I must confess, a bit bummed by the dipping interest in the story...perhaps this will change things...

It was late, but not late enough for them to be the only two left in the office. Torres was somewhere in the building with a couple of staffers, preparing for a meeting the following day. She had been nagging them for weeks to be the lead on one case, once she found and would take care of from start to finish, and she was determined to make the most of the chance she had been given.

It was better for Cal, all considered. As of lately, he had found the appeal of the empty office at night less and less enticing. And given the fact that Gillian had been locked up in her office for hours, he wasn't the only one.

He sighed and leaned down on the couch, giving his beard a thoughtful scratch and abandoning the report he was boringly browsing through then taking his phone. He needed the device to do two things, check the time and possible incoming communications, thinking with a smirk about the twisted way in which the two were related. What he found was that it was well past 8pm, and that he had no new text..

Yet, somehow, that made the message loud and clear.

Cal tossed the report aside and stood up, going over to his desk to pick up his coat and put it on as he walked across the library, taking the shortcut to the hallway and, eventually, to Gillian's office. He stopped for half a minute to look at her, sitting at her desk going through some papers…probably something phoney just to keep up the appearances, just like he had been doing. The room was mostly dark but the desk lamp was on, creating a strange effect that put her in the spotlight whilst also keeping her in the dark, and for a moment Cal wondered if that wasn't a sign.

Then he sighed again and knocked softly, entering the room without waiting for her to look up or tell him to come in. He was afraid that, if he did, whatever she might have seen on him would have delayed the inevitable.

He stepped in and closed the door behind him, leaning with his back on it with his hands in his pockets, his eyes wandering around the dark room as he gathered his strength to say what he had to say.

"It's not working, is it?"

His words came out in a resigned whisper, one that Gillian could still hear loud and clear. She froze for a moment, not surprised that he hadn't fallen for her 'I'm too busy to talk act' but still taken aback by the straightforward overture. It must have taken him all he had to come over with that in his mind, and Gillian didn't make him wait long: she owed him, and herself, that much.

So she looked up at him, taking in his demeanour and the implied meaning of him wearing his coat and looking ready to leave when she wasn't.

"No," she agreed then with a painful whisper of her own. "Not the way I thought." Then she attempted a smile. "Maybe we should talk about it."

Cal smirked, feeling the irony of the situation seeping through him. After all, talking was one of the biggest malfunctions they've had to deal with lately. He appreciated her effort, but he also thought that dragging it wasn't going to help either of them, and no matter what was about to happen they had too much respect for each other to pretend otherwise.

"When's the last time you stayed at work so late, without telling anybody?"

The question was more like a statement, not a provocation but a skilled and well founded observation. Gillian didn't answer, she didn't need to: they both knew the answer to that. When things had started to go bad with Alec, when she didn't want to go home to find it empty - at best - or to find him there and realise they were becoming strangers. She would try, back then, to still arrange things with him for dinner or something, but after a while she had grown tired of going through the trouble only to be lied to, to be given some lame excuses on work engagements and important meetings to attend to. Cal wouldn't lie to her, not like that, he had no secrets comparable to the one Alec had kept from her, but really the situation wasn't much different.

"I'm sorry, Cal," she caved eventually, finally dropping the act and deflating on the chair. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, clenching her lips together. "I really wanted it to work."

"Me too, love. Me too." He nodded thoughtfully more to himself, then took one hand out of his pocket and randomly waved it in the air as if to try and grasp the words he wanted to use out of some invisible shelf. "What kills me is that I can't really understand why."

Gillian had to agree, she had been thinking about it for days and no, she still couldn't quite put a name to what it was. Maybe because she had refused to see it, maybe because it was more than one thing or maybe because it was so difficult to identify that neither of them could understand.

"I'm afraid…trying to figure it out now would only make things worse," she whispered then, feeling oddly relieved when Cal nodded in agreement.

"Too much expectation?" He offered then with a small shrug, and despite the situation Gillian found herself chuckling softly in response.

"I like romance novels, what's your excuse?"

Cal chuckled back, thinking that wasn't going too bad…as far as breakups went.

Then he moved his hand again, tilting his head one side and nearly closing his eyes as he tried to get the next thing out.

"Would you mind… Can I be the one, ending it?" For a moment, Gillian thought that he was joking or something, but the way he was trying to mask the pain with over exaggerated gestures showed how much that really meant to him. "I know it's silly but…I don't think I can take another woman I love leaving me."

Gillian took it in, for a second wondering how could she really be breaking up with a man who could say things like that, who could feel things like that and not be afraid to share them. Then the following thought was about the odd easiness of it all, the calm they both saw and displayed to each other at such a moment, and she realised that maybe it really was for the best in the end.

