"They are the handful of mysteries in all of my career which have eluded my powers of deduction."
The cold case trunk moved back and forth across the library according to need and traffic. Bench, table, prop, obstacle, or ignored, by turns. After that first evening crouched in front of it, Joan pulled the files as she reviewed them and kept the working papers under her pillow. Not so much to hide them from Sherlock — she was under no illusions he wouldn't rationalize some reason to snoop, anywhere — but simply to keep them out of sight, for both their sakes.
She felt almost shy with the contents. Tender, perhaps, was a better word. Tender toward herself as she made her way across their uneven surfaces; uncertain, if exhilarated, by the opportunity to explore the unknown. Tender in the places where her skin was a bit too thin not to bruise when she stumbled or misstepped. But also tender towards him, for all his truculent posturing, baring his battered pride and vulnerability to expose his failures to her. More so once she found that half the cases were simply casualties of addiction he hadn't been able to face again in recovery.
She preferred privacy as she shifted and sifted through the buried remains. She preferred privacy in all things, foremost being the hypocrisy that ruled her days as a detective who kept her own evidence hidden away. She'd logged her ten thousand hours and more buttressing the wall that enclosed her secrets. The trunk was a rebuke to them both: to him for what he perceived as his dereliction of duty; to her for hiding from her past mistakes. It was an embodiment of his willingness to reveal his brokenness, for her benefit, and as such a constant reminder that she offered nothing in kind. Her reticence wasn't even a matter of will anymore; if there had ever been a door in her wall, she'd lost track of it, and he had long since stopped looking for a way in.
His reserve in this context expressed a delicacy of consideration she did not expect. Sherlock disregarded boundaries as a matter of course — a matter of professional pride in fact — and yet as well as he knew the contents of her closet, he hadn't attempted to excavate her since the early weeks of their acquaintance. Yes, he'd broken into her phone and eavesdropped on conversations and observed her comings and goings. But he also deduced the fault lines marking fragile sites where a wrong step might result in cave-in, and he never attempted to trespass without cause.
She began to understand she was another of his cold cases. Not one he was ready to give up, but rather held in reserve. Waiting for the right moment, the right layer of new information gradually exposed by erosion and time that would reveal the whole of her he couldn't deduce just yet. It would be better for them both if she could make some progress on this herself. Brush off the accumulated dust and silt to find the bones of who she used to be. She wondered if she'd recognize the person she would unearth.