Once the panic attack subsided, exhaustion - and the effects of her medication - sent Amanda right off to sleep. It was a long nap for her - a good two hours - but Alex figured she needed it and let her sleep. In the meantime, she busied herself tidying up the study and paying a few bills online.
Alex went to organize Amanda's desk - the working clutter was just shy of becoming unmanageable - and stumbled across a photo album full of old pictures that Amanda must have been sorting through. The fact that they were in an album struck her as odd, until she realized that they had to be Amanda's personal family photos.
Amanda did not have a single framed photo of her family anywhere in the apartment - there were copious photos and collages of her and Alex together over the years, and a few of Alex's parents, even a few of Alex as a baby, but that wasn't at all what Alex had been talking about whenever she'd asked about the lack of mementos.
Alex hesitated for a moment as she stared at the album, weighing the potential invasion of Amanda's privacy against the need to know what Amanda had been looking at - not to mention her own personal curiosity. Deciding to open the album - she'd deal with Amanda's anger later, if need be - and flipped through a series of both color and black and white photos spanning decades.
The pictures were in chronological order, exactly as she'd expect Amanda to have arranged them, and it wasn't hard to flip through them until she got to the pictures of Amanda's mother. Even if the images hadn't been neatly labeled - also as expected - the resemblance between mother and daughter would have immediately identified Caroline Harrington Collins.
There were also images of Amanda's father, Major Matthew Collins. He had the same imperious - and sometimes even cruel - expression that Alex had sometimes seen in Amanda herself. The military uniform he was typically photographed wearing did little to soften his image - and the blank, defeated look often seen on his wife's face in later photos would have told the ugly story there even if Alex hadn't known it.
From 1969 through the late 1980s, Amanda - smiling and happy, at least in the earlier photos - was generally pictured beside a girl who could have been - and in fact was - her twin sister. They were identical in every way, though Alex felt she could easily pick out Amanda. By the end, though, she had no trouble telling Amanda from her sister - the other Collins daughter had grown unhealthily skinny by then, red hair lank and blue eyes gaunt.
It was an unnerving contrast to the images of a thriving, healthy, vibrant Amanda during her adolescence and early adulthood - especially when Alex weighed the images against the Amanda of the last year or so.
{*****}
The revelation of Amanda's family history to Alex was a fairly recent thing. Amanda had made no secret that her family history was an unhappy one she'd rather not dwell on, but it had only been well into Alex's sophomore year at college that she'd seen fit to share the sordid details.
The copious amounts of wine she and Alex had consumed that night had probably also had something to do with it, but that was neither here nor there.
Caroline Harrington - later Collins - had been an artist and painter of no little ability, something she'd passed on to Amanda's sister. She was also a debutante from a Southern society family with a good name and very little money. What little they had left was spent on Caroline's debut, in hopes of marrying her off to a young man from an equally good and far wealthier family.
As one might expect from her high intelligence and artistic leanings, though, Caroline had been something of a free, rebellious spirit. None of the men her family considered appropriate choices had really interested her or could even come close to 'taming' her.
When she discovered the emerging hippie movement during a trip to California, her parents had decided it was time for drastic action - for Caroline's own good, and the good of the family. They sent her to Paris to live with an older cousin, hoping that travel and the indulgence of her love of painting might be enough to finally get the Bohemian out of her system.
It worked, after a fashion.
Matthew Collins graduated Harvard summa cum laude in 1960 and went directly into the Army. He was everything the Harrington family had been searching for - he was from a wealthy family of acceptable pedigree, as well as handsome, charismatic, and well-educated.
Somehow, he'd managed to get the Army to send him to medical school abroad, where he also completed his residency in psychiatry while adding schools like Cambridge and Oxford to his resume. During that time, he apparently fell in love with Europe and did everything he could to stay stationed there.
In January 1969, he made his usual weekend trip over to Paris, where he met a free-spirited American girl who spoke Parisian French with the most adorable Southern drawl. The girl - Caroline Harrington - was pregnant before the weekend ended.
A hasty but lavish wedding in Richmond was the only obvious solution for Caroline's predicament - which Caroline went along with despite her doubts. The newly married Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Collins then moved into a Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan, where Matthew Collins had gotten a teaching fellowship at Columbia. Amanda and her sister Helen were born that October, a mere six months after the wedding.
