When she got back to DC, she went straight home. She hadn't been completely healed from the mission to Djibouti, but this wasn't even so much a physical trauma as it was an emotional one. Ben had finally been transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center after a stint at Tripler.
A coma.
The prognosis wasn't good, but it didn't stop her from sitting in the chair in his room until she'd dropped off to sleep. The nurse had finally woken her up and sent her home around one and Annie had driven the dark streets of Washington in a daze. At home, she'd ignored the blinking voice mail light on her cellphone and gone straight into the shower. It was easier to avoid reality than to face it.
Reality- Standing in the shower, she broke down. So much of her life had been centered around the man currently fighting for his life in a hospital room, but even she hadn't known the extent to which she had focused on him until she'd been back in that - their - hut in Sri Lanka. Everything had come crashing back to her with an intensity that she hadn't realized that she felt and, when it was over, she had realized that it was over.
The guilt had remained.
The mission had remained.
When the bullets had started flying, nothing about the past had mattered - only the mission had mattered. When it was over, the guilt had remained. Not just the guilt for what had happened on the beach, but for what had happened on the roof. Had she moved too slow? Should she have seen the man with the gun? As soon as she was out of the shower, she crawled into bed and searched for sleep that didn't come.
She checked her voice mail in the morning and hearing Clay's voice made her feel ill. She deleted the message and drove to work, opting for the Starbucks five blocks from the Agency rather than the one inside the building. She dumped the cup outside rather than try to get it past security.
Ignoring lunch, she worked on her report and talked to Joan and Arthur about the entire thing.
It wasn't until she left twenty minutes late that she realized that she'd spent almost two days avoiding Clayton Webb, that he probably knew it and that he, too, was used to leaving late. When the elevator came, she wasn't paying attention until she stepped inside.