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chapter three

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she is trapped inside a month of gray
and they take a little every day
she is a victim of her own responses
shackled to a heart that wants to settle
and then runs away
-Counting Crows, "Mercury"

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Sam adjusted the sleeves of her button-down shirt as she rode the elevator to the twelfth floor of the Federal Building. The crook of her elbow still stung slightly from where the lab tech had drawn her blood that morning, and she ran her left index finger over the spot where her pale skin had been punctured, as though it would somehow help her marrow match her nephew's.

Though Emily had told her not to worry about it, Sam still felt guilty that she had not at least listened to what her sister had to say when she first reached out. Emily was ready to come clean about the past to do what was right by Randy, and Sam had almost literally slammed the door in her sister's face.

If she had just listened, she might already know if her tissue type was a match.

The elevator doors opened to reveal the busy hallway of the Missing Persons floor, well over an hour into the bustle of the work day. She held her head high as she walked, moving purposefully as she hung her trench coat and shuffled the files that lay on her desk. She had only twenty minutes before her use of force meeting, and she was disappointed to find that Elena was the only one in the office.

She always wanted to say something to Elena, to warn her. She had watched from a distance as Danny and Elena built up to something, felt her own pangs of regret every time she saw Elena pull further away from Danny. But, like always, she held her tongue. To warn Elena would be to admit that she had been wrong in the way she had handled her relationship with Martin, and she could not allow herself that admission.

"Good morning, Elena." She greeted, collecting her regrets and pushing them away once more.

"Hey, Sam," Elena smiled brightly back at her. "I hear your sister is doing better."

She gave a small nod in response. "Yeah, she is. She's staying a few more days in Kenosha, but she'll be back home soon."

"That's great," Elena turned her head back down to the files she was looking through. "We were all really worried."

Sam, however, could not help but wonder how 'great' her coworkers would think it was when they learned the truth. "Are we still working the Burris case?" She asked, changing the subject.

"Yeah," Elena motioned to the papers spread out on the conference table. "I had no idea teenagers could get into so much trouble! I thought I was bad enough when I was a kid."

Sam simply shrugged. She rarely thought of Elena as 'green' anymore, but nothing about this case shocked Sam. She brushed her own feelings to one side like she had done so many times in the past, wondering if maybe this time would be the last. "So, how old will Sofie be when you finally let her out of the house?" she teased.

"Twenty-five!" Elena laughed. "Anyway, Vivian went back to the high school to interview the boyfriend's ex, who we think had a grudge, and Martin is at the house with the family. He really seems to have connected with the younger brother, and he was hoping to see if he could get him to open up. He knows something that he's not telling us."

She took in the developments in the case they had been working on when her sister had gone missing, and she turned to finger several of the files laid out before her. Sam had just begun to read through the arrest report on one of their missing person's best friends when she noticed Elena's eyes focused on her, studying her intently.

She tilted her head, looking curiously back at her co-worker.

"Sorry," Elena said apologetically. "It's just, I never knew that you and Martin had been, uh..."

Sam instantly felt as though the wind had been knocked out of her. She always assumed that Elena knew -- through one branch of the Bureau grapevine or another -- only to find out that her fellow agents had more respect for her personal life than she did herself.

Too shaken to allow herself to speak, she was almost grateful when Elena continued. "I guess I never really saw it before, but you two would have been a good match. It's too bad things didn't work out..."

Elena spoke with such a casual ease that it felt like a knife twisting in her gut, and she once again fought the urge to impart advice to her friend.

"Yeah," Sam swallowed, agreeing in an even voice. "It's too bad." And even as the words left her mouth, she felt still guiltier about their break up than she had the day that Danny had found out.

It had been over a week since Martin had broken up with her, and Sam was still fighting the inevitability of settling back into her routine of being single.

When she woke up alone that morning, it took several seconds before she realized that the bed beside her was cold -- not because Martin had been up early to run and would be bustling around her kitchen making coffee and watching Sports Center, but because Martin had not been over at all.

She shook the vestiges of sleep quickly, however, chiding herself in her carelessness of allowing such thoughts. She rose from her bed, willing herself to ignore the unnamed ghost who slept beside her at night, and busied herself in putting coffee on and getting ready for work.

She ran into the elderly woman who lived two doors down while she was waiting for the elevator, choosing her words carefully when asked where "that nice young man" was and hating that Martin got on better with her neighbors than she did.

When she arrived at the office, she found Jack and Vivian trading middle school horror stories and chatting casually about their children while Danny sat comfortably at his desk, hiding a game of Spider Solitaire behind his Bureau email.

"Morning, Danny," she waved, sounding far more cheerful than she felt.

Danny minimized his Spider Solitaire window, whirling around in his office chair. "Oh, hey Sam! Listen, I've been meaning to ask you something."

"Sure. What's up?" She said, coming to lean against the side of the conference table.

"A friend of mine bought tickets for his whole family to go see the Yankees and Mets play at Shea during Interleague Play in June, but his wife just got invited to speak at this conference thing that's apparently a really big deal. He has six tickets, and he offered to give them to me. So I was thinking that we could make a thing of it: you know, an early dinner and the game. Viv and Marcus, you and Martin, me and..."

