This is Not a Safe House, Part II

She wept when she heard he was dead.

She almost cried over him once before, in the safe house in Pakistan when he'd been shot while saving her life. She never thought he would die, though—not that night, not ever. Sherlock Holmes seemed a legend in her eyes, and legends never died. Then, he did, by his own hand, which was the most shocking part of the nightmare. How could he do it? How could he splatter that beautiful brain on pavement? How could he leave John? How could he leave her?

He left her in Paris a year before, but he didn't say goodbye. She realized he never said goodbye. How disrespectful to go and kill himself without at least a friendly text, which was exactly what she did when she heard the news—stumbled upon it on the BBC website. Irene Adler sent Sherlock Holmes a text: "Tell me you're not dead."

Then, she waited, in her shiny new flat in San Francisco. Paris was too close to London, too close to him. California was better, safer: a sunny place to start a new business. The day she heard the news, she texted him from her flat, and he never responded, so she wept for what seemed like days.

She cancelled with clients. She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. She sat and stared at her cellular phone, willing it to make a sound until the silence threatened to crush her eardrums—until she turned on loud, American rock music to cover the sound of his absence. Forever. The only man she loved, gone forever.

When the weeping stopped, when the clients returned, she still jumped at every text. When she closed her eyes at night, she dreamt of his hands on her flesh and remembered the way his mouth felt in the safe house in Karachi. When she woke in the morning, she sometimes even felt his warm body next to her, only to reach out and find cold, tangled sheets. She didn't cry then, not anymore. She subdued all sentiment, buried alongside her dead consulting detective.