There was someone else in her apartment.
Sara froze, slitting her eyes open. Her body ached, as if it had held the exact same position for entirely too long. She didn't even remember dreaming - something of a first for her since she'd moved to Boston. And it was nine in the morning.
There was someone in her apartment and she was late for the morning's seminars.
The trained investigator in her took hold, pushing the scared girl behind the carefully built façade, and she was able to identify the noises that had alerted her to the intruder as coming from the kitchen, and sounding distinctly like her cupboards opening and closing. And there - that was the creak from the cupboard above the stove.
She snuck her fingers out from under the covers and grasped the vase by her bed, pulling the carved wooden roses out of it and setting them down on her night stand. Carl had given her the fake flowers to celebrate the opening of the forensics conference, saying jokingly that with what little time she spent at home, she'd never have a chance to appreciate real roses.
The crystal was comfortably heavy in her hand, and Sara tried to make as little noise as possible as she slid out from underneath the covers and tiptoed to her bedroom door - slightly ajar. She hefted the vase to a better striking position and leaned over to peek through the crack.
"Grissom, what the hell are you doing in my kitchen?"
He spun, eggshell in hand. "Making you breakfast?"
"Making me breakfast," she repeated, and lowered the vase, opening the door the rest of the way. "Why are you here?"
"Megan called me about an hour ago," he told her, his back already turned to her again as he tossed the eggshell into the sink for the garbage disposal to pick up.
"I don't have a garbage disposal," she told him, annoyed, and set the vase down on the peninsula counter on her way to fish the shell out of the sink and throw it away.
"Oh." Grissom watched her from where he stood at the stove. "We do at home."
"You do at home," she corrected him. "You should be at the conference. I should be at the conference."
"Eat," he instructed her, and set the plateful of eggs in front of one of the bar stools on the other side of the peninsula.
"I never eat breakfast," she snapped, sitting down on the stool but pushing the plate toward him. "I drink coffee. I have a routine, Grissom. Stop ordering me around."
"Sara." He pushed the plate back toward her. "The coffee is almost done, and you need to eat something, too."
"Since when do you care?" she shot back, and resisted the childish urge to shove the plate at him so hard it slid off the other side of the counter. "And don't you dare say 'since I met you.' You come here, you say things like you never regretted marrying me, you keep telling me that you love me. You haven't bothered calling me once since I came here, Grissom. And God knows you barely said ten words in a row to me for the months before that, except at work."
Sara stood abruptly. "I told you once that I wished I was like you, so that I wouldn't have to feel anything. I take it back. I never want to be so far removed from the human race that I can't even feel anything when my own daughter dies."
There. She'd said it. She'd finally crossed that unspoken line and put the facts out in the open. Seven months of pained silence and studied avoidance, and this was the first time the subject had actually been raised between them.
Probably for a reason.
Gil Grissom was not a man who was quick to temper; at least, not in his personal life. Sara had always wondered how much of that was due to stringent self-control and how much was due to a generally complacent personality.
She had her answer now.
"You think I didn't feel anything?" His voice was low, taut, and he placed his palms flat on the counter and leaned forward slightly, his face filled with anger. "How dare you. How dare you."
Grissom rounded the end of the countertop, and Sara took an involuntary step back.
"Those hours were the happiest of my entire life," he snarled, his hands now fisted at his side. "I have spent every second of every day since then asking myself why she was taken from us. I don't have an answer. I may never have an answer. But while I was looking for one, I lost my wife, too."
Sara felt the tears begin to roll down her cheeks and she blinked rapidly, trying to clear them out of her eyes.
"Did you think I was lying to you when I told you I loved you? When I told you how happy I was to be having a child, even if the circumstances weren't ideal?" He let out a bitter, rueful bark of laughter. "You must think even less of me than I feared."
"What was I supposed to think, Griss?" Her voice was quiet and broken, and she brought her hand up to drag a knuckle across her eyes. "You weren't there to tell me any differently. Nick drove me home from the hospital because there were bugs on a body in a motel room somewhere."
"I didn't..." His impetus seemed to finally be broken. "I didn't know how to...I didn't understand. Work made sense. And then you were just gone."
"I wasn't 'just gone', Grissom," Sara said tiredly, finally looking away from him and sitting down on the couch heavily. "I left three months later. And it's been four months since then. And in those seven months, we never said any of this."
"We should have," was his soft response, and when she looked up again, he was sitting on the coffee table in front of her. "How did we end up like this?"
"We seem to have a lot of talent in that area," she told him, and laughed weakly at her own sentence, sniffling inelegantly. "God, Griss, she was so beautiful."
"I know." If she didn't know any better, she would have said his tone was tight with repressed tears. She looked up and was stunned to see that her guess had been correct. "She looked like her mother."
"But she had her daddy's eyes," Sara added gently, a slight smile twisting her lips. "She probably would have been a liberal arts major."
"I hoped she'd be a poet," Grissom whispered.
Sara's eyes fluttered closed briefly, and when she opened them, she saw a tear sliding down his cheek. Slowly, she reached out and brushed it away with her fingers.
"No chalk this time either," he said, attempting something like a smile.
"No," she agreed. "But do you feel like taking that walk now?"
~*~
They didn't really talk about anything important.
Maybe that was the point.
Right now, Sara didn't really feel up to much more than putting one foot in front of the other, strolling down the sidewalk in a slow, even stride. Grissom matched her, and every so often they brushed up against each other. It wasn't true physical contact - layers of down and wool and acrylic separated their skin - but all the same, it felt breathtakingly intimate to be walking together in broad daylight on a Cambridge street.
He asked her what it was like to work crime scenes in the cold, and she asked him whether Catherine was really going to switch to days. The newest issue of Applied Psychodynamics in Forensic Science had contained an article on the role of computer simulation in predicting blood spatter trajectory and patterning, and they held a spirited debate about the use of technology in forensic science. Predictably, Sara couldn't wait to try the new programming, and Grissom was more inclined to continue dropping dummies and rotting pigs.
But predictability was good, too.
They talked about Thomas, and Megan, and any of a half dozen other forensic scientists in attendance at the conference. Grissom told her about how Thomas had taken him out to a sports bar for a Red Sox game five years ago during a conference in New Hampshire, and how a roomful of half-drunk construction workers had decided that a Cubs fan was almost as good as a Sox fan, and had sobbed into their beer when the Sox had blown a 12-4 lead in the eighth inning.
Sara told a story about Megan in San Francisco, and first time she'd thrown up at a crime scene - a partial decomp caught in a grate in the sewer system. They'd both stood there in the stink and the muck and had to laugh at the complete chance of the maintenance worker even finding the body, much less identifying it as human. It turned out to be a missing persons, a homeless person who had lived in one of the crumbling, unused sections and had hit his head and fallen into the sludge trying to get up to the street.
It was never really anything about themselves, just stories about other people that happened to peripherally involve them. But after so many months of silence, it felt good just to talk again, to debate and engage their minds in the old way. It had been the utter nothingness of grief that had destroyed them more than anything else, the complete inability to interact without reopening barely healed wounds. Grissom had turned to Catherine, and Sara to Nick, both of them completely unable to turn to the other in a twisted circle that was, while understandable, the worst thing they could have done.
For now, the light chitchat that most couples were eager to bypass would prove their salvation.