"This is really good," she said around a mouthful of spaghetti, and across the table from her Elliot smiled, looked pleased with himself, proud of himself for having developed the skills necessary to feed himself. Olivia had never really been much of a cook; it wasn't for lack of trying, or anything, since over the course of her long life she had often had no one to rely on but herself for sustenance, but even in the old days there had always been people willing to welcome a stranger into their tent for an evening meal. The concept of street food was as old as streets themselves, and she'd never really enjoying cooking for its own sake - and resented how often whatever society she was in foisted the duty upon her on account of her sex - and these days she didn't cook at all, if she could help it, but Elliot had learned to cook, and seemed to be happy about it, and the spaghetti was pretty fucking good.

"Glad you like it," he said. "Now, you gonna tell me what you found out today?"

Olivia nodded, swallowed, wiped a stray bit of sauce from her chin, took a moment's pause to gather her thoughts and in her thinking did not notice the way Elliot's eyes followed the movement of her hand across her face.

"Not a whole hell of a lot," she confessed ruefully. "McKenna's mother, Andrea, she was a trust fund baby. She made pottery for fun, mostly. Sold some of it, but her inheritance was what kept her afloat. We've been going over her financials and trying to piece together her movements, and it looks like she wasn't sending McKenna to daycare or anything."

Olivia understood that, on a certain level, though the news grieved her. It might have been good for McKenna, to spend time with other children, to spend time somewhere other than inside that little apartment, to be normal, but McKenna was no normal child, and Olivia suspected that Andrea had just been trying to protect her daughter.

"The neighbors didn't see them much, nobody seems to know them. We got Andrea's cell records but all the text messages are updates from food delivery services, and she hasn't made a call to a friend in at least a month. I think they must have been lonely."

And Olivia understood that, too. She understood lonely.

"Must have been somebody," Elliot mused. "A person can't survive on their own forever."

"You'd be surprised," Olivia said before she could think better of it, and regretted her words when she saw the sorrow flash across Elliot's face. Olivia had been alive a long, long time, and she'd been alone a long, long time, but Elliot had a point; she'd made friends, too. Maybe not very many of them, and she'd outlived all of them, but there had been people, along the way, people she loved, people who made her endless life a little more bearable. People like Elliot.

"My mother didn't have many friends, either," she said.

"I been meaning to ask you about that," Elliot said suddenly. "You're…however many thousands of years old, so I'm guessing your mom died a long time ago?"

A very, very long time ago, Olivia thought as she nodded.

"So who's Serena Benson?"

It was a good question. Elliot had never met Serena, but he'd been with Olivia at the woman's wake, had held her up when her strength was flagging, when she felt herself in danger of lashing out at Serena's old drinking buddies, those women who had never helped her, had watched her slip slowly away and done nothing at all to stop it.

"I met her when I first came to New York," Olivia said. "It was a fluke, really. I still was trying to decide what I was going to do, what my name was going to be, what job I'd like to go for, and I stopped into a bar one night, and there she was. This beautiful, elegant woman, so drunk she could hardly sit up on her stool straight. I talked to her for awhile, and she told me the whole story."

Olivia would learn later that Serena had never shared her story with anyone, but she'd wanted to talk, that night at the bar. Sometimes Olivia had that effect on people. It helped in her line of work, but it hurt sometimes, too.

"She'd been attacked, got pregnant, got an abortion. She regretted it. I don't know if she'd have been happier if she'd kept the baby, she…she wasn't really a happy person. But we spent some time together, and I was moved by her story. I wanted to help women like her, women like my mother. So I took her name, and maybe that was wrong, but she never knew it. I was always just Olivia, to her. You may not remember this, but no one at her funeral called her my mother."

Everyone called her Serena, and Olivia did, too, and she got the feeling Elliot hadn't noticed, and why should he? She'd told him Serena was her mother, and he'd believed her. It wasn't the only thing she'd lied to him about, but she felt guilty for it, just the same.

"Did she remind you of your mother?"

"Can we talk about McKenna, please?"

Yes, Serena Benson had reminded Olivia of her own mother, and that was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. Elliot held his hands up in a gesture of surrender, and so Olivia changed topics at once.

"The building's entrance has a security cam. We've got unis going over the footage, trying to identify everyone who came into the building yesterday, but it's slow going, and it's possible our perp didn't come in through the front door."

"There's another entrance?"

"On the roof."

Elliot frowned. "You think this guy climbed the side of the building? Went up a fire escape or something?"

"No," Olivia said. "Hang on, I'll show you."