Caroline's secret, unspoken doubts had proved well-founded - her spirit was broken in frighteningly short order by a difficult birth, the myriad stresses of mothering twin daughters, and marriage to a man she had apparently never really known at all. Matthew Collins, also in very short order, showed himself to be jealous, autocratic, verbally abusive, and pathologically narcissistic.
Caroline started drinking heavily before her daughters were even a year old.
Matthew noticed his eldest daughter's intelligence early on - or perhaps simply assumed it and was lucky enough to be correct - and determined that she would follow in his footsteps as his intellectual heir. Amanda, by the age of twelve, was already on a steady diet of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard - and that didn't include the various biology and science textbooks she was expected to study in her spare time.
Amanda and her sister were also expected to engage in dialectics three times a week after they had completed their regular school assignments. They would convene in their father's study, where he would assign them opposing sides on whatever issue had caught his fancy.
The girls were then expected to present their arguments over dinner the following night.
This was not a problem for Amanda, who might even have enjoyed the exercise under different circumstances. Helen Collins, however, took after her mother Caroline - she was every bit as intelligent as her sister Amanda, but that intelligence expressed itself through art and music. The cold, rigorous logic demanded by Matthew Collins was foreign to her, and she never caught the hang of it.
Amanda loved her sister and did everything she could to help. She would coach Helen in secret to help her prepare for the next day - if all else failed, she risked her father's wrath by pretending to be unprepared, or by deliberately sabotaging her own argument.
Matthew Collins was too smart to be fooled for long, however. He raged at Helen for her 'intellectual inferiority' and punished her in every way he could think of - Amanda's compassion for Helen only added to his fury, and he took that out on Helen as well.
Even Caroline could see how damaging the situation was, and shook off her alcoholism long enough to try to help her daughters. It was no use, though - the debates didn't end until thirteen-year-old Helen ran away to live in Central Park for several days. Once the police located her and returned her to her parents, she was shipped off to a boarding school - Matthew had meant it as a punishment for humiliating him, but it ended up being the best thing for all of them.
Not that the peace it brought lasted very long.
Amanda despised her father with every fiber of her being, but she was truly his intellectual heir. She feared him as much as she hated him, but couldn't keep herself from fighting to win his approval. She loved her mother, too, but couldn't see Caroline's drinking and passivity as anything other than weakness to be ashamed of.
Even before things had reached their breaking point, Amanda had assumed the role of protector and mediator. She spent countless hours lying awake at night trying to anticipate the next crisis so that she could figure out how to avoid it. This was the very beginning of her career as a psychologist - staring up at the ceiling in her bedroom, trying to read her family's thoughts, to dream their dreams.
Her attempts to keep the peace also instilled a relentless perfectionism into her. No one - not even her father - would ever be as hard on her as she was on herself.
Helen Collins, unfortunately, had also inherited her mother's weak spirit and addictive tendencies. She died of a drug overdose before ever seeing her nineteenth birthday.
By that time, Amanda was in her first year at Barnard, the women's college of Columbia - exactly as her father had planned. She'd fought bitterly to go to Radcliffe instead, but Matthew Collins fought even harder to keep her in sight and under his thumb. An arch-conservative - odd for a Columbia faculty member - he also had a streak of paranoia that left him convinced the world would warp his daughter into some sort of hippie radical if given half a chance.
Ironically enough, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Amanda had inherited Caroline's rebellious streak, and her bitterness over her father's heavy-handedness amplified it a thousand-fold. She became one of the prominent voices in campus unrest, at one point even helping to occupy one of the campus' administration buildings - that was the day she met Percival Rose, a graduate student and fellow radical. He had a mesmeric intensity to him that attracted her both mentally and physically, and she wasted no time acting on that attraction.
They were both arrested the next day, and no detail of the incident had escaped Matthew Collin's notice. Enraged, he threw Amanda out and forbade her to ever come back. She returned the slight by eloping with Percival - or Percy, as he preferred to be called - the day after Helen Collins' funeral.
They moved clear across the country so that could Amanda could start her graduate work at Berkeley. While Amanda lost herself in her psychology studies, Percy occupied himself by delving deeper and deeper into his already radical politics.
Percy eventually affiliated himself with increasingly questionable political groups. He never directly planted a bomb or fired a gun, but his name and his face were always out there on the periphery, tying him to those who had.
