Disclaimer: As ever, they aren't mine. They're yours, CBS, and I'll thank you for setting them on a similar course as this story, if you would be so kind. Lyrics are Kelly Clarkson's.

Sara

And I don't know
This could break my heart or save me
Nothing's real
Until you let go completely

Ronnie is now walking the halls of the lab with Grissom's book beneath her arm, in mirror image of me earlier today. She is brimming with new knowledge, eager to bestow it on the unsuspecting, and I have mischievously suggested she bore.. I mean grace…Hodges with her spiel.

Grissom is in court, and I have only an empty house to return to, so I agreed to some overtime with Ronnie. I am just re-packing the crime scene photographs into their protective wallets while Ronnie fetches some coffee and talks someone other than me to an early grave. We have another hour's worth of work, I estimate, before I will take the drive to our house, via the dog sitter's. I like going to the sitter's. The way Hank bounds up to me is oddly satisfying, as is the way the sitter still sometimes calls me Mrs Grissom. It is only because he made the initial booking, and she just assumes I am his wife. I've corrected her a few times, but she has a lot of clients, and she forgets, and when she does, I quite like it.

Ronnie returns with our coffee. I have taken pains to show her exactly how I like it, because after eight years on nights, I just can't drink bad coffee. She had diligently studied for this particular exam, and now gets it dead right.

"Find Hodges?" I ask, sipping the lovely liquid. What beats really good coffee, I wonder? Oh, right.. Yes. But not until later.

"Yeah," Ronnie gushes, in her particular way which once irritated and now almost galvanises me. "He tried to tell me I had my facts wrong, about the unique composition of whale bone, but I set him straight. He was all, cite your source, Lake, and I was all, Grissom. Via Sidle."

I have to smile. She is so animated, and she both assumes and accepts my seniority like she would water on a hot day.

"Yeah, sounds like Hodges." I say, as she sips her coffee.

"He's an ass."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"Did you know our victim had elevated levels of carbon dioxide in her system?" I raise my eyebrows. I did not.

When I touched down at McCarran, I went straight to my apartment. I walked right into the middle of the living room, looked around me at the place I had not really lived in for months, if ever, and realised enough was enough. I packed what was left, what I wanted to keep, which wasn't much, and loaded it into my car which I had left in the lot before I went away. With every trip down the stairs, my arms tired before the second run, I felt worse and better. Worse that I had kept this cold, empty place at all. Better that I was doing now what I knew I ought to have done a long time ago. Better late than never.

I know why I kept the apartment. Moving in to Grissom's house was never a big occasion, it wasn't the kind of milestone other couples might make it. He gave me a key after a few weeks, which in itself was a giant step for mankind. That key burnt a hole in my pocket. I couldn't muster the courage to use it, without direct invitation to do so, and was delighted when he caught me in the locker room one day, shift ending but his departmental meeting just about to begin, and told me to go on home. I nodded, wondering what else I would be doing when he was staying there, and then he added, warmly, put some coffee on, sit out back, take a bath, whatever you want. Then the smile spread slowly. There was no out back at my place. Whatever indeed.

I didn't really think we were living together until a few months before.. Natalie. I spent a lot of my time there, but I think we both assumed that was because the house was bigger than my apartment. It had a better kitchen, one that actually had pots and pans, and a stoop and porch swing out back that rivalled the two by four terrace my apartment boasted. But I didn't think of it as mine, and still half waited for him to want his space back. So I was surprised, to say the least, when he asked me if I thought we should get a dog.

We were making lunch, or whatever you can call the meal you will eat at sometime during a long night shift. We always made different things, and had two different lunch pails. Such a simple thing, but, as I had pointed out, as we stood in the aisle at the supermarket, our colleagues are paid to notice the details. Cases have been broken on less.

So I was buttering bread, and Grissom was cutting salad, when he slid this into conversation.

"A dog?"

"I've always wanted one."

"You. A dog."

"Yeah."

"Then how come you don't have one?"

"I'm never here. But now, with two of us living here, there's a much better chance of someone being home."

"There are two of us living here?" I put down the knife and turned to look at his back where he stood, working on the counter opposite me. He stopped, but didn't turn.

