The moment Watson said she'd taken another job, his house of cards collapsed, and Holmes remembered the night before when he brought her dinner and found her still working on the case. "That door was closed," she had said. He demurred, observing that the door to being an investigator was obviously not closed to her at all.
He'd been more than flattered to see her there, notes and files arranged as he would have done. He had called it an homage but what he had really felt was kinship, a glimpse of what it might be like to have a true working partner.
Now he knew his mistake, that she had been trying to tell him this: despite her manifest interest and ability, she was closing the door between them now.
Was barging into her room the last straw? The final misstep in a series of arrogant assumptions that had driven her away? No. No, nothing so dramatic. Overreaction was his peccadillo. No, she would have received the job offer days before, or earlier.
"I see," he said. "I'm usually quite good with deductions."
She had accepted it this morning, not out of spite, or because of the things he'd said to aggravate her, but because the timing was right. He felt a slow flush when he realized that he agreed with her assessment. She had taken the new job because she knew he would be ready. As she had promised.
He wondered when she would have told him if he hadn't been blundering about with condescending offers of instruction and puerile plans to fleece his father. Didn't matter. This deduction was sound. He had been foolish to assume she would stay after the end of the contract. For all that he disdained sobriety counseling, he knew she took her ethical obligations to him, as her client, in all seriousness. She wasn't running away from him; she was opening another door between dependence and independence, a threshold he had to cross alone.
She was always going to move on after six weeks. So that he could.
And so that she could come back.
"You OK?"
"My Dear Watson." You got me there faster. "Whenever am I not?"