A Healing Heart

It was mine, my home, my haven,

And he smashed it like glass in an angry hand,

Filling his soul with the splinters of my life.

No matter how many times I tried,

I could not unbreak the broken.

I stood over the trash bin,

The swept up pieces of shattered peace

Poised for disposal

As his body entered the place of burning,

As his soul entered the place of burning,

But I could not tip my hand,

Could not consign my home to the garbage.

Bones mend, don't they?

Wounds heal.

They scar,

But scar tissue,

They say,

Is the strongest.

And so I stayed execution

On the debris of my life.

As I had not stayed my hand on the trigger.

I restored what I could

Replaced what I had to

And I healed what was left.

And day by day,

in the silence of my home

I heal what is left.

SMT, 2007

Chapter 8: Making a Stand

Stella stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. She could smell the coffee brewing in her kitchen, could feel the peace and solitude of her little space, the apartment she had scrubbed and cleansed and repainted. She had even asked Father Tony from St Augustine's to do a house blessing a few weeks ago.

After Frankie Mala had attacked her and held her captive in her own home, she had wondered if she could ever go back. The woman from Victim's Services, the departmental therapist, even Mac had counseled her against it, telling her that making a clean break with the past would be better, more beneficial for her healing. She had refused all advice, of course, and returned when she came out of hospital, only to throw some clothes in a bag and retreat to a hotel for a week after all.

Then she had come back, after Crime Scene Cleanup had done its work, and started to do her own work. This was her place after all, the first place she had lived in that owed nothing to the system, owed nothing to anyone but her. Bouncing around foster homes and institutions most of her childhood, living in dorms and women's residences during her college years, she had found and decorated this little space of her own. It was her refuge and her nest and all the homes she had never had when she was growing up.

She'd be damned if she let a sadistic psychopath take that away from her for good.

Wrapping the towel around her, she wandered in to the kitchen and poured herself coffee, adding cream and putting down toast in well-rehearsed patterns. She caught sight of the empty bottle of wine still sitting on the counter, and ran her hand over it consideringly.

By the time her toast had popped up, she was on her second cup of coffee and had picked out the clothes she was wearing for work. A normal morning, on a normal day, getting ready for work, just as usual.

"Oh, who the hell are you kidding?" she groused as she crunched down on her toast. "You have a bad case of the morning after the night before."

Not hung-over, although half a bottle of wine should have had that effect. Stella guessed that eating ten tons of pasta and drinking over three hours could spread the effect out. But eating and talking to Don had been so easy, it hadn't seemed unusual to be only cleaning up the dinner dishes at nearly 11:00 at night. And then, just as decisions needed to be made, conversations needed to be had, his cell phone rang, and he was off.

"Well," she comforted herself, "It's not like I couldn't have expected it. After all, he took a couple of hours out of his workday yesterday to go out to the Messers. I knew he was on secondary call, too. At least he got to eat."

So far, as a couple, they'd managed one coffee, one meal, one road trip (even if a short one) and two, nearly three, amazing bouts of sex. Stella felt her cheeks heat at the thought.

So where the hell had "Love ya', Stel," come from? She knew he had said it just as he went to sleep. She had felt the words burn into her. Then he woke a few minutes later, and never mentioned it.

Of course, neither had she.

The last person who had told her that was Frankie. Involuntarily, she glanced at the window which had framed him as she blew three bullets into him. Then she shook it off: this was her home, and he had no place here.

And, even after all the talking they had done last night, Don had managed to completely avoid the topic of the Messer family and what he knew about Danny.

It wasn't gossip, Stella tried to convince herself, if she only wanted to know in order to help a friend. She didn't want to know just for the sake of knowing, the way she wanted to know, for example, whether Lindsay and Danny had managed to have sex in Montana, and whether it had remained overwhelming for the cocky New Yorker. She was pretty sure it would have been for the less experienced Lindsay.

