...If I just stare at the phone long enough, she thought to herself, I can will it to ring...

He had called almost every Friday night for a year now. Sometimes, they would go to a movie or to dinner. Other times, he would arrive with a pizza and a DVD. Sometimes, she would feign illness or just let her machine pick up. But he had always called.

When had he stopped? It was all a little fuzzy. He had been in the office on business one Thursday a month or so earlier and asked her if she would be free the next night. He was in the mood for Italian.

She had said yes and then returned to her desk and checked emails. There was one from an old college boyfriend saying he would be passing through Boston that weekend. John. They had ended things on friendly terms, and Jordan had often hoped their paths would cross again.

She managed to catch Woody as he stepped into the elevator.

"Hey, about tomorrow night. Something...came up. Kind of a last minute thing. Work, you know. Tons of work. Sorry."

"Oh. Well. Work. Okay." He looked at her with a touch of hurt, and Jordan knew she had been caught in her lie.

"But next Friday, I promise." She smiled up at him with a winning grin.

"Sure, Jordan." The elevator doors shut. She felt a momentary pang of guilt, but her thoughts quickly turned to her choice of wardrobe for Friday night.

John had called the next night at seven to say his trip had been cancelled. She immediately picked up the phone and dialed Woody's number. There was no answer.

Now she wondered if he had been with Devan.

She sat on her bed, turning up the volume of her iPod as if to drown out the thoughts chasing through her mind.

The phone rang. She grabbed it up eagerly. "Hello?"

"Dr. Cavanaugh?!"

Her heart sank.

"Emmy..."

"Dr. Macy asked me to call. He needs you to come in and finish up the autopsy reports in the Phillips case. The records have been subpoenaed, and discovery is due by tomorrow afternoon."

"It's eight o'clock on a Friday night, and that's not my case. Why me?"

"Well...you're actually the fifth person I called," Emmy began sheepishly, "But no one else was home on a Friday night."

She rolled off the bed and slipped on her shoes. "I'll be right there."

xXxXxXxXxXx

She strode into Garret's office and tossed the reports on his desk.

"Here they are. Signed, sealed, delivered."

Garret looked up from his paperwork and tossed his reading glasses on the desk.

"So, Emmy actually suckered someone into coming down and finishing those reports."

"Yeah, well. You remember what happened the last time someone asked me to cover a shift," she laughed ruefully.

She collapsed onto the sofa with a heavy sigh.

"Everything okay, Jordan?"

"I was just thinking about Devan."

He nodded sadly. "Me, too."

"I was so nasty the last time we spoke."

"A young woman is dead. This isn't about you, Jordan."

She continued. "I was so mean to her when we spoke, and that was probably the last conversation she had before she died."

Garret sighed. "Jordan, she could have had 100 conversations after she talked to you. And I somehow doubt that she was giving you the slightest bit of thought as she was gasping for breath on that airplane."

Jordan looked down at the floor, feeling a sting of shame.

Garret continued quietly. "But I guess it doesn't really help matters any that she was seeing Woody."

Her head snapped back up. "What is that supposed to mean?"

He rolled his eyes ever-so-slightly. "Come on, Jordan."

She jumped to her feet and waved her arms with exasperation. "Once and for all! We're just friends! That's it! Sometimes I wonder if we're even THAT!"

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much."

"Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare, but I don't have feelings for him!"

"Why don't you just come over here and hit me with your bookbag? Come on, Jordan, we're not in middle school. The truth is you have feelings for him that go beyond friendship. How far beyond, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to know. But you being you, you won't admit it to anyone, least of all yourself. You've been keeping that poor kid at arm's length for years, and he finally got sick of waiting and moved on. That's why you were nasty to Devan, and that's why you feel so guilty about her death. Because you were jealous."

She slumped back onto the sofa. "Spare me the dime store psychology, Garret. That is so not true," she said without much conviction.

"God knows you won't take it, but I'm offering you some free advice. Either tell him how you really feel about him or leave him alone. My preference would be that you leave him alone. He's been through too much. You didn't see him at the crash site," he said, shaking his head. "He was devastated."

"Yeah, well..." She had no snappy comeback. She hadn't seen Woody at the crash site, but Garret had told her how he had tried to project a professional air, but that his hands had trembled and his voice broke and he had seemed so small and lost. Her heart had ached for him, and she had wanted to call him, she had meant to, but she had never been able to make herself do it.

"I'm outta here," she finally said and strode quickly out of Garret's office before he could say anything else.

Garret's words nagged at her on the drive home. It wasn't true. Of course it wasn't. She didn't have romantic feelings for Woody. She missed her friend, that was all.

Still, as her head hit the pillow, she knew Garret had been right about her feelings toward Devan. Jordan may not have wanted a relationship with Woody, but his attentions were flattering. Now, she had lost him. Worst of all, she had lost him to Devan Maguire, who was cute and blonde and a pink, perfumed girly-girl.

Jordan had never been above using her femininity, but it seemed to be Devan's stock-in-trade. Woody had fallen for it, and Jordan had been jealous. The realization was not a pleasant one.

The clock beside her bed read 3:17. She sat up and rummaged for the TV remote, knowing that sleep would be elusive that night.

xXxXxXx

Woody sat in his office reviewing a file. He had read the page three times, and not a word of it had sunk in yet.

