AN: Some slightly nsfw stuff in here. I also couldn't resist tossing in another especially heinous crime. Sorry, not sorry.


all these voices in my head get loud / I wish that I could shut them out


On the first warm and sunny May Saturday, Amanda sat on the bleachers at Forest Hill Park. With a faded blue Braves cap on her head and Luca in her lap, she watched as Jesse's co-ed t-ball team took over the field. Frannie sat obediently at her feet, while Sonny stood tall by the dugout with two other parents, all of them charged with getting the group of five and six year olds to successfully complete a ten-inning game. Amanda freely admitted that she didn't have the patience for the task, but Sonny lived for the challenge every spring. His enthusiasm for teaching kids baseball was not only endearing but it influenced Jesse, too, who wanted to 'practice' almost constantly. If a major league game was on television, sometimes Amanda would find them sitting side-by-side on the couch, Sonny explaining rules and plays to the curious little girl as if she was studying.

It was hardly an organized operation - how could it be, when the players were so young and easily distracted? There were a lot of 'time-outs' to refocus the group, which meant that the game was fairly slow-moving. Amanda didn't mind, she enjoyed the opportunity to sit in the sun. She let Luca play on the grass at her feet in front of the bleachers when he got too fidgety to sit on her lap, his little fingers gleefully ripping up chunks of weeds and dirt to toss around. He would need a serious bath later.

Amanda's phone rang in the pocket of her hoodie - it was her mother calling. She let it ring a few times before she finally decided to pick up.

"Hey, mama," she said, eyes flickering from Luca to the field.

"Hi, Amanda," Beth Anne Rollins drawled. "How are you doin'?"

"I'm alright," she answered honestly, because she was. She wasn't good and she wasn't bad. She was alright. "I'm at Jesse's t-ball game."

Beth Anne sighed. "She doesn't wanna do ballet or something? Something more... feminine?"

Amanda rolled her eyes. "We've been over this. She likes sports."

"Well of course she does, she doesn't know any different. Between both her of parents, you guys have more sports memorabilia than eBay."

She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes, mustering up every shred of patience. "It makes her happy."

"Alright, alright," her mother replied. "Anyway, I've been thinkin'... I know you're going to Disney World next month..."

Amanda opened her eyes again. "Yeah..."

"Well, I was hoping maybe before you all go back to New York, you could stop over in Loganville," Beth Anne suggested sweetly.

She snorted at the ridiculousness of her mother's statement. "Why would we ever want to do that?"

"Because this is your home, Amanda, and you've never even brought Sonny here."

"Uh, yeah, for a reason."

"None of my friends have even met my grandchildren-"

"They can look at pictures."

"Amanda, just think about it, would you?"

Amanda looked out at the field; Jesse was waiting on deck, adjusting her helmet. "Look, mama, Jesse's about to be at bat, okay? I'll think about it," she said hurriedly.

"Really think about it," Beth Anne urged.

"Uh huh. I will. Bye." She hung up before the conversation could go any further.

She eagerly shifted her focus back to the game. "C'mon, Jesse!" Amanda called to her daughter enthusiastically.

Jesse looked over at her, grinning proudly as the tee was set up. When she turned back around, she hit the ball with such surprising force that even she looked stunned by her own ability. Then, she stood frozen at home plate.

Amanda jumped to her feet, frantic. "Go! Run, Jesse!" she shrieked amid the chorus of other voices who were prompting Jesse to do the same.

After a few more painful seconds, the five-year-old dropped her bat and began to sprint around the bases, her two braids flying behind her beneath her helmet. Jesse was fast, her little cleats kicking up dust as she rounded the field with obvious determination. Amanda couldn't believe it, but given the other team's level of disorganization, her daughter was soon successfully skidding into home base. Amanda jumped up and down on the bleachers like she had just won the World Series herself. She could hear her daughter buzzing with excitement, asking anyone around her who would listen, did you see me? Did you see me run?

Amanda grinned. For the first time in several weeks, a little jolt of genuine happiness broke through her fog.


Amanda watched television in the living room with her head on Sonny's lap. Slumped into the couch, his feet rested on their coffee table while his fingers toyed lazily with long strands of her blonde hair. Curled onto her side, Amanda felt warm and comfortable, all of her muscles loose and relaxed. Every now and then her eyes fluttered closed as she flirted with sleep, encouraged by the rhythmic movement of Sonny's hand. It was only nine o'clock - hardly a wild Saturday night - but Amanda hadn't been interested in socializing much lately. She didn't think she was depressed, but she also didn't feel quite like herself. She was still Amanda, but muted somehow. It had been just a little over a month since her miscarriage and she couldn't seem to shake it off - sometimes she felt guilty for even wanting to. She knew that it was starting to take a toll on her relationship with Sonny, even if he hadn't said anything about it to her. Amanda was unintentionally distant and he didn't encroach on her space; lately she noticed that when they went to bed, Sonny kept his hands to himself.

