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Emily drifts back to the surface of consciousness to the sound of beeping, soft and easy. She can’t feel her heart in her body, floating somewhere in the muted pain, but she doesn’t have to. The machines are telling her she’s still alive.
There are people in the hospital room with her. At least two, maybe three. She can hear someone breathing at the side of her bed, slow with sleep, and the near-soundless scuff of shoes—probably a nurse’s—further away. Her eyelids are heavy but she forces them open.
JJ’s head has fallen forward, her chin resting against her chest. Wings of her hair fall in front of her face. The nurse is at the other end of the room, just one, a slim man with black hair.
“Jay,” Emily rasps, words rusty in her mouth, the end of the syllable fading to nothing. She’s lucky, she’s so lucky; she thought JJ had left her already, that maybe Hotch had too. But JJ is here.
“Want me to wake her up for you?” the nurse asks quietly, and JJ startles awake at his words.
“Emily!” JJ is quiet too, her excitement damped down almost to a whisper, though nobody is still asleep.
Emily feels like a ghost. They’re all mourning her already, even though everyone here knows she’s alive. JJ’s whisper is for deathbeds, churches, funeral homes. “I need to talk to you in private,” she says, as loud as she can. It’s not very loud, and she gives up.
The nurse offers her an ice chip and hands JJ the cup of ice. “I can wait in the hall for a few minutes,” he says.
JJ looks from Emily to him, then nods. She’s harder than Emily remembers her.
“What is it?” JJ asks once he’s gone.
“I need…” Emily struggles to focus, to find one last bit of courage after a few weeks that had taken everything she had. What the hell, everyone thinks she’s dead anyway. She crunches the last bit of ice between her back teeth and says, “Remember Jordan Todd? Counterterrorism, with you.”
“Yeah,” JJ says, frowning. “We’re not working with each other, but of course I remember her. Why?”
The monitor beeps a little faster.
“Need you to tell her I’m not dead,” Emily says.
“What?” JJ asks, shaking her head. “Emily, we can’t tell anyone else you’re not dead. What are you talking about?” She looks at the equipment surrounding Emily, the IVs and tubes and whatever else.
Emily swallows. She can hear her heart beating even faster on the monitors, though she still can’t feel it. Maybe she is a ghost. “We’re…dating. Since she was with the team. It’s serious, JJ.” She can feel the tears welling over her eyelids, cold on her cheeks. “If she were a guy, if we worked somewhere else, something, I’d’ve…”
That sentence ends somewhere Emily doesn’t even know, some fantasy alternate reality where she brings a date to team movie nights and dancing and doesn’t make up stories about some man she went out with.
JJ’s mouth is open, soft with shock.
“The team’s gonna get counseling,” Emily says. “Grief support. Jordan won’t get any of that, bereavement, nothing. She’ll have to pretend she’s fine. If it were legal”—Emily tries to blink away the trickle of helpless tears, thoughts of the gentleness of a universe that isn’t this one—“two and a half years in maybe we’d be talking whether we were heading toward getting married. If the brass didn’t care we’d at least tell people. I’d bring her around to team things like you bring Will. Brought him when you were still on the… JJ, she’s going to hear I died from the fucking newspaper.”
“Okay,” JJ says, blinking, still shaking her head a little. “Okay. I—”
Emily can see the questions forming behind her dazed expression, can almost recite them herself. Oh, I didn’t know you were a lesbian! Right, because she’d kept it a secret. Did you ever, you know, think about me like that? For a change, yes, but she’d gotten over it.
“So that’s why you never liked any of the guys I kept trying to set you up with,” JJ says finally, on a breath almost like a laugh. “Okay. I didn’t know.”
“Jordan,” Emily says again, insistent. “JJ, please, you have to tell her.”
JJ puts the cup of ice down. Her right hand is cold and damp with condensation, but her left is warm and solid as she takes Emily’s hand between both of hers. “I’ll tell her,” she says. “You’re sure she can keep a secret?”
Emily gives JJ the best death glare she can manage, supine in a hospital bed full of tubes and wires and stitches. “Counterterrorism,” she says, even more slowly than she needs to.
“Okay,” JJ says one last time, and squeezes Emily’s hand. “I promise.”
Emily almost lets go then, but this isn’t her first implausible story. It’s always easier to believe your own eyes. “Video me,” she says. “Don’t send it to her, keep it on your phone and delete it, but give her proof.”
JJ hesitates, but nods and takes out her phone.
