"Over the past five years, sections of over fifty-four bodies have left this hospital without proper authorization and to date fifteen bodies have not been properly accounted for. It was your responsibility to keep track of them. And yet, you have allowed other individuals to remove what should be safely in our care. We are not a loan library, Miss Hooper. It is our responsibility to treat each body that we receive with the utmost respect. Do you understand what it would mean to this Hospital if it became known that we let members of the public walk off with body parts? We depend on donations to provide subjects for dissection for our medical school. Your actions may have adversely affected the reputation of our institution. And it has also come to my attention that you may have been involved in the falsification of a death certificate. I am very disappointed with you, Miss Hooper. A formal reprimand will be placed on your record, and you are suspended of all duties until the audit is complete. That will be all."

Molly left the room without saying a word. There were so many things that she had been meaning to say, but at the time, she couldn't bring herself to say them. The audit was an unexpected thing. She should have made sure that Sherlock returned the body parts that he had borrowed. Or at least she should have fudged the records so it seemed like he had. She had indeed kept careful records of everything that Sherlock had removed, and they had found it when she was away helping take care of John Watson's half-orphaned baby. She walked down to her office, but the warnings and notices on her desk quickly drove her from the place. She picked up her coat, hoping to get a bit of air and passed the lunch room to see Dr. Painford having lunch with that new nurse from Oncology.

Dr. Painford was young with blond hair and a dashing smile. He was very tall and intelligent, and he had asked her out more than once. She had accepted, only to forget about their date when Sherlock had turned up weeks away from dying due to his overindulgence in drugs. Then he had been almost killed by a serial killer, and the subsequent storm of media attention had made it nearly impossible to sneak into the secure hospital where his brother had transferred him after the last one had been proven to have been a killing box that had cost the lives of dozens of adults and children.

His prognosis had been not as severe as she had first thought. His assistant, Bill Wiggins, had indeed been a first rate chemist. The tracer chemicals that he had ingested had made it seem as if his kidneys were failing even though they were not. With some weeks of treatment, he was back to his annoying self again, although much too underweight and with a need for a course of drugs to ease the symptoms of his former addiction.

Sherlock had refused the drugs, as she knew he would, and traded the pains of withdrawal for a vicious tongue that reminded her of how he had been in their first days.

Despite her concern for Sherlock, the baby Rosie was foremost in her thoughts. She had come to love the little child in a way neither of her parents had seemed too. John Watson and she had never been very close before, her being a friend of a friend. But she had become close to Mary Watson before her death. Mary was a strange woman. She was warm and generous on one hand and secretive and sarcastic on the other. She had no fear or superstition about dead bodies, which Molly found odd, but comforting. She also clearly had some issue between herself and Sherlock that they refused to acknowledge. On the surface, they seemed the closest of friends, but there was something in her eyes, and the way that Sherlock refused to turn his back on her. The way that Mary's voice tensed when she mentioned his name.

Molly had planned one day to ask about it, but she never got the chance. She would never forget Mrs Hudson asking her to come by Mary's house at once as she needed to return to Baker Street, and no one else was around to take care of the baby now that Mary was dead.

She was Rosie's godmother. She had agreed to help if anything happened to her parents, but she had never imagined this. She had never imagined rocking a crying baby whose mother would never return. Watching as John became more and more distant from his own child, refusing to touch her and sometimes even to look at her. She had never guessed that she would be the one to tell Sherlock that his best friend would rather be with anyone but him.

She had not been there to witness Mary's death, so she didn't understand how Lestrade could claim that Mary took a bullet to save Sherlock's life when John acted as if Sherlock had shot her himself. He refused to take Sherlock's calls. He even refused to allow her to say his name around Rosie, not that he was around her much these days. Rosie was living with the Browns, a nice young couple that Mary had met in her Lamaze class. Their daughter was born only a week before Rosie, and they had agreed to take her for a while when they heard the shocking news of Mary's car accident. That was the lie that they were told. Mothers of infants were not supposed to be shot.

John rarely visited the child. It was up to Molly to keep an eye on her welfare, going twice a week to check up on her. Saying that her father was thinking of her. Giving excuses for him because he had left her there far longer than he should have. She told the Browns last night that he would come by soon. The lies became less convincing every time she said them.

It was while she was visiting Rosie at the Browns that the inventory had been begun. She had left work early to go to their flat and so she hadn't heard about it until she came into work the next morning. Now she was suspended, and the only man who had shown an interest in her in months seemed to have chucked her over for a younger and prettier woman.

She should have expected it. Birthdays had always gone wrong for her, and today she was thirty. She turned away, and left the building.

As she sat in the tube station watching a mother quiet her wailing baby, she realized what little chance she now had to have her own child. She was getting old. She had thrown away a perfectly good engagement because she couldn't get over what Tom had called her 'hopeless crush for a man indifferent to her'. His words still hurt.

When she staggered into her flat, tired and depressed, she was met with another shock. A crowd of residents were gathered around the mailboxes. It was unusual to see so many people in the lobby at one time. She stepped forward and read the message that was posted on the wall. A sheet next to the mailboxes announced that her block of flats were to be closed. The property had been sold, and this building was to be knocked down to make a bank building. All residents were required to vacate within two months!

The others around her wondered how they could find a new flat in central London especially at this time of year. Molly picked up her mail and rode up to her flat sure that after this, things could only get better. She was wrong.

At first she thought that Sherlock Holmes had remembered her birthday, but he was only a few words into the conversation before she realized that the phone call was simply a massive joke. Sherlock Holmes had asked her to say the words, "I love you."

This wasn't the first time that Sherlock had made a mockery of her feelings. She would never forget the Christmas party where he embarrassed her in front of everyone, and the time with her boyfriend, Jim, although that went wrong for completely different reasons.

She could hear the tell-tale humm that suggested that she was on speaker phone. This was a dare. Someone must have told Sherlock that no one could love him, and he had called her up to prove them wrong. She couldn't stand it now, not with everything else. Let him be embarrassed for once.

"You first," she told him.

She almost hung up, but then he said it..."I love you."

He said it, and odd as it was, she actually believed that he meant it.

Whether it was just as a friend or romantically. It didn't matter. She had never thought to hear those words from him at all.

"I love you," she said and hung up the phone.

The words echoed in her head all night. When she woke the next morning, she wondered if it was a dream. Then she remembered that she was losing her flat, she wasn't wanted at work, and she had nowhere else to go. Well, maybe she had a place to go. She went to Baker Street, but when she got to Sherlock's flat, all that she saw was a burnt out shell.