Sorry about the delay, I wanted this chapter and the next one to be posted at the same time. To make up for it, they're both incredibly long. We are going to get a little dark here for a bit, jus heads up (think Criminal Minds). I hope you all enjoy :)
Grief was a funny thing.
Jamie thought he knew what it was. When his Grandma Betty had died, when his mom had died, watching Vinny die in his arms, Linda. He had felt a deep sorrow and had mourned them. Had regretted not having the chance to spend more time with them. But he had learned to power through and live with it. It wasn't like he had any other option.
Losing Eddie was an entirely different world of pain.
When his grandfather had told him that every single member of the new Blue Templar had admitted to kidnapping her and assaulting Badillo, that had been one thing. But when he had immediately followed that up by saying that all of their statements also matched, claiming that they had killed Eddie sometime that Saturday, less than 48 hours after she had been taken, Jamie had frozen.
It was like his brain was trying to short-circuit out what his grandfather had just said and rearrange it into something that made sense. Because Eddie couldn't be dead. He had just talked to her Wednesday night before they had both gone to bed. He'd given her a parting kiss on her forehead that she had been barely conscious for Thursday morning. Hell, Tuesday afternoon she had been sitting across from him in a café after her ultrasound appointment, happily munching on a cinnamon roll. She couldn't just be gone. Not like that.
His grandfather hadn't had much information to offer him. Apparently, the bastards responsible for it couldn't remember what they did with her body, only that they had weighed it down and thrown it into one of the rivers around the city, or maybe into the Harbor. The searches that first night had been unsuccessful, as had been the subsequent ones the following morning and the day after that.
That first night, his grandfather had refused to leave him alone. Jamie had tried to get him to go home, he knew that sleeping on a couch wouldn't be good for his grandpa's back, but the stubborn old man had refused. In hindsight, he knew that his grandfather had been worried about what he might do in those first few hours after he delivered the news of Eddie's alleged death. So, they had compromised. He would take the couch and his grandfather the bed in the bedroom. Jamie had gotten a somewhat concerned look at the offer but had insisted that if his grandpa wasn't going to leave, he was at least going to sleep in a real bed.
That first night and subsequent morning had been awful. Jamie hardly slept. Every time he closed his eyes, all he could see was Eddie. Injured. Covered in blood and laceration wounds. Calling out for help. Calling out for him. He would snap his eyes back open with a start and stare at the living room ceiling and the shadows from the lights outside for a few hours before his eyes eventually drifted shut of their own accord and he repeated the cycle.
Once daylight had broken, Jamie had gotten up from the couch and gone into the kitchen to make coffee for himself and his grandfather. He had just finished brewing the pot when he noticed his phone on the counter.
He'd had it on vibrate for the past few days. Jamie had wanted to shut the thing off completely, because people would just not stop texting him, but he hadn't due to the chance that one of the messages could be from Detective Lenin about Eddie or from Lena, who had apparently been given the news last night by Lenin while his grandfather was here. Jamie had finally turned it off before going to bed late last night.
He picked it up and turned the screen on. There had to be over a hundred messages and nearly the same number of missed calls. He would work his way through those later. The first messages that Jamie opened were from Erin and Danny, both of them having texted him late last night after missed calls, asking how he was doing.
He fired off a quick response to both, letting them know their grandfather had insisted on staying the night, before skimming through some of the other messages. Nicki and Jack had both texted well after midnight, and Sean had messaged him a few minutes earlier, so Jamie quickly responded to them as well. The rest of the messages could be dealt with eventually.
Jamie heard the sound of his grandfather shuffling down the hallway and poured him a cup of coffee, mentally preparing himself for the conversation he knew was coming. Henry appeared from around the corner and slowly lowered himself into a seat at the table.
Jamie studied the dark swirls in his coffee while his grandfather took a drink, waiting for him to make the first move. He certainly wasn't going to. Eventually, the old man spoke.
"I won't pretend to know exactly what you're feeling right now, Jamie. But I have a pretty good idea and I just want you to know that you can talk to me. Whenever you're ready, you can come to me."
Jamie didn't look up, keeping his eyes on his coffee. It still didn't feel real. He suspected that part of the reason his grandfather had been the one sent to tell him the news instead of Lenin was so he would be able to express his own emotions instead of trying to keep up a front, but that was something everyone involved in that decision had been sorely mistaken on. Jamie was always the emotional rock of the family, the one everyone else leaned on when things got tough, who could always be counted on to support everyone else. Try as he might, he couldn't seem to drag himself out of that role even now.
