Well, the big reveal is out: Gillian left DC (not the company) and Cal knew it was coming.

Guest: they are both in right in my opinon (well I wrote it). Gillian is looking after herself, and perhaps Cal is too by not wanting to fight a battle he sees as lost

Tori: it's an interesting reading approach, but mayve since I post every two days... Just tryng to make things easier for you!

Now, on with the story

Surprisingly, shockingly, very little changed in Dr Foster's contribution to the group when she moved to New York. No matter what the schedule of her new job was, she always found the time to check files and share her opinion, to answer questions and, sometimes, to listen to the employees' problems and help the best she could. It wasn't quite as if she had never left, there was no replacing her gracious authority in the office, but soon the staff back in Washington realised they should consider themselves lucky.

Because if she could move to another city and work from there with little to no impact on the company, it was becoming clear that the new arrangement could have happened long ago. Did she know? Had she imagined that her physical presence was not really all that necessary? No, probably not: Foster must have been well aware that she was needed, if anything, to be the ying to Lightman's yang…

However, after she left he suddenly didn't seem to need constant balancing. He didn't really change, oh no, he was still the brilliantly abrasive scientist they knew well; but where Lightman easily kept his professional arrogance, showing off his superior skills with staff, clients and suspects any chance he could, he seemed to go to great lengths to avoid taking it out on the employees when something went wrong. There could have been many explanations for it: maybe he didn't see the point anymore knowing that there wasn't a counterpart to call him out on that; maybe he had just lost interest in challenging them; maybe, just maybe, he just wanted to compensate for the fact that Foster had left because of him and do everything he could to show to them, her - and perhaps to himself - that he could go on without her too. It wasn't like anybody was going to call him out anyway.

At home, however, he wasn't as lucky.

Emily might have lived under his roof, but between the fact that she was splitting the time at her mother's house and was soon to depart for college, the girl knew he didn't have any real weapon to threaten her with like he did with his employees. Which meant if she wanted to give him a hard time nothing was really going to stop her.

Understandably, she had not welcomed the news well. No matter how she had gone after Gillian that day, no matter the strange things she had picked up on her own between them, no matter the suspicion that her dad knew it already she couldn't help but think that it was his fault. She held him responsible, both for her leaving and for not trying to stop it. If Emily had been more lenient on the first one, still with the ghost of his near death fresh in her memory, she wasn't going to forgive him easily for not doing what he did best: being obnoxiously stubborn and proud and not accepting defeat without a fight.

Cal let her bash at him: he had no answer that she would like because he would have to agree with her on everything, and he wasn't exactly in the mood to talk about it. He had enough of the glances and whispers at work, of the inevitable questions about Dr Foster he occasionally got from clients who wanted to be reassured that nothing in the services they were paying for was compromised. By the end of the day, when he dragged himself home tired by work overload and haunted by visions of Gillian walking the hallways, the last thing he wanted was to explain himself to his teenage daughter.

The interesting thing happened a few weeks after Gillian left, and for someone who alway knew what was going on, Cal had to admit he had not seen it coming. Because all of a sudden Emily was no longer mad at him but at Gillian.

When he arrived home that evening he toed the shoes off his feet right there on the door, looking at the wet tips of his socks and grumbling annoyed as he wiped the snow away from the shoulders of his coat. It was only early November but it was already snowing, not even a week after Halloween: if that was a sign of things to come…

Cal shook his head, mentally going through to get-ready-for-winter list of things to do, just in case, then he started walking toward the kitchen leaving wet footprints on the floor. He had been craving a hot cup of tea through the drive home as his ass froze on the car seat, and he stormed into the room with no hesitation even though he could hear noises coming from there, meaning that Emily was already there getting dinner started. He sighed as he approached, preparing for more jabs about Gillian: she loved snow, she pretty much celebrated the first snowfall of the season and he had no doubt that the weather outside was giving Emily more ammunition to release her grieve on him-

"Hi Dad. How bad is it outside?"

Cal stopped with his hand on the kettle, his back stiffening not so much at her words but at the soft and concerned tone of her voice. He turned around to look at her, catching the side of her face while she stirred the baked beans on the stove - good girl - before going back to cutting some bread. It wasn't just her voice, he soon realised: her entire being oozed a very different disposition towards him than the attitude she had been showing him recently.

"Not too bad," he responded with a mumble, careful not to mess with the vibe. "It's coming down fast but I don't think it will stick."

"I hope not," Emily huffed. "It's way too early for snow."

Cal agreed wholeheartedly but that wasn't the point; the point was that for the first time in weeks his daughter was talking instead of barking at him. And she wasn't forcing herself to do that, as if she was trying too hard to pretend she hadn't been mad at him for days on end; it felt natural, honest, like a switch had been flipped.

If he was smart, Cal should have gone along with it and taken the win without looking too much into it. And smart he was: but he was also a man who had nearly died, lost his best friend and business partner and who had been unable to communicate with the most important person in his life.

"What's going on, Em?" He asked then, trying to sound as casual as she was as he changed his plan and poured himself a glass of scotch instead of tea. "You barely talked to me for weeks and now here we are making small talk? Don't get me wrong love, I do like the change of pace but help me out here."

