Sarah put away the pitcher of freshly-brewed iced tea and glanced out the window. It was a nice day; she planned to spend some time in her garden a bit later . . . Her eyes widened. Someone was headed to their house—a tall, lean figure who strode down the path with an all-too-familiar look of determination plastered over his strong features. "My, my," she said softly. "Took you long enough." She glanced at the big jar on the counter, just filled with a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies she'd baked that morning, and then at the coffeemaker.

She'd just begun to grind the beans when she heard the security code put in and the back door opened, then shut. Sarah kept her back turned as Greg entered the mudroom and stumped up the steps to the kitchen entrance. She felt rather than saw him stand in the doorway, not quite hovering, but indecisive. "Well come on in," she said, and flipped the switch to start the brew. After a moment Greg entered the kitchen. He moved to the breakfast counter but didn't sit down. Sarah turned around. "Good morning," she said, her tone mild. Greg glared at her.

"You know I saw Kelly today," he said.

"No, I didn't," Sarah said. She felt a surge of anxiety. "What's wrong? Are you all right?" She didn't move toward him, but allowed him to see she was worried. His stare softened a bit, though he still looked suspicious.

"Wifey told you, I know she did."

"No, she didn't." Sarah gestured at a stool. "Sit down."

Greg remained on his feet. "You two talk all the time."

"Do you really think we'd discuss your doctor's appointments?" Sarah said in mild exasperation. "You've known me for twenty years now. Aside from one breach of privacy, and I fully admit it was a big one and completely stupid, I haven't made that mistake again. Roz wouldn't say anything to me anyway, even if I did ask, and you know it. So if you want to tell me what happened when you saw Christine, I'm here to listen. But I don't know why you went to her."

Greg didn't move. "The shakes," he said. "It's . . . it's essential tremor." He watched her closely. Sarah leaned against the counter.

"Not Parkinson's," she said after a brief silence. "I'm glad to hear that." She hesitated. "Progressive?"

"Nope."

"All right," she said, relieved. "Get a cup of coffee and let's go into the office."

Greg tilted his head a bit, and Sarah almost smiled at the familiar gesture. "I just came to deliver the news."

"You came over to talk with me," she said. "If all you wanted to do was inform me about the diagnosis you could have sent me a text, or left a message on my inbox." She gestured at the carafe, now full of fresh brew. "You get your coffee, I'll bring the cookies."

A few minutes later they were settled in the office, with Greg in Gene's chair as he usually was. He had both legs up, ankles crossed and propped on the blotter, with two cookies in hand. He munched and stared at Sarah, his vivid gaze full of challenge and defiance. So, she would have to take the first step and prove herself trustworthy. Well, no surprises there. "What exactly did Christine tell you?" she asked.

"You think I'm lying. Trying to gain your sympathy, pulling a fast one—"

"Greg." Sarah gave him a direct look. "What did she say?"

"What I told you," he snapped. "Essential tremor. End of story."

"No it isn't, not by a long shot." Sarah sat back. "How do you feel about this outcome?"

"Here we go with the touchy-feely approach."

"It's a valid question," she pointed out. "Illness isn't just a matter of physical examination and diagnosis. Even when you have a good idea of what's coming, when you get confirmation it still has an emotional impact. So answer the question: how do you feel about this?"

"You tell me how you feel about your kid's working for me. That's far more interesting." Greg popped a cookie into his mouth and chewed noisily. Sarah sighed.

"Quid pro quo," she said. "Okay, fine. I'm happy he's working for you."

Greg raised his brows. "That's it? No paeans of praise for my good deed in taking on your boy?"

"Good deed, my fat ass." Sarah shook her head. "You wouldn't have bothered with him if he hadn't been fully qualified."

"You're telling me if I hadn't hired him you wouldn't have come storming into my office like Queen Boudicca to defend your son."

"Boudicca probably came to a bad end at her own hand, so thanks a lot for the comparison," Sarah said wryly. "No, I wouldn't have stormed your office. You're free to hire anyone you like. Jason would have eventually found work somewhere else."