He gripped the cup, knowing that his grandfather was expecting some sort of response. "I will, Gramps. I promise."
They'd sat in silence for another hour before his grandfather had eventually left.
Lenin called him around noon to tell him that the second search of the rivers and harbor had come up empty again. He was going to try and get them to conduct one more search, likely later that week, but things weren't looking good.
After that call, Jamie had gotten a string of visitors. He knew that many of the condolence calls were well-intentioned, but that didn't keep them from getting on his nerves. All he wanted was to be left alone, to actually be able to process that Eddie was gone and she wasn't coming back, that this wasn't all a bad dream, but it seemed impossible at the moment. First had been his father, then Erin, then Sean, and so on down the line.
He knew that there was going to be a press conference sometime that afternoon announcing Eddie's death and that it would probably bring about another round of well-intentioned sympathy calls, so he went to see Lena in the brief intermission. She was the one of the only other people who he knew would be sharing the same feelings Jamie had right now.
To say that it went poorly would have been an understatement. Lena had been furious to see him. It was probably the closest he'd ever seen her to being out of control. As soon as she'd opened the door, Jamie had known he'd made a mistake going there.
"You have some nerve, showing up here."
Jamie had swallowed, taking a deep breath and trying to find the words to convey to Lena that they were both going through the same loss and pain. To express how sorry he was. "Lena, I-"
She didn't even let him finish his sentence. "No."
He'd frowned, confused. "No?"
"No. I will not let you stand here in my doorway trying to spin this tragedy into some sort of shared pain or uplifting message through those rose-colored glasses you wear. I won't do it. Edit is gone because of you. The only child I had left is gone because some scumbag had a problem with you, Jameson. So don't try to give me some greeting card message about how she would've wanted us to stick together and be stronger and all of that nonsense, because I will not hear it."
Jamie choked back the lump had been lingering in the back of his throat all day and had suddenly decided to make an appearance. "Lena, I get it, you're upset. And you have every right to be. Hell, I blame myself for what's happened more than anyone else ever will."
Lena arched an eyebrow at that. "I very much doubt that. Edit could have done so much better for herself, you know. Married a doctor or a lawyer, someone who could give her the kind of life she deserved, but she chose you anyway. And look at where that got her. Murdered, for something she had no part in, just to get back at you. If it weren't for that mistake of hers, I would still have my daughter."
Jamie glanced at his feet before looking back up at the irate and grieving woman in front of him. "Lena. Don't say that, please. You don't mean it."
She had only frowned. "I most certainly do. Whatever you thought you were going to do by coming here, you aren't. So, I'm going to ask you to leave."
Jamie swallowed and gave a bob of his head. Lena was as stubborn as they came, something that she had certainly passed on to Eddie, and he knew that there would be no changing her mind right now. "Of course."
As he turned to leave, she fired off one last remark. "Don't come back here, Jameson. I don't care who you are, I will call the police on you for trespassing if you do. I never want to see you again." The door slammed shut.
He only dipped his head in a half nod and headed towards the building's exit. Lena's words stung, but they weren't necessarily unexpected. Jamie had had the same thoughts circling through his mind since last night.
Life went on, despite what Jamie wished for. It was different and difficult, but it went on.
By the end of that first week, most of the condolence calls had stopped, something that he was grateful for. He just wanted some time to be alone with his thoughts, to come to terms with this new reality, but it seemed as though everyone was determined to prevent that from happening.
The search for Eddie's remains was called off after a week. Murphey continued to claim to detectives, the DA's office, and his own lawyer that he couldn't remember where he had thrown her body in or even which waterway it had been in, although all parties involved doubted that claim. Jamie suspected, as he knew Danny and Lenin did too, that Murphey knew exactly where he had put Eddie. He just didn't want to share the information because it was a way that he could continue to torture Jamie, even from behind bars. A final upper hand if you would.
The lack of a body was the only thing that really kept him going if he was being honest. Without a body, without an actual grave to visit to remind himself that she was gone and she wasn't coming back, there was still that tiny worm of hope (or maybe it was denial, who could say) wriggling about in the back of his brain that Eddie might still be alive and out there somewhere. It was a miniscule hope, but Jamie still nursed it. Otherwise, there was no closure, nothing to keep him going through the days.
