When she woke up again, very early the next morning, Mary was confused by the unfamiliar surroundings and the lack of cat-taking-up-three-quarters-of-the-bed. Then recollection flooded in, and she rolled over to see John, asleep, on his back, snoring lightly.

In sleep, she saw, some of the creases that life had put on his face disappeared. He looked younger. She also saw the reason he'd not wanted her to see him without his shirt, which was not the regrettable tattoo that she'd privately speculated it was.

At some point, probably back when he was in the service, John Watson had been shot. She wasn't expert enough in scarring to guess the caliber, but it had clearly been big-and-bad enough that they'd needed to reconstruct his shoulder afterwards. It was an ugly wound, even fully healed. The bullet had left him with a deep divot in the musculature, and the surgical incision scar was a good four inches long.

Precisely none of which was likely to upset a trained nurse, and Mary resolved to tease him about his excessive modesty when he woke up. She briefly considered waking him up now by tracing her fingers (or her tongue) over the scar, but then decided against it. John was over forty, after all, and three times in eight hours might be pushing her luck.

Instead, she got up and helped herself to his dressing gown, noticing as she did a suspicious stickiness between her legs. A glance at the single wrapper on the nightstand confirmed it: they hadn't used a condom that second time.

Which, really, how bad was that in the grand scheme of things? She was on the pill and hadn't missed one in years, and he had no noticeable signs of any STDs. It certainly hadn't occurred to her to get him to put one on. And actually, she hated condoms… the way they always seemed to interrupt the moment, the loss of sensation, the smell, and maybe they should just talk about getting tested and making the de facto exclusivity de jure.

Mary blinked. That was an entirely new train of thought for her. It really had been one hell of a night.

She realized she was grinning like an idiot and told herself, sternly, to stop it. Then she went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and flinched, because she really should have taken her makeup off the previous night. She had big panda eyes, the smeared remnants of her lipstick around her mouth, and her carefully styled hair was a mass of knots in the back as always happened whenever she did missionary. John didn't seem to actually own a comb… or, really, any sort of personal grooming products besides shaving cream and toothpaste. She squeezed a dab of the latter onto her forefinger and washed her teeth, then strolled out into the kitchen.

After a quick rummage in the cabinets did not reveal any coffee, Mary settled for tea and put the kettle on. She fished her phone out of her tiny evening bag… sadly, she hadn't brought a comb either… and checked her emails. Then she remembered that she hadn't done her due diligence on John Watson, and googled his name.

Unlike Jim Watson, her particular John turned up as the very first search result.

She clicked on the link, a frown line appearing between her brows. She read the article.

Then she bolted back into the bedroom and started throwing her clothes on as fast as she could manage. She was on her knees looking under the bed for her knickers (which she was not finding) when a warm hand on her bottom announced that John had woken up.

"Morning," he said, a soft smile on his face.

"Morning!" Mary replied, and then tried to tone down the hysteria she could hear in her voice, "I just realized, I've got to run. I've got to get to a meeting!"

"It's… Sunday. And six in the morning," John said.

"Brunch. Brunch meeting. Got to go! Bye."

Abandoning her underwear, she darted out of the apartment, the kettle just coming to the boil.

On the train back to her flat, a man in a tracksuit looked at her laddered stockings, sex hair, and disheveled makeup and gave her a knowing leer. Mary did what she always did with creeps on trains: make direct eye contact and begin mentally devising ways to kill him with only the tools she had to hand. She'd got to four before he turned pale and changed carriages.

When she got home her enormous orange tabby Calton curled around her legs and meowed until she put fresh kibble- identical to the kibble that was already in his dish- in his dish. She put on pyjamas, wiped off her makeup and combed out her hair, and got into bed with her laptop.

For the second time in an hour, she googled "John Watson." This time she kept on reading. About forty-five minutes in, she realized that she was repeating "Fuck, fuck, fuck," in a monotone.

Four years. Four damn years of assiduously avoiding interactions with anyone in law enforcement or intelligence and she happened to randomly start seeing someone who was heavily involved in both. How many of those could there even be in a country this size? She could never justly give Janine grief for terrible taste in men again.

And he had a blog! John Watson, who really did not have much to say for himself, whose two states of existence appeared to be "quiet" and "angry" used to write a blog about how he solved crimes with his now-deceased best friend.

Who she had bloody well heard of! That was the damned thing about it, she clearly remembered the detective's suicide and disgrace. It had been all over the news for a while and she'd taken note of his ridiculous name at the time because it had reminded her of another ridiculously-named person who she had known about in her previous life.

A quick check of the obituary confirmed her earlier suspicion. Sherlock Holmes was Mycroft Holmes' brother. And that was really bad news because Mycroft Holmes was so pivotal in the tiny NATO intelligence world there was essentially no chance he didn't know about her. Not that she'd ever worked in the UK, or she wouldn't have chosen to move here, but she doubted he'd be best pleased to have even retired American black-ops agents living under his nose and he certainly would know how to fix that.

Mary ran her hands through her hair and took a few deep cleansing breaths. This was not all that bad, she rationalized. Yes, she'd put herself in danger of discovery by her poor selection of friends… but she had not, in fact, been discovered, as evidenced by the fact that she was not currently dead or being interrogated at a black site in Devon. She'd had far closer calls than this. Not two years ago she'd run across one of her middle school classmates in Trafalgar Square, of all places. The woman had seen straight through five thousand miles, twenty-five years of aging, new hair color and a fair bit of subtle plastic surgery, and greeted her, loudly, by her old name.