His thoughts, as they frequently had in the last weeks, turned to Devan and Jordan. He had never met anyone quite like Jordan, but it had been an exhausting three years, with very little to show for it but rejection and frustration and the rare, chaste kiss.

Then there was Devan who was, on the other hand, like so many other women he had met. He hadn't noticed her at first, so busy was he pining for Jordan. Then they had been thrown together on a couple of cases, and he had gradually began to understand her appeal.

Then one week, Jordan had blown him off with some flimsy excuse. He had felt wounded at first, then angry. He happened to run into Devan, and she said she would be very pleased to join him for Italian the next night...

They sat across from each other in a booth. It was a cheap Italian place, but the food was good, and they had a band on Friday nights that did Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.

They talked easily about work and the food and wasn't the band great. There was a lull in the conversation. Devan swirled her wine in her glass.

"So. You and Jordan. What's that about?"

"What do you mean?"

"Are you an item?"

He searched for the words to describe their relationship. "No. Just good friends."

"Oh, really?" She smiled and looked at him coyly over the top of her glass of chardonnay. "Was that her choice or hers?"

He squirmed uncomfortably. "It was a mutual thing."

"Oh, really?" She said again, sipping at her wine. "Her loss."

He smiled and blushed and excused himself. When he returned from the men's room, he watched her there in the booth from some distance away.

She was sitting there in her skirt, legs crossed, twirling a strand of blonde hair around a finger. He had been to this restaurant with Jordan once before. They had laughed and talked for hours and even shared a slow dance on the floor. It occurred to him that anyone watching would have thought they were a couple, but the evening ended, as usual, with a sisterly hug and a cool "good night."

Jordan was complicated. She was a mystery he was sure he could never solve. But Devan? She was just who she appeared to be: exasperating, yes. But cute, funny, smart, and utterly uncomplicated.

He went to the table and threw down the tip. "Ready to go?"

She smiled and nodded and slid out of the booth.

They walked down the block silently to her car.

"So, there's really nothing between you and Jordan?"

He shook his head vigorously. "Nothing."

"Good to know," she purred and slipped her hand into his.

They paused wordlessly when they reached her car for that awkward first-kiss moment. Then he leaned in and kissed her softly. She smelled of roses.

She was smiling when he opened his eyes again. He smiled back, and she whispered him a good night. He did not move from the spot as she slid into her car and drove off and was still standing there wearing a somewhat stunned smile as she reached the end of the block and disappeared around the corner.

Her death had dealt him an overwhelming blow. He had tried to sort it out in the weeks since the plane crash. He mourned for a young woman whose unrealized life had been ended violently and needlessly. Harder to understand was his own feelings for her. He enjoyed her company, found her attractive, but mostly he mourned for what might have been, and not for what was.

He felt for some time now that his life had begun to stagnate. Professionally, yes. He had accomplished all he wanted to with the Boston P.D. But the reality had begun, at last, to sink in that Jordan was never going to be ready for the kind of relationship that he wanted.

Sometimes, as the song says, you can't always get what you want, but with Devan, he thought perhaps he could find what he needed.

Now she was gone, and Jordan was a road he was not sure he wanted to walk again.

His mind turned back to the file. He had finished the first paragraph when her voice broke his concentration.

"Hey! Can I interest you in some lunch?"

Jordan had come hesitantly into his office.

"Hey, Jordan..."

"What do you say? Hungry?"

He waved his hand over the stacks of files on his desk. "I can't. Work."

"Come on, Woody, if you hit those files any harder, you'll give yourself a headache. All work and no play..."

"I can't. Really. I'm just going to eat a sandwich here at my desk."

She waited for a moment for him to invite her to join him, but he did not.

"Oh. Well..." She looked around and shuffled her feet awkwardly.

"Sorry you wasted a trip down here, Jordan."

She shrugged and contemplated leaving, but instead sat in the chair next to his desk.

"I guess I'll just grab something on the way back to work. So. How've you been?" Conversation with him had suddenly become stilted and painful.

"Fine. Really." He said without elaboration.

"Well, listen. I was thinking. If you're up for it, how about we go this weekend to that place we went to over by the B.U. campus. Remember? You know, the one with the cheesy karaoke and the unbelievable nachos? Man, I had a blast."

He smiled blandly. "Yeah, sure. We could do that. You, me, Lily, Bug, Nigel. The whole gang."

Her face fell. If he noticed, he said nothing, but maintained the same bland smile.

"Sure. That'd be great." She leapt up and began to babble with forced lightness. "Well, it was GREAT seeing you. I guess I'll just let you get back to work."

She stood in the doorway with her back to him when he spoke again.

"I didn't love her, Jordan," he began with a hushed voice. "But I thought I could have."

She did not turn back to him but stumbled down the hallway. Tears had popped into her eyes, but she willed herself not to cry. Her eyes were dry again as she walked outside. A grey cloud passed over the midday sun, casting a long shadow across the parking lot.

She sat in her car in darkness for a moment. She could see him in his window sitting motionless at his desk, his head in his hands. She dabbed at an errant tear and started the drive back to her office.