Here's chapter two for you. Still not mine.

"Damn, Catherine! I can't believe you just let him leave like that!
What were you thinking?"

"What did you expect me to do, Sara? Trip the boy and sit on him until you got here? He said he had to go. I let him go. I'm guessing he went to be with his family. That would be the logical place."

"Maybe." Sara's voice was tight. "I'm headed out of here. Tell Grissom what's going on." With that she ran out of the lab without waiting for an answer. She could find him if anyone could. She only hoped he wanted to be found.

"Dammit, Greg, pick up the freaking phone. It's me." She sighed heavily and snapped her telephone closed. She had driven by his apartment, the lab, his apartment again. Now she was headed home to the internet to check out where his family lived. He could run, but she'd be damned if she'd let him hide.

She pulled into her parking space, and her heart skipped a beat. His car was parked in the adjoining space, and he sat crosslegged on her steps. She opened the car door and ran to him.

She grabbed his hand and hurriedly unlocked her front door and pulled him in.

His eyes were puffy and red, his cheeks mottled from crying. She led him to the sofa to sit down. "I didn't know where to go," he whispered. "He's dead, Sara. The only person in my entire damned family who ever saw me as anything other than a disappointment and he's dead." He sniffed loudly. "Now that you know the truth about me I guess there's no hope you'll ever feel anything for me but pity and maybe disgust, huh."

Sara shook her head and pulled him into her arms. "No pity or disgust. I have had the overwhelming urge to kick your butt for heading out of there without me, but now that I've found you I'm too relieved to even be mad any more. You're my best friend, Greg. I was so afraid..." She bit her lip, not wanting to finish the sentence.

"You were afraid I'd kill myself, weren't you?" His voice was sad and even. "I can't lie to you, Sara. There have been times in my life I've thought about it very seriously. If I didn't have you to turn to tonight would have been one of them, but I knew you'd be home eventually." He sighed. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I'm weak, sorry I don't have the balls to deal with this. I try to hold it together, but this time it all came undone, and I have no clue how to even start putting my life back together again."

"You're not weak, Greg. You're in crisis. I seem to come undone on a regular basis, and you've put me back together more than you know. Now it's my turn." She stroked his hair. "You're staying here for a while." She paused. She knew she had to ask but wasn't sure how he'd take it. "Are you going home for the funeral?"

He tensed. "For Robert. Yeah." He paused. "I'm not going to the house. Dad doesn't want me there. He has Wills to comfort him. I can't deal with either of them right now."

"What about your Mom?"

He shrugged. "I'm guessing they'll bury Robert right next to her. She died when I was sixteen, right at the start of my freshman year of college. It was really tough on all of us, but Robert especially. He was just a kid, you know? He made it, though. " He shook his head. "And I know, I know I'm a terrible person, because I just wish, I wish..." His voice broke to a whisper. "... I wish it had been Wills that died instead of Robert." He closed his eyes and swallowed. "Wills was always so fucking perfect. He's the handsome one, the athlete, always knows the right thing to say. He's on the fast track at a major pharmaceutical company. He's married to an heiress. Always Wills. Yeah, I'm smarter, but that doesn't matter, because guys like him get guys like me to do their homework for them." His eyes bored into Sara's. "I despise him, Sara. He's my own brother and I hate him. I really do think he doesn't have a soul. I KNOW he doesn't have a conscience. He's coldhearted, cruel, selfish, vain, and treats women like crap. You know the baby they found on my doorstep? That was his, by one of his girlfriends. He's married, Sara, and he won't let his own wife have his child because she might get fat, but he made a baby with someone else and will probably expect her to raise it for him. Can you imagine that?"

Sara shook her head. "No, I can't."

"Robert wasn't like Wills, not like me either, but not like Wills. He was a good person, but always serious, focused. He wanted to make the world a better place. He was finishing up pre-med, wanted to be be a pediatrician. He would've done it, too." Greg sighed and squirmed. "You know all the rest. Want to hear the clencher? It's why Dad hates me so much. I'm not his."

Sara raised her eyebrows but didn't answer.

