"The most curious thing happened: You stayed."

Sometimes he missed having the brownstone to himself. Daily life required a bit more premeditation now. Remembering a change of clothes when he went for a shower and not wandering naked into the kitchen. Keeping music to a sadly subdued volume at certain arbitrary times of the night. Sorting the mail took longer, as she received a lot more junk than he ever had despite his extensive range of periodical subscriptions. The sound of her footsteps occasionally interrupted a productive train of thought. And having become accustomed to her constant presence as sober companion, he was now forced to respect her newly flexible schedule. He continued to expect the slow heartbeat of their two-hour check-in, and any hitch was as distracting as accepting it had been in the beginning.

He knew it was an adjustment for her as well. She apparently disliked sharing a bathroom, finding his hair in the sink much more objectionable than on his head. With some careful nudging, she was getting back into the habit of meeting friends but had yet to invite anyone to the house, family, friend, or lover. He wasn't sure if that was a comment about her or about him. Some of it was due to her previous existence as sober companion, he assumed, and the firm boundaries she maintained between her personal life and the full-time professional identity she performed while living with a client. It would take a while for those patterns to drop away.

He thought it a promising sign when she hung a painting in the kitchen, although he found its chromatic value somewhat insipid. It did brighten up a dark corner, and there was something almost Picasso-like in the brushwork, reminiscent of a zoomed-in closeup of one of his skies. When he mentioned that to her, she smiled and said, "I know."

The state of her room perplexed him. On the one hand, he couldn't complain when she had done so little to disrupt the arrangement of his space, like diving into a pool without making a splash. He felt the ripples of her presence but the surface remained more or less undisturbed. On the other hand, he worried. That she didn't feel at home, that she saw their arrangement as temporary, that she was unhappy with her decision to stay. Her behaviour otherwise suggested nothing of the kind. She comfortably referred to the brownstone as home in casual conversation and seemed at ease in kitchen, study, and parlor. He tried to imagine being in her place, giving up the brownstone and its contents to fit himself into someone else's life. He couldn't.

She went to visit her storage unit every couple of months, taking out a bag- or box-worth of stuff each time. She would stand in front of the open door and look at the furniture and artwork and boxes of things, collect one or two more items, and then pull the door down again, locking it with the special-issue Bolivian military padlock Sherlock insisted she take from his collection. She suspected the lock was worth more than the contents of the unit, but she let him have his way. He asked her once if she didn't want to move all her things — there was room enough on the second and third floors. She said she'd think about it. She was still thinking about it.

Instead, she found her bare room soothing in its emptiness. Damn easy to clean and a respite from the frenetic jumble on the main floor. Every now and then she could imagine something of hers slipped in among his things in the study or parlor, but she hadn't yet placed anything there. She'd hung one piece of art in the kitchen without asking first, and she had caught him looking at it once or twice. Most of the objects in storage still spoke to her of past mistakes, old identities, confusing obligations, and painful memories. She would have to process all of that eventually, but not yet.

She had her room, she had her mug, she had her chair next to the fireplace and her desk in the study. She felt as comfortable among his things as if they were her own, or, rather, as if they belonged to the house she grew up in: they weren't hers, exactly, but they were hers to use, and he never put any limits or restrictions on them. He had a curious relationship to things, intensely interested in all manner of objects and their histories and provenance but rarely possessive of them. He loved his locks and his socks. She laughed to herself at the rhyme and wondered if Dr. Seuss played any part in his childhood.

She was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the painting, an abstract whirl and splatter of muted colors against a white background, while waiting for the water to boil. He came downstairs, hands held out in front of him and tangled up in several feet of what appeared to be extra-strength double-sided tape.

"If you wouldn't mind, Watson, I could use some of your surgical expertise with this."

She briefly considered not smirking. "Are you stuck?"

He returned his best deadpan expression. "I'm testing the patterns made by this tape on itself when pulled apart and I don't want to tear it with my teeth. I just need you to cut this section," and he wiggled the third finger on his left hand, "and then this one," extending his right thumb. "The paring knives are sharper than the shears, I think."

She pulled a short, slim blade from the cutlery drawer and held it up. "Will this do?" He walked over and offered his left hand in reply. She flipped on the light over the stove and drew his hand under the glow, trying not to touch any tape.

"If you can cut on the outside edge, that will preserve the most data," he said.

"Okay, let me see..." her voice trailed off as she concentrated on the problem. "Never thought I'd wish for a scalpel in the kitchen, but it really would be the best tool for the job." She could picture the box at the way-back of her storage unit with the training kit she'd gotten in medical school.

"Well," he started and then paused for a moment when one of her eyebrows went up. "You can't honestly be surprised or offended that I have a very complete first aid kit and didn't mention it to you."

"You're right. Where is it?"

"Upstairs, in the media closet. In a black case." He swallowed suddenly, remembering, she imagined, the tool box he kept in there too. Monsters in the closets. She probably wasn't going to find protection from nightmares with a scalpel in her hand, either.

