You would choose
not to come back again,
you say.
Except perhaps
as rock or tree.

It took you and Booth seven years to decide to be a couple. It took you seven months after that to decide where to live. You are getting a new place together, a house. You decided this after a week when he ran out of clean suits at your place and you ran out of your favorite shampoo at his. You have already begun thinking about how you're going to mix your pricey artifacts with his quirky antiques. You hate that pregnancy limits what you can do physically, but you are glad your condition will render you ineligible from having to help move those heavy and awkward stadium seats that currently occupy Parker's bedroom in Booth's apartment.

You have already discussed things you never imagined yourself discussing seven years ago: the merging of finances, nursery colors, and how you want to have a pool for Parker's sake. It delights you to see the younger Booth happy and this delights the older Booth even more. You want Parker to feel at home in the new house. You are already a mother to him and don't always notice the moments when Booth watches the two of you from a distance, love and thankfulness filling his heart.

In these later months of your pregnancy, you are experiencing contentment you have never fully known before. But even so, when you are packing while going through some boxes you kept on the top shelf of your bedroom closet, you find a newspaper article and it steals your breath for a moment. You're sitting on your bed and you take it out of the box, hands shaking a bit as you read the headline: "FBI AGENT SHOT AND KILLED." At first you can't recall why you would ever save something like this, but then you remember: you cut it out and saved it because of his picture. You realized after you thought you had lost him that you didn't have a photo of your partner. When you saw one in the newspaper, you grabbed scissors and carefully cut out the article that told about Booth's apparent death at the hand of an unbalanced woman named Pam. You look at his picture and the glaring words accompanying it. You tear up and, as you do often in your line of work, begin to think about death.

Those two weeks in which you thought Booth was gone were the slowest two weeks of your life. You used to sit and watch the hands of your clock, noticing how the second hand seemed to move slower than it did before. The rational side of you knew this was impossible, yet you would sometimes sit and watch the clock as if it were some sort of morbid entertainment.

You sat and watched a lot during those two weeks. You sat and watched Angela sob the night you were told Booth was dead. She came home with you so you wouldn't have to be alone, but it was you who ended up consoling her.

You watched Cam as she told you over and over again that you could take some time off. You watched her, but didn't listen to her words. This did not surprise her at all.

You watched Zack as he tried to go on ahead and do his job. You appreciated him the most because he could still look you in the eye and treat you like a colleague rather than a grieving widow.

You watched Hodgins as he watched you, hoping you wouldn't notice the concern in his eyes. Ever since the two of you were buried together in that SUV, you understand life, death, and privilege a bit differently than everyone else around you.

But most of all, you watched that clock. You counted the seconds. Everyone around you thought you'd fall apart, but you didn't. You knew you were supposed to be sad, but instead you were angry. You felt rage you had never felt before. You were full of hatred for Fat Pam and her gun. You hated that she shot Booth, but you hated her more for not shooting you. You knew it should have been you and you were so angry that Booth took that bullet. Your fury would have consumed you had you been a weaker woman. You tried to block thoughts of him as much as you could with work, but Cam and Angela wouldn't let you stay in the lab forever. You had to go home.

It was when you were at home and going through the stack of newspapers that had accumulated unread on your kitchen counter that you saw the headline and his picture. His face surprised you. You stared at the image for a long while and then you grabbed the scissors from the drawer and went to work. You sat the clipping on your nightstand and it remained there until the evening before Booth's funeral when you decided you no longer wanted to remember your partner's face because you were angrier now than you had been a week earlier.

You were absolutely not going to attend his funeral because you thought the whole event was ridiculous. You knew your attendance would mean a lot to Booth, but he wasn't there. He wouldn't know you had been there. He was dead and could not possibly care. He was dead and was never coming back. He was dead.

You were so angry at Booth for dying in your place that you could not allow yourself to miss him. You would not attend his funeral because the whole mess was just so unfair and you would not partake in any ritual that tried to make it better.

But you did attend, thanks to the coaxing of your best friend. You stood and listened to Caroline speak, seething inside. You looked for Parker, but did not see him. You looked everywhere you could while trying to avoid staring at the casket, the stupid casket that would someday only hold Booth's bones.

His bones. That was you. You were his Bones. You knew he would have rolled his eyes at the pun. The nickname had stopped annoying you by then, but you never told him that. There was a lot you never told him and this made you angry, too. You wondered how you could write multiple books full of thousands of words, but somehow never quite know the ones you wanted to say to him.

As you thought about words, there he was. He was very much alive. When you realized what had happened, your anger could not be contained anymore so you hit him. It wasn't until you knew he was actually alive that you cried. That night, after the fake funeral, you went home, walked inside your apartment, and sat down on the floor against your front door and you cried. You were still angry, but these were not tears of anger or even sadness. They were tears of relief. You looked at the clock after you had sat and cried for a while and noticed the second hand seemed to be working like it used to.

You can feel your daughter kick you hard just now and this brings you back from these thoughts you don't often allow yourself to think about. You and Booth have never discussed those two weeks and you have no desire to do so. You crumple the news clipping in your hand and get up to throw it away. You're not crying. You don't feel shaky anymore. You hear Booth's keys in the door and go greet him. You know what words you wish to speak to him now and they are words like love and joy and home.