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Mark says he needs to take a drive after Ellie leaves, so Owen tells him to take Joan’s car.“You shouldn’t be with Sam in this state,” he says delicately. “I’ll take Joan and Sam home.”He makes eye contact with Joan and she nods and fishes out her keys. She’s tired, deep in her bones — not just because they pulled an all-nighter digging through the files and all for naught, but because, looking at Owen now, she’s painfully aware of the six years tangled up between them.Owen knows more about her than just about anyone else — even more than Mark, some days. He knows that she owns too many Christmas ornaments and always buys more milk than she needs. He witnessed her six-month battle with the rats in the carport of the duplex she used to live in, and he carried half her furniture when she moved into her new place. He was there the Father’s Day her dad screened her calls and she cried until she made herself sick over it. He helped her pick out the sheets for the guest bed, and patched and repainted the hole in the drywall she made when her hammer slipped while hanging a photo in the living room, and picked her up from the airport at five in the morning after she admitted taxis made her nervous.“Would you like to come back to mine?” she asks after they drop off Sam. Owen just nods and gives her an exhausted smile like he’d known she was going to ask.He probably did.She leaves him in the living room with the stacks upon stacks of files while she goes to her bedroom. She doesn’t bother closing the door before she strips — he knows her body, too, of course, knows the shape of the stretch marks around her arms and the line of moles that curve over her left hip and the tension knot she gets in her neck on days like today — and then pulls a ratty old sweatshirt over her head. It’s about five sizes too big. She habitually shoves the baggy sleeves up to her elbows, but the hem still falls halfway to her knees.When she goes back to the living room, he looks like he’s fallen asleep leaning against the doorframe leading to the kitchen. He opens his eyes when she stops in front of him, and his forehead creases when he see what she’s wearing.Owen reaches up with one slightly shaking hand and traces the collar of it, fingers brushing her skin. “This was mine,” he says softly.He’d taken up a full third of her closet space by the time they broke up, and she never did manage to get rid of any of it.She shrugs and looks over the carnage of their research. It feels like the ghost of the first investigation binge they’d gone on together all those years ago. When they’d finally found the answer to that problem, the victory of it had burned in their bones with more energy than either of them could contain. That had been the day he’d finally kissed her, after months of them both dancing around it.Everything had seemed so simple then, and now it’s all wrong and broken and the answers they thought they’d found don’t actually mean anything. Joan doesn’t even know how she screwed up this time, but she’s sure it’s her fault (again), and she’s edging towards too tired to care, and the weight and warmth of his hand on her skin still feels familiar somehow.She puts her hand over his, pushes herself up on her toes and into his space, and kisses him slowly.It’s been three years since everything, and they all melt away as he kisses and kisses and kisses her. He keeps his hands on her lightly, like he isn’t sure she’s truly deigning to be touched like this. Her chest is overflowing with the certainty that he’ll give her anything she wants.That’s how his touch always feels. Felt.He breaks the kiss.“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I said I wouldn’t.”She can’t argue; she shouldn’t, obviously. They’re not in a position to consent to even this much right now, either of them, no matter how starved they might be for it.He lets her lean her forehead against his sternum, and runs his fingers into her hair.“Come to bed?” she asks.He takes a deep breath.“Please,” she says.He agrees.Compared to his usual fresh-pressed look it’s pretty clear he didn’t go home last night, but that fades as he undresses. He drapes his suit coat and tie and shirt and slacks over the chair in the corner of her bedroom, until he’s down to his boxers and undershirt. The same lazy pajamas she’d seen him in a hundred times. It looks like just another Saturday morning.He gets under the covers on what is apparently still his side of the bed, and she curls up under his arm, her head on his chest until she can hear his heartbeat.When he sighs deeply enough to shift her, she doesn’t have to see him to know the face he’s making. She could draw it in her sleep; the worry line between his eyebrows, the downtick on the left side of his mouth, the sadness in his deep hazel eyes.“Do you think we’re ever going to stop fucking up like this?” Owen asks.Joan takes a deep breath in and lets the familiar smell of him fill all the spaces between her ribs where she knows his fingers fit perfectly. He smells precisely the same; same laundry detergent and body soap and aftershave.They’re creatures of unshakeable habit.