"They're just boxes," she said with a sad smile, and he looked at her like he wished he could take it all back, all the way back, before her patient and the heroin and revenge fueled by Irene's pool of blood, and she surprised herself with the untenable realization that she didn't wish that at all. Given the chance, she wouldn't want to trade now for then.

It happened sooner than he expected, with a case neither of them would have predicted to have that effect. Something about the shape of the links she could sense hiding behind the notes on the wall, she said, and by the first night, she was the one compelled to be up all hours, uninterested in going to bed or stopping for meals. On the third day and out of cereal, milk, and eggs he reached for the menus when it became clear she wasn't going to waste the time. She didn't hear him ask what she wanted and she didn't notice what was in the white boxes he handed her to eat. He'd gone from pride to amusement and eventually on to concern when he found her pacing around the kitchen table muttering to herself at 3am. He wasn't able to get her attention until he blocked her path on the far side of the table, where there wasn't room for her to go around him.

"Move! I need to keep going, I can almost sense how it fits... The book from the table on Tuesday is part of the pattern, I'm sure..." She huffed in frustration and started to turn around, stumbling against the chair pushed up against the table. He hesitated a moment and then reached out and gripped her shoulders with both hands to hold her in place. "No, let me, I'm almost there..."

"Watson," he said gently, and then louder when she didn't react. "Watson! You need to lie down now. Whoa — not here," as she promptly sank slowly under his hands toward the floor. "Come over this way, to the couch." He held her arm and led her around the table and across the kitchen to his room. The couch was littered with his laundry — mostly clean, he hoped, not that she was in any condition to notice. He shoved it to the floor as he guided her down. She slipped limply onto the cushions, eyes already closed.

"The Tuesday pattern is linked to the shoebox where we found the clockwork cupcake," she mumbled.

"Yes, all right, don't worry about that, I'll keep it safe for you. Rest now." He draped a blanket over her and stepped back to sit in the chair opposite. He knew that feeling of being so lost in the puzzle that you forgot how to sleep. She had helped him when he was like this, once. Lost in his Napoleonic wilderness until he was enveloped in the wordless comfort of being found and not judged for having gotten lost. Shown again how simple it was to rest, trusting that the other would watch out for you, save your place, make sure you got back on track again. Keep you — and your work, if there was any difference between the two — safe from harm.

She was big enough to admit to herself that she didn't want to admit to her mother that she had been right, but Mary didn't need to be told. "I can see it in your eyes," she said, the first time they met for brunch after the proposal. Which she absolutely would never be told was how it was phrased. Joan hadn't gotten the pressure to produce grandchildren that some of her friends endured, but she knew her mother worried about her still being single in her forties. Thankfully, they rarely talked about it, and Mary was the only one who understood implicitly that the lines between her and Sherlock did not pull them together that way.

The ways they did pull pleased her. Without the constraints of professional ethics and unease about lying to him, she was freer to be herself than she'd been around another person for a long time. It would take some practice to find the balance, but she knew she was happier. Even giddy once or twice. She hadn't felt this kind of camaraderie since she was twelve and spent every day of summer vacation with her best friend. It wasn't all bliss, of course; at this rate she was going to cure her farsightedness with all the eye-rolling he inspired. They were both still haunted by secrets they wouldn't discuss, and she was starting to believe him when he talked about his enemies and the real danger she was exposed to. And then there was the bathroom, about which the least said the better.

Once she got comfortable enough with calling herself a consulting detective to talk to people about it, she quickly tired of having the same conversations over and over. No, they weren't dating, romantically involved, or sleeping together. Yes, she really did give up her rent-controlled apartment. "Detective" confused some people who thought it meant she had applied to the police academy, so she told them private investigator, and yes, it was just like on TV, ha ha. If additional flippancy was warranted, she laughed it off as a mid-life crisis, although that was probably closest to the truth of the matter.

When he was her client, he challenged her in ways that required her to have confidence that she really did know what she was doing. As a mentor and partner, he did the same, albeit with kinder techniques. (Most of the time.) Everyone who knew him and heard he was teaching her got the same anxious look, replaced by the same incredulous expression when she assured them that he was actually an excellent teacher. Her insistence would sometimes trigger a return through the "No, we're not seeing each other" loop, which made no sense, because in her experience significant others — herself included — generally made the worst teachers.

Ultimately, what made it work for her was his embrace of experimentation and the related expectation that some experiments simply fail. As a pre-med student, she'd excelled in science courses but they were all about science, not doing it. Figuring out that he saw nothing wrong in proposing one hypothesis after another as each one toppled under the weight of contradicting evidence was one of those revelations that turned her world upside-down while sounding just like common sense. She'd witnessed it with every case he took during their first weeks together, but she hadn't been observing closely enough then.

She rejected his hypothesis that needing two alarm clocks means you hate your job, but she couldn't deny that it's been two months since she last used one.