Sorry for the little delay, life you know?
Tori: we could fill a whole entire season with all those unexpressed feelings and stuff, right!
Well, let's find out what is going on with Cal's eye.
As it turned out, the boy who cried wolf was a serial offender and came from East London.
Captain Cal, as Emily took to calling him despite his initial instructions about pirate jokes, showed once more that they built people differently across the pond. Perhaps it was a certain healthy disposition, a lot of luck, or he was just too stubborn to let things go irreparably wrong. Whatever the reason, as Dr Schultz had anticipated time was all Cal's eyes needed. Well that, some rest and proper nutrition and all the exercise one could get for a busted eye.
In a couple of days the blur in Cal's eye was gone. The patch on the functioning one forced him to use it, and he was the first one to land it on anything small and hard to read he could find. After the moment of despair he had shared with Gillian, Cal had been very careful and determined not to show any of that to anybody else, and instead he had channelled all his fears in doing everything he could to get his eyesight back. He knew he owed it to himself, but more than anything he owed it to Emily and the others after the stunt he had pulled.
Obviously when he had decided on the secret surgery he had taken into consideration the inevitable backlash, but he honestly hadn't thought things could go that bad. He considered himself lucky Emily had decided to focus on the fact that he was ok rather than resent him, and grateful that Zoe hadn't gone off on a tangent of her own. Gillian's stance was far more complicated to read, but there was nothing new in that: he struggled to read her on a good day knowing she didn't like it, and there was no way he could do it with a recovering eye and while she was proactively screening her emotions in his presence. There were many reasons why she would do that, he understood, as well as he understood why despite being understandably upset with him she wasn't bringing it up directly.
And really, as long as that meant that she was spending time with him as much as she could, he wasn't going to say anything that would jeopardise things.
Throughout the days of his recovery, his eye first and then everything else, Gillian was at the hospital as much as the work schedule allowed. Once Cal was moved out of ICU the visiting hours became more flexible, which allowed Gillian to come more often and stay later in the evening after Zoe and Emily had gone home. They would talk about work, there was only so much Cal could go on without knowing what was going on in his company and feeling the need to contribute to something, and since he needed the exercise for his eyes anyway they would go through recordings and videos so that he could try and pitch in. Occasionally, Gillian would even cave to his request to snoop around the surveillance camera feed knowing he'd get a kick out of it and stop worrying about not getting his eyesight back.
It was a delicate and complicated balance to keep, and what Cal couldn't have known from the forced comfort of his hospital room was that it was taking its toll on her. She was waking up early to stop by before work, taking on the brunt of the workload despite the team's best effort to lighten it for her, sometimes barely sneaking in a quick lunch, putting up the 'everything is fine' facade with everybody she met. And then she would come to see him, acting normal and deciding to save the remarks about him doing the most insane thing ever to a later date.
But as he got better, with the attention switching from his eyes to the rest of his body in need of strength, Gillian took a step back. The PT was occupying most of Cal's day and it was a family affair, between the overly-enthusiast therapist, Emily and Zoe he didn't need another person in the room cheering him on and watching him take 10 minutes to take two steps, and slowly Gillian's visits became more sporadic and short.
Everybody noticed, but nobody seemed to think much of it since there was a long list of reasons that would explain that: Cal was out of the woods, recovering at the speed of light despite all his grumbling and moaning, work could only wait so long and there were a lot of people who, as much as they understood the situation, also wanted the job they were paying for done successfully and on time.
Everybody but one person.
She was ready with a range of very reasonable explanations for being in the office on a Sunday, however as it turned out she didn't need any of them. Unsurprising: even the most dedicated employee would try to avoid being at work on such a nice sunny day off.
That was exactly why Gillian had chosen that day to take care of a few things, knowing she'd be alone and hoping that would be enough to stop the flood of thoughts and feelings running through her head. She was happy that Cal was ok, that he was going to be fine on all fronts: but with worry out of the way there was too much going on for her to get a hold of properly. The silent quiet of the office was what she needed, a little wrinkle in space and time where she could pretend for a few hours that everything was ok and-
"Why are you here?"
Caught off guard, Gillian stopped on track as she was walking down the corridor, turning around and somehow managing to keep hold of the mug in her hand. She had taken a break and gone to get some coffee, and lost as she was in her unpleasant musings she had not heard Emily come in or approach her.
"Emily, hi." She recovered quickly, walking towards the girl who looked strangely uncomfortable in a place that was like a second home to her. "What are you- Is Cal ok?"
To her surprise and shock, Emily audibly scoffed at her. And that wasn't even the worst part.
"Would you even care?"
The way Emily hissed at her was something Gillian had never heard nor seen coming from her: her father yes, once or twice, and it was striking how much she resembled him at that moment.
"What- Emily what's wrong?"
Gillian knew it might have been a risk, trying to turn the tables on the girl's opening and focus on what was up with her rather than the other way around, but the truth was that Emily's approach had surprised her in more ways than one. She didn't expect anybody to be in the office, certainly not Cal's daughter when he was still in hospital recovering from a brain tumour, and least of all she expected to be called out on the thinning frequency of her visits to him.
"You didn't come to see him today," Emily said then, staring right at her with accusatory eyes. "Yesterday you left after one hour, not even that."
