Dr. Maura Isles loves facts. Facts are black and white, and they are cold and hard. When she was a little girl of only three, she had pointed at a pretty dress and proclaimed, "Pretty blue." Her mother had given her that patronizing look and answered, "It's Prussian blue chiffon."

She washes her hands yet again and finally dries them on the towel hanging nearby and plucks at the front of the scrubs she is wearing. These scrubs are definitely not Prussian blue. They're a soft baby blue, but that is the only thing soft about them. Her clothes were ruined, soaked through, but she pushes that to the back of her mind as she watches the suds swirling counter-clockwise down the drain.

In the northern hemisphere, water always tended to swirl in a counter-clockwise direction. She had first learned about this, as well as why Prussian blue was named after the long-gone country of Prussia, in the pages of National Geographic. Her home had a fully stocked library as a child, and in fact she cannot remember stepping foot into a public library until possibly her college years. All of the books in her home library had hard bindings, stiff and rigid, many more words than pictures.

And then one day, her parents had paraded her through the headquarters of one of their charities. It was at a children's hospital, and she had spotted the vivid cover tucked in a neat stack on the bottom of an end table. Her fingers had slid over the smooth cover, and she had climbed into the nearest chair and had begun turning the pages with careful reverence. No more than five, Maura had found herself enthralled with colors—people, animals, places, each more fascinating than the next.

She pushes open the door into the hall, oblivious to the flurry of activity as patients, doctors, crash carts, and gurneys weave their way around each other. As Maura slips through a door into the private waiting room, it's like sinking under water. The rush of noise is strangely muted, and she barely looks where she is going before heading to nearby chair.

Someone has muted the television, and she considers it a favor. The last thing she needs to see is coverage of what she just endured. She has a long wait in store, and she knows that at any moment now Frost, Korsak, and the Rizzoli's will join her. Someone is going to want her statement, and her brain is whirling with facts about everything but the things they will want to know.

Her gaze drops to the table littered with magazines, and she pushes away Vogue and Vanity Fair to pull out the yellow spine she spots under the stack. This National Geographic is at least a month old, but she doesn't care. It's the comfort some children would derive from a stuffed toy, and it looks like home. She doesn't even care that one page is torn and several are dog-eared.

Years ago, her mother had wrinkled her nose when she discovered Maura in possession of three of these magazines during a car ride. It had always been the same—her parents were quickly engrossed in either their own private conversation or conversations with their respective staff and assistants. At first she had been given coloring books to keep her occupied, and then books. If they weren't careful, though, reading while riding made her slightly carsick. Not enough to be sick, but enough to feel miserable.

But these magazines… they had become her own private world, one she could keep her parents away from just as neatly as they tucked her out of theirs. She smiled to herself as she spotted an article about some of the first women allowed to public practice medicine and those who had, for centuries, practiced in secret. It reminded her of the picture hanging in her own office of women, decades earlier, performing an autopsy.

Her thoughts trip over themselves, and she tires not to think of the autopsy she nearly had to perform today. Instead, she had had a patient. Her throat is still a little raw from shouting her friend's name, but once she had reached the fallen woman, she had thrown herself into full doctor mode. Pulse, breathing, and pressure had been her main concerns, and now her own pulse spiked and her breath caught as the side door opened and Rizzolis rushed to join her.

Angela was leading the group, and she immediately rushed to Maura, enfolding the smaller woman into a fierce hug. "Maura, thank God you were there! God…" her voice breaks off, and she swallows hard. "How is… do they know anything, yet?"

Maura is frozen for a moment, unable to find words. The emotions are washing over them, and she gropes for a reply. Her gaze falls to the open pages of a woman expertly tying off stitches. The technique is precise, automatic, and she gives Angela's shoulder a pat before guiding them both to seats for the long wait.

A human being is either dead or alive. It's a fact—the two states cannot coexist. She had lingered near the door of the E.R. room, out of the way and wholly engrossed. The patient was intubated, and lines for blood and saline had been started. Everyone was moving quickly, and the stats on the machines were finally leveling a bit. "Angela, they're in surgery. She's too Rizzoli to let the other guy win." It was a fact.