"Danny!" Her voice was quiet but forceful.

"What?" He answered at full volume, and she felt her face flush, embarrassed. Martin obviously hadn't told him.

"I don't think --" she began to stutter, unsure of what to say.

"Oh!" Danny's eyes lit up excitedly. "Is that the weekend of his cousin's wedding? I'm glad you decided to take the time off and go with him!"

"It's not that," she lowered her eyes to look down at her shoes. "We broke up."

It was the first time she had said the words out loud, and they stung as they left her mouth.

They hung in the air, cutting bitter and deep.

She walked away before Danny had a chance to say anything further, and she left him looking as stunned and disappointed as she felt.

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Forty minutes later, Sam signed the incident report in the use of force meeting with steady hands although she was sure the other agents could hear her heart racing. For the second time in an hour, she was rendered barely able to breathe.

Jack rose from the table first, with Agents Olzcyk and Newman following close behind. Sam was unaware of how she herself rose to follow, and only vaguely heard her own reply as Agent Newman told her that the administrative angle would be cleared up before the end of the business day.

"Sorry to blindside you like that," Jack said, although his tone was neither completely apologetic nor completely professional.

"You made it impossible for me to tell the truth without getting you in trouble." She led, turning her head and wondering what he thought he was doing.

"I know." And it seemed that was all Jack wanted to say on the matter, as he changed the subject the second the elevator doors opened in front of them. "Did you get the bone marrow test?"

She sighed. "This morning. They'll let me know sometime next week." She squared her shoulders and turned her eyes up toward his. "I was going to tell the truth. I'm kind of tired of being stuck in this."

"But you're not stuck anymore. You did tell the truth, to me."

As she looked back down at the elevator floor, her eyes wandering, she wanted to know if that was supposed to comfort her. "What do I do? I just forget about it?" She asked.

"No," he replied with words too quick to be calculated, but too cliché to be sincere. "You learn how to forgive yourself, so if you screw up it's for something you do now, not for something that happened decades ago that you had no control over."

Not for the first time in the past several days, she fought the urge to slap him; she had always despised when he lectured her. Instead, she raised her eyebrow, replying with an even skepticism. "Is that supposed to be wise?"

"No, not really," he said with a smile that she could see right through, sighing as they exited the elevator. "I'm just not really to see you leave yet."

She stopped, turning her body to face him. "I'm tired, Jack," she admitted. And she was, tired of carrying the burden of her secret, tired of constantly looking over her shoulder, tired of lying to herself and to the people around her.

But he apparently could not see that, and she was tired of giving him too much credit.

"I know you are, honey," he sounded more like her father than her ex-lover, and her stomach churned. "Why don't you take a couple days off?"

"I will," she said absent-mindedly, shrugging it off as they went opposite directions down the hallway. For the first time it felt like she was leaving him behind, instead of the other way around.

She re-entered the bullpen feeling determined, when she saw Martin's head bent over a background check, bagel in one hand and coffee in the other. She had never before fully appreciated that some things never change.

"Did Lenny give you anything more?" She came up behind him, asking him about his meeting with the younger brother.

"Sam!" He exclaimed, his voice muffled as he chewed. He rotated the chair so that he was facing her, and looked for a second like he might rise to hug her.

She was almost disappointed when he did not. His smile, however, seemed to be the first genuine one she had seen all day, so she welcomed that readily instead.

"I'm really glad that things turned out okay with your sister," he said, once he had finished swallowing.

Her breath caught in her throat, and all she could do was nod.

"Hey!" She said with surprise as an image popped up on Martin's computer screen; the scarred, sullen face of Allan Tylman, known associate of the same Edward Freeman that Martin had been searching for, stared back at them. Sam quickly stepped over to the white board that held several sketches of potential suspects, retrieving a sketch and holding it next to the computer. "What do you think?"

She felt Martin's eyes scan back and forth between the sketch and the computer-generated picture, knowing that he was mentally adding a beard to the on-screen image as she had done before. "I think we have a viable suspect," he said finally, grinning at her. "What do you say we pay Mr. Tylman a house call?"

"I think that sounds like a brilliant plan," she said, returning his smile easily.

It was only as she heard the remote control to Martin's car click and echo through the quiet of the parking garage did she remember that Jack had told her to take a few days off.

Their missing sixteen-year-old girl was more important. Her time off could wait.

She opened the door on the passenger side, lowering herself into the seat, and she shared an easy laugh with Martin as he brought her up-to-date on the details of the case. Today seemed to be one of the rare occasions when she and Martin could speak easily around each other, almost as though there was no history between them.

Elena's words from earlier that morning echoed in her ears, and she swallowed hard, feeling the guilt settle in the pit of her stomach.

"Hey," Martin breathed, concern etched across his forehead even as he drove. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," her voice came in a soft whisper.

She squared her shoulders determinedly, bracing herself as the car pulled out into the late morning sunlight, and once again willed her heart not to break.

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