"Do I even want to know what you told your wife you're doing?"

"Let me worry about my wife…" Jane did not need this from him; he wasn't here to be her shrink. She had enough people in her life that were monitoring her emotional state and waiting for her marriage to fall apart – and she was sure her wife was one of them.

"Problem is Rizzoli…I don't think you are, worrying about your wife…or yourself. This is becoming an unhealthy obsession." She looked away from him and out over the crowds that had gathered around the coffee cart in the area of the park they always met. She could not help but clench her fists. "…he deserves better from you hun." He was now looking down at her son.

"Listen…don't call me hun… I never liked it when we were fucking and I don't like it now … that stopped when we stopped." She wasn't in the mood for his jesting, or his caring, she was only in the mood to find out why he'd dragged her here to meet with him.

"Jesus!" He barked at her genuine anger that she didn't miss being subjected to on a daily basis, "the little one is right here. Watch your mouth" he looked back into the pram happy to see the young boy was still soundly asleep. He shook his head, now looking back to the brunette in front of him.

Jane rolled her eyes impatiently, thought she did feel the guilt. He was right, Danny shouldn't be here – hearing her like this. He should be protected from this side of her life, the madness that her professional world had pulled her into and the person it made her. She was trying her best to keep this from her wife, she should be doing the same from her son. Today however it had not been possible, his texts had come too late, given her little time to arrange this meeting without Danny. Next time she'd ask her Ma to watch him while she went to her 'shrink' – the 'shrink' Maura had recommended and whom Jane had booked one appointment with. She had never made it to her first appointment, she'd made it to the car park, she'd made it out of the car – and she'd made it down the pathway, past the front door to the clinic and kept walking until she made it a block and a half away when she had got to a hell hole of a bar. It was a bar she'd usually show up to track down a perp or a witness, not find herself sinking into a couple of beers at the far end of the bar. It was nothing like the dirty robber, it was small, dirty and dark – exactly where she wanted to hide away for a few hours at a time and just escape being Jane Rizzoli.

This was where her weekly visits to the shrink would really take her. Not that either her Ma or Maura knew, to them she was sat on some sofa, talking and processing and dealing and they were sure she'd be the old Jane again soon. Jane had used the shrink excuse to stop them both from worrying at first, she'd realised that in both her Ma and Maura's world if Jane was getting professional help they believed all would be okay and Jane had been through enough mandatory precinct psych evaluations after shooting dead one criminal or another through her career and she'd sat through enough documentaries with Maura when they were dating and she was still trying to impress and please the blond that she could pull off a review of what they had covered in her 'sessions'.

"Look when we first started this you agreed to help me, so either you're here to give me some news or you have wasted both our time" Jane looked intently at the guy in the seat opposite the small metal table that parted them, on top of the table their coffees sat untouched. He'd brought them out of habit – just like back in the day when they rode together – when both were making their way up in the force. Neither expected back then that this is where their paths would take them.

She remembered his face before the scar across his left cheek that he had earned a few years after they'd ended being partners on the force, though she was still familiar with the scar because a long while after they'd split professionally many a bad case, a few crap breakups and always a few too many beers brought them together. She was no stranger to his bed, or sofa, or the back of one of their cars. One thing however that she wasn't familiar was how worn this guy looked, how defeated. Had the job tore her apart like it had him. She didn't need a mirror to answer that, the way her hands twitched and her booted foot tapped impatiently against the floor, the feel of cold damp palms as she waited for even a little intel from him like a dealer waited for a score on a street corner. She hated who she was.

He shook his head sadly, and then informed her bluntly "Months of following this guy and nothing Rizzoli. We have nothing…" he finally told her.

"No Rich…come on…" She couldn't believe this.

"I got nothing!" He repeated firmly "and I can't keep chasing a feeling you got. I'm getting pulled in too deep and one wrong move…we could lose our god damn badges."

"It's not a feeling…I'm telling you he's guilty god damn it." Jane lent forward her fist banging down on the table spilling the long forgotten coffee. The desire for proof outweighing her ability to keep rational.

Rich reached over placing his hand over her first, gripping it. "Hey…I know! I know… but he's too clever to be caught like this." Rich told her, "and we're too involved to play this how we need to. We're too tired, and too broken…" for a moment his harshness faded, he enjoyed the feeling of her hand in him. He swallowed – "I'm ending this!" he told her.

Jane shook her head; she couldn't have reached this point already. The point where the one case that would ever matter to her ran cold. "Rich…BPD closed the case when they got the shooter…the god damn, bottom of the chain shooter"

"They closed it because of lack … no… because of no evidence Rizzoli!"

