“Aunt Em?”
“Mmhmm?” Emily replied absently, browsing through the clothing on a nearby rack. She and Leah were spending the day shopping, spending some time together before Emily had to return to Virginia.
“Um... Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”
Emily stopped browsing, turning to Leah. “I’m sorry?”
“Can you convince Mom to call me in sick?”
“Leah, what’s going on?”
“I just want to spend another day with you,” she responded and though Emily could tell it was a lie, it was a well-rehearsed one.
“Honey, you need to go back to school. It’s the next step in getting your life back.”
Leah sighed, fingers brushing over the fabric of nearby clothes. “I know.”
“Then do you want to tell me what’s really bothering you?” Emily asked, guiding the young woman out of the store, smiling politely at the saleswoman who had been all but stalking them. She found a nearby bench and sat the girl down.
“I just want to spend time with you.”
“Honey, I want to spend time with you too, but is that really what going to school is about?” Emily had known Leah was going to have a little bit of a difficult time adjusting back into life as she used to know it, but she did have faith she would. This didn’t exactly come as a surprise, it was just a matter of figuring out exactly what it was that was bothering her.
“What else could it be?”
Defensive, so there was something else that was bothering her. “You aren’t excited to see your friends?”
Silence. Ah.
“Leah, they’re your friends.”
“But I lied to them.”
“You didn’t really get much of a choice in it,” Emily responded logically. “You couldn’t say anything.”
“There should have been a way to at least hint to them that there were a lot of things I couldn’t tell them.”
Emily remembered the interviews with Leah’s closest friends, how they often alluded to an entire life that Leah wouldn’t talk about. She remembered the students being confused and a little curious. “Now you can.”
“How?” Leah inquired. “How do you tell your best friend of eight years that there’s an entire half of your life she knows nothing about?”
“You go slow,” Emily coached. “Tomorrow, you can start telling them bits and pieces, but maybe do a night where you can sit down with them and just tell them about it.”
“What if they don’t want to be my friend?”
Emily looked at the woman she’d thought was so incredibly strong. The worry about not having friends was not something that she’d seriously considered would be going through Leah’s head. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”
Tears were pooling in Leah’s eyes and she reached out to play with the snap on Emily’s purse. “I hate him.”
Ah, anger was something she definitely expected. “I know, Le,” Emily replied, taking the hand that was fiddling with her purse. “It sucks.”
Leah chuckled slightly. “You never realize how much it ruins your life,” she said wisely. “I was living a different life and I don’t know what to do.”
“There’s nothing that says you have to stop living that life.”
“But then what am I supposed to do with ‘Leah Scott’?”
“You don’t have to let her go,” Emily insisted. “She’s still a part of you.”
“Then who is ‘Annabelle White’?”
Emily took a mental deep breath. “Leah, you had a life in Chicago, a full life, with friends and family and activities and school... that will always be a part of you. There’s nothing you can do to change that, nothing you can do and nothing anyone else to tell you anything different.”
“A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet,” Leah almost mumbled. “It sounds easier than it is.”
Emily sighed, moving their bags and things out of the way so she could pull Leah against her side to hug her tightly. “I know. But it’ll get easier.”
“Time. It’s always time.”
“I know,” Emily chuckled slightly, kissing Leah’s hair. “But you have support. You have tonnes of support.”
“But if I’m moving with you then I’m leaving it all behind anyway and starting new. Do I use Anabelle then?”
Emily was stunned by Leah’s blunt, straight forward way of bringing up a subject that she felt was a little touchy. She hasn’t talked to Leah about staying in Seattle. “Leah, I want you to stay here.”
“What?”
“I want you to stay in Seattle.”
“But...I don’t understand.”
Emily took both of her hands, focusing all of her attention on the sixteen-year-old. “I love you. You’re like a daughter to me, but you have a life here, a life you’ve spent eight years building. You have friends, you have parents that love you, you have such a support system here without me. We have e-mail, now we can call, and I can visit and you can come visit me.”
“You don’t want me.”
Emily chuckled slightly. “That’s not what this is about. This is about you. And you need to stay here with the life you’ve built instead of uprooting for two years. And I travel all the time. You’d be home by yourself too often for me to like it.”
“But you’re all by yourself.
“I am,” Emily agreed, “But I have a family in Virginia too. I have JJ and Derek and Reid and that’s okay with me.”
“And Agent Hotchner.”
Emily looked away. She and Hotch had been communicating almost since the moment he left. He’d called her last night and they’d been texting back and forth as he checked on her and Leah. She had no idea what it meant. While they’d exchanged vaguely caring statements, she didn’t know if it would amount to anything. She wasn’t sure what to think at all. “And Hotch.”
“What if I wanted to come back with you?”
“You don’t, honey. You want to stay here with your friends, with your family, with a routine you know... It’ll help you get everything back to normal.”
“I haven’t been normal for eight years.”
“And now you get the chance to be. Leah, you know I travelled a lot as a kid, you know what my parents did. I would have killed for a shred of normalcy. You have that chance.”
“Until the trial. Are you going to come back for the trial?”
“I don’t know,” Emily admitted honestly. “There’s a lot of depending factors in it.”
“You worked the initial case and you’re here on this one so you know it better than anyone else,” Leah protested. “You have to come.”
Emily laughed. “Leah, you’re not listening to me,” she said. “I told you that I’d come visit and you can come visit me. Just because this case is over doesn’t mean we’ll lose touch by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Emily replied, leaning forward to kiss Leah’s forehead. “Now come on. There’s shoe store up there and I want a new pair of boots.”
