Two more deliveries had shown up at her building while Elisa had been out.
Two more cards. Without reading the messages, she looked down and spotted the now familiar "J" on the bottom.
Elisa shook her head. At this rate, the lobby was going to be full of flowers by the end of the day.
"Ms Maza," Marco, the Jade Building's day security guard called out as she took the cards and left the flowers. "What would you like us to do with these?"
Elisa looked angrily at the flowers. "Take what you want, and find a nice place to donate the rest."
"Gotcha," Marco said. "Are you expecting any more deliveries?"
"I wasn't expecting the first one," Elisa snapped, then stopped. She closed her eyes and took a calming breath, "Sorry, Marco. I'm tired and frustrated. I didn't mean to take it out on you."
He waved her apology away. "No need to worry about me," He said with a grin. "I figured something was going on." He frowned. "Tony told me to hold the deliveries here at the desk. Would you like me to call you if any more come up?"
Elisa thought about it a moment. "I was going to try to grab a few more hours of sleep before work, so don't call me unless something other than flowers show up. I'll come down and check on it all when I get up."
Elisa tapped the two floral envelopes against her palm as she made her way to the elevator. She rode it to the top, then made her way through the still quiet house to bed. She got into her favorite pajamas, needing the familiar comfort, set her alarm and laid down.
She was sure that she wouldn't get any sleep…
She was out like a light a moment later.
-{- -{- -{- -{- -{- -{-
Elisa woke to her alarm, smiling at the sound of her son's laughter from the living room.
She hurriedly got dressed, and went downstairs to join the human side of her family for breakfast.
The sun wasn't quite ready to set just yet when Elisa had to leave for work. She kissed Liam on her way out the door and told him that she'd be home later. Waving goodbye to Skyler, she entered the elevator. There were no new flowers, no new notes, waiting for her at the desk. The lobby had been cleared of the flowers, as well, only leaving the lingering floral smell behind.
Tony greeted her as she passed through the lobby to the attached resident parking structure.
She waved at him, and continued through to her car.
-{- -{- -{- -{- -{- -{-
Matt got to work a little over ten minutes early, so decided to take the opportunity to check his email and see if there were any pending cases that he could be working on.
When he saw the email about "A mutual friend", he almost didn't read it.
First of all, this was the internal NYPD email system. The email addresses for the internal purposes were just that. To his knowledge, they weren't even listed anywhere, so receiving an email from a civilian email address was odd.
Initially, he skipped over it, choosing to focus on the nightly hot sheets, assignments and meeting notes from the morning stand ups.
Once those tasks were completed, he returned to the civvie email and hovered his cursor over the "delete" option.
Instead, he chose to open it to see what was going on.
He read Jason's email twice, and it still didn't make sense to him.
He was here with Elisa last night when those flowers had come in, and had seen Elisa's reaction to the card it had held. She had been so certain that it was Jason, and Matt had almost pitied Jason when Elisa decided to confront Jason.
Evidently, she had done that, all right, but something wasn't right.
Why was Jason reaching out to him about something being wrong with Elisa? Matt had met with Jason a few times, and couldn't really picture Jason as a crazy flower sending stalker…
But something wasn't sitting right with Matt.
"Hey," Elisa said, pulling her desk chair out so that she could log in to her own computer to do the safe things that Matt had just finished. "Anything good?"
Matt hurried to close his email.
Elisa looked a little rough, in an "I didn't get enough sleep" kind of way. He knew that at a certain point of being tired, Elisa's stubbornness actually got worse, which meant that she would clam up and not talk about... well… anything.
Still, that email from Jason wasn't sitting well.
Matt would probably need to buy her one of her favorite overpriced coffee drinks to wake her up enough to talk about… whatever was going on.
He was just opening his mouth to suggest just that, when his desk phone rang.
He and Elisa were being called out to assist in a hit and run incident. No injuries, but a truck had side-swiped an entire block long's worth of cars.
"Elisa," Matt said, getting to his feet, "Looks like it's going to be a busy one if we're getting called out already."
"Just my kind of night," Elisa said, seeming to really mean that.