The same approach she'd used then would work now… brazen it out, act unaware… and then distance herself from the problem.

She composed a text. It took her nearly twenty minutes to get it right, but she finally sent:

-John, this has all been lovely for me, but I think it's probably time we let it come to its natural end.

Twenty minutes after that she got a reply.

-Okay, if that's how you feel.

And that was that. She'd keep as far from him as she could manage until Archana Bhat came back from maternity leave in three months and he moved on to a new job. His natural disinclination to have a relationship with her would probably make this easy for her to do. She'd never be found out. She'd be safe.

Then she pulled the covers over her head and let herself have a self-indulgent snivel, because this sucked. John hadn't been boring, not one bit, and she'd really liked him. Maybe more than liked him; if she were completely honest, she'd been totally ready to upgrade him to "boyfriend" if he would have gone for it. The new information she'd gleaned about him today made her heart ache for him, too, and she wanted very little more than to go right now and try to make John feel better.

But he would have to be somebody else's problem now.

Nothing much happened for two weeks. She'd swapped some shifts around so she ended up doing a lot of triage (dull, vomity) and children's vaccine clinics (repetitive, screamy). She came home, fed the cat, and made dinner. There was television to watch. She went to a travelling exhibit of Dior dresses with Janine, dinner with her friend Magda, and a pub quiz night with several of the other girls from work. On the two Sunday evenings, she prepared jam thumbprints and shortbread pinwheels to bring into the office. She bought a pair of Dansko clogs, which were on sale.

It was a good life, one with friendship and meaning, one that she'd worked hard to make for herself. So if it felt unusually drab and pointless, that was a tacky little problem had by an idiot and one that would undoubtedly go away on its own in time.

Or so she thought, until the end of a very long shift when she walked out to the parking lot and found John Watson leaning on the hood of her car.

"Hi," he said.

"Hey," she replied.

"I'm not... trying to scare you or anything," he said, lifting his hands to the level of his chest.

"I wasn't scared," Mary said, though as soon as the words came out of her mouth she suspected they were wrong. Normal women probably would be alarmed to see a man they'd just recently chucked hanging about their car in an unlit car park.

"Whatever," she thought. Her feet hurt, Dansko clogs being wildly overrated. She was tired and just wanted to microwave a TV dinner and have a glass of wine and go to bed. If she couldn't manage to be unaware that she could easily take John down if he got troublesome, now that she knew about his tricky shoulder, that was just... life.

"I wanted to give you this," he said, taking a manila envelope out of an inside pocket and passing it over, "It's your underwear. They looked expensive."

"Ah. Thank you."

"They're laundered and everything. I wasn't doing anything weird with them."

"I actually hadn't thought of that," Mary said, though now she suspected she might never stop thinking of that, ew, "But yes, thank you. They weren't cheap."

"And also I was wondering if you had started seeing somebody else," John said, in a tone suggesting he was about to tell her off.

"Oh," Mary said, "No, no, I haven't."

"Because you come by late, wearing a pretty dress and fancy matching underwear and then you drop me like a hot potato first thing the next morning. And you swapped all of your shifts that we would have worked together-"

"You saw that?"

"We all use the same scheduling software, yes, I saw that. Everybody at work could see that," he snapped, " So I thought... maybe, you'd been out with some other guy that night? And you just came by as a last hurrah sort of thing."

"No..." she said, not knowing how to extricate herself from this conversation.

"So…" he said carefully, "I must have done something to make you want to leave, then. Is it… the John thing? Because if you really want you can call me Jim. I wouldn't mind."

He was smiling at her, weakly, and despite herself she found that she was smiling back.

"No, not at all, John's a nice name, it's just," and she racked her brains to try and come up with a plausible justification for her behavior, "It's nothing you did wrong. It's just that I think... you and I want very different things. And sometimes it's best to cut the cord before there's drama, you know."

"It's the casual thing," John replied, flatly.

"Um-"

"Look," he said, folding his arms across his chest and scuffing a shoe into the concrete, "I make a shit boyfriend."

"Right."

"As in I could literally give you the numbers of half a dozen women who'd be happy to tell you that. But if that's what you want… I'll do it. And I'll try not to fuck it up too badly."

"Really?" she said, despite that not being the best way to let him down gently, what the hell was the matter with her?

"Yeah. Yeah, really," he said, staring intensely at the ground, "Everything… everything was a lot better when you were around. So, whatever it takes…" he trailed off.

John looked at her, then, and the naked hope in his eyes pierced her to the core. Mary took one breath. Two. Then she decided. In her old life, she'd had courage. Courage to a stupid extent, actually, it had always gotten her into more trouble than not, but she had really never been afraid of anything. Fear was something she'd had to learn to become Mary Morstan, and she still wasn't that good at it. She should be afraid of dangerous dogs or jilted exes, and she never could remember to do it in time.

So why was she being afraid now? There would be some risk to her, yes. But what was the point in being safe if the cost was that you didn't have the life you wanted?

"Tell you what," Mary said, digging her keys out of her bag and hitting the button that unlocked the car doors, "Come over to mine. I'll cook."

"You sure?" John asked, smiling tentatively, "I still might be a serial killer."

"Meh," Mary replied as she got into the driver's side, "I think I'll chance it."

She might have made a different choice, she considered, had they met a few years ago, because the alleged preternatural observational skills of Sherlock Holmes would have posed a much more serious threat to her secret.

But now? Sherlock Holmes was dead. So everything was going to be fine.