Author's Note: Thank you for all of the nice reviews and alerts! They definitely make my day to see them, and I hope from this point forward I can be a little quicker with updating, depending on my real life and how it goes. I've inserted in a third viewpoint, which is Sara prior to the beginning of the story, and it will gradually, over the course of the next few chapters, be filling in a few of the blanks that I left open in the first chapter.

All I own are my ideas. Anything else belongs to whoever was lucky enough to have created them.

Sara looked at the phone after she ended the call. The wallpaper on her cell phone, which had remained unchanged all of these months, had a picture of her and Grissom, laughing over a joke she couldn't even remember now. "Oh, Gris," she murmured under her breath, trailing her finger over the screen, choking back the fresh flood of tears that threatened to come without warning. A distant memory came fluttering back, and she let her memories take flight.

-three and a half months ago-

It had been a blissful two weeks since Grissom's arrival. They had spent as much of it together as was humanly possible, and Sara had to admit; if this was what paradise was like, she wouldn't want it to ever end...

"Grissom, where did you put my binoculars?" Sara asked one morning, searching through her knapsack. "I told you last night to put them back in my knapsack after you were done using them."

Grissom came into the room, running a towel over his wet hair. "What did you say? I didn't hear you over the water running."

Sara, clearly exasperated, repeated herself, "I said, where did you put my binoculars?" Upon seeing the confusion on his face, she softened slightly. "Look, if you don't remember, it's okay, it's not that important."

"Sara, if it's important to you, it's important to me," he replied softly. "They're right here, by the way. You must have just missed them." He picked the binoculars up from the side table and gently pressed them into her outstretched hand with a smile.

Sara sighed at the memory of his touch, clenching her fist to attempt, however feebly, to retain the feel of it. Sucking in a deep breath, she took a look around the baggage claim. Being the time of night it was, there weren't too many people mulling around, just a few employees cleaning up before the first flights of the day landed. She knew, from experience, that the first travelers would be arriving at the airport around now, boarding their flights, going about their daily lives...saying goodbye to the people that they love. The lucky ones, she thought bitterly, were the ones who had no one to love, no one to have to say goodbye to. Maybe if she hadn't opened up and let people into her life, she wouldn't be looking like the crying, hysterical, girl in the middle of the McCarran Airport baggage claim.

"No man is an island," she said aloud, remembering one of her literature teachers at Harvard talking about John Donne once. If she was an island, however, she mused, her friends at the lab were boats anchored along the shoreline. The analogy didn't quite fit, but it worked well enough for her, and she lay back on top of her carry-on and smiled for the first time in three and a half months. It was not a large smile, just wide enough for her to feel slightly better. But, as she thought to herself, any smile is better than no smile at all.

As Nick quickly got dressed to go to the airport, neglecting to look at what he was pulling out of his closet, he thought about how he thought this day would never come. He had, for the most part, given up on seeing her again after they had left Warrick's funeral. There were two things that were sticking out in his mind as he replayed their conversation over and over, like a CD with a smudge on it, preventing the track from advancing: Nowhere in their conversation had Grissom been brought up at all and she had been crying worse than he had heard her cry in a long time, if not ever. "I swear, if Grissom did anything to hurt her..." he muttered to himself as he stuck his head through a T-shirt. "I know that Sara will tell me what's going on though. I just have to get to her first."

He walked out into the living room, looking for his keys, when out of the corner of one eye, he saw it. It, being the urn that held all of the ashes of the written and then promptly burned letters he had written to Sara, pouring out his heart and soul into each press of the pen, as a matter of fact. Moving quickly, he took the urn off of his fireplace mantel and put it in a kitchen cabinet. "I hope she won't find it and ask too many questions," he thought out loud. "I don't want to explain all of it...yet."

Shouting triumphantly as he found his keys, he ran out to his car and started the ignition. "I'm coming, Sara. Wait for me." He eased the car out onto the road and sped off for McCarran, for Sara, for his friend who needed him.

-to be continued-