Jamie had tried to go back to work that following Monday after the searches were called off. He couldn't keep sitting around in that empty apartment with reminders of Eddie everywhere he looked and nothing but his own thoughts for company, but his CO wasn't having it. Fleming told him point blank that he wasn't allowed to work until at least the next week, and he would be on modified duty until all the trials were over. He knew why it had to be that way, his boss obviously didn't trust Jamie's state of mind and decision-making abilities at the moment, but that didn't mean he had to like it.
The DA's office had called him the next day to give him a heads up about the charges. They were declining to prosecute charges on anything relating to Eddie, so all members of the Templar were only going to be facing charges related to the money, some for the murder of the dealers they had stolen the money from, and relating to the attack on Badillo.
Logically, Jamie understood why. The lawyer in him had read through the case after Lenin had conveniently 'forgotten' to put them away one day when he came to visit, and he knew that their case for charges relating to Eddie would be weak at best. As ADA Davis had said, without a body or any real physical evidence besides Eddie's rings, most of what they had was hearsay. Each of the men confessed to killing and assaulting her, but that was all they really had. If the DA's office tried to prosecute on those statements, their case would fall apart almost immediately if even one of the men decided to retract his confession. And if that happened, the entire case could be thrown out and there was a very real chance it wouldn't be able to be tried again. But just because he understood why they weren't prosecuting didn't mean he had to like it.
He skipped the trials, not that there were many of them. Most of the members of the new Templar took plea deals to protect their own families from any more public humiliation. The ones that did go to trial got court dates incredibly quickly, likely due to the publicity of the case. A few of the cockier ones were among those who opted for a trial, which resulted in maximum sentences and nearly forty years in prison for the lightest one.
Murphey's trial was the most publicized and the one he knew everyone expected him to be at, but he couldn't bring himself to go. Jamie just couldn't bring himself to be in the same room as the man that knew full well where Eddie was, but refused to tell them for his own sick pleasure. Danny would be there anyway, as one of the lead detectives, so he figured that was good enough.
They gave him her rings back at the conclusion of the prosecution, saying that since they had been properly tagged and cataloged, along with being processed by the lab, he could have them back. If they needed them as evidence later, they had pictures, scans, and lab results on file so they wouldn't need the actual rings. Jamie hadn't known what to do with them initially, but he wound up putting them on a silver chain that he had found lying around. That way, he could wear them while he was on the job and Eddie would always be with him. He wore it under his shirt every day.
Jamie knew that the people around him thought that he had finally accepted what had happened. As his dad had told him, the final stage of grief was acceptance, and he thought that he was doing a pretty good job of giving off the impression that he had accepted what had happened. That Eddie's death wasn't his fault, that she wasn't coming back, that he wouldn't see her again and probably wouldn't get to even bury her. He even convinced himself for a period of time that it was true.
But that right there was another one of the funny things about grief. It didn't just move from one stage to the other and then one day you were past it. No, it lurked in the shadows, striking when you least expected, dragging a person back into the depression, the anger, the denial, regarding what had happened. And when it came back, it struck with such a suddenness that you never saw it coming.
That was what happened to Jamie nearly a month after the fact. He'd been putting up a pretty good face, nearly convincing himself that he had accepted what had happened, when it all came back.
If you asked him what had triggered it, Jamie wouldn't have been able to give a clear answer. Maybe it was the sight of a blonde woman that resembled Eddie from behind in a park. Maybe it was a news report about the ongoing trials and sentencing that he overheard while on his lunch break. Maybe it was the sight of a happy couple with a young baby passing by one day while he was out for a run or an elderly couple that sat in the same booth at a local diner every morning for breakfast. Or maybe it was as simple as it being one month since everything fell apart.
Whatever it had been, everything came rushing back to him with crystal clear detail. The good, the bad, all of it. But it mostly brought back the loneliness, the grief, and the guilt that Jamie still carried, knowing that the only reason the Templar had targeted Eddie, and eventually killed her, was because some of them had blamed him for the downfall of the original Templar all those years ago. A consequence of his actions he never would've considered back then, when all he wanted was to get justice for his big brother and best friend, to finish what Joe had started.
Which led him to the here and now, sitting on the edge of his couch, a glass of whiskey in front of him, his off-duty weapon in one hand and that damn sonogram in his other hand. Jamie's mind just wouldn't stop looping through every possible way he could have prevented this, whether it was by insisting that Eddie go on modified duty immediately or by raising the alarm when she didn't come home on time that night and wasn't answering her phone. Anything, that would've meant that she was here now, instead of who knew where.
