Robin Scherbatsky left McLaren's alone at a quarter to one, still wishing she could turn back the clock to a day and a half ago and do everything in the intervening hours differently.

But as it was, since that kiss in the cab, with each tick of the second hand, she had slowly begun shutting down.

It began with a single thought: This is a mistake, followed by an inability to stop herself, to stop Barney, to do anything but let it happen as the night unfolded around them. As the bed grew warm and they fell into old, familiar rhythms, she felt disconnected from her body. It moved on autopilot while her mind told her Stop, This is wrong, What are you doing? Only she couldn't stop, couldn't control her body; she couldn't even bring herself to enjoy this closeness between them. There was something in this that was poison. And when it was over and she sat, clutching the blanket to her chest without speaking, listening to the sound of Barney sigh contentedly at her side, she had to choke back a sob. The guilt of what they had done bore down on her, knocked the air from her lungs.And he didn't see it.

Maybe even Kevin was wrong about her. Maybe there was something deep down that was truly broken inside her. Something he missed during the therapy sessions.

And maybe that was why Barney's words got to her. Really got to her, lodged themselves in her chest, restricted her breathing:

Because you're almost as messed up as I am.

You're almost as messed up as I am.

That phrase scared her more than Kevin's I love you had, more than anything anyone had ever said to her. It contained within it all the fears she had ever dared to consider about herself: that she would never be good enough, that there was something seriously wrong with her, that she was and would forever be completely undeserving of love.

She lay down on her bed, still in her dress and shoes, and stretched her arms out around her. She didn't bother to turn the light on, or close the curtain in front of her window. She wanted to open the window and have a cigarette, but wouldn't even allow herself that one small pleasure in the wake of everything.

Kevin had offered her a way out. No questions asked. Just forgiveness she didn't deserve and that promise, if it was a promise, of showing her how to see herself. It was the only way.

That was what she told herself now as tears blurred her vision, as the pictures and books around her room took on new half-lives, existing for some other Robin she had lost somewhere. She turned over onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow and cried in a way she hadn't for a long time: the long, rattling breaths, the uncontrollable shaking, the endless sobs that remind her of being very small. She gave herself to it completely for probably a few minutes, but which felt much longer: lifetimes, eons. She expected almost to come out on the other side changed, or for the feelings of panic to have lessened. But nothing in her life had ever been neat or easy, and every step she had taken still seemed some fatal wrong turn.

She stretched her arms underneath her pillow, reaching for the cold space, for numbness, for another life. Something brushed against her finger. She captured it in her hand and pulled it out slowly, thinking it might be a dead moth, or some other insect burnt up flying towards the light.

When she opened her fist, it wasn't the body of some unfortunate insect that she found. Lying there, in the center of her palm was single petal of a red rose. It wasn't wilted or torn or damaged, just slightly misshapen, but otherwise, to her surprise, still whole.