Hello hello.

JustMyPillow; where are you my friend?!

Eteri: back, safe and, mostly, sound! Still, now she has an important challenge to face.


"Alright then," Cal hissed, hands in his pockets and head tilted on the side. "Let's hear it, Foster."


On her way home, Gillian had expected nothing less than a straightforward approach. When she had spoken to Reynolds he had mentioned there might be some pressing questions waiting for her and she thought it was understandable. However, she had not anticipated Cal being there, and certainly had not expected him to pull that Jekyll and Hyde act on her, going from comforting and caring to downright hostile.

She knew that the past couple of days couldn't have been easy for him, but it hadn't been quite the walk in the park for her either. However, Foster did recognise that for all the "I can't tell yous" and "I'm sorrys" he had resigned to, Cal was now ready to cash in.

Then she took a deep breath and dared to ask with a look if she could have a beer too. He obliged, his gestures still powered more by annoyance and eagerness than anything else, and once he put the bottle in front of her he stepped back to create some space between them. There were so many messages he was throwing her way Gillian suspected he wasn't even aware of all of them, or at least he was too debated internally to control them. She sighed, hoping what she was about to tell him would ease that confusion, then took a long sip and started talking.

"I couldn't get you involved, Cal. There was nothing you could have done-"

"If this is the way you think you're gonna do it, love, think again." Cal hissed, his voice hardened by exhausted patience. "You've been telling me that for two days, I won't listen to any of that anymore."

Gillian nodded as if to acknowledge his request but didn't go any further, trying to see if Cal was going to share which approach he wanted to go with instead. The fact that he didn't seem to have one was of very little consolation; it still left her with the difficult task to figure out what was best for him whilst pretty much giving up how she had wanted to tell the story.

"What do you want to know?" She asked then, exposing herself to the dangers of being interrogated by Cal Lightman.

Despite her offer, Cal rolled his eyes and snickered at her with a loud noise, folding his arms and shaking his head. Cal wasn't turning down the proposal, but after all the things he had found out about her in the past two days, things he'd never even remotely associated with the Gillian Foster he thought he knew, he struggled to believe she would just go with it.

Gillian could understand, she happened to know how he felt, but held his sceptical gaze firmly until he had to accept the fact that she was committed to answer his questions.

"The drive you put in my safe, was that what you got in the package?"

He started with an easy one, and a small movement of nausea ran through Gillian when she realised he was trying to establish a baseline.

"Yes."

The answer was as easy as the question, but Gillian knew there was a lot riding on it.

"What was in it?"

What was so damn important about it you had to risk your life for it?!

"A database, a list of names of people associated with the CIA."

That was a big give, and they both knew it. Cal had been ready to fight with her and push back on any resistance or denial to the things he had discovered, but the fact that she didn't seem to care certainly eased his demeanour.

"Like Radner?"

She shook her head, although it was only a partial negation.

"Radner was the one who recruited them. And me."

Gillian saw his jaw clench and his whole body stiffen. Cal had guessed as much, but it was a whole other thing to hear her say it out loud.

"Are you working with the CIA?"

"No."

Cal stared at her with an intensity she had rarely seen in his face, even less addressed to her. He looked at her, taking in every millimetre of her face and let her expression echoe in his head long after her single word had been spoken. Long enough for him to determine that she was telling the truth.

"Have you ever?" This time Gillian didn't respond, instead holding his gaze as best she could with apologetic eyes until his widened in honest shock. "Bloody hell Foster!"

"Not exactly, and not to my knowledge. I was just asked to consult on a project, not as an operative or agent or whatever you want to call it." She knew that wasn't supposed to make it any better but Gillian felt she had the right to clarify. "Radner was leading a project to select and train academics and civilian experts to bring a different kind of knowledge to the agency."

"And their names are on the drive?" She nodded. "Yours too?"

Gillian nodded again.

"Among other things, but that's just my guess." She shook her head and leaned back on the chair. "Radner had been with the agency since the 70s, he was old school and always looking for new resources."

"Meaning?"

Neither of them would have cared to admit it, but as tense and forced as that conversation was things were getting a little better. The pace was different, Cal was now confident she wasn't going to hide anything anymore and Gillian didn't feel like she had to diligently wait for him to badger her with questions anymore.

"His plan was to get these civilian experts to consult in their fields at first, then eventually turn them into undercover agents. Whether they were aware of it or not." She paused, a small shudder running through her wondering for not the first time in years if that could have been her destiny. "They would have been aware of some sort of connection with the agency but just as external consultants, not really knowing exactly how much they were being exposed."

