* This starts on CPD 10.3.
What really made Jay quit his job? His wife? His whole life, without looking back? Was going back to the army the right decision? The answer to his angst? After all the suffering and struggling his previous overseas tours had put him through? Did he really board a flight straight to Bolivia? Or maybe there was a detour?
This is a Linstead story. But also a crossover between One Chicago and the FBI's. With a hint of Gray's Anatomy in the mix. ;-)
Erin Lindsay Jay Halstead
Will Hastead ~ Hank Voight ~ Hailey Uptown ~ Maggie Bells ~ Wes Mitchel ~ Cassidy Beckman *
How long does it take to forget about someone? To move on? To wipe away all the memories from one's heart?
Five years. It had been over five years, and Jay still didn't have a clue.
So much changed in those five years. He changed; life had forced him to. But the one thing he couldn't seem to shake, no matter how much time had passed, was the hold she still had on him. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't move on.
It had been five years since that night at Molly's, when he waited while his mother's ring seemed to burn a hole in his pocket. Five years since he ran the words of his proposal over and over in his mind, rehearsing how he would ask her, how he would make her his wife. Five years since the last time he saw her. Five years since his world shattered, the gut-wrenching emptiness he felt when he found their apartment, once filled with promise, now abandoned.
Five years, and the pain hadn't dulled. It was still raw, still there, like a wound that refused to heal.
For the entire first year, he tried to reach out. Texts sent, voicemails left… an endless stream of attempts to make contact, to find her, to understand. But not once did she reply. Not a single word. All those messages, all that hope, lost in the void.
He just needed to know if she was alright. All those years when they worked together, his eyes were always on her, silently checking, making sure she was okay. He'd instinctively position himself between her and any threat, always watching over her. He knew she could handle herself… She was strong, capable. But it didn't matter. He couldn't stop himself. It was just in him, that need to protect her silently, to be there.
For a year, his life had felt like it was stuck in limbo. Every day was just another moment waiting for her to be ready, waiting for her to reach out again. But she never did. And with each passing day, that hope gradually withered, leaving him with an aching emptiness that he didn't know how to fill.
So, he learned to live with it. Learned to pretend that he was fine. That the void she left behind didn't burn a hole in his chest every time he thought of her. He put on the mask of normalcy, even when every part of him felt broken.
Tonight, like so many others, he lay in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, drunk. Drowning in the haze of alcohol, because it was the only way to keep going. The only way to numb the constant gnawing pain that wouldn't go away.
He glanced to his right. His wife was asleep beside him. Wife. The word hit him like a slap. How had he ended up here? How had this become his life? But deep down, he knew. It wasn't love that had led him here… it was fear. Fear of being alone, of facing the world without someone by his side. And now, here he was, trapped. Stuck in a life he didn't choose, with a woman he had never truly wanted, his heart still in pieces over the one he'd lost.
Hailey had been by his side from the very beginning. She was the one who picked up the pieces of his broken heart, the one who tried tirelessly to put him back together. She was his partner, his friend, the person who believed in him when he couldn't believe in himself. She did everything she could to help him heal, to get him back on his feet. But no matter how hard she tried, his heart was beyond repair. It was shattered in ways that couldn't be fixed, no matter how much she cared.
He had let her get too close. He should have stopped it from going any further. He should have never let her believe they could be anything more than friends. He never meant to hurt her, but by the time he realized his mistake, it was too late. She had already fallen for him, and he had only led her on, hoping—no, desperately wishing—that maybe she could somehow fill the void Erin had left behind.
When Hailey came back from New York and told him she had been offered a full-time position with the FBI, his heart stopped.
No! Not again, he thought. Not like this. But then she said something that completely caught him off guard. She said she chose him. She wasn't going to leave him, not for New York, not for the FBI. She would stay.
He didn't know how to process it. His mind was reeling, spinning. It felt like déjà vu. He should have felt relief, or maybe even happiness, but instead, all he felt was confusion and regret.
