Gabi had never liked police stations.
She'd spent enough time in them, over the years. Not because she was a troublemaker, or anything, but she'd made her bones writing quick and dirty crime of the week stories for small time papers, and she'd learned that a cup of coffee and a pretty smile could charm a tired cop faster than just about anything else. These days she didn't have to waste her time with shit like that, sensationalizing drug busts and kiddie murders. These days the big bosses let her spend weeks, months, sometimes, researching and writing in-depth investigative pieces, and this one, this was the biggest one yet. This was the one she'd always wanted to write, the reason she'd gone into journalism in the first place, the one that would cost the most, and mean the most when it was done. This was her story, and she could not wait to tell it.
They gave her the greenlight in March, and she'd spent the next seven weeks shuttling back and forth from Brooklyn to Albany, digging through government records and newspaper clippings and microfiche at the libraries, pissing off social workers and generally causing a ruckus. Seven weeks of dedicated, non-stop work, seven weeks of Natalie wearily asking when she was gonna come home, seven weeks of not being able to give her wife an answer. Seven weeks of missing bedtime, and submitting expense reports, and shifting through the detritus of bureaucracy. It took seven fucking weeks. It only took seven weeks. She'd been waiting for the answers to these questions for thirty-seven years, and in the end it only took seven weeks. If she'd known that, she'd have taken a sabbatical ages ago and just gotten the damn thing done, but she couldn't change it now.
There was a name written on a legal pad in her briefcase - yeah, she still carried a briefcase, but it had been a gift from her father and she liked the heft of it in her hand - and a few brief queries scribbled underneath it. Once she had the name she could have gone digging further, but she'd decided for now to just let her subject answer the questions herself. Once Gabi heard what the woman had to say she could go back and search public records for verification - would have to, in order to pass muster with her bosses - but hearing the truth from the woman's own lips, in her own words, that was the human part of the interest. The color, as Jerry used to say. It would fill in the black and white outline of the story taking shape in Gabi's mind, paint it in shades of red and blue and yellow, until they all faded in together, made a technicolor film of the choices that had led Gabi to this point.
And the woman who belonged to that name on the legal pad, the woman who was not just a name but a person, real and whole, with a history and a future and hopes and dreams and failures, she was inside this police station. All Gabi had to do was walk in the door.
So she did, walked in with her back straight and her heels clicking on the linoleum and her briefcase clutched in her hand. Walked up and found the desk sergeant, and clocked the sorrow in his eyes when she asked him where the Special Victims Unit was. All she had to do was ask for directions; she didn't need to ask why just the mention of the place made that gruff old timer look so grim. Gabi had gotten her start in police stations, and she knew exactly what SVU was, and she knew that no one who sought it out went there for happy reasons. It was a place of sorrow, by its very nature.
And it was upstairs, so Gabi went to the elevator, still feeling a little bit wrong cramming in shoulder to shoulder with strangers without a mask in sight. Natalie had told her to take one with her when she left this morning, but then Gabi got distracted, and forgot all about it. Maybe next time she'd remember.
SVU looked like pretty much every other squad room Gabi had ever seen, updated from the halcyon days of Gabi's youth and tricked out with tech but still a little grimy around the edges, still lacking in the lighting department, still not particularly welcoming. There were people bustling around, but most of them paid her no mind, and so she took a moment just to get her bearings. The woman she was looking for boasted the rank of Captain, and that made her the big boss, and that meant, Gabi thought, that the office at the back of the squadroom probably belonged to her, but the door was closed and the lights were off inside.
"Help you?" a man asked her, and she jumped, having not noticed his approach. There was a bit of grey in his close cropped hair, and his eyes were warm but tired; he looked like he'd been hanging around this place for a long, long time, and that made him, she thought, a good place to start.
"I'm looking for Captain Benson," she said. "Is she here?"
The man's eyes sized her up, then, something like suspicion in them, like anyone asking for his Captain was a threat, and he was trying to figure out how hard he'd have to work to take Gabi down. His shoulders tightened, just a little, and his stance widened, like he was bracing himself for a fight. It was a strangely protective response, and one that intrigued Gabi immensely.
"No," he said. "But I'm her Sergeant. Is there something I can help you with?"
Her Sergeant, he'd said. Not the Sergeant. He didn't align himself with his department; he aligned himself with his boss. That spoke of loyalty, Gabi thought. And someone who could inspire that kind of loyalty, someone whose Sergeant would defend her as carefully as this man was doing now, that was someone she wanted to get to know.
"No, thank you," she said. "It's personal. I'll just wait here, if that's ok."
To her right there was an empty desk and an empty chair in front of it, and so she set her briefcase down there, preparing to settle in for the wait.
"Personal," the man repeated. "What's your name?"
"Gabriella Swanson."
He frowned.
"Look," he said. "I've known Benson for more than twenty years. There's not a lot personal with her I don't know about. And I don't know you. So what are you really doing here?"
The question threw her; she had been prepared to explain herself to Benson, but she hadn't been prepared for this. To be met with a bulldog who apparently knew Benson so well that he'd immediately clocked the fact that Gabi was a stranger. Twenty years he'd known her. More than twenty years. For most of Gabi's life, he'd known this woman. A lot of shit could go down between two people, in twenty fucking years, and Gabi didn't know anything about any of it. Didn't know a damn thing about them, and what they'd seen together. The Sergeant was looking at her expectantly, but she couldn't answer his question, not without talking to Benson first. She wasn't looking to make enemies, and she got the feeling that if she spilled the truth now, she'd poison the well with Benson and ruin this whole thing before it even got started.
"I'm a reporter," she confessed. "I'm doing a human interest piece, and she's the subject."
