For the next few days Olivia was busy at work and Gabi was busy writing her article. The first article in the series, the one that would detail Gabi's attempts to track down her mother alongside stories from other adoptees who had struggled to find any information about themselves under the closed adoption system. That first one wouldn't have any details about Olivia in it, and so Gabi figured it was safe to go ahead and get it rolling; it was safer ground to tread, gave her something to think about besides Burton Lowe and William Lewis, two men who had assaulted and abused her mother, albeit in very different ways. How many times, she kept asking herself, how many times had Olivia been hurt? How much pain rested on her shoulders, how many scars covered her skin? How much penance had she paid, trying to right the wrongs of an unjust world?

It was unfair, Gabi thought. It was worse than unfair, that a single woman should have to endure so much grief. From the moment of her conception Olivia seemed to have been marked for pain, cursed by it, covered by it, and it was so unfair because despite it all, despite every horrible thing that had been done to her, every horrible thing she'd witnessed, Olivia was still kind. Still lovely, and warm, and compassionate, and gentle.

You only know one side of her, Nat kept trying to remind Gabi. She's a mother, and that's what she's showing you. You don't know what else is in there.

That was true, Gabi figured; she'd stopped looking, after she'd finished reading every article about William Lewis she could find. She'd stopped searching, because those stories were dripping with Olivia's blood, because they implied she might have been a murderer, and Gabi was afraid to dig too much deeper, and find out the truth. Gabi was afraid of what secrets might be hiding, buried in Olivia's past; Gabi was terrified of a woman who - after four days with no food, little water, drunk and drugged to the gills, with a broken wrist and a concussion - had beaten a man so severely he had died, had to be brought back to life in the back of an ambulance. If Olivia was capable of that when she was so severely injured, what had she done when she was in perfect health and in full control of herself? What if Nat was right, and there was more to Olivia than met the eye, and Gabi didn't like what she found?

The days passed quickly, the way they did when her brain and her hands were busy, but Olivia reached out to her, texted her, invited her out for dinner on Friday, and Gabi said yes. She didn't know what they'd talk about; she had so many questions she wanted to ask, but they were invasive, frightening questions, and she wasn't sure if she even had a right to ask them, wasn't sure how Olivia would respond. She said yes, because all she wanted was another chance. Another chance to sit at a table with her mother, another chance to gaze into a pair of brown eyes that looked so much like her own, another chance to make Olivia someone she knew, and not just a kindly stranger.

She said yes, and went to the restaurant, and stood on the sidewalk just beside the door, and waited. Waited for fifteen minutes, but there was no sign of Olivia, and no text from her either, and worry began to nip at Gabi's heart. Had Olivia changed her mind? Had she decided she didn't want to know her daughter after all, decided she didn't want the complications this newfound connection brought? Had something come up at work, was she hurt? Would anyone even know to call Gabi, if something happened to her mother; had Olivia even told anyone about her secret daughter?

After twenty minutes Gabi threw caution to the wind, dug her phone out of her purse, and called her mother.

"Benson," Olivia answered after the third ring, her voice thick and sleepy.

"Olivia? It's Gabi."

"Gabi," Olivia sighed, a little dreamily, not unhappily. "It's nice to hear your voice, sweetheart."

Ok, what the fuck? Gabi wondered.

"Did you…did you forget we're having dinner tonight?"

"Shit," Olivia swore. "I'm sorry, Gabi, something…came up."

It sounded, Gabi thought, like Olivia was drunk. Her words slurred just a little, and her voice was soft and far away, like she wasn't even holding the phone properly, and resentment stirred in Gabi's belly. How could Olivia have just forgotten her like this?

"Well," Gabi said, a little sharply, "I'll just leave you to it then-"

"No, baby, wait."

Olivia had not ever called her baby, and Gabi wasn't entirely sure how she felt about hearing it now. A small piece of her rejoiced, to hear Olivia claim her so openly, relieved and comforted to know that her mother wanted her, cared for her, but a larger piece of her recoiled, concerned by this sudden display of possessiveness from a woman she'd only met a bare handful of times.

