Disclaimer: Again. Not mine. You know why Dick would hate me for this, don't you? I'm giving Munch a place that they haven't given him for years.
It's someone's birthday. But not hers or mine. There's a little girl down the hall, just a few hours old. It's her birthday - the day that exhausted her mother and possibly left me with a few broken fingers.
I never thought I'd be a father at all. Never mind at my age. I'm not a young man. I'll be interrogating her first boyfriends when I'm in my seventies and retired. Olivia, beautiful woman she is, will be the same age I am now.
We're not young people - neither of us. The nurses in the delivery room traded a few looks with each other, when they were told I was the father - of the baby, not the mother.
It wasn't planned. We think it was either a mix-up in the birth control she was using - or it just happened by fluke... no birth control method is foolproof. So we ended up with a baby on the way.
Olivia, the brave one - she offered me the chance to leave. She said she'd understand, if I didn't want to raise a child this late in life. She didn't want to give me that option - I could see it her face - she wanted the baby she was carrying to have a father - but she did.
I wasn't going to leave her, though. I'd probably get my ass handed to me by more than a few people, if I did that - and I lost my own father, as a kid. It wasn't easy then - never mind growing up never knowing him.
We've got a healthy baby girl. Olivia was afraid - and so was I - that there was something she could have passed onto the baby from her father. Not genes, even though I know in the back of her mind she still worries about it - but something else. An illness, a defect. Of course, she's just a newborn and we'll have to wait and see if anything develops, but right now, everything seems to be okay.
One of the nurses escorts me down to the nursery so I can look in at my daughter. Daughter. I'm a father. That's a shock, still. It hasn't sunk in just yet.
Looking in through the glass, I see her. A shock of dark hair, - Olivia's, not mine - her mother's nose, but my eyes.
"Named her yet?" The nurse smiles - a genuine smile.
"No. According to her mother, that needs her female input - but said female input is half asleep."
The young woman grins. "She's a trooper, your wife."
My wife? Liv? I decide it's not worth the trouble to correct the woman. "She is, isn't she?"
"What was that name you liked?" I ask, after managing to wake Olivia up, back in her room.
She rubs her eyes and takes a sip of the water the nurse brought her. "Ava," she answers, wearily. Birth has taken more out of her than any case ever will.
Ava. Not something I would have thought of - but there's a reason Olivia spent hours pouring over baby name books while on maternity leave. She said her mother had given her a name from literature - Shakespeare - and had put some thought into it at some point - and she wanted to do the same. But it seems to suit.
"I like it, Liv," I answer, softly, kissing her on the forehead.
She smiles. "Thought you would."