my bones are shifting in my skin / and you my love are gone


Lately, Luca's favorite game was to build a tower of Legos up as high as possible and wait until it inevitably wobbled and crashed to the floor. Every time it happened, he howled with laughter and clapped his chubby hands until he started gathering the blocks up again. That Sunday afternoon, he played this game with the help of Sonny on the Carisi's living room floor. So far, the tower they were constructing was only ten blocks tall. More! Luca kept demanding of his father, seemingly unimpressed with their progress each time Sonny clicked a Lego into place.

"Go 'head," Sonny prompted him after he finished his turn.

Luca, with as much caution as he could muster, set a blue Lego atop his father's red. "More!"

Sonny adjusted the block on the tower so it was aligned with the rest, then went to pick up another. He paused when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, but when he pulled the device out, he didn't recognize the number on the screen. He groaned, anticipating something work-related.

"More! More!" Luca kept chanting.

"Carisi," Sonny answered, balancing the phone against his shoulder so he could add a yellow Lego to the tower.

"Hi, is this Dominick?" an unfamiliar female voice asked.

"This is."

"Hi, my name is Holly, I'm calling from Bellevue OBGYN-"

"Oh, you probably want my wife's number-"

"No, no. I need to talk to you," Holly insisted. "Your wife is here."

Sonny's brow furrowed, confused. "Huh? It's Sunday. She doesn't have an appointment."

"I know," Holly said slowly. "She came in a couple of hours ago complaining of some fatigue and cramping. While she was waiting in our office she passed out-"

"Is she okay?" he demanded, his blood suddenly running cold in his veins.

"More, dada!" Luca whined, but Sonny ignored him.

Holly continued, "She's in surgery right now-"

"Surgery?" he exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "What are you talkin' about? What kind of surgery?"

"The doctor can explain more to you," Holly told him levelly. "He just asked me to call you and have you come here as soon as possible."

"I, okay, yeah. I'm comin' right now," Sonny stammered before hanging up and running into the kitchen. There, Jesse was making cookies with his mother. "Ma, I need you to watch the kids."

His mother raised an eyebrow. "Where are you running off to?"

He snatched up his coat and yanked open the door. "I've gotta go to the hospital."

"The hospital?" she said. "I thought you were off today?"

Sonny looked between Jesse and his mother. Jesse was standing on a stool at the counter, covered in pink and green frosting from decorating. She was enthusiastically tossing multicolored sprinkles onto her flower-shaped creations. He didn't want to worry the five-year-old, even if he was boiling over with anxiety himself. "Ma, I can't... I'll tell you later, okay? Luca's in the livin' room. Just stay here with the kids, would you?"

"Yeah, of course I will," his mother assured him.

He had a foot out of the door when he heard Jesse call, "Dad-"

"I'll be back soon," he promised her loudly, hoping it was true.


Sonny skidded into the OB-GYN department at Bellevue. Breathless with his haste and his nerves, he approached the young woman behind the front desk.

"Hi. I'm looking for my wife, Amanda. Amanda Carisi," he told her as pleasantly as possible.

She glanced up at him. "Are you her husband?"

"Yeah, I am," he asserted. "Where is she?"

Her eyes flickered to her computer screen and Sonny could have sworn he saw her mouth twitch into a split-second frown. She stood up. "Let me get Dr. Miller for you."

He crossed his arms over his chest, pacing while he waited. In his head, he tried to replay the hours before to get a clue as to what was going on: Amanda hadn't felt well that morning. The description of her symptoms had been sort of vague, but Sonny assumed that was because she was exhausted by his nagging.

"Sonny," Dr. Miller said, appearing in the waiting room. He waved him over. "Come have a seat in my office."

Sonny followed him, but he didn't sit down, not even when Dr. Miller took his place behind his large desk.

"Where's Amanda?" Sonny demanded, trying his hardest to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

He watched Dr. Miller pull in a breath. "Amanda came in with some fatigue and mild cramping. Before I got to see her, her blood pressure plummeted."

"That's happened to her before."

"I know, but, this time she started hemorrhaging."

His eyes widened. "Hemorrhaging? What? I just left her three hours ago, she was fine-"

"We rushed her into surgery and I'm told that they just finished," Dr. Miller continued gently. "She needed over a liter of blood. She's okay, but..." He sighed, looking down at his folded hands before meeting Sonny's gaze. "There's no easy way to tell you this. She had a miscarriage."

