Jane wishes she could say she's surprised when Maura doesn't show up the next morning. She doesn't need anyone to tell her 'Dr Isles has taken a personal day', but everyone does, in their own way, though not always out loud. Korsak's making sympathetic eyes at her over his first coffee and Frost smiles at her like he's in on some little secret. The whole thing makes her sick.

She doesn't want their sympathy. She doesn't need it. Maura needs it. The only thing she wants from them is for things to stay normal, but apparently that's not the plan, and with Maura missing, it only makes things worse. She spends the whole day frustrated and glaring in silence while everyone gives her a ten-foot clearance. When she stops down in the café for a moment, Ma corners her and her frustration boils over. "What? What do you want?"

And there's that familiar look of hurt that, as always, sends Jane into a guilty spiral. "I didn't realize you were going to be so…hostile."

"I'm sorry, okay? Today's been…stressful."
"Well, then you won't like this…"
"Do you have to do that? Just tell me. It can't get any worse."
"I think it might be better if I stay with you a few nights while this whole thing blows over, babe."
"What, you mean for as long as Maura still hates me? Because that's gonna be a while."
"Janie, don't be like that. You'll work it out."

She wishes she could say no, but she knows very well that there's nowhere else for her mother to stay. She pushes a hand through her hair and sighs heavily, hardening her own resolve. "Yes. Yeah, you're probably right."

.,.

Jane is surprised by how little her mother has, materially speaking. When she picks her up at Maura's house, she only has two boxes and a suitcase of clothes. And even though it's been a while since the divorce, and the house, and that whole mess, she's struck with a pang of grief so strong she wants to cry. The idea that you could love someone enough to pledge to spend the rest of your life with them, and then they could turn around and leave you with next to nothing…it terrifies her. And it's not fair, especially not now.

She puts a brave face on because she knows better than to let anything but efficiency take over while she's feeling like such a wreck, but when she pulls away she can see Maura watching them through her window, her face perfectly expressionless. By the time she's back at her apartment she knows she's going to go back later to say the things she had wanted to say when she waited outside the hospital. She knows she needs to apologize, and she needs to know, some way or another, what's going on in Maura's mind. She has a hunch that it was Maura who asked her mother to movee out, and she feels less betrayed by that than she thought she would. It makes too much sense to upset her. After a quiet dinner a la Angela, and some brief small talk that she vaguely registers as involving Tommy and his new apartment and his new job as a pizza guy, she gets up and grabs her coat.

"Where are you going?"
"To talk to Maura."
"Don't you think…maybe you should just leave it for a while?"

As if Angela has any idea how much worse things would be. As if she can even possibly begin to understand what damage it does to their professional relationship if the two of them aren't on speaking terms. "No," she says simply, "I don't."

.,.

Maura's house has never seemed so oddly unfriendly before. It's too quiet, too gray, too…looming. Jane feels like an intruder when she fishes the spare key she was given out of her pocket and turns the lock. The moment she's inside, Maura glances up from where she's cleaning something over the sink and addresses her with the same cold casualty she might a lab tech.

"Jane, please leave."

No hello, nothing. The detective straightens, catching her friend's gaze and trying in vain to keep it there. Maura looks away almost immediately, the same hurt in her eyes as before.

"No, Maura. We have to talk about this."

Maura shakes her head, her usually-perfect hair falling limply in front of her face.

"I'm sorry."

Jane repeats herself, clasping her clammy hands together for a moment. "I'm sorry, Maura. I'm so sorry, I mean it." The truth is that she's never meant anything more. She feels too much, too many different things welling up inside of her- too much she can't name taking over everything she does. The numbness she's forced upon herself for the past day and a half is gone now. She can remember Maura crawling into the ambulance. She can remember how fragile Maura had been in the wake of the destruction she'd caused. She doesn't expect Maura to speak, much less for the tone of her voice to make her want so badly to cry.

"When they looked over the body, Frost looked at Doyle's gun, and it wasn't loaded. He'd used his last two bullets, Jane, defending me and defending himself. If Cavanaugh finds out- if Doyle dies, and Cavanaugh finds out the gun was empty, you can be tried for murder."

It isn't the word murder that makes Jane's blood run cold. It isn't the reality of the situation crashing down onto her that makes her tremble suddenly and violently. It is, quite simply, Maura's voice: detached, flat, empty. Maura has given up. And without Maura, Jane doesn't know that she has any reason to try. She sucks in a deep, shuddering breath, and lets herself fall into the rift between them, tucking her emotions neatly back into place.

"Are you gonna tell him?" As if she's sensed that Jane's resolved not to feel anything else for the time being, Maura looks up, and her eyes have grayed into something that's no longer recognizable as green. No longer recognizable as Maura at all. "I don't want to."

That, at the very least, has a ring of honesty to it. Something surges against Jane's chest and she refuses to let it out, clamping her teeth together because if she doesn't she knows she'll say something she'll regret.