"My mother wants us to go to Loganville after Disney World," she offered randomly.

"Yeah?" Sonny replied.

"I don't want to," she sighed.

"I already assumed that."

"It's just..."

"You hate it there, I know."

"Yeah, that."

"Don't you want the kids to see where you're from?"

She chewed her lower lip. "It's kinda embarrassing."

"I've always wanted to go," Sonny admitted.

"You have?"

"Yeah, I mean. It's a part of you," he explained. "I've always been curious about it."

"I mean, nothing is worse than being from Staten Island-"

"Hey!"

"I'm kidding. Kinda." She rolled over so she was facing up, her eyes to the ceiling. "It's not gonna feel like much of a vacation..."

"You think any part of this is gonna feel that way?" he chuckled. "We're subjectin' ourselves to a gigantic theme park crawlin' with overstimulated kids."

He had a point. "I know."

Sonny gently toyed with her bangs against her forehead in silence for a few minutes. "Don't worry about it right now."

Sometimes Amanda felt like all she did was worry, like she had been born perpetually anxious. First it was her parents, then her sister, then school, then all of the stupid shit she gotten herself into in her adult life. She was aware that sometimes she came off as abrasive and callous even on her best days, but anybody who knew her understood that her attitude was the direct result of frayed nerves. Two weeks ago, Dr. Lindstrom had suggested that she go on medication temporarily given her recent loss, but Amanda had patently refused. That option was fine for other people, not her.

"Okay," Amanda answered him simply. She rolled back over onto her side and pretended to watch television.


Panting and sticky with sweat, Sonny collapsed on top of her. "Fuck, that was good," he breathed into the crook of neck.

Amanda let out a breathless laugh beneath him. Knees bent up close to her chest, she gingerly straightened them out onto the mattress. "That's only because I haven't let you touch me in like, four and a half weeks."

It wasn't an exaggeration - she hadn't. At first it was because medically, she wasn't allowed to have sex after her miscarriage for two weeks, but her abstinence hadn't ended there. Typically a sexual person, lately Amanda felt too muddled and conflicted to get out of her own head and enjoy anything physical. Of course, Sonny had made valiant attempts at convincing her otherwise before he finally gave up trying. She knew her rejection hurt his feelings (among other things) but she didn't know how to explain how disconnected her body and mind felt.

Sonny may have stopped coming on to her, but there was no hesitation in his response when Amanda's interest resurfaced again that night. After he turned off the lights so that they could both go to sleep, Amanda had stared up at the dark ceiling, restless. Despite their proximity, she felt very far away from Sonny. For the first time in a few weeks, her stomach began to coil up with desire, knowing that she was mere inches away from the only person she wanted to soothe the ache. She hadn't bothered with being subtle or coy: she simply rolled over, pressed her body into his side and whispered fuck me hotly into his ear. His mouth didn't say anything, but his body responded instantaneously. It was quick and dirty, the type of coupling that had absolutely nothing to do with romance and everything to do with getting their mutual needs met. Fifteen minutes later, the sheets were damp and tangled and everything smelled of sex.

"Good things... come... to those... who wait," he murmured slyly, his words punctuated by kisses against her neck, collarbone and sternum.

Amanda smiled, then let out a low hum of discontent at the sensation of him pulling out of her and rolling off to her side. Looking smug, he propped himself up on an elbow with his head in his hand, his free palm trailing down the flat plane of her abdomen to slide between her thighs. His fingers slipped around leisurely, as if he was surveying his work. Hypersensitive, she twitched beneath him, but she didn't tell him to stop. "I'm sorry," she sighed.

"For what?" He sounded distracted.

"For being..." she began tentatively. "Not... myself."

He stopped playing with her. "Don't apologize for that," he said huskily.

Head lolling to one side, Amanda gazed at him sheepishly in the dark.

Sonny leaned over and kissed her slowly, gently. "C'mon, babe. It's fine."

It was not fine. She wanted to talk to him, even if how she was feeling was hard to explain, just like he had asked her to do weeks ago. Maybe that would make her feel better. "Remember... remember those old Zoloft commercials?" she said randomly. "With that little egg floatin' around under a dark cloud?"

His brow furrowed. "Yeah..."

"I feel like him, sometimes, lately."

"You think you're depressed?"

"I dunno. No? Maybe," Amanda told him tentatively. "It's more like... I feel fuzzy. I'm not always sad or whatever, but I'm just... not me. I feel disconnected."

"Fuzzy," he repeatedly slowly.

"I know it doesn't make any sense."

"What'll help?"

She shrugged bare shoulders. "I don't really know."

"Maybe it just takes time," Sonny suggested gently. "I know how you are, how you always want a solution, to fix stuff, but maybe... maybe there isn't necessarily anything to be done."

