ALEX
She's blubbering like a little girl and she can't bring herself to care. With his usual deft touch, her partner hit the nail on the head – even though in this instance it seems like he didn't fully intend to.
I understood the desperation of yearning for something you've lost and you fear you'll never get back.
She understands too. She's felt that way for a year – desperate and yearning for something she can't even put into words. Does she wish that her sister's child was her own? No. Her sister is a wonderful mother and that little baby definitely belongs to her. Does she wish that she hadn't had that way-back-when abortion and that she had raised the child that would have grown from that cluster of cells? No. She still stands by her decision and doesn't want that either. In fact, the longer she dwells on it, the more she comes to realize that she's confused because what she does want is that very same thing that millions of other women want but that she thought she had moved beyond desiring.
She wants children, wants a family. In short, Alex wants to one day live the much-cliched American dream. After losing her husband in the line of duty, she'd thought that it was best to put aside that hope, that her work was meant to be her life, and that she didn't need two point five children and an SUV to feel complete. But the act of giving birth, the process of being pregnant and bringing a new life into the world, revealed the truth: she wants it all. She wants a husband and children and even a minivan if need be – yet she's already lost her husband, the baby that long-ago cluster of cells would have formed and - now that circumstances have turned out the way they have - she fears that she's lost her chance at that dream along with them.
It is this feeling of hopelessness that brings on the wave of tears, that causes her to put aside her teacup and bury her face in her hands while her normally undemonstrative partner hastens to her side and pulls her close. He rests his chin on top of her head and rocks her slowly while shushing her softly with incoherent words, comforting gestures that bring to her mind how much they have been through together and yet how much still lies unspoken between them. In all the time they have worked together, in all of the dangerous situations they've been in when one or both of them have nearly been or injured, Alex realizes that this has never happened. Bobby has never caught her this way, never held her close until her shaking subsided – most likely because she's never let him. On the job, she's all business and she doesn't want special treatment. Bobby knows this and acts accordingly. On the job, they're just two detectives solving crimes.
Tonight, however, they're two friends and, while she doesn't really want special treatment, she doesn't want Bobby to ever let go either.
You've become a walking contradiction tonight, Eames, chides her inner voice. Can't you make up your mind how you're feeling?
But she feels too much. It's too overwhelming to pick out one feeling and go with it and she suddenly remembers that she's been faced with such a predicament before – twice, in fact. When her husband was killed, she went through the exact same emotional upheaval, the same swirling feelings that she never could verbalize. And when she returned home from her abortion, she spent the next week in bed, knowing that she made the right choice and yet wondering how the right choice could feel so wrong.
And it's that swirling mass of feelings inside her that let's her know she's in mourning again - not for a person this time, but for a life she fears she may never have. Who would have thought that by giving a new life to her sister, she would find herself mourning her own?
Tonight, irony is not Alex's friend. Thankfully, Bobby Goren is.