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It turns out fantasy really is better than reality.
He may have respected her work�though he never actually said so�but he didn�t respect her. Which, at first, Sara thought she could live with, but when he started leaving experiments involving beef-bullets and god-knows-what-else next to her eggplant parmesan when he had shared over three hundred meals with her since she stopped being able to even look at meat, she knew that, like many people, she had idealized someone, elevated him to an almost God-like level in her mind, and, being the flawed�extremely flawed�human being that he is, there was no way for him to live up to her impossible standards.
So she took a leave of absence.
In response he sent her a potted plant with a card that said �from Grissom� in handwriting that was clearly too female for him to have even bothered to go to a flower shop and pick the damn thing out himself.
It was an effort, Sara gave him that, but it was too little, and much too late, so she packed a bag and caught the first flight to the capitol because she had a friend who had been trying to woo her into the FBI since she was still a Level One. A week later she was in Virginia taking in courses at Quantico. A month after that she got her orders and was placing a call to Los Vegas asking Warrick and Nick if they would mind packing up the rest of her apartment and shipping her things to New York, care of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Sara wasn�t going back to Las Vegas, maybe not ever again, and, the longer she sat in her hotel room in New York with that week�s copy of the Rental Papers open on the bedspread in front of me, the less sad she was about the prospect of never seeing him again.
New challenges, new adventures, and, hopefully, a better life lay before her.
Now if she could just find an apartment.
Another day, another picture on the white-board, a school picture of a little girl, all pigtails and missing front teeth, beaming at the camera like she�s just been told she�s getting a pony and a trip to Disneyland and the new Barbie doll she�s been eyeing in Toys-R-Us since she first saw the ad for it on TV. The girl had beautiful red hair that fell in ringlets outside the multicoloured-fabric scrunchies holding her pigtails in place high atop her head, and freckles much brighter than Samantha�s own ever were splashed across the girl�s cheeks.