"I'm still angry," Grace says.
The bullpen is all but deserted, save for a few tortured types and workaholics who drift through the kitchenette every now and again. She and Jane, representing a category each, have convened on Jane's couch, poring over video feeds from today's crime scene that, so far, other than painting a grainy telenovela of two movie producers having affairs, have been entirely useless.
It's silly, but it always makes her feel a little special, getting to relax on the couch after everyone else has gone home. Sure, the guys get to go out into the field more than she does, but who else does Jane let sit on his couch, aside from Lisbon? Who does he let get close to him without him being the one to get close first? She guesses this is her 'thing' with Jane, the way Rigsby has card tricks and Cho has books.
Maybe that's why she feels safe enough to say it out loud.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jane, who had been drifting gradually toward her shoulder over the course of the last hour, slowly raise his head. "At who?"
She looks over; he's still watching the computer screen, hands folded in his lap and legs stretched out in front of him like he's settled in to watch the evening news. But his shoulders are tense, angled away from her like he's ready to run. Like he always does. She averts her eyes. "Craig. Red John."
You, she doesn't say. He's psychic, he can just read her mind and hear it himself.
Jane purses his lips, chin tucked low to his chest. He doesn't respond. Maybe he heard after all.
Maybe she's made a mistake, she thinks, a hot kernel of resentment starting to smolder in the dead center of her chest. Maybe he's the wrong person to talk to about this. Maybe he doesn't even care. Maybe Jane's the only one allowed to unburden himself onto other people, whether they want it or not. Maybe that's written in the terms of his goddamn deal with the CBI: 'I get whatever I want, you get just what I want to give.'
"He betrayed you," Jane speaks up, before she can snap at him. "You should be angry."
As quickly as it's been given permission to live, the spark of anger in her dies. "No I shouldn't."
"Why not?"
He looks her square in the eyes, face unreadable, and Grace is, with a chill, reminded that he shot someone. Three times, in cold blood.
So? an insidious little voice in her whispers. You shot Craig.
It's not the same, she whispers back.
You say that now.
"I'm supposed to be the bigger person," she replies. Somehow her hands have found their way together in her lap, and her fingers are twisting round and round and round. A few short months, and she'd already gotten so used to one of them having a ring. "I said I was going to live with my past. I'm supposed to…to forgive him, move on with my life."
Jane lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Why?"
So I don't end up like you, miserable and making everyone else miserable, she wants to throw back at him. "Because that's what good people do," she says instead, which still isn't very kind, but he isn't being very kind either, so, that's what he gets. "Because if I stay angry with him, he wins. If I stay off my game, if I keep taking my anger out on people, then I'm just as bad as he is."
"You're not," Jane says quietly.
He sounds so sympathetic that Grace sees red. She slams the laptop closed, relishing the way he twitches, and snaps, "Then why don't I feel bad that I shot him?"
The hum of fluorescent lights from the hall is loud in the silence, a metaphorical cricket chirping in an awkward moment. Jane's eyes are hooded in shadow, unblinkingly fixed on hers; the light from the lamp behind him wreathes his hair in golden fire, casting his profile in both sun and night. She feels so small beneath his stare.
Then he says softly, clinically, "You do. It's just harder to see because you know that he deserved it."
She opens her mouth to protest and he startles her into silence by taking her hand, turning it palm-up and gently folding her fingers under his. He looks into her eyes so seriously that it's like he's looking all the way through her, to the wistful and haunted places in her head that only her dreams can take her, and it takes her much longer than it should have to realize that his thumb is pressing into the curve of her wrist, settled on a pulse point.
It should be insulting, the baldness of this lie detector test that she's seen him do on dozens of people before, on suspects, but that's the point, isn't it? That she knows he's doing it? That he's letting her know?
"He hurt you," Jane says, low and even. "You trusted him, and you got used to him, and then he threw that all away. Just tore it all to shreds. You wish he was still alive so you could ask him why he did it, so that maybe he could explain himself, so that maybe you could give him a second chance, or at least let him know that you refuse to. But he isn't, and he can't. So all he'll know as he burns in Hell is that you loved him. That you fell for it. That's the real problem, isn't it? You're not just angry with him, Grace, you're angry with yourself, too. Aren't you?"
She wants to slap him for being able to lay her dirty laundry out so plainly, for wielding her own emotions against her. She wants to throw it back in his face, demand to know why he thinks he can read her so well when he couldn't even tell that she was dating Red John's accomplice. She wants to curl up in a ball and cry, and cry and cry and cry.
Instead, when Jane starts to blur into a puddle of grey and gold and she feels her lower lip start to wobble, she says, "You don't even believe in Hell."
Watery-Jane looks like he smiles, slightly. "No. But it's a good story, isn't it?"
Despite the urge to lecture him, she laughs. It goes on for a while, a sound that doesn't sound like her, that wavers frantically as she tries to keep it from turning into something more. When the fit finally passes, she finds she can only whisper, because the lump in her throat is the size of a boulder and she can't get all of her voice out around it. "I can't stop thinking about him. All of the nice things he said to me. All the little gifts, the visits at work, the dinners at nice restaurants, the stupid necklace. It's like I'm a little kid and he said 'get in my van, I have candy', and I believed him. He tricked me, and I fell for it."
His thumb is rubbing circles against her wrist, no longer seeking, just soothing. "You loved him."
"Yeah," she snorts, wiping angrily at her eyes with her free hand. "Should have been red flag number one, huh? It's only the second time someone I dated tried to kill someone I worked with."
