"You okay?"

"Why'd you keep asking me that?" prickled Olivia, sipping at her long since cold coffee and heaving a sigh. "I'm fine."

"Okay."

"I'm sorry…" she winced, knowing just how unfair she was being on him.

The dogged resilience that had once made Ed Tucker her nemesis, now kept him coming back to her breakfast table where any other man, any sensible man, would long since have walked away. Standing tall, hands braced at his hips, his crisp white polo shirt and clean blue jeans the epitome of everything she needed. He was good for her, so very good. He had returned the kind of emotional equilibrium to her life that she had thought lost forever.

"What's going on with you Olivia?"

"I'm going to take a day. I've already called in. I just need to take Noah somewhere and….." it wasn't an answer, worse than that it only provoked more questions in his mind, "… is that okay? Do you mind?"

"You don't want me along?"

"It's not that, I…." she was lying. She didn't want him there. Being around him only compounded the heaviness, the pressing weight compressing her brain and the hammering thundering in her ears.

"Promise me that you'll talk to someone, whatever 'this' is…." lifting his hand he gestured a round motioning in her direction, "… even if it isn't me?"

"That's cold."

"Huh!" he scoffed. She was impossible.

He was throwing everything he had at this, he had been for months. He wanted to be the rock; he wanted her to lean on him, to let him fix the brokenness he could see in her eyes. The strongest woman he had ever met, that exquisite doll he had secretly desired for years, bore cracks and imperfections that terrified him at close range. Olivia Benson terrified him and he was painfully aware that he had barely scratched the surface of her.

"I'm sorry Ed, truly I am. I'm fine, I just had a bad week and work and then a guy I used to know showed up and caught me a little off balance but I swear one day out with Noah and everything will be…."

"A guy you used to know?" he was jealous, painfully so, but he wasn't even sure quite why. She talked so calmly, flippant almost, but if this was the root of the change in her than it was so much more than that. She was coming undone at the seams and he was watching, helpless, feeling so impotent in the face of exquisite complexity and stubborn unwillingness to let anyone in.

"You have got to stop trying to fix me Ed."

"Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"You're a good man…." she tried desperately not to sound patronising but it was futile. Even before, even before the past had become present again it hadn't been right.

She had tried so hard to convince herself that comfort, support, a solid shoulder, a warm pair of arms to run into was all that mattered. In her quietest moments at 4am, in the screaming intensity of Manhattan in rush hour, she fought desperately to stop herself wondering whether this was what it felt like to know a father's love.

"You should definitely take your day with Noah, it'll do you good. Fresh air, a break…." he nodded slowly, flashing a smile, "… then we can regroup."

"Okay."

"Olivia?" he asked, as she gathered up Noah's essentials day bag.

"Yeah?" she asked brightly, flashing a tired smile. She hadn't slept in days and he had to ask. He needed to know. It wasn't just a bad week, something had set these footsteps of fate in motion and there was a strange sense of the inevitable in the air.

"Can I ask? Dare I ask?" he shrugged, and she braced herself against the couch for what was coming. Laying a steadying hand against it she shrugged, feigning nonchalance, as he stepped off the cliff edge, "Only I went for a drink with an old buddy from IAB last night who said he'd an interesting meeting."

"Really?" perhaps she already knew where this was going. Worse, perhaps, she didn't much care.

"An ex-cop wanting to exorcize some demons, lay some ghosts to rest…."

"Did you want to ask me a question?" she didn't like games. He knew and he was testing her, and deploying his old tactics in this intimate setting left a nasty taste in her mouth. Narrowing her eyes she added tartly, "You clearly want to get something off your chest."

"The guy you used to know?"

"You've known this whole time."

"No, no I didn't figure it out until just now. I hadn't realised you knew he was back in town until you said what you just did, let alone…"

"Leave it alone Ed, please."

"I know what he was to you Olivia. I know what happened when Elliot Stabler left SVU and I know…"

"You don't know anything."

