There was really only one person who would be knocking on her door, but that didn't stop Sara from checking.
Grissom stared right back at her, obviously focused on the Judas hole from the other side.
She rested her forehead against the cool wood and closed her eyes.
"Sara, let me in."
Too late. He'd seen her shadow through the hole.
"I know you're there."
The door vibrated slightly - he must have leaned against it from his side.
"Sara...please."
She slid down to the floor, legs splayed out, cheek and right shoulder rested against the door. "What do you want?"
"To talk." Grissom, saying please. Grissom, wanting to talk. She wished it had come about any other way.
"It's too late, Grissom."
He was silent for a long time, and she couldn't decide whether or not she hoped he had left.
"I don't..." He paused, as if he was regrouping. "I don't want it to be too late."
The simplicity, the near-childishness of the statement made her catch her breath.
"Sara, please let me in."
"I don't think that would be a good idea, Griss," she confessed.
"Sara."
"What would talking accomplish?" she asked angrily, fisting her hand against the door, the barely-healed scabs in her palms making themselves known through pain. "It didn't work out, Grissom. We never should have gotten married."
"I love you," he offered up, and she screwed her eyes shut even harder.
"Love isn't always enough," she whispered back.
He was quiet for a long time, and she stood and opened the door.
He was gone.
~*~
Someone's hand was on her shoulder, rocking her slightly. Sara knitted her eyebrows together in confusion, and then cracked an eyelid. The wall of the break room. Sideways.
Huh?
"Good morning," Jonas said simply, and pushed the mug of coffee across the table at her.
Sara groaned and rubbed at the side of her face, numb from where it had rested on the plastic of the break room table. "Thank you," she said sincerely, sliding her fingers through the mug handle and bringing the hot liquid to her lips. She paused halfway through setting it back down, a frown on her lips.
"I was waiting for - oh, shit, the DNA results," she yelped, and unclipped her pager from her belt while struggling to her feet. Four messages - all from the DNA lab, the last sent nearly an hour ago. It was six in the morning. She'd slept for an hour and a half.
Jonas didn't say anything, but slid a manila folder across the table with a slight smile on his lips. Sara looked at the label and breathed in relief. "You're amazing, you know that, right?"
The other CSI shrugged, a shy smile on his face. "You needed your sleep, and there was nothing pressing. Thomas told me to let you sleep."
"Thomas?" Sara could feel a headache coming on. She took a gulp of the hot coffee, and part of her noted that it was heavily sugared - Jonas might have been the most reclusive of the night shift CSIs, but he was observant and sensitive, and he'd taken the time to make the coffee exactly the way she liked it.
Jonas shrugged. "You've been working so hard for the conference." He paused, obviously unsure about whether to continue or not. "And with Dr. Grissom here, uhm...you know what, I'm sorry. It's none of my business."
She couldn't help but smile. "Don't be sorry. I'm dealing with it." That was...a lie. A white lie, but a lie nonetheless. She hadn't told him how she was dealing with it. He hadn't asked. They would leave it at that and go home to their separate lives, and work was more comfortable for it.
Jonas nodded, apparently satisfied with her answer. "So...did you find what you were hoping for?"
Damn Grissom, anyway. She'd completely forgottten the report under her fingertips. "Oh - uhm, let's see..." She'd retrieved several skin samples from the scrubs found in the bassinet, as well as saliva from the baby's wristband.
"The skin from the scrubs came back unknown," she said aloud for Jonas's benefit. "And the saliva from the wristband matched six markers to Monica Itzin." That confirmed her suspicions that baby Gregory had slobbered a bit on the plastic. The image that brought to her mind gave her a bittersweet pang, and she closed the folder quickly just as her pager sounded. "Fingerprinting."
"Wow," Jonas said with a half-smile, trying to lighten the mood. "They must like you. I've been waiting on a confirmation from my first case of the night since midnight. Tell me, what's your secret?"
Sara smirked and tapped him on the head with the folder in chastisement, then swallowed the rest of the coffee and put the mug in the sink. "I don't give them the contents of a victim's entire purse to print."
"I was being thorough," Jonas mock-whined, and Sara rolled her eyes at him before exiting the break room.
~*~
Sara had no illusions about just how big a mistake she was making by slipping into a chair in the back of the room. Fortunately, it was the large ampitheater, and the back row was not only at least thirty yards back from the lecturer's podium, it was the darkest part of the room when the lights were dimmed to show slides.
It hadn't been in this exact room, but one very like it, that she'd first heard Grissom speak about entomology. She'd sat in the front row, then, full of the curiosity and more than her fair share of arrogance. He had matched her, answer for question, and for a time it had seemed like they were the only two people in the auditorium.
He still had that spark about him, that intensity of mind that made him one of the most respected scientists in his field in the country. Forensics was the only subject he'd ever been able to converse freely on, and it was as if he'd saved all his communication skills just for that. The several dozen forensics specialists remained completely silent as he talked about linear regression, maturation stages, and habitat placement. He had them in the palm of his hand, and he was almost completely oblivious to that fact.
Sara remembered his voice, muffled through the wood of her apartment door, telling her he loved her.
She knew she had been right, because the problem never had been that they didn't love each other enough. If anything, they had loved each other too much. Weakness and a need to mutually affirm their place among the living after a particulary difficult case had led them into each other's arms, and it had been a mistake to think that they could just carry on as before.
But somehow they had, for almost a month. Sara didn't remember those weeks too clearly; they were a blur of heightened awareness and cold showers and the occasional tears of frustration.
What she did recall with crystal clarity was the chilled porcelain of the sink against her cheek as she lay slumped on the floor of her bathroom, the home pregnancy test in her hand reading positive.
Her pager vibrated against her side, and she folded her body in the seat to look down at it without unclipping it. Kevin, who was acting as supervisor when Carl was attending various panels. No message; just to call him back.
It wasn't marked urgent, so she waited the last few minutes and exited discreetly with the small group that chose to leave before the open discussion portion of the lecture. Once in the hall, she opened her cell phone and dialed the number Kevin had left her while walking out to her car and sliding on her sunglasses.