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Penelope was already three sentences into it before Emily had her coat off.
"We're finding JJ love," she announced to the kitchen, to the mixing bowl, to the streamers she was untangling with the focus of a bomb tech.
Emily set the wine on the counter. "Uh. Hello to you too."
"Me and JJ are going out. She finally admitted she's ready to meet people. And I mean in the oo-la-la sense." Penelope's whole face was involved. "She said she saw the guy leaving my apartment the other morning and it got her thinking. About moving on."
The word did something small and specific behind Emily's ribs. She'd stood next to JJ exactly once while JJ watched a man walk away from her — a Miami station hallway, eighteen years ago, JJ handing him a dead cop's badge and watching him go, the exit right there, wide open. And Emily had leaned in and shut it. You should go for him. You'd make a cute couple. Four seconds of being a good friend. She made herself pick up the corkscrew. Turned the foil. You're good at this, she thought, with the flat contempt she usually saved for unsubs. Catching her mid-leaving and turning her back around.
"Oh," she said.
"Isn't it exciting?"
"Uh-huh."
Penelope looked up then, and her face fell into something soft and apologetic, which was worse. "Oh — you're mad we didn't invite you. We just figured you wouldn't come. Miss all-work-no-play-makes-Em-a-dull-girl."
"I don't want to come." It came out fine. Level. "I don't want any part of it."
"It'll be fun." Penelope went back to the streamers, reassured, and that was the mercy of her, that she could be reassured. "Besides. No new man of JJ's is squeaking past without the unit chief's approval. You'll get your interrogation."
There it was. The role, handed over gift-wrapped: protective friend. The one seat in JJ's life Emily was allowed to keep, offered like a kindness, and it took everything she had not to laugh at the size of the misunderstanding.
"I get it, Penelope."
Penelope blinked.
Too sharp. Emily heard it a half-second too late, the way you can already hear a glass shatter just as it leaves your hand. She smoothed it. Reached for a wineglass she didn't need. "Sorry. I get it. I'll — sign off on the paperwork."
And then the door, and the boys, and the whole apartment tilting toward the light of them — Michael loud about the cars parked around the corner, Henry taller than the last time and trying not to grin, JJ in the middle of it with her hand on the back of her son's neck. Somebody put music on. Penelope shrieked. It was easy, in a crowd, to be the version of herself that a crowd expected.
She found JJ by the window later, both of them a step out of the noise.
"Spence called," JJ said. "Told me he's happy for Henry. Then said if he changes his mind, the Caltech offer's still good." She laughed, wet at the edges. "He's going to California, Em. Actually going."
"You have a lot to be proud of." Emily meant it. That was the thing nobody understood about the wall — that everything behind it was true. "You know who we're really here to celebrate, don't you." She let it land warm, let the whole room hear a woman honoring a widow. "You… and Will."
She watched it go in. Watched JJ take the words and understand them, understand exactly what Emily had just done, the two of them standing in the one pocket of silence in the whole bright apartment.
"It's been a long road," JJ said quietly.
I know, Emily didn't say. I helped build the road. I told you to take it.
And then JJ's smile failed — a small collapse at the corners of it, there and gone, the light going out of her eyes. It stung her. Emily could see that it stung, and for one ugly second was glad, and then hated herself for the gladness. And then she read the fallen face the way she'd read a hundred witnesses, quick and sure and — she would not know for months — completely wrong. She's not over him, Emily told herself, filing the sting where it hurt least. A year isn't long. Of course the name still cuts. The tidy, grief-shaped explanation, and she took it, because the true shape of that sting — that it had nothing to do with the man in the ground and everything to do with the woman who'd said his name like a blade — was the one reading the profiler in her could not afford to make.
The party pulled JJ back — Penelope loud, the boys laughing at something Uncle Luke had said — and JJ went, and turned at the last second and caught Emily in a hug on her way past.
Emily let her. For a second. Then some old reflex angled her shoulder in between them, turned it into the kind of hug you give a colleague, an arm and a pat and daylight where JJ's arms wanted to close, and she stepped back before JJ could hold on.
"Congratulations," Emily said, to the mother of the boy, and picked up her wine, and did not let herself watch JJ's face work out what had just been taken from her.
The city slid by wet and gold outside the window and JJ could not believe she was doing this again.
