A/N: I hereby deliver more angst to you all. It gets better after this, I promise! Slowly. By degrees. Thanks to all of you for your continued support of this story. I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.

xxx

The next several days were, in a word, awful.

Missing Jane was like nursing a broken rib. The ache was constant, but just about tolerable as long as she didn't make any sudden movements or breathe too deeply.

At the same time, she couldn't bear the thought of being around him. She shied from the idea like flinching from a hot range after being burned.

She turned to her usual coping mechanism to distract herself, burying herself in work. She spent half her time poring over the photographs of the documents she'd acquired from City Hall and the rest of her time calling around the city between her regular assignments, trying to piece the whole thing together.

Jane filled up her voicemail within two days. Then texted when she refused to answer the phone. She ignored the texts, too. She stayed holed up in the hotel, determined to avoid him at all costs.

On the fourth day, however, certain practical realities forced her to return to the house.

She purposefully waited until mid-morning to sneak out of the office so she could be assured Jane would be at work when she stopped by, but when she let herself into the front door, she caught sight of a scruffy, manic Jane pacing the living room floor.

He looked up immediately when he heard the door open. "Teresa," he breathed in relief. He crossed over to the entry hall in three long strides and caught her up in a desperate hug not unlike the one he had given her the night he'd pretended to shoot her. 'Good luck, Teresa. Love you,' echoed in her mind in an endless loop.

She stiffened and pulled away. "Patrick," she said, her voice clipped.

"Thank God you're back," he said, letting her go and passing a hand over his eyes in a gesture of relief. He looked awful.

"I'm not back," Lisbon said tightly. "I'm just here to pick up a few things."

His face fell. "Pick up a few things?"

"I'm going to stay in the hotel a few days longer."

He shook his head. "Teresa, no. If you're still that angry, I'll stay in the hotel. You stay here where you'll be more comfortable."

"No," she said sharply. "I don't want to be around you right now. And I don't want to be around anything that reminds me of you."

Jane flinched. "Okay," he said quietly. "That's fair."

Lisbon glanced at him, trying not to notice his unkempt appearance and the dark hollows under his eyes. "Why aren't you at work?" she asked abruptly.

Jane cringed. "Mrs. Jenkins insisted I take the week off to recover from my, erm, traumatic experience."

Lisbon nodded, biting back an acerbic comment about how his ill-thought out plan seemed to have had more far-reaching consequences than he had anticipated. She was still angry, but now that she'd had a couple days to cool off, she no longer wanted to inflict any additional pain upon him. She just didn't want to have anything to do with him. She knew that being left to spend time in his own company, unable to escape that big brain of his was a far worse punishment than anything she could have said to him, anyway.

"You go back on Monday?" she asked finally.

"Yes," Jane said, searching her face.

She looked away in an effort to avoid meeting his eyes while he stared at her so unabashedly. She glanced around and caught sight of a glittery piece of construction paper on the hall table. "What's this?" she asked, nodding in its direction.

Jane winced. "It's a 'get well soon' card from the kids to Mr. Meyers. Mrs. Jenkins dropped it off yesterday."

Lisbon nodded. More punishment via guilt, in other words. "I'd better get my stuff," she said, unable to think of anything else to say.

Jane hesitated, then nodded. "Yeah," he said, defeated.

Jane hovered in the hallway but wisely didn't attempt further conversation while she packed her things in the bedroom.

She packed on auto-pilot, arranging her clothes into a rolling suitcase neatly and efficiently. She paused only when she was about to close it, looking down and realizing that every single item in it was something Jane had bought her as part of his efforts to "replenish her wardrobe." So much for not being reminded of him. She pressed her lips into a thin line and zipped the thing closed with unnecessary force.

She brushed past Jane in the hallway and marched briskly towards the door, trying to keep her unruly emotions under control.

Jane followed her to the door and caught her by the hand before she could slip out. "Teresa," he said, hope straining through his voice despite the obvious pain in it. "You're just going back to the hotel for a few days, right? You—you will be back, won't you?"

She looked down at their joined hands and extricated herself gently, but firmly. She didn't look back at him, but kept her gaze fixed on the door for two long beats. "I don't know," she said finally.

She opened the door and left.

Xxx

Lisbon went back to the hotel that night feeling cold and brittle inside. Still broken. The hotel room was empty and desolate.

