Work is uncomfortable. Harding won't look at him, and whenever he tries to nab her in the corridor, she runs away.
"Trouble in paradise?" House asks.
"In Aus?" she responds sweetly. "Yeah, you seen our PM?"
When Cameron asks Chase what happened, he shrugs. "Dunno."
A week later, Harding hands House an envelope.
"What's this?" He turns it over, pulls out a short letter.
"My notice. I gave one to Cuddy as well."
"Where are you going?"
"Got a job with the city working with troubled adults."
"Pays even less than this."
"I'll manage."
Chase watches the whole exchange silently. No one notices the thin red scabs on the inside of her upper arm.
Winnie is upset some days. "Mummy, where's Robert?"
"He's not coming here anymore lovey." Bowen scrapes a fried egg and some cabbage from the frying pan into a bowl of rice.
"Why not?"
"He and I had a fight." It's Winnie's birthday, and two chocolate cupcakes sit on the table along with a small wrapped package. "Eat your supper, Win," she says, trying to sound jovial. "Then you can open your present!"
Bowen herself eats less and exercises more; it doesn't get easier, the wheezing continues, longer each time, but she goes still - sit-ups, squats, anything until her muscles scream, pain making her less anxious, at least for a little while. The hours at her new job are hard, talking down schizophrenics and helping abused women. She doesn't like it, but she's good at it; the paperwork is deadly.
She misses Robert. Everyday like a constant ache behind the sharp anxiety. ("Bupropion's for depression," a coworker tells her. "You need to get your prescription changed." what Robert had told her for months, but now more than ever there's no money for a doctor's visit.) Even though it's summer, there's a bit of golden lost from her life, slipped from between her fingers. She curls into herself at night, wondering - in her half asleep haze - why the other side of the bed is so cold. The bones of her wrists come back, iliac crests poke from her skin, spine once more like a mountain range. Winnie eats apple and peanut butter, and Bo steals bites of her macaroni, smiling the whole time.
She ignores the calls from her father, and wishes for Robert.
Her phone buzzes one day as she slows in front of her staircase, waving at the kids on the curb. A 'Gong number - not her father's, not from one of his usual bars. She can hardly breath, collapsing onto the step as she answers.
"'lo?"
"Bowen Harding?"
Gasp. "Speaking."
"This is Sara Fischer at Shellhabour Public Hospital. I'm very sorry to tell you that your father, Greg Harding, was admitted earlier with a heart attack, and passes away about half an hour ago."
Bowen chokes for air. "What?"
"Your father is dead."
The phone drops from her hand. Her heart is racing, blood stomping through her ears. Seven then six then five then four three two now one. Just one. One little girl sitting on a step thousands of miles from home all alone with no one left in her family. She can't breathe, the kids on the curb stand in concern.
"Miss, you okay?"
She doesn't answer, just tries to force her lungs to open. No one left. Nothing but empty beer bottles and burned-to-ashes joints, orange containers of pills lying next to a cold hand, a scale with thirty-nine kilos and a gun at a temple. She can't feel the waves anymore when she thinks of them only cold flat water like a bottomless lake trying to swallow you whole - she feels like she's breathing in water.
A woman has come down the stairs, a neighbour with a head full of braids. "She all right?"
"I don't think she's breathing."
"Call an ambulance!" A kid whips out a cell phone.
Bowen breaths in the water, but her chest is filled with sand packed in too tight around her lungs, cementing them into shape. Six headstones six urns six plaques six funerals she stopped crying after the third, stopped crying the kind of tears that make it feel like you can't breathe why can't she breathe.
"Bowen, right?" One of the kids, no more than fifteen, crouches in front of her. "It's all right. You'll be fine. EMS are on their way." His skin is dark, smooth like the lake she's drowning in.
"She's got a kid, doesn't she?" the lady asks above her.
Winnie. Winnie with small arms and small hands and smooth wrists with no bones jutting out of them. Winnie with soft hair and kind eyes and a silly accent.
The kid rubs her arm. "It's all right, just breathe."
She stares at him, hazel irises dim. She blinks, eyes full of panic, then goes limp. He hardly has time to catch her before she cracks her head on the stairs.
"Do you know what one of my favorite memories of you is?" They're lying nose to nose in bed, both grinning absurdly.
"No," Wally bites her lip mischievously. "Is it dirty?"
His hand sneaks around to her ass. "Yes." she laughs loudly at his tone.
"Tell me."
The hand stays were it is. "D'you remember that day after we came back from Rio when we got super high? When I went out to the store to get beer and shit-"
"-because we had no food. I remember you were to stoned to pick up anything but crumpled violets and milo."
"Yeah, but do you remember what happened while I was gone?"
"Not a fucking clue." She presses the side of her face into the pillow, loving staring at him. The silver light of an overcast afternoon plays off his skin, ringing him in a peaceful halo.
"You apparently got a little bored waiting for me," Robert teases. "Because I came back into the bedroom to find you, hand between your legs, just-" he kisses her neck "-about-" another one, lower "-to come-" and another, right between her breasts.
"So what did you do?" she prods, running a hand over his hair.
"What any gentleman would do: I helped you." he kisses her none-to-precisely, with all the delicious sloppiness of a lazy afternoon twined together. Wally looses herself for a while, in absolute joyful bliss that fills her up. As if sensing her contentment, Robert smiles against her mouth.
"What?"
She blinks lazily. "Nothing. I just love you."
"Hmmm," he hugs her close, touching their foreheads. "I love you too." They doze off like that, close, happy, and glowing.