Another wait, for which I apologise. Again. But I compensate with long chapter. Thanks for the reviews, and all the favourites. Enjoy.

Standard disclaimers, etc

~W

CHAPTER FIVE

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Everything DC knew about the outcome of the Lightman tragedy has proved false. Administrator Dr. Cal Lightman, whose body was purportedly identified amongst the dead, has in fact spent the past eleven days with the man previously suspected to be the engineer of the bombing, Guy Ward. A former badge with the MPDC, Guy Ward harboured a grudge against the co-founder of the Lightman Group because of Dr. Lightman's role in Ward's late partner's death, the details of which are still shrouded in mystery.

It is certain now that Ward was the engineer of the lethal explosion, but after further investigations by the remaining co-founder, Gillian Foster, and the MPDC, it was discovered that the criminal had not left the country or even the city; instead, he holed up in the warehousing district with Dr Lightman as a hostage, intent on cruel and fatal punishment for imagined crimes.

The MPDC say that Ward, already slightly unbalanced, attached blame to Lightman when his partner, Grace Hallowell, died in the line of duty four years ago. Only recently had he begun to meditate on actual revenge, composing a complex stratagem to abduct Lightman, placing six bombs around the weakest structural points of the Lightman Building when the least number of innocents would be at work. The crux of his plan was to have an associate pose as a client and set off a fire alarm as a diversion. While the employees evacuated and security were searching for a fire, Ward's associate planted false identification on a cadaver already placed in the basement to buy time with his victim. Once his associate was out of range, Ward blew up the building with two ends in mind: first, to give Lightman a legit reason for going missing, and second, to make it more difficult to identify the planted body as someone other than Lightman. Investigations are underway on the morticians who identified it as such despite the intransigent law requiring them to ascertain assumed identity with DNA.

Dr Foster, convinced that the body uncovered was not her business partner, conducted a private search for Lightman. While this decision might have been perceived as the stage of grieving known as denial, it ended up saving Cal Lightman's life; he was admitted to Sibley Memorial Hospital in critical condition, having sustained grave injuries from his assailant. He fights for his life as DC reels at Ward's incredible malevolence and at the incredible truth exposed.

Gillian hovered beside the gurney, jostling against the paramedic at Cal's head, not yet grasping the terrible reality of his injuries, the stains of fluid already seeping through the gauze, none of it. His eyes were open, and they were looking at her, and they were alive. She grabbed his hand.

There were no complications en route to the hospital. He didn't flatline or stop breathing or seize. He just lay there looking at her while the medics hustled in the periphery, still as death, and she could do nothing but stare back in terror. The ride was a ten, twenty-minute eternity. Several times she imagined the light had gone out of those eyes. It paralysed her every time, and even when she realised she'd only imagined it there was no succour in the knowledge.

Only once did his eyes close. When that happened Gillian hit the roof, screeching his name like a banshee until one of the medics was forced to leave Cal and rein her in. As soon as she noticed she was keeping the woman from helping Cal, she locked her jaw and watched him fixedly, willing him silently to open his eyes, open them, come on, Cal, open your eyes. He never did. She thought vaguely of looking to the medics, listening to whatever it was they were saying, because surely that was the smart thing. She never did. She couldn't force herself to look away, for fear that if she blinked, he would slip away.

She scrambled out of the ambulance and ran beside the gurney with her fingers glued to his. Down the white hall, between patients and staff and family members, the acrid cocktail of formaldehydes and floor cleaners and human excrement routing her nose, watching and watching and watching Cal's eyes. She could hear herself talking to him, saying insipid comfort-the-suffering comments, but even she wasn't paying any attention. She couldn't think of the words that would tell him what she wanted him to hear.

The door closed on her. Stunned, she stared at it, not really aware of the exact moment she'd been cut out. She stared through glare of the glass at the retreating shape of the gurney and its attendants, unable to watch Cal's eyes anymore to keep him from dying.

She thought of the words then.

'I love you, too.'

Several minutes later, while she was still staring through the motionless doors that led to OR, a small force of nature crashed into her from behind. She managed to worm around within Emily's vice grip and returned the embrace with equal intensity.

'He's alive, Emily,' she said into the girl's shoulder, to relieve Emily's terrible quiet, 'he's in surgery, we got there in time. He's going to be all right.'

