A/N: It's been a super stressful week and I definitely needed this. Writing is always a huge stress relief for me. I also love sharing my stress relieving musings with you. There could be spoilers for the 5th season in this, but my knowledge is mixed together and am unsure which season most things happened in. Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: I own nothing pertaining to The Mentalist and never will.

Relief

She didn't know how she would feel once she was able to let him go, just that little bit. If she had known, she might have tried to let him go earlier. It no longer hurt to smile or laugh. Looking at things that reminded her of him still left a pang of regret reverberating through her soul, yet it didn't seem to last long and she could ignore it if she out her mind on something else.

She takes a seat at her desk and pulls out the latest report from the case the team is currently working on. He has been gone for nearly eight months now and the team has managed to keep close a decent amount of their cases. The number is somewhere around 60% of the cases they would have closed with Jane. The number isn't great because there are families out there that haven't found closure yet, but they still have the highest close rate in the precinct. That in itself is something to be proud of. It shows that old-fashioned police work has its benefits too.

She looks to the couch in her office and the familiar sinking of her heart feels just a little less terrible than it did yesterday. The case file itself is slim, there isn't much to go on for this case, but she chooses to read through the information again. There could be something that she missed; something that the team missed. They didn't even know who the victim was yet, fingerprints were not in the system and the victim doesn't match any missing person's reports.

She studies the crime scene photos again. It reminds her of all the times he reviewed the crime scene photos and found something that they had missed the first time. Of course any time he found anything it was a production to get the evidence they had needed to get to arrest the criminal. The memory makes her smile. She figures that is a good first step. Van Pelt sees her and the younger woman nods in her direction.

She can feel it, she is well on the way to moving on. She hopes that one day all her memories of the time spent with him will bring a smile to her face. Right now there are still moments that she misses him terribly. The elevator dings and she looks up out of habit, somewhere deep inside hoping that she'll get a glimpse of him seconds after the sound. She shakes her head and looks back at the case file. If he hasn't come back by now, he's not coming.

She her face betrays her surprise when her door opens and he walks in.

A/N: Any thoughts?