Amanda tried to ignore it all, choosing instead to immerse herself in her studies - she was enjoying herself immensely, all but obsessed with forensic psychology. It wasn't long, though, before Percy's behavior became impossible to overlook - she honestly couldn't have cared less about Percy's constant cheating with his groupies, but their home had become a haven and halfway house for fugitive and decidedly dangerous members of various radical groups. Their phones were being tapped, and the endless visits by various law enforcement agencies were becoming depressingly routine.
Amanda filed for divorce from Percival Rose after five years of marriage, part of her wondering if she had ever really loved him at all. Percy hadn't even blinked when she handed him the divorce papers, much less protested her filing of them. They still ran into each other occasionally - last time she'd seen him, he was newly remarried and slowly working his way up the ladder of mainstream politics, having somehow managed to escape his radical past.
Amanda, for her part, had never remarried. Oh, she'd dated plenty, but only a few relationships had even managed to become memorable, much less serious - and every one of those serious relationships had ended in heartache. There had been a torrid affair with a married professor that she still felt ashamed of herself for. There had also been an FBI agent down at Quantico during her time there - a woman, though that was hardly a new development for Amanda.
She'd honestly surprised herself with the depth of her feelings for Carla Bennett, and even allowed herself to envision a future for them, She'd had to call it off once it became clear that the relationship would never survive their divergent career paths, or their conflicting politics, and a part of her had never truly healed from that breakup.
Rather than wallow in grief, she'd thrown herself back into her work, becoming more obsessed than ever with serial killers and getting to the root of their sickness. The regret she felt over Carla Bennett - one of the few regrets she allowed herself - had been easy enough to ignore with teaching and research and writing to occupy her mind.
Even so, no matter how content she seemed to be, there were still days that she looked into the mirror and saw Matthew Collins staring back at her. Those were the days she she started drinking early.
{*****}
Amanda finally opened her eyes when Alex popped her head into the bedroom to check on her. Seeing her finally awake, Alex came over to sit beside her on the bed, not saying a word as Amanda shifted to lay her head on the pillow Alex had placed in her lap.
Alex just stroked Amanda's hair without saying a word, allowing Amanda some space and silence as she tried to sift through her foggy recollection of the earlier police visit. Grudgingly admitting to herself that alcohol and prescription drugs did terrible things to her faculties, Amanda finally just asked the one person present who did remember. "How bad was it?"
"Not bad," Alex assured her. "I got you out of there before anything major happened."
Amanda thought of Inspector Mears and sighed in relief. "Oh, thank god."
She'd worry later about why she felt such a sudden need to impress a total stranger...
Alex just chuckled, though she also displayed her uncanny knack for following Amanda's unspoken train of thought. "I wouldn't worry too much about it. She'll be back."
"I don't know what you mean," Amanda replied, feeling vaguely adolescent - and therefore ridiculous - even as she said it.
Alex jabbed her lightly in the ribs, a common gesture of playful affection from her. "You know exactly what - or who - I mean. Detective Inspector Nikita Mears. I saw the way you two were looking at each other - admit it, you were wondering if she's into wearing her handcuffs."
There were times that Amanda regretted having raised Alex to speak her mind - generally when that mind was directed at her, of course - but this time she couldn't help but laugh. She'd been wondering no such thing about the Inspector, but there had been a time where part of her would have been.
The laughter turned into a sob, which then turned into a hiccup as the worst of the remaining anxiety receded and Amanda began to regain what little balance she had left these days. "Is it possible that I actually miss dating?"
Alex chuckled again. "You hate dating. You miss sex."
That was as accurate an assessment as any Amanda herself had ever made, and couldn't help smiling a little. "Touche."
She'd had many lovers of varying gender identities, and made no secret of it - not to Alex, not to anyone else who had reason to discuss her sex life with her - but she also had to concede that her current dry spell had started long before she'd become housebound. Work had taken precedence over everything else - except Alex, of course - long before the attack.
Alex, for her part, hadn't seen Amanda look at someone the way she'd looked at the Inspector in... well, ever, though that was probably exaggerating. A subtle push to explore that attraction didn't seem like a bad idea - she'd just have to keep an eye on things to make sure nothing went too sideways. "You know, the Inspector left her card. Maybe you could call her, invite her back over."
Amanda could read between any lines Alex cared to draw, had been able to for years, and stiffened as she flashed back to what little she could recall of that damned file. "Alex..."
"I mean it," Alex insisted. "it's not being housebound that's killing you - it's being housebound with nothing to keep you busy. You called the station fourteen times, Amanda - because helping the cops solve cases like that one is what you do and you can't just ignore that."