He carefully set the picture down on the table next to the glass. He'd already had one, but he couldn't seem to bring himself to have another. Jamie suspected it had something to do with what Danny had told him when he stopped by that first day after the searches were called off. He had told him that while you could try to drink the pain away, it never really worked, and you just ended up in more pain later on.
Jamie supposed that was true. He knew that when Danny had first come back from Afghanistan, he'd developed a bit of a drinking problem and that Linda had threatened to leave him if he hadn't gotten his act together and sought some help. Then when Linda had died, Danny had been dangerously close to relapsing in those first few months. And he knew that he wasn't supposed to know about his older brother's old vices, but he did, which was probably why he couldn't bring himself to have another drink now.
He tapped the barrel of the gun against his head, trying to get the images out of his brain. They had been playing on repeat all day and had only gotten worse since he got home earlier that afternoon. They were images of Eddie, but there was no consistency in them. Sometimes she was happy, smiling at him with their baby in her arms, laughing at a joke he had made or making a snarky comment at his father's dinner table. Other times she was terrified, covered in blood, screaming out for him to help her as she struggled to free herself in that damn warehouse where they had found her rings. And the worst one, a picture that his mind had created all on its own, of her body rotting in the woods somewhere, animals scavenging it, not even given the dignity of a shallow grave. The last one was the one that just wouldn't leave, no matter how much he wanted it to.
Jamie screwed his eyes shut, gripping his head with both his free hand and the one holding his weapon, trying to get the images to just stop. He knew it was his fault, he knew that Eddie would be here if it wasn't for him, that Lena would still have her daughter, and Badillo his partner. But his mind just kept screaming at him and wouldn't stop telling him it's your fault, you're the reason she's dead, you're the one that brought all this pain on everyone else.
He rocked back and forth on the edge of the couch, head still in his hands and his finger flirting with the trigger. Jamie had flipped the safety off twenty minutes prior but couldn't bring himself to take that final step. He couldn't say why exactly. It wasn't like this was going to be a temporary problem that he was seeking a permanent solution to. As far as he was concerned, it was a permanent problem that had a similarly permanent solution.
But he supposed the permanent solution part was what had him hesitating. Every time he turned the gun so that the end of the barrel was pointed at his temple, he would think of who he would see again once he pulled that trigger. His mom, his grandma, Linda, Vinny, Joe, and most importantly, Eddie.
But that was where his brain would short-circuit itself and remind him about the others. Remind him that if he pulled that trigger, his dad would have to bury another son, his grandpa another grandson, Danny and Erin another brother, and Joe, Nicki, Sean, and Jack another uncle. Despite how much Jamie wanted to see everyone he'd lost again; he couldn't bring about that kind of pain to his family. He wouldn't inflict that agony on them, they didn't deserve that, even if he did. Not to mention that one of them would likely be the one who would find his body.
Besides, the little niggle in the back of his brain, the other thing that was stopping him, kept reminding him that he wasn't entirely sure he would see Eddie again if he went through with it. There had been no body recovered, despite multiple searches of the waterways surrounding Manhattan. And even though the odds of her still being alive were almost zero, there was still a chance she was out there. And if she was and Jamie killed himself over this, he knew that she would never forgive herself, not to mention give him an earful about it when they did meet again. Plus, she deserved to be laid to rest in a proper grave. And Jamie needed to at least give her that honor, since he had been the one responsible for her death.
He slowly opened his eyes, faintly aware of the tears streaking down his face. They refocused on the sonogram, lingering on what could have been for a minute, before catching sight of another picture. It was one he had taken at the café just last month, right after their appointment and shortly after Eddie had finished her cinnamon roll.
She looked gorgeous, as always, her hair down and framing her face in waves as she beamed at the camera, that slight glow she had about her shining through. Her eyes were sparkling with amusement. Jamie couldn't even remember why, but she looked like she was about to burst out into laughter, or maybe give him a snarky remark about his own food choices.
It was his favorite picture of Eddie by far. It captured everything he loved about her, but also how happy they had been. Jamie had printed it out last week after finding it in his camera roll, wanting to have a physical copy to keep with him or to look at home. It wasn't the same as actually having her here, but it was the closest he was going to get.
He slowly reached out, letting the hand holding his weapon drop between his legs while the other one carefully picked up the photo. Jamie's thumb softly stroked Eddie's smiling face and he felt a sad smile of his own form. Better times briefly flashed through his head, replacing the other images, if only momentarily.
