Jolting awake, Jane's eyes snapped open and she stiffened. This was not her bed. This was not her room. There was no one on the mattress beside her.

No Casey. No Maura.

Maura.

Shit. Last night's dialogue came flooding back to her. Maura's voice floated, unbidden through her mind. "I am in love with you, Jane." And Jane relived her own stunning realization that her long suppressed feelings for Maura were mutual.

I kissed Maura last night. Jane went limp in defeat, limbs sinking into the mattress.

She remembered grieving with Maura at the loss of her partner. Frost.

Jane groaned. Frost is dead. His funeral is today. Shit. I'm in love with my best friend, who loves me back, but I'm married; my partner is dead and his funeral is today. She sat up abruptly and raked her fingers through her tousled hair. Then she pitched forward and buried her face in her hands. She sat this way for a moment, then sighed heavily, peeking through her fingers at the clock on the nightstand. It was just after four a.m. They'll probably expect me to speak at the service. God, what do I even say?

What do I say to Maura? How will we ever get back to normal? But she already knew the answer to that. She'd passed the point of no return. Hell, was there ever a "normal" between us to begin with?

After a brief shower, Jane slipped into the main living area to retrieve her shoes on the way to the front door. As she passed between the kitchen and the living room, she heard a soft sigh. She froze. The sound, faint though it was, was clearly coming from the couch. Pivoting slowly, Jane peered over the back of the couch.

There she was. Maura. Curled in on herself, right where Jane had left her late last night. With a fresh wave of gut-clenching guilt, Jane realized Maura had probably cried herself to sleep, too distraught to even get herself to bed. Jane shuddered and gripped the back of the couch. She closed her eyes against a fresh onslaught of grief and then released her white-knuckled grasp on the cushions.

Maura inhaled and shifted on the couch. Jane's eyes were drawn to her forlorn sleeping form huddled on the cushions. "Oh Maura," she whispered under her breath. The medical examiner didn't even have the blanket over her, and her nearly fetal position belied the chill that she was somehow sleeping through.

Jane gathered the blanket from the far corner of the couch and drew it slowly, lightly, over Maura's body. She dared to let her fingertips linger, smoothing the folds of the blanket unnecessarily over her best friend's shoulder, back, and hip. Maura stirred again, and Jane went still, hoping she hadn't woken her friend. But Maura merely sighed again in her sleep. The combination of watching Maura sleep, watching her disturbed expression slowly relax, and hearing the soft sigh caused a fluttering in her abdomen and a squeezing in her heart. She brushed a stray lock of red-gold hair from Maura's shoulder and started to lean down to place a kiss on her cheek but stopped herself short.

Don't push it, she thought. Don't wake her. You'll just have to start making amends later.

"I do love you, Maura," she murmured. "I just don't know what to do about it anymore."

"Jane! Good morning! Isn't this a little early for you?" Casey jogged up in gym shorts and a t-shirt, checking his watch.

Jane paused with her hand on the knob of her front door. "Yeah, I guess it is." She shrugged resignedly. "Didn't get much sleep last night, to be honest."

Her husband's expression grew sympathetic as he stepped up to kiss her. "I'm sorry, babe. I know it's hard."

"Did you ever…lose soldiers? In Iraq?" She pushed the door open and they both stepped inside.

While it clearly wasn't his favorite topic, he didn't shy away from sharing. "A few," he admitted with a shrug. "Not as many as it could've been. But even one is too many."

Jane nodded, flashing on Frost yet again. Would it ever get easier to accept the fact that her partner's smiling face would no longer be a part of her daily routine? She made a beeline for the bedroom while Casey headed into the kitchen.

"I thought you would have headed straight to work from Maura's?" his voice came from the kitchen, accompanied by the sound of the running faucet. Jane rifled through the contents of her closet, scanning for that one hanger that was always encased in a suit bag.

"Normally, I would," she called back. "But Frost's memorial service is today and…" she trailed off, her voice catching. Tears welled, blurring her vision, and she clutched the sleeve of one of her blazers in a white-knuckled fist as her chest tightened with restrained sobs. Don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry…

She cleared her throat and managed to finish the sentence without sounding too strangled. "And I needed to pick up my uniform."

He came to stand quietly in the doorway as she pulled her uniform from its bag and hanger and laid it on the bed. "Is everything okay, Jane?"

She froze for a moment, her back to him, fingertips resting lightly on the badge pinned to the front of her dress blues. "No. It's not. I can't lie and pretend everything is okay. Because it's not." She shook her head, pressed her lips together. She couldn't bring herself to turn around and face her husband. To face the sympathy and concern in his eyes. She couldn't let him see her crumble.

"Well," he murmured, "if you ever want to talk about it, with someone not associated with the precinct, I'm –"

"I'm not one of your wounded vets that you can fix with words of sympathy and encouragement," she snapped. Instant regret flooded her in a hot wave. She turned, then, and dared to look at his face.

His gaze on her was heated with hurt, his jaw tight with restrained anger. Clearly he was biting his tongue.

"Look, Casey," she said with a grimace, shoulders slumping. "Baby, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make light of the work you've done. It's wonderful, how you help those guys who come back and don't know what to do with themselves." His face softened. Mollified. "But I have to figure out what to do myself. On my own. There are things that I have to do," she pressed her palm to her chest, "things I have to think about, that…don't include you. They can't. I need to handle it alone right now. I'm sorry."

He looked lost, fumbling for what to say next. She could see the confusion in his eyes, how he had reached out to help her and could not understand why she wasn't reaching back. "We really should discuss this at some point," he admonished halfheartedly. "I just want to help, Jane."

"I know. I know you do." She sighed. "And we will. Just not…now."

He nodded, conceding reluctantly. He lingered a moment, looking as though he wanted to go to her, embrace her, kiss her, perhaps. But he eventually gave up, correctly reading her body language as that of a wounded animal. He turned and left the room.

And so it begins, Jane thought with a quiet sigh. She had seen this coming the moment she found out Frost had been killed. But even knowing it would happen, she felt powerless to stop it. She had always dreaded that this would happen one day. In fact, she'd anticipated with painful certainty that it would. That something would happen, something so painful that she would have no idea what to do with herself, and in a last-ditch desperate effort of emotional self-preservation, she would isolate herself from everyone she ever cared about. That she would drive away and alienate those who strove to "be there" for her, because she couldn't stand the thought of dragging them down into the same darkness she was slipping toward. Knowing herself, knowing how she tended to operate, she feared this would happen when the possibility of marrying Casey became real.

She just didn't expect it would happen this soon.