Amanda just sighed. "Not anymore. And not after what happened earlier."
Alex pondered that for a moment. "You were already having a bad day and you weren't prepared for those crime scene photos. The folder's still here - take a look at them while you're actually prepared and see what happens."
She teasingly poked Amanda in the ribs one last time. "Besides, one of us has to pay the bills."
There had never been any danger of a money shortage, of course, but it made Amanda laugh a little, and that had been the whole point. That, and it made her think about how nice it might be to work again...
{*****}
It was now 8:45pm - the dead end of the shift - and Detective Inspector Nikita Mears sat hunched over her desk, studying photographs of women too close to her own age for comfort.
Lost in thought, she blew a lock of hair out of her face and started chewing on a nail. One leg was bouncing up and down under the desk, and she was hunched over enough that her hair was brushing the edges of the files spread across her desk.
It gave her the air of a schoolgirl pouring over her homework - a rare moment of distraction and vulnerability that made the man watching her smile.
Oblivious to the fact that she was being observed, Nikita grabbed a different set of photos - printouts of the crowd around Jennifer Lyle's apartment in Potrero Hills. She was so wrapped up in analyzing them that the sudden appearance of someone beside her startled her enough to instinctively reach for her gun.
Fortunately for Michael Bishop, her gun was currently locked in her desk drawer, out of her reach. Holding his hands up, he smiled apologetically. "It's just me."
She glared at him. "You startled me."
Michael didn't bother to point out that the annoyed glare was just as adorable as it had always been - he didn't have the right to, not anymore. Instead, he settled onto a clear corner of her desk. "I was about to grab dinner. You need anything?"
Nikita just shook her head. "Owen's on a food run already. Should be back any minute."
Then Michael looked down at the photos and files scattered across her desk, and weighed how long she'd been sitting there pouring over them. "You okay?"
She blew out a breath and closed her eyes. "Yeah. I just - talk to me about something happy, okay?"
Michael grinned. "Cassandra and I got our new place - we pick up the keys next week. Hayley and Max'll finally both have their own rooms."
"That's great!" Nikita teased. "But please tell me you also have room for a nursery. You're gonna need it here pretty soon."
Michael's smile widened at the thought of the new baby. "Just a few more weeks now. That reminds me - Cassandra wants me to invite you to the baby shower. I've got the invitation at my desk."
The moment suddenly turned awkward and uncomfortable, and Nikita's easy smile fled. "I don't really think I should..."
Michael shifted and reached out to touch Nikita's arm. "I already told you - she likes you. She doesn't care that we were together before, and it would mean a lot to her..."
That same wayward lock of hair had fallen back into Nikita's face, and he automatically reached out to move it. His fingers slid down the length of it - something they'd done a hundred times in the past - and they both froze as something suddenly sparked to life between them.
They both jumped apart as if scalded as Owen suddenly came walking back into the bullpen with dinner. He didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary - or maybe just did a good job of pretending he didn't - as he set a takeout bag on Nikita's desk. "Veggie burger, with sweet potato fries. Also got you an extra sweet iced tea."
Owen took the other bag to own desk. "I got an extra burger if you're hungry, Mikey."
Michael shook his head and muttered something about having just been on the way to get something for himself. Then he hurried out of the bullpen, not even bothering to be subtle about it.
Owen just looked at the door, then back at his partner. "Niki..."
"Don't start," Nikita told him, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes. "He wasn't trying anything - it was just one of those weird moments."
The look on Owen's face when she finally opened her eyes again made his estimation of her ability to keep from getting re-entangled with Michael Bishop perfectly clear - and considering what he'd walked in on just a few minutes earlier, Nikita was inclined to think that that estimation was probably spot on...
{*****}
At 8:50pm - while Nikita sat at her desk pondering the complexities of her (former) love life - Amanda Collins was sitting at her own desk in her study. Her computer was booted up and unlocked, but she was ignoring her email client in favor of staring at a nearby statue.
The statue was a small, abstract bronze casting of a woman, her arms reaching up toward the heavens. The figure was molded but not smoothed, leaving the piece with the rough, unfinished look of fingers pressed into clay. There was a certain earthy gutsiness to the piece as well - the woman seemed to be more a priestess conducting a rite than a mere mortal begging for divine assistance - and Amanda had fallen in love with it the moment she'd first seen it.
