He didn't know what it was about her. She was beautiful, yes, but he'd seen beautiful women before. None of them had ever made him feel this way, not even his own beautiful wife.

He supposed it came down to what Roy had said the night they were introduced. "You'll like her. She's something else." She was.

And he did.

At first, Cole was able to pretend that he just liked coming to the Blue Room. It was nice, having a place he could go to get a drink after a long day at work. He would never have admitted it to anyone, least of all Rusty, but the day he saw Celine Henry's corpse, curses scrawled across her naked body in blood red; the afternoon that they found Antonia Maldonado with a bloody channel across her throat; that night that they found Claudia Dominguez in her own home, a kitchen knife lodged in her heart and three other stab wounds in her chest-those days, Cole found that a glass of Scotch helped him sleep at night. And Cole had no doubt that he was treated well at the club. Alphonse and the others may have feared Roy's power, but they understood and reciprocated Cole's respect.

But eventually, he couldn't deny that he came to the Blue Room more often than he craved a drink. He couldn't ignore the fact that he tended to reward himself for a long day's work on the nights that he knew Elsa was performing.

He never acted on his feelings, though. If he didn't do anything, Cole kept telling himself, it was alright. So even though he went to see her perform so often that he started learning her lyrics without really trying, he never spoke to her. He just watched from his table as she swayed back and forth, filling the room with her voice.

The first time he ever said a word to her, it was during an interrogation. It may not have been as formal as it would have been had the conversation taken place at Hollywood station, but they both knew that it was serious. Cole also knew that Elsa recognized him from the audience, although she didn't mention it. He tried to treat it like any other interrogation, but the things she said struck a chord in him. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was more they had to say to each other.

Cole sat behind the wheel of his car for hours after he asked Roy for more time. He spent the wait with his thoughts chasing each other in circles; he couldn't pin down what it was he actually wanted to do. He thought about going back into the Blue Room to try to talk to Elsa again, this time without Roy and the case weighing him down, but he found himself glued to his seat.

When Elsa walked out to the taxi, he turned the key in the ignition without even considering what it was he was doing. He didn't know why he was following her. He didn't know why he kept making the same turns that her cab did when this was obviously a terrible idea. He didn't know what he was going to do when they got to Elsa's home. He just knew that he was keeping an eye on her, waiting to see which street they'd be going down next.

The hallway was his last chance to turn back without her ever knowing he'd been there. For a second, Cole thought he was going to do it-he'd just turn around and be gone. No one would be any the wiser.

And then his fist tapped the door. She answered quickly, as if she'd been waiting for him. Maybe she had been.

He never planned for it to happen. One moment they were just talking, and the next, he was kissing her across the table. And then the lights were off, and so were their clothes.

He never once thought it was a mistake.

When it all came crashing down around him-the suspension, the lawsuit, the separation from his family-he didn't mind it as much as he should have. He'd lost everything he had been working toward since he got back from the war, but Elsa helped him to realize that that wasn't all he had in his life. He had her. He had hope. He had a chance at actually being happy.

For once, no matter how much his head told him that this was wrong, he was doing something that felt right, that made him feel good.

Elsa didn't love him for the hero he was supposed to be, the hero that everyone else knew him as. To her, he wasn't the Silver Star-winning golden boy of the LAPD. He was just a man who fought for justice, who could see good in everyone but himself, who genuinely deserved to be happy no matter how little he believed it.

He was just Cole.

Things were definitely different after Elsa. Cole was happy when he was with her, but there was almost no one who treated him the same way as they did before the news broke. He knew by then that glory wasn't everything-Elsa wouldn't let him forget that-but he did miss it at times. It was difficult to separate himself from the thing which had been his goal for years.

But he had bigger things to worry about. Corruption ruled L.A., and he wanted to change that. And then there was the stolen morphine, still turning up all over the city-still being plunged into Elsa's arm. That was something in particular he wanted to fight. He had spent enough time with her to know that she was much stronger than she sometimes let herself believe. He knew that she could beat the addiction, and with his encouragement, she started to believe it too.

Cole found himself running through conversations in his head whenever he wasn't thinking about anything in particular. That he tended to dwell on the past was something he'd realized years ago, so he didn't really pay it any mind. He neither stopped himself nor actively initiated the memories; he just let them come. Sometimes he would think about Marie and the girls; other times it was Elsa; still others, he saw the faces of men who he needed to bring to justice.

One specific exchange kept coming up. After he and Roy had seen the aftermath of one woman's actions destroying the lives of four men, they had spoken about it. Cole had even said that life has a way of making you pay for your pride, a price that he was certainly paying now.

And, as it turned out, he would throw it all away for a woman.

After all, who knew? Maybe it would turn out that he had thrown it all away for love.