"We were close...Anderson was close. I am telling you that we can still do this" Jane was begging and she wasn't ashamed, her other hand reached over grabbing his hand with both of hers. She needed to catch the guy ultimately responsible, the guy who was calling the shots, who arranged the ambush and who shot then both down leaving them in lay in the rain – bleeding out. The guilty outcome for the shooter was nothing more than BPD pinning it on the minor player in a much bigger game.

"Yeah…and look what close got you last time Rizzoli. I don't want close…I want certain" He barked with anger, "This kid here deserves better than his Ma been knelt down on main street and executed….and I'm damned if I'm going to be kneeling next to you…"

"Fuck you Rich!" She pulled her hands back.

"I told you I had your back…" He barked at her. "But I told you we do it my way!"

"you have nothing…I gave you months. MONTHS and You have nothing!"

"There is nothing that I can get us sitting in a car night after night with a pair of binoculars Rizzoli." He tried to calm his voice again and pull her back from the edge. "look…it's not over… it's just…" He noticed Jane was now shaking with anger, the anticipation she had when she first arrived, the hope of him giving her something that got them closer to the guy she knew was guilty had deflated into desperation. "Rizzoli it's on hold. I called you out here to tell you…I'm passing this up the chain. I have a favour I'm calling in…and we will see what happens. But for now… we…as in me and you…we are backing off"

"For how long Rich, how long do I have to rock my Son to sleep, looking down at him knowing his Pa's killer is out there. I can't be that kind of Mother…" Jane demanded.

"You have to be, for as long as it takes...until we get that son of a bitch. You need to fix up Rizzoli"


Half nine in the evening came, and Jane was sat down stairs in their home alone. Maura was yet to return home, though the medical examiner had attempted many calls and even a few texts to Jane – the brunette only responding to those texts as and when she felt it completely necessary, and she made little effort in developing the text responses beyond three or four words.

Maybe Rich had been right earlier, she needed to fix up, she needed to worry about her wife and her family. There was a time that if she was at home and Maura was pulling a late shift – she would go out of her way to make a nice meal, something healthy with vegetables she'd rarely heard of let alone eaten. She'd pick up a bottle of wine that cost her more than a shift made her at work and she'd make an effort to put on a shirt that fitted in all the places Maura liked them to fit on her. Though that all felt like a lifetime ago.

Tonight, there was boxed up meals that Angela had made them. Angela had got in the habit of stocking the fridge in the Rizzoli-Isles household when Jane was in hospital – the first time – with the multiple gunshot wounds…many months before the birth of their son, and this had continued as neither Jane nor Maura now found the energy to live life as they used to. They reheated the food as and when such an exercise was required in order for them to sustain their bodies, they both ate out of necessity and if they were honest that's how they both went about life lately. Tonight Jane did not need food, she needed Maura to get home so that she could take herself into the guest house and put on an old baseball game she'd seen more times than she cared to count and find her way into a bottle and out of her head. It was not the kind of distance she allowed herself from life when she was the sole carer of Danny however as soon as Maura returned home she would allow the responsibility of being the parent fall to the Doctor for the rest of the evening.

As she waited, with a beer that she wished was darker in colour and stronger in strength – she played with her phone in her hand. Killing time, she re-read over the last texts she'd received.

It was from her Pa was the one she kept reading.

Thanks again Janie… you wait till I'm on my feet. I'll pay you back. Give the little one a hug from Gramps. Pa x

Jane shook her head, how did he go from ashamed father of the daughter who in his opinion was an embarrassment and a let-down to referring to himself as Gramps to the grandson he'd seen for all of a breakfast earlier that day. She let out a laugh, into the emptiness of the kitchen, she looked over to the wall she'd cowered in when her and Frank had previously been reunited. Three thousand dollars changed the way Frank Senior saw his daughter, for a short time anyhow, she supposed. She wondered how many more thousand she'd have to give him to stop referring to Maura as an arrangement, and see her as a wife to his daughter and a mother to Danny. Funny Jane thought, he didn't have a problem taking money from them as a married couple but he wound dare take a meal and some polite conversation, or offer support and acceptance.

The money brought with it a whole set of problems to Jane and her marriage, she wondered how long she could avoid admitting she'd paid off her father's gambling debts, sure she'd wrote a cheque from her account but she knew this should have been a conversation she's had with her wife before signing it away.

She took a mouthful of the cool beer, it had been a long day and trying to figure out another little lie to tell Maura to avoid more issues, another lie to add to a tangled web that seemed to wrap itself around her marriage seemed way too much effort. She'd avoid it, for tonight at least.