Prologue
After their disastrous trip upstate, Eames sees Bobby a total of three times before she nearly blows his head off (not counting that little worrisome blip when she ran into him at the diner, which didn't count because he blew her off and nothing changed because of it).
They didn't find Donny, of course. Which Eames expected. She suspects that Donny took a bus or called a friend or hell, just ran to Nebraska or Michigan or Washington, some state where no one would ever think to look for him.
Goren's taking it hard, though. He's never been one to get his hopes up, but it seems to her that he expected, somehow, that Donny would just turn up.
Well, that's what she thinks, at least. It would be easier to read him if he'd maybe return one of her phone calls, but she doubts that's going to happen. It's been a month since their trip, and she hasn't seen him since she dropped him off at his apartment and ordered him to call her. A month of working cases alone and with Ross and with the occasional fleeting partner—clearly, Goren's rubbed off on her because now she is the one who can't keep a partner for longer than a case or two. Or maybe she's just getting harsher as the years go on and she sees more death, more destruction, more depravity. Either way, she finds herself snapping at her "partners", at their slowness, their inability to get things quickly and make outrageous connections and know ridiculous amounts of trivia. At their inability to be her partner. Her partner.
And so they leave.
And so she waits.