It's past 9:30 when Olivia quietly closes the door to Noah's bedroom. She spent the past twenty minutes with him, under his covers, one arm wrapped around his athletic frame, nose buried in his hair. They do this now, since he's back from the McCanns, basking in a sweet embrace every evening, quietly reflecting on the day. She needs this, knows Noah does, too, even though he'd be embarrassed to admit as much to anyone. At school drop offs she doesn't get to hug or kiss him goodbye, and she is brutally aware that any acts of outward affection might be numbered. She soaks up what she can now, for as long as Noah will let her.
The table is cleared of their glasses and plates, one pizza box of leftovers at the far end of the island. Elliot gives her deja-vu standing in her kitchen, turning to face her, much like he did last week.
"He asleep?"
"He is," Olivia breathes, walking towards the breakfast bar. "Didn't take him too long."
Elliot's head lowers, eyes dropping to the where the card Noah made for him sits.
"When you said Noah gets attached easily…I thought you were just keeping me at arm's length." He's serious now, pensive.
Olivia remembers that day, lips pursed as her gaze falls where Elliot's lingers. Shoulders sagging, she realizes she could leave it at that, but it's not what she wants, not with the vague sense of remorse rumbling through her stomach. They agreed to talk, and while not everything needs to be said tonight, she doesn't think glossing over the truth is the right start for them.
"To be fair, it gave me an excuse," she offers meekly. „You weren't wrong."
He regards her then, sorrowful when her eyes draw up to meet his, and she imagines how he's been thinking this over since she left him in her kitchen, that maybe her hesitation then wasn't triggered by underlying distrust.
"That hurts."
"Elliot." She places both hands on the counter, uncertain of what to say.
He shakes his head, and brows furrowed, takes a harsh breath.
„It's not a rebuke, Liv. It's on me, I get that. It just hurts to think that you needed an excuse for me not to meet your son in the first place."
„We weren't solid," she says barely above a whisper. „I did what I could at the time. I told him about you but I needed time, Elliot. In the end, us running into you when I least expected it was a good thing, because there was no more overthinking when or how to introduce you to him." At first the thought had been paralyzing, even after Noah saw Elliot from afar, once. She'd deflected then, when her child had asked, had said the man she met while they were out sledding was someone she knows from work, giving away as little as possible while sticking to the truth.
Elliot's next words are weighted. He stands right across from her now, shoulders sagged, forlorn.
"How'd we get here?"
Instantaneously an ache starts to swell within her, a reminder of simmering anger blistering in her stomach.
Something flippant sits on the tip of her tongue, but the deep sadness swimming in his eyes gives her pause, cools off part of the exasperation. She swallows the rest of it down, the sour aftertaste making her throat almost close.
"You really ask me that?"
There's a small sound he makes, and suddenly the proximity and eye contact are stifling in comparison to his complete eradication from her life, too much for her to withstand.
She wants to tell him that he chose this, that he walked away from her and kept her hanging on, futilely hoping for a couple of years. Until what happened with Lewis made her come to the sobering realization that she was chasing ghosts, that nothing was going to bring Elliot back, forcing her to learn to rely on herself only, and learn to live without him.
"Why didn't you call me?" drones in her head, a steady haunting echo.
She'd untaught herself to need him, forced herself not to want him. It's hard to break down these walls she put up and allow him back in, especially at her most fragile state.
When Elliot doesn't answer she moves, walks around the counter and past him, in need to occupy her hands. It's not a way to evade the conversation entirely, the ball is in his court after all, but she can't look at him right now, and honestly, their situation begs for a drink.
She gets ice from her freezer, glasses, palms clammy and heart pounding in her ears when she feels Elliot's gaze following her in hot intensity.
"I don't have any beer," she says finally, breaking the oppressive silence.
"Whatever you're having'll do."
There's bourbon and gin; she goes for the latter because there's an opened bottle of tonic chilling in the refrigerator. She fixes the drinks with steely attention, not yet ready to put her focus on anything else. When it's done Olivia takes a labored breath, sliding one of the two tumblers towards Elliot while taking a hasty sip from her own.
The silence is thick for ten, maybe fifteen seconds after she puts her glass down with a weighted thud, the tension from both of them bleeding into the room until Elliot speaks.
"Ask me, Liv." It's a plea, strangled words she believes have been sitting on the tip of that tongue for a week.
They break her a little.
She wishes she could harden her heart to Elliot, wish it to stone. Talking about what happened is inevitable. Maybe she'd expected they'd dodge these conversations for a while longer, but they are here and clearly this is happening.
She tucks her bottom lip between her teeth, swallows, head falling forward before she turns and repeats his question back to him.