She rose to her feet, walked back across the apartment to the place where she'd dropped her bag, and retrieved the feather she'd stowed there, still safe in its evidence bag. As she returned to the table it seemed to her that a strangely soft expression crossed Elliot's face, and she looked down, trying to hide her smile. Maybe it shouldn't have, but it felt nice, sitting with him, eating, talking about a case. It felt right, felt like so many other nights they'd spent together, nights she'd been missing while he was on suspension. She'd been missing him, his blue eyes and his smart mouth and his unwavering faith. Fin was a good cop, and a good friend, but Elliot was something else.

Elliot was something she couldn't let herself think about too much. He made her feel safe, in a way she so often had not been, made her feel known, when for so long she'd felt as if no one would ever understand her at all. But Elliot was her partner, her friend, somebody else's husband, even if he swore Kathy was done with him for good this time. Elliot was mortal, and however much she cared for him, however handsome he was, however her heart might call out for him in the still darkness of a lonely night, he could not ever, ever be someone that she loved. He would die, one day, whether from illness or age or violence, he would die, and she would be left alone without him, and that would be hard enough, losing her closest friend, the closest friend she'd had in a century; if she let herself love him, losing him might break her.

She could have, though. She could have loved him. In another life.

"Look at that," she said, and passed him the feather before settling down in her seat and taking another bite of her dinner.

"Jesus," he said, turning the feather over in his hands. "Is this what I think it is?"

"Wing feather," she confirmed. "Nephilim or angel, I can't tell." There wasn't much of a difference, really, when it came down to their wings. "But McKenna's father had to have been an angel. Nephilim can't reproduce."

"How can you be sure?"

We tried, she thought. I tried. The words stuck in the back of her throat, though. It was all so long ago, those days when the nephilim were young and did not know yet the extent of their curse, when they'd tried, when she'd tried, to be just like the humans. To love, and to live, to make families of their own, to find homes for themselves. In the beginning, the trying had not hurt so very much, but each progressive failure became a mounting agony. There had been a man, once, a man with blue eyes like Elliot's, a man…there had been a man she loved, once, but there had been no babies. Medicine advanced, technology advanced, and one or two of the more scientific minded nephilim had run tests for themselves, and found the truth. Or confirmed it, really; Olivia had known the truth already, to her sorrow.

"We're sure," she said. "Finding that at the scene makes me wonder if McKenna's father came back for her."

"And you think he, what? Flew onto the roof? Can…I mean you can fly, can't you?"

"That is what wings are for, yes," she said tartly, and Elliot grinned.

"You gotta show me someday," he said. "I bet that's really something."

"It makes our perp harder to track, though."

If he was an angel, he'd be able to do a hell of a lot more than just fly, and that would make him all but impossible to track down.

We might not be the only ones looking for him, Olivia thought, though for the moment she'd decided to keep that to herself. Angels coming down to earth, that sort of thing wasn't allowed, any more, hadn't been for millennia, and if an angel had violated the prohibition against returning, the folks upstairs would be livid when they discovered his transgression. Human cops might never get their hands on him; a horde of his brethren might come down after him, and that, Olivia thought, was the last fucking thing she needed.

"I think we're going to have to talk to McKenna," she said heavily. "I don't know how much she knows, but maybe her mother said something, or she saw something."

"It's worth a shot," Elliot agreed. "We can ask her in the morning."

If there was any way around it Olivia would have protected the girl from those questions, but they'd found no one else in Andrea's life to answer them. No siblings, no parents, relatives too distant to be of any use; Andrea had been utterly alone, and left no one to speak for her but a four year old child who didn't seem to want to speak at all.

"It isn't fair," Olivia said softly, sadly. "She's just a little girl. She's innocent. She didn't ask for this."

Didn't ask to be a nephilim, to be marked for life, didn't ask for the wings on her back and the loneliness that came with them. She was a sweet little thing, too young to have ever really done anything wrong, and yet she was barred from heaven, doomed to be cast out from human society, too, unable to make a family, unable to be part of a world that scorned her. That precious little girl, she had done nothing to deserve such horror, and the unfairness of it all was nearly enough to bring tears to Olivia's eyes.

"Neither did you," Elliot said seriously, and she looked up at him sharply, and found him watching her, his expression soft, and sad, and knowing. McKenna's curse was Olivia's curse, too; Olivia had once been a child, an innocent in the world, hurt by the same cruel twist of fate that had hurt McKenna now, but she had grown accustomed to the ache in her chest. She'd made her peace with it, with her own fate, but Elliot hadn't, yet. Elliot could still look at her the same way she looked at McKenna; Elliot could still look at her, and see something worth saving.

One day he would accept the truth, she thought. One day he would accept that she was beyond redemption. When that day came, it would break her heart, and she knew it. Not today, though; today he was looking at her like he cared for her, and she cared for him too much to tell him why he shouldn't. Instead she let him look, and let herself believe, just for a moment, that she was someone he could care for. It was a nice thought.