Starting over. Mid-forties, a kid halfway to California, and here she was in the back of somebody's Honda in her one good going-out top, being driven toward a room full of strangers she was supposed to want. She didn't want to start over. That was the thing she couldn't say to Penelope, who was glowing beside her like this was a rescue mission. She didn't want to start over. She wanted to start from the beginning — from the exact moment she'd walked into Hotch's office a hundred years ago and found a dark-haired woman standing there with her hand out, Emily Prentiss, nice to meet you, and JJ's whole life quietly rearranging itself around a door she wouldn't let herself walk through for the next two decades.
She couldn't afford to think like that. She made herself not. Because the road she'd taken — the one somebody had once told her to take, in a hallway, in the heat — that road had given her Henry. Had given her Michael. And there was no version of the wish where she got to undo the heartache and keep her sons, no clean trade, no starting from the beginning that didn't cost her the two people she'd die for. So she didn't get to want it. She got to want this. A Honda. A stranger. A start-over she never asked for.
"So." Penelope twisted in her seat, seatbelt cutting across the sequins. "Who are we looking for tonight? Tall, dark, and mysterious? Or blonde, flirty, and fun? What's your flavor, homegirl?"
JJ laughed and shook her head. "Eh. I don't even know. Someone to take my mind off serial killers and sons, I guess."
"Oh, we are going to just the place."
It was just the place, in the sense that it was loud and dark and full of people who did not know a single thing about her. A bar that got ambitious after eleven and called itself a club — string lights and exposed brick giving way, deeper in, to a low pulsing room where the bass came up through the floor and into the soles of your feet. Penelope steered her in like a woman launching a ship, one hand flat between JJ's shoulder blades, and claimed a high-top near the edge of it all like she was planting a flag.
And then — JJ had forgotten this part, honestly forgotten it was a thing that could happen to her — the night just kept coming at her.
It started before she'd even gotten a drink. A guy in a good shirt appeared at her elbow, bought her the vodka soda she was three words into ordering, and told her she had a great laugh, which was a strange thing to say to a woman who hadn't laughed yet. She thanked him. He lingered like the thank-you was a down payment. Penelope materialized, chirped something bright and merciless about the two of them just catching up, girls' night, so sorry, and folded JJ back toward the high-top with the efficiency of a woman who'd done crowd control in worse rooms than this.
"One," Penelope announced, holding up a finger. "We're keeping score."
"We are absolutely not."
They were. Over the next hour Penelope kept a running tally on a cocktail napkin like she was scoring a gymnastics meet. A woman with an undercut and a leather jacket wrote her number on the inside of JJ's wrist in liquid eyeliner, told her to text her when she got bored of everyone else, and melted back into the dark before JJ could say anything. Style points, Penelope mouthed. Two women who turned out to be on a date each hit on JJ separately at the bar and then found each other again, which Penelope found so funny she had to sit down. A bearded guy did a whole bit about how he could tell JJ was "the interesting one." A younger man — genuinely too young, sweet about it — asked if she was here with anyone and looked so relieved when she said my friend, over there that she almost wanted to adopt him.
It should have been flattering. Some far-back, honest part of JJ clocked that it was — that she still had whatever this was, that mid-forties and tired and out of practice, a dark room full of strangers still turned toward her like she was worth crossing a floor for. She collected the numbers. She let Penelope keep score. She smiled until her face knew the shape without her.
And still. An hour in, the napkin full, her wrist inked, she found herself drifting to the actual bar with a fistful of nothing — worn thin, wanting to be wanted by exactly one person who wasn't in the building and never would be again, and instead standing in a wall of everyone else. The attention didn't land. It sluiced off her and pooled somewhere she couldn't feel it. She ordered a real drink, something brown, and leaned on the rail and let herself be, for a second, a woman alone in a loud place.
Which was where she met Leah.
"Whatever that is," a voice said beside her, nodding at JJ's glass, "it looks a lot more serious than what I'm drinking."
JJ turned. An inch taller than her, maybe. Dark hair pushed back off a face with sharp features — good cheekbones, a mouth that already knew it was going to say something. The kind of face that knew what it was doing. She was holding something pink with a paper umbrella in it and looking at it with theatrical betrayal.
"It's bourbon," JJ said. "It's been a night."
"See, I respect that. I ordered this ironically and now I'm just a person drinking a fruit drink." She stuck out a hand. "Leah."
"JJ."
"JJ." Leah repeated it like she was tasting it. "Just letters? Or is that a witness-protection thing."
"Little of both."
