I lay on the grass in the backyard in Manassas, mapping the stars in the in the sky and thinking about life and the choices I've made, and Savannah and Charlie and Emily. But mostly Emily.

I didn't leave her house after her second chemotherapy session, preferring to be right there in case something went wrong. She came home already feverish, from the Bleomycin she was given that day, with a care sheet that I read until I memorized it word for word. I started out on the couch, but found myself waking every hour to check her temperature and make sure it wasn't tipping into the danger zone. Mostly, she slept through that, and sometime around two o'clock in the morning, I laid down next to her on the bed, on top of the covers, watching her sleep with one hand protectively resting on her forehead, until I dozed off.

She woke up at four o'clock in the morning, cognizant enough to whisper, "What are you doing in here?"

I startled fully awake, and was ready to jump out of the bed lest I be the recipient of another verbal rampage about pushing my boundaries, but she smiled softly at me and put my hand back on her forehead. "It feels nice," she murmured before falling asleep again.

I'm glad her eyes were closed, because I think I would have been embarrassed about how hugely and instantly a smile filled my face. I settled my head back down on the pillow; I think I was still smiling just as widely when I drifted off to sleep.

The next day, she was glassy eyed and feverish all day and mostly stayed in bed. I brought Charlie in the room to see her and visit with her when she was awake. They snuggled in the bed together and watched cartoons on her iPad. And that night, there was no pretense. Charlie went to bed, Claudia went to her room, and, pajamas on and thermometer in hand, I laid down in bed next to Emily, on top of the covers again, and rested my cool hand against her burning forehead.

She woke up and stared at me for a good minute, her face unreadable, but she didn't say anything. She closed her eyes slowly and I stayed put. Her fever faded away sometime in the night; when I took her temperature around one o'clock, it was already down to 99.2. At that point I sunk into a deep sleep for the first time in two nights, only to wake just before dawn with her head buried against my chest and one arm flung over my waist.

I panicked, but I didn't want to wake her. I didn't put my arm around, I didn't move my body an inch. I forced myself to keep my breathing slow and even and, eventually, I fell asleep again. I woke up a couple hours later with her out of the bed and the sound of her shower running. My t-shirt was still warm from where her head had been resting against it.

I got off the bed quickly and made my way down the hall to find Claudia giving Charlie breakfast. She smiled at me and patted my arm gently. Claudia had an uncanny ability to communicate a novel with a simple touch and a look; her smile read warmth and appreciation, with just a hint of, 'BEWARE: Emily is going to be twitchy today after you stayed the whole night in her bed.'

Claudia was right, back a couple of weeks ago when we had our first conversation: Emily really is not that difficult to figure out, as long as you're looking.

And twitchy she was. I focused entirely on Charlie, got him out of the house that morning, and went for a run while he was napping. I stayed only until dinner was made. I gave Charlie a hug goodbye and told him now that his mommy was feeling better, I'm sure she was looking forward to putting him to bed that night.

Charlie smiled at that and nodded. I said a casual goodbye to both Claudia and Emily, and I got the hell out of there so Emily could get some space.

I've been out in the backyard of my property ever since, slowly sipping beer and contemplating every aspect of my life right now, realizing that I needed a little space, too.

I'm so lost in thought that I don't hear her pull up or her car door closing; it's only when Penelope Garcia is standing on my back porch that I realize she's there, unexpectedly. I'm actually glad to see her; my mother has been a great source of comfort to me over the phone the past week, but to have someone who knows me so well and who I trust completely to talk to that's there in person, just for me for the moment, feels like something I need.

I raise my arm from where I'm laying on the grass so she sees me, but I don't get up. She makes her way towards me, and sits on the ground next to me. Then she lays back on the grass, mimicking my position, facing up towards the stars with her hands behind her head.

"Case over?" I ask. The team had flown out to Texas late on Sunday night.

"Yep. Bad guy caught, the current woman he had in captivity is alive and going to pull through. The team's flying back now," she says. "What are you out here thinking about?"

"Life," I say back. Then I whisper. "Emily."

I feel her turn her head to look at me, but I keep staring up at the sky. "When do you give yourself a chance to think about Savannah?" she asks, getting right to her point. "You were together for over two years, and I've watched you the past couple of weeks when I've visited Emily's house and talked to you on the phone, and you've thrown yourself into a life with Charlie and Emily without really letting yourself feel the loss of Savannah."

"I know," I reply. "I don't know what to think about that. I feel like any outsider looking in would think I gave up too soon, but I don't feel like that, which makes me feel like an asshole. People tend to think that there has to be a history of misery before the inevitable end, but when you know misery is coming, why wait?"

"You're sure that misery was coming?" Garcia asks.

I turn to look at her. "Yes. I would have felt torn helping Emily if I was still living with Savannah. Every moment I spent at our house wouldn't have been genuine, and Savannah would have felt that. And I would have been trying to let her get to know Charlie, and she would have been waiting for things to settle before she could accept him. When Emily pulls through this, I really don't believe Savannah could handle a shared custody situation. And if, and I hate to say this out loud because there isn't an ounce of me that believes it, but if Emily doesn't make it, I would always know I was with a woman who was only able to love my son because his mother was out of the picture."