Staring at the figure's generous curves and confident pose, Amanda was reminded yet again of why she kept that particular piece in clear, easy view of the one place in her apartment she spent the most time in. Tonight - like so many other nights and days over the last year - she felt oddly compelled to reach out and touch the cool bronze, tracing out the sculptor's lines.
And just like every other time, she pulled up just short of actually touching the piece, something in her recoiling from the action. In quieter, calmer moments - like the current one - she understood quite clearly that it was because she no longer felt worthy to touch the statue that she'd always viewed as a symbol of her inner strength.
The file folder left by Nikita Mears caught her peripheral vision as she shifted her gaze to another, less painful focus. That momentary flash of manila was enough to bump her heart rate up a notch or two - which wasn't the least bit surprising - but something was different this time.
There was still the fear - that wasn't going to go away for a long while, if ever - only this time, there was also the faintest hint of her old passion and excitement underneath it...
Amanda stood up and went to pour herself a generous helping of cognac. Putting on her glasses - she wasn't going to bother with her contacts in her own home - she picked up the file and opened it. A couple minutes later, she reached for a notepad and pen. An hour - and another helping of cognac - later, her nerves were still surprising steady and she'd filled two pages with notes penned in her small, careful script.
It wasn't much - not compared to the sort of work she'd been known for in the past - but it was enough to leave her with a sense of satisfied accomplishment she hadn't felt in over a year. A satisfaction that faded a little as she caught sight of her bedraggled reflection in her monitor screen - sighing, she decided to head upstairs and soak in the tub, something she hadn't done in a good long while.
On the way up, she stopped to close a set of open blinds that neither she nor Alex had bothered to remember. There was a faint noise under the whir of the electric blinds, though, and she froze. not quite sure she'd heard it. She called out to Alex, but got no answer after a few tries - Alex obviously hadn't gotten home yet. Refusing to be cowed in her own home - especially at this particular moment - Amanda forced herself to dismiss the random noise, and moved on to her bedroom as she'd intended.
Once there, she stood in her closet looking between her dresser and the clothes hanging neatly in a row near it. It was late enough that she could easily justify changing back into her pajamas after her bath, but she found that she honestly didn't want to. Something had shifted inside her today - something good, she hoped - and she was actually surprisingly eager to get back to that police file to see if she could add to her initial notes.
Smiling without even realizing it, Amanda quickly selected a crisp white button down shirt and a pair of black slacks, accompanied by a bra and panty set that had once been a favorite but hadn't been worn in many, many months. She also decided - very much like her old self would have - that she didn't want to waste time soaking in the tub when she had work to do, and so a hot shower would have to suffice.
None of which meant, of course, that she didn't stay in the shower just a little longer than was strictly necessary. She left the water just as hot as she could stand it, but not so much in one of her usual neurotic attempts to wash away the memory of the attack as in an attempt to wash away the mental fog that seemed to surround her these days. Tonight, for once, it actually worked - by the time she shut the water off, she felt much more like herself than she could remember having felt in ages.
That lasted just long enough for her to walk out of her bathroom and back into her bedroom. The shirt and slacks she'd laid out were gone now, replaced by the red dress she'd been wearing the day Daryl Lee Cullum had attacked her. A different bra and panty set had been laid out as well, and Amanda quickly began sifting back through the day, trying to work out if the combination of panic attacks, medication, and alcohol could have led her to dissociate badly enough to set out the wrong clothes without realizing it.
Ultimately, she couldn't decide if it had or not. Unwilling to let anything ruin the progress she'd made in the last couple hours, Amanda just put everything back where it belonged - though she decided to save the shirt and slacks for tomorrow and chose a favorite set of silk pajamas instead.
Forcibly clearing her mind of everything except the case she was working, Amanda made her way downstairs and back to the study. Suddenly hungry as well, she stopped in the kitchen along the way, forgoing her usual steady diet of cognac for real food and some sparkling water.
A couple of hours later, she'd filled up several more pages with notes, and decided she'd done all she could do that night. Reaching for Nikita Mears' business card, she felt a long forgotten zing of anticipation as she dialed the number on it - even if it was just Mears' voicemail. "Inspector Mears? This is Amanda Collins. I apologize for calling so late, but I wanted to let you know that I've looked over the file you left and will be free in the morning if you and Inspector Elliot want to come by and discuss it."
Smiling to herself again - again without even realizing it - she heard Alex at the front door and went to say good night before they both headed to bed.