"Aren't there?" He said, carefully, lightly. I tilted my head to see his profile. He was smiling. I narrowed my eyes, my own smile unavoidable.

"Well," I began, almost lost for words. "I guess there are."

So we got a dog. And I boxed up a lot of my stuff, and Grissom made some room, and I transferred my life from one set of walls to another. I kept the lease, partly because we didn't think it would be a good idea to change my address on the employee database, just in case, and partly because I knew there would be times when I needed somewhere else to be. And there were, from time to time, awful moments where Catherine would call and announce she was coming over for a drink, as she had used to do when they were both bachelors in the emotional sense of the word. She wasn't to know things had changed, and I could hardly expect Grissom to tell her, or even to successfully put her off every time, which would have triggered as many alarm bells in her head as leaving my hairbrush on the coffee table. Which I did, once, although Grissom managed to get to it in time.

So sometimes, I would sweep all obvious clues into my bedside drawer, make sure my closet was firmly shut, tuck my shampoo bottles well behind his and take Hank over to my place for the night. I didn't really mind. If Catherine ever wondered why the dog was always with the sitter when she called round, she never mentioned it.

Likewise, sometimes Greg would insist on pizza and a movie, and when I couldn't convince him to have me over to his place, I would go back to mine before he arrived, skip round nudging things out of place and ruffling bed clothes that it might look like someone had slept there recently. If he ever wondered where half of my stuff was, he never asked.

So it was to this bolthole that I retreated, during the first and only real argument we had, between Heather and Natalie. I was still sore, and wasn't very receptive to Grissom's attempts to explain. He came to my apartment, eventually, after I had spent two nights there, and we fought, briefly.

"What are you afraid of, Sara? Why do you always run back here?"

"I'm afraid of being hurt, you know that."

"Have I hurt you?"

"I don't know," I levelled at him, slowly, almost not wanting the answer, "have you?"

"Do you trust me?" Answering a question with a question. So Grissom.

"You know the answer to that,"

"Then you know the answer to your question."

I did know, and I did trust him. But I wasn't ready to let it go, and I didn't want to fight, not really, not with him. I was frustrated with the world, not just his slight recklessness. I hated the secrecy, the fact that I had let Catherine's words get to me, the fact that I had let myself be intimidated by Heather's beauty.

"Sara, I'm sorry, that I didn't get the message to you, that you didn't know where I was. I'm sorry that you heard what you heard at the lab. But that's our situation, isn't it? We have to deal with things like that. People can't be respectful of our relationship because they don't know about it."

"I know."

"But?"

"You took a risk, going there."

"Yes, I did. Like I take one every day being with you."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Look. I'm not going to belittle your intellect by assuring you that nothing happened. Because you know that it didn't, because you know I wouldn't, and if I had, I wouldn't be here, and you know that too."

I nodded.

"I think you should give up this lease." His eyes were imploring, promising.

"I'm not ready to give it up." He sighed, suddenly looking tired.

"Then will you at least come home with me now?"

I did, hesitantly, and we slid into our bed, still unsure of the ground we had covered. I didn't think he had literally spent the night with Heather, and I never had thought that. But it stung, a lot, and I couldn't just shake it off. He held me silently until I fell asleep. The downside of being with a man who knew me, and knew me well. I couldn't hide, and he, knowing I wanted to, only drew me closer.

When I got back to Vegas, I could wait no longer to tie off this loose end, and it was no more than a couple of hours before I was dropping the keys into the manager's office, the last box in my arms. In the time I'd been away it had dawned on me quite quickly that I was scared, and that the apartment had been a safety net for the insecurities I couldn't rid myself of. That, even after all, he would leave me, or want me to leave him, and I would be thrown back into the old way of life. I just couldn't accept that he was in, and in for life. After the proposal, and my swift exit, it had all begun to sink in, and from my vantage point all those miles away I had seen what I had never seen before. Grissom had changed. Just as I had always wanted him to, he had fallen for me, and realised, in line with only my wildest dreams, that we were in fact supposed to spend our lives together.

So I did it. I got straight with myself, and admitted that having two places to live was not necessary, and that my excuses about mail and address changes and convenience were pathetic. It was just a way of avoiding admitting that I was still ready to run. And when I stepped off that plane I felt anything but. I just wanted to go home.