Jamie shut his eyes, letting the picture fall back onto the table from his hand, clenching it into a fist and tightening his grip on his gun. No. He had to keep going. If not for himself, for his dad. For his grandfather. For Eddie. He had to at least bring her home, give Lena that peace, before he died.
He stood up from where he had been sitting on the couch for what had to have been hours and moved towards their bedroom. Jamie crouched down and slowly spun open the safe at the bottom of the closet, placing his off-duty weapon inside next to Eddie's and some of their important documents. He knew it was better to keep it locked up for now, especially given the fact that he had spent the better part of at least the past three hours flirting with the trigger.
He had just gotten back to the living room and started to tuck the sonogram picture back into his wallet when there was a loud, nearly frantic banging on his door. Jamie instantly went on alert, reaching to his waistband for the gun he had just locked up.
The banging stopped after a few seconds and a voice came through the door. "Jamie? Jamie, open up!" Danny's voice sounded scared, almost frantic with worry.
Jamie relaxed slightly and walked over to the door, turning the lock, and opening it as Danny paused in his pounding for a second. "What?"
His older brother visibly relaxed. The look on Danny's face was one that Jamie had rarely seen, something he only saw when someone his brother cared about was in danger. "You weren't answering any calls or texts. I was worried something might have happened."
Jamie gave a half-hearted shrug. "Well, as you can see, I'm fine. No need to worry, so you can be on your way."
Danny's eyes went over Jamie's shoulder, catching sight of the untouched drink on the coffee table and the mess the rest of the apartment was. He saw the look in his older brother's eyes shift from relief to concern and tried to redirect him, shifting so that the table and the rest of the apartment was blocked from view. "Like I said, I'm fine, Danny."
Danny gave him a look and he reluctantly stepped to the side so he could enter. Jamie shut the door behind him and closed his eyes briefly before turning around. Whatever his older brother was here to preach to him about, he really wasn't in the mood for it right now.
Danny was standing in the living room, surveying his surroundings. Jamie already knew he had clocked the drink on the table, and almost certainly the picture of Eddie sitting near it, but he supposed his brother was also taking in the state the rest of the apartment was in.
He hadn't really had a chance to clean since going back to work a few weeks ago. There was an unfolded basket of laundry sitting on the ground near the kitchen table and dirty dishes in the sink. Jamie had been drowning himself in the job recently in an attempt to avoid the memories and just couldn't seem to find the energy to do simple household tasks when he got home. It was more of a crash pad at this point anyways, not an actual home. Not without Eddie.
He saw Danny walk over and pick up the glass. "How many of these have you had tonight?"
So that was the game he was going to play. An attempt at being the concerned big brother. Jamie's eyes flickered down to the glass in Danny's hand before meeting his gaze. "Only one. That's been sitting there for an hour or so, but I haven't touched it." He gave a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders, still lingering near the door, hoping it would be enough to satisfy his brother's curiosity and get him to leave.
Danny slowly set the drink down, picking up the picture of Eddie that was nearby and studying it. He looked up to where Jamie had moved slightly further into the room. "Jamie. I know it's hard. Believe me, out of everyone else, I know. And that also means that I know this right here is a bad idea." He gestured at the drink on the table and the picture he was holding.
Jamie tried to play it off. "I don't know what you're talking about." He stepped forward and took the image out of Danny's hand. "I'm fine."
That earned him a cocked eyebrow. "Like hell you are. Look, Jamie. You can keep this whole farce of a façade up, keep pretending you're fine, but you can't fool me. Or Dad, or Erin, or Joe, and certainly not Gramps. We've all noticed it. And this right here, drinking and thinking about Eddie while you isolate yourself from everybody isn't the way to go."
Jamie raised his hands. "Who said that's what I was doing?"
"Cut the crap, kid. You've been spending every minute you can at work, you barely say anything at Sunday dinner when you do show up, and this place is a mess." Danny stepped towards him, an uncharacteristic tone of concern in his voice. "Jamie, talk to me. Please."
He felt himself deflate a little bit and sat down on the couch in nearly the same spot he had been in earlier, Danny mirroring him on the opposite one. He didn't really want to talk, especially not with Danny, not when he was supposed to be the one that kept everyone together, the rock of the family, but if it would get his brother off his back and out of his apartment, then he could do a little bit. Just enough to be left alone again.
Jamie leaned forward, playing with the wedding band on his finger. "I don't know. It's like I'm on autopilot and I just can't get her out of my head. How I could've prevented it from happening, how she was one other call away from never going down that alley, what it must have been like for her. I just can't get my brain to stop."
