A/N:

STILL MISERY.

Winter 2013 to Fall 2015. Las Vegas, Nevada.

I don't want to be worshipped. I want to be loved.

– Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn), in The Philadelphia Story.

The Awful Truth: Sara Sidle

Sara told her colleagues she was sure that, in divorcing her, Grissom had had her best interests in mind, but really she wasn't. How could he make a unilateral decision but claim it was in her best interests? Surely, if it were to be in her best interests, she should have had a say; she should have been consulted.

After the divorce, Grissom's responses to Sara's emails and calls were curt at best and non-existent at worst. For the most part, she stopped trying to contact him. She wondered whether he'd tired of her. She wondered whether she had simply helped him transition from the lab to the next stage of his life. She wondered whether she'd merely been his midlife crisis. That missing 5% had taken over everything, and Sara doubted what she had once known with almost her whole heart.

Sara knew she'd never love any man but Grissom, but sometimes, in her worst moments, she wondered whether he'd ever really loved her at all. To say Sara felt foolish would be an immense understatement: after years of thinking they had a love that transcended time, distance, and trauma, Sara had been unceremoniously dumped by the man she still, always and forever, adored; their marriage had lasted not even four years, most of them spent apart.

Shortly after her split from Grissom, a somewhat drunk Sara had briefly made out with another man in the parking lot of a bar. This made her miserable. Soon thereafter, Grissom (unsurprisingly, yet somehow she'd held out hope) failed to join her at a dinner reservation they'd made, before the split, for a special occasion. That night, Sara saw the man with whom she'd had her earlier drunken encounter.

Feeling at a nearly all-time low, Sara had gone back to the man's hotel room, but she was interrupted by a text from Grissom; she left the man's hotel room. In the morning, the man was found murdered, and someone had tried to frame Sara for the crime. Ultimately the real murderer was caught, and Sara was vindicated, but it felt like an empty victory.

Sara concluded that perhaps she was simply not meant to be with someone. Maybe she was meant to be alone. She'd grown up without love. Maybe that just wasn't meant to be part of her life—certainly not in a romantic sense, at least; maybe she didn't deserve it. After all, the only man she'd ever loved had left her, and the only home she'd ever had was gone.

In her better moments, Sara still believed Grissom had loved her once. She still believed it had been worth the risk, to be with somebody who really got her and who, for a time, loved her for who she was. But she did not believe life held any more love for her; Grissom had been it for her. Sara accepted she would likely spend her life alone, and, after fifteen years of having her life intertwined with his, Sara Sidle tried her best not to think about Gil Grissom.

Sara wasn't sure whether things would have turned out differently if she and Grissom had stayed together—physically together—years earlier. She knew the odds would surely have been greater, though. Sara felt as though she'd sacrificed her marriage to her career. So, if her career was what she had left, she was going to give it her all.

Eventually, Sara's supervisor announced he was leaving the lab and heading east; opportunity had knocked, and it was never too late to start a new chapter. Sara decided to apply for his job. Sara had once told Grissom she preferred science to administrative work. This was still true, but she didn't really know what else to do with herself. She certainly didn't want an external candidate being chosen for the position of lab director and coming in and messing with their well-oiled machine.

So Sara applied for the job. If she got it, she would once more be queen of the science nerds, but she would again be queen of a very lonely castle, a very lonely hive. All Sara's original contemporaries on the graveyard shift of the Las Vegas crime lab—all the CSIs on her original team—were gone, and Sara had been left to fend for herself in the company of immature bees. Though she was surrounded by friends and colleagues she'd known for years, Sara felt all alone.

The day Sara submitted her application for the position of lab director, the first in a series of bombings took place in Las Vegas. Her ex-husband's friend Heather Kessler was a suspect. Ecklie wanted Grissom's input and asked Sara for his cell phone number. The next thing she knew, her ex-husband was coming back to Las Vegas, for the first time in over two and a half years. But it wasn't for her.

UP NEXT: NEXT CHAPTER: WINTER 2013 TO FALL 2015. ELSEWHERE, IN THE WORLD.

NOTES

On Sara's birthday (again):

I've developed a pretty convoluted headcanon to explain the date discrepancy with Sara's birthday in "Forget Me Not" (13x15), but I don't think this is the best place to discuss it. I'll try to get there later in the story (notes).

EPISODE REFERENCE(S)

13x15. "Forget Me Not." Original air date: February 20, 2013.

16. "Immortality." Original air date: September 27, 2015.

A/N:

The next chapter will be posted today. 💛