No, she wanted to get all the details on that purely the way she wanted to buy new shoes whenever she had a bad day: it just made her feel happy. But the bad blood between Mac and Don and the Messer family – that was more like a curiosity chip in her head: she wouldn't be able to think about anything else until she had that cleared up.

Because she had a bad feeling about this. The Sassones, the Messers, the Flacks, Mac: the whole setup screamed trouble. And Danny was going to be in the middle of it. And if he was, then so was Lindsay.

Stella may not have been able to stop what happened in Montana. She hadn't been able to help Lindsay out there. But once Linds came back to New York, she was Stella's again. And Stella didn't let people she loved get hurt. It was like an article of faith for her.

She dressed and left her apartment, walking out to the nearby subway stop. As she did, she made two calls: one to Flack, whose phone went straight to voice mail, so she left a message.

The second to St Augustine's.

-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-

To: Aisha Blanco

From: Adam Ross

Subject: R U talking 2 me yet?

send

-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-

Reed jumped up from his chair and started clearing the table, stacking the dishes in the dishwasher after scraping them, wiping the grease out of the frying pan before putting it in the sink and filling it with hot water. He did it all so automatically that Mac could only mentally compliment his mother on having trained him well.

"Well," Mac's thought continued down that line, "If he's not ready to tell you why he's here, get to him from a different angle."

"Tell me about your parents, Reed," he said casually as he filled his coffee cup yet again. He shoved the chair he had been sitting in away from the table a little, into the early morning sunshine and half-closed his eyes, lifting his face to the warmth.

Reed glanced at him as if wondering about the change of topic, but then shrugged and topped up his coffee as well, before pulling himself up on the kitchen counter, swinging feet that were several inches off the ground.

"My dad, he's a librarian. Peter Garrett. He works at the New York Public Library. I used to walk to the Library from school and wait for him every day. I'd sit in the children's section and read or do homework."

Reed's eyes were bright and his body was relaxed. He wasn't worried about his dad, Mac diagnosed.

"And your mother?"

Reed stiffened, and some of the light was dimmed by worry, "She's a lawyer. Well, a city councilor, now."

Mac sat up a little, "Miranda Garrett? She's your mother?"

Reed nodded, and looked down at his hands, wrapped whitely around the edge of the counter. "I thought you'd call her my adoptive mother."

"Why? She brought you up, didn't she? Claire …" Mac's voice faded a bit as he said his wife's name, but he cleared his throat and carried on strong, "Claire always said she wondered what your parents were like. A librarian and a politician! I don't know whether she would have guessed that."

"You said she talked about me?"

"Every year, on your birthday, Claire would bring home a little cake. She called it her 'best worst day' cake. She'd put on the right number of candles, and blow them out for you. And she'd make a wish." Mac kept his eyes closed. Too much. The memories, flooding back now, were too much.

"What kinds of wishes?" Reed's voice was muffled.

"She didn't always tell me – it's bad luck. When you turned three, she wished a brother or sister for you. When you turned five, she wished you would like kindergarten." Mac sighed, "She wished that you would be healthy and happy, always. Her last wish… the year you turned thirteen … was that the teenage years would be easy for you."

Reed looked up. "I always have two gift days: one on my birthday, and one on my adoption day. My dad always gives me a book on my adoption day. At first it was a book, you know, about being adopted. Later, it was something he thought I should read. When I was twelve, they told me that I could look for my mother when I was eighteen. I'd always known that I had a birth mother out there somewhere. It's nice to know she thought about me too."

Mac stood up and turned away, briskly rubbing a hand over his wet eyes. "You want the first shower? I have to go in to work pretty soon here." He actually was on the later shift, but perhaps the threat of having to leave would open Reed up.

"Um, that's okay. I'll go back to the dorm. Mac, I … thanks for letting me stay. I think I over-reacted to something I heard. I'm okay now." Reed dropped off the counter, refusing to look Mac in the eyes.

