In the car on the way to Long Island, Elliot asks Nick about his visit with Olivia the previous evening. "How'd she like the lilies?"

"She liked them," Nick says distractedly.

Elliot picks up on his passenger's pensiveness. "How was she?"

"She was all right," he says. "She said something, though. Something that stuck with me."

Elliot glances to his right, waits.

"She said she feels guilty about what she put the squad through."

Elliot has the sudden urge to pound the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. God dammit, Olivia! he wants to shout out. For fuck's sake, no one suffered like you did!

Nick turns to him, evidently reading his mind. "I know," he says quietly. "She can't help it. She seems… programmed."

"She is," he responds grimly. Lost in thought, his hand wanders to a microscopic whisker on his cheek, which he picks at as he drives. It's a nervous tic Kathy spent years hounding him to break.

"Stabler," Nick starts warningly.

The tone gets Elliot's attention. "Yeah?"

"She won't recover if she thinks this was her fault."

"I know."

"You should talk to her. She trusts you."

"I will."

"Try to convince her to get some counseling."

"She won't do it," he says reflexively, but he wonders if he isn't being a little lazy. Reluctance is not the same as refusal. She will surely protest at first, but with some prodding and effort, he can ultimately convince her.

"I don't think she's as averse to it in principle as you'd think," Nick says. "I just think she may procrastinate. And she needs to talk about it." He pauses. "And I don't just mean about what he did to her."

"Then about what?"

Nick sighs. "I'm not sure how to put this without sounding…"

"Just say it."

"Well, there's an element of truth to how she feels."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, this guy had threatened her pretty explicitly in the squad room. He was brazen about it. He basically told her in so many words that he would come after her."

"Are you seriously suggesting Olivia should've done more to prevent this?" If he weren't driving, he would punch Amaro in the face. This dolt clearly isn't fit to be in a victim-centric squad like SVU.

"Absolutely not. I'm suggesting we should've."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning… she was very upset when she left the stationhouse. We all assumed it was because justice hadn't been served; this blatantly guilty guy had literally walked. It didn't occur to any of us she was scared for her own safety."

"Was she?"

"I don't know. What I do know is this: When she first walked into her apartment, she says she heard a noise, and she called out, 'hello'?"

"So?"

"So, she didn't pull her gun. And those few seconds turned out to be all he needed. Stabler, you worked with her for twelve years. Have you ever seen anyone with better reflexes?"

"No." He pauses. "But if her guard was down when she walked in, as you suggest, wouldn't that mean she wasn't that scared for her safety?"

"It might. But there's no way his threat wasn'tweighing on her mind when she came home. She had to have taken it seriously."

"She's been threatened before."

"Not like this."

Elliot frowns.

Nick adds, "He was a vicious, sadistic sociopath who didn't bluff, and had no fear of getting caught. She had absolutely no reason to believe his threat was empty."

He grips the wheel tightly, his knuckles white. Then why the fuck didn't they protect her? How could Cragen have let her go like that?

"So what's your theory?" Elliot asks, keeping his voice even.

"I'm thinking… when she got home that day, she applied some reverse psychology on herself, and it backfired."

"Explain what you mean."

"Well, I think she was fixated on the mantra of not letting this guy control her life. I think she convinced herself to buck up, that any fear she felt was somehow… unbecoming of a cop. I think she was deliberately not cautious, because to have pulled her gun over nothing would've meant that she was letting her paranoia take over, letting this guy win."

He pretends to mull this over. Deep in his gut, though, he knows her partner's assessment is spot-on. "That could be," he allows irresolutely. As loyal and beneficent as Amaro has proven himself, conceding this point about his partner still feels like a betrayal.

"Yeah," Nick continues. "And now she's questioning her whole career – her ability to be a cop, that is. She thinks she failed."

He doesn't know what to do with this. He is crestfallen. "Damn," he mutters.

Then Nick drops the final bombshell: "She asked me if I would still trust her to be my partner."

An hour later, they turn onto a dirt road. Up ahead is the rocky shoreline, with the rough Atlantic just beyond. It's a blustery, unseasonably chilly May day.

"It's just up here."

"This is remote," Elliot remarks, as he pulls up to the house.