The only way Emily and Liz could convince Leah to go to school the next day was to promise her Emily would take her. Leah had come around to Emily’s side of the car as the older woman got out.
“This is where I leave you, you know?” Emily said, tucking hair behind Leah’s ear. In another life, another job, she would have taken Leah home with her in an instant.
“Can’t you walk me to my locker? Please?”
“Bells?”
Leah turned swiftly to find Danielle behind her, flanked by Justin and Cait. “Hi,” she said shyly.
Danielle looked down at her hands, then back up at Leah. “I’m sorry.”
Emily felt Leah stiffen and reached out a hand, absently stroking her forearm.
“I’m the one that should be sorry,” she said quietly.
Justin was shaking his head before she’d even finished the comment, stepping towards her. “No way. We get it, we do. You couldn’t because of the danger and all that.”
“Still-“
“There’s no still,” Cait said softly, quiet calm. “You had to do what you had to do to keep yourself alive and we understand that.”
“You-“ She had to stop to swallow. “You do?”
“Well, theoretically anyway,” Danielle agreed, coming forward to link her arm with Leah’s. “You’re still you, right? You weren’t acting as someone else when you were here.”
Leah was shaking her head before Danielle had even finished asking the question. “I tried not to be.”
“Then why does it matter?” Cait agreed, coming to link with Leah’s other arm. “A rose by any other name-“
“Would still smell as sweet,” Leah finished with a smile.
Emily could tell she was feeling much more comfortable now with where she was and that her friends weren’t going to abandon her.
“Hey, Annie.”
Emily watched, eyebrow raised as Leah’s complete attention shifted to a dark-haired young man with a British accent. She watched the sixteen-year-old blush a bright red.
“Hey Geoff,” Leah replied but didn’t move from her spot.
Emily almost laughed at Danielle’s curious look.
“Jamie’s been waiting at your locker, you know,” Danielle told her as they started walking away. “Oh, and do we call you Belle or Leah? That was confusing.”
Leah smiled widely. She and Emily had talked about that on their shopping trip and Leah had made the executive decision to make ‘Leah Scott’ her middle names. “Whatever you want to call me.”
“Potato it is!”
Emily smiled as hung up the phone. She stood out on the front porch of the White home, having been invited to dinner the night before she was to leave. They’d been in the middle of dessert when her phone had gone off, vibrating against her hip. She’d checked her caller ID and apologized for having to take the call.
It had been Hotch and for a moment, she’d thought he was calling to tell her she needed to come home early, that she had to jump on the next flight back to Virginia. But that hadn’t been the reason he was calling and she’d related her day with Leah back to him. He’d shared his own day with his son and Emily had to admit, she was warmed from the inside to realize that he was starting to open up to her.
She’d reassured him that she’d be home tomorrow and she’d text him her flight information at the end of their conversation and he’d reassured her he’d be there, as someone who cared about her. And Emily now had a serious warm fuzzy feeling in her stomach.
“Emily.”
Emily looked up to find Liz White poking her head through the doorway. “Hey, Liz. Sorry about that.”
“It’s no problem. Was that Agent Hotchner?”
Emily blinked. “It was.” How had Liz come up with that conclusion.
“Annabelle thought it probably him. She said you seemed pretty close working on her case.”
Emily felt herself blushing. “He was very understanding.”
“Understanding?”
“About Leah. About how important the case was to me.”
Liz stepped out onto the porch with a smile. “From what Annabelle says he truly cares about you.”
“Leah’s idealistic.”
“She is,” Liz allowed. “But I saw how you interacted with him, too. There’s more than professional courtesy there.”
“We’re friends. I helped him through a rough time with his ex-wife.”
Liz chuckled. “Why are so many young people so against just accepting when someone may be more than a friend? It took me ages to explain to Annabelle that Jamie was hanging out by her locker because he liked her. And goodness me, have you seen her face when you bring up the boy in her English class?”
Emily laughed along with the other woman. She hadn’t talked to Leah about her English class, but she’d seen the way the sixteen-year-old had reacted to seeing Geoffery Losh again. “There’s a little bit more to my situation than that,” she said.
“Emily, if there’s one thing Annabelle has taught us, it’s that you have to grab on to what you do have in life. You can’t sit there dwelling on the what ifs and the maybes. There’s too much to life and not enough time to fuss.”
“It’s a little bit more complicated,” Emily repeated with a small smile.
“He’s your boss?”
“For one.”
“Ah.”
“I love my job, Liz. A lot. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened between us then it all fell apart and I had to leave the team.”
“He could.”
“No.” And Emily would always be adamant about that. “The BAU is what I do and as much as I love it, it’s who he is. That team has been every inch cultivated by Aaron Hotchner and I won’t take that away from him.”
“Does he feel the same?”
“About me?”
“About the situation. I can tell he feels the same about you.”
Emily felt the heat flooding her cheeks again. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Well, it doesn’t seem fair to judge the potential of a relationship between you when you don’t know his side,” Liz said logically, appealing to Emily’s rational side. “That seems like a terrible way to gauge what could happen.”
Emily looked out onto the quiet Seattle street. “I’m just not sure I’m willing to risk it.”
“He is.”
“What?”
“I’m a mother, Emily. I look for those things. David still looks at me the way Agent Hotchner was looking at you in Agent Spring’s office.”
That was a comment Emily hadn’t been expecting. David and Liz had been married for almost twenty-five years. They had been Emily’s first choice family for placing Leah.
“Look, dear, you need to jump at every opportunity,” the older woman said, reaching out to place a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “You never know when that opportunity might pass you by.”
Emily smiled. “Thanks Liz.”
“It’s no problem. Now come inside, I’m sure it’s almost time for you to go.”