The next day, Maura woke up before the sunrise.

Or, to be precise, she woke up for the final time before sunrise, after spending the preceding night sleeping in fits and starts. One time, she jolted out of almost-slumber of sheer guilt from what she'd done before bed. Another time, she woke up from a dream that made her want to do it again. A third time was because she remembered something she wanted to add to Susie Chang's performance review, because Maura wasn't crazy, and she did occasionally think about something that wasn't Jane. A fourth time was Jane again.

Unmotivated to do anything but feel sorry for herself, Maura flopped on her back and replayed the previous evening's conversation with Jane, this time in a markedly less debased manner. Mostly, she tried to figure out if she behaved like her old self, or whether she did something that might have given away her new, slightly lecherous self.

She thought about when she might see Jane next. She would surely be across the driveway tomorrow night, for Sunday dinner at Angela's. These past six months, Maura had made a point of being busy Sunday evenings, so she didn't have to deal with the excruciating hardship of listening to the whole Rizzoli clan laughing and fighting and living so fully across from her silent, empty house. Maybe this week she'd stay home. She drifted in her thoughts, imagining being invited to cross the driveway and join them again. That didn't feel right yet. Perhaps it would be best to avoid Jane until Monday. Her feelings had really gotten away from her last night.

Maura groaned, rubbing her palms into her eyes. She was primarily upset because of the way these feelings for Jane could threaten to complicate her friendship and her job, but she was also frustrated that she would need to come up with a new theory for how she could unburden herself of these feelings.

Like a Catholic thumbing beads on a rosary, she went through the scientific method in her mind.

Formulation of a question, hypothesis, prediction, testing, analysis.

She sighed, sitting up in bed a little.

Formulation of a question: could I rid myself of sexual desire for Jane?

Maura was attracted to Jane, yes, but not for the first time, either. She had previously managed to temper these feelings with great success. Maura had surmised that her initial attraction to Jane was killed off by a two-pronged approach. The first was that Jane had identified herself as straight, and the second was that she became a deeply important platonic relationship in Maura's life. Then, Maura had found out that Jane was involved with women at the same time that the two women weren't friends. Both lines of defence had fallen, and there was no way to restore the first. Maura had hoped that the second was significant enough to do the job on its own.

Hypothesis: if I repair my rift with the Jane, then the maintenance of this important friendship will be sufficient motivation to get over my attraction to Jane.

Her friendship with Jane was the single most important relationship in Maura's life. Surely reason would win out.

Prediction: yes (please).

She had really needed it to work.

Testing: repair friendship with Jane.

This part had started the day that Jane asked Maura to help with the case, so approximately a week and a half ago. Maura had lowered her defences just a bit, and Jane had barged right in. The Friday evening at her house had reached a boiling point, but it also put them on the precipice of a reconciliation. Then the baby steps of this past week had culminated in last night's conversation at the bar. And every single step of the process had only increased Maura's desire for Jane.

Analysis: spectacular failure, getting worse every day.

Of course, Maura's application of the method wouldn't exactly pass muster with a peer reviewed journal. It wouldn't even be rigorous enough for a high school paper. So she could keep trying, but she knew it wouldn't help.

There were several conclusions that she could consider drawing from this. The first was the distinct possibility that her friendship with Jane had nothing to do with stilling her attraction the first time; what she had thought was a two-front war was actually fought entirely on a single border. Jane was straight and Maura didn't pursue straight women and that had been all it took. Now Jane wasn't straight and Maura was having a repeating fantasy about being pushed up against a Ford Crown Victoria in a poorly lit parking lot, the badge on Jane's hip pressing sharp edges against the soft skin of Maura's stomach…

Oh my god, this has to stop. Maura shook herself free of the intrusive thoughts and flopped herself over onto her stomach with great flourish. Groaning into her mattress, she considered her options.

I could tell Jane. I'll sit down with her, calmly explain the attraction. She will be surprised. She will, at first, think that this is my first attraction to a woman. I will explain that it is not. She will ask why I never told her, and I will have to be honest, although maybe I'll be able to avoid the part where I was initially worried she could be a bigot. She will let me down gently. She will once again be unavailable to me, and this attraction will subside. We will be friends again.