Leah laughed — loud, unguarded, nothing held back for effect — and JJ felt something in her chest unclench for the first time all night, because it was easy. Leah was quick. Kept the volley going, teased the bartender, teased JJ, worked an angle of suave that didn't quite land its dismount but got points for commitment. She was funny about her terrible job and funnier about her terrible ex and she leaned into JJ's space just enough to make the question underneath obvious.
And somewhere at the very back of JJ's skull, unbidden, a soft voice said she reminds you of a young —
JJ shut the drawer on it before it finished.
Put it away. Leah wasn't that. She catalogued it fast, clinically, the way you'd clear a room: Leah was funny in a loud way, not a dry one — telegraphed the joke instead of letting you find it a beat later and feel smart for it. Reached for cool instead of just being it, that effortless bored elegance that couldn't be reached for at all. Said the thing out loud. Wore the sharpness on the outside. Close enough to summon the ghost, wrong in every particular that mattered, and the wrongness was somehow worse than a stranger who looked nothing like —
JJ made herself stop.
She ordered another round and let Leah lean closer and told the voice in her head to be quiet, and when they ended up in the narrow fluorescent hum of the ladies' room JJ decided she was done thinking. She kissed her. Pushed the whole eighteen years out through her mouth and into someone who wasn't it, someone easy, someone here — out, out, get out —
"You want to get out of here?" JJ asked.
"My place?" Leah smirked.
"Perfect." JJ nodded. "Let me just tell my friend."
She found Penelope near the DJ. Leaned in to shout that she was heading out — and watched Penelope's gaze snag on Leah hovering a few feet back.
"Oh." Penelope's face did a whole silent play in three acts. "Oh. I didn't — um — who's your lady. Friend."
"This is Leah Forrester," JJ said. "We're gonna get out of here."
"Uh-huh." Penelope was grinning like the Cheshire Cat now, delighted past speech, and she wiggled all five fingers in a goodbye. "Toodaloo."
The bourbon hadn't had enough ice in it. That was the thought JJ came back to, of all the thoughts available to her, as she gathered her things off a stranger's floor at four in the morning — not enough ice — like her brain had decided the drink was the safest thing in the room to have an opinion about.
She'd dozed maybe an hour. Couldn't do more than that. She had never in her life been able to sleep in a stranger's bed; some animal part of her stayed on watch, counting exits, and it had kept her floating just under the surface of sleep until she gave up and surfaced entirely. So she got up. Gathered. Wobbled a little, still not sober, and when she ran her tongue over her teeth she tasted the bourbon gone stale and something faintly salty underneath it, and only distantly, like a rumor, the memory of Leah's tongue on her.
It had been fine.
That was the whole of it. That was everything she could find when she went looking for a word. Fine. An experience she'd had, technically, present for it, going through the motions with her body while the rest of her stood a few feet back with its arms crossed. An experience but not one she'd been sober enough to actually feel — and, if she was honest, zipping her boots in the blue dark, she wasn't sure feeling it stone-cold sober would have changed the verdict. Fine all the way down. A door she'd walked through to prove she could, into a room with nothing in it.
"You going?" Leah's voice, thick with sleep, from the bed.
"Yeah. My friend — she'll worry about me." A lie with a true skeleton. Penelope would worry. That wasn't why she was leaving.
"Right." Leah shifted, didn't get up. "Well. You got my number at the bar. Call me sometime."
"Sure," JJ said, and didn't mean it, and heard how easily the word came, and thought about how she'd learned that trick a long time ago — saying the warm thing, the sure, the of course, while some sealed-off part of her had already left the building. She was so good at it. She'd been so good at it for so long.
The distance between her and the woman in the bed felt wider than the room. Wider than the city. They'd been as close as two people could physically be a few hours ago and JJ stood in the doorway now feeling like she was calling to Leah across a canyon, and the awful thing, the thing she made herself look at for exactly one second before she killed the lights on it — she had never had Emily Prentiss's tongue on her. Not once. Twenty years and she'd never know what that was like. But she was certain, with a certainty that had no business being this total at four in the morning in a stranger's doorway, that if she ever had, she would not be standing here calling it fine. She'd remember it in her teeth for the rest of her life.
She put the thought out like a cigarette.
Then she let herself into the hallway, down three flights, into the last cold edge of the night, and walked until the blocks off Leah's downtown place turned into a street wide enough to flag a cab. She got in. Gave her address. Watched DC slide by wet and empty and gold, the exact reverse of the ride out, except now the seat beside her was empty and she had a fistful of numbers she'd never call and the ghost of a night that had taken her mind off nothing at all.