Nick splays his hands helplessly. "Truth? When she called, we weren't even in the right vicinity in our search."

"You can't beat yourself up over that. If he found the place randomly, there was no way for you to find it till he stopped for gas, or left some sort of trail. It was a needle in a haystack."

"Yeah, well. It's bad enough we didn't get our act together to even start looking till the third day. If she ever found out we wouldn't have gotten there –"

"I would never say a word."

"Thanks, man."

Elliot parks the car in front of the otherwise innocuous-looking house. "So this is it."

"CSU has the place for another few days," Amaro informs him. "But homeowners made it clear we can keep it as long as we want; I think they're freaked out and planning to put it on the market once this blows over."

"Can't say I blame them," Elliot comments.

"Yeah."

Still bent over the steering wheel, he peers through the windshield, a pall of storybook dread washing over him, not at all allayed by the awareness of a (relatively, he's careful to add in his head) happy ending to the story. It's like watching a thriller already knowing the characters make it out alive; the foreboding aura still hovers like rainclouds. "Perfect place to drag a woman," he murmurs, the sense of doom stubbornly clinging to him like static electricity. "No neighbors for a quarter-mile in every direction. And ocean sounds would drown out any calls for help."

"He didn't plan," Nick says. "Didn't know where he was going. He just worked on instinct. But his instincts were… dead-on."

"Yeah."

Nick then turns to him wide-eyed, and, his voice nearly cracking, says bluntly, "He would've killed her. I'm ashamed to admit it, but we wouldn't have found her in time. It's a mathematical fact."

It's like the man is in confession. Taken aback by the abrupt transformation, Elliot finds himself in the unlikely position of consoling Olivia's partner. He tentatively places a palm on the man's crumpled shoulder. "You can't dwell on it. She survived. However she did it, she survived."

"Everyone's feeling the weight of this guilt. Fin, Munch, Cragen. It was the fourth day, and we'd barely narrowed down the shoreline. Everyone's focused on how not close we were to finding her. If she comes back to work –"

"When she comes back," Elliot corrects.

Nick nods vigorously. "When she comes back, none of us knows how we'll look her in the eye. It's like this shameful group secret: nobody was gonna help her. He would've done some final sick thing to her and she would've lain there dying, wondering… hadn't a single fucking person in her life noticed she was missing?"

Elliot is bowled over by this display of effusiveness. In the days since learning about Olivia's ordeal, he hasn't expended a moment thinking about the toll it must have taken on her team. "For what it's worth, I don't think she thinks that way."

Nick's pitch-black eyes are forlorn as they search Elliot's face. "Why shouldn't she think that way?" he asks.

Elliot's not sure if it's a rhetorical question. "What?"

"She should expect people to help her, don't you think? Especially her own squad, for christsakes. I mean, that's what we do –we rescue people. Plus it's sort of… sort of a human right."

"I know," he says quietly.

"That's the part that's eating Cragen up, I think. That maybe she didn't expect anyone to help her."

"Maybe that's true," Elliot says pensively. "But think of it like this: whatever trauma she suffered, she also gets to have the comfort of knowing she saved herself. Maybe that'll help her feel a little stronger, a little less ashamed."

"Maybe."

"That's important to her," he adds.

"I know."

"But hey. I understand how you feel. Nothing worse than feeling responsible for something your partner's gone through."

Nick looks at him wistfully. "I thought about checking on her, you know? The next day. It sounds so lame now. It's like intending to donate to charity at Christmastime and then flaking out on actually doing it. But I really was just about to call her. Then I got a call from my son's school that he got into a fight. And the thing is I just learned I even had a son this past year and I've been trying to make up for lost –"

"Nick," he interrupts. "Family comes first. We all know that going in. She's a colleague. You weren't on duty. You don't have to explain. I have five kids. I drop everything when there's an emergency with one of them."

"Yeah, well." He grimaces bitterly. "Turns out it wasn't an emergency. The school called the wrong kid's parents, can you believe it?" He shakes his head, laughs mirthlessly. "I had the phone in my hand, her number pulled up, about to hit 'send.' How can I look her in the eye and tell her I thought about calling her?"

"You don't have to tell her anything."

