She hesitated for a moment outside his doorway, but mustered up her courage, took a deep breath, and knocked on the glass.
He looked up from his desk and stood to greet her. "Dr. Rogers. Come in, come in."
Returning his own welcoming smile with a tentative one, she made her way into his office.
It was a spacious, open room, and one she hardly ever spent time in. The first time she had visited this office was when Colonel Carter had been in charge of the expedition. The room had felt smaller, somehow, when it belonged to Carter. Framed photos of her team and family members had crowded every shelf, each nook and cranny filled with some sort of fascinating artifact or interior plant. She had even brought decorative pillows for the upholstered chairs. Woolsey, on the other hand, was a minimalist. It wasn't that the room now lacked personality – there was a framed photo of a Yorkshire Terrier behind the desk, an old set of Shakespeare's complete works on the bookshelf – but it certainly felt emptier.
Emma found their contrasting decorating styles particularly odd, considering how much time Carter had spent behind that desk in comparison to Woolsey. When Carter was head of the expedition, they jokingly called her Colonel Capone because she was notoriously difficult to find; at any given moment, she might have been in the physics lab with McKay and Zelenka, or in the Jumper Bay making repairs, or even off-world assisting a team, rarely was she ever in her office. Maybe, Emma suspected, Carter's attempts to make the office feel more homey were part of an effort to make the time she spent in it more bearable. Mr. Woolsey, on the contrary, possessed a natural passion for desk work and bureaucracy. Perhaps it didn't matter much to him what his workspace looked like; as long as he had a desk, paper, and pen, he would get the work done and dare she say it, he would enjoy doing so.
"How can I help you?" Woolsey asked.
She glanced over his shoulder and down to the gate room, to the technicians' deck across the way, then to the security guards stationed on the main staircase, and found herself particularly despising her boss's paired down decorating choices. With nothing else around them, she felt like some specimen at a museum, on full display through the glass for anyone who cared to look. Reminding herself that she couldn't blame the actual transparent construction of the room on anyone but the Ancients, she tried to reframe her attitude toward Woolsey before she spoke.
"Do you mind if we close the door?" she asked.
Others might be able to see her, but she sure as hell didn't want anyone hearing her.
Mr. Woolsey gestured to the doorway. "I'm afraid my office isn't equipped with actual doors. Really takes 'open-door' policy to a new level, doesn't it?"
She let out a huff of air in place of a laugh.
"What's on your mind, Doctor?" He gestured for her to take a seat, which she did, albeit reluctantly.
Another difference. Had it still been Carter in his place, she would have suggested they sit on the soft upholstered chairs – not across from each other, but next to each other. But Woolsey clearly preferred both the formality and the protection of keeping a desk between them.
"I, um…I had a request for you."
He gave her a pitying smile. "Now Doctor, if this is about M5R-233 –"
"It's not," she said quickly.
He leaned back in his chair and gave her a quizzical look.
"It's…more personal than that." She looked down at her hands in her lap and folded them tight to keep them from trembling. Oh, how she wished she had one of Carter's decorative cushions to hug to her chest right now.
"Everything all right, Doctor?"
It was like jumping into a cold pool. Best to do it all at once than to wade in little by little.
"I think someone came into my quarters last night."
Woolsey's eyebrows rose above the frames of his glasses. "Uninvited?"
She nodded. "It happened while I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed, so I didn't hear anything, but when I came out of the bathroom…" she took another deep breath, "there was a vase full of flowers on my desk."
"Flowers?"
"Yes. With a note to me on them. And they weren't there before I went into the bathroom."
"Why didn't you radio someone to you immediately?" He started jabbing his tablet with the stylus.
There it was. The part she dreaded the most. The "why didn't you say something sooner?" The part where this was somehow her fault, and not the fault of the man who had broken into her bedroom.
"I got so worked up about it that I had an asthma attack," she answered truthfully. "I wasn't really able to radio anyone."
"Beckett didn't mention anything this morning about you visiting the infirmary."
Her hands curled against each other in her lap. What was this? An interrogation? Did he not believe her?
"I didn't go to the infirmary," she said curtly. "I had my medication."
In spite of her biting tone, he didn't look up from the tablet. "I'm looking at last night's radio logs and it looks like you made a call to…Ronon's channel around 22:30?"
"I—I thought the flowers had maybe come from him." It sounded ever so pathetic when actually said out loud.
