It's been a while since he's seen her; between her job and her son, she doesn't have much time for anything else these days. And maybe she doesn't need him so much any more; she's come a long way from the furious, fragile state she was in when he first met her. There have been setbacks along the way - Lewis came back for her, relationships fell apart, her son was kidnapped, her brother died, her former lover killed himself, Christ, the hits just kept on coming - but she's steady, now. Or she was the last time he saw her.
This time she looks exhausted, a weariness that's bone-deep, the eloquence of the circles beneath her eyes hard to ignore. Something's been troubling her, but she's learned to face these problems when they crop up, not to ignore them, and he likes to think some credit for that is due to him, but in his heart he knows better. It's not his victory, that she learned to take her own advice. That's all down to her.
"What brings you here, Olivia?" he asks as she settles herself into the chair. So much has changed over the last seven years; she's still beautiful, now - he might be gay but he's not blind, and he knows a beautiful woman when he sees one - but she's older, and tired. Her beauty has settled into an elegance she lacked seven years ago.
"I've been having trouble sleeping."
It's as good a place as any to start.
"Just this week, or?" he prods her when she doesn't explain.
"It's been about two months, I guess."
She's not looking at him. But that's often how it starts; if she's spoiling for a fight she'll look him straight in the eyes, and if she's hiding from herself she won't look at him at all.
"What happened two months ago, Olivia?"
She does look up at him then, eyes huge and dark and terrified. Like she knows the answer and doesn't want to give it. He's seen her wear that look before; the first time he asked about her mother comes to mind. It's been a long journey, from the day to this, and they have learned to read one another - he's not fool enough to think that she hasn't been studying him while he's studying her. There's something special about Olivia, something compelling. He wouldn't be in this job if he wasn't interested in people, their stories, what makes them tick, if he didn't want to help them find their way through their problems, and all his patients are important to him but Olivia...she's something else. She's smart as a whip, and the stories she tells so casually make the hair stand up on his arms sometimes. She's strong, and brave; the face she presents to the world is fearless but she knows, as he does, that true bravery is not the absence of fear. It is being afraid and acting anyway. And Olivia, she's the bravest person he's ever met.
"I was hoping you could just give me some tips-"
She's also the most stubborn.
"Olivia, you can meditate or count sheep or cut out technology or do yoga all you want, but there's something here that's bothering you and until you address it-"
"Fine!" she snaps, suddenly angry. "Fine. Fine. It's Elliot."
For a woman on the south side of fifty, she still pouts like a teenager. She's doing it now, moody, put out with him for making her tell him the truth. It doesn't bother him. They both know that whether she wants to talk about it or not, this Elliot, whoever he is, is the real reason she's come here today.
"I don't think I've heard that name before."
It had been like pulling teeth, in the beginning, to get Olivia to talk about her personal life. They'd had four sessions before she even told him her boyfriend's name. The boyfriend she was living with, the one who was changing her bandages and taking her to doctor's appointments after Lewis. The one who swept the remnants of her hair off his bathroom floor and never said a word about it. It took a year before she was ready to tell him about her mother. He wonders what it means, that it's taken her seven years to mention Elliot.
And she seems surprised, too, looks at him strangely.
"Seriously?" she says.
"You tell me, Olivia. Do you remember ever speaking to me about him?"
"No. No, I guess not. He...he was my partner, before Nick, before I...met you. We worked together a long time. A really long time."
He lets that one land, lets the words settle. Somehow he gets the feeling that if he pressed her she could tell him down to the minute exactly how long they worked together. Nick he remembers; the young hot head who had her back, the one she had to mentor, and grew to see as a friend. It had been easy for her to talk to him about that partner; why had she never mentioned the one before him? Because he didn't matter, or because he mattered too much? Peter thinks he knows already; he's been thinking for years now that something like this was lurking out there. A locked door, one she meant to keep closed forever, even from him. One last secret she wasn't willing to give up, until now.
