A week after Kathy Stabler's funeral, he turns up at her office, asking for a favor. She's on the phone so she just waves him in, closes her eyes so she can focus on the conversation she's meant to be having with Garland, and not on Elliot's face. She caught a glimpse of him, though, before he sank into the chair across from her desk. He looks tired, she thinks. He looks like he hasn't slept in days. Maybe he hasn't. After she lost Ed, it was a long, long time before she slept all the way through the night again. After she lost Ed the dreams came back. Blood and burns and Ed, drifting away. Melinda never let her see his body, but she has seen enough head shots in her life for her subconscious mind to take the two visuals, the face of the man she loves and the corpses of victims, and mash them up into a psychedelic horror show. Doctor Lindstrom told her that was only natural, but it isn't, she thinks, because most people haven't seen the kinda shit she has. The things she has in her head, the memories, the grisly gore of it, that's not natural, and no one else could possibly understand it. Elliot would, though. She wonders if he has nightmares, now.

A clattering sound makes her open her eyes; the phone call with Garland is nearly done and Elliot is sprawled comfortably in a chair across the desk from her, his rangy limbs all splayed out and the arrogant twist to his mouth at odds with his expensive suit. He picked up a sense of fashion in Italy, apparently, and he does look good, but she thinks of him in an old plaid flannel, the first few buttons undone and showing off his white thermals underneath, and she thinks she liked the old clothes best.

He is the source of the sound that drew her attention away from Garland; Elliot has taken an interest in one of the photographs on her desk, has reached out and taken it into his hands, and she knows exactly which picture it is, and she feels a headache starting to build behind her eyes.

I can't do this right now, she thinks, watching the vein start to pulse in the side of Elliot's neck, a sure sign that he's angry, now. Like he has any goddamn right to be.

"We're on it, Chief," she says to Garland. The phone call ends. Silence settles over them, Elliot looking hard at the framed photograph in his hands, Olivia watching him, warily. Waiting. She knows what's coming. Honestly, she's a little shocked it's taken them this long to get here. He didn't close the door behind him when he came in and she's wishing he had, now, and wondering if she has enough time to get up and close it herself before he loses his mind.

"What the fuck, Liv?" he asks her in a low, dangerous voice. Apparently she has no time at all.

"I'm not talking to you about this," she says.

I'm not, she thinks. I can't.

She can't. His wife has been buried for a week, and he still doesn't know who is responsible, or why, and he is lost, and scrambling to hold his children, to hold his whole life together, living out of suitcases in a hotel. His grief sits heavily on him, and she is still learning how to walk with her own, and the combination of the two will drown them both. She knows it will, and she is trying to push him back, trying to save herself, but Elliot is clinging to her ankle, dragging her beneath the waves with him.

"Tucker, Liv?" he spits, and shows her the picture.

As if she needed him to remind her.

It's one of the photos from their wedding day. Ed is wearing his best black suit, and there is a white rose in his lapel. He is holding Noah, whose suit looks just like Ed's, on his left hip. His right arm is slung around Olivia's waist, and she is wearing her pretty white dress, and her head is tilted towards him, and they are, all three of them, smiling. It is a picture of her family, a reminder of a happier day. It is a memory that pains her, now, but one she cannot part with. On the good days she looks at it, and smiles, thinking about him, and on the bad days she has to hide it in a drawer because just the sight of it makes her want to scream. Everyone knows what she has lost, and no one dares to mention it. No one but Elliot, sitting there with eyes full of rage, speaking her husband's name like a curse. She thinks, then, about a case she and Nick worked early in their partnership, about a Romani boy who was kidnapped and killed. She thinks of the child's mother, swearing at her for speaking the boy's name; she did not want Olivia to say his name, because if she did he would not rest. She wonders if the woman was right. She wonders if there is life still, on the other side of the veil, wonders if Ed has heard Elliot call out his name just now. Wonders if he's gonna come walking, called out of shadows by the sound of his name, and what she'll do if he does.

"You're married to that asshole?" Elliot asks her, dropping the picture back on her desk with a clatter. She reaches for it instinctively; it is precious, to her, and if the glass in the frame breaks she might, too. His eyes follow the progress of her hands, watching the fluorescent lights overhead glinting off her rings. He looks like he wants to throw something.

"You don't get to talk to me about him," she tells him through clenched teeth.

