A/N: This is part of my endless series, "Private Lives." A brief summary is below and all of the fics can be found on Archive of Our Own (I have the same username there.)

Mike Logan and Elizabeth Olivet were in a relationship from 1991 until 1995.
When Ben Stone left the District Attorney's office, he began writing legal thrillers and moved to Paris for a time before moving back to New York in 1996.
In 1996, after Claire Kincaid's death, Ben and Liz began a relationship. They married in 1997.
Liz had one daughter, Caroline, in 1999. Her father was Mike Logan although Liz was married to Ben at the time.
Liz and Ben divorced in 2007.
Liz and Mike got back together in 2008 and were married in 2009.

Complicated and soap-opera-y, I know! Enjoy!

He watches her get dressed-black wool dress nipped in at the waist, knee-length skirt; little cropped black and grey tweed jacket; pearl earrings; pearl necklace; black heels. She applies her makeup carefully, nothing more than she'd wear to the office, brushes her chin-length hair, then spritzes her perfume and walks through it. Finally she turns back to him.

'Are you sure you aren't going to come?'

He raises an eyebrow and looks at her. 'He hated me.'

'He didn't hate you,' she says again, for what must be the dozenth time.

'Lizzie,' he says, and she stops fiddling with her necklace and looks at him. 'We had an affair. We had a child together. You left him and then we got married. If I was him, I'd hate me too.'

'He didn't know about that,' she reminds him. 'Well, not until just before…'

He shakes his head. 'He must have, deep down. He wouldn't have asked you, otherwise. But he hated me anyway, even without knowin' all that. I really can't show up there, Lizzie.'

She sighs and leans back against her vanity. 'I understand. I just… I wish you were coming. For support.'

'Caroline's gonna be there,' he says. 'And Lucas. And your stepson, presumably. And McCoy, and Shambala, and…'

'I know, I know,' she says, holding up a hand to stop him from continuing. 'All right.'

Caroline knocks at their open bedroom door. She barely looks at him, just a little flicker of a glance to see if he's coming or not. Her attention focuses on Liz.

'Mom, are you ready?'

'I'll be right there,' she says, and Caroline nods and leaves the room.

He says, before she can say anything, 'It's better that I don't go.'

She is disappointed, he can tell. 'All right. We'll see you later today.'

'Okay,' he says, and she nods before beginning to leave the room. 'I love you,' he adds, quickly, and she pauses in the doorway.

'I love you too,' she says, looking at him over her shoulder. He smiles at her, trying to cheer her up, but she turns away.

He can't settle down to his day. He tries to go for a run, but it's fucking freezing and he can't get into the rhythm of it, so he and Sadie walk a couple blocks instead and then head back inside. He feeds her and she goes to take a nap and he goes to see if the game is on, any game, but nothing keeps his attention there either. He doesn't have any work to do, he doesn't want to read, he doesn't want to do anything. He definitely doesn't want to think about Ben Stone, but he can't seem to help it.

Before Liz-or actually, before Stone got together with Liz-he hadn't minded Stone. Hell, they'd worked well together, he always knew where he stood with him, he tried his damndest to put perps behind bars. Yeah, he was a bit of a stickler, but at least he got the job done, at least he was easier to deal with than McCoy.

And then she married him.

He knew that Stone had a thing for her-it was obvious. The way he looked at her, the way he sought to spend time with her away from the office… he thought she was beautiful. He loved her. He didn't blame Stone for that, because she was beautiful, is beautiful, and as for Stone loving her… she is an easy person to love. That's why he fell head over heels for her.

So that day, when he and Liz met at Bemelmans and she told him she was going to marry Stone… he was stunned. Furious. Angry, but mostly angry at her. That she let him win her over. That she didn't come back to him. And then even when she was pregnant with Caroline, she didn't tell Stone, she didn't leave him until much later… and the way Stone treated Caroline… he hates that son-of-a-bitch, even though he hasn't treated Caroline well either…

No, what he hates about Stone is that he was with Liz. He was married to her for almost a decade; he was her husband; he slept in her bed. She had sex with him not once but for years and years.

He won, but the thought of Stone with her, kissing her, his hands on her… it sickens him. It disgusts him. Any time he sees Stone-saw Stone-any time they interacted, he wanted to punch him, kill him, even, for once being married to her.

Stone was a better husband for Lizzie than he is, he knows. He's always known it. If you took away how Stone was as a father to Caroline, he knows that if you could just remove that from the equation, Lizzie never would have left him. What she said to him once… Stone was her friend. Stone loved her. If Stone had wanted more children, if he had been a halfway decent father to Caroline, he knows that she would have been happy with him.

