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Ironically enough, the news about Maggie reaches Don through Jim, and if that doesn’t adequately sum up how deeply entrenched the guy was in Don’s relationship, then nothing will.
He looks tense, maybe a little guilty, and he stumbles over various sentences before Don interrupts.
“Use your words, Harper,” he says with no real malice, and Jim sobers.
“Maggie and Gary got back last night. I, uh … I saw her,” he explains, rubbing the back of his neck with one of his hands and shoving the other in his pocket with enough force that Don’s surprised it doesn’t tear a hole.
Don, for his part, raises an eyebrow. He’d accidentally walked in on a meeting between Mac and Will discussing what happened in Africa and he’d gotten enough to infer that while no one had died, Maggie and Gary had clearly experienced something dangerous. He ignored the lurch in his ribcage and tactfully changed the subject once Mac whipped her head around to see him standing in Will’s doorway and opened her mouth in surprise.
There was no point in feeling panicked over someone he’d had a previous (failed) relationship with. He tells himself this resolutely. Maggie’s back, she’s physically fine, and he’s pretty damn sure she wouldn’t want him around anyway.
Except that Maggie deserved better than this, even if they’d never really loved each other. She’d always seemed so guileless that Don couldn’t help but wonder if she honestly had never realized she’d hurt him when she fell for Jim.
(Granted, when he’d said it to Elliot over drinks after the program it had been a little condescending, but the statement held.)
She isn’t the girl for him, but she’s a Good Person, and he still cares about her. (More than most people would guess.)
So he gives her space. Time to process. She’s jetlagged, he tells himself, and she needs sleep. Which reminds him that she has no place to live, which turns his stomach out of guilt.
(It’s not his fault, he reasons. She agreed to move in even when she had feelings for someone else.
It doesn’t silence the voice in the back of his head.)
He finally sees her a few days later during Mac’s routine meeting over what the program will cover. She’s silent, meeting everyone’s eyes in an odd display of defiance and giving quick strained smiles at the ones who catch her gaze. Something is very clearly not right. Throughout the debriefing, he studies her from the corner of his eye. His normal pithy comments are absent as he’s too busy attempting to decipher the change in the girl he used to pretend he could spend the rest of his life with. There’s no silly asides, no nervous little movements that she usually makes when she’s trying to articulate her admittedly scattered thoughts. She’s not the girl who left here a few weeks ago. There’s a haunted look in her eyes similar to the one in Elliot’s after Syria.
Don hovers in the conference room at the end of the meeting and gently reaches out to lay a hand on Maggie’s shoulder. She jumps and takes a few ragged breaths when she realizes it’s only Don. No matter how many protein bars he eats, he could barely hurt a fly.
“You’re not okay,” he says bluntly, although there’s compassion in his tone. “And I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
His words hang heavy in the air surrounding them and Maggie bites back the automatic reply of I’m fine that he knows she’s been using all day. She rocks back on her heels and Don assumes that’ll be the extent of their conversation because he can’t imagine she has anything else she wants to say to him, but suddenly she lurches forward and wraps her arms around him. They stand together in the conference room for a few moments, with no sound but deep breathing. There are no tears, there are no apologies, but he returns her hug and lets her silence speak for itself.