It doesn't surprise him that this last secret involves a man. Work has always been a safe topic of conversation, boyfriends not so much. She'd been more comfortable talking about Nick than Brian, or Ed. There've only been two men that she's told him about since Lewis. Brian, who put her back together after, and Ed, who he privately thinks was the best thing to happen to her since Noah. Both of those men, they'd known her for years. More importantly, though, both of those men had known already what Lewis did to her. She never had to explain it to them. Well, maybe to Brian, but he was a cop, and he probably heard enough from his old connections to spare her any long explanations. It means something, he's sure, that the only two men she's cared enough about to mention to him - he won't assume they're the only men she's been with, but they're the only ones with names - are men who knew her before. He knows she cared about them both, deeply, differently, but there was always a certain defensive quality to her when she talked about them. She had a habit of giving him reasons why they were good for her, even when they maybe weren't. As if she thought she was doing something wrong, seeing them, and had to justify it. He wonders if this man will make her defensive, too.
"Can you tell me about him? Elliot?" He asks.
She just looks at him, aghast. He can tell she'd rather chew her own arm off, but she's the one who booked this appointment. She doesn't want to talk about it, and yet she does. With her position at work, and her lack of support outside it, she doesn't really have anywhere else to go when she needs to get something off her chest. That's what he's here for. He leans back in his chair, and waits.
"He's... he's...he's Elliot," she starts out. She says his name like it should explain everything all by itself. Like he's a piece of her, and anyone who knows her should know him already. "When I first came to SVU, he was my first partner." When she first came to him she asked him if he'd seen her service record. He hadn't, and so she'd told him part of it herself. She's been with SVU since '98; if Elliot was her first partner, she's known the man more than twenty years. It's a hell of a long time to know someone. "He's a good man. He cares so much. I have never worked with a better cop."
She looks like she's gonna cry, stops, catches her breath. That's how it's always been with Olivia; she never cries without a fight. And she's not giving him anything else. Her Elliot is a good man. A good cop. The end. But it can't be, or else she wouldn't look so devastated right now.
"What happened two months ago, Olivia?"
This is how it goes, with him and her. He asks her leading questions until he gets to the root of the problem. She won't volunteer it on her own. Sometimes he wonders if this is what her interrogations feel like. He'd hate to be on the other side of this conversation.
"He came back."
"Came back from where?"
At that question she rises to her feet, starts to pace. Usually, she only does that when she's really agitated. Usually she sits, comfortably, and talks. When she starts to prowl back and forth like a tiger in a too-small cage, it makes him nervous, too. This is a woman who beat a man to the point of death with a metal rod; there is anger in her, and it can be explosive. He's never seen the full fury of that anger, not in person, but he knows it's there. He wonders if this will be the appointment where she shows it to him.
After a moment's pause she snaps, and the words come flooding out of her so fast he can only barely keep up.
"He came back from his fucking fairytale life in Rome and they were gonna come to that stupid award ceremony I didn't even want to go to in the first place," she's ranting, waving her hands around while she paces the perimeter of the office.
"And I'm on my way there and the radio goes off and it's a 10-13. That means officer in need of assistance. I wasn't going to answer because it's not my patch but I heard them say Stabler and I had to go and when I got there, Jesus, the car was just this horrible, burnt-out shell and they were already loading Kathy into the ambulance and they wouldn't let me talk to her. And I turned around and he was just. He was right there. Ten years later. Looking at me the same way he did the last time I saw him. Like somehow I'm supposed to make everything all right and I want to but I don't know how."
She starts crying, hard. He hasn't seen her do that for a long, long time. Olivia fights the tears, usually she blinks them away, holds her mouth tight, keeps it in, but she's full on sobbing now. From her outburst he's been able to guess a few things about the situation, that her partner has a woman in his life, that he left under strained circumstances ten years before, that the woman is either seriously injured or dead. That this man's name is Elliot Stabler, and he means something to her. The way Olivia has reacted to this...this man must mean everything to her. He can see it in her eyes, in her tears. He just has to hope she'll tell him.
"Kathy is his wife?" Peter asks, seeking clarification. Olivia nods, scrubs her tears from her cheeks with the palms of her hands. Takes a few deep breaths to try to banish the last of her weeping, and he lets her.
"What happened to Kathy?" He asks when Olivia can breathe again. He's pretty sure he knows but he wants to hear her say it.
"Ruptured spleen. Someone blew up her car and she was hurt so bad in so many places and in the end it's her fucking spleen that kills her."
Olivia sounds so, so angry about it and he can't blame her. Someone she knows was blown up (Jesus, he thinks, some days he's surprised she's still standing) and it was the smallest, most innocuous of things that killed this person. And whatever her relationship with Elliot, she appears to be taking his wife's death as some sort of personal insult. She's like that, Olivia; every injustice is personal, to her.
