"Ahem."
Catherine started at the soft noise and turned, surprised to find Grissom loitering behind her.
"Gil." She greeted, going back to her work. "Did you need something or are you just checking up on me?"
He stepped up to the bench, wringing his hands in a telltale sign of nervousness. She stopped what she was doing again and fixed him with her full attention.
"What's wrong?"
He cleared his throat again, fidgeting on the spot.
"Do you know what's wrong with Sara?"
The question, posed with his usual confounding mix of vague bluntness, caused a shiver to run down her spine and she immediately resumed her close examination of the evidence in front of her in an attempt to disguise her expression.
She had been anxiously waiting for this day. The day that someone finally figured out what was going on. Although she had to admit, her money had been on Nick being the first to confront her.
"What do you mean?" She asked, feigning ignorance.
"She just doesn't seem ... well." He shuffled his feet again. "She's very pale and just ... not with it, tonight. I saw the two of you come in together earlier, I thought maybe you might know what was wrong."
She looked up again, realising that she had perhaps jumped to conclusions. He hadn't sussed what was going on at all, his concerns were localised to her condition tonight.
Seeing the poorly-disguised worry etched into his features didn't make her feel any better about the lie she was about to spin; but, her promise to Sara ringing in her ears, she released a heavy sigh.
"She's just run down at the moment. Probably just a bug." She stated as emotionlessly as she could. "I'm keeping an eye on her."
This appeared to appease him and he brightened somewhat.
"Oh. Good." He nodded, satisfied with that. And why wouldn't he be? He trusted Catherine.
Having suitably answered his question, he nodded at her to continue with her work and bumbled back out, presumably happy to let Sara continue sleepwalking her way through her shift in peace now.
She exhaled heavily in his absence, shaking her head. She hated lying to him, but she had come so far in earning Sara's trust that she couldn't bring herself to shatter that just yet.
If she could just break down her last few walls, then maybe she could convince the stubborn young CSI to come clean to the rest of the team herself.
x X x
A smile fell naturally onto her face at the sight of her colleague, until she stepped into the room and got a proper look at her.
"Jesus, Grissom wasn't kidding." She stated, alarmed. "You look awful."
Sara cast her eyes wearily towards her, visibly unamused.
"Thanks Cat." She offered sarcastically.
Catherine came closer, resting one hand on the bench and placing the other on Sara's forehead.
"What do you mean about Grissom?" The brunette asked suspiciously, attempting and failing to move out of her reach.
"He came to see me earlier, wanted to know what's wrong with you."
"What did you tell him?" Sara asked, fear creeping into her voice. Cath straightened up and placed her hands on her hips, looking down at her friend with sad eyes.
"Exactly what we agreed." She confirmed. "But I don't know how much longer that's going to work."
"I know." Sara mumbled, glancing away. "I'm just not ready yet. I only have a couple more treatment sessions left. If I can get through them and see what the situation is, then I'll tell them."
Catherine turned this over in her mind. Three weeks and they'd know whether she needed more treatment. That seemed fair enough, she supposed.
"Alright." She conceded, retrieving her jacket from her locker and holding out a hand to pull Sara up. "On one condition."
"Oh God, what now?" Sara sighed exasperatedly.
"We're detouring by the hospital on the way home."
Sara's protest was cut off before it even began by the arrival of the boys. Offering a quick goodbye, she scarpered from the room before any of them could register how unwell she looked, leaving Catherine standing alone in her wake.
"She's in a hurry." Nick noted, shooting Cath a sly smile. "You two been fighting again?"
Catherine returned the gesture.
"Fighting, us?" She joked lightly. "It's only a fight if she had a chance of winning."
The boys chuckled, oblivious to the double meaning to her little joke. Right now, Sara didn't have the strength to fight a kitten.
Making her excuses, she slipped out in search of her elusive housemate. Poorly or not, she wouldn't put it past Sara to have set off walking home just to avoid a trip to the hospital.
As she disappeared, Warrick nodded in the general direction of the hallway.
"She knows something." He mused, stripping off his shirt.
"What?" Nick frowned, turning his back and doing the same.
"Come on, you haven't noticed Sara's been unwell recently." The dark skinned CSI scoffed. "And doing a pretty poor job of hiding it."
"Yeah, I know she's had a bug recently." Nick agreed.
"A bug?" Warrick almost laughed. "What kind of bug hangs around for two months?"
Nick whirled around to face his mate, his clean shirt hanging open.
"It hasn't been that long, has it?" He asked, trying to think back to the first time he'd noticed that Sara wasn't feeling herself.
"I'm telling you man," Warrick hummed. "There's something more serious wrong with her. And I'd bet my back teeth that Cath knows what it is."
x X x
"I told you it was nothing."
She was too tired to put any real effort into gloating, but she wasn't going to let it slide without at least trying.
"Never hurts to make sure." Catherine pointed out, placing a mug of coffee in front of her friend. "And besides, they didn't say it was nothing. They said your blood pressure was too low and you were running a fever."
"Both of which are normal symptoms." Sara rolled her eyes impetuously, cupping her drink between her hands.
"Sweetheart, there's nothing normal about what's wrong with you." Cath countered lightly, dropping a kiss onto the top of her head, before ambling to the sink and beginning to load the dishwasher.
It was Lindsey's job, technically, but she had let a few of the girl's chores slide recently. Her schoolwork wasn't suffering and she was doing a good job taking care of Maverick. That was enough for now.
"My mother has schizophrenia."
The plate in Catherine's hand slipped, cracking as it landed in the tray. She stared at it for a few seconds, before turning to the source of the calm declaration.
Sara was staring into the black liquid swirling in her mug. She looked so lost in her own thoughts, Catherine wasn't even sure that she was aware she had just said that out loud.
Abandoning the smashed plate, she crept over and slunk into a chair at the table.
"She's in a facility in California." Sara continued, confirming that she was at least conscious of the fact she was sharing this information.
"I'm sorry." Cath offered meekly, not sure how to approach this unexpected conversation.
"You remember I told you that my father died when I was a child?" The brunette flicked her eyes up all too briefly, but long enough to catch her nod. "She ... she killed him. They'd had a fight; he went to the bedroom to sleep it off. She took a knife from the kitchen and she stabbed him to death."
For a whole moment, time seemed to slow down as Catherine processed this information. Slowly, she reached out and placed a hand over Sara's where it still lay around her coffee mug.
The touch appeared to jolt the younger woman back to reality and she flinched, glancing away.
"That's why all this is so hard for me, you know." She sniffed. "My mom didn't exactly take care of me. She taught me about the feminist revolution and took me to see banned movies," she laughed softly. "But she wasn't like ... you. All of this, it comes easy to you."
Catherine offered a sad smile, uncharacteristically lost for words.
"I'm sorry honey." She managed to say at last.
Sara shrugged, indicating that she too wasn't quite sure where to go from here. Casting her gaze into the next room, where Lindsey was doing her homework on the couch with Maverick settled on her lap, she realised a sigh.
"Your little girl has no idea how lucky she is."