Danny's voice was surprisingly gentle. "You couldn't have known, Jamie, no one could've. The desk sergeant on duty that night was part of the Templar, he made sure that they were the only ones who would respond to that call and that the next sergeant wouldn't realize they never returned at end of tour. That's not on you."
Jamie clasped his hands in front of his face and forced himself to meet his brother's eyes. "But it is, Danny. They only took her because of me. Because of my actions. I may not have been in those interview rooms, but I read enough of the case notes to have a pretty good idea of what was said. If I had just left things alone all those years ago or died the first time someone tried to kill me, Eddie would still be here. It's on me."
Something shifted in Danny's eyes and when he spoke, his voice was sharp. "Don't say that. Don't you ever say that again. This is not on you, understand me? This is on the guys that took Eddie. They're the ones that made the decision to take her, they're the ones that killed her. Not you."
Jamie shook his head. "Whatever."
Danny let out a sigh when he seemed to pick up that Jamie wasn't going to give him the response he was looking for. "Look, kid. After Linda died, I was a wreck. You know it, Dad knows it, Baez did, hell everyone did. I was in a dark spot, like you are right now." He paused, studying Jamie, who was making a point not to look at his face. "And when I was at my darkest point, you know what kept me going? My boys. The family. I focused on the people who were still here, the ones who still needed me. Because that's what Linda would have wanted me to do and that's what Eddie would want you to do too. Because there are still people who care about you here, who want to help you find your way through this."
Jamie said nothing.
His brother let out another sigh, obviously picking up on the fact that he wasn't going to get much out of him tonight. Danny stood up. "Fine. You don't want to talk, I can leave. But I'm not leaving without both of your weapons."
That last comment was like a bucket of cold water being thrown on him. Danny couldn't know what Jamie had been sitting here thinking for the last few hours, could he? There was no way. He would've said something.
Jamie had stood up to escort Danny to the door, but stopped, frowning. "What do you want my off-duty gun for?"
Danny gave him a look that told him more than he could have said with words. Jamie suddenly remembered the frantic way his brother had been pounding on the door earlier, the near panic in his voice.
"Because. Like I said, I've been where you are right now, much as I wish you weren't. And I know the kinds of thoughts that go through a person's mind when stuff like this happens." There was a tone to his voice that spoke of seeing the aftermath of far too many of those thoughts and suddenly, Jamie was thankful he hadn't followed through on his thoughts from earlier. "Let's just call it being overly cautious, alright?"
Jamie searched Danny's face, seeing nothing but concern there. He gave a slow nod and turned to head to the bedroom to grab his weapon from the safe. He supposed it was better to be safe than sorry. Especially if it gave his brother some peace of mind.
As he headed down the hallway, Danny called out behind him. "Eddie's too."
Jamie didn't say anything, just continued on to the bedroom, where he unlocked the safe again for the second time in under an hour, this time grabbing both guns out of it. They were loaded, so he quickly removed the ammo and placed it back inside the safe before shutting it and heading back to where Danny was waiting by the front door.
He placed the two unloaded weapons in his brother's outstretched hands, unable to meet his eyes. Even if it wasn't, Jamie still felt like he was showing a moment of weakness to Danny, something that he would never admit to otherwise.
Danny placed both guns in one hand and gave Jamie's shoulder a squeeze before he turned to leave. Jamie didn't look up as he heard his brother open the door, waiting until he heard it click shut before he went over to lock it.
After he did so, Jamie leaned his head against the door, taking several deep breaths in an attempt to get his emotions under control. He obviously must not have been doing a good job convincing people that he was fine if Danny was concerned enough that he didn't trust him to be left alone with guns in his own home. Stupid. He would have to put in some more effort, make sure that his walls were up in full force when he went to dinner on Sunday.
After the encounter with Danny and the conversation he had with his father that following Sunday, Jamie condensed life down into just a few phases. Wake up, go to the gym, go to work, go home, and go to bed. Try not to think about Eddie at any point. Sometimes on his days off he would do simple chores around the apartment, but he could never be consistent with it. Some weeks it was pristinely clean, others it looked nearly uninhabitable. He got used to it.
Detective Lenin would meet him for lunch once a month to give him an update on Eddie's case. Jamie knew the chances of there being any progress made, especially once the trials were complete and the members of the Templar were sentenced, were slim to none, but that didn't mean he didn't appreciate the effort. Lenin told him that since they never did find a body, even with an alert out to all coroners on the East Coast and in the state of New York, technically the case was still open as a missing persons case, and that as long as he could, he would keep working on it.
