Greg was tapping his foot frenetically against the leg of the chair as he waited for Grissom to finish work. He saw Sara glance his way once or twice, but didn't pay her much attention look up until she said his name with such force that he almost fell off the chair.

"Greg!"

"Jes – what, Sara?"

"I know you probably have a lot of nervous energy right now, but if you don't stop that tapping then I am going to chain your foot to the floor!"

He glared at her but obliged. She was right. He was full of nervous energy. On top of that, the pain in his head had moved from dull ache to crushing pain. He had taken some aspirin which had done nothing to alleviate the pain. He figured that his head felt about as good as it looked. He sighed silently to himself. He wanted to tell Sara about the dream, but he couldn't quite bring himself to talk about it. He wondered if it meant something. He wasn't a big believer in pop psychology or dream analysis, but he was certain that there had to be some underlying context to the dream he had had the previous night. Unlike most dreams, this one wasn't fading from his memory. It stood out with stark clarity and was frankly driving him crazy. He may have sat there and tried to analyze his unconscious psyche further but Grissom walked into the room at the moment.

"What's the other guy look like?" he asked, peering over his glasses to get a better look at the bruise on Greg's head.

"Terrible. I really finished him off" he replied with false machismo.

"He threw himself onto a night table in his sleep" said Sara dryly without looking up.

"I didn't throw myself – I fell" Greg retorted indignantly. "And for the record, I haven't fallen out of bed since I was eight years old".

"So what made you fall last night?" inquired Grissom.

"Just a dream I had. I was dreaming that I –" he faltered. "I don't really remember. Ready to go?" he finished lamely.

Grissom silently nodded and walked out of the room. Greg followed. He heard Sara whisper from behind him.

"Good luck".

I'm going to need it, thought Greg as he hurried to keep up.

A sense of déjà vu swept over Greg as he and Grissom sat in the diner drinking coffee and pretending to eat their food. It was as if they had been in this exact place, this moment in time before. Of course it feels that way dummy, Greg thought to himself. You just had this dream last night. But it wasn't until he met Grissom's eyes that he realized why this all felt so familiar. It wasn't the dream he had the night before; it was something that had taken place so many months ago…..

"… Let's face it; we are way beyond apologies here. I can't say anything that will make you feel any differently. And you can't say anything that will change the way I acted. The last three days have been a turning point for us. For all of us. And things won't ever be the same again. They can't be. You and I, and everyone, we are all different people then we were on Friday. I don't know how to get us back to who were then, and I am not ever sure if those people exist anymore. All I know is that what's done is done. There's no going back."

Greg looked at Grissom carefully. It was true. There was something different in his eyes now, something that wasn't there before. And Greg knew if he were to look in the mirror that he would find a stranger staring back at him. The realization cut like a knife. He swallowed hard.

"So if we can't go back, then I guess the next logical question is where do we go from here?"

"It depends. I guess the only thing we can do is try and move on from where we are now. We take tiny baby steps forward and try to put our lives back in order."

Greg smiled grimly. "I'm not sure if I can do that. My life right now feels like a jigsaw puzzle that has pieces missing. I feel as if I have lost part of myself. I don't know when, or if, I will be able to find those pieces and put everything back again."

Grissom was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, there was a startling finality in his voice. "I came here tonight because Sara asked me to. She wants to see you, but not until you and I have made our peace. I came here because I thought we could do that. But there more I thought about it, the more I realized something: everything that has happened between us, it was never about you and what I thought you had done. My only concern was for Sara. And in the process, I treated you with great disrespect and for that I am sorry. I wish things had turned out differently. But they didn't. I don't know how to make peace with you, because I can't make peace with my life. And I suspect you are caught in that same dilemma. I am sorry for what's transpired between us but I don't have an easy 'band-aid' solution…"

Greg shook himself out of his reverie. He had forgotten about that conversation in the bar, the one they had had just before Greg had left. It felt as if they had just had that conversation. It felt as if they were still having that conversation. Everything could have changed with the conversation. But somehow, one or both of them had missed the opportunity to make things right. Greg was still mulling over this as Grissom began to speak.

"Greg-"

"Don't," he said tightly. Grissom stared back at him, slightly taken aback.

Greg forced himself to meet Grissom's eyes. "Just don't. Don't tell me what you think you need to say to me. We've already done that Grissom. We've already been here, already said those things."

Grissom nodded slowly. "The night in the bar" he said, almost to himself.