"I got hurt," Olivia said. "At work. I've got a concussion. I'm not supposed to leave the house."

That explained it, Gabi figured, explained why Olivia seemed so loopy and out of it, why she hadn't turned up, but this was hardly a comforting revelation; instead it seemed to justify her fears, seemed to serve as a reminder that all that bad shit in the past, all the bad shit that had happened to Olivia before, it could all happen again. A reminder that she wasn't safe, that as quickly as she had entered Gabi's life she could be gone again.

And shit, but Olivia was all alone. All alone, with no one to help her, no one to support her, no one but her son, who needed her care, who was too little to be left with the burden of looking after her himself.

"Is anybody taking care of you?" Gabi asked quickly. Olivia said she had good people around her, maybe she'd called one of her friends -

"I'm ok, sweetheart."

"That didn't answer my question."

Olivia sighed, a little ruefully.

"No," she said. "I'm here alone."

"What about Noah?"

"Rollins took him for tonight so I can rest."

Gabi didn't know who Rollins was, but she didn't really need to. Olivia was alone, hurt, halfway out of her mind either from pain killers or the head injury or both, and Gabi couldn't just leave her that way. Even if Olivia hadn't been her mother, even if they'd just been friends, Gabi wouldn't have been able to rest easy, knowing Olivia was all by herself in the one moment when she should have had someone taking care of her. Maybe whatever providence had brought Gabi to Olivia's door hadn't just done it for Gabi's sake; maybe Olivia needed her daughter, as much as Gabi needed her mother.

"I'm gonna come over," Gabi said. "Gimme your address."

"I'm fine, Gabi, really-"

"You've got a concussion. When's the last time you ate? What if you pass out in the shower and hit your head again? I'm not kidding, Olivia. I'm coming."

There was a pause, then, a moment of silence that stretched out so long that Gabi was starting to worry that maybe Olivia had lost consciousness or something, but then finally she spoke.

"I…I'd appreciate that. I'd like to see you." She sounded small, and shy, almost, like she didn't know what to do with herself when someone else was kind to her.

"I wanna see you, too. Now tell me where you live."

So Olivia did, gave Gabi her address while Gabi furiously typed it into her phone, and then they hung up. Gabi ducked into the restaurant and ordered two plates of pasta to go, and then she hailed a cab, sat in the backseat chewing her lip the whole way, wondering just how the hell Olivia - who was a Captain, who surely should not have been in the field - had gotten hurt, wondering what might happen when Gabi stepped foot in her mother's home for the first time.

Olivia's building was big and grand, and the security guard stopped Gabi before she could make it to the elevator. One of the articles Gabi had read about Lewis said that the first time he took Olivia he'd been lying in wait for her in her apartment; apparently Olivia had taken that painful lesson to heart, because this building was covered in cameras and that security guard was quick and grim-faced. He let her through, though - apparently Olivia had called down and warned him Gabi was coming - and she continued on her way, rode up to Olivia's floor and walked down the hall to a door that bore a little nameplate reading Benson. Gabi knocked on that door twice, hard, and then stood uneasily, shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other until Olivia finally appeared to welcome her inside.

It was the most disheveled Gabi had ever seen Olivia; her dark hair hung wild and loose around her face, and there was a purpling bruise on her cheek, and her hands were shaking. She was wearing a loose pair of black pajama pants and a soft grey zip-up hoodie, and her eyes were just a little unfocused, her movements just a little uncoordinated.

"You didn't have to come all this way," Olivia said, but she held the door open anyway, beckoned Gabi into the apartment.

The first impression Gabi had of Olivia's home was one of brightness; the walls were painted white, and the sofa was sort of cream colored, and there were wide windows on the far wall letting in the lights of the city streets below. There wasn't a bunch of clutter, just a kid's backpack by the door and a wall of bookshelves, home to countless books and little knicknacks. There was a large framed portrait of Olivia and the boy who must have been her son on the wall; the kid was cute, with dark, curly hair and a sweet face, and he looked so much like her that Gabi forgot, for a second, that the kid was adopted. The place was clean, and elegant, in its own way, in keeping with the position of the woman who lived there, a successful professional who had long outgrown any use for flatpacked furniture. There was something intimidating about it, though, something like an ideal Gabi wasn't sure she could live up to.