But Amaro is intent on his odyssey of self-flagellation. "Every night since her rescue I've lain awake thinking about what he was doing to her while I was tearing across the city for a false alarm…"

"Even if you'd made that call, she wouldn't have picked up, and there was no guarantee you would've figured out something was wrong before he'd –"

Nick lets out a hardy laugh. "You're lucky you have the luxury of being that objective."

I don't. I just never would've forgotten to check on her.

He's bursting to say it out loud, but he knows it's mean-spirited and also patently unfair. Emergencies with his own children have always taken priority too. And also because he knows his concern for Olivia long ago exceeded the boundaries of normal partnership. For Nick to have put Olivia ahead of his children would have been for him to cross a line that Elliot himself vowed never again to cross that day in the bus station.

"Eight years ago," he says, "a six-year-old had his throat slashed because I focused my energy on a false alarm."

"The cut on her neck," Nick says immediately, much to Elliot's surprise.

"She told you about it?"

"Not in the context you think. We were talking about judgment calls in this job. She was saying how for every mistake we make there are dozens of things we do right; critical, pivotal split-second decisions we make that save lives, but which we never think to dwell on in a positive way, to give ourselves credit for. We never say to ourselves, if I hadn't reacted in this exact, precise, even improbable, way, this beautiful child – or my partner – would be dead now."

"She's right," Elliot says.

"Of course she's right. Doesn't change how any of us feels though."

"Of course."

Nick lets a beat pass. "I think Cragen might resign, go into early retirement."

He looks at him in shock. "Over this?"

"Yes. I think he's having trouble living with himself."

"She would never blame him."

"Of course she wouldn't. Doesn't mean he doesn't feel responsible. He sent her home for two days. He sent her home, straight into Lewis' arms. In his head, he manufactured the exact conditions under which she could be tortured for two full days without anyone noticing."

"That's a little… dramatic."

Nick raises an eyebrow in challenge. "How would you feel in his shoes?"

Vivid images of the lifeless teenaged girl flood his brain. Of that awful moment when he realized she was dead, that there was nothing he could do to revive her. No second chances, no redemption. Of coming to the irrefutable conclusion, then and there, that he could never be a cop again. "The same," he concedes, swallowing a lump. He sighs. "As long as he doesn't go back to drinking. That would be terrible. And it would make Olivia feel terrible."

"Yeah, Munch told me about his… problem. Sounds like he's been on the wagon long enough not to succumb, but this case… it was a game-changer for everyone. And what if she wouldn't have survived?"

"But she did."

Amaro locks his jaw, as if to ward off a chin-quiver that is threatening to expose him. "Yeah she did," he says proudly.

"Here's where he kept her."

Inside the dank, salty-aired house, Elliot follows Amaro into the bedroom. The bed is old-fashioned, complete with an iron frame with four metal bars across the head, that, in retrospect, look specially designed to hold a woman captive.

The decrepit mattress is stripped bare and is spotted with blood. Elliot is experienced enough to realize that this blood is not the result of a rape per se, but it also doesn't preclude it. It's hardly reassuring.

Amaro points to a dusty corner of space between the foot of the bed and an antiquey-looking dresser. "This is where she was huddled when I got here."

Elliot crouches in front of the spot. He shudders, a crisp picture in his head of Amaro's earlier description of how she'd looked when he found her. But staring at this spot doesn't give him any new information, beyond another visceral image of what his poor partner must have gone through. "The room was searched, top to bottom?"

"It was."

"Nada?"

"Not nada. Drug paraphernalia that the homeowners swear aren't theirs – and if you met these people, you'd believe them – plus another set of melted keys, a can opener, cattle prods and a blow torch."

He wants to pass out at the sheer breadth of this list, not least its final item. "A blow torch?" he whispers.

"Yeah."

He squeezes his eyes shut, tightly, as if to crush the possibility physically. He starts to wheeze, desperately sucking in air. "Did he… did he use it on her?"

"We don't think he got the chance."

He exhales forcefully. "Thank God," he chokes out. "Thank. God."

"Even if he only threatened her with it…"

Elliot looks at Nick, and they lock gazes, an understanding passing between them. He searches for the right words to do proper justice to the man's point. "It would've been… mind-numbingly terrifying."

"Exactly."