"And yet you found it necessary to freak out over the whole writing papers thing."

She'd known this would come up; there was little point to tell him this was no longer quid pro quo, but an inquisition. She understood this was a necessary process to re-establish trust on his side of things. "I've had time to think about that first reaction. That's what it was, a reaction, not a choice." She picked up her cup of tea, set it down again. "I've already said there was some cheating going on during my days in college. It angered me that I struggled to get good grades when people used other means. I didn't want Jason to be a part of that. But I didn't give him a chance to explain. I didn't listen to you either. I'm sorry."

"Quite the pretty speech," Greg said softly.

"It's the truth. Take it or leave it." Sarah took up her cup once more. "Your turn."

"No, we're not done here." Greg selected a cookie from the jar and ate half of it in one bite. "Keep going," he said through a mouthful of food. Sarah rolled her eyes.

"You're gonna dislocate your jaw one of these days," she told him, and sipped her tea. "I don't know what else you want, you got a sincere apology."

Greg swallowed and downed a slug of coffee. "There's more to it," he said when he could speak. "Something personal. Something that still pisses you off every time you think about it." He chose another cookie from the jar, his gaze still on her. "Tell."

She knew she had no choice. Sarah held her cup with both hands. "You sure you want to bring that mess to light," she said, more to herself than him. She gathered bits and pieces of memory. "Yeah . . . all right, then."

"'All right then,'" Greg prompted when she fell silent. Sarah sighed.

"It was during my senior undergraduate year. There was an internship up for grabs for first-year grad students with a doctor, a big name. Lots of competition, as you can imagine. We had to submit a sample of writing, a five-page essay. It took me a week to write the draft, revise it, re-write it, edit and shape it up. Writing's always been hard for me. I can see what I want to say, but the words never come out right somehow." Her fingers tightened on the cup just a bit. "You can guess the rest. I sent in my essay, someone else got the internship. Someone who bought their sample."

"You're pissed off that you didn't win," Greg said when she fell silent.

"No," Sarah said, and knew she sounded terse, even angry. "It wasn't that. I never expected an equal playing field. Some people are smarter, some aren't. I didn't have much of a chance anyway. But this . . . this isn't that. It was someone changin' where the game's played and not tellin' anyone else where the new location was, so they won by default." She set aside her tea. "With that internship I could have graduated earlier, maybe have gotten a better job."

"And that's it?" Greg said after she fell silent. He sounded incredulous. "All this geshrying over a stupid meaningless internship that would maybe have gotten you out of school a year earlier, or earned you a spot nominally better than Mayfield. It wouldn't have changed anything in the long run, and here you are still hanging onto it."

"Yeah, I am," Sarah snapped. "The girl who bought the paper was a friend of mine, at least until she cheated."

"Big deal. People do it all the time, that wouldn't have bothered you this much." Greg watched her. "There's more."

"The doctor knew it was a bogus essay, but she didn't care," Sarah said after a short, tense silence. "Apparently it amused her to watch us all fighting to get that internship, like sharks in a feeding frenzy. She told stories about us at conferences, funny little anecdotes to make her peers laugh. I didn't find that out until years later, when someone told me one of those great stories . . ." Sarah felt her throat try to close up, but she forced herself to keep talking. "All those years of struggle, reduced to a joke."

Greg said nothing for a few moments. Then he sat back, tucked his hands behind his head, and gave her a challenging glare. "Your backstory is bullshit."

Sarah blinked. Indignation swept through her. "Is not."

"Is too. You've been hanging onto this for years as justification for all the suffering you decided to endure." Greg's blue eyes glinted. "It's total balls and you know it."

Annoyance turned almost instantly to anger. "Easy for you to say," she snapped. "You were on the other side of things in school, weren't you?"

"There were no sides," Greg said, and now he sounded angry too. "There was only surviving the complete pointlessness of it all long enough to get a degree."

"It was pointless because it was easy for you! You never had to learn how to construct a sentence or—or read a text to pick up salient points because you already knew the answers, you'd known them for years! Writing papers, selling answers, of course none of that meant anything!"