"We spent so much time in hospitals, him and me. Even with her. But I just think about the look on his face when I came walking down that hallway, when she was gone, and he just looked so lost. I'd never...I'd never seen him like that."
She's not giving him a lot of detail, but then she often doesn't. These sessions, she's mostly talking to herself, anyway. It's his job to let her. It's the only way she'll ever hear her own heart.
"They were together a long time?"
"They got married when they were seventeen. Had five kids. The oldest is nearly forty."
Some days it feels like no one ever comes to him with happy stories. For a second he thinks about this Elliot, this man who means so much to Olivia. This man who's just lost his wife of nearly forty years, the woman who's been with him since he was hardly more than a child. He thinks about what that would do to a man, to lose a woman he's never known a life without. Maybe Olivia isn't the only one who hasn't been sleeping.
"Must be difficult for him."
"It's not all about him!" She's almost shouting. The pacing, the tears, the agitated movement of her hands, the volume of her voice; this is Olivia close to the edge. It must be more than Kathy's death that's pushed her there, he thinks, and in the next breath she confirms that for him.
"He's totally out of control and those goddamn kids need their dad." For a moment he pales; he's never heard her swear like that before, but it rolls off her tongue natural as breathing.
"Eli had to move in with his sister for god's sake." He doesn't know what that means, but he figures it's something to do with the kids. The kids she's so worried about. It's always the kids, he thinks, because it is, with her.
"I look at him and I see me the way I was after...after." He knows what after means. After Lewis. When she was a hair's breadth from losing her own control, every minute of every day. When she was full of rage, and hurt, and guilt, and her whole world was upside down. That's not something he's ever gonna forget.
"But he won't listen. He won't talk to me. Actually that's not true. He won't stop calling me but I can't answer. I can't let him..."
She catches herself, like she's only just realized how close she is to revealing something vulnerable about herself, and how badly she doesn't want to. On the other side of the room from him she stops in her tracks and wraps her arms around herself, like something small and frightened is trying to claw its way out of her chest and she's trying to force it back down.
"Can't let him what, Olivia?"
There is a part of him that's almost morbidly curious about this now. About what happened with this man, what made him disappear for ten years and come back in time for her award ceremony, what makes him so important to her, what's hurt her so deeply. Olivia is secrets wrapped in secrets, and each new one he uncovers brings him - and in turn, her - one step closer to understanding who she is, and how she came to be that way. Understanding can bring clarity, but it can bring devastation, too. He wonders which one Olivia will find here.
"I can't let him take me over," she tells him in a low, terrible voice. "I can't let it be the way it was back then."
Take me over. He can't imagine anyone having that kind of sway over Olivia, who is so fiercely, violently, self destructively independent. Unless, he thinks. Unless she loved him.
That would be something else, if she loved him.
She loved Brian, in a way. Loved Ed, in a way. Not enough to let them stay, to change her life for them. He remembers the way she laughed when he asked her what she thought about Brian as a potential father for her child. Like it was ridiculous to even consider having a child with the man she was living with. And he remembers, too, the way she reacted when Ed suggested she retire, like the very idea of it was inconceivable, like just the thought was in some way insulting to her. Each of those men, she found reasons not to love them, and she left them behind. It would all make sense, he thinks, if all along she's been in love with someone else, someone unobtainable - and therefore safe. Safer to love a man who will never love her back, one who will not be able to break her heart because he'll never take it in the first place. It would make perfect sense, he thinks, if she's been, for years, comparing every man she meets to this one, but he's been long gone for a decade and so he hasn't been there to tarnish her memories of him. No one can hold a candle to a memory.
But then there's the way it was back then. He doesn't know what that means but he wonders if maybe he has it wrong, if that's the real reason why she's been so reluctant to let anyone else in. If she let this man, this married man, in too deep, and she never wants to risk that much of her heart again.
"Why do you think he's calling?"
He keeps calling, she's told him. That means more than once. That means she's ignoring him, and he's still trying. That means he's stubborn, just like she is. Idly Peter wonders if that's a good thing. In his experience, dogged dedication to an unwilling partner is not the sign of a well-adjusted man.
"Because he's scared. He's lost Kathy and his kids are afraid of him and he thinks he's gonna lose me, too."
"If you haven't seen him in ten years does he really have anything to lose?"