This could have been my life for the entire time until the trial, a voice whispered inside her head, unbidden and unwelcome. Just me, waiting all these months by myself with this cold feeling inside.

She shoved the thought aside and sat down at the writing table by the window, pulling her laptop out to review the photographed documents once again.

She reviewed them twice more before she acknowledged to herself what she had known since she first read through them. If she wanted to take this story further, she was going to need help. She'd identified several anomalies in the banking records, but she had no way to definitively prove the contract had been purposefully mishandled without additional information.

She bit her lip, her instincts warring against the bounds of protocol. Van Pelt, she knew, could make mincemeat of these records in no time flat. With her technical skills, she would be able to trace the money to its source and demonstrate to a jury—or the reading public—that Durst had accepted a payoff to award the contract to Blackhawk. But she wasn't supposed to be in contact with her team. On the other hand, she still had that burner phone…

But she couldn't call Van Pelt. She could imagine how that conversation would go. Despite the ban on communications, Van Pelt would be chipper, excited to hear from her. She would want to know all about their lives in Salt Lake, how they were dealing with their cover identities, the people they'd met. That would be okay. But inevitably, she would ask about Jane. And at the moment, Lisbon didn't think she could answer even the most innocuous question about Jane without her voice breaking and betraying that things between them were not all right at all.

For a moment, she toyed with the idea of calling Van Pelt anyway. Van Pelt would be sympathetic, she knew. A good listener. But even if they had been back in California, she knew she wouldn't have been able to bring herself to confide in Van Pelt. Partly because she wasn't comfortable with agents who reported to her knowing that much detail about her personal life. Partly because Van Pelt was friends with Jane, too, and she didn't want to put her in the middle. But mostly because she had never learned how to talk about the deepest parts of herself to anyone. To the extent she had ever learned, it had been because Jane himself had pulled the information out of her despite any resistance she offered. But now Jane was the problem. He was her closest confidante. Without him, she was lost. At sea.

She spent a while pondering the sad state of her social life, wondering if she should make an effort to be more open with her team, trying to imagine herself doing such a thing and failing, then missing her brothers—who were even worse as confidantes than her team members, but who would at least have teased her out of her funk through sheer obnoxiousness. She thought about her nieces and nephews and wondered how tall they would be when she saw them again.

After passing much of the evening blue and miserable, she finally huffed, exasperated with her maudlin train of thought, sternly told herself to stop feeling sorry for herself, and decided to hell with protocol. She texted Van Pelt on the burner to ask her if she could help her.

Van Pelt replied immediately, sending her instructions to access an anonymous account they could use to securely exchange messages.

Once she logged onto the account using the information Van Pelt had provided her, Van Pelt barraged her with almost the exact sequence of questions Lisbon had predicted. Reading these, Lisbon smiled a little despite herself. In response to Van Pelt's question about Jane, she wrote after some deliberation, "the same as usual, only more so." Which she felt was both true and vague enough that Van Pelt wouldn't read too much into it and inquire further. She asked about the team, missing them even more than usual now that she had re-established this tenuous link with Van Pelt. Van Pelt responded with a newsy update about Cho and Rigsby, Ron and Karl, and various other people they interacted with on a routine basis. Lisbon smiled, glad to hear even these small scraps of information. Miss you guys, she wrote.

Then she turned to the business at hand.

She sent Van Pelt a brief summary of the chain of events surrounding Dorothy Ramseth's death as well as the audio file she'd captured of Durst talking to Thorpe and the photographs of all the documents she'd taken on her not-exactly-legal venture into Durst and Ramseth's offices.

Give me a couple of days, Van Pelt wrote. I should have something for you then.

You're the best, Lisbon wrote back. I owe you.

She logged off. Got ready for bed. And stared at the ceiling a long time.

Xxx

The following day, Lisbon clutched a thermos of coffee to her like a lifeline as she half-heartedly worked through yet another tedious assignment Givens had tasked her with.

"Lunch time," Heather announced, getting up from her chair and grabbing her bag. She cocked her head at Lisbon. "You want to get out of here?"

Lisbon glanced at the spreadsheet in front of her. "Definitely," she said with feeling. She got up and grabbed her things, keeping hold of the thermos.

Heather took the thermos out of her hands and examined it. "What do you have in there, vodka? No human could possibly drink that much coffee in one day."

"I'm going for a world record," Lisbon said dryly.