Utterly unnerved, Elliot shakes his head raggedly, as if to cast the image from his brain and hit the reset button. If this excursion is to yield any fruit, he needs to regain his equilibrium. "All right. So she's on the bed, her wrists are cuffed above her head. At some point she manages to break the bar and clock him with it. She grabs his gun and points it at him." He pauses to think. "But her wrists are still cuffed together. So how does she get them off?"

"She needs the keys from his pocket."

"Does she take them from him or does he give them to her when she points the gun at him?"

Nick snorts. "This guy would rather be shot dead point-blank than hand over those keys."

"So then she needs to make sure he's knocked out."

"Right."

"All right. So let's assume she hit him hard enough to knock him unconscious in the initial scuffle."

"Okay," agrees Nick.

"Good. So fast-forward: She's got him cuffed to the foot of the bed, he's not threatening her anymore. What does she do next?"

"Depends on her state of mind."

Elliot nods at Nick. "Fair enough. So let's assume, for the moment, she's still relatively lucid, given she had the wherewithal to break free in the first place."

Nick steps back from the bed to survey the room panoramically.

Elliot points to the half-full juice glass perched atop the dresser. "She's thirsty. She gets a drink of water."

But her partner shakes his head sadly. "No. I got her that."

Elliot frowns; if she didn't tend to this most basic need, she was already on the path to delirium.

Nick points across the room. "She goes over there to check herself in the mirror."

Elliot nods bleakly. Olivia is not especially vain, but she's still a woman. "Yes," he agrees. "So she looks at herself and she sees she's a mess." He pads over to the bathroom. "So she comes in here to clean up?"

"But I can tell you for a fact that she didn't clean herself up."

"You said there was vomit. Maybe that was when she started to feel sick."

"Then she would've done it in the toilet."

"Good point. So she skips the bathroom?"

"No."

Elliot's eyes track Nick as he traverses the room, steps inside the bathroom and points to the closed lid of the toilet. "She starts to cry."

Elliot nods.

"He wouldn't have left the seat down," Nick adds. "Let alone closed the lid. She must've done it."

"Okay. So she collapses down here and lets loose."

"It's a bathroom. It's her first moment of privacy in four days."

"Makes sense." Once again his mind involuntarily summons a crisp polaroid: this time, of his devastated partner sitting here, her body hunched over, her forehead cupped in her palms, as she sobs; for her body, as it abruptly feels the toll taken by a hundred continuous hours of grueling, vicious mistreatment, and also for her spirit, as she possibly pictures the humiliating days ahead, as others struggle to relearn how to treat her.

"So she cries for a bit," Nick continues, breaking Elliot's reverie. "If she'd been lucid, she would've then collected herself and called 911."

"Well do we know for sure that she didn't?"

"Her voice on the phone," Nick reminds him. "By the time she called she had definitely had some sort of… break."

"Right, right."

"So either she let some time pass, or he… or something… changed the situation."

Elliot swallows. "Her BAC was still high when you got there," he points out. "So she couldn't have let too much time pass."

Both men are silent, but they are having the identical thought: Then he did something else to her.

Elliot manages to regroup first. "Okay. So what does she do next?"

"She goes to him."

"Why?"

"Maybe she forgot to retrieve her gun from him the first time."

"But if she was relatively clear-headed when she clocked him, why wouldn't she have grabbed it right away?"

"Well, there may have been aspects of her thinking pattern that were clear, but that didn't mean her judgment was perfect."

"Meaning?"

"She might've had enough instinct to get free, but mentally she might've lacked clarity. She might've even been hallucinating, which wouldn't have necessarily precluded good hand-eye coordination."

"Okay. Good theory."

It's Nick's turn, now, to take up the narrative. "So she realizes she needs to get her gun from him. But he's waking up now, and she's missed her window. And he manages to pull her gun out of his pants, even handcuffed."

"It's possible," Elliot says skeptically.

Nick looks at him. "This guy was capable of burning his fingerprints off without flinching; bending his wrists like Houdini wouldn't have been a stretch for him."

"Fine. So he points her gun at her?"

"Yes, but what did she do with his gun? Why isn't she pointing it right back at him?"

Several beats pass, before Nick answers his own question. "Maybe she is still pointing it at him, but he's reminding her he's not afraid of dying, and that if he does, she's going down with him."

