So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. - Henry Longfellow

The house is calm and quiet as he walks in and shuts the door, and it feels both no time at all and years since he left to face a tortuous hell. He keeps getting flashes even as he tries to focus on the present, of Olivia's face, and Hartman's, and the pain of his loss then and now. There is still the numbness, the familiarity of his five years of grief and uncertainty, but also the burning sting of a scab ripped off and acid poured in. Time is twisting within him, and he wonders how it can be so long since she went missing, but so recently that he walked out to try and discover her fate.

He leans on the back of the front door, hearing long known creaks and groans as Kathy walks towards him, the floor charting her progress. She says nothing when she reaches him, simply resting a hand on his shoulder until he looks her in the eye and and sees nothing but sorrow and love within them. He has no words or explanation for her and she knows it.

"Come and have some breakfast. Or coffee," she adds, as his face screws up like a child's at the thought of food, "Eli wouldn't eat his until you came home." They walk into the kitchen, Kathy leading him in, and Elliot finds not only Eli but Maureen sitting at the table as well. He wonders how it can be only a day ago that he watched them play in the backyard, how free they were then. How sad she looks now.

"Hi Dad," she says, and stands, giving him a hug he hardly feels within his exhaustion. When he stays silent, not even lifting his hands to return her comfort, she sits back down and flicks another page of the magazine in front of her, movements relaxed, unforced.

"Why?" Elliot is just about able to ask, gesturing at Eli who is also sitting at the table, winding up a toy car and causing it to crash into various things scattered across the surface. He knows his youngest son should be in school, but Kathy intervenes before he can even speak.

"He was pretty unsettled last night so I let him stay off today. He was tired."

Tired, he thinks. He knows what that feels. Weary to his bones, the ache for a relief that will not come, even in the losing of himself to darkness. He's surprised to find he has shut his eyes at the word, and it feels comfortable. Easy. Too easy. He opens them again, and nothing has changed, not even the look of his wife and the sound of his children. "I'm pretty tired myself."

"Of course," Kathy gives the smile of grief that is so familiar but doesn't move towards him, seeming to recognise that he wants no more pointless gestures. He thinks for a second that perhaps she finally knows him after all these years, that it has taken his destruction for her to be able to get through. Perhaps only now he is letting her through. It is Maureen that moves at his words, standing up and coming onto tiptoe beside him to kiss his forehead like a small child. He turns away. He cannot bear to see her sorrow.

Eli is busy still, busy being a small boy, and Elliot doesn't break the spell as he walks past, just ruffling his hair instead. That is enough. The stairs sigh as he walks up them to a quiet salvation that might come today, sleeping in the light while the rest of the world lives. It's easy to hope for as he slips his shoes off and lies down without undressing further. He closes his eyes and listens to his heartbeat slow, his mind shutting down, either despite him or because of him. He doesn't want to sleep, to let go and yet he needs to so much he does not dare fight it. The last image he sees is hers, smiling back at him.

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
-Steward Alsop

"El......El."

He is woken by the sound of a voice, and for a second his dreams and reality mix. It is her speaking his name and his heart leaps in confusion. It comes again and he sinks when he realises he is wrong, and Kathy is shaking his shoulder. Rolling over, blinking slightly at the afternoon light, he is about to ask her why she has woken him when he feels his sticky eyes and wet cheeks, tears stained down them in sleep. He wipes an arm across with one brusque moment, before hauling himself up to sit, and his body aches.

"It was bad then." Her comment is a statement, not a question and he wants to get angry at her for voicing the obvious, before recognising her attempt at....at what? Comfort? There will be no comfort today, with uncertainty regaining control over his life. Solace? Perhaps. Perhaps she simply wants to know. He forgets too often that she cares too.

"Yeah, you could say that," he says, swinging his legs off the bed and testing them out, strangely proud that they hold him, "I'm going to grab a shower." He knows she deserves more than that, but with the salt still resting on his skin, he has no words.

The water washes the dried tears off his face but does nothing more, either to wake him from the numbness that has settled since walking in through the door, or to making him feel different. Better. Stronger He is coated in grief, his skin has been stripped from him and replaced with a shroud of ache and pain and bitter agony that cracks and tears as he dares to breathe. He pauses for a minute in front of the steamed bathroom mirror but cannot bear to sweep away the condensation and see himself. He's scared of how broken he will be, how little life remains within his eyes.