She turned her head, pressing her cheek against the sheets as she stared out the window.

I'll sit down with her, calmly explain the attraction. With great relief and urgency, Jane will confess she's attracted to me as well. She will reach across the table for my hand. Firmly, insistently, she will lead me outside to take me home. We won't make it that far. Oh, there's the Crown Victoria again…

Maura reached up, grabbing a pillow. She pulled it down to her face, gave a short, cathartic scream into its down-filled centre, then shifted onto her side and hugged the pillow against her chest.

I'll sit down with her, calmly explain the attraction. Jane will be furious that I never told her, and question the foundation of our friendship. We will end up in another fight. She won't return the attraction, and while we will probably recover from the fight, her knowledge of my attraction will alter the intimacy of our relationship permanently, even if I do get over it. We'll never be as close again.

Maura sighed heavily. She was sure she could quite literally do this all day. It felt like there were a hundred scenarios. Some good, some really good, but many awful. What if she told her, and Jane confessed that she had been in love with Maura for years? What if they ended up in bed together and afterwards, Maura was totally sated, itch scratched, and had to break Jane's heart?

What if the sex was terrible? That one was a little harder to believe. Though, if Maura were being totally honest, it wouldn't have been such a stretch months ago. Jane was always a little prudish and awkward discussing sex, and had spoken of it in rather perfunctory terms. But based on their conversation the night before, her attitude had changed. No, Jane was surely good at it. She had the self-assured air of a woman who knew what she was doing, though certainly the increasing number of notches in her bedpost would help with confidence as well.

Of course, there could be no chemistry. It could be awkward. They'd end up drunk and in bed together, expecting fireworks, only to find themselves painfully knocking their teeth together and fumbling awkwardly, unsuccessfully. No rhythm and no spark. This was one of the better scenarios Maura could think of—the idea of trying and failing and getting over it and going back to being friends.

There was one scenario that Maura was particularly reluctant to think through. She tells Jane about the attraction, they end up in bed together, and only Jane regrets it. Maura wasn't quite ready to confront why this one bothered her most of all.

Suddenly, her alarm was going off. It was seven in the morning. She reached for her nightstand, fumbling for the phone. She hit 'end' on her alarm just a moment before a text notification dropped down from the top of her screen. Reflexively, she tapped on the notification a split second before she realized it was from Jane.

J: you up?

Maura regretted never turning off her read receipts for Jane. She sighed as she typed a response.

M: Yes. Everything okay?

J: run this morning?

M: Are you asking me if I ran this morning, or are you asking me if I'd like to run this morning?

J: like to run

M: …

Maura tried to compose her text quickly, to not let the ellipsis of indecision hang out in their text chain for too long. She felt a little discombobulated at being the one asked to go on a jog. That was her thing. She was the eager jogger and Jane the reluctant participant. Maura had in fact been planning to jog that morning, but she'd very much been planning to do it alone. That was still an option, but Jane's own jogs took her unpredictably across the city so if Maura wanted to be certain to avoid her, she'd have to hop on the treadmill, which wasn't going to cut it. She composed then erased a lengthy response about needing time alone, because she knew that would seem absurd. She'd had so much of that of that lately. There was no reason, or at least no reason known to Jane, why the two women shouldn't spend time together.

M: Sure.

And then her doorbell rang. Maura bolted up in bed.

No.

She groaned as she rolled out of bed, grabbing her robe off the hook of her en suite door. She'd just finished tying a knot in it when she reached her front door and opened it to find a shockingly energized Jane Rizzoli. She stared at her blankly, while Jane bounced on the balls of her feet. She was wearing one of her half dozen BPD t-shirts, and the heather grey had already darkened a bit around the collar as Jane worked up a warmup sweat. To her dismay, Maura realized she was aroused by the fact that Jane was so comfortable in her skin that visibly sweating in public didn't bother her. What other things in public might not bother her? She was ripped out of her increasingly erotic thoughts by Jane's scolding tone.

"Oh my god, you're not ready yet?"

Taking offence helped Maura recover quickly, and she scoffed, "You just texted me."