In Elliot's memories, Ed is a villain. A shadow, lurking just out of sight, waiting to strike. A bogeyman, used to frighten children and overzealous cops. In Elliot's memories, Ed is the one hunting him, hunting them. Ed is the monster under the bed. Elliot hates him, and Elliot has just found out that Olivia married him, and she tries to remind herself that if the woman she'd been ten years ago - the woman she'd been when last Elliot saw her - found out that she'd one day marry Ed Tucker, she would have been furious, and hurt, and confused, just as Elliot is now. Elliot wasn't there, for all the long years in between. Elliot wasn't there, after Lewis took her the second time, when Ed tried like hell to give her an out. Elliot wasn't there, that night Ed bought her a bourbon and made her laugh for the first time. Elliot wasn't there, that day in front of the townhouse, when Ed looped his arm around her waist and half-carried her to his car and kept the vultures off her. The dance that led Olivia and Ed from hatred into love was long, and slow, and winding, and Elliot has not seen a single step of it. He has a right to his anger, she tells herself, but his anger cuts her to the quick, because Elliot was a piece of her once, and so, too, was Ed, and she is being torn apart because one half of her heart hates the other and she cannot mend the fissure between the two. It will take more than stitches, more than staples and glue. It is a wound that will take more skill than she has to heal.

"After everything he did to us-"

"You have no idea what he did for me," she snaps, cutting him off quick. And he doesn't, she thinks, he really doesn't have a clue, because he wasn't fucking there. He didn't know Ed, not really. He has never tried, as she has tried, to see things from Ed's point of view. Ed saw two cops who were prone to lying, prone to getting themselves into trouble, when it was his job to stop them. Ed had her arrested for murder, and yes she was innocent but her DNA was found at the crime scene, and he had every reason to doubt her. He couldn't ignore the evidence just because she was such a nice girl; she has never been nice. And Jenna, Christ; maybe there had been another way to stop her or maybe Elliot had no choice, but they'll never know, because Elliot killed her, and she was the sixth person he'd shot and no one else on the squad had numbers anywhere close to that, and Ed's hands were tied. Elliot's indignation is rubbing her raw; part of her wants to be on his side, again, wants to be righteous and self-assured and in lockstep with him, but the part that is a Captain, the part that loved her husband, wants to kick him for his petulance.

"You don't have any idea," she hisses at him. "He was there for me. He was here, Elliot, and you were god knows where. He was good to me and he stayed." Until he didn't, she thinks. "You don't get to talk about my husband."

Ed's was the voice that pulled her back, when she was flirting on the edge of drinking too much to cover her pain. Ed is the one who held her up at Mike Dodds's funeral. Ed is the one who calmed her when the nightmares woke her in the middle of the night, gasping and sweating. Ed is the one whose fingers laced with hers, whose voice joined hers as they cheered Noah on at baseball games, and later at his dance recitals. Ed is the one who waited for her in the morgue while she said goodbye to her brother, and held her after. Every ghost that haunts her steps, every moment of pain she has endured over the last ten years, Ed knew about it, and helped her move past it, and Elliot wasn't there at all, and it makes her feel like throwing something, watching Elliot sitting there looking at her like she's the one who's hurting him.

You're the asshole who left, she thinks. If Elliot hadn't left, would she have married Ed at all? She doesn't know, and the question troubles her.

In his chair Elliot is fuming; she can see that the sound of the word husband coming out of her mouth makes him want to eat his own liver. Good, she thinks.

"Your husband." He says it like it's a dirty word. "Christ, Olivia." He runs his hand over his head, agitated and disappointed with her, but she is immune to his displeasure; she has enough of her own.

"My husband," she digs in, relentlessly. "Yes, I got married. Yes, I have a son. Yes, I still had a life after you left. The world didn't stop turning just because you weren't here."

If she says it just to hurt him she tries not to think about that, or what it means. He needs to hear it; he needs to know that when he left he stopped being the most important person in her world, stopped being the center of everything. He needs to know that she learned how to live without him. That she is not who she was, that he cannot expect her to be. When he looks at her now, what does he see?

"It's like I don't even know you, Liv," he says, shaking his head, and with those words he answers her question. He sees a stranger.

There have been times, over the years, when she's wondered what she would do if he came back, what that would look like. She has imagined yelling at him, striking him, holding him. She has imagined wry smiles, and cups of coffee, tentative overtures of kindness and laughter as they tell stories about the good old days. She never imagined this. Kathy Stabler in the ground and Elliot's eyes wild around the edges and both of them lashing out, hurt and hurting each other. When she dreamed about his homecoming in the past it always felt like a reconciliation; this feels like an execution.