She'd wanted to forget serial killers and sons for one night. She'd have settled, it turned out, for forgetting one silver-haired woman for one hour. She hadn't managed even that.
It had been months since that night.
Henry had left for California three weeks ago now — a rental car packed to the roof, Michael riding shotgun for the airport run, the boy himself half-vibrating with a joy so pure JJ had made herself match it all the way to the gate and only fell apart in the parking garage after, forehead on the steering wheel, in a silence that had a shape and a weight and a name. So she was empty in a new way now. Not the sharp four-a.m. emptiness of Leah's doorway. A wider one. A house-with-one-fewer-set-of-footsteps emptiness, the kind that met her when she came home and would keep meeting her, she understood, for a long time.
And she'd been on too many dates since. That was Penelope's doing, all of it — Penelope, who had appointed herself to the sacred task of Getting JJ Out There with the zeal of a woman who could not fix the Henry-shaped quiet in her friend's life and had decided, God love her, to try filling it sideways.
They fell flat. Every one of them, flat as a pancake, flat as week-old soda. And the thing was, JJ could always find the reason. That was the skill, wasn't it — twenty years of reading people for a living meant she could sit across a nice restaurant from a genuinely nice person and clock, by the time the appetizers came, the exact disqualifying thing. He talked about himself in the third person once, as a joke, but still. She was lovely but laughed at the ends of her own sentences like she was apologizing for them. He was too eager. She gave off, and JJ used this word to Penelope with a straight face, bad vibes. There was always something. JJ was very, very good at finding the something.
A few she saw twice. One she saw three times — a warm, easy woman named Dana who did something in policy and asked good questions and would have been, by any reasonable accounting, a catch — and JJ talked to her, texted her, let it get as far as a fourth plan penciled in, and then began the slow quiet work of becoming a ghost. Longer reply times. A cancelled coffee. The warm thing said in a cooling voice until Dana, who was nobody's fool, stopped texting first and then stopped texting at all. JJ told herself she felt bad about it. She did feel bad about it. She also felt the specific relief of a door she didn't have to walk through, and she knew what that relief was, and she didn't look at it directly.
Because Emily was doing the Emily thing. That was the worst of it. That was the thing under all the other things.
Whatever had cracked open for one second in that party — you… and Will — had sealed over completely, and Emily had gone back to being the version of herself she'd apparently been building since London, since the promotion, since whatever year she'd decided that the safest Emily Prentiss was the one behind glass. A consummate professional. When JJ's dating life came up — and Penelope made sure it came up, cheerfully, constantly, in bullpens and break rooms — Emily hummed. Emily hawed. Emily said things like good for you and he sounds nice in a tone sanded so smooth you could have skated on it, and then found a reason to be needed somewhere else in the building. She was unfailingly kind. She was completely unreachable. She asked after Henry and meant it and never once asked after JJ in the way that would have cost her anything.
They had never, in twenty years, been farther apart. Not when Emily was in London. Not when Emily was supposed to be dead. They'd found each other across worse distances than this and here they were, two desks apart, coordinating on cases with the frictionless courtesy of strangers who'd read each other's files. JJ would catch it sometimes — a look landing on her a half-second too long from across a room, gone by the time she turned — and she'd tell herself she imagined it, because the alternative, that Emily felt some fraction of what JJ was drowning in and had simply decided to seal it behind glass and let them both stand here starving, was somehow the loneliest thought of all.
So that was the fall. Henry's empty room and a phone full of numbers she never called and a woman two desks away she'd have crawled across broken glass for, being unfailingly kind to her. JJ went on the dates. She let Penelope keep hoping. And somewhere in there, without deciding to, she stopped believing there was a version of this that ended any way but exactly like it was going: the two of them, polite, forever, on opposite sides of a wall neither of them would name.
She was so tired. That was the last thing. Under the grief and the numbers and the glass, just — tired. Worn down to something thin. The kind of tired that doesn't decide things but lets them happen.
Everyone had gone home. The bullpen sat dark and honest about itself the way it only did after ten, half the monitors sleeping, the cleaning cart parked somewhere down the hall. And light still burned in the unit chief's office, because of course it did, because the whole building could empty out and Emily Prentiss would still be at that desk with her reading glasses on and a stack of case files squared to the edge like squaring them fixed anything.