“I’m not dead,” Emily says at JJ’s signal. The phone is small and lifeless, the room is cold. “I’m sorry if you’ve already heard I was. JJ can explain the rest, but I’m—” She’s not okay. Jordan wouldn’t believe it if she tried to say she was, so she doesn’t have to try. “I’m going to be okay. I love you.”
With everything else it’s still surreal to say that in front of someone else, through someone else. Emily had never really thought about having a colleague she could ask to pass on that kind of message, not in her line of work. Not in Jordan’s, either.
“I’ll tell her,” JJ whispers, and takes Emily’s hand again. “You need to rest now, though.”
Emily lets herself fall back into sleep to the sound of the mechanical promise that her heart is still beating.
Jordan Todd had called in with the flu, JJ is informed. She’s not available.
“I need to speak with her,” JJ says through a tight smile. “Can I get her home number?”
“She has a pager,” the hapless clerk JJ is smiling at says. “If you’d like to—”
JJ smiles harder. “I would like her telephone number, please.” She’s never had much patience for red tape, even as she used it herself; with the new job she has less. “I’d like you to give it to me, but I’m prepared to consider other options.”
The clerk looks doubtful. “She sounded awful when she called to ask me to hold her mail. I don’t know—”
“That’s all right,” JJ says confidently. “I do.”
She extracts the number from the clerk and calls. And calls. Jordan picks up the third time sounding awful, so groggy and out of it JJ has a second’s doubt that Emily didn’t somehow hallucinate the entire thing off a bad reaction to the painkillers. Maybe Jordan really does just have the flu, maybe the whole thing—
“Hi, this is Jennifer Jareau,” JJ says, and Jordan chokes off a sob fast enough to fool anyone but a profiler, anyone who hadn’t spent years talking to grieving families. “We need to talk. Can I meet you somewhere?”
“It’s not a great time,” Jordan manages, voice raw and tight. “I should be back at work day after tomorrow—”
“Today,” JJ says, and Jordan sighs and gives JJ her address.
JJ doesn’t know what she’s expecting. Signs of Emily, maybe, but she doesn’t even know what signs of Emily would be. She doesn’t know Emily half as well as she’d thought she did, between the CIA past and now the secret long-term girlfriend. Partner? Whatever Emily calls her. She has no idea if any of Emily’s stories about ex-boyfriends were true, or totally made up, or whether the only parts that were lies were the parts when Emily said “he.”
Two and a half years, Emily had said. Emily has had a secret relationship for the entire length of time Henry’s been alive. The span of his entire existence on this planet—every milestone, every gorgeous memory, everything JJ has cherished—has been… God, it’s a long time, even though it’s gone past so quickly.
JJ parks ten blocks away from Jordan’s apartment and walks, just to be safe.
It’s a nice building, when she gets there, well-kept and pleasant but not ornate. Jordan answers the door in an oversized t-shirt, inside out, over a pair of pajama shorts. Her skin is dark enough that her complexion can’t reveal anything, but there’s no hiding the redness of her eyes, or how hard her mouth is clamped, like if it softens even a little it will give her away. Even the average person over in counterterrorism, JJ guesses, would be able to spot that something was wrong with her.
JJ says, “Is there somewhere we can sit?”
“I’m not really up for company,” Jordan says, flat.
JJ isn’t feeling much up for company herself. She barely knows Jordan—she picked her out, she liked her, but they only knew each other for a few weeks, two and a half years ago. JJ’s head is practically spinning with everything she still needs to do. But she’s broken bad news to so many people that she knows the doorway isn’t a spot for good news. “Just for a moment.”
Jordan turns away and gestures wearily. “Living room’s this way.” Like the rest of the apartment, the living room is pleasant. Big windows, pillows on the chenille couch, bright fabrics, opening across a bar into the kitchen. Jordan drops wearily onto the end of the couch, chin propped on her hands and elbows propped on her knees, not looking at JJ. “What is it?”
This JJ really hasn’t prepared for in her career, and now that she thinks about it she’s not sure how she managed the omission. Surely they’ve had to tell people that bodies were misidentified before? Well, getting it out quickly will be kindest as well as easiest. “Emily isn’t dead. She—we—made it up to protect her.”
Jordan stares at her as if one or both of them has lost their minds.
“Here,” JJ says, and pulls out her phone. “She said you’d want proof.”
“I’m not dead,” Emily’s voice says, tinny from the phone speakers, so small to be echoing so hugely between them. “I’m sorry if you’ve already heard I was.”
