Maura hears Jane before she sees her. The clunking of Jane's boots on the hardwood floor is loud enough for it to echo into the kitchen where Maura's preparing a simple dinner of baked chicken and salad. She knows that Jane's unit would have only fed her lunch and Maura had made Jane promise to come home and have dinner with her instead of going out to the bar like she does every other weekend.

Humming softly, Maura pretends she hasn't heard her girlfriend walk in and continues mixing the garden salad. But the second she feels strong arms wrap around her waist and Jane place a kiss on the side of her head, Maura lets her mouth break out in a smile. Jane smells like a combination of cigarettes from hanging around the many smokers in her company and gasoline. It shouldn't be arousing, but it is.

"Smells good," Practically purring, Jane places another kiss underneath Maura's ear.

"The chicken is almost ready, and –", Maura gasps, her breath hitching when she feels one of Jane's hands caressing her inner thigh. She turns around in Jane's arms and tries to give her a stern look but fails when she sees the lust in the soldier's face.

"I wasn't talking about the chicken, you know," Jane's eyes keep darting down to Maura's lips. "The whole time I was driving home, I couldn't stop thinking about how fucking gorgeous you would look sprawled out across the dining room table, your dress hitched up to your waist, and me slowly kissing my way up your body."

There's a slight pause before Maura lurches forward to capture Jane's lips with her own, their noses bumping. Jane moans into the kiss and wastes no time hooking her hands beneath Maura's thighs and lifting her onto the counter. Refusing to break the kiss, Jane's hands wave blindly behind Maura to clear the surface before laying the blonde down and showing Maura exactly what had been going through her mind.

The fire alarm starts blaring twenty minutes later, startling them both.

They look at each other, hair disheveled and the apartment smelling like burnt poultry, and they dissolve into giggles.

The deployment is a large, grey block of time that Maura needs to fill.

It's a lot of waiting and worrying and trying to keep a smile on her face whenever Maura sees Jane's face pop up on her laptop, the soldier always looking a little more haggard and distant and scratched up each time. It's a lot of struggling not to worry every time she sees a news article online about another suicide bomber in Afghanistan or walking by a newsstand and seeing the loud bolded letters on a newspaper exclaiming about keeping more troops overseas.

She remembers Jane trying to calm her down on Skype one night after a particularly violent video online. She had been panic-stricken, babbling about how 1,771 service members had been killed since September 2013 and there have been nineteen thousand and two hundred fifty service members wounded since the beginning of this war, Jane! Do not tell me to calm down, NINETEEN THOUSAND.

Maura learns that technology is a double-edged sword. On one hand, she can see Jane's face and reassure herself that Jane is still alive and breathing and intact. She can listen to Jane complain because she's alive and Maura sometimes catches herself reaching out to the screen to smooth out the wrinkles on Jane's forehead when she's deep in concentration. On the other hand, technology gives her a brutal live-feed of improvised explosive devices detonating and camouflaged body parts lying on the ground next to unrecognizable bodies.

Maura realizes how agonizing the silence in communication is after a reported attack in Jane's area. Maura discovers the feeling of goosebumps every time she hears the National Anthem at Red Sox games (we're wasting seasons tickets if you don't go Maur, just record them for me. Jane's grin does her in and Jane knows it), and Maura knows how it feels when the lump gathers in her throat and she struggles not to tear up.

The military does not ask for permission. The military does not ask a veteran's spouse or significant other if they can take them and place them on the other side of the world, where there's a good chance that the one they love will not come back. And if they do come back, they're never completely the same.

The night after Jane left, Maura had driven back mindlessly, her thoughts still on Jane and the way Jane had kissed her, desperate and hard, as if she was trying to burn the feeling and taste of Maura's lips into her brain. Maura didn't know how long they'd stood there holding onto each other, but she knows it wasn't long enough and Maura had pulled Jane in for another kiss when she heard Jane's unit calling for her.

Both faces had been free of any tears during the ceremony. They had spoken about it and both had agreed that there should be no waterworks, lest it made it harder. But the second she had returned to their apartment and had seen Jane's dirty uniform in the hamper, Maura had broken down, sliding down the wall to clench the uniform top tightly to her chest. She'd woken up the next morning in her disheveled dress, all cried out and still clutching the blouse.

Her life becomes muted, almost like when you step off a plane and your ears haven't adjusted to the elevation change; she hears people and the television and the kids playing in the streets but it's muffled and constant and it envelops her life and routine. Maura checks the internet every morning for news about Afghanistan, despite Jane's protestations, knowing it'll just worry her. She does it anyways to always makes sure that Jane's unit is left unscathed, at least for that day.

Maura learns to appreciate the messy scrawl of Jane's handwriting on the carefully folded letters, and when Maura clutches these letters in her hand, it's like she's almost holding Jane's hand again. Jane always writes, I miss our life together, over and over again and in Maura's mind, they have three different lives: Maura's life without Jane, Jane's in Afghanistan and the one life that used to include both of them, a distant memory almost but no longer present.

Grocery shopping seems to be a constant. She doesn't enjoy having to only cook for herself and not have Jane over her shoulder every other minute, complaining about how healthy her meals are, but Maura takes pleasure in walking down the aisles and picking out things to put in care packages for Jane: beef jerky, gum and Twizzlers, magazines and books; all the things that end up being crushed and exposed to high temperatures on the way to Afghanistan, but Jane still devours each item because they remind her of Maura and home.

The first time she walks by the meat aisle, Maura cannot bring herself to pick up a piece of packaged meat because all she could think about was how a fresh human cadaver looked on her table, and she imagines Jane's body, bones protruding, shrapnel sticking out and dust clinging to her body, blood gathering in the sand. Maura calls the Dr. Pike's office afterwards and takes a couple days off.

Every time the phone used to ring, Maura would jump. She wonders if it's Jane calling or if it would be someone introducing themselves and saying they're from the Army asking for her and apologizing and she won't be able to listen anymore. Sometimes Maura hears the neighbor's dogs bark and the distinctive sound of doors slamming and she can't bring herself to go to the window to see who it is, just in case it's people in uniform walking up her front steps and knocking on her door. And this one time, she's getting out of her car and her heart stops when she sees two uniforms get out of a vehicle and she just stands there and stares and clutches her purse and thinks to herself please no please not Jane, please please please. Maura doesn't know how to start her heart again when she sees them, and she doesn't know if she'll ever forgive herself for feeling relieved when they knock on a neighbor's door.

Sometimes she wonders what it'd be like to live normally. Maura thinks about a normal life with Jane, a life where she only worries about ordinary things such as Jane forgetting to take Jo Friday out for a walk or skipping lunch to work on a case, not whether she might get shot or think about Jane crossing a street in Kabul and not making it to the other side. The anxiety gnaws at her and Maura carries it every day, on her shoulders and her mind.

She looks up support groups and seeks out information because she is Maura Isles and Maura Isles is never one to be ignorant about a subject. The support groups all tell her to keep busy, keep her routine and do her thing. They tell her, be realistic and don't dwell, but don't push away your emotions. It will be okay but sometimes you won't be okay and that's fine, just let it happen.

So Maura goes to work, she helps Dr. Pike with his cases, she goes to yoga every day and she makes friends, multiple times she gets drunk and gets angry and depressed and resolves to drink so much again, and she takes on watercolor painting classes and she goes out to lunch and she splurges on new dresses and spa days, and she Skypes with Jane and every time, she smiles so hard it hurts and every time she hangs up she cries, sometimes it's just a couple tears, sometimes she sobs uncontrollably, but in the end, she's okay.

That's what she has to keep telling herself.

She's okay.

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
― G.K. Chesterton