Sonny felt his heart drop into his stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, like maybe he had misheard, or maybe he wasn't actually in that office at all. "No. No, that's not possible. We were just here... three weeks ago and everything was fine-"

"The baby didn't have a heartbeat when she got here, Sonny," Dr. Miller told him grimly.

He blinked the physician back into focus on again. He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it, his throat too tight to say anything.

"We had to do a procedure called a dilation and curettage to stop the bleeding," the doctor continued. "Amanda is just coming out of anesthesia now and she's on pain medication, so she's a little out of it."

"Does she know?" Sonny asked bluntly, his voice low and foreign to his own ears.

Dr. Miller shook his head. "No, not yet. It all happened very quickly. I was planning to go in and talk to her now."

"Wait. Just... let me do it. Let me tell her," he requested quietly.

"Alright... she's in recovery room five on the third floor. I'll come up in a little while and check in," Dr. Miller agreed. He frowned as he added solemnly, "I'm really sorry, Sonny."

"Yeah. Thanks." The words sounded angrier than he had intended them to but he didn't apologize for his tone.

He moved through the hospital mindlessly; he had been there so many times for work, he probably could have drawn a detailed map of the place. On the third floor, he walked down the hall with nauseating apprehension. Sonny breezed past the nursing station and slipped through the door to room five to find Amanda in bed. She looked paler than usual, but not much different than how she appeared when he had left her at home earlier. He felt a rush of relief, immensely grateful that she was alive, but that did not quell the growing pit in his stomach. As Sonny approached her, she blinked at him in confusion for a minute before her glassy blue eyes widened.

"Baby," Amanda drawled, reaching out for him. "What are you doin' here?" She struggled to sit up straighter. "What am... what am I doin' here?"

Sonny mustered a small smile. She always sounded her most southern when she was intoxicated or angry - he just wished she was either of those things outside of this situation. He sat on the edge of her bed, as close to her as possible, and set a hand atop her blanket-clad thigh. "You don't remember anything?"

She squinted, very obviously trying to think through her haze. "I remember feeling kinda funny and coming in. I got really dizzy. Don't be pissed, I just wanted to be sure everything was okay and I didn't wanna worry you." Her lower lip puffed out slightly in her disorientation. "Everything is okay, isn't it?"

He was having trouble looking her in the eye. Maybe Dr. Miller should have done this himself, in his clinical, well-practiced way. Sonny tried to remember what he learned at the police academy so many years go: when you're giving difficult news to somebody, intellectualize it. You're stating facts, not feelings. But he had never been good at that, he had always been the person with the lump in his throat or the hitch in his voice. He had always felt too much. Now, it was impossible not to be consumed by both grief and dread. There was not a stoic bone left in his body.

"No, Amanda," he began quietly. "You passed out in the waiting room. Something happened, you lost a lot of blood and they had to bring you into surgery and..." He pulled in a deep, steadying breath before adding almost inaudibly, "the baby. The baby didn't make it."

Amanda studied him as if he had sprouted an extra head. "What?"

Oh, God, don't make me say it again, he pleaded with her silently. "You had a miscarriage-"

"No, everything was fine," she interrupted, suddenly animated and fierce. "You were with me three weeks ago, everything was good-"

"I know, Amanda," Sonny told her weakly. "It was, but... but somethin' happened. Dr. Miller is gonna come up later..."

Wild-eyed and chest heaving, she looked at him. Selfishly, he wanted to avert his gaze because it was painful to watch the devastating realization wash over Amanda's features. It was like witnessing her crumble into a million trembling pieces. As seconds passed, she looked like she was struggling for air.

He reached up for her hand and squeezed it hard, hoping to ground her. "Hey, take a deep breath, you're-"

"I-I don't feel good," she stammered breathlessly, wriggling beneath his grasp. "I'm gonna be sick. I'm gonna be sick." She suddenly leaned over and vomited into the trash can by her bed; it was only bile.

Sonny winced, his heart clenching in his chest at the sight of her suffering. "Let me get the doctor, okay?" he said quietly, getting up from her side to walk quickly out of her room.

It was a perfectly-timed yet cowardly excuse to step out into the hallway. There was so much pain in that small space that Sonny suddenly felt as if he was being suffocated. He swallowed thickly, staving off the tears that were burning his eyes, then strode over to the nurses' station to do what he said he would.


"Second trimester miscarriages are very rare," Dr. Miller had told her, as if that was something to be impressed by. "But the good news is this doesn't mean you'll have trouble conceiving again in the near future, and your risk of another miscarriage is much lower."