"You're usually out the door by now. Doctor Isles, are you slipping?" She grinned mischievously at Maura, then slipped past her and towards the kitchen. "Go get ready, I'll make you your gross green juice."

Maura couldn't have been more shocked if a puppet show popped out of her next y-incision. "What is happening? How did you find a way to surprise me more than dating women did?"

Jane was pulling kale out of Maura's fridge and grimacing at it. "Well, Maur, I think the answer to your question is that, when you really think about it, it wasn't that surprising." She winked at Maura, who felt immediately flushed. "Jogging, however, is not something that I demonstrated stereotypical tendencies towards. It's definitely the more surprising of the two. Now please would you go get ready!"

In a daze, Maura made her way back to her bedroom. She could hear Jane waging war against her masticating juicer as she closed the door behind her. Once in her closet, she stripped quickly and put on some workout clothes. She soon found herself staring blankly at her reflection in the mirror. Given the after hours activities she was pretty confident Jane had engaged in last night, Maura couldn't get over her surprise at finding her here bright and early for a jog. But perhaps there was such a bounce in Jane's step specifically because of the rest of her night. Maura winced. Anxiety and desire rumbled through her body.

"What on earth am I going to do?" She asked herself quietly, blowing out a breath. Then she drew her hair back in a ponytail and quickly brushed her teeth before heading back downstairs to find Jane.

The run itself was good. Despite her restless night, Maura found herself moving with great pace, fuelled by nervous energy and general desire, and also a very specific desire to stay ahead of Jane so she didn't have to watch her run. Unfortunately, Jane's long legs helped her match Maura's speed, and it was clear that even without Maura around to nag her, Jane had exercised regularly during the break in their friendship.

They discussed the case further, and Maura learned that during a follow-up interview, a member of the garden had told the detectives that when Arthur Hill had been confronted about his actions in the garden, he had vehemently denied being the flower thief, although not a soul in the garden believed it. It was, of course, not particularly unusual for someone to lie when accused of something, but it struck Jane as interesting, because it didn't sound like he'd put quite the same amount of effort into denying the other thefts in the garden. Maura agreed that denying one thing while accepting the other was odd. Coupled with the observation that the careful cutting of the flowers stood out against his other slapdash misdeeds, Jane was starting to wonder if the garden had multiple thieves.

"That's unfortunately probably not unusual for a community garden, right?" Maura leaned forward with her hands on her hips, breathing deeply. They were back at her house, in the driveway, and she looked over as Jane braced herself against her car, holding one foot behind her back in a stretch.

"No, definitely not. Everyone says this year has been the worst for it, but a lot of it, including the flower stealing, has stopped since Hill's murder." She switched legs, and sighed. "Tell me again why I have to stretch after the jog as well as before?"

Maura straightened up and sighed theatrically. "I will tell you, again, that the stretching before is to warm up the muscles and prevent injury and the stretching after is to aid recovery. It will prevent delayed-onset muscle soreness as it helps with the accumulation of lactic acid in your muscles. But if you want to just be stiff and sore later, Jane, be my guest."

"No, this is fine," Jane said grouchily. Maura rolled her eyes.

"Do you think the flower thefts are connected to the murder?" Maura finished the last of her stretches, and looked to Jane inquisitively. Despite her professional aversion to speculation, she had to admit that she did like watching Jane hunch and gut feeling her way through an investigation. And knowing which way her mind was going would let Maura know where to fix her efforts, so that she could eventually find evidence to support Jane's theories.

"Maybe, yeah. I don't think it's nothing. And if someone was angry enough about the thefts, it would be a reason for Hill to deny them, to avoid that heat. Frost and I will start exploring that angle on Monday. We've been trying to look into Hill's purchase history but he was one of those cash only kind of guys. Might just have to go store-to-store in his neighbourhood to see if anyone can tell us if he was buying anything that would suggest he was stealing flowers, or afraid of a confrontation, or anything like that."

Maura nodded, watching quietly as Jane shook out her legs.

"Did you want to come in for breakfast? To keep talking through the case? We didn't really get as far as we wanted the other week."