"You've been jealous of that all this time." The words dropped into her like stones. She heard the hurt behind the harshness and knew only honesty would keep him from bolting.

"I'm jealous, yes," she said. "I'd have given anything to have such a vast store of knowledge at my fingertips, the way it is for you. When I showed up at school, all I knew—" She drew in a breath. "All I knew was how to ride a horse and . . . and stay quiet when someone climbed into my bed at two a.m."

"So we're back to that again," Greg said after a brief, charged silence. "You're not a decent woman because you grew up with assholes who had no brains or money to speak of, and as a consequence they took their problems out on you because you couldn't stop them." He plunked his coffee cup on the desk. "Don't make that my fault. You think it's a blessing to have a fucking endless differential with a search engine jammed into your mental processes. I can tell you it's not. I can't turn it on and off, it's there all the time, even in the middle of making love to my wife, dammit! So don't turn it into my fault that your kid decided to earn some money on the side in a way you find morally reprehensible or unacceptable or whatever term you have on tap, just because I'm smarter than you! You're the one who talked about not expecting a level playing field!"

They sat in silence for some time. Sarah gathered the shreds of her composure and struggled to think about what Greg had said.

"I hate it that I'm jealous of you," she said after a time. "I don't want to be."

"I don't give a shit if you are. You wouldn't be the first, and you won't be the last. Just stop pretending you're not."

"I wasn't pretending! I—I didn't know." She felt stupid and small. "Now I do." She took a mouthful of tepid tea, swallowed it with a grimace. "Quid pro quo."

Greg took a cookie and leaned forward to set the jar on her desk. "Have something to eat first. You look a little peaky."

"Like you care," she said, though she knew he did. "Anyway, I'm a redhead. I'm naturally peaky."

"Damn stubborn woman," Greg growled, and took a cookie from the jar. He slapped it on the blotter in front of her. It promptly disintegrated from such rough treatment and spread over the paper like a cow pat. To her surprise Sarah felt a laugh bubble up. She tried to hold it back, but it came out as a giggle. When she dared a look at Greg, his lips twitched as he fought a smile. That did it. She had to laugh; even he snorted out a chuckle.

"So it's your turn," she said, as she picked up pieces of cookie and ate them, and enjoyed the taste of oats, raisins and brown sugar. "Tell me what you felt when you got the diagnosis."

[H]

"How did I feeeeel," Greg says, and draws out the word. Sarah gives him a look as she picks up another piece of cookie. "Feeeelings."

"Don't you dare sing that stupid song," she says, and pops the chunk of oatmeal-raisin in her mouth.

"Trust you to take all the fun out of things." He glances at his now-cold coffee. "Need a fresh cuppa joe to get through this."

Sarah sits back. "Stall all you like, I know where you live," she says, and the amusement in her words spurs him into action.

So not only does he get a fresh brew, he makes himself a robust sandwich, grabs the unopened bag of chips, and even raids Sarah's chocolate stash. When he brings all this swag with him she raises a brow but says nothing. He sweeps aside the last remnants of deceased cookie, sets the food on her blotter, picks up the sandwich and takes a large bite. As he chews he watches her. She looks back at him, and he sees both affection and worry in those sea-green eyes. Still, he won't let cheap sentiment sway him.

"It's still your turn," she says when he swallows and lifts the sandwich for another bite. "I can wait till you're done stuffing that bottomless pit you call a stomach, but you'd do better to start talking now."

"And spray food all over everything?"

"As if that's stopped you in the past." Sarah folds her arms. "Quid. Pro. Quo." Each word is pronounced with exquisite clarity. She means business, he knows it. He still takes the second bite, savors the taste of roast beef, cheddar and horseradish on homemade white bread, a simple blend of which he'll never tire. When the mouthful of sandwich is gone he slugs down some coffee and pretends to wince.

"Burned my tongue," he says.

"Too bad. Talk."

"It's idiotic to ask how I felt. What difference does it make? Any emotions I experienced are not relevant to the diagnosis."

