloh had to darken it a little so she wouldn't go blind, which was done by pressing the little buttons on the front of the screen. Then she'd go exploring on that thing called the 'Internet'; she couldn't use the mouse – humans had such funny words for things; it no more looked like a mouse than Shiloh did a Goliath bird eater – so she'd learned from trial and error how to find things by pushing an assortment of buttons, especially the little arrow keys and the two big left-point arrows. The left point arrow on the bottom meant going to something new and the best way to find something new was the page that first came up. It had only taken a few tries to learn the G-O-O-G-L-E meant finding new things that led to other things. Shiloh's favourite 'screens' to look at were the ones that had the card games on them. Again, from listening to the TV when Grissom fell asleep on his couch watching something called a poker tour, which yet again confused Shiloh but she didn't care about the name since it was the actual learning of the game that interested her. Then once Grissom was gone, she would scuttle on over to the computer, hop up her little system of steps and uses those clever little buttons to find her card game of poker, where the music and lights told her she was kicking computer butt. She'd play until the clock on the screen said 6:45; that was cue to hurry back over to her tank and hop back in before the door rattled and her boyfriend was back once again.

This time around, though something was different. Grissom had her 'playpen' out on the table, that is, the little box she'd lived in when she first came home from the pet store. Usually this meant she was getting fresh earth or a new plant in the tank, but the duffel was also out. Then he had out the phone and was calling not Sara the Boyfriend-Thief but a different person.

"Nick? Yeah, I'm bringing Shiloh by now…yeah her food too…you're sure you cleared this with Renee…alright…I'll see you in a few minutes…right…bye."

Shiloh glanced around nervously. She'd never gone to another house before; if she went away with Grissom, it was always to a hotel. Now, as they were in the car and driving, Shiloh found she was practically shaking with fear. Who were this Nick and Renee? What if they didn't like her? Would they know that her favourite TV show was Friends? Or that she liked a little bit of mango as a treat?