"Have you ever taken a ride on the swan boats?"

It was a near thing, but Sara twisted her body back and managed to avoid the splash of coffee that leapt from her mug when she jumped. "Dammit, Grissom, don't sneak up on me like that."

"I didn't sneak up on you," he corrected. "Have you?"

"Not since freshman orientation," she told him. "They took all the out of state kids on a whole trip around Boston. We did the Freedom Trail, too. Is there...is there a point to this?"

"Would you like to go again?" he asked, and Sara was once again reminded of how very little she understood this man.

"Like, right now?" She stared at him.

"Yes."

"It's the middle of January, Griss," she reminded him. "The pond in Public Garden is frozen solid."

"Oh." His brow knitted together, and Sara felt a moment of wild disbelief. He hadn't realized that? Either he had been living in Las Vegas for entirely too long, or...she refused to let herself think that she'd managed to muddle his thoughts that completely. It was entirely out of character. "Then would you like to take a walk? Go get some lunch?"

Carl and Megan were eyeing them from across the room, and Sara felt distinctly like a goldfish in a tiny little bowl. "I'd like that."

They left the room where the coffee break was being held - and where sandwiches would have been catered in ten minutes, had they stayed for a public lunch - and began wandering the Harvard campus.

"It's a beautiful area." Grissom was the first to speak.

"It really is," Sara agreed, her boots crunching ice as they walked along a path between two dormitories and came out into a courtyard, red brick buildings nestled in sparkling white snow. She was pretty sure they sold a postcard with this exact view at the college bookstore. It screamed New England prep school.

It had only been twelve or so hours since they'd last talked - his ill-timed visit at Boston CSI - and nearly twenty hours since their last walk, but somehow the air was immeasurably more clear than it had been even twenty-four hours ago.

"When..." Grissom started to speak, and stopped, halting physically as well, digging at a layer of ice with his toe and then suddenly looking up at her. "When Ashleigh died, I had no idea what to do."

Sara's mouth suddenly went dry. It was the first time either of them had said her name since the funeral, and she felt tears spring to her eyes in automatic response as the memory of the day washed over her - Nick's hand in hers, the priest's voice echoing in the nearly-empty church, and the relentless heat of a Vegas day beating against the back of her neck as she placed an orchid on the tiny coffin.

"Catherine told me once...she said that the truth doesn't always bring closure. I didn't understand her then." He paused. "Finding out what happened is what I do, and once you find out what happened, it's over, and you move on."

A tear spilled over onto Sara's cheek, making its icy track down her skin before she reached up to scrub it away.

"I didn't know what to do," he repeated softly. "She was just gone, and there was no reason for her to be." He frowned, obviously searching for words - already, he'd been more open with her than he ever had. If he'd said any of these words when Ashleigh had first died, it might have saved their marriage. "I think...I overcompensated. I worked harder than I ever had. If I couldn't have my answers, I wanted to make sure that other people could have theirs. I tried to substitute their closure for my own."

"And I did the same," Sara echoed him, and rubbed away a second tear. "We're both workaholics, Griss. It was...our outlet. And the whole time, it just made the problems worse."

They didn't feel any need to vocalize what had happened next, but they were both remembering it. Their shared home had grown cold and empty as their conversation was reduced to the bare essentials. She remembered the first time he'd opted to sleep on the couch in his office rather than come home, and the first time she'd cried herself to sleep on Nick's couch. The polarizing of the night shift team as Catherine tried to comfort her oldest friend and Warrick his surrogate father, and Nick tried to protect Sara against the world. The primly worded memo that had made it clear that the administration of the Las Vegas Crime Lab did not at all appreciate the personal issues that were beginning to erode the efficiency of the number two lab in the country.

His utter lack of reaction when she'd turned in her leave of absence request.

Sara finally decided to break the silence of memory. "We never balanced. We never learned how to trust each other, or how to build a relationship. We just took the first plunge without thinking about it, and we kept riding that until..." She couldn't bring herself to say it, and wondered when Grissom had developed more emotional courage than she had. "Until we had to face the fact that we weren't having a marrige so much as a love affair."