Penelope stood in the doorway a moment and just looked at her. Looked at the tableau of it. And decided, God help them both, that she was going to do this.
"You know they invented a thing called going home," she said, coming in without being asked. "I've seen it. It's lovely."
"Penelope." Emily didn't look up. "It's late."
"It is very late. Which is my entire point, actually." She set a folder on the desk she'd been using as a pretext and then abandoned the pretext entirely, dropping into the chair across from Emily and pulling her cardigan around herself like she was settling in for weather. "Can I ask you something? A real one."
"You're going to regardless."
"Why don't you ever look for someone?"
Emily's pen didn't stop. "I have a very demanding job."
"No, see." Penelope shook her head. "That's the answer you keep in your pocket for when someone asks. I'm asking the real one. Why don't you ever look for the right woman? Why do you let this — " she gestured at the files, the dark office, the hour "— eat you alive? Why do you wall yourself off even in the warm places, Em? Even at a party. Even when it's just us."
Emily set the pen down. Took the glasses off, and the taking-off was its own small stalling. "Garcia. There are a hundred million reasons behind every single one of those questions."
"You didn't used to be this shut down. Even before Doyle." Penelope said the name gently, the way you'd step around glass. "You were more — open. Before. You were thinking about taking in that girl, and there was Declan, you wanted a family, I know you did, I saw it on you — "
"Garcia — "
"And then it was like — " Penelope's hands moved, trying to shape the thing she was seeing, the thing she'd maybe been seeing for years without letting it resolve. "You froze. Somewhere along the way you just — froze. Like you were." She stopped. Started again, slower, the picture coming clear. "Like you were waiting on someone."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"It's not a coincidence." Vague, still — Penelope reaching, not landing yet. "Is it?"
"Is what a coincidence?"
"London." And there it was, the click, Penelope's whole face changing as her mind sprinted somewhere ahead of her mouth. "You taking the London job. Would you — you and JJ, you two were in Paris together, you shared secrets, you shared a death, a miscarriage, God, the things you two carried for each other — " her breath caught on the arithmetic of it "— would you have left? Would you have taken London at all, if she hadn't married Will?"
For a second Emily said nothing. When she did, the deflection came a beat too slow to be clean. "That's — that's absurd. I mean. We shared those things, sure." A pause she didn't fill well. "But I was always happy for her. Hell. I'm the one who told her to go for Will."
And Penelope — who was oblivious, who had been so cheerfully, catastrophically oblivious for so long — went very quiet and very kind.
"You can be happy for someone," she said. "You can do the right thing and step back and mean it. And still be in love with them. Especially then, Em. Especially if you're in love with them."
"Penelope." The name came out with all the air gone from it. "Leave it alone."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"What was there to tell?" And this Emily said evenly, almost easily, which was the worst of it — like it was a fact she'd sanded smooth over years of handling. "JJ made her choice a long time ago. I lived with it."
"And you waited on it." Penelope leaned forward. "And now it's here — the moment's here, it's now, JJ's single and she's out there dating half of DC and you're — what? Sitting in a dark office at eleven at night. Sulking. Doing this."
"I'm doing my job. I'm keeping my working relationships exactly what they are. Professional. Functional."
"Bullshit." Penelope said it without heat, which made it worse. "You're scared. And don't you dare give me the face, Prentiss, I know you."
"I don't wait for things." Emily's voice had gone flat and final, the tone she used to end briefings. "I built my life. I made my choices. Nothing about that changes now."
"Except you're actively not making one specific choice. Right this second."
"I have the job. I have the team." Ticking them off like a checklist proved the account was full. "I don't need more than that."
"And you've got a very JJ-and-her-boys-shaped hole in your chest and you have had it for years."
The office went quiet. Somewhere down the hall the cleaning cart squeaked and turned a corner.
Emily picked her glasses back up. Put them on. Pulled the top file off the stack and opened it to a page she very clearly did not read.
"Penelope Garcia." Each word placed down like a stone. "Do not do the very Penelope-Garcia thing you are so widely known for doing. Do not meddle. That is a direct order."
"Mm." Penelope stood, gathered her cardigan, entirely unbothered by the direct order, because a direct order was the most telling thing Emily could possibly have given her — you didn't outlaw a thing that wasn't a threat. She got to the doorway. Turned. Emily was still staring at the unread page.
"For the record," Penelope said, soft now, the teasing gone out of it. "She looks for you too. In every room. First thing. Every single time. I've watched her do it for twenty years." A beat. "You're not the only one who froze, Em."