"Yeah well maybe you don't," she says, very quietly. "A lot can happen in ten years."

In ten years she has been traumatized and tortured. She has said goodbye to friends and lovers, buried a husband and a brother. In ten years she has settled, and calmed, and wept. She has made a family, not just with Ed and with Noah, but with Fin, and Amanda, and Sonny, and Kat. Noah calls Barba Uncle Rafa, and asks to see him when he calls Olivia on facetime. Uncle Nick calls sometimes, too, and Uncle Munch comes over for Sunday dinner every now and again. Her life is full, now, full of people, of voices and faces and love, even when it hurts, and how can Elliot know her, if he doesn't know about all of that?

Something her mother used to say, when she was sober, comes back to Olivia then, a piece of wisdom handed down from one of the books Serena loved more than anything else. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. It was silly, she tells herself now, to think she could reclaim her former closeness with this man. They aren't those people, any more.

"How long have you been married?" he asks her, and his tone is a little softer, a little less brutal this time. She can hear the gears turning over in his brain; his guilt is overriding his anger, and she loses some of her own frustration. Really, she thinks, they're both just doing the best they can.

"It would have been five years in October."

She answers him reflexively, without thinking about the consequences, but his brow furrows, and she realizes too late the door she has just opened. She keeps forgetting that he doesn't know her husband is dead, that she hasn't told him yet. Everyone else knows; everyone else looks at her and sees her wounds like scar tissue on her skin, but it is news to him. It is news she promised herself she wouldn't share, and now she's gone and done it.

"Would have been?" he repeats, concerned. He leans towards her, forearms resting loosely on his knees, his eyes blue and bright and intense. Blue eyes make her think of Ed, and she looks away from Elliot now. Sometimes, not so much towards the end but when they were first getting serious, she would look into Ed's eyes, and see Elliot's, and wonder where he was. And now the opposite is happening, and she is as torn and as miserable now as she ever has been.

"I really, really can't talk to you about this, Elliot," she says. She is begging him, in her own way, not to do this. Not to force her to make this revelation, not to unmask her pain, because when he does he will be confronted once more by his own. She does not want him to look at her, and think there but for the grace of god.

"Why not?" He is like a dog with a bone, sometimes. Undeterred, thoughtless. He wants his answers, and he won't back down, even though she wishes like hell he would.

"Liv, what's going on?"

The words come out gentle, too gentle, and reignite her anger. If he wants to be kind to her now, if he wants to be steady for her now, if he wants to be someone she can lean on now, fuck him because now is not the moment when she needed him. She needed him six months ago, when the first responders broke down her door and found her husband dead in their bedroom. She needed him seven years ago, when Lewis took her, and damn near killed her, left her bruised and bloody and a shell of herself. She needed him, and he wasn't there. He is now, but too little too late, she thinks. He has asked her one time too many, and the words come flooding out of her, full of pain and anger.

"Because he ate his gun last year, Elliot, and your wife just died, and neither of us is ready to have this conversation."

That shuts him up. His eyes go wide, and hurt, and his mouth drops open, just for a second before he catches himself and clamps it shut. His face is soft, and full of compassion, but it does not soothe her; it twists in her gut, feels too much like pity for her to welcome it. What a fucking pair they make, she thinks. His wife is dead and so is her husband, and they are left alone, separated by a well of grief and yet joined by it. She knows the road he is walking now, because she has walked it herself, and maybe they could help each other through, if only they weren't both so fucking angry. She doesn't want platitudes, doesn't want to hear him say they'll get through this, somehow, but he's not saying any of that shit to her. He's just looking at her like he understands. Like for the first time since he's come back he actually recognizes her.

"I'm sorry, Olivia," he says. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"There's a lot of things you don't know," she tells him, but this time it is not an accusation. It is just a statement of fact. There is so much they have left to say to one another.

Maybe he wants to hear it because his mouth opens, then, determined to speak, but before he can Amanda appears in the doorway. Duty calls. Elliot shuffles out, and he has to call her back two hours later when he remembers the original purpose for his visit, the favor he forgot to ask her the moment he saw Ed's face in the photograph. She doesn't pick up the phone, and she never does that favor for him.