She could feel Emily's silent nod, but the gesture was undermined by her fingers, which clenched harder around fistfuls of Gillian's shirt, and by the tremors. Gillian shook with her, certain for a moment that Emily was crying like the five-year-old Daddy's girl she'd once been, calling out in the crystalline voice of innocence for her father.

Dallas, drifting in and out of consciousness, looked through the flashing lights and the howling sirens at the second gurney. He couldn't see the dying man except for the vague outline. What he did see were several silhouettes all around Lightman, medics and one civilian. In the brief glimpse he caught before the convoy disappeared into the ambulance, he realised the civilian was a woman, and that she was bent over Lightman like a lover, one hand cinched with his in a dead man's grip. Her voice carried to him through the chaos and the fog that was beginning to gather at the corners of his eyes. One word. A name. The syllable was a song.

The doors shut on Cal Lightman and the woman, and then on Dallas too. He closed his eyes to the pure white light and closed himself to the world.

He knew there was one more ambulance in the parking lot of the warehouse, but while he could hear the sirens from both his and Lightman's, overlapping like ripples on a still sea through the night, there was no third wail of urgent grief. His brother was dead. Dallas was an only child.

And worse than that, he thought that maybe that was as it should be.

Saturday

'Well, Doctor Lightman, you're a very lucky man.' The white-coated blur told Cal. There was a smear of skin, too, the colour of black coffee, and a glint that might have been a pair of glasses.

Cal couldn't tell; he seemed to be bloody near blind. He heard with perfect clarity, though, the shuffling his attendant made with the folder, and the metronome bip... bip... bip of whatever machines were attached to various of Cal's limbs. Like a leech. A big, tentacle-ridden leech.

Lucky. Yeah, he'd heard that so many times in the past hours that the meaning of the sodding word had been bludgeoned out of it. 'What's wrong with my eyes?'

'That's your IV.' The doc answered promptly, which made up a bit for the "lucky" comment. 'A side effect of the morphine, should go away once we take you off the cocktail.'

'How long's that?'

The doctor exhaled through his teeth and seemed to talk to himself as he shuffled his papers some more: '40% skin loss, healing fine... projected scarring relatively minor... range of motion seriously reduced... but treatable... then there's the trauma not caused by the fire... several lacerations ... lethal blood loss, working on that... one puncture, bullet removed...'

Several seconds of this. Cal hadn't really listened to his list of injuries until now. He'd been very out of it, being on enough painkillers to topple a horse. But now he did. Bleeding hell, maybe he was lucky.

No. He needed to find a new word for lucky. Anything but lucky. Fortunate? Er, no. Blessed? Gag. Fluky? Oh, he liked that one. Fluky. Sounded funny in his head. He said it out loud.

'Sorry?'

'Fluky.' Cal replied. 'Not lucky.'

'Yes.' Doctor Holland paused, unable to help a small smile. He'd heard things about Cal Lightman; apparently none of them was true when the formidable man was high on morphine. 'Well, you're going to be here a while, Cal. Get comfortable.'

Emily and Zoe came to visit him. He didn't catch their arrival; one minute they weren't there, and he must have dozed off, because the next minute they were. Somebody was crying. Cal recognized the sound instantly as his daughters and opened his eyes.

'Oi, who's making all that noise?' He said, affecting a cranky growl. Which wasn't that hard with a throat the texture of sandpaper. He still couldn't see Emily very well, but as soon as he spoke he could sort of feel her hands fluttering over him, looking for a safe place to touch. She was hiccupping hard between sobs- his throat clenched and he reached up toward her blur of white and gold and brown. Bandages constricted against his skin, but he didn't notice; Emily burrowed into his arms and clung to her. 'I'm all right, Em, it's all right. Stop that, love, it's all right.'

Looking up over his daughter's shoulder he could make out the shape of his ex-wife, her hand pressed to her lips, shaking silently.

Three weeks later: April 4

'Thinking I might have to break up with Ward.' Cal said thoughtfully. 'Bad luck, he is. Always seem to take a bullet or two around him.'

'I'm never letting you out of my sight again.' Gillian told him. Her throat was still scratchy from the crying she'd been doing for the past decade.

'Nor I you; you seem to be good luck.' He was being dry, or ironic, or whatever it was stupid British gits did for humour. But Gillian could see it in the sidelong glances he gave her, however casual he attempted to make them. Dressings covered half his chest, for Christ's sake, and all of one leg and half the other and God knew where the hell else. Dressings covering a healing wound, but dressings just the same. And he was giving her that look.