And she left before Emily could find a wall to put up against that one — walked out through the dark bullpen with her mind already, unstoppably, gloriously beginning to meddle.
The last time JJ saw Dana, it was already over. They both knew it walking in. It had been weeks since the last date, days since the last text, and the space had done what space does — let the air out of the thing so quietly that sitting down across from her now felt less like a date and more like two people meeting to sign papers on something that had never quite gotten built.
It was awkward. JJ thought that, precisely, sitting there: this is awkward. And she knew whose fault it was. She'd done the thing she always did — gone somewhere behind her own eyes, pulled the warm surface over cold water, become her own kind of wall. She could feel herself doing it even now and couldn't stop, the way you can watch your own hand let go of something and still not catch it. Dana deserved better than a woman phoning it in from behind glass. Dana had always deserved better. That was almost the worst part, that she was nice, that there was nothing to find, and JJ had gone looking for the exit anyway.
"Can I ask you something?" Dana said, over the wine neither of them was really drinking. "And you don't have to answer."
"Sure."
"Is this about your husband?"
JJ felt the old reflex come up, smooth and automatic. She shrugged. "My husband is dead, Dana." It landed harder than she meant, and she softened it, because none of this was Dana's fault. "I'll always love him. Of course I will. But my life didn't stop when he died. I didn't stop."
Dana nodded slowly. Turned her glass by the stem. "When did it, then?"
"Excuse me?"
"Your love life." She said it gently. Not a jab — a diagnosis, the kind you deliver carefully because you know it's going to hurt and you think the person should have it anyway. "It stopped somewhere. Because it is not in motion now, whatever you're telling yourself this is. And I don't think it's Will. I've watched women grieve husbands. This isn't that." She tilted her head, not unkind, just done pretending she didn't see it. "This is someone who's already spoken for. Just — not by anybody at this table."
JJ scoffed. It came out reflexive, defensive, the sound of a door being pulled shut. "That's — "
"I'm not angry." Dana held up a hand. "I want to be clear, I'm not. You've been perfectly lovely and perfectly gone the whole time, and it took me a few dates to understand those were two different things happening at once." She almost smiled. "You show up. You say the right things. You laugh in the right places. And the entire time there's a part of you that's just — somewhere else. With someone else. I kept thinking if I was patient enough you'd come back into the room." A pause. "You never came back into the room, JJ."
And JJ, who profiled people for a living, who could take one look at a stranger and tell you what they were hiding — JJ sat there and got read like a case file by a woman she'd known for six weeks, and found she couldn't argue a word of it. That was the thing. She opened her mouth to and there was nothing to put in it. No counter. No you've got it wrong. Because Dana didn't have it wrong. Dana had it so exactly, surgically right that JJ could feel the truth of it sitting in her chest like a stone she'd swallowed years ago and finally been made to notice.
Perfectly lovely and perfectly gone. God. It was the same sentence you could have written about her whole life. The dates. The marriage, if she was brutal about it. Every warm sure and of course she'd handed out while the real her stood a few feet back with its arms crossed, waiting on a door it wouldn't walk through.
"Who is she?" Dana asked. Soft. Certain. Not even is there someone. Who is she.
JJ didn't answer. She looked down at the wine and did not say the name and the not-saying was the loudest thing she'd done in months.
Dana exhaled — something like relief, something like being right and taking no pleasure in it — and reached for her bag. "Okay," she said, and it was kind, it was so kind it nearly undid JJ right there. "Okay. Then can I give you some unsolicited advice, and then I'll go, and we'll both stop doing this?"
JJ managed a nod.
"Whoever she is." Dana stood, looped her bag over her shoulder, looked down at JJ with the clear plain sympathy of someone who'd already made it to the far side of this exact feeling. "You're not going to be able to want anyone else until you've actually lost her. Not maybe-lost. Not too-scared-to-find-out lost. Actually asked and actually lost. Right now you're not protecting yourself from anything, you know that? You're just — pre-grieving. You're mourning someone who's still alive and still reachable because that's safer than finding out." She shrugged into her coat. "Go find out. Or don't, and stop doing this to nice women in wine bars. But God, JJ. Go find out."
She left cash on the table for her half — of course she did — and squeezed JJ's shoulder once on her way past, warm and final, and then she was gone, and JJ sat alone in the low light with a glass she hadn't touched and the truth Dana had set down in front of her like a check she was going to have to pay.