Cal did catch the sudden fear and disgust on her face, and for the first time the thought he might have been too hard on her came across his mind. He had been working with government and law enforcement agencies for years, in many countries and yes, sometimes not in the cleanest way possible: but he had always know what he was doing and who he was working for, and the thought that someone might have been manipulating him in such a way was beyond scary. He suppressed a gasp when an additional fearful thought crossed his mind, then his whole body loosened up and he stepped a little closer looking down at her.

"Were you one of them?"

"No, I don't think I was," she huffed quickly, relieved that she could say that as much as he was to hear it. "Radner was a psychologist too, that's how he reeled me in. His version of the story was that we could help these people, provide support so that they could cope with the stress of being undercover."

"You were working with these people to recover them and bring them back in?"

Gillian wished she could say yes, and she wished that she could have another beer or something stronger. Thinking back on those days, when she thought she was doing something good, she suddenly remembered all the people she had met and spoken to, people she believed she was helping. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, successfully fighting back tears before opening them again and giving Cal a tired and defeated look.

"No, to prepare them." There was so much pain in her voice that further clarification wouldn't have been needed but it did her good to say it. "I didn't know that was what I was doing, I thought I was helping them dealing with the pressure of being undercover, like you said-"

"Who were the people going after it?"

Gillian knew he meant after her, it was all over his face and voice. She also knew he had graciously shifted the focus of the conversation away from something that was clearly hard for her, a little attention that she filed away doing her best to hide her gratitude.

"That I don't know, Cal. Not for sure." She made sure he took a good look and only went on when he nodded. "Reynolds told me that when they checked the drive there was more information than just the names of the people involved in the programme. Apparently Radner had threatened to come clean about it, some people at the CIA wanted to make sure he didn't. And that what he had done would never come to light."

"They were ready to kill for it."

It was a statement, not a question.

"I know, Cal. That's why I left when I saw the package." She stood up, she couldn't take sitting there anymore and after all that was still her house. "When I saw the original sender I knew something was wrong. I didn't know how to reach Radner so I looked him up and I saw he was dead. I figured the two things had to be related, so I looked up some of the people who had been part of the programme and found at least two more had died since the package had left Hong Kong." Under other circumstances, Cal would have been impressed: by the sound of it, it had taken her just a few hours to track down the information he and Reynold had only uncovered after days.

"So what? These…spies, they were going after the names in the drive?"

"I don't think they had a list, they wouldn't have needed to go after Radner first if they had."

"Why did Radner send the package in the first place?" Cal asked, and Gillian shrugged, pacing nervously.

"Because he was a coward, other than a manipulator. It's just a guess, but maybe he knew they were after him and hoped that by shipping out the drive he could protect himself." She stopped and leaned with her back on the fridge, the cold contact giving her some sort of solace. "I guess they followed the package, figured it would take them to other people whose name was on it and they could just kill them, one after the other."

"Because they did what Radner did." Cal interjected, once again stating what seemed to be obvious rather than asking. "They got the hot potato and tried to get rid of it before it was too late."

"And they still got killed for it." Gillian added, looking right at him before shaking her head. "I couldn't do that. I knew what was coming and I could have tried to protect myself, send the drive to someone else and make a run for it but-"

"You decided to use it to lure them out instead." She nodded, realising only then as Cal said it out loud that how ridiculous her plan had been. "On your own? Without any help?"

"I just thought I would wait them out, see what happened."

"You were at the post office." She didn't respond but her face didn't deny it. "What were you going to do? Shoot them?"

It was Gillian's turn to be frustrated and annoyed. She understood how he felt, probably better than he did or understood, but she didn't feel the need to keep rearshing that part. He had been worried about her, scared, and so had she. Couldn't he just leave the past in the past and see that the danger was gone?

"No Cal. When I tracked down the post office I figured they would too. I thought I would just wait and try to identify them, take a picture maybe, or something." Gillian strongly bit into her bottom lip and closed her eyes, knowing she didn't sound like she was making much sense but still feeling that back then it had been a good plan. "Then you and Reynolds and Torres showed up and I didn't know what to do, and it all went wrong."

"Why didn't you come back in Gill?" He asked, desperate, taking another step toward her. "We could have helped you. Even if I couldn't, Reynolds would have. Isn't that why you left the drive for him?"