Three weeks he'd been here. His room kept changing as his condition went from emergency to critical to serious, but she'd followed along in the wake of his gurney, then his wheelchair. That first night had been the worst of her life, and that was rather an accomplishment, staring at an immovable metal door waiting to be saved from her agonising. And when they'd finally allowed visitors, the visitors had to be family, and Gillian was left alone with the tyrant doors once more. A twenty-five-hour eternity. Plenty of time to think in a twenty-five-hour eternity, although she hadn't done much of that. Mostly she'd remembered and conjured up several different versions of the moment a doctor came out of those doors again:

'He's in a coma,'

'He's going to be just fine,'

'He's gone.'

She'd thought of them all. And somewhere in between, her turmoil had boiled down to one need: see him. Ask him. Understand. Move on. Four parts of the same basic drive.

'You lied to me.' She said now, sitting at his bedside with her eyes on the hand she was stroking absently with her thumb. Even it showed signs of the awful events, dry and almost sunburnt. 'On the phone.'

'Yeah.' He said. She glanced at his face. His eyes were closed now, his complexion pallid from blood loss and lower eyelids shadowy. Better than before, but still bad. She shouldn't bring this up now. Yet after everything she'd been through the past two weeks… she needed everything to stop spinning and go back to normal. And for that to happen, she needed to know why it had been knocked off kilter in the first place.

'Cal, please?' She pushed quietly, crossing the line. He raised his head and looked at her, and she knew he'd registered it.

'Walking the high wire.' He explained finally. ' Didn't want… couldn't drag you in.'

Gillian stared at him, her gut clenching in some unfathomable emotion she recognized - had felt before, in similar circumstances - but could never explain. 'Oh, Cal.' She said. 'You stupid, stupid bastard.'

She didn't try to tell him off. That was the way Cal had always been. From the beginning he'd been the one swanning off into the crossfire, leaving behind the people he loved because he had this warped, idiotic idea that their lives were worth more than his.

'I thought you were dead, Cal.' She told the pillow, and closed her eyes as she relived that shock, that disbelief, that despair, standing there with Eli and Rea in the wreckage of their second home and staring at a mangled hand that had slipped out from beneath a funeral shroud. 'We all thought you were dead. What would we have done? Cal? Mourn you and cry and move on while you got the shit tortured out of you in some warehouse off Emerald Street? While you died?'

She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep herself from saying something that would send her over the edge. She was sick of crying, she'd already cried so much she thought she might dry out like an autumn leaf with one more stupid tear, she wanted to go home. Home: the way things had been before, before all this gut-wrenching palaver and death and not-death and near-death.

Cal squeezed her hand. She looked at him again. His face was unguarded, displaying everything: sadness, guilt, regret. But she knew he didn't regret what he'd done. She knew he'd do it again.

'No, Cal.' She said. 'It has to stop this time. Next time something happens, swear you'll let me help you. Swear.'

Cal dropped his attention to their hands, clasped tightly. Gillian saw it in his face before he said anything, and grabbed. 'You tell me no right now and I swear to God, Cal. I deserve a fucking yes.'

Cal's eyebrows went up when she cursed. Yeah, she was that god-damned serious. He spoke before she could grab again.

'Lesser of two evils.' He said firmly. 'I'd do it again. And again, and again, you understand?'

'Well I wouldn't.' She practically shouted. 'You know I'll never walk out on you, Cal, God knows I'm not even capable of walking out, but one more crisis like this and I think it might kill me. You know what it does to me, Cal? When you do something like this? Do you have any idea what I go through? No, you don't, or you wouldn't do it. You - walk your high wire - so I don't have to, or so you say, but that can't be it, because if it was about me then you'd see that every time you clamber on up there and leave me craning my neck and wringing my hands and just waiting for you to fall and not being able to do a god-damned thing, it kills me.'

He didn't need this. Why was she saying this, what was she doing? But she couldn't stop now; her words were running into each other in their haste to get out.

'It kills me, Cal, a little bit every time. But you don't see that, so no, it's not about me, it's about you. You and your adventure, you and your drama, you and your sainthood. Saint Cal, who shoves everyone away so he can be the hero, Saint Cal who says he does it for them but really just wants a soliloquy, Saint Cal who can't even see somebody's in l-'

She stopped, choking back the rest of her mad rampage. Unable to look him in the eye after that, she bolted up to run. Cal grabbed her wrist.