You're mourning someone who's still alive.
She'd been so busy calling it too late. Too late, too complicated, a door already closed — she'd built a whole grief around a woman who was, right now, tonight, two desks away and breathing and reachable, being unfailingly kind to her across a wall that JJ had helped build every bit as much as Emily had. Nobody had closed the door. That was the thing she'd been refusing to look at. The door wasn't closed. They were both just standing on either side of it, calling it locked, so neither of them would have to be the one to try the handle.
JJ took out her phone. Not to call anyone — she wasn't there yet, wasn't nearly there yet. Just held it. Just sat with the terrible new arithmetic of a loss she hadn't actually suffered yet because she hadn't been brave enough to risk it.
Then she texted Penelope, because Penelope was safe, because Penelope was the kind of tired-proof that JJ needed right now: I think I need a drink. A real one. You free?
The reply came back fast enough that JJ would wonder about it later. Would wonder, much later, exactly how long Penelope Garcia had been sitting at home with her phone in her hand, waiting.
Funny you should ask, it said. I know just the place.
Just the place turned out to be a quiet bar JJ half-knew, the kind with low amber light and a bartender who didn't rush you, three neighborhoods from anywhere either of them lived. JJ got there first. Ordered a bourbon — with ice this time, she thought, and hated that the thought had a ghost in it — and was two sips in when the door opened and it wasn't Penelope who walked through it.
It was Emily.
Who stopped when she saw JJ. Who wore, for exactly one unguarded second before the professional smoothed back over it, the face of a woman realizing she'd been played — and JJ watched that second happen and understood, all at once, that they both had. That there was no Penelope coming. That somewhere across town a certain analyst was sitting very smugly with her phone off, having told each of them, separately, to meet her here, and having no intention whatsoever of arriving.
"She's not coming, is she," Emily said. Still by the door.
"No," JJ said. "I don't think she is."
A long beat. Emily could have left. JJ watched her weigh it — the exit right there behind her, wide open, and wasn't that its own bitter little rhyme — and then Emily exhaled, and crossed the room, and sat down on the stool one over from JJ's like a woman lowering herself into cold water.
"I'm going to kill her," Emily said, and signaled the bartender, and something in JJ's chest that had been clenched for months came loose by a single notch. Because Emily had stayed.
They drank. They talked, carefully at first and then less so, the way you do when the person beside you already knows all the worst things and the alcohol is doing its slow patient work of unlatching the doors. They talked about the team and about Henry in California and about nothing, and then — because Penelope's fingerprints were all over the evening and there was no more pretending it was an accident — about the thing itself. Dating. Starting over. The whole miserable circus of it.
"Can I tell you something awful?" JJ said. "I've been on, I think, eleven dates this year. And I couldn't tell you one thing about a single one of them that I liked."
Emily huffed a laugh into her glass. "At least you're out there."
"Are you? Ever?"
"God, no." Easy. Dismissive. A wall with a joke painted on it. "I swore it off years ago."
JJ turned on her stool. "Why?"
And Emily — maybe it was the drinks, maybe it was Penelope, maybe it was just late and JJ was looking at her the way JJ was looking at her — didn't deflect. She stared into her glass a moment. Then:
"You love someone long enough," Emily said, "it's not even love anymore. It's masochistic."
The bar seemed to go very quiet around them.
"What if that person was blind," JJ said carefully. "And didn't see it."
"That's arguably worse." A dry twist of the mouth that didn't reach her eyes. "Means they never loved me the way I loved them."
JJ's heart was going hard now. She set her glass down. "What if that person," she said, "lied to themselves for years about what you were to them. What if that person had someone — good, and kind, and loyal — and just. Couldn't risk the fall."
Emily went still. She knew, now. JJ could see her knowing. But Emily was a wall built over twenty years and she did not come down all at once.
"I'd say that's complicated," Emily said, low.
"And?"
"And I'd say — " a breath " — 'I don't do complicated.'" The ghost of the old armor. "And then I'd turn around and do the complicated thing anyway. Probably. Because I always do, with you. That's the — " She stopped herself.
"Emily." JJ's voice had gone to almost nothing. "Do me a favor?"
Emily looked at her then. Fully. The wall right there at the edge of it, the whole twenty years balanced on a single second. "Anything," she said, and it came out helpless, and JJ knew — the way you know a thing in your body before your mind catches up — that anything had always been the truest word Emily Prentiss ever said to her.