Greg shook his head. "When I was a teenager, right after Mom first got sick, I couldn't understand why Dad hated me so much. I was depressed, feeling like a total waste. She was sitting on my bed and we were talking. She just looked at me, ruffled my hair, and told me she knew why I was so different from Wills and Robert. She said she and Dad had separated when Wills was seven. She'd worked at a coffee shop on the UCLA campus to support them. Every day, this young professor would come in and sit at her table and order coffee. He was painfully shy, but eventually he worked up the nerve to ask her out. They dated for close to a year. When she found out I was on the way he wanted her to get a divorce from Dad and marry him, but Dad threatened to take Robert if she didn't go back to him, and he had the means to do it. She said I was her favorite because I was just like my real father. I begged her to tell me who he was, but she refused. She never did tell me, only said that he was a good man, a brilliant scientist and medical researcher and that sometimes she wished she'd told Dad to go to hell and married him like she wanted to."

"So you don't know who he is?"

"No. I have suspicions, but nothing certain. There's this guy. I don't know who he is, but I think... I think he's been there looking on sometimes. At my graduation, Mom's funeral. Once when I visited her grave he was kneeling beside it, placing a red rose on the headstone. He turned and looked at me, just looked into my eyes and walked away. He was about my height, medium brown hair, slight build. I wish I knew who he was."

"Greg. I'll bet he'll be at your brother's funeral. He obviously loved your mother, and he clearly cares about you." Sara's voice was excited. "I'm going with you. You don't need to worry about your dad and Wills. They WON'T bother you. If they do, I'll handle it."

Greg chuckled. "I believe you would, too."

She grinned. "After the way they've treated you, it won't take much."

Greg sipped at his coffee while Sara made phone calls. "Uh-huh. Meadowview Cemetary. Tomorrow at two. Thank you so much." She hung up the telephone. "It seems like we need to get going. I'm packed; we just need to stop by your place and we're on our way to San Gabriel."

"What about work?"

"I called while you were asleep. Grissom wasn't thrilled, but he'll get over it. We're out until they hear from us. Emergency leave of absence."

"Guess I need to get moving, then."

"Yes, you do. You know where the bathroom is. Towels are on the shelf over the toilet. You can shave at your place."

An hour later, the two were on their way. "It's ten a.m. now. We should be there by five or six, depending on traffic."

Greg laughed. "Discounting traffic jams, yeah."

"You okay?" She glanced over at his. Today he almost seemed like himself.

He shrugged. "Yeah, considering. I still can't believe Robert is gone." He sighed. "I talked to him two, three times a week. He was really psyched about med school. I was happy for him. You know I originally planned to be a doctor, right?"

"No. No, I didn't"

He shrugged. "I changed majors when it became apparent that financially I wasn't going to be able to do it. I was on my own when it came to college. I got through undergrad on scholarship, but the family income was too high for me to be able to get it for med school."

"What specialty would you have chosen?"

"Endocrinology, maybe OB/GYN. I think I would've been good at it."

Sara smiled over at him. "I KNOW you would've, but I'm selfish. I'm glad things turned out like they did. I somehow doubt we'd be quite as close if I'd had my feet in stirrups when we met."

Greg chuckled. "Yeah, I'm all about being inappropriate, but asking a lady to dinner while doing her Pap smear would be a little over the line even for me."

"Well, at least your other problems are taken care of. "

He snorted. "Except the entire lab knows my business. "

"I don't recall anything particularly damning about the particulars of either case. Who's going to say anything - Nick? Remember the dead hooker? Warrick? Holly Gribbs. Catherine? Sam Braun. Grissom? Lady Heather. Brass? His kid's a hooker. Me? Too many things to mention. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Every one of us has closet skeletons. You want to look at a few of mine? My mother murdered my father. She spent the next five years in a mental hospital - that's why I was in foster care. I'm telling you this because you need to know that I do understand how it feels when your life seems ugly, dirty, stained, like you are so different from everyone else that no one could ever understand you. And now you feel naked and ashamed, because all your carefully constructed cover has blown away and the edges of the truth are hanging out and you are afraid, so damned afraid they're going to grab an edge and pull and figure it all out. Am I getting close?"

He nodded and swallowed hard. "Yeah. You've got it."

"Let me help you out here. They aren't going to figure it out. Maybe Grissom could if he tried, but he won't because he doesn't want to know because if he did know then he'd have to try to fix you and he has no idea how to do that. Warrick won't pry; he'll respect your privacy because if he doesn't then you might not respect his, and he doesn't want that because I think he has a LOT to hide. Nick cares, but he won't push. He has his own demons to fight. Catherine is not about getting in other peoples' business. That leaves me, and you know where I'm coming from. I knew there was something, even before this, just like you did about me. We're sort of coming from the same place. That's probably why we've ended up so close."

"So how do you ever get to the point where you don't feel different,
like you're not good enough?"

Sara glanced over at him sadly. "I'll let you know if I ever get to that point."