Mac stopped and put his hands on Reed's thin shoulders. "Reed, if you want to tell me, want me to help you work something out, I'm here. Sometimes if you say something out loud, you can figure out more about it. That's why we work in teams at CSI, so that we can talk things out, bounce ideas off each other."

Reed looked up at him, a flicker of hope deep in his eyes. "Some of it sounds stupid."

Mac pushed him into a chair and grinned a little. "Then let's sort out what's stupid from what's worrying, okay?"

-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-CSI:NY-

When Stella got into work, the office seemed unusually quiet. Mac and Hawkes were both on later shifts than she was today, and Adam was hiding and sulking in his lab. She had statements to prepare for a court appearance that afternoon, and with a sigh she pulled up the information on her computer.

There was always more information than a jury could easily take in or understand: it was one of the jobs of an investigator to make the most important things accessible to the average person on a jury. Stella didn't subscribe to the cynical view of jurors as "people too stupid to get out of jury duty".

According to Mac, "It was a significant part of civic responsibility to be willing to put personal concerns aside and give time to the business of the State." Like every one on his team, Stella saw her role as educating citizens as well as presenting a case for the prosecution. The case she was preparing was a reasonably simple one, but the conclusion led directly from the evidence she was presenting.

"Get that right, they get it all right," she thought to herself as she reviewed the case files.

Her cell phone rang and she answered it offhandedly, "Bonasera."

"Stella? It's Lindsay," the younger woman's voice shook slightly.

"Lindsay!" Stella nearly dropped the phone, but recovered quickly. "Are you all right? Where are you? What's happening? When are you coming back?"

Lindsay chuckled, sounding more relaxed as she tried to answer even one of the questions that had tumbled out of Stella's mouth. "I'm at home, at the ranch, I mean. We're … all right, I guess, considering. I have to stay this week for the hearing into Forbes' appeal. It'll be dismissed; we have all the evidence we need against him. He didn't kill them all, but he did shoot Cameron and Mark. I'll be home as soon as I can after that."

Stella smiled at hearing her call New York home, "What about Danny? How is he doing?"

"My mom insisted on springing Danny, so he's here with me. He was going stir crazy in the hospital. I don't think he should have come out so soon."

Stella could imagine Lindsay biting her bottom lip as she did when she was worried. "Your mom wouldn't have supported him leaving if she didn't think he would be okay, Lindsay. Sometimes, people just need to do things their own way."

"My mother would do anything Danny asked her to. I notice she didn't bring me home so quickly," Lindsay grumbled.

"So, your mom likes him?" Stella probed.

"No. My mom loves him. She loves him more than she does me, I think. And my dad seems to like him, which is weird. And even Mick and Jamie are nice to him. It's all very strange, Stel."

"I notice you didn't add John to the Danny Messer Fan Club list," Stella teased.

"No," Lindsay laughed. "John still doesn't do more than tolerate him. At least I can count on him."

Stella chuckled. "You and Danny … you two okay?" Details would have to wait until she could get Lindsay alone and off guard, but the big question had to be asked.

Lindsay was silent for a minute; then she sighed. "He got shot, Stella. A through and through from back to front. It should have killed him. And then, he crawled – I don't know how far, 20 yards? – to the cabin. And came in with his gun in his hand, covered in blood, soaked to the skin. Every time I close my eyes, I see him like that."

"Lindsay," Stella broke in before Lindsay lost her composure. "Danny is a tough guy, you know. And he was where he wanted to be, where he had to be. He loves you."

"I love him, too." It came out as a whisper, then Lindsay sighed and said it with more confidence, "Of course I do. But …"

"No," Stella interrupted. "No buts. In our line of work, there's no time for buts." She looked up at a movement in the doorway, and her eyes widened as she saw Don Flack leaning up against the doorway. Her voice lowered and warmed as she said, "When life could change in a minute, Lindsay, you grab on to whatever good thing comes into it and you don't let go. Do you hear me?"

Flack nodded once, his blue eyes unreadable.