Disclaimer: of course I don't own them, nobody does, they have a life of their own.

Note: this is my second fanfic ever, so bear with me, and remember English is not my first language. You'll see I have a thing with redemption, so a lot of my stories are centered around it… Guess I have to get it out of my system before I start writing something else. I know there are already several post-ep fics for this episode, but honestly, I just couldn't resist.

Chapter 1

- It depends on the lie.

He could see that she was crumbling, could see the strain that particular lie had put on her for all those years. Habit and instinct kicked in, and he found himself unable to deny her the comfort of his arms at this moment. He felt her body relax, felt her cling to him, and hugged her back, but inside he was still appraising her every expressions of a moment before. His mind was reeling. Who was this woman who had lied to him for almost 10 years? Could anything they had built survive this?

She disengaged from him first, searching his face in the low light of the room. She knew better than to think it would be so easy. She just had needed his arms to hold her up for a moment, to give her strength to face what she knew would be coming now… How ironic that she needed his strength to face him.

- Cal?

- Yes, Gill?

He didn't call her "love".

- Are we ok?

- Of course we are.

She watched him, and this lie she saw, plain as day, written all over his face. But she didn't push it. She wasn't sure she could handle the truth right now. Truth or happiness, never both. So now, this night, she chose the comfort of believing his words over what her eyes, his eyes, were telling her. Instead of asking again, she gave him a strained smile, her eyes fluttering to the ground, and left the office softly, feeling like somehow, in the last ten minutes, she'd lost the right to belong there.

The following day, he avoided her. She had known this was coming, but it still hurt like hell. And it kept hurting, as the days passed and the rift didn't mend between them. She wondered if she had maybe made the worst mistake of all by accepting his first lie, that they were ok. They were definitely not ok, or all right, or anything in between. Yes, they greeted each other in the morning, and acted, for the most part, as if nothing had happened. But she could feel him watching her now, all the time, not in friendship but in doubt, as if he was constantly looking for a clue as to what she was really thinking. He didn't drop by her office anymore, and sometimes they didn't even see each other all day if they were working on different cases. She'd never felt lonelier in her life.

She accepted his distance, knowing he needed time. That's even what she'd told Emily when the girl had barreled into her office some days before, demanding to know what was going on. She'd considered for a moment pretending that she didn't know what she meant, but the truth was, she needed to talk to someone, anyone, about it. To confess that this was her doing, and not Cal being his usual jerky self, as everyone else in the office believed. So without giving out any of the details, she'd told Emily that she'd hurt her dad, and that he needed time to forgive her. She had seen the surprise in Em's face, that she should be the one to mess up, and once more she had felt the sadness rising within her, like a tide that came and went, never strong enough to breach her wall of control and spill on her cheeks, but slowly eroding her heart.

Now they were working on a case together, and he had done nothing but contradict her, implying her emotions were tempering with her reading of the different parties. To tell the truth, she was less than focused, but what he blamed her for she was not guilty of. He was just taking any excuse to lash out at her, to test her, see if she would crack. And she'd taken it, she'd taken it all, welcoming his anger, anything but the silent treatment by which he made her feel she was nothing to him. Anger was improvement.