At the bottom of Sara's closet, right at the very back, there is a shoebox. It's not something that she takes out often, indeed, no-one but her knows that it is even there. But it is, and it contains memories, snapshots of her life.

There is a photograph of her as a baby, with her parents and her older brother. Mike is holding her, looking distinctly uncomfortable, her parents are smiling at the camera. She loves this photograph, because a happy family isn't something she has a lot of memories of. Mike was eight years older than her, and by the time she has any real memories of her childhood, he was already into the terrible - emphasis on terrible - teens, when the B&B would ring to the sound of raised voices and slamming doors.

There are certificates of merit from her high school days, awards from science fairs and suchlike, and still in its original envelope is her acceptance letter from Harvard.

There's the stub of a boarding pass for a flight from San Francisco to New York, the first time she'd ever made that flight, during her senior year in high school. Mike had been working in New York for a while then, and she'd visited him, ostensibly to check out colleges, but her big brother had shown her quite a bit of the city too. There's a photograph of them somewhere, in the Windows to the World restaurant, smiling at the waitress as she got them to say "cheese", and when Sara remembers Mike, that's how she wants him to be.

There is a business card with Grissom's name on it, worn around the edges now, given to her at a seminar, and another boarding card, San Francisco to Las Vegas, almost a year old.

There's a man's digital watch, the battery long having since died, but she keeps it still, because it's one of the few things she has that belonged to Mike when he died. It's not the one that their parents had given him for his twenty-first birthday; that had long since been sold, and she cherishes this one instead.

There are mementoes from a more recent trip to New York, when her then-supervisor forced her to take a vacation. Among them is a ticket stub for Rent, the hottest ticket in town at the time, and she still doesn't know how Tony pulled that one off. There's a matchbook too, from the Windows to the World restaurant, that she took on a whim when they were there for breakfast, and she'd told him how she'd been there with Mike so long ago.

In her hand, she holds a phone message slip that was given to her today. It has today's date, September 12th 2001, and the name of the caller, Tony Rodriguez. The message is simple; "Everyone ok here. Will call you later."

It's simple, but she smiles again with relief and puts it in the box with everything else.