Sometimes he wonders, after all the shit he put her through, after the cruel streak he discovered in himself that came out only with her, after what he said to their daughter, after the things he said to her, why the hell she took him back, why she gave him yet another chance, why she married him. Why she gave him another chance this fall, when he got angry and left and kissed someone else. Why she's still giving him all these chances no matter how much he's hurt her.

She is a strong woman. She doesn't need him. But she loves him and apparently that's enough for her to still want him after everything.

He sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and gets up from the couch. He hates the distance between the two of them. It's been almost five months now and he feels like a stranger to her and to himself. It's killing him. He doesn't know what to do or say; he doesn't know how to talk to her; he doesn't know how to share their bed with her. He ends up, most nights, crashing on the couch in his office. They've barely even had sex since he came back and that was always the thing that worked for them, that was always the way they could connect, and now…

He finds himself walking over to the bookcase that houses her photo albums. She has one for each year up until 1999, when suddenly there are several for each year. Each album has the year embossed in gold at the base of the spine. Looking at these, he sees that the albums for 1996, 1997, and 1998 are missing.

He bends down and opens the cabinet that makes up the base of the bookshelf, and here they are, stacked neatly in the darkness. He pulls them out. He's particularly interested in 1997, when she got married, but when he looks at the stack he sees there are four albums there. There is one that says "Wedding" and that's the one he wants. He sets the other ones aside, brings the wedding album to the sofa, and begins to look through it.

It starts with an invitation to their engagement party. The invitation is on heavy cardstock with blue script and blue edges and reads

Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Pratt Olivet
request the pleasure of your presence
to celebrate the engagement of their daughter
Elizabeth Griswold
to
Mr. Benjamin Lynch Stone, Esquire
on Saturday afternoon, January eighteenth,
at five o'clock

The Metropolitan Club
One East Sixtieth Street

Black tie

'Black tie,' he says to Sadie, who is on the couch next to him. 'Fancy fancy.'

She thumps her tail in agreement and he turns the page. There are three cuttings here, all announcing the engagement, and he skims one and then looks at the next page. It's photographs from this engagement party, apparently-his wife looking stunning in a long pale blue floaty gown, with a sapphire necklace and matching earrings, standing next to Stone, looking in awe of her and proud and so, so happy.

He barely glances at the rest of the pictures, uninterested in any but the ones with Liz. Then he gets to the invitation for the rehearsal dinner, which is the same style as the engagement announcement.

Mrs. Helen Lynch Stone
invites you to a rehearsal dinner in honor of
Elizabeth Griswold Olivet and Benjamin Lynch Stone
Friday, May Second
at 6 o'clock in the evening
The University Club
One West Fifty-fourth Street
New York City

And then there's the wedding invitation, same sort of thing as the others, then the wedding photos.

She was, and is, a beautiful woman. She always has been and he knows that she always will be. He has seen her at almost every possible moment-sick, injured, devastated, depressed, sad, asleep, awake, happy, elated, ecstatic, thrilled, content. He has seen her after the most devastating events of her life and he has seen her at the most joyous too. At every moment she has been beautiful.

He's never seen her like this, the way she is in these pictures. It's not that she's looking at Stone with love, or at least she's not looking at Stone with more love that she's given to him. It's not that she's so young in these pictures, with so much of her life still ahead of her. Christ, in 1997 he hardly thought of them as young but now, twenty years later… they were so young. She was thirty-four years old when she got married to Stone and when they finally got married she was forty-eight.

God, he fucked up, he thinks, looking at these pictures, flipping through the album until he stops at one. It literally takes his breath away.

The photograph was obviously meant to be a posed portrait, because she is standing in front of a wall beautifully painted with flowers and birds. It's shot from the waist up and he can see the elegant lines of her shoulders in the white silk dress, her auburn hair held back in a French twist, the intricate lace veil, falling down from her hair past her waist, the pearl earrings. She is laughing, just looking away from the camera at whoever is making her laugh. And she is stunning, she is gorgeous, but this is the moment when she's supposed to be laughing with him, laughing because she is so ecstatic they are married.

Instead this is a moment he never was a part of, this was a moment he never knew existed until right now, almost twenty years later.

They've had many moments as happy or happier than this one, but right now, for some reason, he can't seem to recall any of them. Right now it seems that the only moment that matters is this one, the one that didn't involve him at all.