Juliet woke up the next morning well before her alarm went off. Not that she had really slept at all. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Carlton in the hospital bed, surrounded by monitors. And every time she did, she was transported back in time to her own stent in the hospital, tubes tangling themselves in knots around her arms and across her chest, tying her down to the stiff bed like an insane person in an institution. But she wasn't in an institution, though she might as well have been. Just spending one night in a hospital was enough to make anyone go crazy- weeks on end and she was sure to go nuts. Just thinking about it made her feel nauseous.

"I'm gonna go for my run," she whispered to Shawn, not sure if he was even awake yet.

"You sure, sweetheart?" He asked, flopping his hand on top of her stomach and rolling to look up at her. The pressure of his arm against her skin felt more like a trap than a comfort in that moment. And while she knew he meant well, she still felt the need to quickly slide herself out from under his arm and off the side of the bed.

"I'm sure. I just need to move. I'll call Marlowe when I get back." Her phone hadn't rung all night. That had to be good news, right? No news is good news, she reminded herself as she threw on a t-shirt, trying to ease her mind. Without looking back, she dashed down the steps onto the front pavement. The temperature had dropped significantly since the day before, and it took her a minute to catch her breath as the chilled air hit her lungs.

Go. She urged herself, and set off down the hill onto her running path. She tried not to think about Carlton sitting in that hospital bed, or Marlowe laying on the couch where she had left her. She tried not to think about the waiting game the doctors had explained to them yesterday. She tried not to imagine what it would be like going to work without her partner there to have her back. But there was nothing else to think about.

With each step on the pavement, her mind raced with possibility, and very few were good. The nausea still lingered in the pit of her stomach when suddenly, the gravity became too much for her to handle. Taking a few steps off the path, she attempted to lower herself gracefully to the ground, the center of the earth pulling her quickly into the damp grass.

He's going to be okay. She thought, resting her arms on her knees and willing herself to inhale properly. She focused hard on the stretch of her lungs against her chest and the uncomfortable amount of effort it took to pull air in. He's Carlton. He's strong-willed and determined. This will not get the best of him.

She tried to reason with herself. She tried to remind herself who she was talking about. Carlton was her partner, but he was so much more than that. They were confidants. They relied on each other in every situation and had for the last eleven years. They could read each other better than they could read themselves, knew each other better than their significant others. They could have whole conversations in less than three words with little more than a raised eyebrow or a painted look.

But that wasn't who she looked at yesterday in the ambulance. Or even worse, in the hospital bed, drugged beyond recognition into the shell of a crazy person. Reduced to a patient, not a person. That wasn't her partner anymore. It couldn't be. And yet somehow, it was.

The sinking recognition of what her reality had become swirled through her head and darted across her stomach, churning up her worries and fears in her abdomen. The pressure growing inside her suddenly worked its way up her esophagus. Before she knew it she was leaning over, coughing up nothing.

What the hell? She thought, trying to take deep breaths to calm her stomach. She was not in the mood to throw up again. After the chemo had made her so nauseous she couldn't keep anything down for months, she did her best to avoid throwing up at all costs. But thinking back, she had been putting off feelings of nausea for the last few weeks. She hadn't been this nauseous since…

No. I can't be.

The last time she was this nauseous was when she was pregnant.

"Are you sure?" Juliet asked Shawn in disbelief. He was holding the stick like a snake at the tip of his fingers, but he was smiling.

"We're gonna have a baby." He said through his smile. He scooped her up in a hug and swung her around.

The doctors had told them it might not happen. They told her it can be hard to get pregnant after chemo. They told her after all that she had been through, her hormones might be messed up and it may never happen for them. But it had always been something that she wanted.

She had started to show. They had heard the heartbeat. They had told people.

But it didn't last.

Juliet was in the field with Lassiter running around the outside of an abandoned warehouse after a perp. Suddenly a sharp pain ripped through her uterus, and she involuntarily doubled over.

Lassiter stopped short "O'Hara!"

"It's fine," she called, waving him away, "You go ahead!"

She leaned up against a brick wall and held her arms tightly across her stomach. She heard the sirens in the background and saw their backup running to follow Lassiter. He caught the perp and quickly put on handcuffs before handing the man off to one of the officers and running back to where Juliet was stiffly crouched over, her head hung low as she sunk down, unknowingly dropping into fetal position.