Neither did she, she realised with a sudden agony twisting at her gut. No one knew. Not one single person knew what happened when Elliot Stabler had left SVU and that was what hurt the most. It hurt, it hurt so much that even then all those years arguing in the middle of her living room with Ed Tucker it consumed her. It wasn't over, it wasn't a closed book; it wasn't even a finished chapter.

"Olivia? Liv? Hey?"

"I'm sorry, really. I didn't mean to keep anything from you it's just all….."

"He was your partner."

"Yeah, yeah he was my partner…." biting down so hard on her cheek she tasted a copper she just stared at him, not even knowing what else to say, or even if she could manage to find words.

Instead she invited him to join her at the park with Noah, something small, something easy and normal, a part of their routine. Ed stood guard at the bottom of the slide as Noah climbed the stairs, slid down, climbed the stairs, and repeated without tiring. As she watched her little boy play, carefree, oblivious to all the women she was Olivia inhaled deeply and nodded to herself. Reaching into her coat pocket she unfolded the battered telephone number and tapped out a short text message, "Café Barcomi, 7pm tomorrow – Liv x". Then, with a flutter in her stomach, she removed the 'x' and hit send.


"I've never been here before."

"No, no you wouldn't it's new…." prickled Olivia, wrapping her hands around her coffee mug and adding, "… only opened last year."

"I get that you want to punish me."

"What?" she wasn't very good at this, and she knew it.

She didn't like being this cold around him anymore than he did but it was all she knew now. There was a layer of ice so thick around her heart, built up over time, slowly encasing all the hurt and betrayal and pain and loss. There was a part of her that wanted desperately to let the way he was looking at her across the table sear through it, melt away the barricades, split a blueberry muffin and remark on the international weather report the way they used to. It's warm in Sydney, Baltic in Berlin. Did you read about that woman breeding snakes in the Bronx? Animal welfare confiscated over 400 of them yesterday.

"Liv?"

"Sorry….." shaking herself back into the present she flashed an unusually coy smile, "… miles away."

"Where?" he asked softly, taking a sip from his cup and smiling that lopsided half smile that would've made her want to weep if she wasn't so angry.

"I hate this, El."

"Talk to me."

"I don't know what to say."

"I know you're still mad and that's okay but…"

"No, no it's not just that. I mean….." taking a moment, the words catching in her throat, she shrugged, "… I literally don't know what to say to you. I don't know where to start. I don't know if I even want to."

"I get that."

He was different, softer somehow, as though the rough edges had been rounded off and despite everything she felt comforted by it. He had lost his anger, just as she had found hers.

"I never thought that would happen to us. I used to know everything about you, more than I wanted to sometimes. I don't just mean what you had for breakfast or that you'd switched deodorant…." blinking away tears she was too stubborn to cry Olivia sighed sadly, "… I never thought I'd see the stranger in your eyes Elliot."

"I'm sorry….." he repeated, prepared to say it over and over again for the rest of his life if that's what it took, "… will you at least try to hear that? To feel it?"

"I needed you."

This time it was his turn to be lost for words. He knew a little of what had happened with William Lewis. He had not been entirely disconnected from the force over the years and a case of that nature, that level of trauma experienced by a cop as well thought of as Lieutenant Benson, did not escape public discourse.

"I needed you too."

"I was right there! I'm not the one that left!" she whispered with a muted hiss, her eyes ablaze with reignited fury. "How could you just disappear? Why didn't you talk to me?"

"I wanted to."

"How do you just walk away like that and not even look back Elliot? You just left. You left me. You didn't even say goodbye….." by God she still loved him, and it took her breath away how much. She wanted to throw the table at him. She wanted to throw the table away and hold him, tight, and never let go.

"And for that I will never forgive myself. I wasted years. I did. But so did you."

"What?"

"I needed you too, Liv. I was right there too. Same house in Queens, same cell number."

"I…." feeling a wash of sudden, unbearable regret Olivia set her coffee cup down a little harder than intended.

"You didn't call either."