"I understand you think that," she says with marked patience. "We're not discussing the diagnosis itself in clinical terms. In fact we're not discussing anything because you're dancing around like a cat on hot bricks, mainly because you find it amusing to do so."

He stops with the sandwich halfway to his mouth. "Amusing? Amusing?"

Sarah rolls her eyes. "Good to know I can always count on you to be a drama queen too."

"First a cat, and now a queen. For your information I happen to be pretty secure in my sexuality." He takes an enormous bite of sandwich.

"I'm happy for you. I'd be even happier if you'd stop jerkin' me around and answer my question." Sarah takes a cookie from the jar.

"Once on the lips, twice on the hips," Greg says when he can speak.

"Like I care. I already have a man and he doesn't mind if I've got a bubble butt," Sarah says. "I'm beginning to think you freaked out when Christine told you the results."

Of course this is nothing more than provocation, intellectually he knows that. But he's offended by the insinuation that he panicked or couldn't handle things.

"Didn't," he says, and glares at her.

"Don't believe you," she says, and munches her cookie.

"Don't care." Sarah takes another bite of cookie and says nothing. Greg lowers the sandwich. "I don't."

"Okay." She chews and swallows, finishes the cookie, and sips her tea. The silence stretches between them.

"It's not important," he says finally.

"It's my job to decide that, not yours." She holds her cup and gives him a direct look. "Just say it."

That sounds suspiciously like an order, not a request. "See, that's the trouble with you shrinks. You have to find out all this stuff that really isn't any of your business, which you know isn't your business but you—"

"Greg." She cuts across his babble with that single soft word. He stops, watches her with wary caution. "Do you trust me?"

"Bringing out the big guns," he says after a moment. Sarah nods.

"Yes. Do you trust me?"

"It's not that simple," Greg says. He's nervous now. "It's more about you trusting me to know how I feel."

"I'm well aware of that," Sarah says quietly. "But you talked about this with anyone else because you really aren't sure of your feelings, and I think that's a mistake. You should tell someone. So why don't you start with me? Unless you feel I'm not trustworthy."

He fidgets, puts the sandwich down, picks it up. "It's not that simple," he says again.

"Why?"

"Because it might excite your latent jealousy," he says, to riff on their previous conversation.

"Nice try," Sarah says in a dry tone. "You haven't truthfully answered either question I asked you. That leads me to believe you think I won't like your answers, might even reject or attack you. So in a roundabout way that gives me the answer to the second question, and also tells me why you won't answer the first one—you don't trust me."

"Nice logic," Greg says, impressed despite himself.

"Then it's true." Sarah finishes the last of her cookie.

"No." The word slips out before he can stop it. Sarah doesn't look at him.

"No?" she says mildly.

"You're not a parrot," he snaps. He stares down at his sandwich, but his appetite has deserted him. "It isn't that I don't trust you."

"All right," Sarah says after a moment, still in that mild tone, "let's see if we can figure out what's going on," and he knows a vast relief at her willingness to talk, because she's correct-he hasn't really sorted all this out himself. For the first time in a very long while, he takes comfort in the fact that he's here, he's with someone who knows and understands him, and likes him anyway. "Tell me what happened at Christine's office."

"I went in, discussed the test findings, went home."

"You discussed the findings. I'm presuming she confirmed what you already knew, that it was essential tremor." Greg hesitates, then nods. "Okay. You probably talked about whether or not it would progress, then protocols, medications, therapy." He nods again. "You were sure of the diagnosis, but I'm certain you felt relief that you hadn't missed something and discovered it was Parkinson's. A long shot, but you're too thorough."

"Bio dad's history indicated essential tremor. He told me himself a year before he died," Greg says, and ignores the little wince of sadness deep inside.

"So you knew Hawkeye's line inherited the predisposition. That gave you primary evidence for your symptoms, and the tests confirmed it." Sarah's gaze is steady on his. "That must have engendered several emotions. No doubt a couple of them were contradictory."

"I didn't feel anything." Now it's out. "Not in the office. That was just . . . fact-finding."

"Do you think you should have felt something then?"

"I don't know," he mutters. "I've already stated emotions are pointless in diagnosis. They—they get in the way. So it was just as well."