Gillian looked at him for as long as she could before the deep and raw emotions in his eyes got to her, forcing her to look down. She was far from being ashamed of what she had done, or tried to do, and she was not going to apologise for trying to keep the people she cared about safe. Gillian knew by then Cal wasn't going to let her live it down easily, and he was making it even more difficult with the way he was looking at her.

"No, it wasn't," she whispered. "After the post office, after I called you…I don't know how but they tracked me down and were closing in on me. I knew having a plan wasn't enough, that it might not work and I was out of my depth." She paused, Cal didn't like that. "I left the drive in the safe when I was in the office that night because I thought even if I didn't make it I could still save all those people."

Cal expected it to be easier on him, to hear her say that at some point she had given up and had made her peace with it, just because he'd had hours to process the first time she had expressed the very same thought to him. It wasn't, in no shape of form. For neither of them. He knew he should have been more understanding, that it must not have been comfortable for her to confess her plan had failed so spectacularly and that her plan B was simple defeat. She sure was making it hard for him, especially when revealing that her hail Mary had been about helping others rather than herself, but he still had questions.

"Radner, this project," he asked after a while, at least no longer with anger and disdain in his voice. "When was this?"

"Cal-"

"I'm not letting this go, Gillian."

She looked up and folded her arms, for the first time really on the defensive.

"Before I worked at the Pentagon, it actually turned out to be my way in." Before I met you, before I even knew you existed. "Radner knew about my profile, that's why he approached me. After I found out what he was really doing to those people all I wanted to do was to fix that, somehow."

Cal nodded, that was such a Foster thing to do and it was nearly impossible to fault her for it. That explained a lot about the work she was doing at the Pentagon when they met, perhaps even about why she had decided to protect a man she didn't even know.

That thought, the memories of those sessions in her office in what seemed to be a different lifetime, chipped away at his frustration a bit more. He could see her pain, not for the small injury she had suffered but for the people she had failed. And she was angry, not at the person who had tricked her but at herself for having missed the obvious deception right under her nose.

"What did Reynolds do with the drive?" He asked after a while. "How did he contact you?"

"I don't know exactly who he gave it to, I trusted he would know best how to use it and not just for my safety." She bit at her lip, shyly, knowing he wasn't going to like the second part. "And I wrote the number of the burner phone on the back of the paper I taped to the drive."

Cal took it all in, another thing he had to stomach and it wasn't something he could put on her. He had thought about it at least a couple of times: he had opened the safe, he had checked to see what was missing and he hadn't seen the additional object. If he had, he might have found the drive sooner, and now he was finding out that he could have had a way to reach her if only he'd been his usual unrelenting self never taking things at face value.

Then he took another step forward, right on cue for Gillian to look up and register he was coming closer.

"How did you get hurt?"

"Cal don't-"

"Did they get to you?"

Gillian rolled her eyes but felt his insistence was hard to ignore, as much as his proximity.

"I was getting away from them, trying to lose them in the crowd when I felt something cutting in my side. I got to the underground and managed to get into a train just before they got to me, then I found a place to hide and look after it."

Cal took two more steps and was now standing in front of her, his hands now out of his pockets and down by the sides of his body.

"The gun," he muttered. "Did you use it?"

Incredibly, a foreign and unexpected laughter came from her as the first response to his very serious question. Then she shook her head and rolled her eyes, not knowing what to do with her hands.

"I saw it when I opened the safe and I just thought it might make me feel safer." Cal tilted his head and wiggled his eyebrows at her. "I would have probably ended up shooting myself with it if I tried to use it!"

This time he chuckled, it was hard to find a funny side in the visuals of Gillian shooting at her own foot while trying to work a handgun, but there it was. The truth was that her laugh was contagious, it was something he had missed and, for a couple of times, he had wondered if he would ever hear again. That thought hit him then, about all the things he would have lost if she hadn't come back, and the sense of impotence he had been trapped in for hours came back with a vengeance. He had been mad at her, he had been scared and sad and upset and none of that mattered for a moment. In that moment Cal realised that he had been, as often, self-centred and selfish; that in his usual egocentric and egomaniacal stupor he had lost track of the fact that those past days had not happened to just him. She had been through them, alone as much as he had been, and it didn't matter that she had been on her own by choice.

So he stepped forward a bit more and gently wrapped his arms around her, holding her softly as she returned the gesture and her hysterical chuckle slowly turned into tears.


So there it was, the secret revealed. I am not entirely happy about the way the whole plot thing came out but I did my best.

Was Cal too hard still?

This second hug is certainly more on the comforting side, but what will happen next?

Chapter 12: Come & gone