Stepping out just wrapped in a towel, he isn't surprised to see Kathy still sitting on the bed, picking at threads on the cover. He doesn't say anything but dresses in old, worn clothes that fit him as if nothing has changed, then sits down beside her with a sigh. They don't speak for lingering heartbeats, until the sun has moved slightly across the room and she rests a hand on his leg. "What happened?"

He stumbles over his words, and it takes him a few breaths and starts to be able to get the words out, and when he does his voice sounds foreign, broken, "It was the man. The suspect they found, he confessed to the rapes that we had the DNA on," he takes a deep gasp before continuing, "they couldn't get him for Olivia though," and as he says her name he cracks. Failure floods him, suffocating his thoughts and his brain at the knowledge that there was still no justice found.

Head hanging, he can see Kathy squeeze his leg but feels nothing. "He'll go to arraignment today. But it's over...." and a sob creeps from his throat, "it's over." But it isn't over, how can it be, its spinning and never-ending and blurred in its dizzying force. It's choking him, smothering him and something with that much force can't just end. Distantly, he hears an echo of the cries of grief he had expelled hours ago, when the wave hit, and he knows that he is crying again, exhausted but so full of pain he cannot hold it in.

Kathy's arms grip him and he falls, leaning into her and depending on her in a way he never has before, and she is the smell of years together, of children and home and companionship. It soothes, as rocking and a blanket soothe a baby, and his cries subside. He knows that this is the first time he has shown his grief to her, shown something of the extent of his agony in losing Olivia, but he doesn't care. He's past that.

There is a quiet hum that falls around them as he calms. It's the future settling, diluted loss and desperate longing and familiar, nagging questions with no answers. Kathy knows as well, her sigh shows she does, but it isn't a sigh of despair, just of resignation.

The sound of a phone breaks the silence, and she gives him one last touch of comfort before she reaches for it, and he steels himself for the rest of his life, for his son waiting downstairs, for the hours and days and years that he already knows. But then Kathy is handing him the phone, and it is her voice that sounds wrong as she says, "It's Don. He says it's important."

He notices his hand is shaking as he reaches for the phone and he wonders why. Nothing can devastate him more than today, nothing can hurt more than trying to ease himself back into a life without her, a life of watching and waiting and bitter, slim hope. But when he says "hello" with a question in the word, he sounds almost normal, whatever that is.

"I've got bad news," Don is worryingly calm, but Elliot can do nothing but wonder what news can have occurred that would be considered bad in the grand scheme of the last hours, "Hartman skipped bail."

That news then.

"What?" He heard but he needs it repeated, needs the time to dissolve the information, and he doesn't concentrate as Don says it again. "How? How did he get bail in the first place?"

"He had a good lawyer, paid for by his grandmother. The judge set bail at $500,000. No one thought he'd make it."

"And now he's gone?" There is disbelief in Elliot's voice but he doesn't know why he should feel that. Everything is so surreal that he should have expected it, planned it, realised that his pain should be set to continue, and the longest odds should come true.

"Yeah, the grandmother came up with it. He was supposed to be staying with her but he skipped town almost as soon as he was released. They were tailing him but he lost them."

The information should scald, should release fire within him and make him want to burn with injustice, with anger, with pain and noise and fury but it doesn't. Instead it sinks slowly, dropping until it rests quietly inside his skin. Don is quiet on the other end of the phone.

"Guess that's it then."

"They're looking for him, El. Maybe..."

Elliot cannot help but snort. Maybe what? Maybe they'll catch him again and he still won't speak. Maybe he will. Maybe he's vanished into the fog and they'll never even get a glimpse as they stumble through their lives. Maybe she's living, maybe she's dead. Maybe is a million things and nothing at all, and Don knows it.

"Thanks for calling, Don. I'll see you soon." It's a promise he strangely doesn't want to keep, though he knows Kathy will make him, and it will help. She's still there as he hears Don hang up, and takes the handset from him.

"He's gone?" She asks, already knowing the answer, but he still nods. Gone. Like her. Gone. Exhaustion hits him like a train despite his sleep, and closing his eyes feels like giving up on her all over again. He had her within his grasp, all he had to do was close his fist, but now there is nothing, she's drifted away. His chance was fleeting, and he didn't take it, and he's left clutching ghosts. A ghost.

As night falls over them, he stays within the bedroom, hearing the sounds of home and life beneath him, glimpsing real people as they come to say goodnight, and then he is staring at the ceiling and watching shadows dance, too tired to sleep, waiting for it all to end.