Jordan’s arms give—just go straight out from under her—and JJ is so glad that she made Jordan sit down. Jordan catches herself before her head bounces off her knees, but barely. She’s staring at JJ’s phone like it’s—well, like it is a miracle.
Emily’s voice keeps going. “JJ can explain the rest, but I’m…” That awful pause, where Emily had tried for reassurance and hadn’t been able to get the lie together. It still twists in JJ’s chest, another thing that got taken from Emily in all this. “I’m going to be okay. I love you.”
JJ looks away from the tears starting to spill over Jordan’s eyelids.
“Can,” Jordan chokes out, and has to stop to breathe. “Can you play it again?”
JJ does. Then she asks, “Can I get you anything? Water, or tea or something?” She wouldn’t offer alcohol, and she doesn’t know what else Jordan has around. If it were her own kitchen she’d offer soup, get Jordan some nutrients, but it isn’t.
“Water,” Jordan says. “Thank you.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, belatedly, but all it really does is smear the water around on her cheeks. Still, she looks twenty times better than she had when JJ got there.
When JJ gets back with the water, Jordan has found a box of tissues and dried her face. She takes the glass with a shaky smile and says, “Thank you so much. When did Emily tell you?”
“Uh, middle of the night sometime?” JJ says, trying to remember. “Maybe yesterday.”
“Oh,” Jordan says. “Well. Thank you for coming, anyway.”
There are a lot of things JJ could say, and she doesn’t know which ones are the right ones. She tries to imagine what she’d be saying to Emily’s boyfriend in this situation, but there’d be no way Emily would ever have kept a boyfriend secret for that long. “I hope she’ll be back soon,” JJ says finally. “I… It was good to see you again. If you and Emily ever decide you want to come over to dinner, we’d be happy to have you.”
“Yeah?” Jordan asks. She watches JJ over the rim of her glass as she takes a sip.
JJ nods firmly. “Emily is important to me,” she says. “I want her to be happy, and I trusted you with my team when I left for a reason. I, uh, I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this when I picked you out, but…yeah.”
Look at that, she’d set Emily up with someone after all. She fights back a nervous bubble of laughter—successfully, she thinks. She hopes. Jordan wouldn’t understand.
“Thank you,” Jordan says. “Again. So what…she said you’d explain what happened. Why she had to do this.”
Ian Doyle is a mess to explain. JJ thinks about how badly Morgan took it, and he’s just Emily’s… He’s the other kind of partner. On the other hand, Jordan’s probably seen worse than he has, at least on the job. JJ does her best, and Jordan listens gravely, sipping her water and nodding in the right places.
When JJ is done, Jordan asks, “So what exactly is the plan? She pretends she’s dead and…then what?”
“Well, we try to catch him,” JJ says. She’s a little hazy on that part too. “Hotch has a plan.”
“Hopefully it’s the right plan,” Jordan says. JJ can’t read the expression that flashes across her face, but it’s something close to cynical. “Hopefully it works.”
JJ sighs, and tries to believe it when she says, “They’ll find him, and then she’ll be able to come home.”
There’s a pause, as Jordan turns her empty glass in her hands, and JJ shifts her weight from one foot to the other.
“I’m guessing you’d like me to go now,” JJ says finally.
“I do appreciate you coming to tell me,” Jordan says. “Really, I—thank you. Thank you so much. But it’s been a long few days.”
JJ nods. “Well,” she says, “good luck.”
Jordan needs that luck.
She’s used to pretending there’s nobody in her life at work, deflecting with jokes about being married to the job. She doesn’t know how she would have gotten through it if JJ hadn’t come to tell her it was all a lie—she can barely pretend everything is normal as it is, and she’s glad she had the wits to come up with that flu excuse. For a week or two after she gets back, Weston sprays everything down with Lysol when she’s been in the room, and someone—she thinks Ortiz—keeps leaving vitamin C gummies and powders at her desk.
“You look like hell,” Burns tells her. Flatterer.
Jordan shrugs. “Flu season’s bad this year.”
“Flu season is bad every year,” Weston says, frowning.
“That’s how flu seasons work,” Ortiz tells her. “They say it’s unusually bad so that people will actually pay attention and get their shots.”
Jordan pops a vitamin C gummy, makes a face at the taste, and lets her colleagues’ bickering wash over her. She can call up Emily’s voice in her memory: “I’m not dead. I’m sorry.” If she couldn’t do that, if she were trying to pretend she’d just been sick…
God, it was good of Emily to make sure she knew.