"Everything okay?"

Lisbon shrugged. "Haven't been sleeping well."

"Burning the midnight oil, huh?" Heather said approvingly. "I knew you were still working on that Ramseth story."

"Shh!" Lisbon said, glancing around to make sure none of their colleagues could overhear. "Givens banned me from that story, remember?"

"Yeah. But you're a plucky newshound who's not afraid to go up against the man," Heather said with a grin. "You've got grit, kid."

Lisbon rolled her eyes. "All right, fine. Yes, I'm still working on it."

"Thought so," Heather said smugly. She hefted the thermos. "But I'm cutting you off for now, my friend. You can resume your efforts to claim the world record after lunch."

"Deal," Lisbon agreed.

They went to their favorite lunch spot, a sandwich place around the corner. They put in their orders and snagged a table by the window. "So what's the latest?" Heather asked around a bite of her sandwich once they'd gotten their food. "On the story, I mean."

"I'm in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment," Lisbon admitted. "I asked a friend of mine to give me a hand running down some of the financial information."

"What friend is this?" Heather asked curiously.

Lisbon shifted uncomfortably. "Someone I know from my old job. She's a genius with computers."

"I haven't heard you talk much about your old job," Heather said. "I thought you did mostly freelance work before you came here, right?"

"Yeah," Lisbon said, her shoulders hunching unconsciously at the lie. "I met her through a project I was working on for a freelance article. We worked together a long time after that."

"Sounds like a good friend," Heather said. "Where is she now?"

Lisbon hesitated. "Back in Scottsdale."

"You must miss her," Heather commented.

"Yeah. There were—there were five of us that…" Lisbon trailed off. "Well—we spent a lot of time together," she said inadequately.

"Sounds like you had a good crew," Heather said.

"We were a good crew," Lisbon said wistfully. "It's been hard being away from them."

"At least you still have Patrick," Heather said bracingly. "Speaking of which, when are we going to have that double date you promised me? I'm still dying to meet him."

"Oh," Lisbon said, her face clouding over. She looked down at her sandwich, suddenly not hungry anymore. "This—this isn't really the best time."

"Why not?" Heather said. "You embarrassed for him to meet me or something? I promise, I'll be on my best behavior." She punctuated this comment by baring her spinach-laden teeth in a comical grin.

"It's not that," Lisbon said. She fiddled with her napkin. "We, uh, had a fight."

"Oh, is that all?" Heather said, relaxing. "Well, it's not like we have to plan it for tonight or anything. Why don't we just pick out a date next week so the argument has enough time to blow over?"

"It wasn't that kind of fight," Lisbon said, her discomfort palpable. "I'm—I'm staying at a hotel right now."

"Oh," Heather said, stricken. "Oh, my God, Teresa. I'm so sorry."

"S'okay," Lisbon muttered. "You couldn't have known."

"So the not sleeping well—it's not just because you're wrapped up with the story, is it?" Heather said sadly.

Lisbon bit her lip and shook her head, her throat suddenly too thick for speech.

Heather reached out and squeezed her hand. "I'm sorry, Teresa."

Lisbon jerked her head upwards in acknowledgment and squeezed her hand back, unable to respond in words.

"What happened?" Heather asked sympathetically. "I mean—I don't mean to pry, or anything. But if it would help to talk about it—"

Lisbon shook her head and withdrew her hand from Heather's to dash at her eyes. "It's not that. I just—I don't think I can explain properly. There's—there's a lot of history there. I'm not sure it would make much sense to someone who hadn't lived through—everything that came before." She sniffled a bit. "And well—I'm crap at talking about feelings."

"You shock and amaze me," Heather said, deadpan. "Heretofore, I've never been able to get you to stop prattling about the state of your emotions."

Lisbon threw her napkin at her and managed a wet sort of chuckle. "Shut up."

Heather watched her closely. "Do you need a place to stay? You're welcome to crash on my couch if you want. It's kinda lumpy, though. Probably murder on your back, but it's yours if you want it."

Lisbon was touched. "Thank you for the offer. I'm okay at the hotel for now, though."

"All right," Heather said. "But if you change your mind, the offer stands."

"You're a good friend, Heather," Lisbon said, her emotions threatening to get the better of her yet again. "I'm lucky to know you."

"You say that now," Heather said, taking another bite of her sandwich. "You haven't experienced a night on that couch yet."