PART 4

Sleep had only lasted for a few innocent minutes.

"Can you stay?" Elliot had sent out into the dark, his voice low in case they both decided to pretend he hadn't asked.

"I can't," Olivia had answered after a moment of wishful thinking. "My sitter is waiting."

"Of course," his voice had lowered from the collision with reality. Silence had sealed it shut after that.

The rest of the night was about what it could have been if she'd stayed — and what it turned out to be because she hadn't.

Maybe he would have stared at her warm body all night; maybe he would have told her he'd always liked the unique shape of her nose, the way it scrunched when she laughed, when she really laughed.

But she had left, so he stared at the cold walls until they told him he had no business lying in that cold bed alone.

He went back to the living room where the moon drew fluorescent stripes through the blinds across his chest where her fingers could have traced patterns. He stayed up mourning in regret instead of taking the chance to drift back to an unburdened sleep.

The difference her presence had made. The difference it could have continued to make. The way her absence wiped it all clean in just a few hours and left him thinking it was too soon. Not soon enough, and yet, soon enough to be too soon.

When morning came, he could no longer tell if that night had been a moment of clarity or an opportunity to bury secrets in the darkness.

No thought process had been involved in the way Olivia had acted the night before. It was as if her brain had been dosed with something, rendered dormant, allowing for emotions and feelings to take over. A foreign concept.

She had confessed her fragility to Elliot. He had embraced it and offered his skin as shelter. He had made her feel protected like never before, something she had never allowed anyone else to do.

But he had his own fragility right now, and she couldn't help but wonder how hard it must have been for him to draw strength from himself to give to her. He must have felt drained.

She hated herself for making him feel like he owed her that for his abandonment. And he did. But that wasn't the point.

She was well aware that he was grieving and that, as much as he denied it, he was battling a bad case of PTSD, and she felt like she'd taken advantage of him by making her demands whether she was entitled to them or not.

She had wanted to call him; she had picked up the phone to dial his number several times and given up just short of pressing the red phone icon.

She wouldn't have known what to say.

The few hours of troubled sleep hadn't helped either of them reach any helpful conclusions, and when they abruptly met at the entrance of the task force office, a detached, hushed awkwardness of grunted apologies was their only communication.

There was a lot of work to do; both Elliot and Olivia initially thought that was going to be a good thing, keep their minds occupied.

But the truth was much uglier than any regret they might have felt about how things had started the night before, or how things had ended. It buried all the feelings stirred up by their fleeting connection.

The whole day was spent running leads that could point to a possible explanation for Kathy having become Wheatley's target in the short period she had been in town, but their discoveries covered a much greater stretch of time than that, and the only unclear piece of information was when exactly during the first twenty years of her marriage to Elliot she had become associated with Manfredi Sinatra and Richard Wheatley.

Elliot had never had the habit of looking twice at anything his wife had ever done. He'd been so used to feeling like he was always the one who owed her something he couldn't deliver that he had never even entertained the thought of suspecting her of anything other than securing a safe, stable environment for their children.

The first thing he found out was that she had been absolutely certain of his complete, blind trust. The second was that she hadn't been planning on dying: he saw both of those things clearly in the way that nothing was hidden. Once he started looking, it was a very natural movement of unraveling. The truth was neatly organized, hiding in plain sight as it rested every night on the pillow next to his. Unburdened.

There had been reasons Kathy had wanted to join him in New York that had nothing to do with seeing their kids or attending an NYPD award ceremony in honor of Olivia Benson — she had only been the mirage his wife had baited him with, used as a smokescreen to keep him distracted.

It turned out he hadn't been the only one in the family acting as liaison between Italy and the United States.

Elliot felt his insides churning in shame; a detective thirty-five years into the job who had never even suspected he'd been sleeping with the enemy his entire life. There were no suspicions about anything they were uncovering: only certainties, and he held proof in his glove-covered hand, stared at it with his dread-colored eyes, let it sink like solid granite in his betrayal-filled heart.

Sergeant Bell and Olivia had tried to cushion the blow and slow down the dam break as information gathered and assembled like a map of the web of lies that he had considered to be his life, but he refused: thirty years had gone by without him suspecting anything. The truth couldn't wait any longer; he couldn't afford another second of make believe.

It was when the question of Eli's true paternity was raised, however, that he felt like he was about to explode, leaving without a word in a rush to the roof, where he screamed until his throat was so raw it might have bled.

Olivia knew to wait some time before she followed him there.

"It can't be easy to come across all of this…" she stated the obvious as she stood a few feet from him and respectfully avoided his stare. "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," he offered simply, hands on the railing, sustaining the weight of his life, the words feeling as tiny insect legs running up and down his stinging throat.

Her small voice carried with the air, making it sound almost surreal, almost like a whisper fabricated by the wind. "I'm still sorry."

His voice strained through the scurrying of the tiny bug legs as he struggled to get the words out. "I chose wrong," he said. "Every time I chose her. I chose someone who lied to me my whole life. Someone I didn't know at all."

Olivia tried to soothe him. "There was no way to know—"

"Stop trying to make me feel better!" he yelled, looking at her for the first time since she'd gotten up there, since she'd gotten there at all that morning. The bugs cleared for a while, shying away from the rumble in his voice.

Elliot stared at Olivia until she looked up at him. When their eyes met, they spent some time together, connected, in silence, communicating misfortunes and sorrows. In that moment, both of them knew there were much greater regrets between them than the night before.

Frankly, it was a relief.

Both of them sighed. Elliot nodded. So did Olivia. They looked away, out into the skyline as grey clouds tried to hide it. The imminence of rain hung heavy in the air, but the storm wasn't going to be the biggest disruption happening that day, and they knew it.

All the roads not taken presented themselves before Elliot's eyes so clearly.

"I could've divorced her all those years ago," he said haltingly, afraid that the scratch in his throat would resume, but the truth seemed to soothe it, just like it had injured it. "I could've stayed here… with my kids. Fought for my job. I didn't need to leave. I could've…" he risked a glance in Olivia's overall direction as his voice lowered another octave. "We could've…"

"Don't blame yourself," Olivia shook her head and stared back at him with a benevolent smile. "You chose the woman you loved."

Bitterness and sadness battled in the depths of his icy blue eyes as he met her gaze. "That's the thing: I didn't."