"I don't want to, but I'm not going to lie to him."

She ought to have known. Even if she hadn't shot Doyle- if it had been some other crime lord- and Maura knew, there would have been that complication. Maura's morals, as they have always probably been, are stronger than anything else. Certainly stronger than the friendship Jane has shattered clean to pieces with one shot.

"I screwed up, Maura. I'm sorry. I should have done something else. Anything else."

Even if she meant that- and she isn't sure that she does- she can't think of another way the situation could have ended. She says it mainly because she feels like it needed to be said, not because she thinks it would fix anything, because she knows Maura is smart enough to see through it.

"I asked you to leave."
"I'm not going anywhere until we talk."

.,.

Maura can feel her entire body trembling with anger. Not anger, obviously, the physical manifestations of anger: the decrease of seratonin and the sudden influx of adrenaline. Either way, she's shaking slightly, but she's also determined to wipe that look off of Jane's face. She looks hurt, she looks scared, and she looks a thousand other things that she has no right to feel at all. She isn't the one who might lose her father. She isn't the one whose best friend has just betrayed her. She has no reason on Earth to feel as if she deserves some kind of forgiveness or sympathy, and Maura certainly isn't going to give it to her. Not anymore.

"You knew that Doyle wasn't going to shoot you," she's surprised at the steadiness of her own voice, given the constriction of her trachea. "He knew who you were, and he knew you hadn't given him up yet. Even if he'd had bullets left, he wasn't going to hurt you or Detective Frost."

Jane never had a comeback to rationality, but Maura doesn't bother to wait for one. She lifts her chin and feels a twinge of annoyance when Jane looks away.

"And you let Agent Dean get in the way of your job. Doyle's relation to me and his relation to the case should have been confidential. If you had been thinking about protecting me and solving the case, you wouldn't have exposed anything to him." Maura could tell moments after seeing them together that Jane had exposed more than just information to him. Their body language had indicated almost painfully obviously that he felt possessive over her, and that she, in her way, was acting the submissive. It shouldn't have bothered her as much as she did. But then, she's always been aware of her feelings for Jane, lurking insensitively in the back of her mind. Not something that helps build a healthy working relationship- in fact, her 'feelings' are what caused her to slip up and let Jane so close, in spite of her better judgment. And now, like everyone else, Jane has disappointed her.

Jane looks up and the hurt in her eyes almost softens Maura's frustration. But no- no. Jane doesn't deserve that, doesn't deserve to feel hurt, she only deserves to feel remorse and the utter wrongness of her actions. All of her actions, from trusting Gabriel Dean down to destroying their relationship.

"You let him get in the way of our relationship," Maura continues, nails digging into her palms.

Please. Make my words important. Make her hear me.

"I trusted you, and you barely knew him, but you told him things about me that I…I thought you'd never tell anyone."

She's said too much, but it's the time and the place for that. There it is- remorse flickers over Jane's face, and the anger in Maura is sated for a moment, until Jane speaks and ruins everything all over again. "I should have been with you."

You should have been with me. You should have been with me, you should always, always have been with me. From the start to the end. I wanted you with me. And now you've ruined it.

Jane interprets it platonically- 'I should have been with her while her mother was critical in the hospital instead of screwing Dean'- and she agrees. Maura means it much, much differently. She means it in every possible way there is to mean it, and it hurts. It hurts that she trusted someone with her heart and soul and life and it hurts that her trust is broken and now she has nobody. Because in another life, Jane could have been her everything. They were close enough, or at least they had been close enough before everything went to hell. Jane was her best friend- she could have easily pushed past that into soul mate territory, into days and days spent doing nothing but being with each other.

"Please go."

And Maura hates herself for believing it could have happened.

Jane turns to go, and Maura watches her, still shaking. Her voice surprises her and she startles slightly, fairly sure that a few minutes from now she won't be able to stand on her own two feet anymore. "Jane."

.,.

Jane, for her part, is baffled. And hurt, and quite sure she's never felt as horribly about something in her entire life. She knows that if Doyle dies Maura will never, ever forgive her. And she can't help but feel like she's missing something, a piece of the equation. She stops when Maura says her name, even though it's not a question, and she's afraid of what Maura's feeling.

"You were right. You should have been with me."

Maura is inches from her. Jane wonders if it's that easy, if Maura has already forgiven her, if they can move on now and she'll live through the nightmares of this day over and over as long as she can just have her friendship back. She realizes very quickly that this isn't the case.

Quite suddenly, Maura's lips are on hers, and something that should have felt, to her, like an invasion of space, a betrayal, anything but long overdue….just feels long overdue. Jane is startled more by how natural it feels and less by the fact that it's happening.

In fact, given her decision-making skills in the past 24 hours, it's very likely that Jane Rizzoli's best decision of the past day or so is to kiss Maura back in the few seconds she can before Maura pulls away. Their breaths mingle and their eyes meet as if they've never properly met before.

"I really think you should go."

And she does.