"What happened?" He said, squatting down to make eye contact with her.

"Carlton, I think I need to go to the hospital." When she finally opened her eyes, she saw a red streak of blood working its way down the leg of her gray pantsuit.

"Let's go." He said quickly, his hand on her back as he helped her to his car. He turned on the siren and raced her down the highway to the emergency room. She texted Shawn on the way.

Something happened. Come to the hospital.

He was standing at the front door with open arms when they pulled up.

"I am so sorry." The doctor said when she was quickly escorted into a private room. Turns out walking into an emergency room pregnant with blood running down her leg was a good way to cut the line. She was lying on butcher paper on a hard observation table with her shirt propped up on her chest. Cold ultrasound jelly was smeared across her stomach, making her shiver. "I can't find a heartbeat."

She held tightly to Shawn's hand and let a few tears roll down her cheeks. "Okay," she mustered.

"I am so sorry."

She couldn't be. It was impossible. Her body wasn't made for it. It wasn't in the cards for her. She had promised herself that much after the last time. But maybe…

She shook off the thought and picked herself up off the ground. She took a shortcut back to the house and quickly made it to their front steps.

"That was fast," Shawn said, still in bed when she returned.

"I wasn't feeling great." She replied abruptly, already making a beeline for the bathroom without wanting to make eye contact. She didn't want to tell him yet. She didn't want to get his hopes up. Not again.

He had been so devastated after last time. It was like something had broken within him when he brought her home from the hospital that night. He stopped joking around with Gus. He would make sly comments out of habit, but his eyes were somewhere else. He had gotten lost in his mind, spending so much time studying the world around him and so little time being part of it. It felt so wrong, and it had scared Juliet. And Gus too. They would try to come together to bring him back to the world, but he was so absent. It had taken months for him to come back to being Shawn.

But with everything that was happening with Lassiter, she needed Shawn right now. Her Shawn.

She took off her shirt and looked in the mirror at her stomach. It looked the same, no bigger or smaller than before. But it would be too early to tell anyways. She made a mental note to stop at the drugstore on the way home.

She quickly showered and grabbed her phone off the charger on the bedside table to see if Marlowe had texted her yet. They must have had a good night, if her phone hadn't gone off yet.

She tapped on the screen to check for messages.

What? She thought, tapping the screen a little more frantically.

It stayed black.

She pressed the home button once. Twice. Three times. Suddenly the empty battery icon lit up her screen, igniting a burning fire in the pit of her stomach.

My phone died? She frantically raced around the room, looking for a new charging cable. There wasn't no news last night. The stupid cable wasn't plugged in the right way. Something happened last night and I missed it. She just knew it.

How could I have let this happen? Stupid Apple charger that is supposed to work both directions but never does.

Her sinking suspicion was confirmed when she wiggled the charger in the cable port until the charging bolt flashed across her screen, mocking her. After a few agonizing minutes of light and color her phone projected as it rebooted, the texts from Marlowe began pouring in. And calls. And more texts. And even a few calls from Gus.

Carlton got worse overnight.

They took him to surgery.

They had to cut out part of his skull.

He'll be out of surgery in an hour.

"Shawn!" Juliet said, running into the bedroom where he was getting dressed. "We have to go! They had to take Carlton to surgery overnight. Marlowe said they took off part of his skull. I guess he got worse overnight. I think he's out of surgery now."

"They took off his skull?" Shawn asked, quickly pulling on his shirt and following Juliet out of their bedroom.

"Where is your phone? Why didn't Marlowe call you?" Juliet asked frantically, pacing around the house waiting for him to pull on his shoes.

"I…I don't know," Shawn called out, walking around the house searching under the couch and behind the bedside table. "I thought I had it with me when I got home last night." Their collective nervous energy was making it impossible to look as their shaky hands pulled pillows and books aside, looking in places they knew they wouldn't find it.

"Did you leave it in the car-" Juliet started to ask, but stopped short when she opened the fridge and saw it sitting on top of a take out container. "Shawn!"

"Did you find it?" He called out, following her voice.

"Seriously?" She asked, holding it up. It would have been funny. She wanted it to be funny. But all humor was sucked out of the air when she tapped on the screen and saw the notifications lighting up his screen as well.