"I know Emily, I'm sorry but we have a backlog of work piling up and I had to-"
"Where is everybody else then?" The girl asked, waving her arms around at the empty office. "I mean, is Dad right? Is everybody here so useless? Because you're the one always trying to convince him that this place doesn't run on him alone."
Gillian smiled at her and took a few steps forward, registering how she didn't soften her stance but deciding to pretend she hadn't.
"It's just a lot of paperwork, I don't think your father would find that very entertaining."
Gillian knew her argument wasn't exactly the strongest one, certainly not for Emily. She had grown up around very smart people who, for one reason or the other, were trained to observe and understand others' actions and act on them: her father had literally invented the science around it, her mother was a lawyer who was trained to read witnesses on the stand and Gillian herself knew a thing or two about it as a psychologist. It was easy to see how Emily might have picked up things from all of them over the years, and combined with the fact that she was naturally predisposed to be even more attentive towards the people she cared about, it shouldn't have surprised Gillian that the girl had noticed something was off.
And she was about to find out exactly just how much.
"That didn't seem to be a problem last week," Emily rebuked her instantly, her words accompanied by a harsh shrug. "When he was still in a coma and you were telling him about the new HR systems you've been developing? Or two days ago, when you told him about the recruitment template you've been commissioned by the fire department and he said to give it to Eli because it's too boring for him?"
"Emily-"
"You've been there everyday, you were there before any of us. You waited hours at the hospital for us to arrive and they didn't even let you be with him but you were there." Emily insisted, keeping her voice low and letting her eyes channel all the deep emotions stirring inside her. "You were there for him and for me every day even when you were tired and stressed for work, you've been there for him when we didn't know if he was going to wake up, or if he'd get the use of his eye back."
"Of course I was Emily," Gillian smiled and took a step forward. "He needed to feel we were there for him."
"Is that why you stopped coming to the hospital? Because now he's ok and he doesn't need you anymore?"
Gillian didn't honestly know what to reply there: in a way yes, Cal was ok and didn't need constant care, certainly not from three different people hovering around him with their worries, but that was all due to the fact that he was recovering remarkably well. So she opted for something else, sticking with her 'it's all about work' related line of response but opting not to take the dismissal route and instead being open about it with Emily.
"He's been out for two weeks now, I wish I didn't have to say it but it's been very hard on the company." Gillian explained, talking slowly to make sure Emily could see she was being sincere. It seemed to be working, as Emily relaxed a little. "As much as our clients understood the situation they were more worried about what it would mean for them if Cal wouldn't-" To her own surprise, she found that she struggled to finish the sentence and voice out loud the scenario that hadn't been. "I can't tell you I knew he was going to recover and everything would be fine, but I had to make sure there would still be a company waiting for him if it did."
That was going somewhere, Gillian immediately noticed by the way Emily's face darkened. The girl's eyes went blank for a second as she got lost in some uncomfortable thoughts, and Gillian could easily guess what she was thinking. Judging by the way Emily couldn't look at her for a moment, the older woman guessed that for the first time Cal's daughter was looking at a bigger picture, one she normally wouldn't concern herself with. Gillian had been there at Cal's bedside everyday, hoping that someone she cared for deeply would wake up and live, possibly torn between a personal and professional loss: she had been there worried about Cal's life, all the while trying not to feel like a horrible person for also having to consider how the potential personal loss would have affected what they had built together.
Emily seemed to make that leap in reasoning, her bottom lip quivering for a second when she remembered how close she had gone - they all had - to losing her dad. She sighed and shook her head, bracing her arms tight around herself and this time when Gillian stepped forward and motioned to reach out to her she didn't give sign of backing away. She eased one arm around Emily's shoulder, gently guiding her back towards the lobby to sit down on the couch there rather than the one in her office, holding her softly until she seemed calm enough.
"It's never easy, preparing for the worst," she said after a while. "And it's not easy to forget how scared we were. But your father is ok now, he will be as good as new before you know it."
"I know, it's just so hard to get over it." She looked at Gillian who smiled and nodded, she knew exactly how she felt. "I think…maybe it's because it happened now? I mean, here I am planning to go to college on the other side of the country-"
"Emily, this has nothing to do with it, you're smart enough to know that. And yes, your father always makes a big spectacle of not wanting you to go to college that far but you know he will support you when the time comes."
"I know that, that's why- Things were going so great, you know?" Gillian frowned, not sure what she was talking about and Emily shrugged before continuing. "Mom is happy with Rudi and Dad has stopped obsessing about it, I know he's finally ready to move on. That's why I have been looking at colleges in California, I know he can take it despite all his whining. And just a few days before all this he told me- He had something on his mind and I thought he was finally going to do something about it."
Gillian didn't enquire any further, feeling like Emily was mostly talking to herself at that point and clearly had caught herself about to say something she shouldn't. But the fact that for the second time she had hinted at some possible unusual behaviour on Cal's part just before the surgery, when his symptoms should have been clear and visible to those around him, didn't get lost on her.
But maybe, Gillian thought while holding Emily close in a lulling silence, maybe that wasn't exactly what the girl was talking about after all. Yes, she had mentioned that perhaps Cal had been acting a bit weird recently, but she had used very specific words whether she had meant to or not.
Either way, she might have been more right than she thought, about more than one thing.