The words she said—words he would have given anything to hear three years before—rang in his ears. He would have given everything to have heard Erin say those words, to have heard her choose him. But Erin didn't choose him. She packed up and left without a word, without even looking back.
And now here was Hailey, telling him she wouldn't la leave, that she chose him. And just like that, without thinking, he kissed her.
The kiss felt wrong, but then again, it had been so long since anything felt right. Maybe this could work. Maybe Hailey could somehow fill the space Erin had left. Maybe she could make him forget. Maybe, just maybe, she could erase Erin from his heart.
He had to try. It had been over three years. He owed it to Hailey and to himself, to move on. But deep down, he knew. He knew it wasn't enough. And Hailey knew it too.
"I never saw Erin in NY." Hailey's voice cut through the silence, her words coming out of nowhere one night right after they had sex, almost as if she had been holding them back for a long time.
It had been over two months since she returned to Chicago. Two months since they had started whatever it was they were doing—dating, perhaps?
He had wanted to ask, to bring Erin up, but he never did. For two months, the question hovered between them like unspoken, yet he never found the courage to ask. He knew she knew, though, that he wanted to ask. From the moment she returned, it was obvious. The question was there in the air, thick and heavy, waiting for someone to bring it up. But Hailey, for some reason, didn't say anything until that night, after they had sex.
He didn't understand why she had said it, or why it came out then. Did she sense Erin still lived in his mind, even after all this time? Did she know that it was still Erin his body craved when they were together, no matter how many times he tried to convince himself otherwise?
Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe she thought she was safe now, that after two months, he was finally over Erin. Maybe, in her mind, it was her turn, and she believed he had moved on.
He didn't respond. Instead, he kissed the top of her head softly, and turned away, his back to her. But even in the dark, he could feel the weight of her words. His heart shattered again.
Would he have felt better if she had said she had seen Erin? He was almost sure he would have been furious, disgusted even, if Hailey had been in New York, around Erin, and hadn't told him. If she had kept that from him for two months, it would've been the end. He knew it. There would be no coming back from that kind of betrayal.
But as much as he tried to convince himself that Hailey's silence was better than the alternative, he couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. His thoughts spiraled, his mind racing with questions he didn't know if he wanted the answers.
Hailey had spent two weeks in New York, working with the FBI, and she hadn't seen Erin? He couldn't make sense of it. Was Erin really gone forever? Was she lost somewhere out there in the world, never to be seen again? He thought about it, replaying it in his mind until he couldn't breathe. Would he ever get the chance to see her again? To know if she still cared, or if she had completely forgotten about him?
The thought gnawed at him, keeping him awake long into the night.
Erin was not dead. That much, he knew. He had seen Hank in the aftermath of losing Justin, the way his eyes darkened, the way his entire presence seemed to carry the weight of a thousand unsaid words. Jay forced himself to remember how Hank had been back then, hoping he'd never see that same desolation in Hank's eyes when it came to Erin.
He had searched Hank's face countless times, looking for that trace of grief or loss, the kind of look that would tell him something had happened to Erin. But so far, he hadn't found it. That was the one thing he clung to—the certainty that if something had happened to her, Hank wouldn't have been able to hide it. He would have seen it. There was no way Hank could mask that kind of pain, not from him.
Yet, even with that small sliver of hope, Jay had long since stopped asking Hank about Erin. It had been a futile effort from the start. Every time he inquired, Hank would offer him the same empty advice: "You gotta move on," "You gotta let it go," "You gotta make peace with it." Those words stung every time, like a bitter reminder that Hank never took his feelings for Erin seriously. To Hank, it seemed, Erin was for him just another casualty of the job, another chapter to close. And maybe that was why Hank never gave him any real answers. He saw Erin's absence as something to get over, something to accept and move on from—while Jay was still trapped in the past, unable to release her from his heart.