'Get off.' She snapped, breaking out of his grip. When she started running she heard the machine send up a ruckus as Cal snatched off all his little wires and scrambled up.

'Get back in the bed, Cal.' She barked, whirling around to face him, and when he tried to take her wrist again she wrenched her wrist away. 'No. Get back in the bed.' Something had faded in her voice; even to her it sounded flat and dead.

'No, don't fucking do that, Gill.' He said, grabbing her wrist and this time not letting go. 'Don't put up your walls on me, not now, be mad at me. Rage at me, hit me if you like -'

'Get back in the bed, Cal.'

'You get back in the bleedin' bed! Come on, you're mad at me. What were you saying? Saint Cal, eh, pissing on his friends, high and mighty Cal, blind Cal, stupid Cal, son of a bitch Cal, come on Gil, what were you saying -' He went on, gripping her wrist like a vice and using it to back her into a wall, snarling at her, unrelenting. Gillian struggled to hold on to the ice fortress she'd pulled up in herself, but he was hounding her, cornering her, giving her no outs, and at last she splintered.

'Get off me!' She yelled, shoving him with her free hand and shaking the other madly in an attempt to free it. She focussed on this as her throat threw out the rest of her pent-up emotion, rage and fear and relief, focussed on shaking him off like a dog as she shouted insults and called him names. Focussed enough that she didn't really notice it when she started to sink to the floor, or when she started to cry again, but that was the way she found herself: on her knees on the floor, clutching Cal like the only rock in a raging river, her face buried in his shoulder.

'All right,' Cal said, running his fingers through her hair over and over, 'all right, Gill, there it is. Be done with it.'

'I'm sorry, Cal, I didn't mean any of those things.' She told his bandaged chest. 'I didn't mean them.'

'No, love, of course not.'

'I just… I hate it when you don't trust me to help you, or to see you when you're vulnerable. I just wish you'd let me in, even… even if only to be with you when you're drowning.'

'I know. I can see it, when I leave. It's just - better me than you. Eh? If I'd told you where I really was, I don't know what Ward would have done, and I couldn't risk it, not with you. I just couldn't do it, I never could, I'm not strong enough. I'm sorry.'

She pulled back to look him in the eye, put her hand on his cheek. She felt spent; she couldn't think what to say anymore. Suddenly she remembered. 'Oh, God. Cal, get back in the bed.'

'Well, I'm already up now -'

'I said get back in the bed!'

May 15

'I can't believe she blew up on him like that.' Rea said, perched on the kitchen counter with a look of delighted surprise.

'I can.' Eli put in, pulling his head out of the fridge where he'd been hunting for food. 'I mean, think of the week she'd just had. She had all this destructive emotion pent up from not expressing it because she's the boss, she's got to stand in for him and everything. So she blew. Like a soda bottle that's been shaken up a lot but the cap screwed on real tight.'

'There was a lull, there. Close to the end.' Rea recalled, looking out the window as though watching the scene. 'I don't get -'

'She tried to put her cap on.' Eli interrupted, surfacing with a cheese stick and a ham sandwich. 'Cal took it off and shook her up again.'

'Which wasn't that smart. She ripped out a couple of his stitches.'

Eli made a face like, "what can you do?" and unwrapped his sandwich. Peered between the bread and frowned, put it down and dug in the fridge again for mustard.

'Think it'll ever be the same again?'

'What, the Group? Probably not. New building, for starters, and they'll probably have to lay some guys off to pay for the move. Good thing I don't get paid.'

'I mean between them. I mean, you know, how it was.'

Eli paused in squirting his mustard to look at her, and then through the kitchen door, through which they could hear Gillian talking indistinctly. He tilted his head and thought about it. 'No. I don't think so. They crossed their line in a big way, and I think now they won't be able to go back. Everything will be different now.'

Rea nodded thoughtfully and Eli stuck the mustard back in the fridge. There was an old picture of Lightman and Emily stuck on by a magnet, Emily grinning and giving Lightman bunny ears. Lightman didn't look the same as he did at work, didn't look like the boss in that picture. He was smiling, for one thing, a smile Eli had never seen for himself and doubted he ever would, especially now. It felt like he was looking at something private.

'Hey.' He said. 'Think he'll mind I took his sandwich?'