"Oh, I didn't take it personally," Jane says with a smile. "Hightower won't either."
"I really thought he loved me too." Saying it makes her feel pathetic, like a little girl clinging to her safety blanket to keep the monsters away. As if good intentions have ever made a difference in this job.
"He might have." She snorts again, but he shakes his head, gently squeezing her hand. "He might have, and he might not have. He can't answer any questions for you, Grace. If it brings you peace to know you loved and were loved in return, then know it. If it doesn't, then don't."
"That doesn't make any sense," she tells him, but the nonsense of it makes her smile anyway.
Jane smiles back and shrugs enigmatically, like he has all the answers but he just won't share. "It does, or it doesn't. Whatever the truth may be, being in love, Grace…"
He trails off as a shadow passes over his face, and it's not the frightful overcast of vengeance on the horizon but a soft flicker of faraway longing; the smoke and carried laughter of a distant campfire. "It's a good feeling. Easy to get wrapped up in. Don't hate yourself for basking in it while you had it."
For all that Jane lies like a masterfully crafted rug, there's no hiding when he talks about his family; for all that he's open about them, hearing it never stops feeling like she's eavesdropping. She has the bizarre urge to apologize, and tamps it down. "Love shouldn't…be like sleepwalking. That's what it feels like I was doing, now that I look back on it. It feels like I must have known, but I kept my eyes closed because I just didn't want the dream to end. I should have known, somehow."
"Well, then the rest of us should have known too," Jane says simply. Infuriatingly logically. "I mean, think about it, Cho and Lisbon are basically the wheels on which guilty consciences break. Rigsby watched O'Laughlin like a hawk the whole time you were dating — not in a jealous way, mostly," he adds, just when Grace is ready to crawl out of her skin and hide, "y'know, in a protective way. Me, I've made my whole life about finding Red John, and I never suspected a thing. A whiff of toxic masculinity, maybe, but —"
"And I'm sorry, about that," Grace blurts out, shame crawling up her back with greasy fingers.
Jane falters, seemingly caught on the wrong foot for once. "About toxic masculinity? Oh, no, that's a result of cultural and social stressors, he was probably pressure-cooking from birth. Definitely nothing to do with you."
"About…about Red John." The storm rolls in, Jane's expression going slow and stiff, and Grace suddenly finds that she can't look at him anymore, glancing down at her lap and pretending she's not holding his hand just a little tighter than before. "By dating Craig, I all but gave him a back door into the CBI. All he had to do was…was show up and he could stay as long as he wanted. I mean, you..."
You sleep here, she wants to say. You stay on this couch, right here in the bullpen, right next to my desk. Your files are just upstairs. He could have killed you. Red John could have come here and killed you, and it would have been my fault.
"I put you in danger," she says instead. "I put all of you in danger. Being in love isn't an excuse for that."
Jane doesn't respond. Somewhere in the building, a phone rings, and Grace jumps, catching her laptop before it can slide off her knees.
It rings two more times before someone answers it in their office, voice muffled through the walls.
The phone number, that was my fault too. The damn phone number, the one in Craig's phone. The one that Lisbon called, that led you to shoot that man. I wish I'd known. I should have known. Then you would never have killed anyone.
From the mire of her thoughts, she becomes aware of her hand being moved, smoothed out flat and pressed against something warm and beating. When she looks up, Jane is leaning into her space, head dipped low to catch her gaze; he's holding her hand to his chest like the weapon of a ritual suicide, begging her to give the blade a final shove.
"Grace, listen to me. Nothing," Jane promises, ragged as a torn nail, "involving Red John is your fault. Nothing about my actions are your fault. If he'd wanted in the CBI, if he'd wanted to get to me, he would have done it, one way or another. You are not to blame for my mistakes. Believe me. Believe me."
There's so much under his words that he will never trust her enough to say aloud, so much she knows about him that could fill in the blanks — so much he knows she'll use to fill in the blanks. Offhanded statements of guilt and grief, quick conversational dodges that give away more than he thinks; the look in his eyes when a 'not guilty' verdict was read, neither joy nor shock nor disbelief but only sorrow — sorrow, and the frightening blankness of an unfinished page in a writer's manuscript.
Right now, though, all Grace can think of is the hummingbird-wing thrum of his heart beneath her hand that tells her that he understands her, and all her anger and her shame. This is the closest that Jane will ever get to saying 'sorry' for the things she silently blames him for, for the things she's sure he blames himself for: for the reasons Craig entered her life, for the reasons Craig hurt her, for her having to shoulder the responsibility of his death. For future hurts and future failings.
"I believe you," she tells him back, and finds that she really does.
It takes several more heartbeats for his frozen face to thaw. When it does, he makes himself smile, small and unconvincing, and Grace decides she's had enough of being a mature, problem-solving adult for the day. She kicks off her shoes and tucks her knees up to her chest like a child, curls her fingers around the lapel of his vest and pulls Jane down until his head rests on her shoulder and she can tuck her chin into his hair. Tugs the blanket off his legs (that he's not even using anyway) and laughs when he complains. Balances the laptop between them and presses play.
She thinks that maybe this can be her thing with Jane, the way Rigsby has card tricks and Cho has books: grief, and open conversation, and a comfortable couch to share it on. Maybe with some popcorn, tonight, if reviewing the footage drags on for too long.
To love and be loved in return. Or maybe just to be honest, every once in a while.