"Do the complicated thing," JJ said. "Right now."
And she leaned in.
Emily hesitated — half a second, her breath catching, some final reflexive flinch of a woman who'd taught herself for two decades not to want exactly this — and then she didn't hesitate anymore, and their lips met, and it was not fine. It was the furthest thing in the world from fine. It was JJ's whole chest cracking open in the amber dark and every wasted stranger of the last year evaporating like they'd never been, because this was what she'd been reaching for the entire time and here it finally, finally was.
When they broke apart JJ didn't let herself think. She turned and flagged the bartender.
"Liquid courage?" she asked, glancing back at Emily.
"Please," Emily said, and it came out like begging, like relief, like a woman who'd just set down something she'd been carrying so long she'd forgotten it had weight.
JJ leaned over the bar to call the order — and felt Emily's hand come to rest, low, at the small of her back. Not tentative. Not a colleague's pat with daylight between them. A whole palm, warm through her shirt, staying. JJ closed her eyes for a second at the feel of it.
She ordered the shots. Turned back. Found Emily just — looking at her.
"What?" JJ said.
Emily shook her head, that small helpless shake. "Nothing. I just — " She almost laughed at herself. "The complicated thing seems a lot easier right now. But that could be the drinks."
"It doesn't have to be complicated anymore, Em." JJ reached up, tucked a strand of silver behind Emily's ear, let her hand stay against her jaw. "It's just me."
"It's always been you." Emily laughed, wet and quiet, leaning into JJ's palm. "That's the problem."
"It's always been my problem too," JJ said. "Not trusting the fall. I had him for a while, and that was — that was good, it was real, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't." Will, a year in the ground, still loved, still true. "But no one's been there like you have. Not him. Not anyone. Twenty years, Emily. No one."
The shots landed in front of them, two amber little dares.
Emily picked hers up, and JJ watched her decide not to say the enormous thing sitting behind her eyes — the Miami thing, maybe, the hallway and the four seconds and you should go for him, the whole architecture of the loss she'd built with her own hands — watched her decide, instead, to just be here, now, alive and wanted.
"Alright," Emily said, a little unsteady. "Enough of that." She raised the glass. "To liquid courage?"
JJ raised hers. Looked at her. Twenty years.
"To trusting the fall."
She woke to grey morning light and the fact of Emily Prentiss asleep beside her.
Naked. Both of them. In JJ's bed — her ceiling, her window, the familiar wrong angle of the light. And she remembered. That was the thing that stopped her breath, lying there in the quiet: she remembered all of it. Not a blur, not a merciful haze she could blame on tequila and blame her way back out of. The cab. The stairs. Her hands and Emily's hands. Emily's tongue on her — and JJ thought, with something that wasn't quite a laugh, of the last stranger's bathroom and the flat fine and the certainty she'd carried out of it: if I ever knew what Emily Prentiss's tongue felt like, I'd remember it in my teeth for the rest of my life.
She'd been right. She did. Every second of it, kept and gleaming, and no drink to hide behind.
Emily stirred. Woke. Surfaced into the same grey light and the same fact, and JJ watched the old reflex flicker up in her — the reach for the wall, the out already forming — and JJ didn't let it get there. She reached over first. Cupped Emily's face in her hand, thumb along her cheekbone, and she felt Emily go still under the touch.
"Hey," JJ said softly. She shook her head. "No more pretending?"
For a second Emily just looked at her. Then something loosened, something twenty years old.
"Okay," she breathed. "Yeah. No more pretending. God help us."
"We'll need it."
"How do we do this, JJ?"
"I don't know." JJ's thumb moved over her cheek. "I don't know, but we figure it out. Rumor has it you're smart." A beat. "And I sort of love you."
"Yeah." Emily's mouth curved, wet-eyed. "Sorta had the whole love thing for you for a long time."
"You asked how we do this." JJ picked up Emily's hand in her own and brought it to her lips, pressed her mouth to the back of it. It tasted like salt and sweat and, faintly, her own scent worn into Emily's skin from the night before. "We do it together."
"I don't know how to do that," Emily said. "The 'together.'"
"I've got a little experience with it." JJ laced their fingers. "And it's not starting over. I figured that out. It's a continuing."
"Don't go getting sappy on me, Jareau."
"Mm. Part of the deal."
"Where do I sign?"
And JJ leaned in and kissed her.
And trusted the fall.