"You think Ronon was the one who broke into your room?" This time, he did look at her and once again, his eyebrows looked like they were playing leapfrog with the top of his glasses.
"No. No, it wasn't him."
Both of her cheeks were burning with embarrassment. She hadn't told anyone about her feelings toward Ronon, not even her closest friends, and Woolsey would definitely be at the bottom of her list of confidants. This was all to say nothing of the fact that those feelings were so clearly unreciprocated; it was mortifying to admit that she even, if momentarily, considered the flowers to be a gift from him.
The waking look he had given her the night before played again in her memory, that expression of unmitigated hope which had soured so quickly into disappointment. There was no doubting that the man was in love with a ghost. Any bouquet of flowers that came into Ronon's possession were more likely to find their way to a tombstone than to her front door.
Woolsey seemed to have recovered from the shock of suspecting Ronon capable of such a crime as breaking and entering into a young woman's room and tactfully carried on. "Yes, well, I suppose flowers wouldn't be Ronon's style anyway. Presenting you with an animal carcass or a severed Wraith finger, maybe."
Emma laughed in spite of herself, appreciating the humor. "I was just hoping that maybe you could pull up the security camera footage and see if the person was caught on camera?"
"Of course," he said, already opening a new window on his tablet. "Around what time did this occur?"
"Around 10 PM. South pier. Floor 4."
"22:00? But you didn't make the call to Ronon until a full thirty minutes later?"
"Thereabouts. I'm not really sure when it happened. I was in the bathroom for a while." Once again, the heat rose to her cheeks. "I have a very involved skincare routine."
"Hm. I see." He scrolled through several sets of files, seemingly unable to find the correct one. "You'll have to forgive me," he muttered, clearly struggling with the interface. "Someone in our security department would be much more adept at this."
Emma's heart skipped. "I'd rather this be kept between you and me, sir."
Nodding absentmindedly, he continued scrolling. "Aha! Here it is." He shifted the tablet so she could take a look but the screen was blank – completely black. "That's odd," he murmured. "Let me check something else."
Even from her upside-down view of his tablet, she could see all the security thumbnails stacked in a grid. He clicked on one, but it was another black screen. Then another. And another.
"The power outage," he said under his breath. "The complications from last night's power outage must have shorted out the cameras for a couple hours."
There was an awful sinking sensation in her stomach.
"What a terrible coincidence," he whispered. "Perhaps when they rebooted…"
"Yes." She heard herself say the word but felt suddenly removed from every part of her body, like she was floating above, watching herself from several feet back.
There was no evidence. No trace of him entering her room.
"Perhaps we should post a guard outside your room for the foreseeable future." He brought his finger to his earpiece.
"No," she barked. "That won't be necessary. I'll just…stay with a friend for the next few nights."
"Nonsense. You've brought a complaint to my attention and it will be dealt with appropriately." He finally set the tablet onto the desk and regarded her intensely through his rimless spectacles. "Now…do you have any idea who it was that might have entered your quarters? Anyone you've recently argued with? Or perhaps the opposite? Anyone you've been recently involved with?" He gave an awkward cough. "Romantically, I mean?"
The name caught in her throat. The captain. She knew it. It was him. The note was proof. So then why couldn't she say it?
"Mr. Woolsey?"
The sound of the technician's voice made her jump.
"Sir, there's something you need to see."
He gestured toward Emma. "I'm in the middle of an important matter. Can it wait?"
"Afraid not, sir. We've detected a Wraith Cruiser on our long-range scanners."
"A Cruiser? You're sure?" he asked, swiveling that singular gaze onto the new messenger.
"Yes, sir."
"I see." He stared at the wall for the briefest of seconds as he gathered his thoughts. "Call Sheppard and his team to the conference room immediately," he said as he got to his feet. "Oh! And Dr. Beckett, too."
"Yes, sir."
He straightened the papers on his desk into a folder, which he took with him as he started to leave his office. "My apologies, Doctor. You understand."
"Of course," she squeaked.
"Unfortunately, it looks like there are other pressing matters which will soon require my undivided attention."
She nodded, numbly.
"But I'll make sure security is aware of your complaint and they can take it from there."
"No. Sir –"
She got up to follow him, to stop him, to purge the name still on the tip of her tongue, but he had already left the room.
A/N: Dun dun dunnnnnnn. What do you think? Should she have gone to Woolsey? Thank you for reading and reviewing, everyone! You're great.