Both his dad and Fleming made him meet with the department shrink before they would allow him back to full duty. His dad had asked him to do so in private that Sunday after Danny took his guns, but Jamie had given him a murky response and brushed it off. Fleming wasn't as kind. He made it clear that he wouldn't let Jamie back out into the field until a psychologist signed off on him, so he'd cooperated and gone, primarily so he could get out of the precinct again.
It took him an additional two weeks (and six sessions) to get clearance to go back to working in the field. The shrink wanted Jamie to keep seeing him, which he did keep doing for another two weeks to make sure he didn't revoke his approval to send him back to full duty, but after that he stopped going. Whatever the man thought he would be able to achieve through Jamie continuing to see him, Jamie strongly disagreed with.
That was about when he stopped going to family dinners too. It wasn't like he contributed much to them anyways now, so he didn't see much point in his own attendance. He just brought the mood down. Instead, Jamie started to pick up twelve hour shifts for other cops in the precinct and within intelligence, whether it was by sitting on a potential perp's house while a guy took a break or so Cristo could go have dinner with his fiancé's parents when they were in town.
He got away with it for about a month, managing to duck the calls and texts from everybody with relatively decent success. Jamie would text Danny or Erin to let them know not to bother waiting for him to show up, before shutting his phone off and turning back to the task at hand. Sometimes Joe or Sean would text, asking where he was, and Jamie would give them a slightly more in depth response than the others, if only because he felt like he owed it to the kids.
Eventually, the weekend before Thanksgiving, after he missed something like his sixth or seventh family dinner in a row, Jamie came home to find his grandfather sitting in his kitchen, waiting for him. He didn't have a clue how the man had gotten in. He caught a lecture for his continued absences and when he pointed out that he had been working, got shut down pretty quickly. They eventually came to an agreement, a compromise if you would. Jamie would be allowed to miss one family dinner a month, for whatever reason, but that would be it. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And holidays were going to be non-negotiable regarding attendance. That was one thing his grandfather would not budge on.
The holiday season was even worse than Jamie had feared it would be. It felt so wrong to be celebrating the season with everyone else when Eddie couldn't, when she wasn't even there. He couldn't help thinking about how the holidays would have been too, how they would've been anticipating a new arrival to the family soon, how Eddie would've been absolutely delighted that she could eat whatever she wanted to, and he wouldn't be able to poke fun at her at all. Those thoughts were what chased each other around in Jamie's mind as he smiled and put on a somewhat happy front for the sake of everyone else around him.
He caught Danny and Erin's concerned looks more than once but made a point to ignore them. Danny still hadn't given him back his off-duty weapon and Erin was trying almost too hard to drag Jamie back into things when he would rather just sit on the sidelines and observe. Not to mention the fact that apparently Jack was back in the picture again, something that did nothing to improve his mood, although he was glad that Nicki seemed to be happy about that development. On the upside though, neither his father, Danny, nor his grandfather seemed to be thrilled about it either.
After the start of the new year, the first of what he knew would be likely many without Eddie, he asked Fleming to put him in for an undercover assignment. Jamie knew that they were working on at least three different operations that were angling to send someone in soon, one of which was rumored to be a long-term, deep cover situation. As far as he was concerned, there wasn't much keeping him here and the other guys on his team had a lot more to lose if they got sent in, so why not him?
Unfortunately, his boss had other ideas. He was told point-blank that he was not getting sent undercover by any means any time soon. When Jamie tried to plead his case, Fleming had shut him down almost immediately. His reasoning was that he barely wanted to allow Jamie to go back out into the field for regular cases, there was no way he was going to send him into a potentially volatile situation when he couldn't trust that he would come back alive.
That had shut Jamie down real quick. He'd thought he'd been successful in convincing his boss that he was fine, but apparently that wasn't the case. Fleming still didn't completely trust Jamie to be in the field, but probably had been getting sick of having one of his sergeants riding a desk for months, so he'd compromised. And after that conversation, he got downgraded to working only the least dangerous assignments, which did nothing to help.
Jamie was a little bitter about it if he was being honest. He wasn't actively suicidal right now, but apparently the people around him disagreed on that front. Danny still wouldn't give him his off-duty gun back and his boss thought that if he gave him even a slightly dangerous assignment, he would do something to get himself killed, so that was reassuring.