That's the part he doesn't understand. Ten years is a hell of a long time. It's longer than he's known her. Everything she's been through in the last ten years, there's no way she's the same person now she was back then. Likely Elliot isn't either. So why do they still matter so much to one another? Olivia shoots him a wounded look, as if the answer to his question is obvious, as if his confusion is unfounded.
"He told me he loved me," she says, very quietly. "and then he just walked out."
"Ten years ago?"
She shakes her head. "Two weeks ago."
No wonder she's not sleeping, he thinks. She's described her friend's behavior as reminiscent of her own PTSD, and she has expressed a remarkably personal concern for his children, and now she's revealed that he's told her he loves her, and it's only been two months since his wife died. No wonder she's not answering the phone, either. He could try to pathologize this guy but he's never met him and he feels certain he never will. But he wants to. He wants to know what sort of man could have this kind of impact on Olivia Benson. He wants to know what sort of man she could love, because looking at her now he's certain that she does, love Elliot. Love him the way she never loved Brian or Ed. Love him in a way that stays, even ten years after he left her. That sort of man, he thinks, would surely be as fascinating as she is.
"How do you feel about him, Olivia?" That's the part that matters, and it's the part she's going to want to talk about the least.
She makes a strangled sound and looks away.
"He told you that he loves you-"
"He's out of his mind. He doesn't know what he's saying. He just misses Kathy. And I'm not what he needs."
He's not supposed to hug his patients, so he won't, but he's never seen anyone who looks as badly in need of a hug as she does right now. It's all right there, in black and white. The long term marriage, the kids, the family, everything she's always wanted, everything she never had. He can almost hear the jealousy in her voice. The grief. And if she had to stare that in the face for all the years she worked with this man, and now it's been taken away...he's known Olivia for seven years and she has never made more sense to him than she does in this moment.
"Nevermind whether or not he meant it. How do you feel about him?"
He wonders if she can say it out loud.
She doesn't answer.
It's what he expected but it's frustrating, too; they're on the clock here. Sometimes the only way to get the bear to move is to poke it with a stick, so he does.
"Did you have an affair with him? Is that why he left?"
To his surprise, she's spitting mad in an instant.
"No," she snarls. "He left because he killed a teenage girl in the station house and he couldn't face it. We never once crossed the line."
Christ, the man had five children and a wife and he killed a teenager. It's no wonder he left, Peter thinks. Who wouldn't, after something like that? He understands the drive Olivia - and people like her - have to help people, what makes them want to sacrifice all of themselves for the greater good, but everyone has their limits, and he supposes her Elliot found his. Now he knows why Elliot left, and he knows they didn't have an affair; the vehemence of her tone gives evidence of her sincerity. She never slept with him. That isn't really the point, though.
"Did you want to?"
She shakes her head, an angry, incredulous sort of expression on her face, like she can't believe what she's hearing. She starts pacing again.
"I'm done talking about this." It's her Captain Benson voice she uses on him now, deep and authoritative. Any man would be hard pressed to go against her when she uses that tone, but it's his job to make her face herself, even when she doesn't want to.
"Olivia-"
"He was everything to me," she spits out finally, and then the words are coming again, fast, like when she first started to explain the situation, and once again, he's left trying to keep up.
"That's what you wanna hear. He was my best friend. He was my family. He was the one person I trusted most. Maybe the only person I trusted. He was the one who picked me up when I hit the ground. He was...he was me and I was him and he was everything and then he just walked away and never called me back. And now he's here and every time I look at him I, I, I..."
There's a great big neon sign flashing in his mind, now. All along he's thought that Olivia's problems stem from having been so isolated for so long, in her formative years and then after, being forced into independence and then embracing it at the loss of everything else. And of course that's true, but he can see now that it's more than that. It's that when she finally did find someone, someone she depended on, someone who mattered, someone who cared for her, the way she always wanted, that person hurt her, and she has never been the same. This Elliot, he disappeared from her life, and now he's back, and that's what's tearing her up, is wanting something she thinks she shouldn't, missing something that she knows hurts her, trying to reconcile what was and what is. It isn't lost on him that she said Elliot never called her back, the same way she won't answer his calls now. That she's making him hurt, the same way he hurt her. That's she's stuck, still, in what used to be.
"Olivia-"
"Of course I do," she says breathily, brokenly. "Of course I love him. But he's gonna break me in half and I can't take that. Not again."