Her mother is a different story.
“How’s your girl doing?” she asks, while Jordan has her phone on speaker and is trying to chop vegetables for a crock-pot recipe.
Jordan almost gets her finger instead of the carrots. “She’s all right, Mom.”
“I’m going to be okay. I love you.”
“Are you sure?” her mother asks suspiciously. “You don’t sound sure.”
Go through one spectacularly bad breakup in college, find yourself still trying to live it down fifteen years later.
Jordan had told her mother she’d met someone at work, but not when or where. Her mother hasn’t met Emily yet—she almost did back at Thanksgiving, but the BAU got called out of town and the scheduling hadn’t worked out. She doesn’t know Emily’s last name, wouldn’t have stumbled across Emily Prentiss’s obituary anywhere.
“She’s on an assignment,” Jordan says, pushing the half-finished carrots out of the way and going for celery instead. It’s greener, paler, safer. “I haven’t been able to talk to her in a while, it’s not safe for her to be…to be getting that kind of communications.”
“Oh, honey.” Her mother’s voice is warm now. “You must be so worried.”
“No, I…” Jordan starts, and is horrified when her voice cracks. She lets the knife fall onto the cutting board and starts crying, shuddery sobs that fight their way out until she gives up and lets them come.
Emily could die for real, somewhere else wearing someone else’s name, and Jordan might not ever know about it.
She gets herself back under control after a minute, or maybe a little longer. Her mother is making soothing sounds over the speaker, and once both of them can hear her clearly she says, “I’m going to come visit you this weekend.”
“It’s all right,” Jordan says. “I’m all right.”
“You are not all right,” her mother says, and when she leaves again after the weekend Jordan has a freezer full of soups and casseroles that almost but not quite manage to warm her up inside.
She is not all right.
Emily’s Facebook page is silent, full of her friends’ grief. Jordan gets home from work and wants to call Emily and knows that nobody will answer. Some days she thinks about calling anyway.
In July she emails JJ:
Hi, Ms. Jareau,
Sorry to bother you! I’m having a difficult time remembering—was it you who consulted me about a file in March? Just trying to sort out some notes.
Thanks,
Jordan Todd
The thirty-seven hours it takes JJ to respond are agonizing. Jordan has halfway convinced herself that she imagined the entire conversation with JJ, that she dreamed Emily’s reassurance, that she’s spent months she should have been grieving completely out of touch with reality.
Ms. Todd,
It’s no bother at all. I did consult you about a file in March, so if you had a request from my department I’m sure that was me. Thanks again for your help—everything worked out great, thanks to your expertise.
Jennifer Jareau
Jordan takes what feels like her first full breath in days. She’s not losing her mind, not any kind of danger to the people around her as grief unravels her grip on reality. A couple of months with the BAU was more than long enough to ensure a lot of nightmares, even without this.
Summer winds on, hot and still. Counterterrorism doesn’t change with the seasons, and Jordan’s days are the same weary grind as they have been. The job is a cold, bleak, unpleasant wife to have. She’d forgotten how much she hated going home alone to a quiet house, no one to talk to or listen to. The reality doesn’t half live up to the lies she’d been telling her coworkers.
But what can she do? She’d get a pet, but she can’t exactly borrow Sergio from Garcia to make sure he gets along with the new animal. She’s never had what the BAU has with each other with her own colleagues, and her friends outside the Bureau wouldn’t get her stories even if she could share them. This has to be the real reason they tell people not to date at work—there’s something ripped out of Jordan’s life, and she keeps tripping over the lies about it.
Towards the end of September she gets a call from a blocked number. She almost doesn’t pick up, but something makes her. “Hello?”
“Jordan?” Emily asks, soft and hesitant.
“Emily.” Jordan’s knees go watery with relief. “It’s so good to hear your voice. Are you okay?”
Emily lets out a shaky laugh. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. I’m okay. I’m coming home. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Jordan promises.
When she shows up at Jordan’s door Emily is thinner, sharper, her eyes hollowed out and shadowed.
But she’s real, real as she leans trembling into Jordan’s arms, real as she holds Jordan back tight enough to bruise. Jordan thinks about carrying those aching fingerprints until they heal—proof even when she’s at work that Emily has been alive all these months when it seemed truly delusional to believe it—and breathes, and breathes, and holds Emily just as tightly back.