She nodded.

"Okay. And I gather you remember most of the conversation between us afterward, about why you'd asked me to get involved officially in the investigation. That was when you finally told me about the attack on Sunday night. That it had affected your memory a little and your senses a lot. You said you wanted someone you could trust to keep an eye on you in case the attack had caused more damage than you already knew about."

Riley sorted through what "memories" she had, wondering again which knowledge or seeming knowledge she could trust. "I didn't tell you I had forgotten most of the last three weeks?"

Ash frowned. "No, that's not what you said. You didn't remember the attack or the hours before it happened. You didn't remember why you had gone out or where you had gone that night. That's what you told me. That's all you told me."

"Oh."

"Riley, are you saying now that you didn't remember anything about the last few weeks?"

"Bits and pieces, but-" She sighed. "Dammit, in my head we've had this conversation before. I didn't remember us, but once you touched me I knew we were lovers, I felt what was between us, and that was the one thing in this whole damn screwy situation I was sure of. So don't get pissed that I was faking my way through our relationship, because I wasn't, not in any way that counted. Fumbling a little, I'll grant you. But not faking."

"You were…very convincing," he said finally.

"Now, see, you're getting pissed again. Please don't make me repeat the speech about how I was affected by what happened to me on Sunday night and how it left me scrambling to catch up on everything, not just us."

Dryly, he said, "Sorry, but I wasn't there the first time."

"Yes, you were." Riley shook her head. "At least that's the way I remember it. Damn, it was-is-so real in my mind. I don't understand this. Any of it."

Ash eyed her thoughtfully. "Well, you're still shaking a bit, but you also seem to be taking this very calmly."

She didn't bother to explain that in the SCU, one learned to handle unexpected things thrown at one without warning.

Or else one washed out of the SCU. Rather quickly.

Instead, all she said was, "I'm not calm, I'm numb. Big difference."

"Riley, maybe you should go back to Quantico."

"No." The response came instantly, without thought, and as soon as she heard herself say it Riley felt the rightness of it, the certainty. She wasn't sure of much, but she was absolutely certain she had to stay the course here. It went against logic and reason, to say nothing of all her training, but it was what she felt.

And how can I trust what I feel any more than what I think? Is this genuine instinct fighting its way through all the bewilderment of lost memories and unreliable senses, or just bloody-minded determination not to quit before the job is done?

It could have been either. Or neither.

Ash reclaimed her attention, saying, "Look, we both know-or at least I hope you know-that I do not want you to leave. I've been gathering all the arguments I can think of for you to transfer down here, maybe work out of the Charleston FBI field office. But you'd said you were considering taking a full six weeks off, so I thought I had a bit more time to make my case."

Momentarily distracted-not surprisingly, considering the current state of her mind-Riley said, "Six weeks? I said I was thinking of staying-what is it now?-another two weeks?"

He nodded. "Saturday, you'll have been here four weeks."

"That doesn't make sense either," she murmured. By the previous Sunday night, she had to have known that Bishop and the rest of the team were all but overwhelmed with cases; she might not have checked in with him, but it was her habit to keep tabs on the unit wherever she was, and she couldn't imagine a situation in which she would have been contemplating an extension of her "vacation" knowing how thinly stretched the SCU resources were.

"Thanks a lot," Ash said.

Riley shook her head. "It has nothing to do with us. Bishop's current investigation is a serial killer on the rampage in Boston, making the national news on a daily basis, and I would have known the other teams were just as busy; the SCU is strained to its absolute limits right now. It wouldn't have been in character for me to decide to stay here on what was supposed to be a minor and unofficial investigation."

"Minor?"

"In the general scheme of things, sure. At least until what happened on Sunday. To that point, all we really had in the way of violence were a couple of instances of arson, property damage; nobody got hurt, and that wasn't something Jake and his people needed my help to investigate. Why would I have stayed here knowing I was badly needed elsewhere? Unless…"

Ash was watching her intently. "Unless?"

"Unless I knew that, however unthreatening the situation looked on the surface, Gordon's instincts were right and there was something very dangerous going on here. You're sure everything I was telling you pointed to-"

"‘No big deal,' I think were your exact words." He frowned. "Although if your…performance…since Sunday is anything to go by, you could have been telling me that while believing the opposite, and I'd never have known. Apparently."

She sighed. "I knew we were going to have to have this conversation again."

"Riley-"

"Ash, I can't apologize for not confiding in you during those first weeks because I'm not sure there was anything to confide. Or if there was, why I decided to keep it to myself. And since waking up on Monday I've spent most of my time just trying to figure out if my mind and senses will ever get back to something I fondly call normal. I'm sorry if you're pissed. I'm sorry if you're hurt. But put yourself in my place for just a minute and think about it. If you had no idea why you had done something uncharacteristic-why you had done a lot of things that were uncharacteristic-how quick would you be to push aside all your doubts and confide everything to the woman unexpectedly sharing your bed?"

After a long moment, he sighed and nodded. "Okay, point taken."

"Thank you." Half to herself, she muttered, "I just wish I could be sure we won't be repeating all this tomorrow. The term ‘déjà vu' has taken on a whole new meaning for me."

"You think there'll be more blackouts?"

"I don't know what to think. Except that whatever I'm experiencing, it's like nothing I've ever heard of before. Blackouts and lost time aren't unknown among psychics. In fact, if anything they're fairly common. But they tend to present as either total unconsciousness or radically different behavior."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if you and everybody else around here noticed nothing odd about how I was acting during the time I've lost, it can only mean I didn't actually lose those hours. I was functional. I was here, doing normal things. I was me. But then, for whatever reason, those memories and experiences…ceased to exist for me. I've lost the perception of their reality."

"Why does that sound a lot more scary to me?"

"Probably for the same reason it feels a lot more scary. Because how we perceive the world is our reality. And if I've lost that, even pieces of it, then…I can't trust anything I think, or feel…or believe. Especially now. It's not just holes now; my mind has apparently begun filling in the holes, the blank spots, supplying memories that aren't real at all."

"Assuming you can believe me," he noted.

"I have to believe you," she said flatly. "I have to have something solid to hold on to, to anchor me. And that's you. Because you're in my bed. Because before all this started, I trusted you that much. It's never casual for me, in case I didn't mention that. Sex. So you being my lover has to mean I trusted you absolutely within days of meeting you. I may not remember why, but I have to believe that. I have to hold on to it. You're my lifeline, Ash."