"You have to know what happened with Garrett wasn't your fault." He tried to convince me, but I felt like I would always blame myself. The truth was if I had done what I was supposed to do that night—collecting the evidence to put Booth away—I would have never put myself or Garrett in danger. We would have caught him and put in jail long before I had joined Intelligence.

"Yeah. At least that's what everyone keeps telling me." Not being able to sit there any longer, I hopped off the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. I glanced into the living room, certain he wasn't going to follow as I grabbed a glass from the cabinet left of my sink.

"You alright?" His sudden presence made me jump as I held tighter to the breakable object in my hand. Since everything had gone down with Booth, I was still a little on edge.

"I'd be lying if I didn't say I had a little bit of a headache right now." I refrained from rubbing the back of my neck and grabbed the bottle of ibuprofen from the next cabinet over.

"You had one heck of a night. How are you holding up?" I could tell he was watching me closely as he leaned up against the counter.

"My body hurts a little, but nothing I can't handle," I said all this as I swallowed down the pill in my hand. "With the help of ibuprofen, of course." I rattled the bottle for emphasis before placing it back in the cabinet. "First one I've had to take since last night."

"That's good. Uh, did the doctor clear you when you went in?"

"Yeah. When my head heals, I'm in the clear to come back. I'm thinking it's not such a bad idea to sit back for the next couple of days."

"You sitting back? Never thought I'd see the day—" He laughed quietly as he pulled his phone out of his pocket.

"What can I say? I mostly live by rules."

"Yeah, about that—" He teased as he glanced down at his phone, which took our conversation in a different direction. "It's Voight. I should probably take this."

As he stepped towards the other side of the kitchen, I watched him talk to Voight about their current case and then realized how odd it was that I wasn't working with them. I could have insisted that I was fine and went to work anyway, while the truth was I could hardly move to do so.

"It turns out the guy we're after showed up just ten blocks south of here," Jay called as he walked back towards the kitchen.

"Go. Do what you have to do."

"We'll talk later?" He questioned as he turned to head out the door.

"Yeah."

"You're sure."

"Yes! Now go do your job before I have to kick you out." I held my hands up as if I was standing in a boxing ring.

"Yeah. Nobody wants to see that." He smirked as he looked over his shoulder, taking wide strides across the room until his hand was grasping the doorknob.

Okay. So it was clear that I wasn't okay. That was pretty obvious by his reluctance to leave, but he had a job to do and as his partner, I had to make sure his head was screwed on straight so he could do what he had to do to solve this case.

Finally, he nodded a few times before walking out the door, trailing down the sidewalk and pulling his car away from the curb as he sped away.

After he left, it took several minutes before I locked the door behind him and walked over to my bedroom. As I stood at the door, I lingered hesitantly before kneeling down in front of my nightstand and reached near the back of the top drawer.

There I removed a picture I had taped there long ago. It was a picture that had been taken several days after I had given birth to Eva. I was pained, tired, sore and grieving—both for the loss of her father and giving her up for adoption. You wouldn't be able to see all that emotion as the picture was of my outstretched hands, holding Eva. Her blonde hair barely poking through the multicolored baby hat they had put on her at the hospital.

Even though her birth had been the most blurry moment of my life, I remembered the tears running down my cheeks the entire twenty minutes I had to say goodbye to her. I studied her fine golden hair that twinkled in the morning sun as it rose in the sky. I smiled at her precious yawn that almost made me change my mind about keeping her. But somewhere in my broken mind, I knew I couldn't.

So I kept feeding myself excuses about why she'd be better off. That she would have a better family than just me. That Booth would never find her if she wasn't with me. She would be happy, grow up in a safe environment and one day I had planned to tell her all about why I gave her up.

Fast forward to now and I always thought she would be a lot older before I told her about me. Even though I could tell she was an independent little girl, I still debated revealing who I really was to her. Maybe I could get away with not telling her, but her disappointment had been real when she mentioned wanting to meet her "real mommy". It made it that more difficult to decide what was best for her right now.

What if she wasn't ready to know who I was? There was so much I didn't know how to explain to her—like why I had given her up, instead of keeping her in my life. Why I had chosen my career over her, instead of coming home to her every night. When I didn't understand it all myself.

When everything was looking up putting Booth in jail, this little girl fell straight into my lap. Why? I had no idea. It still felt strange, so unreal that now she needed a home. Maybe it was my second chance that I had always thought about, even though it scared me to death to think about it really coming true.

Shaking my head with doubt with what I was going to do about keeping her, I removed the tape from the picture, tucked it in the middle of the second book sitting in my drawer and closed it up.