I watch a slow tear make a path down Penelope's empathetic and loving face. "And?" she asks.

I blink. Leave it to her to call me on my bullshit. I am quiet for a solid two minutes, looking back up at the sky, with the truth making my heart thrum in my chest. "And, when Emily makes it through, I don't want a shared custody agreement either, and it's not Savannah I see myself with."

I feel Penelope's hand reach out and touch my arm nearest her, pulling it from under my head and placing her hand around mine, holding it. "I think you're the farthest thing from an asshole on the planet, but I think maybe you'd stop feeling like one if you told Savannah the truth. As it stands now, you've left her holding the entire burden of responsibility for why you're no longer together."

I nod my head. I know she's right. I mentally accept the fact that tomorrow morning, when I go to the house to meet Savannah and take care of the bills, I will be honest with her.

Penelope sits up and moves her body closer to mine, moving my arm and resting her head on my shoulder while looking up at the sky with me; it's a move that startles me, but wouldn't have two years ago.

Penelope and I had been affectionate with each other for years, definitely something a little more than best friends, but always platonic. Our relationship is a difficult thing to describe to anyone. We're not like siblings; I could never imagine sharing the verbal volley and banter that I share with Penelope with one of my sisters. I see us more like two opposite-sex best friends might be as children, before puberty and social norms enforced strict boundaries. Except that doesn't make sense either, since children would not speak to each other like we sometimes do.

Whatever it is she and I have, it's unique.

When Savannah came into the picture, a lot of mine and Penelope's affection for each other outside of work fizzled away, by some unwritten acknowledgement that it would neither be understood nor appreciated by Savannah. Hell, it wouldn't be understood by most people outside of the BAU, and they only understand it because they've lived it for so long.

I didn't even realize I missed the ease and comfort we had with each other until that moment. This is an unexpected gift that comes from ending things with Savannah, and something Emily wouldn't even blink at.

I loop my arm around my best friend's shoulder and we look up at the sky together.

"I don't know what it looks like a few months from now, for you or Emily, but I believe with everything in me that she's going to make it, Derek, and you're going to get the time to figure it out," she whispers.

Penelope Garcia has been my touchstone for nearly a decade now. Her advice, whether I've liked hearing it or not, has always been spot on given the circumstance. Though she's not exactly giving me direct advice here, she isn't trying to steer me away from the path I've chosen to take, either; she's jumping in right beside me.

That's more of a salve to my soul than my conscience could ever be on its own.

I stare at myself in the full-length mirror that's hung on the back of my bathroom door. The loose pants with the drawstring waist that I'm wearing are not like anything I've owned in recent years, but they help hide how thin I am better than the other pants I own, pants that now slip past my hips when I walk more than few steps. I'd sent Claudia off with Garcia the evening before, because I didn't have the energy to go shopping myself, but I needed some new things.

I contemplate myself for just a few seconds more before shrugging an equally loose, summery blouse over my tank top, to help hide the rash and irritation on my arm from one of the chemotherapy drugs I receive.

Three and a half weeks into chemotherapy and I'm now down a total of sixteen pounds since I first started feeling sick when I was in London. I am down to a very unbecoming extra-small on my tall frame; my breasts, which have required some pretty damned supportive bras if I was going to do anything active since puberty, can now be supported just fine in a shelf bra inside a tank top. Not that it matters, not that I'm very active these days at all.

All of this despite the fact that I'm managing to consume enough calories to at least maintain my weight, if not gain weight.

I'm hopeful, though. Hopeful that things are maybe starting to take a turn - my scale has remained consistent for the past three days. Maybe things are starting to work inside my body. So far my blood work looks good. My heart is handling all of this well, as are my lungs, despite one of the drugs potentially causing issues. It's still very early in the game, though.

I put makeup on my face to hide how gaunt I look, if it's possible for a person to look gaunt when her face is puffy from daily Prednisone. My hair actually looks decent, despite the frightful number of strands I found on my pillowcase this morning, and the amount that came out in my brush after my shower.

It's Friday, and, as I'm learning, weekends are my best time. Mondays to Wednesdays are fairly horrible, Thursday is much improved, and by Friday I'm feeling moderately okay. I still exhaust quickly, my taste buds are screwed up, soon I'm going to be bald, and I bruise easily, but I'm hanging in there.

I think this is twenty-five percent my will to live, twenty-five percent forcing myself to be normal for Charlie, twenty-five percent the drugs, and twenty-five percent because of my incredible support system, and most of that is Derek Morgan. I've accepted the fact that they aren't going to get angry with me, and they aren't going to scream. Sometimes I still want to scream, though.

I'm letting Derek get way too close and I'm taking way too much comfort from his presence in my and Charlie's lives, but I don't have the energy to get angry with myself about it. Last week, he stayed at the house on Monday and Tuesday night, and I found myself on Tuesday morning with my body wrapped around his. It freaked me out, but seeing as he acted like nothing was different, it was easy to pretend I felt the same way after a couple of days.