The language she uses is surprisingly intense. Take me over, break me in half. She's never spoken as if anyone has that much control over her except, he realizes, in the early days after Lewis. She talked about Lewis like that. God, he needs a drink.
"What makes you so certain this love will end in hurt?" he asks. From the long years he's known her he already knows the answer; she thinks love will hurt her because it always has.
"I'm never gonna be her."
There's a part of Olivia's heart that won't let her forget that in a perfect world, she would not exist. Those things she wants - the man who chooses her, and stays, the family, the little house full of love - are things she believes she can't ever have. Things this Kathy had. Kathy who is now dead. Kathy, the sainted memory of motherhood. Olivia is herself a mother, but she's unconventional, and her family is small, and they're squeezed into a two bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Peter feels certain the Stabler home was a house with a backyard, with a fence. It would have to be. Olivia's dreams weren't just figments of her imagination; they existed all along, but they belonged to someone else.
"Maybe he doesn't want you to be," Peter points out gently. Olivia is unlike anyone else he has ever known, in the most remarkable way, and he feels certain that Elliot, whoever he is, whatever he might be thinking, must feel the same. "Has he ever expressed feelings like this for you before?"
She brushes tears from her cheeks, looks away. There's an answer in her avoidance.
"He's never said the word love before."
Ah, Peter thinks. There it is.
"That isn't what I asked."
Love is so rarely about what is said, and so often about what is done. Whatever Olivia and her Elliot went through during the years of their partnership, they may never have said the word love, but that doesn't mean the love wasn't there.
"We don't talk about it."
She's still not looking at him.
"Don't talk about what?"
"This," she gestures vaguely. "All the times he risked everything for me. All the times I threw everything away for him. The nights while he and Kathy were separated when we'd just stay up late, talking, and I'd think...it doesn't matter what I thought. He went back and we don't talk about it."
Little details, clicking into place. They were separated once, Stabler and his wife. The ideal family, in Olivia's mind, shattered, however impermanently, and she was there, stepping into the void Kathy left behind. How must she have felt, then, sitting beside him in the night when he was no longer with his wife? How must she have felt when he went back? And now Kathy's gone. One of the obstacles preventing Olivia from being with this man is finally gone and the guilt is probably eating her alive.
"But he's said it now."
"Yeah, he just blurts it out right in front of all his fucking kids and then runs out the door and leaves me alone with them just..staring at me."
He's seriously considering cancelling his next appointment so he can just stay here listening to this story all night. Every time she opens her mouth something new and compelling comes tumbling out. The kids, five of them, heard their father confess his love for someone who was not their mother. He doesn't know how old they are - one is nearly forty, and one is young enough to live with his father, and that's all he's got but that's quite a spread - but he tries to imagine it, Olivia alone, facing five people she thinks of as kids, with those words hanging in the air. It must have been difficult for her, facing their judgement, their questions, their grief, doubly difficult for Olivia, who wants, so badly, to help.
"What did you say to them?"
"We talked about next steps. His youngest is a teenager but it's not safe for him to be alone with Elliot right now so we decided to move him in with his big sister. We talked about ways to deal with him."
"So his children heard him tell you that he loves you, and then they turned to you for help afterward?"
"What, am I gonna say no? I love those kids like they were my own. I was the first person to hold Eli, the day he was born. I don't mean like the first besides his parents, I mean the EMT delivered him and a minute later I was holding him in the ambulance while Kathy crashed right in front of me. He was about two minutes old and I thought I was watching his mom die."
She does this every time, he thinks. There are so many secrets inside her and she only ever lets him catch glimpses of them. But the list of traumatic, terrifying things she's seen could fill a book. And it would be, he thinks, a damn good read. But what matters now is not the fascinating story she's holding just out of reach, but what her words are telling him about her. About who she is. About why this hurts. About how to heal it.
She's a protector, and a healer. She fixes what is broken and she fights fiercely for what is right. She wants to fix her friend, this man she loves, and she wants to fix his family, but she is afraid, and he can't blame her.
He can't encourage her to pursue a relationship that terrifies her, one that she describes in heavy, oppressive language. But Olivia has always pushed other people away, and he wants to see her grab hold of something instead. Maybe this guy is no good for her - privately, he thinks she would have been better off with Ed, who spent as much time looking after her as she did looking after him, only Ed is dead and gone, now - and he can't be responsible for pushing her to add yet another responsibility to her never ending list of duties. Olivia can't save the whole world on her own. But it's clearly breaking her heart, this situation with this man. Maybe, he thinks, maybe there's some way to salvage it.