The months kept passing by, much to his chagrin. For Eddie's birthday, he went to church, where he hadn't been in months, to light a votive candle for her and say a prayer that she was at least at peace, wherever she was. As far as Jamie was concerned, there wasn't a God, or at least not one worth praying to. If there was, why would he have let this happen, let Eddie be taken and suffer for Jamie's mistakes? It didn't make any sense to him, but he figured that it was probably the only place he could go to talk to Eddie in a way that she might hear him.
Winter turned to spring and with spring came their wedding anniversary, which was another rough one for Jamie. A day that normally came with happy memories was once again tainted by the reminder that he wouldn't be able to celebrate it with Eddie ever again. But he tried to honor it all the same. He cooked her favorite meal, went to the little mini golf place where he had proposed to her all those years ago, the whole nine yards. Everywhere he had a good memory of Eddie, he went out of his way visit. It was almost like she was there with him.
Danny finally gave him his gun back in June. Jamie wasn't certain what it was that finally convinced his older brother to return it to him, but one Sunday after dinner, when Jamie had been going to leave, Danny had followed him outside and slipped it back into his hand without a word before going back inside. When he got home, he locked it back up in the safe, unloaded, and tried not to think about it.
The worst part was the one year anniversary of it all. Heading into it, Jamie had suspected it would be rough. The one year anniversary of his mother's death had been difficult when it happened, so he knew that this would hit ten times worse. But that still didn't prepare him for it.
He woke up that first morning and when he glanced at the clock and noted the date, realized the gravity of what it meant. One year. One year without Eddie, one year without answers, one year trying to learn how to go through life without his soulmate. When he had first gotten the news that she was gone, a little less than a year ago now, Jamie had thought that his life was over.
But it wasn't. No matter how much pain he was in, how much it hurt, the world kept turning, life kept marching forward, whether you wanted it to or not.
He lounged around in bed for a while, trying to find the willpower to get up and start going about his day. Fleming had mandated Jamie be off today, so it wasn't like he had anywhere to be. Some days, it took him a lot longer than he'd like to admit to do so. Jamie rolled over and glanced at the bedside table again, studying the image sitting in the frame right next to his alarm clock.
It was a picture of Eddie, the same one he had held in his hand nearly a year ago when he had been fighting against his own mind with a gun in his hand, the night that Danny had arrived and taken both Jamie's and Eddie's off-duty weapons. Jamie had found a small frame in a box in the back of a closet when he was doing some cleaning and figured it would be best if he kept the picture somewhere safe, where it wouldn't get worn down by his constant handling of it.
So, he had placed it somewhere where it was the first thing he saw in the morning and the last thing he saw before falling asleep. Like a good luck charm, to ward off the nightmares that would still plague him from time to time. And behind it, hidden between the image of Eddie and the back of the frame, was a copy of the sonogram of their baby. Eddie's copy, to be precise.
Jamie had found it in her locker when the captain had asked him to clean it out the week after the searches were called off. It had been taped up on the inside of the door, along with a picture of her with Witten and one of their wedding pictures. Most of what he had removed from there was still sitting in the box he had brought it home in, but he had taken the sonogram and put it in the back of the photo frame, while he still kept his in his wallet. In the frame at least, the memory of Eddie and their baby would be safe and protected, despite what happened in the real world.
He knew that it wasn't healthy, keeping her picture right beside his bed, still looking at the sonogram for a child he would never meet, but as far as Jamie was concerned, it wasn't causing anyone else harm. If he wanted to keep a memento with him at nearly all times to remember the two things he had loved more than anything else, then he saw no problem with that, although a shrink probably would. The sonogram and wedding photo in his wallet were incredibly worn along their fold lines from being taken out and looked at, but they were still holding up pretty well.
That weekend, Jamie knew that he was supposed to be at Sunday dinner. But Ramirez's wife went into early labor and the poor guy was frantically trying to get someone to cover so he could go be with her. And Jamie didn't exactly have binding plans, so he had volunteered. He saw his family every weekend, but he would never get to see the birth of his own child, so what was the harm in using his free pass for the month so that a fellow cop could?
He had texted his dad as soon as he'd heard that they were looking for coverage and the reason why. Jamie suspected that his dad thought he might just be looking to avoid facing what the weekend brought, a theory that wouldn't be wrong necessarily, but that didn't mean that he wasn't going to do it. He had been at Sunday dinner the past few weeks, so it wasn't like he was starting to make a habit of it again. And besides, when Ramirez's partner got the text that he and his wife had welcomed a healthy baby boy late that night, it made it all the more worth it. At least someone would have good memories of this date.