And so, that's how he stayed in Intelligence, day after day, year after year. He stayed, not because he cared about the work, but because it gave him an excuse to keep looking into Hank's eyes, hoping for some hint, some flicker of reassurance that Erin was still out there, still alive, still somewhere in the world. But in truth, it was slowly killing him. The constant waiting. The constant wondering. Not knowing whether she was okay, whether she was safe, whether she was still even there. It gnawed at him with each passing day, a dull ache that never went away, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it.
Her name was almost a taboo in the bullpen. No one dared to say it. Afraid to piss off Hank? Afraid to upset him? Hurt his feelings? Everybody knew she was still present in his mind, yet it was like she had never been there. She had never shared so much with all of them.
When Hailey asked him to marry her, less than a year after they first got together, it caught him completely off guard. He didn't know how to say no. She was falling apart. He was falling apart. They were both so broken, so tangled in their own wounds. And so, he made the same mistake again. He got married, not out of love, but to numb the suffocating pain. Again. First Abby, and now Hailey.
Yet, in all that time, he had never once proposed to either of them. The one time he had a ring in his pocket, he couldn't bring himself to use it. It sat there, a silent reminder of everything he couldn't say. He had given the ring back to his brother, feeling a strange sense of finality. When Will told him that he had used it to propose to Nat, it struck him deeper than it should have. He knew the rule—"It's not a race, but the one who finds the right woman first can have the ring." Those words had come from their mother when she was on her deathbed. They had always made sense, in theory. But at that moment, it felt like a cruel twist of fate. He couldn't bear the thought of that ring being worn by anyone but Erin. It wasn't just a symbol; it was the symbol, the one he had hoped would someday encircle her finger. The idea of Nat wearing it was unbearable. It would have shattered him to see that ring on her hand—he couldn't even imagine looking at Nat without seeing Erin's face, without feeling that gnawing emptiness. But at the same time, he felt really bad that things hadn't worked out for his brother either. Could that ring be cursed? No! Of course not! It was his mother's ring. He had never met anyone so lovely and selfless as his mom. God, he missed his mother so much.
Technically, he had been married to Abby for one single day—a stupid, drunken mistake that was barely more than a blur. But legally, it was an entirely different matter. He had been unknowingly married for eight fucking years. He didn't even know that he was still legally married, but it ended up destroying him.
He had convinced himself he was doing the right thing. He had broken up with Erin, thinking it was the only way to fix his mistakes, to get his head back on straight. It wasn't just about the fact that he was married—that was a mess he was ashamed of. But it was the weight that marriage carried, the suffocating shadow that hung over everything. The deep hole he'd been in when he came back from the war, the horrific memories of lost friends, the things he had to do just to survive—it all came rushing back when Abby showed up. The nightmares, the fear, the guilt, the raw pain—every ounce of it came crashing down on him, leaving him breathless, trapped in his own mind.
And the last thing he wanted was to drag Erin into that darkness. He didn't know how to let her in, to share the broken, haunted pieces of himself. He couldn't bear the thought of her seeing him at his lowest, of her becoming entangled in his mess. So, he stepped away, convinced that if he could just fix himself, if he could put the pieces of his shattered soul back together, then maybe—just maybe—he could go back to her. How stupid he was! How selfish! How could he have expected her to wait for him when he never told her the truth? How could he have thought she'd be okay with the silence, with the distance? She deserved so much more than that.
Now, it had been nine months since he signed the papers with Hailey in that empty and emotionless courtroom. Just the two of them—no celebration, no joy, no future they could look forward to. It had all felt hollow, like going through the motions of something he had no business being a part of.
The same damn mistake. How could he be so stupid? He had promised himself, no more. He'd learned nothing. He was sober this time, and yet it still felt like he was drowning. The weight of his choices was suffocating him. He didn't know how to stop the spiral, how to find any meaning in it. He had no reason to live anymore. He was stuck in quicksand, sinking with every breath he took, and he didn't know how to escape the suffocating grip of his own regrets.