"Professor, something's wrong. Janine's gone." The urgent voice on the phone was Kylie's. She was usually a good judge of people and situations, but what she was saying now wasn't making a lot of sense.

"Gone? Or not there?" It was three-thirty; too early for her to have left for the day. If she'd gone out on an errand, she would have let Kylie know.

"Gone. She was here when I got here. I went upstairs for a while and heard the door. When I came back down her keys were on the desk and she was gone."

His first reflexive thought was that she'd been kidnapped by someone or something wanting revenge... but that didn't explain the keys.

"She didn't seem very happy when I got here. This doesn't feel right."

Janine didn't often seem happy anymore. The Janine who had walked into his classroom a few months ago was not the Janine he'd known from the Ghostbusters' heyday. She had lost her vivacity and energy. Now she dressed much more conservatively and seemed to have kept the quick tongue but replaced her former good cheer with bitterness. He found the change a little uncomfortable, but it hardly seemed his place to comment on it. She'd likely only bite his head off if he did anyway. Her attitude toward him had seemed to become cooler as the months passed. He found this unsettling as well.

There was no answer on the phone at Janine's apartment. On a hunch he walked the few blocks to a small park near the river; Janine had sometimes spent her lunch hours there when the weather was good.

She was sitting on a bench watching the sun set. He hesitated a few feet away; she spoke to him anyway without turning her head.

"I can't do this anymore, Egon." Her tone was flat and matter-of-fact. A cold, twisting sickness began to form in the pit of his stomach.

"Do what?" he asked warily, sitting on the far end of her bench.

"Coming back was the biggest mistake I ever made. I don't know what I was thinking. There are some things that just won't ever change."

He wished he didn't know what she meant. "You disappeared after we closed the doors," he ventured.

"I didn't go anywhere, Egon. I still live in the same apartment. I still have the same phone number. Once the company was gone--I guess I got tired of chasing. I wanted to know what would happen if I stopped." Several seconds of uncomfortable silence. "I found out."

He wanted to protest, but there was nothing he could say. Once the dissolution was final, the partners scattered to the four winds, it had seemed too late to try to attempt to renew contact. He had almost made the call on a few late, sleepless nights, but he had been too afraid of what he might find. What if she really had moved on?

Peter, with his silver tongue, could have talked her out of this; or Ray, with his irresistible likability, or Winston with his solid common sense. But they weren't here and Egon was left on his own to watch something he had no way of stopping.

"You told me twice that you loved me." Her head was tilted back slightly to look at the sky, and her tone was almost conversational. "Both times it was to save me from the clutches of something. But once the bad guy had been defeated... everything went back to the way it had always been." She paused. "I should have been somebody's mom by now, not playing den mother to the only college kids crazy enough to take Professor Spengler's class." She sighed. "Sometimes it felt like we were so close, but 'close' just isn't enough anymore. I'm sorry." She rose, still without looking at him--was she afraid of what was on his face, or hers?--and walked back toward the firehouse and the nearest subway stop.

He had very effectively bound himself to the firehouse and the containment unit, probably for the rest of his life. There was no guarantee that any of his students would actually choose ghostbusting as a life and a career. With him as a cautionary tale, it seemed even less likely.

Maybe he could find a way to dispel the ghosts and free himself... but to what end? He had nothing else anymore. He would lose his only remaining purpose in life.

He wondered if Slimer would linger on in the firehouse after the humans were gone. Maybe he'd go back to the Sedgewick. Maybe he too would lose his purpose and just fade away.

Maybe he himself would linger on in the firehouse after death like he did in life. It would be an extraordinary opportunity, to see it all from the other side. Maybe he could continue his research.

He'd still be alone.

"Close isn't enough, Egon. Not anymore."

He thought of one of the few colloquial expressions his father had ever used. "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades." He'd directed it at his son whenever he'd told his father of how close he was to a breakthrough or an understanding in his coursework or personal research. "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, Egon." He'd come to hate that phrase.

He didn't like it any better now.