'He'll have to get used to it if we're going to be working out of his kitchen.'

Gillian descended the stairs, struggling to keep her grip on an overflowing folder, and caught sight of Cal standing in the doorway. She sighed with relief. 'There you are, I thought you might like to look through some of these -' She realised he wasn't paying any attention to her and followed his gaze. He was looking into the kitchen, where Rea and Eli were talking easily. Cal's back was to her, but the set of his shoulders, the way he leaned against the doorframe. She sighed.

He was always doing that now. Standing on thresholds in his own house, hovering like some unwanted vampire. She didn't know what to do. He'd healed up very well, all things considered, and attended physical therapy sessions twice a week. Those things he seemed to be taking well. And anything related to work. All business. Sharp as ever. When addressed, he was perfectly amiable, or at least as much as he'd ever been. But he didn't talk much, and he smiled even less. There was the cane. There were the scars. She would have to let him be, at least for now. Baby steps.

June

At first she didn't know what had woken her, and she rolled over, blinking blearily, to see him not asleep beside her but slumped before the armoire.

'Cal?'

He didn't move. In the early morning gloom she could just see the shining reflections of his eyes flick to her mirror double. She couldn't see well enough to gage an expression. She had the horrible feeling that there was none. His voice, at least, was hollow when he spoke. 'Go back to sleep, love.'

She didn't go back to sleep. Instead she slid out from under the slate grey duvet and rounded the bed to stand beside him. He didn't say anything. She didn't say anything either. Entwining one hand in his, she extended her other to turn on the floor lamp.

Cal winced, stepped instinctively back from his reflection. Even in the lenient light his scars gleamed like plastic all across his chest in a loose diagonal ending at his gonial angle, warped and textured as human skin was not meant to be textured. Quickly, he reached over and snapped the light off again.

'At least in the dark,' he managed past a tight throat, 'I can't see it.'

She ignored his strangled protest when she put out her hand again. The gentle light flooded the room once more. Aware that Cal had closed his eyes against the sight of the two of them, she studied his body mercilessly. Neck. The small patch of pink, shiny tissue where there should have been five-o'clock shadow, right by his ear. Chest. Patterns in the blight. No chest hair anymore. Abdomen not so bad; he'd been hunched over when Ward set him on fire, not allowing the flames access. Gillian's eyes stung at the image her mind conjured, but she kept all pity and sympathy out of her expression. She knew Cal was watching her now, incredibly vulnerable.

Without meeting his pleading gaze in the mirror, she stepped back and scrutinised his back, stone-faced. The muscles of his shoulders were tense with emotion. She studied every plane and dip with the same brutal focus. Shoulder blades. The small of his back. Her eyes were hard, assessing him as coldly as a slave-driver would have done. When she felt she'd absorbed every infinitesimal facet of his changed countenance, she returned to his side and faced him. When he uncertainly mirrored her action, she let him search her eyes for pity, revulsion, grief. Then she told him with absolute frankness, 'You're beautiful.'

Cal walked with a cane now, due to constrictive scarring at the left knee. When asked he said he sure as hell did plan on getting it fixed surgically. One of his eyes had changed colour - it was almost translucent now, as though it were indeed a window to his soul. The doctors had no concrete explanation for this, and attributed it to trauma. The scar left by the fire stretched above his collar even when he wore an Oxford, covering the left half of his neck all the way up to what the doctors called his mandibular gonial angle. Or in English, the bottommost edge of his jaw, way back by his ear. The discolouration was otherwise invisible as long as he avoided shorts. Which he did for a while despite the summer weather, a behaviour that hurt Gillian to observe.

She intended, with time, to coax the penchant out of him.

Cal had always bounced back, more or less. He had the habit of brooding - their annual visits to Marty's Tavern, for example - but he always came through without leaning much on those around him. It was his way, walking the high wire alone, and in the past she'd allowed it. But this time she would be more than his rock. This time she refused to watch him drown.

July 4

They had a new building. Not as centrally located, more toward the fringes of centre city, but not bad. They had new stuff too: computers and high-tech lab and interrogation gadgetry and enough paperclips to build a slightly smaller Eiffel Tower. Surprisingly, a lot of the funding for this had come through donations. A lot of people had followed the story in the Washington Post. In their letters, which they paper clipped to their endowments, many of them praised Gillian for her fortitude in the search for her business partner. Still more extolled Cal's decision to carry on with the Group despite what he'd been through.