Maura was surprised to find herself inviting Jane in. While in bed that morning, she had quite firmly determined that rebuilding their friendship wasn't doing anything for the attraction, but suddenly she was willing to give immersion therapy a further try.

Something flickered across Jane's face, and she looked at her watch with regret. "I can't. I have a thing."

"You have a thing?" Maura put some emphasis on the vague phrasing, and raised an eyebrow. Jane gave a quiet, relenting grunt.

"Yeah. Well. Amy is selling at the Rosalinde Village farmer's market today. I told her I'd swing by right before it starts at 9."

"Ah." Maura glanced down at her own watch, trying to ignore the sudden hollow pit in her stomach. It was 8:23. "Then yes, you better get going. That's almost a half-hour drive."

Jane nodded, but seemed hesitant to get going, despite the tight deadline. She moved around to the driver's side of the car.

"I'll see you on Monday, Jane." "Come to Sunday dinner," Jane blurted out, talking right over Maura.

Maura bit her lip, considering carefully. She thought of family dinner Jane, gregarious and funny, teasing her brothers, being playfully annoyed with her mother Jane. She thought of those private little glances that she and Jane would share amid all the chaos. Jane, silently apologizing for her crazy family, and Maura, thrilled to be included in something so messy and loving after her austere, waspy upbringing. Her heart constricted, and in that moment she realized she might be dealing with a lot more than sexual desire.

"If I'm coming to Sunday dinner, I can't in good conscience make your mother cook it in the guesthouse kitchenette. And I'm not sure I'm ready to have the Rizzolis descend on my house yet. There's going to be so many questions about why this took so long and I'm honestly still a little raw, Jane. Maybe next week?" That was true enough. Maura looked hesitantly to Jane and found understanding in her eyes. She smiled gratefully as her friend nodded.

"That makes sense. It's no rush." Jane wouldn't push.

Maura watched as Jane got into her car and left, gave her a little wave just before the car was entirely out of view, then felt quite silly about it.

It was Sunday, and Maura was logged into her work account remotely, carefully examining digital photographs of Arthur Hill's garden plot.

She'd spent the rest of Saturday distracting herself with Isles Foundation work. Saturday night she had slept fitfully again, thoughts of Jane rampant. She'd run again that morning, this time blissfully alone, and the rest of the day so far had been devoted to a very unsuccessful meditation session and all the open investigations for which she was serving as the medical examiner, culminating with the Arthur Hill case. Work seemed to be the only thing so far that could really prevent her wandering thoughts, and she was pleased to find that she'd managed to distract herself enough that it was already the early evening.

The pictures she was examining had been taken to catalogue the extremely faint blood splatter they had found on some of the plants, but Maura noticed that it gave her a very clear and detailed look of where the flowers had been trimmed, too. She zoomed in as far as she could go onto the cut stems, her face just inches away from the screen. She had scanned through each photo of the plot, narrowing in on the flower stems each time. There was also a folder of photographs collected from other gardeners, many of whom had been carefully documenting the thefts in the garden throughout the season. Many of these showed much fresher trimmings, taken the morning after someone had absconded with the flowers.

Maura had noticed that although the flowers had clearly been carefully selected and trimmed at an appropriate length, the actual site of the cut was a little rough, perhaps like they'd been cut with a dull tool. But another possibility had also occurred to her, and she suddenly found herself brimming with purpose and scientific curiosity, the excitement of a newly forming hypothesis.

She rushed out to her garden, stopping to grab a basket of garden tools from her mud room before alighting upon her own flower beds. She quickly trimmed several flowers, carefully examining the neatly cut ends. She switched to her left hand, and cut several more flowers, finding it significantly more awkward with her non-dominant hand, both due to handedness and the angle of the blade. Again, she peered down close to examine the angle of the cut on what remained of the plant. They were decidedly different when cut with her right hand and her left hand, and those cut with her left were a not-insignificant approximation of the mashed ends she found in the photography. Suddenly, Maura heard the familiar sound of Jane's car in the drive, and she very nearly sprinted around to the path between the main house and guesthouse.

