Even when he was back on real ground, Gus seemed distracted, moody, and distant. Shawn tried to ask him if something was wrong, but Gus insisted everything was fine. Then he went back to being a grump.

This was not the Gus Shawn had known for so many years. Yes, he’d always had a tendency toward the judgmental and there was frequently an undercurrent of unnecessary seriousness running through him, but Shawn had never seen him in such a mood for longer than a day or so. Something was wrong.

Then it got worse. For the first time in as long as Shawn had known him, Gus started to become unreliable. He’d come into the office an hour late, claiming that his alarm hadn’t gone off or that he’d been stuck in traffic. And once he got there he’d disappear for hours at a time. When he came back he’d give only the vaguest of excuses, claiming that there was some kind of problem at the pharmaceuticals company where he still maintained a second job as a sales rep.

This behavior presented Shawn with two immediate problems. The first was obvious-a small firm like Psych couldn’t afford to have two partners who were both unreliable, and this had been Shawn’s role since the firm’s founding. It was a position he prized, and he didn’t plan to give it up just because Gus was in a bad mood.

But the second problem was much more serious. Shawn recognized all the excuses Gus was giving him because Shawn had used them himself, over and over again. So he knew these were not only lies, but lazy lies. They were the lies of someone who doesn’t care if anyone believes them. They were the lies of a man who’d moved on.

Shawn had spent a lot of time trying to figure out why Gus might not want to be part of Psych anymore, but he couldn’t come up with a single reason. They did what they wanted when they wanted, took only the cases that sounded like fun, and managed to avoid almost all sense of adult responsibility. Who could ever find fault with that? Who could ever want anything else?