Elliot sighs. "So if he's got a gun on her, she's back to square one. She's under his control again."

"And yet she was free when she called us. So either we're completely off in the sequence of events, or she managed to subdue him a second time."

Elliot grits his teeth. "Nick… I think we need to find that gun."

Ten minutes later, Nick and Elliot stand on the rocky beach; at their backs is the sunny, country-style vacation home they will forevermore think of as haunted.

Elliot glances around. "If I wanted to discard a gun so it's never found, where would I put it?"

"The ocean?"

Elliot shakes his head. "Olivia knows nothing about the tides, I know this for a fact. There's a lot of property downstream. Would she risk it washing up?"

"Depends how impaired her judgment was."

"For argument's sake, let's say you're in a drunken stupor. But you're also hell-bent on getting rid of a piece of evidence. Do you become careless, or ultra-paranoid?"

"Probably paranoid. Especially if there's also meth in your system."

Elliot nods. "All right, so no ocean."

"Bury it in the sand?"

"Naw, same problem – she'd worry about the tides uncovering it." He points to the northern border of the property. "Over there, in the reeds. The pier blocks access to the ocean."

"Bingo."

As they traipse to the swampy ditch, a renewed sense of doom consumes him. Standing at the scene of his beautiful partner's assault and torture has drained him emotionally. It's been almost as upsetting as seeing the terrible burn marks on her chest.

Elliot scans the length of the ditch.

"We can't search this whole thing," Nick says.

"Well we're not enlisting a team here to help," Elliot warns.

"Not what I was getting at," Nick rejoins. "Just saying, maybe there's a shortcut." He points at a patch of disturbed earth, possibly in the shape of a footprint. "Like right… there."

The man has a good eye. Indeed, somebody has trampled this spot recently.

As they start to excavate the muddy earth with their bare hands, dread washes over Elliot in tidal waves. A part of him wonders if they aren't making matters worse by digging – literally – to find something Olivia clearly doesn't want found.

But just as he's about to pull the plug on this misguided – if not downright cruel – exercise, he uncovers an all-too familiar-looking object. His heart sinks in his throat: they have just passed the point of no return. "This is definitely her gun. I recognize it." He brusquely hands it over to Nick, as if physically ridding himself of it will also cleanse him of the horrifying story it eventually tells.

Nick turns it around in his hands. "It's sticky," he says. "It's coated in dried fluids."

Elliot girds himself. "Yeah."

But it's Nick's turn, now, to look despondent.

Alarmed that her partner knows something he doesn't, Elliot asks, "You think he… you think we'll find her saliva on it?"

"No, I don't," he responds grimly.

"Why not?" Elliot asks, confused, and also thoroughly disconcerted.

"Because his gun had her saliva on it. And she told us about that in her statement. A little bit before she broke free, he climbed on top of her and shoved his gun right into her mouth. He made her beg for her life. It sounds like he was just about to rape her."

"What stopped him?"

"That's when the story starts to become… murky. She said that that's when she broke the bed frame and clocked him."

"All right. So she's comfortable telling us about this…. part. What isn't she comfortable telling us?"

Nick picks up a twig and crouches in the ditch, starts to dig a little deeper. And out pops a piece of satin material. It is pink. "Something worse," he says ominously.

He's barely able to hold back the torrent of vomit that rushes up his throat at the sight. "Panties."

"They've got to be hers." Nick twirls them with the twig so that their crotch is face-up. He points. "Blood."

"Maybe she had her –"

But Nick cuts him off, blushing. "Um, don't think so. Two weeks ago we were on a stakeout…"

Elliot puts up his hand. "Got it."

"So then the blood…."

"There was a reason she buried her own gun," Elliot states gravely.

Nick examines the muzzle. "Look. There's a bit of blood there too."

Elliot shifts on his feet. "Well he did hit her on the head…?" His voice rises in a last-minute question, reflecting his hail-mary hopefulness.

But once again Nick dashes this hope point-blank, shaking his head with unequivocalness. "Nope. He always used his gun for that. She was very clear about that in her statement."

Elliot swallows. "Then what it probably means…" He lets his voice trail off, unable to say the words out loud.

Nick bravely finishes his thought. "… is that the fluids coating this gun are vaginal."