"How'd we get here, then? How…" Her stomach plummets into a freefall. "I mean, I get that the shooting must have been-"
"It wasn't about the shooting," Elliot blurts at her.
Olivia regards him with a confused stare.
"It wasn't about the shooting," he repeats, broad shoulders dropping under the admission again, his blue eyes clouded by grief and something she can't quite put her finger on.
It pulls the rug from under her, because for all these years she thought that shooting Jenna Fox, a teenage girl that subsequently died, must have been the last straw.
"What?"
It's all Olivia can manage to croak out. He leaves her no chance to process this, pushing on, before he loses his nerve, maybe.
"For years I managed to justify my actions. My feelings. That we were just close . That I was bound to feel a certain kind of way about my partner after all these years. Why I couldn't take a shot that I should've taken, how it threw me so much when you refused to pull the trigger at that warehouse with Gitano. Why I couldn't just push a button to hear you suffer during the Merrit Rook case, why I cared so goddamn much. Until I took that shot, and it wasn't because I honored a vow to serve and protect. I didn't take a moment to estimate if it was worth trying to talk her down."
It's shame, that thing she couldn't place before, making Elliot break eye-contact for a moment. It's written all over his face and posture now, making it seem like this tall, broad man is shrinking inches into himself right before her.
"I didn't think straight. I saw Sister Peg bleeding out on that floor and I couldn't stop thinking that it could've been you. That the next bullet could be you, even though that gun was pointed elsewhere." Elliot's hand balls to a fist, shaking, and just when she thinks he's going to hit the counter he lets it sink against the countertop in a hollow, controlled thud. "I wasn't gonna risk this going sideways and losing you. There were no more lines, no more rules," he says, quiet now.
She stands, shellshocked. For over a decade she held onto the idea that killing a teenage girl is what drove Elliot away. That maybe he wasn't in a good place, not in any place to talk to her because it hit too close to home. Even his confession at the hospital that he didn't think he'd be able to leave if he'd talked to her made some sort of sense. It didn't make her less angry. It didn't make the abandonment hurt less, but if he was scared she'd try and talk him into not giving up, into staying , she could understand it.
But this is not that, and she can't fully comprehend what he's saying to her.
"It was you, Olivia. Us. Jenna Fox was just a catalyst. One of many." His gaze is unsteady and watery, his voice faint. "You couldn't be who I wanted, and yet I couldn't ignore this… this thing that kept me up and wore me down. Always wondering why I felt like I'm in the wrong place at home. Always questioning the turns my life was taking, and whether when I looked at you, I was looking at the real thing."
His eyes droop, and Olivia trembles so much, she fears it's going to shake the earth.
"I was no longer wondering or questioning then. I knew . And it scared the crap out of me, Liv."
She draws in a breath that hardly feels like enough, head spinning with admissions throwing her completely off-kilter. She tucks her thumb inside her palm, trying to battle everything that comes bubbling up, every misplaced emotion she had herself when they were partners, carefully taking step after step within the lines the NYPD, Elliot's marriage, and human decency dictated.
It feels like Olivia's body is all fractured limbs and broken heart when Elliot takes a careful step towards her, dragging his hand along the counter. He hesitates to take another as he gauges her deer-caught-in-headlights reaction but doesn't move away, doesn't do or say anything to encourage him to stop, either, so he closes the distance.
When he initiates contact, touches his fingers to the back of her hand, she doesn't flinch. Her gaze turns teary and sinks to a spot on the floor between their feet, the words that clamber up her throat a faint staccato.
"You never said goodbye."
"I know," he says, and two simple words carry the heaviness of realization. "I am so sorry, Olivia. There's nothing I can say that will make up for it, nothing at all."
"Why? How could you just…" Her voice breaks and there's a part of her that wants to run away from this. From further explanations, from his searing yet comforting proximity that stifles the ache from missing him for so long after he left, an ache that carried on even when he was right back here in the city.
Instead of running though, she leans into him, allows herself to be a desegregating pillar dissolving to quicksand.
His hand slips from her hand to her back and he's holding her, again. There's a lot of it all of a sudden. Holding and touching after decades of being mindful of rules to be upheld and lines not to be crossed, and it's still foreign, but nice .
Being held, wanting to be held by Elliot is no longer as paralyzing. Instead it allows her to breathe a little easier, soothes every ache he placed underneath her skin for a sweet moment.
Olivia can feel Elliot's tension slipping away, taking hers right along with it. Despite her questions and the pain Elliot's truth inflicts she revels in his warmth, a moment of blissful ignorance because she's so very tired of pushing him away.