Amanda slept better that night than she had since before the attack.
{*****}
Nikita Mears - who'd realized halfway home that she'd forgotten her cell phone on her desk, and decided that it could stay there until morning - was indulging in a rare moment of regret and angst as she pondered some of her less laudable life choices on the drive home.
The moment with Michael Bishop had rattled her more than she'd let on, and that had somehow combined with the stress of the investigation to put her into the sort of melancholy funk she normally avoided like the plague.
The gloomy and perpetually fog-shrouded appearance of her Sunset District neighborhood suited her unusually well tonight. The fog-diffused street lights leached away a good deal of the color, but Nikita tried to focus on the bright colors of the houses she was driving by - they were all painted bright, happy pastel colors like white, pink, green, and baby blue, as if in defiance of the neighborhoods perpetual lack of good sunlight.
The random flashes of color here and there as she wound through the streets near her home struck her as just that - defiant, and refusing to surrender - and the thought managed to buoy her mood at least a little. She wasn't exactly smiling by the time she got the front door to her small two-bedroom house unlocked, but she was no longer scowling or glowering either.
Kicking off her shoes in the entryway - after locking her door behind herself, of course - Nikita moved into her living room, dumping her suit jacket and briefcase onto one of the living room chairs. The high-end stereo system - one of her few indulgences - called to her tonight even more than usual, and she cranked the volume up while simultaneously hitting shuffle.
She hit the pause button just as quickly as Joan Jett's 'I Hate Myself For Loving You' suddenly filled the silence. She quickly switched over to something a little more soothing - and less annoyingly apropos - and the sounds of classical music followed her into her kitchen.
The bulb in the fridge flared, popped, and died when she opened the fridge door, but it didn't really matter much - the fridge was depressingly empty anyway. She hadn't had time to go shopping in the last few days, and would have to finally bite the bullet tomorrow once she broke free from the station. For now, she had the last dregs of her usual assortment of fresh produce - a little brown and/or overripe now, but still perfectly serviceable - and several bottles of beer that Owen had left the last time he'd been over.
The beer was tempting - very tempting, actually - but Nikita weighed the potential ramifications of indulging in alcohol given the mess she was currently mired in at work, and decided against it. Instead, she scarfed down a hastily-prepared salad and went to change into her exercise togs.
Another change of music later - to something of a more appropriate mood and tempo - and Nikita was now running through her favorite yoga workout. It normally let her detach her thoughts from whatever was bugging her or stressing her out, but tonight it just left her mind free to wander.
Trying to stay positive, she let her thoughts turn toward her sister in San Jose, who had called earlier to let Nikita know that she was now pregnant with her third child. Nikita's brother-in-law was a nice enough guy - sweet and attentive, if a little bland - but something about the notion of life in suburbia with a husband and 2.5 kids was as foreign to Nikita as the life of a homicide cop was to her sister.
Thinking of babies and houses and suburbia only led her back to Michael, and the awkward moment back at the station. She liked to think that nothing else would have come of it even if Owen hadn't interrupted, but couldn't lie to herself well enough to be completely certain. That just pissed her off - on top of everything else she was already annoyed and/or pissed off over to start with - and made her long for just one day where she didn't have to navigate the minefield that was her professional relationship with Michael Bishop.
And it had been professional, at least at first. She had found him cute enough, and an excellent detective, but he was married and their assignment as partners was only temporary. Things had turned awkward fast, though, as hours spent working together had made him much more attractive than she would ever have initially guessed - he understood her, just got what made her tick, and he didn't even blink at the notion of a female cop wanting to make detective.
The tension between them had simmered and simmered, but they somehow managed to keep it from reaching a full boil for four long years, even after she'd made detective and been assigned to the same squad - until the night he'd turned up at her doorstep and informed her that his wife Elizabeth had filed for divorce, and for sole custody of their daughter Hayley.
He was angry, and grieving, and in pain, and she'd known what would happen even as she let into the house - her offer to make him some coffee had sounded lame even to her ears, but they'd gone into her tiny kitchen anyway. There hadn't been any coffee to speak of - she never drank the stuff, preferring tea instead - but it hadn't mattered.
He'd come up behind her, reaching up and over her to pull something off a shelf she couldn't get to, and the spark of close physical proximity had finally ignited the sexual heat between them. She hadn't been able to bring herself to push him away - hadn't wanted to, even knowing it could never end well - and they'd fucked each other senseless against her kitchen counter while the teakettle boiled down to nothing.