"Jane! I need a hand. Your left one specifically." She waved a quick hello at a surprised Angela, grabbed an even more surprised Jane, and dragged her around to the garden. Jane stumbled in surprise when she saw the dozens and dozens of flowers that had been cut.

"What the hell, Maur. Are you becoming a florist? Do you have a wedding this weekend?"

"Arthur Hill was right-handed!" Maura was incredibly excited. Jane blinked slowly, taking in the flower carnage. Suddenly she was looking down in confusion, because Maura had shoved a pair of garden sheers into her hands.

"Are we recreating the crime scene? Am I going to stab something?"

"Yes, we are recreating the crime scene, no you aren't going to stab something. Same scene, different crime. Come here." She was dragging Jane again, this time to a batch of still-uncut flowers. "Here, please cut these for me."

"Maura, I just need like a little wisp of an explanation here. Like just a tiny taste of what the fuck is going on. You want me to cut some flowers?" Jane was incredulous. Maura made an impatient noise.

"I've been cutting the flowers with my left hand and my right hand. When I cut it with my right hand, the trimmings don't look like they do in the crime scene photography. They're much neater. When I cut with my left hand, it looks more like the photographs, but I need a true lefty in order to really test my hypothesis."

"There's a difference?" Jane looked from the shears down to the flowers.

"Jane, they make left-handed scissors, right?" Maura spoke with exasperation, but had a gleam in her eyes, so excited and frantic to get Jane on her level. "Isn't it a pain when you cut with regular scissors? And I got you those left-handed ones last year and now your Christmas wrapping paper looks less like an uncoordinated first grader did it?"

"Hey," said Jane, slightly wounded, but acknowledging with a begrudging tilt of her head that Maura had a point. Maura continued breathlessly. "Garden shears are just like scissors. I think whoever cut the flowers was left-handed, but they were using regular right-handed garden shears. Or I suppose they could have been right-handed using left-handed garden shears but that seems so much less likely. You have to order them special, they don't typically just have them at the store. Arthur Hill was right-handed! If he had cut these flowers with the garden shears we found in his tools, they would be cut cleanly. But I'm getting ahead of myself, I need more evidence, so can you please just cut some flowers."

Jane stared, mouth agape at the force in Maura's voice, and quickly dropped to her knees to cut a few flowers with the garden shears.

"You're right, it's kind of hard to get the angle where the blade cuts through clean. I feel like I'm smashing them in half." Jane turned to look up at Maura, only to discover that she too had dropped to her knees and was carefully inspecting the carnage left behind from Jane's attempts to cut the flowers.

"Oh, excellent. This is excellent, Jane. Cut more, keep going. I'll have to recreate this with the crime lab techs to be sure, but this could definitely show that Arthur Hill wasn't the person stealing flowers. Maybe... Perhaps..." Maura trailed off, resisting the urge to venture into the domain of guesses and guts. Jane, the queen of that particular kingdom, finished for her, finally excited as well.

"Maybe the night he was murdered, he confronted the person doing the stealing?"

"Jane, you know I can't speculate," Maura chided. They both grinned, and Jane reached out to give Maura's hand a squeeze. Maura placed her other hand over Jane's and smiled harder than she had in months. Before Jane could say anything further, an unfamiliar voice shattered the moment.

"Jane? Are you back here?"

A tall woman with bleached blonde hair was peering around the side of Maura's house. Her eyes fell on the two women, the detective and the doctor, on their knees, clutching hands, surrounded by cut flowers. She blinked slowly. It was Amy from the community garden, and she was looking at them in utter confusion.

Jane sputtered, scrambling gracelessly to her feet.

"Amy! You made it."

Maura stared at the woman, stared at the two of them greeting each other, resented the energy that crackled between them. Jane was suddenly so awkward. Maura could see a blush creeping up her neck. The other woman's eyes were bright blue and sparkled with excitement. They were both so tall, looked so complimentary together, like two women who played for the same team. But not like the gay way, although that was true, too. Like a real team. Like a volleyball team. Like a beach volleyball pair. Maura tried to silence her thoughts and wondered, sincerely, if she might be going crazy. Suddenly she realized Jane was speaking and holding her hand out to help Maura to her feet.