Last Thursday, he wasn't here in the morning when Charlie woke up, because he was meeting Savannah at their house to take care of bills and other things. I don't know what their conversation was like, because he wouldn't talk about it. All I know is that he arrived around ten o'clock that morning, when Claudia and Charlie were at the grocery store. He stepped into the house and he'd clearly been crying, but he didn't say anything. He just wrapped me in a hug like he hadn't seen me in forever, and I hugged him back because this time it seemed like he needed comfort.

I asked him, "What's wrong?" and he responded, "Nothing. It's all going to be okay."

I have no clue what exactly he meant, but it was the first time the sentiment of everything being okay didn't make me want to lash back with a, "How do you fucking know?" Anyway, he seemed to be saying it for his benefit more than mine. So I hugged him for longer than I normally would have or should have and told him I was there if he needed to talk.

This week, because every third week of chemotherapy I go in two days in a row, he stayed Monday through Wednesday night. He stayed on the couch, but I heard him checking on me throughout the night, and I almost - almost - patted the empty side of my bed and invited him in on a few occasions. But I held myself back.

Instead, I moved things around in my dresser and gave him a couple of drawers for the accumulation of his clothing and other things that are slowly finding permanence in my home. I couldn't be entirely sure, but I'm pretty certain I heard him happily whistling in the kitchen after that, while I was in my bathroom after taking a shower.

Sometimes I just want to beg him to go home, to go back to Savannah, to ride it out and find a way to make Charlie fit in there, because I don't want to leave him as a single father. But I heard him that fateful day in my kitchen after I'd spilled a number of embarrassing wishes to him. Savannah doesn't want to be a step-mother, and Derek wants nothing more than to be Charlie's father. And that's that, according to him.

Sometimes I like to delude myself into thinking that nothing more is going on here except that I'm miraculously getting my friend Derek Morgan back, despite what I did to him. But I know it's far more than that, even if we don't talk about it. Sometimes, with him, it's easy to forget I have cancer, and I want to pull him closer to me; sometimes cancer and my own mortality are on the forefront of my mind, and I want to run and hide from him. But I've got Charlie and an oncologist I've come to trust completely holding me firmly in place.

Last night, Derek kissed my forehead again before he left for the night, for the first time since I blew up at him. And I wasn't even asleep yet, just resting on the couch and reading with eyes wide open.

I sigh in the mirror. I look better than I have in awhile in a lot of ways, with my hair styled instead of pulled sloppily back, and makeup applied, and nice, but loose, clothing on my body. My heart is racing because instead of being here when Charlie woke up this morning, Derek was at Dulles, picking up his mother, and they should be here any minute.

I am completely terrified about the initial response Fran Morgan is going to have towards me, but I'm digging deep to calm my fears and face this head on, because Derek wants it so much. That he wants Charlie to get to know his mother is no surprise. If he'd asked to take Charlie to Manassas, or even Chicago, for the weekend so they could spend it all together, it would have been hard for me, but I would have granted him that request in a heartbeat.

Instead, he requested something much more difficult for me, something that included both me and Charlie. He wanted to bring Fran here. He wanted to put her up in a hotel for the weekend that was a five minute cab ride or a twenty minute walk away from this house, so she had the freedom to come and go without relying on him for a fifty minute ride back to the house in Manassas, if she wanted some downtime and he wanted to stay.

What I want is for her reactions and feelings about me to be genuine, not concealed because she feels sorry for me because I look so sick. So I'm trying not to look sick, and I've done the best job I can possibly do, given what I have to work with.

In a lot of ways, this is harder for me than seeing Derek for the first time and telling him about Charlie, because with Derek, I had only kept Charlie from him. This time, I'm going to be seeing a woman from whom I've kept her grandson, with the addition of hurting her only son.

Claudia knocks on the bathroom door and calls through it, "They just pulled up."

I open the door and find Claudia there with an excited Charlie who has been told about his other grandmother and can't wait to meet her. But all thoughts are lost when they get a look at me.

"Mummy!" Charlie exclaims happily when he sees me, like he hasn't seen me in a very long time. And it's true, he hasn't seen me quite like this in about a month. It flits through my head that this is nearly the last hurrah for my hair.

"You look lovely," says Claudia, blinking back the atypical tears in her eyes.

I smile and pull Charlie into my arms and we're just making our way into the living room when Derek opens the front door.

Charlie cries out excitedly, "Daddy!" and wiggles to get out of my arms. I set him down and watch him run into Derek's arms.

"Grandma?" Charlie asks Fran from the safety of Derek's arms.

Fran chokes back a sob and nods. Charlie leans towards her and is comfortable in her arms in an instant.

And I get the very last thing I ever expected at this initial re-introduction to Fran Morgan. My son is in her arms and she is hugging him, and she is looking right at me with tears dripping down her face in a torrent.

She smiles at me and mouths, "Thank you."