"What would you say to him? If he called, and you could tell him anything you wanted without repercussions, what would you say?"
She opens her mouth, closes it again. Looks away. That means she knows the answer, but she doesn't want to face it. The thing is maybe she's right, and she shouldn't confess whatever's on her mind to Elliot. But she's got to get it out, or it's going to eat her alive.
"Olivia."
"I can't even say it to him. How am I supposed to say it to you?"
"Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let it out."
So she does.
"I wanna tell him how angry I am. How angry I am that he just left me. How he knew exactly how much that would hurt me and he did it anyway." Peter knows, too, exactly how much that would hurt her. Abandonment issues was one of the very first notes he ever made about her, maybe twenty minutes into their first conversation. The next seven years proved it; people kept leaving, and it shattered her every time.
"I wanna tell him how I blame him for Lewis."
That surprises him. She's never blamed anyone but herself for what happened when Lewis took her. They've spent years working on that, too, working to help her accept that the actions of a madman weren't her responsibility. How could she have kept this from him? Before now he'd thought she'd told him everything there was to tell about Lewis. She's about to prove him wrong.
"I wanna tell him how certain I am that if he'd never left me it never would have happened. How...how when I was hitting Lewis with that bar, when I was trying to kill him, it was Elliot's voice I heard in my head, telling me not to stop. How after it was done I laid on the floor and wrapped my arms around myself and cried and prayed that somehow he'd come back. How his face was the only one I wanted to see. And I'd tell him that what happened to Kathy isn't his fault. I'd tell him I know it's hard but we can figure it out. I'd tell him how much...how much I love him."
It's a hell of a speech and her voice is shaking by the end of it. It makes sense, the way she blames Elliot for Lewis. He was her partner, the one she trusted more than any other by her own admission. If she loved him, if she saw him as her protector, of course she would have wanted him to save her. Of course it would have broken her heart when he didn't. Christ, this is too much. Peter wants to tell her to say all these things to Elliot, but if her man is as bad off as she says maybe she's right to keep it to herself, especially if he is already, as she's indicated, blaming himself for his wife's death. Words like that, blame like that, would be tough for a stable man to take.
"Does he know about Lewis?"
He thinks he knows the answer but he has to ask anyway.
"No."
Of course not, he thinks. It's not something Olivia would offer up without a fight.
"What do you think he'd do if you told him?"
"Honestly? I think he'd kill himself. He's blaming himself for what happened to Kathy and his kids are pulling away. If he finds out about that...I think he'd eat his gun."
Peter has never cared for that particular turn of phrase, but the words come out of her mouth easily. She's been a cop too long, and the work has made her hard in ways he knows he'll never understand, ways she needs to survive. It's a hell of a lot to carry, her worries for Elliot's kids, her grief for herself, her anger, and this fear that someone she cares for might be so close to ending it all. And that's already happened, with Ed, and she can't bear to go through that again, and Peter knows it.
"I don't know what to do," she says. "I want to help him. I want him whole. I want him back to the way he was. I want him..."
She just wants, and she's always been afraid of what she wants.
"He may not ever be the same, after a loss like this," he tells her gently. "But that doesn't mean he can't love you. That doesn't mean you can't be important to each other. Why don't you answer, next time he calls? Just hear what he has to say?"
It's clear she wants to talk to him, and it's clear she knows better than to tell him about how she was abducted and tortured and blames him for it. She's smart, and she knows how to talk to victims. If she just hears her man out then maybe, he thinks, maybe there's a chance. Maybe if they start talking, they can start to find a way to heal this hurt. Or maybe this guy is really out of his mind, and when Olivia answers the phone she'll hear it, and she'll come back next week and tell him all about how impossible Elliot is. Then at least they'd know, he thinks. Until she picks up the phone, it's impossible to say for certain what it is Elliot wants from her, and he can't work with uncertainty.
He leads the session to a quiet conclusion, watches her leave, takes a deep breath before his next patient. Olivia at 5:00 p.m., with the horror-story trauma and the Hallmark movie broken heart, then Shana at 6:00 p.m., with the two kids and the new-age, sensitive husband. Olivia, who's waded through blood, and Shana, who's biggest problem is that she's bored. He has to care about them both equally; that's the job.