It was not the entire truth, but not one word of it was a lie. Gabi thought she'd handled that pretty well, but the Sergeant's frown deepened.
"Yeah, that's not gonna happen," he said. "Cap's not too fond of reporters."
Shit.
She should have expected that, really, because most cops weren't, especially these days, when the rose colored glasses had been removed and the press was printing more truth about them than ever. Things were tense, between journalists and cops, and she should have known better, she should have known -
"Everything ok, Fin?" A woman's voice called out from behind them, and Gabi spun slowly, excitement and terror bubbling up inside her.
It had to be Benson. It had to be, because Olivia Benson was fifty-four years old, and this woman looked about that age. It had to be her, because this woman's eyes were big and dark, because her hair was dark and thick and softly curling, because her face was lovely and lined with the passage of years and with the weight of sorrow. It had to be Olivia Benson, this woman with a voice rich and deep and warm, with a furrow forming between her brows as she looked at her Sergeant. She wore a black blazer over a black blouse, black trousers, black boots, a big ass badge clipped to her black belt, and she was an inch or two taller than Gabi herself, and the picture she painted was one of power, quiet and dignified and just a little intimidating.
"Just a reporter, Cap," the Sergeant - Fin - answered. "I was just telling her to get lost."
"Good," the Captain said, and then she was moving, marching away, towards her office, towards a door she could slam in Gabi's face, and shut her out forever.
Gabi had come too fucking far to let that happen now, and so she unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth, and spoke.
"You're gonna wanna hear what I have to say, Captain," she called out. "Off the record."
Off the record were magic words. Off the record opened doors; people relaxed, a little, if they knew that what they were saying couldn't be used against them, and sometimes if they relaxed enough Gabi could talk them on to the record. And cops, shit, most cops - most detectives, at least - were curious by nature. No one took a job solving mysteries because they didn't like 'em. Gabi had dangled the carrot, the offer of intrigue, and promised not to print Benson's name, and she just had to hope that would be enough.
For a moment Captain Benson looked at her, thoughtful, wary, weighing her options, trying to decide if it was worth it, if Gabi would be worth her time. What the fuck am I gonna do if she says no? Gabi wondered. All the work it had taken to get her to this point, all the sleepless nights, all the furious searching; what if it all came to an end right here, because the Captain didn't feel like talking?
"All right," Benson said eventually. "You got five minutes."
Gabi only needed one.
"Thank you," she answered gratefully, and then rushed to join the Captain in her office.
Captain Benson's office was a warm, homey sort of place; there was a couch under the window, and two comfortable chairs sitting across from her desk, and plants on the back counter, and a water cooler. There were framed newspaper articles and commendations on the walls, and a stack of books on one of the side tables. The left wall boasted a two way mirror looking into a comfortable interview room, and the right a matching mirror, though that one looked into an interrogation room. Gabi knew the difference. Victims and their families got the nice, comfortable chairs in the well lit interview room, suspects got the hard metal chairs and bars on the windows under the flickering lights in interrogation. Both rooms were empty now, and the Captain paid them no mind, just went straight to her desk while Gabi closed the door behind them.
Benson's family, maybe, and the thought made her shift uncomfortably on her feet.
"What's this about?" Benson asked, smoothing her thumb over her brow in a tired sort of way before dropping into her chair, gesturing for Gabi to have a seat across from her.
Now or never, Gabi told herself.
It had all been leading up to this. Up to this moment when Gabi got the chance to sit here, and look at this woman, and speak. To tell her everything that Gabi had learned, and ask an accounting from her. Everything, everything, every moment of the last thirty-seven fucking years, it all came down to this. To Gabi, sitting alone in a room with this woman. Not just any woman; this one. The answer to every question, the beginning of everything.
"My name is Gabi Swanson," she began slowly. "I'm with the Times. I'm writing an investigative series on adoption."
"Did Trevor Langan send you here?" Benson asked shrewdly.
Gabi just stared back, perplexed.
"I don't know who that is."
"Ok. Is this about my son? I do not talk about him on the record and I'm not changing my mind about that, so don't waste your breath."
Gabi was feeling a little nauseous, a little dizzy. It was happening too fast; she'd been working towards this moment for years but now that she was here the sheer weight of it threatened to drag her under. Olivia Benson was there, just there, just a few feet away, beautiful and hard and untouchable, and she had a son, a son she'd adopted, and Jesus, Gabi was gonna barf if she didn't get herself under control.
"No," she said. "I didn't…I didn't know about your son." She hadn't known because she hadn't looked, because she had decided not to go digging into Benson's life, not yet, because she wanted to come to this meeting fresh, and hear Benson's story from the woman's own mouth. At the moment she was regretting that decision; there was so much she did not know, and she worried what might become of her when she found the answers she sought. But she had come this far, and there would be no turning back now.
"The piece is about the consequences of the state's decades long practice of closed adoptions," she explained. "The impact on the children, on the parents who gave them up. And it's about the experience of adoptees, those who grew up knowing they were adopted, those who found out late in life. Why people look for their birth parents and why they don't and what happens when they find them, and what happens when they can't. It's about our culture's perception of adoption and lived realities for adoptees. It's about all of it, really."
"Ok," Benson said again, slowly. "I still don't see what this has to do with me."
You're about to, Gabi thought.
"The thing is," Gabi said. "I'm adopted. So the thread connecting all these different articles is going to be my own journey with being adopted. And I've decided to start at the beginning. My adoption was closed, so I never knew anything about where I came from. I wanted to see if with all the information that's available through technology now and genetic testing and all the old records I could find my birth mother, even though the adoption was closed."
"And you did," Benson said sagely, already putting the pieces together. "Was she one of our cases? I didn't get here until '98, so I'm afraid I won't-"
"It's you," Gabi blurted out. "You're my mother."