She hadn't led him back to her bed - that wouldn't happen until later - but he'd stayed the night, and, much to her surprise, several nights after. It had seemed like heaven for a while, actually - a man who understood the horrible things she saw and did every single day, who didn't turn away in confusion when she couldn't leave the bad things at work, and who didn't try to reduce her chosen career down to some sort of kinky joke.
That repeated experience with civilian men, incidentally, was part of why she couldn't be angry with Elizabeth Bishop for divorcing Michael without warning. Elizabeth hadn't understood what Michael went through on a daily basis, and he couldn't seem to help her understand - sadly, it happened all the time when one spouse was law enforcement and the other one wasn't.
Not to mention that she herself had been seeing someone at the time - a computer programmer named Daniel Munroe, one of the few civilian men she'd ever known who accepted her career without flinching and didn't question her ambition to be detective. After just a few minutes with Michael that night in her kitchen, though, she'd had to stare directly into the face of one very painful fact: she loved Daniel dearly, but she wasn't in love with him.
She'd even entertained the thought of marrying Daniel - knowing without needing to be told that he was on the verge of asking - until the night Michael had stepped into her kitchen. Daniel had been a gentle, attentive lover but she'd known the instant Michael touched her that Daniel would never be able to set her world on fire the way Michael could.
She'd broken it off with Daniel the very next day. He'd taken it well enough - it just wasn't in him to rage or even just be angry, which had been part of the whole problem, really - and his resulting move to Sacramento had actually somehow managed to let them rebuild their friendship.
The reaction around the precinct wasn't as simple, or as calm. Michael was technically still married, and still her senior in rank and experience - there were some very ugly words said behind both their backs, though it had mostly died down by the time the divorce was finalized a few weeks later.
Despite the possible damage to Nikita's career, her father - Nicholas Mears - had actually approved of her relationship with Michael. He'd never worried about her career, having helped raise both his daughters to be the same sort of strong, intelligent women as their mother.
Both Mears girls had been raised knowing that they could be whatever they wanted to be, that their gender shouldn't keep them from following their dreams. And it had been obvious from childhood that Nikita, the oldest and therefore named after her father, had big dreams of following in his footsteps and becoming a detective like her father.
It wouldn't be an easy dream, and her parents worried about the tough road ahead for their eldest if she pursued it, but it was obvious to them both that Nikita was born and bred to be a cop, just like her father. It was equally obvious - especially once she got into the police academy - that nothing would, or should, keep her from making detective. Nick Mears never wasted time worrying about his namesake's career - he worried about her heart, and whether she'd ever find anyone worth giving it to.
Michael Bishop had entered the force while Nick Mears was very much still in his mentoring days - Nick had liked and respected Michael from the first, though he'd needed his fair share of smacks upside the head just like any rookie. Michael, in Nick's estimation, was a good man - worthy of his daughter's heart, and one of the few he'd trust to care for her properly - and Nick would have been happy to call him 'son'.
The divorce gave Nick a bit of pause - largely because it hadn't gone through yet, and that meant Bishop was still a married man - but he'd watched his daughter with her new boyfriend and decided to overlook it. The personal and professional fallout for both Nikita and Michael wouldn't be quite so easily dismissed, but they were both good, solid cops - they'd eventually earn any lost respect back and then some, as long as they didn't let their involvement affect their work.
Nicholas Mears had died of a heart attack around the same time that Michael Bishop had started dropping hints to Nikita that he wanted to live together.
Almost as if reaching the end of a recording, Nikita's thoughts finally shifted away from Michael and her father, and back onto the case. Michael had ultimately chosen Cassandra over her, and they were all better for it - letting Michael go had been hard, and Nikita still missed him sometimes, but she nonetheless was absolutely certain she had no regrets over how things had worked out.
After a quick shower and a change of clothes, Nikita grabbed a beer - deeming it safe enough to allow herself just one - and went to retrieve the various books she'd stuffed into her briefcase. She'd asked Gigi the clerk to have the library pull everything they had on anxiety disorders, with a particular emphasis on agoraphobia.
The hardback books that had been pulled for her all had titles like Living With Anxiety, or The Anxious Self, or Phobic Syndromes, and Nikita had her doubts they would be very helpful.