"We have to go," Juliet said, rushing out the door, ignoring his attempts to apologize. They had abandoned Marlowe. They told her they would be there for her and they had left her alone all night.

"Gus will meet us at the hospital," Shawn said when they were on the road.

"Okay good."

"And I told Marlowe we were on the way."

"Thanks."

"I'm so sorry, Jules."

Juliet sat silently in the car. She didn't have any more words to say. Neither did Shawn. Both were lost in thought, an anxious energy filling the space between them. She was afraid for what she was about to see. How bad did someone have to be for their only hope to be removing part of their skull? And then what? He just had a hole in his head forever?

She was never going to get her partner back. Hope was slowly draining from her heart with each passing second. The closer she got to Carlton the more nervous she became for what she would see once they finally got to him.

Gus was already at the hospital when Shawn and Juliet parked.

"Hey, man," Gus said, patting Shawn on the shoulder. "Marlowe texted me."

"Thanks, Gus," Juliet said, accepting a hug from him.

The three walked back into the elevator she had seen entirely too much of in just two days. Her eyes traced the wood panels and skimmed over the shiny paper advertising some heart association sponsoring some run that she had read over and over as they rode the elevators up and down trying to get to her partner faster.

Marlowe was leaning awkwardly on a chair with her eyes closed when they made it up to the 12th floor.

"Marlowe," Juliet whispered, sitting down on the chair next to her and rubbing her shoulder.

"You're here," she said, sitting up and looking up at them gratefully. Her hair was tangled into a messy bun that Juliet could tell had been done and redone a hundred times that night. She looked paler than usual but her eyes were dark and her cheeks red. "Thank you so much for coming,"

"Of course, have you seen him yet?" Juliet asked.

"Just for a little bit. They said he needed to rest. You can go see him though. Just, only one at a time they said."

Juliet looked to Shawn for encouragement. He nodded, giving her permission to leave.

"I'll be right back," Juliet said, leaving them sitting quietly. Shawn reached out and gave her hand a squeeze before she left down the hall.

"Carlton Lassiter?" Juliet asked a young woman at the front desk.

"Name?" The woman said, shortly.

"Juliet Spencer O'Hara."

"1203," the woman said, tilting her head down the hall. Juliet nodded and walked down the hall a few doors until she made it to one with a big "3" written on the wall above it.

She slid open the door and gingerly took a step into the room. She saw what she knew to be her partner laying in the middle of a large hospital bed. The shape she was looking at looked nothing like her partner. He had a big white bandage wrapped around his partially shaved head with bright red oozing out of the middle. His mouth was dry and unhinged around a thick tube that disappeared down his throat. He had IV lines coming out of both arms leading to poles lined with machines and bags of fluid stacked on top of each other and cords that snaked out of every opening in his gown.

Juliet stared at him from the door frame for a while. In movies and TV shows, being in a hospital looked pretty. Elegant almost. A few lines would hang delicately off to one pump over the patient's shoulder and the gown would be laying perfectly unwrinkled over their body.

That's not what it looked like. This was what it looked like. His hair was sticking out in every direction. A reddish yellow dye stained the shaved side of his forehead. His partially shaved hair was caked with flakes of dried blood. His cheeks were squished together by pads that held the tube in place. Everything looked braided together in one big mess.

She wanted to take another step in. She wanted to say something to him. But she couldn't. That wasn't Lassiter. That wasn't her partner. That couldn't be him. There had to be a mistake. In some alternate universe, she was driving to a case with her partner this morning, talking about their nights or just sitting quietly. How could she be here? How could he be here? It didn't add up.

Her stomach did another somersault as she thought about Marlowe. That was her husband, laying there, completely out of it. What must she be thinking right now? And what if he never got better? Then what was she going to do?

"You've got to get better, Carlton," Juliet said quietly over the dull rumble of the room, "There are a lot of people who need you."

She took a few steps into the room and sat down in the chair next to him.

"Carlton, I think I might be… well… you know. With Shawn's demon seed," she couldn't say the word. She didn't want to jinx it, but she had to tell someone. Smiling to herself at the obnoxious eye roll Carlton would have given her if he was awake, she continued, "I'm sorry. I know you wouldn't approve."