"But you still feel guilty about that." He says nothing, a silent, reluctant assent. "What do you think you should have felt in that moment? Relief, anger, sadness?"

"I knew I was right. That's all that matters."

"How you felt and still feel about this matters too," Sarah says. "You're a diagnostician, but you're also a patient." She tilts her head just a bit. "There's the rub, however. This holds echoes of the other time you were a patient, when you were confused and scared and full of rage at incompetent doctors, and helpless to do anything about it."

Her soft words bring bits of memories, stark, bitter, as if the years between have melted away. He makes a feeble attempt to negate her observation. "Nope."

"More like 'yup'." She watches him with such quiet compassion. "The outcome of the misdiagnosis for the blood clot, the muscle death, they defined your life for years. They still do to some extent at least. Of course you were worried the symptoms were something bigger than essential tremor. It's a logical fear based on previous experience."

He listens to her make sense out of what has to this point seemed like ridiculous indulgence. The sequence of events and their outcome falls into place, and understanding replaces anxiety. "Why couldn't I see that?" he says, and doesn't realize he's spoken aloud until Sarah answers him.

"Because there's no distance between you and the patient." She offers him a slight smile. "Now if you can, tell me what you felt."

No, not yet, he can't do it yet, he's too close to it now. For answer he reaches out, takes her cup, gets to his feet, and flees the office.

He's in the kitchen as he waits for the kettle to boil when Sarah says behind him, "It's all right to be scared." Her hand comes to rest on his arm, that familiar butterfly touch. "It's normal." She gives him the lightest of caresses. "I'll be in the office eating chocolate."

She indeed does that very thing when he comes in. He puts the cup of tea down in front of her and resumes his seat, wary of what comes next.

"We've pushed far enough for one day," she says, to his surprise. "I think you need some time to sort things out, talk to Roz. If . . . if you want to come over again in a few days and work on this some more, that would be all right." She pops a piece of chocolate into her mouth and is careful not to look at him. Greg understands then this is the olive branch. If he refuses, not only will things go back to the way they've been for several weeks, something will be lost for good and they'll both be infinitely the poorer for it. He finds he doesn't want to lose that something either. So he gives a single nod of acknowledgment, and picks up what's left of his sandwich.

"And you can call anytime," she says. Now he knows she gets what's at stake too, and doesn't want to lose it either.

"Don't nag," he says, and stuffs the last of the sandwich in his mouth. Sarah rolls her eyes.

"Guess I'd better stock up," she says, but under the sarcasm there's a distinct note of what sounds suspiciously like happiness. Greg swallows, licks his fingers, and stares at her.

"Genoa salami," he says. "Smoked turkey. And not sliced so thin you can read through it."

"Anything else?" She smiles though. He knows when he comes over again, the fridge will have everything he told her to get, and more besides.

"Plenty of cold beer. If you going to interrogate me under hot lights, I need alcohol."

To her credit, Sarah doesn't look at his hands. "Talk to Gene about the beer. I think it's your turn to buy the next case."

"No way!" He munches some chips and scatters crumbs all over the blotter. "Cheapskate."

"That's good coming from you." Sarah's smile widens. "Bring Roz over, we'll have a pizza and game night, maybe pick some tunes. Haven't done that for a while."

He likes the sound of that, and nods. "'kay." He closes up the bag of chips, dumps it on his plate and stands.

They move together through the quiet living room, past the big table and into the kitchen. Sarah puts his plate on the counter. Before he can turn away, she comes forward and enfolds him in a gentle embrace. She doesn't say anything, just holds him. Greg stands there in the circle of her arms; he can smell her shampoo, feel the warmth of her body.

"Thanks for coming over," she says. "I've missed you." The quiet honesty in her words is as comforting as her physical touch, something he can admit to himself, if not her. Then she lets him go, pats his shoulder. "Call me about coming over for dinner," she says.

"I will." He looks at her, still unable to express aloud what he feels. She offers him a slight smile.

"I know," she says. "It's okay."

He takes those simple words with him as he walks home through the bright, soft day.