An hour or so later, Cal sat in his office and stared at the wall with his feet comfortably on his desk, pondering Rose and his brief interaction with her.

Mystery aside about her past abuse and the temptation Cal was pushing away to crack the girl's case, Rose had shown an above average tendency for reading micro expressions, and now Cal had a hunch.

He jumped up from his desk and strode purposely out of his office and down to Gillian's office, where he had seen her lead Rose into a few minutes ago on his way up to his office. He knocked twice, then entered anyways.

Foster and Rose were sitting next to each other on Foster's leather couch, facing each other as they casually chatted. Rose looked much more relaxed than before, though still tentative and shy.

"Hey, Foster, I'm really sorry," Cal said from the doorway, screwing up his face in an infallible impression of honest guilt. "You're needed in the lab,"

Foster instantly bought it and looked up at Cal with surprise and annoyance, her mouth falling open before she pursed her lips, but Cal was more interested by Rose, who the scene play out with doubt. Cal was shocked, but it was a pleasant surprise - even trained professionals often couldn't tell when Cal was lying.

"I'll be right back, Rose," Foster said apologetically to Rose, then glared at Cal on her way out. "This better be some emergency," she hissed at him. "I was just starting to get through to her,"

Cal felt a twinge of guilt for possibly messing up Foster's connection, but it passed as he focused on his current plan of action. He watched Gillian's form go down the hall, then round the corner.

"Right," he said, snapping back into the room from the doorway and clapping his hands at Rose. "You, with me. I've got a game I'd like to play with you,"

Micro expressions of intense fear crossed the girl's face. "Why? What game?"

"Oh, just a theory I've got," Cal said, walking out of the room, then poking his head back in a second later. "Well, come on then, we haven't got all day. She'll be back in a minute, and then where will we be?" he said, jutting his head to where Foster had disappeared around the corner.

Rose's liquid grey eyes widened as the implications of what Cal had done sunk in, but she said nothing. Fearfully, she got up and followed Cal out of the room and down another long hallway.

"Right, so about this game," Cal said, stopping in a room with a projector and a touch-screen machine as Rose watched apprehensively.

Little to Rose's knowledge, Cal had taken her to the employee training room, and was now setting up the micro expressions test. "So, a face will show up here, and it'll show an expression for a brief amount of time. We'll start at, let's say... 1/10th of a second and the speed'll keep increasing. Got it?"

Rose nodded, gulping.

"Right, so, then a list of emotions will appear over here, and you'll click the right one. Simple enough?"

Rose nodded again, then stepped up to the machine at Cal's cue.

"Just click start when you're ready, sweetheart."

Rose shuddered, distrusting Cal more each second, but clicked start. A face flickered across the screen at the blink of an eye. Rose hesitantly clicked the button marked GUILT, and green checkmark filled the screen.

Quickly, Rose got into the groove of the game, and Cal watched, becoming more and more interested in this mysterious girl as she passed the 1/15th of a second level, then 1/20th of a second, then moved on to 1/25th, still with a 100% score.

Most people couldn't even keep an 80% at 1/5th of a second, which was the actual speed of a micro expression.

A door suddenly flung open behind the pair, and Rose gasped audibly, whipping around in surprise.

"What the hell is going on, Cal?" A flustered and angry Foster burst out, crossing her arms and standing in front of Cal. "Do you know how worried I was when I came back to an empty office, and there wasn't even anything in the lab? Did you honestly refuse to give me the week off to spend with Rose so you could steal her from me behind my back?"

The timer on Rose's 'game' buzzed, and both Cal and Gillian jumped and turned to Rose, who looked very small and very young and very guilty as she stood in front of the touch screen with wide, watery eyes.

Rose gulped, trying to form an apology, but Foster reacted first, rushing over to Rose and wrapping her in a hug. "None of that was directed at you," Gillian murmured soothingly to Rose, who was busy trying to decide how to react to the unexpected hug. "This was not your fault, ok?"

Rose gulped and nodded as she blinked rapidly, trying to form words or just make her brain start functioning again. She yearned to try Cal's game again, where she could just focus on something simple and not worry about people or other confusing things.

"Look, Foster, I'm sorry for scaring you, but the girl's a natural, and a very gifted one at that," Cal said, getting excited as he pointed to the screen, which had ended at 1/27th of a second. "My record is 1/40th after twenty-five-odd years of training!"

"Yeah, that's great," Gillian snapped, rounding on Cal, "But she's not your latest science experiment, and she's not your employee, Cal, she's my foster daughter! You could have at least asked me to test her for natural ability,"

Rose gulped again, slowly backing up to the door, trying to get away from the heated argument, although she was touched by Foster's unusually kind words towards her.

Rose made it out of the room and waited just outside the doorway behind the half-closed metal door, staring without seeing the wall across from her as she took a deep breath and tried to take in her newest life, which was already turning out to be crazy.

Inside the testing room, Lightman and Foster noticed that Rose had gone. "I'd better go find her," Gillian said, shaking her head in defeat at Cal, "And later you'd better come find her too and apologize profusely,"

With that, Gillian turned on her heel and marched out of the room, where she found Rose patiently, if somewhat anxiously, waiting outside. Instantly, she was relieved, but then Foster got more worried than she would have been to find Rose had run off somewhere.

Rose should have run off somewhere. She had been with Gillian for little over two hours, and was already blaming herself for running off with Cal and for Foster's panicked display of temper in the testing room afterwards. Any other foster kid, who already chronically had trouble connecting, would have acted out by now and tested their boundaries. For Rose to be internalizing her fear and guilt to such a degree meant that her abuse had been worse than Gillian had originally thought.

"Hey," Gillian said gently to Rose, who startled and looked up at Gillian. Her watery silver eyes were filled with guilt and shame, and made Gillian feel horrible. "Why don't we go back to my office and talk some more?" she asked, and Rose bit her lip in fear.

"Not like that," Foster said quickly, "You're not in trouble for anything. I just feel horrible for abandoning you,"

Rose cocked her head, and her eyes twinkled ever so slightly with... was that amusement? "Do you even know what abandoning means?" Rose asked softly, teasing.

Gillian broke out into a relieved grin, though her eyes stayed worried with the implications. "Would you care to enlighten me?" she asked. Rose shook her head, still amused, but with a dark shadow flickering over her face.

"Well then how will I ever find out what abandoning means?" Foster asked, to which Rose replied, "With a dictionary," and the two fell into a gentle banter as they walked back to Foster's office.