"Liv... Liv!"
Her eyes shoot open and without saying anything she gets off the couch, walking to the door and leaving. I sit there a moment, allowing her time to get up to the roof. I close my eyes, trying to gather myself, for I had been asleep as well, before waking to her elbow in my stomach. She had been moving in her sleep, thrashing almost.
It's a hard thing, waiting, especially for her. But somehow I manage to always wait until she's ready. Getting up, I go over and grab my coat, for her, not me. I've got a fleece jacket on. Leaving the apartment, I make sure it's locked and I have the keys. You never know when a burglar might strike, right? Walking up the stairs, I open the door quietly, peering around first before making my way over to where she's standing.
When I get close enough, I put my coat over her shoulders and she takes it silently, hugging it close to her. I stand behind her, not saying anything, just looking over her head to the buildings before us. I resist the urge to wrap my arms around her, just because I know she needs it, like she needed the shower and she needed the special dinner and she needed the dumb movie we watched. But this, this she'll deny herself, until she's ready because she doesn't like feeling needy when she's trying to tell you something.
"That little girl should be alive," she finally says. "She should be alive."
I don't say anything because no matter what I say, it won't help. All I can really do is be here.
"I let her down. When I walked into that room... she should be alive."
There's nothing she can really say either, because she knows I'll just tell her it wasn't her fault and there wasn't anything else she could've done. But she'll say it anyway.
"Why did it have to be her, John? We were coming to get her out of that hell hole. Two hours earlier, she would've been alive. Two hours and she would still be here today."
"You know that all the ifs in the world couldn't bring her back, Liv," I say quietly.
She ignores me. "We should've gone earlier. Should've gone as soon as we felt something was wrong and stood outside that door until Novak got the search warrant. Then we would've heard. We could've stopped it. We shouldn't've waited at the house. Why the hell we'd wait at the house?"
"Because Cragen told us to. Because we had other cases to work in the meantime."
"Because we didn't care enough, more like," she says bitterly.
"No one can ever accuse you of not caring enough, never. If you could, you'd care too much." I put voice to the thoughts I had earlier while she had been sleeping. "Liv, you did everything in the world to try and save that little girl. We didn't make it this time, but we have to keep going. You get hung up on a case like this... you can't feel so guilty about it." I'm such a hypocrite. Telling her not to feel so guilty. I'm like the king of hypocrites at this point.
But she doesn't throw it in my face, which tells me that soon, I'll be able to wrap my arms around her and shelter her from the world outside, if only for so long.
"I can't help it, John. What the hell are we doing in this job if we can't save a child depending on us with everything they have? With such hope that to break it is like sending yourself to the equivalent of the devil?"
"We're doing the best we can, that's what we're doing. We can't save them all, as much as you or any one of the rest of us, would like to. We just can't. All the cops in the world couldn't save every child in New York City." I take that last little step towards her and wrap my arms around her, at last. "We're doin' the best we can."