That brought a slight smile to his face. "It wasn't always a bad thing."

She smiled in return. "No, most of the time it was good. It was really good. But we never fought. We never learned how to work through things." She threw her arms open to encompass the Harvard campus surrounding them. "See that dorm there? I lived there junior year, on the fourth floor. You can even see the window from here. I had a five foot by ten foot single, a poster of the periodic table on the wall, and I got so drunk at a hall party I threw up an entire night's worth of pretzels right under that street lamp there."

Grissom didn't understand her change of subject at all, and she didn't really blame him. "The only thing I know about your college years is that you went to UCLA, and the only reason I know that is because I saw your diploma on the wall in your office. We shared a house and a bed, and I still don't know why you know sign language."

"My mother," he said abruptly. "My mother was deaf."

She stared at him. "Otosclerosis," she said suddenly. "That's why you listed a family history of it on the medical forms."

"Yes," he confirmed, and shifted uncomfortably.

"It's genetic," she pressed.

"It's no longer a concern," he returned, and she could tell he was struggling to keep his tone of voice light. She was pushing too hard for today, and backed off.

"Okay." She started walking again, and after a moment's hesitation, he followed her. "But do you see the problem?"

"I think I do," Grissom agreed. "I'm a private person, Sara. You knew that before you married me."

"I guess I expected it to change, at least a little," she said wistfully. "I'm not demanding your entire life's history. But I don't think you can have a balanced relationship without some sharing." She tried a different tack. "How many people do we see in our line of work who have problems because they haven't learned how to communicate their issues with each other?"

"Far too many," he said on a sigh, and she thought maybe he finally understood.

"It would have been a problem sooner or later," Sara said, unable to look at him as they doubled back around and behind the dorm she'd pointed out earlier. "That's why I said we never should have gotten married in the first place. We never did the couple thing, Grissom. We never got to know each other beyond work, and that's just not enough to build a marriage around."

"I see," he said noncommitally. "There's a cafe here, if you're hungry."

The man would never cease to confuse her. "What?" He just looked at her. "Fine. Lunch."

She had a carrot muffin with cream cheese, and he had a ham sandwich. Sara didn't press him any further on what they'd talked about, but on the very edges of her awareness, she sensed that something had changed. Something subtle, but very big, and it would determine where they went next. But she was done with making the first moves. If Grissom couldn't meet her halfway, she had no intention of changing her mind about the divorce, and she would stay in Boston without a backwards glance. She'd gotten over him once. She would do it again if it killed her.

~*~

"What have you got for me?" Sara asked into her cell phone as she made her way back to the CSI van she'd taken to the conference. Her pager had gone off with a 911 message from the police department in the middle of a seminar on computer fraud, and she'd left as quickly as she could, opening up her cell phone as soon as she was in the hallway.

"Jerry Catten," Nevins told her, a triumphant tone in her voice. "He was picked up on a routine speeding stop on 93 in Wilmington. The cop recognized the name on the license and brought him in for questioning - drove him all the way down to us."

"You're kidding me," Sara said, stunned, as she leapt the snowbank to get to the driver's side of the van faster than doubling down to the end of the sidewalk.

"Nope," Nevins confirmed. "Guess the luck just went our way."

"The car?"

"It's being towed as we speak; ETA is another twenty minutes. They didn't touch it; my guess is, waiting for Boston CSI to process."

"Oh, wow." She felt positively giddy. "I'll be there in ten. Alec?"

"Already on his way. Another officer called him same time I called you."

"Great." She didn't bother to wait for Nevins to say goodbye before she ended the call and dialed Alec's cell phone.

"Tremain."

"Alec, do you want the car or Catten?"

"Catten," he replied immediately, and as much as she wanted to be in that interrogation room wringing information out of the smug son of a bitch, she knew this was one area in which she would have to bow to his superior skills.

"Deal," she replied, and ended the call again, weaving her way through Cambridge traffic to cross the bridge into Boston.