She wants to try. All week she psyched herself up for tonight, telling herself no matter how it'll go, she will not keep on running from the hard stuff, and here they are right in the eye of the storm. There's a time to process, a time to mourn what was lost, Olivia always hoped for that. It starts right here with confessions and hurt pouring out, old wounds cracking open before she can start to maybe finally heal.
If there's such a thing as catharsis, Olivia believes this could be it.
Much like last week she finds herself crying into Elliot's shirt, not quite as hard, but she is no less vulnerable tonight.
Elliot's nuzzling into her hair, arms cocooning her and it's baffling that they do it like this, coming together when it could have torn them further apart just as well.
The moment drags into silence, and she's almost convinced that for the time being what limited information he's offering has to be enough when she feels his breath, hears the worn rasp of Elliot's words.
"I didn't know up from down. I went home and it didn't feel like I should be there, like I was just not supposed to be there, but I couldn't… I didn't know what to do. I just didn't know. And so I didn't." He releases a harsh breath that rattles them both. "I didn't do anything. I wanted to call a thousand times, I swear I did, but I didn't know what to say. I didn't have the words, I didn't have the guts to tell you the truth and fuck it all up, and I didn't know how to say goodbye and lie to you when I hardly knew how to pretend that I didn't…You would have known. I couldn't. Olivia, I am sorry. I am so, so sorry."
She hears everything he doesn't say, what she surmises he can't spell out in actual words even now because he was married then, he had kids and a wife, an actual home . People who loved and relied on him. He had his faith , and she understands how much it always meant to him, that it defined him. It wouldn't hurl just any man into deep crisis, but it's not surprising that it did Elliot.
Inside she dies a little at the conclusion that his leaving had nothing to do with caring about her too little, but caring too much. That he'd come to the clear and ineradicable understanding that he loved her.
Olivia wants to tell him that she understands the complications, he had everything to lose after all, but she fails to form the words and so they die on her tongue. Instead she releases a single depleted sob into his shoulder.
Maybe she should feel sorry for Kathy, a woman she's certain would have given about anything to have her husband love only her, leave this soulsucking unit for her - a job Elliot eventually left not because of vicarious trauma but because he couldn't face what had grown between them. After just a couple of months, she'd told Elliot about her upbringing and her mother's alcoholism, about how she came about, what she believed was her purpose in SVU. She'd never mentioned any of it to friends in college or academy. But she told him. She felt their inexplicable connection. She felt safe with him, seen by him. Now she wonders if what they've become to each other had been inevitable, if it's been stirring from the beginning.
Olivia should feel sorry for Kathy, indeed, but the truth is that right here, right now she only feels sorry for herself.
Every chance to mourn for an actual reason was taken from her. Instead she was left with countless question marks, fumbling in the dark, wondering where she went wrong. There wasn't a single memory that wasn't tainted with regret and anguish – his 'for better or worse', his 'Liv, you're family'.
An explanation would have torn her apart, Elliot inevitably walking away over what couldn't be leaving an imprint on her forever, but at least she would've known for the first time that someone loved her fiercely. She wishes he would have spared her the cruelty of the unknown that weighed like lead in her stomach.
The silence has been torturous and every ounce of hope Olivia once held for Elliot to eventually pick up the phone and contact her or see him again had sunken well below her feet.
A part of her wants to scream at him to take his excuses elsewhere, poised to push him away, open palms flat against his chest, but she needed this acknowledgement, needed to know what brought them to a finish line and back here to what could possibly be a starting point, so she crumbles against him as his embrace tightens, squeezing out her confusion.
It takes Olivia a minute to withdraw enough to look at Elliot, her eyes slightly bloodshot and hazy. His hands fall to her sides, cradling her still, making her feel like something sacred when every instinct tells her to stay a little cautious. Her thumb slowly brushes his chest, unwitting, as if to convince herself that he's there and tangible in every way.
"You're right here, and all I feel is… grief and loss. I've mourned you for the longest time, but I never knew what I was even supposed to mourn," Olivia manages. Her voice is husky. "I don't know how to trust this. You being here, being… reliable? Even after you came back it felt like you kept disappearing on me, when all I wanted was for you to try. "
"I know it took me too long, and you deserved more than that, but it's different now. "I'm here. I'm not going to go anywhere. You have to know that's not who I am."
She makes a hopeless sound, eyes drooping, and she wishes she could trust this, but he gave her so many reasons to be so reticent.
"That is just the thing, Elliot. Half the time I didn't know who you were. You never came to me for anything, instead you confided in Angela Wheatley and-," she stops herself, shaking her head and takes a deep breath. "Going UC without giving me a heads up, weeks of total radio silence just to turn around and tell me you had orders?"