The first one she skimmed through at least did a decent job of explaining agoraphobia, so she was ahead of the game whether the books proved useful or not. The word was Greek in origin - 'phobia' was from phobos, meaning fear, and 'agora' was a type of marketplace.
So, at least etymologically, fear of the marketplace - or any open space, really.
None of the anxiety disorders outlined in her reading were particularly pleasant, but it quickly became apparent that agoraphobia was especially insidious, and probably one of the worst of them all. It wasn't actually a fear of open spaces, so much as it was a fear of fear itself - the agoraphobic was so afraid of panicking and losing control that even the thought of something that might provoke that kind of response actually created the response just the same.
They avoided any place or situation that might make escape difficult if they began to panic - crowds, tunnels, elevators, anywhere they might feel trapped if something set them off. Some cases left the sufferer unable to leave their home, rendering them unable to function in the outside world and, more often than not, completely dependent on a caretaker to handle things in the outside world for them.
Nikita winced as she read all of that, and sent a silent apology to Amanda Collins for having triggered the woman earlier. If she'd known that even the suggestion of leaving the loft could affect the other woman that way, she'd never have let Owen make the offer to drive her to the station.
The books indicated that the caretaker was usually a spouse or relative, though sometimes a paid assistant would do the trick just as well. Nikita pushed aside a flare of idle curiosity about which category young Alex Udinov fell under, and read on, flipping through one of the books until she found the section on treatment.
The pills Amanda Collins had taken were likely tranquilizers, something like Xanax or alprazolam. Nikita had a sneaking suspicion neither was meant to be mixed with the snifter of scotch Collins had had with her during their visit, but she figured that Collins deserved whatever creature comforts she felt well enough to enjoy.
Nikita had initially assumed that the agoraphobia was a direct result of the attack by Daryl Lee Cullum - she'd read that report, and the fact that Cullum apparently hadn't had enough time to sexually assault Collins was the only theoretical bright spot in a very, very ugly incident - and she probably wasn't too far off on the idea that it was part and parcel of a very bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The books, though, indicated that most cases - upwards of ninety percent, actually - did not trace back to any one particular event. Sufferers might have some history of phobias or other anxiety problems, but that first panic attack usually struck out of the blue, and for no discernible reason.
Further reading - she'd also cracked open her laptop and looked at few of the more reputable sites on agoraphobia - gave Nikita the lingering impression that Amanda Collins wasn't a typical agoraphobic. It wasn't something she could articulate yet, just something whispering at the back of her brain as she assembled the bits and pieces of info she was acquiring, and she hoped that whatever it was she was sensing would make Amanda Collins' recovery that much easier.
She paused for a moment, finally yanking her tangled thoughts into order, and popped open her work email. It took a few minutes to translate everything into an email message, but she eventually got the pertinent info and questions laid out in text and sent them off to Ryan Fletcher, another forensic psychologist she'd met while working past cases.
Fletcher wasn't the celebrity that Amanda Collins was, but he was exceedingly good at his job - he was just so quiet and matter-of-fact about it that he tended to fly under his superiors' radar when it came time for commendations and promotions. It was a sign of Nikita's faith in his abilities - and his discretion - that she'd even gone to him herself a time or two when in need of advice or a friendly ear.
Every cop knew that department-ordered therapy had limited confidentiality - that was kind of the point, really, since there was usually something going on the department needed to know about. Unfortunately, it also left a certain lingering paranoia about civilian shrinks - even though it was supposed to be completely confidential, since you were going in private, on your own time, no cop Nikita had ever known had ever fully trusted in that.
Nikita had gotten herself through the worst of the fallout over her relationship with Michael without really needing much help - some of the gossip had been cruel and horrible, but the people who mattered had known the truth. It was only after she ended things with Michael that she found it hard to cope - she'd taken a leap of faith then and trusted Ryan Fletcher with her fears.
He hadn't let her down then, or ever, and she'd come to trust him like a brother. His analysis of Amanda Collins would go a long toward easing her concerns about bringing the woman into the case - and, she hoped, provide good, solid support for her not-entirely-sanctioned choice to involve Collins despite the risks.
Fletcher wouldn't reply until he reached his office in the morning, though, and that was several hours away. It was already 1:30 in the morning, and Nikita needed at least a little sleep if she was going to function at work tomorrow.
She was too tired and groggy to question why Amanda Collins' blue eyes, full of anger and indignance like they'd been earlier that morning, were the last thing she saw before she fell into a dead sleep.