Amanda nodded thoughtfully. "Maybe."


May had just begun, but early mornings were still chilly. Zipped up in her NYPD jacket, Amanda trudged down the muddy riverbank with Fin by her side. The Eleventh Street basin was flooded with police officers and Crime Scene Investigators; despite the hour, it was already attracting the attention of runners and dog-walkers. Spotting Liv talking to CSI, Amanda lifted up the yellow tape to enter the area with her partner.

"An E.R. doc was running with their dog after a night shift," the lieutenant explained quickly. "The dog stopped to smell what they thought was just a bag of trash on the shore but it turns out, there was a kid inside. A little girl."

At their feet, a deceased child was laying atop the black garbage bag she had been found in. The circumstances had rendered her almost unrecognizable: her skin was blotched shades of blue, gray and white, her features bloated and distorted from her time in the river. Her clothes were soiled but intact: she wore polka dot leggings and a pink t-shirt.

"She's already started to decompose and it's going to be nearly impossible to get fingerprints after being in the water. We can't tell by looking how old she is, not like this," one of the CSI technicians explained. He held up a dirty zebra print blanket. "She was found with this blanket..."

Reaching into the pocket of her coat, Amanda snapped on a latex glove. Crouching down next to the small body, she gently pushed aside matted hair to tug at the little girl's t-shirt collar. She held her breath and tried not to look at her face; it never got easier. Her fingers eventually encountered a tag at the back of the child's shirt. Amanda rubbed her thumb against the once-white fabric, trying to clean it off just enough to see the size printed there.

"4T," she concluded, straightening up again to look between the tech and Liv. "I'd bet she's three years old, or a small four-year-old."

"Makes sense. An autopsy will reveal more, but I'm not sure how much it'll help in identifying her," the tech said.

"We'll be in touch with Missing and Exploited Children, but it's going to be hard to match a description to this," Liv agreed, motioning down to the corpse.

Amanda cringed. This. She wondered what the little girl's name was.

"So, she was either put here, or she washed up from somewhere else," Fin mused before adding grimly, "the dive team is on their way to see if there was anybody else in the water with her."

"She belongs to somebody, and somebody's responsible for this," Amanda said firmly, invigorated by the desire to bring about justice for an innocent child. Selfishly, she was oddly thankful, too: this was the distraction she had been waiting for.


Two days later, a photograph of the little girl's decomposed body hung on the bulletin board in the squad room. With no way to properly identify her yet, she was referred to as Baby Doe. Sonny, Fin and Liv hovered around the circular table while Amanda paced before them. She stole glances down at her phone while she recited the preliminary autopsy results to her colleagues.

"'Natural cause of death excluded,'" she began. "No traces of bleach, drugs, alcohol... Warner thinks she's between the ages of three and five. Race is white, brown hair, she estimated that Baby Doe is between three feet one and three feet six tall. No birthmarks, no scars. She's got pierced ears. No signs of malnutrition or abuse. Warner says she looks like she was healthy and well cared for." Amanda walked over to her laptop in between Sonny and Fin, which was hooked up to the large computer screen at the front of the room. She pulled up a photo of a pretty, chubby-cheeked little brunette. "Missing and Exploited children reconstructed her face with that information to see if anybody recognizes her. This is it. It's been all over the news since last night."

"Well cared for, huh?" Sonny repeated skeptically. "How'd she end up dead in a garbage bag, then?"

"Somebody who knew her put her in that trash bag, I'm almost positive," Amanda asserted. She was buzzing with too much caffeine; she hadn't slept more than three hours a night in two days. The case had consumed her. "She was in there with her blanket. A stranger wouldn't do that. And how come nobody's claimed her yet? I know the picture has only been circulating since yesterday, but doesn't that seem a little bizarre that nobody's concerned relatives have come forward? We've only heard from strangers thinking they saw her at the park one day."

"Maybe her family is dead, too," Fin offered bluntly.

"Wow, that's depressin'," Sonny mumbled.

Fin shrugged. "Just sayin'. If this a drug-related, revenge thing, there could be more vics involved."

"I'm gonna enter her in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and see if she matches anything," Amanda added.

"Amanda, there are like, forty thousand people in NamUs," Sonny exclaimed. "You're gonna have to rule out a lot of cases."

"I didn't ask you to do it," she retorted irritably.

"Rollins is right," Liv interjected. "We can't rely on tips at this stage. We've gotta start somewhere. People are going to want to know that we're doing everything we can." She added cynically, "this is a dead kid. You know how people get about dead kids."

Amanda felt a hot flash of indignation. "Rightfully so. This is somebody's... she's just a baby..." She caught herself just in time, regaining her composure in an instant as to not appear emotionally involved. She continued levelly, "it's our job to figure this out."