She almost didn't want to stand up, didn't want Amy to see how much shorter she was than the two of them. Somehow it felt like that mattered very much, like it would cast her out, demonstrate that she was an intruder on this scene.

Despite her frantic thoughts, she realized staying crouched on the ground was the worst of her options, so she took Jane's hand and stood up. In the split second it took to get to her feet, she managed to flip the switch inside her that allowed her to turn on autopilot pleasantry for company. It was that polite society coping mechanism that, given her adoption, was such a good example of nurture over nature—though the notion of associating the word 'nurture' with her mother was always a funny one. Whatever happened, she couldn't humiliate herself in front of this woman. Surely the words that Jane had said that she hadn't heard were an introduction. Maura proceeded as such. She somehow found her poise.

"Amy, it's so lovely to meet you. How was your market yesterday?"

"Oh, It went well, thanks for asking. It's a really great market to be a part of." Her tone was chipper, and she smiled, but both voice and expression belied what was going on in her eyes, where the smile didn't reach. Maura wasn't very good with social cues, but she did pick up facial ones. Maura realized that Amy was slightly put off by her presence. She looked at the other woman curiously, and a dangerous but intoxicating possibility reared its head.

Did Amy feel threatened?

If she did feel threatened, what had Jane said about Maura to make that be the case?

Something possessive snapped deep inside Maura. She suddenly felt the need to enter the proverbial ring with this woman, this unwelcome Amazon who had shown up and trampled all over her moment with Jane. If Amy was viewing Maura as an obstacle, or perhaps even competition, that meant that something was at stake. She turned up the charm to eleven. "That's just wonderful. I'll have to come check it out one of these Saturdays. Jane, maybe after our jog next week you could take me?" Maura turned her eyes to Jane, who swallowed noticeably, and looked between the two women.

"Yeah. Sure, that would be cool." She smiled at both of them, but mostly at Maura.

"Great!" Maura enthused.

"Great," Amy said, somewhat less convincingly. Suddenly there was silence. Maura watched Jane patiently, knowing there was one thing that her friend could say to make the situation more uncomfortable, and the high likelihood that she would say it. Jane rubbed the back of her neck, looked momentarily indecisive, then unwittingly fanned the flames.

"Are you sure you can't join us for dinner, Maura?"

Jackpot.

Maura broke into a smile, and looked just oh so regretfully between both women. Amy's displeasure at Maura being invited was brief, gone before Jane finally looked to her, but it had happened. And Maura saw it, and it told her much.

"Oh, that's so kind, but unfortunately I really can't. I'm covered in dirt and I have to write this up while it's fresh in my mind. Thanks for asking, Jane," and she paused ever so slightly before adding, "again." Amy's eyebrow twitched, and Maura was certain the woman was wondering if she had been invited to dinner first, or if it had only happened after (and because?) Maura had declined Jane the first time. She smiled glamorously at Amy, at the same time touching Jane's arm every so lightly before continuing. "I'm sure we'll have a chance to get to know each other better soon."

Maura could see Jane's eyes narrow just slightly, and she knew Jane herself was flipping a switch, between dopey golden retriever and detective. She was trying to figure out the reason for Maura's display. But Maura wasn't going to let herself be interrogated today. She rushed into a goodbye. "Tell everyone I send my regrets. Jane. Why don't you swing by the lab tomorrow and we can talk about my findings then." She gave Jane her most genuine smile, and watched as Jane's suspicion was overtaken by flushed cheeks. Maura turned to Amy and offered her a very practiced rich-person-being-honoured-at-the-charity-benefit smile. "Again, so lovely to meet you."

"Yeah, you too." Amy smiled thinly, and Maura could tell the woman had caught up quickly to what was happening. Amy wove her hand through Jane's elbow and pressed her long body possessively against her side. Maura offered no reaction, but she could see that Jane was watching her, and not Amy, while it happened. Jane's dark eyes were a maelstrom. Suddenly she blinked out of her daze and looked over at Amy, as if surprised to find her so close.

Maura brought up her mental list of possible outcomes if she told Jane about her attraction, and confidently deleted all the ones where Jane didn't feel the same way.