Still, things were hardly going to be that easy moving forward and they'd better remember that,

"So, what now?"

She asked out loud, although it was both a question for Cal and one for herself. He sighed and put his hand back in his pocket, his head wobbling as he tried to think.

"We see how it goes, we try to make it work." He managed to look at her, suddenly focused. "Too many people depend on us."

Gillian couldn't help but smile, a good smile. It meant a lot to her that he could think that way, not about himself or them but about the others, even more so because he meant it and he wasn't saying it just to please her. After all, as things stood he didn't need to do that anymore.

They didn't need to talk about how to share the update with the staff, they were probably going to pick up on the change on their own really quickly, but for a moment Gillian wondered about Emily.

"Yeah, that one is going to be tough," Cal smirked, reading the thought on her face. "I'll take care of it, don't worry."

Worry wasn't the right word, but of course it wasn't her place to say anything about that. No matter how close she had grown with the young girl she was still his daughter, and it was up to him to deliver the news in the way he saw fit.

There were probably other things they should have said, details about how to move forward and trivial conversations on returning personal effects, but they didn't want to venture into that. Not because it made it all the more real, the full picture was very much loud and clear, but because it seemed like a stupid thing to talk about at that hour.

Then Cal pulled himself up from the wall and gave an absent nod, mumbling as he turned around to leave.

"Well, goodnight then."

"Cal." He stopped when she called his name, looking back to her sad half smile. "I think this is the most we've talked in a while."

"Fancy that!" He chuckled, not knowing what else to respond and thinking it was fair enough since she looked like she didn't know why she had made that observation either. What they both knew was that she meant a specific kind of talking, one that was made of uncomfortable truths rather than the washed down conversations they had been having as of recently. Then he sighed and opened the door, giving her one last look. "'Night Foster."

She responded to his goodnight with one of her own, not feeling at all bothered by the fact that he had used her last name to address her directly for the first time in months. Not because she didn't care, as easy and seemingly painless as their breakup had been, it wasn't something she was going to take lightly. She knew there was a bar crawling tour in Cal's immediate future, and for her a good cry on her couch with a bottle of wine and a tub of ice cream, but all considered things could have gone a lot worse.

Over the years they had gone from strangers to doctor and patient, then to friends and business partners and, finally, to lovers. Every stage of their ever evolving relationship had been a shift, a change to adjust to: they had survived all of them, adapted to all of them.

All they had to do was do it again.

There was no angst, no rage, no cataclysmic reaction blowing up their lives and those of people around them.

Cal didn't spiral; apart from a few drinks on the night of he didn't go for the bottle, or lock himself away somewhere to be alone with his own pain. He had done that before, with Zoe, and it hadn't helped at all, so might as well try something new. The one reason he had had back then to at least try to keep it together had been his daughter; now, with Emily a young woman off to college - more likely being her to look after him than the other way around - there was a different kind of child to look after. The company, their company…their child, of sorts.

After the first night of sorrow and mourning, Gillian hadn't really know what to expect of herself. Her divorce from Alec had been long overdue, some kind of liberation as bad as it sounded to admit it, but no matter how strained things had become, ending her relationship with Cal was a very different thing. As it turned out, in both cases focusing on work seemed to be the best remedy. Still, after Alec it had been mostly due to the fact that after her complicated marriage work seemed to be the only thing she had: after Cal however, focusing on work was a choice she happily made, coming off of months in which she had proved to others and herself that she was more than just her job.

The morning after they ran into each other at the desk, exchanging a polite and natural good morning that didn't sound any different than the hundreds of others they had exchanged in the past. The difference, which didn't go unnoticed to the few people who witnessed, was the lack of touching or smiles between them. Actually, Anna thought as she watched them part ways, each to their offices, the difference was they didn't look like they were trying too hard as they had done, in her opinion, as of recently.

It seemed fitting: she had been the one picking up on their new dynamic when they had gotten together, and she was probably the first one wondering what might have changed again.

It wasn't as easy as she thought, perhaps because whenever she had thought about them breaking up - not that she had wished for it, of course - she had imagined yelling matches, awkward silence and overall tension spreading through the office like wildfire. She saw none of that, and neither did the others in the following days.

No matter what was going on, even when it became crystal clear that they were no longer together, the bosses were civil, friendly, and professional. Not just to their staff and clients, that was to be expected, but also to each other. At first they thought it was mostly a forced effort, not an act but a genuine effort to keep things smooth for people around them. But as the days went by it became clear that they were not pretending, not for their own benefit or any others'. On the contrary, as strange as it might have been there seemed to be a new found work connection between them, which somehow was also what gave them away on the officiality of their breakup.