Emily sighed and lowered the fire on the stove, then covered the pot with a lid and turned around. He knew that face, he knew those expressions really well, he had been faced with them for weeks; but for the first time in days he was not the cause of those emotions. Cal had been too focused on her until that moment and only then noticed her laptop on the table, at the ready as he found out when she swiftly opened it and turned it towards him so that he could look at the screen. He leaned down on the table with the glass in his hands, coming closer to study the three different tabs open at once so they were all visible. The first thing he noticed, trying to ignore the knot immediately forming in his intestines, was Gillian's smiling face staring at him from each of them. It wasn't the wide happy smile he had seen many times, but rather the polite and shy smile of someone who knew she had to deliver the artificial expression for a good reason; it still looked stunning, no mistake about it. Once he recovered from that, he paid attention to the rest of the content on the page. One of the tabs was from the Columbia University website and it was a list of guest lectures to be given by Dr Gillian Foster, the second one was some psychology podcast he had never heard of and the last one was the link to a paper by the one and only published in the American Journal of Psychology.

Cal looked at the tabs, navigating them a little mostly because he felt that Emily expected him to rather than out of his own real interest, then he looked up at her and shrugged.

"I don't follow," he commented, honesty all over his face easy even for Emily to see.

It wasn't like he didn't know what Gillian had been up to; her leaving-not leaving the group had been news in the professional and academic circles they both frequented, and her profile in the sector was too big for any of her activities to go under the radar. He had captured things here and there from clients, whispered conversation between the staff, caught something in newsletters and publications he normally followed; but he had never asked, and he had never looked her up. Petty? Probably, highly likely; but things were bad enough as they were and he had no problem admitting with himself that he wasn't strong enough to either hang on to something he had lost or to pretend that it wasn't a big deal.

"She's been busy," Emily spatted out in response.

Cal would have had to agree, although clearly that wasn't the point of the current portion of their interaction. Gillian had left D.C about two months ago and the one he was looking at was quite the spread of activities, although he knew that she had likely set things in motion earlier, before his tumour. But it wasn't surprising to him: she had clearly needed a change, a new challenge, and unlike him she was used to getting things done and didn't procrastinate for the sake of it.

Emily knew that too, and he was struggling to figure out what her issue with the discovery was.

"Looks like it," he huffed, sipping his drink and realising how much he suddenly missed the silent treatment and how very, very little he wanted to talk about that.

"Is that why she left?"

Emily's follow up question added on Cal's surprise and confusion, especially for the not so veiled aggression in her voice. He stared at her, not sure if she really expected him to answer, and even less that she would like the only reply he could try to provide. The truth was that he didn't know why Gillian had left, not with enough certainty to voice it out loud; oh yes, he had very early come to terms with the fact that he was the cause for the departure, but even that obvious note had different shades to it. Had he finally done something she couldn't look past anymore? Very likely. Had she realised that their professional and personal partnership was never going to change its dynamic? Also highly possible. Had she decided that she was tired of not being appreciated as she should have, having to remind people all the time that he was not her boss? Definitely up there with the rest as far as explanations were concerned. But they had never openly spoken about it: he knew Gillian wanted to leave and he had never asked why, and he knew it wasn't something he could have fixed by offering a bigger office or more power and visibility within the company.

The reason for the missing enquiry was rather simple: he didn't want to hear her say that it was his fault. He was already sure of it anyway, so he had decided to spare himself the additional grief.

In a way that had given him the perfect alibi with Emily when his daughter had asked him why Gillian had left, and he certainly wasn't going to share any of the scenarios running through his mind.

"I don't know Em, I told you already-"

"She wanted to do her own thing? Up her profile?" Cal felt he was starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable, not liking how increasingly upset Emily sounded. "She was tired of being number two and had something to prove?"

"Em, darling…I don't think you're being fair."

"Fair? Dad," she grabbed the laptop and pointed at the screen. "Look at this, this isn't even her actual job! This is all extra stuff she'd been doing-"

"As it's her right to Em. As long as she keeps working for the company as she promised, what exactly do you expect me to do about it?"

"I just don't understand-"

"And you're not supposed to, Em. Foster is a grown woman, she can make choices for herself." Cal was exasperated inside, but tried to keep a calmer exterior not to escalate the situation on his daughter's emotion and reached out across the table to gently close the laptop and take her hand. "You wanna be mad at her? Go ahead, I can't stop you. But frankly, I think you should give her more credit than that. And trust me love, speaking from experience being mad at her it's not gonna do you any good."

He hadn't expected that, what was about to come, but then again he hadn't expected Emily to suddenly no longer be upset with him and so openly hostile to Gillian. Adding to the already long list of surprises of the day, including the early snow, Cal suddenly realised that his daughter was simply grasping for meaning about one of the biggest losses in her young life. Cal sighed, calling himself an idiot as he briskly walked around the table and took her in his arms, pulling her closer and holding her gently. Emily immediately returned the gesture and hid her face on his shoulder, not sobbing or crying - thank God for that! - but squeezing him tight until she seemed calm enough.

"I miss her," she whispered after a while, making Cal's heart sink in his abdomen knowing he was somehow the cause of the grief in her voice. "I miss Gillian, Dad."

"I know love, I know." He really did, not that it made things any easier for either of them. Then he pulled back and took Emily's face in his hands, smiling softly but making sure she was looking at him carefully. "But if she felt that she needed to go…she knows how to take care of herself, doesn't she? And as complicated as it is…whatever she needed, whatever she wanted…if leaving D.C was the way to do it we should respect that."

Emily was a smart girl, she was growing up surrounded by smart people who had left a big impact on her, and on a superficial level she knew he was right. But as she went back into his embrace after a small nod, the teenager in her kept screaming that no, maybe Gillian didn't know better.