A few even asked why they weren't married.

The four of them were celebrating in the largest office. Cal's desk hadn't been moved in yet, so the remnants of their banquet of Thai take-out ("terrible patriots, you lot.") was spread out on a tablecloth on the floor. The first bottle of bubbly was long gone, and they worked their way leisurely through the second, sprawled out and looking over the cityscape.

'Nice view, anyway,' Loker commented, nodding down at the Technicolor stars liberally dusting the black night.

'My nice view.' Cal corrected. Torres rolled her eyes. Cal's lip twitched as he took another drought of champagne. He lay languidly with his hands twined behind his head, the cane some yards away. Gillian watched him. He seemed okay. But she knew something was off. Cal Lightman was a very good actor, but she was an even better critic. Quietly, she got up and left the office.

The new place was pretty good. It smelled like paint and cleaner at the moment, but the windows in the hall took up everything above about waist height on the left, allowing a panoramic view of the city, and the Expressions collage would take up residence all along the right. Gillian ignored everything en route to her own office.

There was no furniture here either, yet. It had a view even better than Cal's, to make up for the slightly smaller size; she could see the Lincoln Memorial some distance off, the great American facing her and deceptively small. He might have been life-sized, from here, lit up like that in the dark. She thought of the words that surrounded him, protective walls of Idea that were more impenetrable than the rock on which they were engraved:

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

Gillian wondered if Cal had prayed, those months ago, tied to a chair and riddled with holes. She didn't know. He'd never talked about it, beyond the testimony to the authorities. Just the skeleton tale: Ward had been with the MPDC when they hired him to help bust a kingpin; Ward's partner died, and Ward blamed Cal; Ward blew up the building to hold up the search, planted a body toward the same end; Ward tortured Cal; Cal tortured Ward back, psychologically; Gillian saved Cal.

He never elaborated on the things Ward had done to him. But he didn't have to. They had left their marks on him, on all of him. Gillian's throat clenched and her eyes stung and she couldn't move whenever the thought occurred to her: he'd suffered. A lot.

She tried not to let the thought occur to her. After several seconds of staring at Abraham Lincoln in his temple of words, Gillian turned her back.

Cal came in quietly. The lights were off, but the cityscape cast his features in a gentle glow.

He had lost weight, being 'under the weather' so long. But he'd gained a little of it back again, over the past few weeks, and his face, so long gaunt and pale, had livened up once more. Only his eyes hinted now that anything at all had happened to him. His eyes and the scars peeking out from under his collar. He leaned on the cane casually, as though it had become part of him, as though it no longer repulsed him to depend on it.

But Gillian was a better critic.

She would have to tread carefully. There were only a precious few ways she could do this.

'Things have changed.' She said finally. 'Between us.'

Cal looked at her, understanding perfectly.

'After… that… we crossed a line. And I don't regret it. But I need… you still have walls, Cal. You're still acting a part, even with me. And I don't love the person you're playing. I need you to let me touch you.'

He said nothing. He looked down at his cane, rubbed the head absently with a thumb. She knew he wouldn't open his mouth until she'd said absolutely everything, and so she ploughed directly into it, forgetting her deliberate approach.

'Obviously we've been sleeping together for a while,' she started, 'which is huge and different and confusing as hell, and we haven't said a word about it, just like we haven't talked about what happened to you in that warehouse. And we need to. If this is going to work – or at least, if you want it to work as much as me, whatever it is – you have to let me in. We have to be able to talk. You have to trust me.'

When it had all poured out, Cal just continued to look at her. Then, without so much as a nod or a blink, he acceded. He told her about the case, four years ago, about the particular intimacy between Ward and his partner, about Hallowell's death and what Cal surmised Ward had gone through because of it. He told her about the abduction and the delivery, briefly, of his wounds. Hesitantly, but because he knew she would ask anyway, he told her why he screamed at the end of that first phone call.

Gillian listened silently, giving her attention to him so completely that her eyes closed so that nothing distracted her from his voice. Until he said that about the scream, she hadn't exactly connected the event to the man standing in front of her. It was like he was talking about someone else from a long time ago. But then she remembered the scream itself, and the two realities snapped together.

And then she remembered 'I love you.'

He told her about manipulating the Ward brothers into thinking he was worse off than he felt, and how that involved acting. And, hesitating again, he said that the 'I love you' was part of the act.

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