"I gotta sit down," Olivia said. "There's wine in the kitchen, water in the fridge if you want some."

"I brought dinner," Gabi said, watching Olivia pick her way gingerly to the sofa, favoring her left leg just a little. "You sit, and I'll bring it to you."

"Thank you," Olivia remembered to say, and then she collapsed on the sofa with a sigh that sounded like it hurt.

The kitchen was nice, too, and well organized; Gabi grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge - a fridge, she noticed, that was bursting with organic vegetables and yogurts and the kind of healthy snacks she always meant to feed her own kids but never seemed to buy - and two forks from a drawer, and then carried everything back into the living room. Olivia was resting with her head leaned back and her eyes closed, and it occurred to Gabi as she looked at her mother that even with summer coming on, even though it was hot as shit outside, she'd only ever seen Olivia covered from collarbone to ankles, had never seen her in a t-shirt, or even a scoop-necked blouse. Even now, the only skin she could see was Olivia's face and her hands.

"You should eat," Gabi said. She plopped down next to Olivia, started unpacking their supper, but Olivia didn't reach for the water or the pasta.

"Meds make me nauseous," she said.

"Well, I'm gonna eat." It was a ploy she and Nat used often with the girls; if one of them wouldn't eat, for whatever reason, protesting the dinner menu or just being obstinate for the sake of it, Nat and Gabi would carry on with dinner, not make a point of forcing her, and usually it only took a few minutes before their child would give in, and eat something on her own. "Will you tell me what happened?"

Olivia groaned.

"It's stupid," she said. "I'm not supposed to be chasing perps any more."

Gabi's early days spent roaming in and out of police precincts had taught her all the cop lingo, and she didn't balk at it now, just twirled some pasta around her fork and gave Olivia the space to tell her story, when she was ready.

"I'm too old for it," Olivia continued, grumbling, and part of Gabi wanted to protest, wanted to remind her that really fifty-four wasn't that old, that Olivia looked to be in pretty decent shape, but she also wanted Olivia safe, and so she didn't try to contradict her. "And I've got a bad ankle."

"How'd that happen?"

"Richard fucking Wheatley," Olivia said in a tone dripping with venom. "Ran my fucking car off the road. Had to have surgery, ankle hasn't been the same since. Doc tried to convince me to retire."

Wheatley, Gabi recalled, was the man who'd been accused of killing the cop's wife. Olivia's friend's wife. The man who'd been on trial at Christmas, the man who'd gotten off with a mistrial, the man the papers said Olivia and her friend had tried to frame. But if he was responsible for hurting Olivia, Gabi thought, surely it hadn't been a frame, surely they'd been right. It was confusing and more than a little scary, though, the idea that Olivia had made such enemies, that people could want to hurt her. And if her doctor thought she ought to retire, why the fuck hadn't she?

"But we're short staffed, and I…I miss it. Being out in the field. Doing the work. I feel useless sitting in that office all day. Anyway, I was chasing some asshole in Harlem and he spun around too quick and knocked my head into a wall and I went down but the little prick tripped over me trying to get away, and Rollins caught him. All's well that end's well."

Except that Olivia was limping, and loopy from a head injury; it didn't seem to Gabi like all was well at all.

But it was kinda nice, despite the grim subject at hand, to just sit with Olivia like this. To just talk, to hear Olivia swear so freely, like she was comfortable, like she wasn't trying to put on a show of being a good mother, like they were just friends. Gabi passed Olivia one of the bottles of water and she took it, this time, drank a little, and though they were quiet it wasn't an awkward sort of quiet. It was just…easy, in a way Gabi hadn't been expecting, in a way she really liked.

"Hey," Olivia said after a moment, turning her head slowly to look at Gabi, who just hummed around a mouthful of pasta.

"You got any pictures of my granddaughters?"