It hadn't felt like good news; it hadn't felt like anything. In fact, if she hadn't been trapped in that hospital bed until eight o'clock that night, Amanda probably wouldn't have known that anything had happened to her at all. She had been a little sore and woozy, but aside from some slight bleeding, there was no evidence that the life that had grown inside of her for four and a half months no longer existed.

Everything was blurry. Sonny had driven them home in silence that evening. He clearly hadn't known what to say to her, but Amanda hadn't known what to say to him, either.

"Y'want something to eat?" he had offered her timidly once they were back. The default Carisi response to any situation.

Amanda had refused. Instead, she promptly took two of the sleeping pills she had left the hospital with and fell into a dreamless slumber.

Curled beneath the sheets of their messy bed the next morning, she stared into space for an hour. She could hear Sonny watching television downstairs; their walls were thin. She had called out of work, feigning illness, while Sonny wasn't scheduled till the evening shift. The doctor had advised her to stay home for the next few days and Amanda was debating what was worse: to go into the precinct no longer pregnant or to hide out at home plagued by her own miserable thoughts. In her head, Amanda looked back at the past four and a half months, trying to pinpoint what she had done wrong. We'll send the tissue out for testing to see if this can be explained, Dr. Miller had told her. If she hadn't been so exhausted, she would have screamed, that isn't tissue, that's my son!

Sitting up, Amanda got out of bed. She felt a little light-headed, most likely from whatever she had taken the night before. She didn't bother looking at herself in the mirror, certain she would cringe at her reflection. She began to pad down the hallway with the intention of going downstairs, but she paused outside of the spare room like her feet had suddenly gotten trapped in wet cement. The door ajar, she felt her fingertips pushing it all the way open. The space was still empty save for the messy pile of baby clothes from Sonny's mother and a can of unopened gray paint in the shade 'reflecting pool,' both sitting on the wood floor.

She walked further into the room as if her legs were working on their own accord, then carefully shut the door behind her. Amanda lowered herself down against a wall and reached for the clothes. She hadn't washed them yet - she figured she had plenty of time to do that - but they were soft to the touch. A little green dinosaur on the front of a white onesie grinned up at her and she smoothed her hand over it before she folded it neatly. She set it down at her side. Amanda didn't know why, but she felt compelled to do that with all of them, and soon she had an orderly stack of clothing that nobody needed.

Her eyes settled on the near-by can of paint. 'Reflecting pool' was such a stupid name; it was just light gray. Even so, Sonny had opened it up a few days earlier to make sure that she liked the very particular shade. Amanda did and he remained impartial, only concerned about whether or not it made her happy. It had - in her past apartments, she hadn't been allowed to paint Jesse's room and Luca had never even had his own space. Now she had the opportunity to make something special out of the dusty old office.

A hot rush of anger coursed through her. With surprising strength, Amanda kicked out a leg so her heel could send the paint flying across the hardwood until it hit the opposite wall with a loud 'crack.' The re-sealed top popped open, 'reflecting pool' slowly seeping out to stain the molding and floor. Her foot throbbed immediately, tears springing to her eyes as she pulled her knees to her chest. Through her blurred vision, Amanda watched the paint continue to ooze from its container, uncaring.

The door swung open suddenly and Sonny appeared panicked in the doorway. He had heard the noise from all the way downstairs. "What the hell was-" His gaze dropped to the mess on the floor by his feet. "Oh." He looked at Amanda again, concern etched deeply into his features. "What happened?"

Her arms tightened around her knees. "I kicked it."

"Why?" he asked tentatively.

It felt like too much of an effort to answer.

Sonny moved toward her cautiously. "Let's get out of here, huh?" he suggested gently, reaching out his hand to her "C'mon."

"I like it in here," Amanda told him.

His brows knitted together. "Why?"

She rested her chin on top of her knees. "Because in here, everything's the same. It's just how I left it."

He looked uncomfortable, anxious. "Well, I don't wanna be in here."

There was an obvious edge to his voice; he was hurting. She didn't say anything.

"Amanda..." he sighed. "D'you wanna talk?"

She shook her head. I don't know how to talk about this.

"Maybe I should tell Liv that I can't come in tonight," Sonny continued. "My parents'll keep the kids till tomorrow, we can just hang around..."

Amanda shook her head again. "No, it's alright. I'm fine." She pulled herself to her feet and brushed past him, her hand giving his bicep a squeeze as she walked out the door. "I'm gonna go get something to clean this mess up."


AN: Ahhh sorry, I know I'm the worst! But at least I got these chapters out to you quick! ;-)