Greg nodded sadly. "I thought I'd forgotten about it," he admitted, swirling the last dregs of his coffee around in the cup.

Both men were silent for a moment. It was Grissom who spoke first.

"Has anything changed?"

"Yes. No. Maybe. I don't know" Greg said. "I thought everything would change. I thought leaving would make everything better."

"And?"

"Everything is exactly the way I left it. Yet somehow, its not. Does that make any sense to you?"

Grissom's lip twitched slightly, almost imperceptibly. "It makes sense insofar as that though time has moved forward, we have stood still. It's as if the world around us has gone on living and changing, and we have just been standing still."

Greg nodded. "That's what I thought. So how do we get things moving again?"

"I don't know Grissom answered honestly. "I think that first, you need to really want things to be moving again."

Greg stared. "Are you saying that I don't want things to change, to be better? Why else would I be here?"

"Sara" Grissom said simply.

The silence once again ensconced them. Grissom was right of course, they both knew it.

"She asked you to come back, didn't she?" inquired Grissom a lifetime later.

"Yes" Greg admitted, not liking the direction the conversation seemed to be headed in.

"Why?" Grissom's tone was edging on harsh.

Greg fidgeted absently with his napkin and looked everywhere but at Grissom. "You'd really have to ask her that" he said finally.

"Greg, if there is something going on with her, then I need to know about it. You can't hide something like that from me."

"Grissom, you can't even see what's right in front of you. No one is hiding anything."

Grissom narrowed his eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Greg leaned in, his elbows on the table. "Look, I can't tell you outright why Sara called me. But I will say this: I was able to figure out what was really going on with her from halfway across the country. You haven't been able to see the truth, even though it is staring you in the face every day. Think about it Grissom: what's the one thing that she could never bring yourself to tell you? What's the one thing in her life that has kept her standing still this last year?"

Grissom furrowed his brow in concentration. It slowly began to dawn on him. He thought about every time she had avoided his gaze. He thought about every time she laughed too hard at a joke that hadn't been funny. He thought about every time she acted like a stranger in their midst. Suddenly, the realization of what Greg meant hit him. It physically hurt him to think about. Surely Greg didn't mean what Grissom thought he meant.

"Greg, she's not..."

"What?" Greg challenged. "Say it Grissom. What's she been hiding all this time?"

"Her drinking?" it was little more then a whisper.

Greg didn't answer. His silence spoke for him.

"Oh God" whispered Grissom, looking like he might pass out. "Why didn't she tell me?"

Greg felt a wave of pity. Grissom looked so miserable at the moment. He had to say something to help Grissom understand, even though Greg wasn't so sure that he understood it himself.

"You remember playing hide-and-go-seek as a kid?" Greg asked. Grissom gave him the just where exactly is this going look. Greg hurried on. "Okay, so you never did. But if you had, you'd remember that there was always that one kid who hid too well. He always hid so well that you would eventually give up on looking for him. Sara is that kid. She hid too well. And eventually, you just give up on trying to find her."

"You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found," mused Grissom, waving away the waitress as she came to refill his coffee.

Greg nodded as he gratefully accepted the refill. The coffee was terrible and it burned his mouth, but it provided a nice distraction from the heavy turn the conversation had taken. He was starting to understand that his future in Vegas was not the issue right now. There was something more pressing, more urgent that they needed to address. Sara's secret was out, and it would need to be dealt with before any more headway could be made. Greg felt a knot of worry form in his stomach. He had promised Sara that he wouldn't say anything to Grissom. And here they were, with the secret and remnants of dinner on the table in front of them. Greg reasoned that he hadn't actually told Grissom about Sara's drinking; Grissom had guessed all on his own, with maybe a hint or two. Of course, Greg also realized that Sara probably wasn't going to see it that way. But he would jump off that bridge when he got to it.

"I did play hide-and-seek as a kid," Grissom said suddenly. Greg looked at him, startled.

"Really?"

Grissom gave the closest thing to a real smile Greg had seen since he'd got there. "Yeah. I could never settle on a hiding place. I would move around from place to place, so sure that the next spot would be the perfect one. Someone always found me in the end."

Greg grinned. He caught just a hint of the underlying message. Grissom was giving just a little but of himself away. Grissom glanced at his watch then, and stood up.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

Grissom shrugged himself into his jacket. "Time to play some hide-and-seek. Grown-up style."