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In keeping with the other spaces in this institution, the visitation room has few distinguishing characteristics. It is large. Larger than makes me comfortable when its only furnishings are a table and two chairs. Light streams brightly through barred windows and the bleak acoustics swallow words quickly. The lack of an echo makes me feel claustrophobic, but I push the feeling down.

I process what Dr. Sweets is saying to me across the table but respond to my own thoughts, rather than his.

"I'm putting them behind me."

He shifts smoothly to my train of thought and leans forward. "Zack, it's important for you to voice your problems to get past them. Sharing is an integral step in that process."

"I do share them."

"With whom?" he asks with creases on his brow.

Will's blank face and tight curls flash to the fore of my memory. "Another patient."

"And he gives you rational feedback?"

My eyebrows float upward. "Sometimes he replies, and occasionally it makes sense."

Sweets has a notepad on the table in front of him during each of our sessions, but he doesn't make notes while I'm here. Now he taps his finger against the side of the dime-a-dozen ball point pen laying on the yellow paper. "I'd be very interested to hear what you talk to him about."

I consider for a moment. "My time in Iraq. I can do it now. I couldn't put it behind me then, but I think now I can."

"Something happened during your time in the military?" he asks quietly.

The prosthetics that extend my damaged digits sit silent. Blood flows in the surrounding tissue but the plastic and rubber remains cool.

When Hodgins visited me the week before, he informed me about the split between himself and Angela. I wondered how much my betrayal played into the strain on their relationship. For reasons both within and outside of my control, the cultural ritual that first drew me into society, Hodgins' and Angela's wedding, would not take place.

Nor would mine. I would never introduce Lily to my friends (my friends, I think with a sharp twinge in my stomach) as I had been so eager to do. I hadn't wanted to tell them about her in letters. I wanted them to meet her in person.

The neurons controlling long-term memory begin to fire and, for once, I am glad that I can't see my hands.

--

It had been like any other day. The heat prompted me to leave the door to the hallway open. Air conditioning was always better there, as the operating room and post-operative ward across from me tended to get quicker repair than the lab space I shared with the mortician. The tinny pipes rattled and a whir echoed in the long hallway.

A distant door opened, followed by the unmistakable sound of controlled, approaching chaos. I'd heard the pattern before and it always seemed to me a horrible disconnect. The sound of medical personnel calmly assessing a patient in critical condition. Squeaking wheels rolling fast, voices routine. A gurney drew near and clattered by, a medic applied fresh gauze to the gut wound as they passed. The old was dirty and had been soaked through.

My chest turned cold when I saw her dark skin covered in blood. I darted along in their wake.

I was used to death. In my work, I dealt with it on a daily basis. I wasn't used to seeing it actually happen. And I was certainly not used to seeing the innards of someone I loved falling helplessly out of open wounds.

I'd had no trouble researching intimacy, but she'd taught me about love. She spoke with poetry and beauty, even about literature's tragic love. But this was not poetic. It was not beautiful.

They would later discover that the land mine that hit her jeep was one of ours, mislabeled on a map. A clerical error. Typos usually were the kind of thing that made you wait in line two hours longer at the DMV. I would have spent the rest of my life in line at the DMV if it could have prevented this.

"Zack," she gurgled and coughed weakly. She reached out and caught my hand while medical personnel moved quickly and calmly around her. Shaking fingers ran along my palm, depositing her blood in my loops and whorls. "I didn't..." her eyes shone. And then didn't.

I didn't what? I wondered later. I didn't get to see Paris? I didn't finish the letter to my mother? I didn't get to tell you I was pregnant?

The autopsy discovered her condition. It had only been a few weeks, she might not have even known.

The pathologist looked over at me from the autopsy table across the room. I continued peeling back tissue from bones found the previous day, but tried not to look at my hands as I did so. I had long since wiped them clean, but I still saw her blood there.

"Did you know she was seeing someone?" He must have taken my lack of response as a no. "Must have been a local. She'd been spending all of her down time off base by herself."

--

Sweets shifted in his seat. "What happened in Iraq, Zack? Why did the army psychiatrist send you home?"

"You should talk to him."

"I have, at length. He said that you were never very social, but that you seemed to give up trying at some point."

"I don't believe he cared enough to try to figure out what was wrong."

"You might be right." He leaned further forward and spoke softly, "But I do care, Zack. I want to help you with what happened."

"I don't need help. I'm already putting it behind me."

A long pause was smothered by the overlarge room.

My voice sounded odd coming from my throat. "I never understood why people say 'I loved them' in reference to deceased persons. Using the past tense seems odd. The person is gone, not the love."

Sweets' brow furrowed.

The love hangs stubbornly on.

we still have several more chapters to go. soon we'll be returning to the jeffersonian and following zack through the third season.

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