"That wasn't right," he agrees, gentle. "I wasn't thinking straight."
"You have no idea how that felt. How scary it was. You'd dropped off the earth before, and all I wanted was some steadiness. You do one thing and I always start to get my hopes up, always setting my heart on you and then you don't come through, Elliot. Not once did you come through."
Finally Olivia takes a step back, in desperate need for a little space. What he's done in the past two and half years has been scalding, and she feels it in its full intensity again, now.
"You gave me that letter and it was heartbreaking, and to be honest, I've never felt more embarrassed after reading it and thinking that this… this thing between us was all in my head, but I still talked myself into coming to talk about it just for you to leave me standing there – which would have been all right, I get that things get in the way. But you never got back to me. Not for months, and then when you finally gather you wanna talk, it's when you're high on God knows what to tell me Kathy wrote it all, barring the one thing that didn't make sense."
She looks at him, her gaze as hollow as she feels.
Elliot nods, and for a few moments her words stretch between them, stifling and oppressive.
"I never should have given you that letter. I know that now, but at the time I was so confused, Liv. I was nowhere near being able to tell you the full truth, I was hurting, I was full of fear and grief and a thirst for finding who did this to Kathy, for revenge. I told you I didn't know where to start and I didn't. After all this time I really didn't, so I thought maybe it would give us a clean slate. And maybe I also thought that I owed it to Kathy. To keep on… pretending. It was never my intention to hurt you."
As she listens she bites her bottom lip, feels the sting of her teeth. She wants to desperately believe Elliot didn't go out of his way to hurt her, but she still feels battered and bruised from his actions. She's hardly able to count the times she felt like she was losing him all over again, their friendship only hanging on by a thread.
She regards her drink now, her hand wrapping around the cool glass, condensation wetting her fingers.
"But you did hurt me, and it's… it's just hard ."
Taking a sip she closes her eyes, feels the bitterness of the tonic on her tongue, reveling in the distinct notes of juniper and citrus. The alcohol settles in her stomach like sweet relief when his words don't quite get her there.
"Liv, look at me."
Hesitantly she does, the corners of her mouth distorted.
"What can I do? I know apologies don't cut it at this point."
He looks forlorn to her, and she wishes she had the answer. There's the slightest shrug of her shoulders, a saddened shake of the head.
"I don't know, Elliot," she breathes. "Just… be here ."
If anything is going to fix this, Olivia thinks it's consistency. There's not much else that can be done. It's hard to be convinced when he says that he cares when his actions say otherwise, when he touches her like he wants her only to turn around and make her feel like an afterthought. If he wants her to trust this, trust him , he has to earn it. He has to show up for her, and she's convinced he'll need to be persistent about it all, too.
When he speaks he sounds determined and sincere, reaching out once more, wrapping his hand around her wrist.
"I am. I will be."
She's inclined to give him a chance to prove it, opening herself up to the possibility of him keeping his word this time. Lindstrom's voice is a quiet whisper in the back of her head, advising her to either see whether there's more there and explore it, or to move on. She's spent weeks lying motionless in her bed at night, staring at the ceiling in total darkness, trying to picture what either option could look like for them. Imagining her life without Elliot in it had been a razor blade to the mind. If she could walk away, she believes she would have done it by now, so she figures it must be worth one more try to see if they can be more than just friends. Elliot will have to show up and earn it, and she'll have to stop catastrophizing and allow him to step up.
It will take a bit of time, Olivia knows it will, but she doesn't want to see another winter, another summer fade, stuck in this place, nursing old wounds. They are already here, toes tipped into cold, unknown waters, and she readies herself to take a leap. Looking into his eyes Olivia sees something there that makes her think that redemption might exist.
There's no air in her lungs, and little fog in her brain, making her move just enough to allow his fingers to slip from her wrist into her closing hand.
Twenty three years, and she's tired of counting.
"Okay. We'll do this. Let's see how this can work." She expels a breath, squeezes his warm hand that rests in hers, heartbeat accelerating at the thought of fully committing herself to this, to him.
Elliot's brows draw together. He looks dumbfoundedly at her before his gaze falls to their joint hands.
„I do need time," she clarifies. „That hasn't changed. But I'm willing to figure this out, if you are. No more excuses."
She looks at him, expectant and his features soften, corners of his mouth lifting into a slight smile.
"I am, Liv. One hundred percent."
There's tug at her hand, drawing her closer, but before she fully steps back to align their bodies she looks at him seriously.
"Elliot, if you screw this up…" She lets it hang, hoping she doesn't have to say it out loud ever. If this goes sideways, she's not sure they can come back from it.
He nods soberly, a stalwart soldier for her.
"Understood, Captain."
