I'll be fine. I will.
He says the words, and he knows they're true.
He will be fine.
Probably not happy, but fine. He will miss her when she's gone. He will be worried about her all the time, knowing she's undercover and things can always go wrong.
Would anyone ever be happy about that? Who would be happy about not being able to talk to the person you love, see them, touch them, know they're okay? Who would enjoy their relationship being broken up into chunks and interrupted for months at a time?
It's like he said to Isabel – he'll be holding his breath until she returns, time and time again.
So maybe he won't be happy about it, but he will be fine because he knows how to do this. He's lived this life before.
He knows he'll spend more time at the gym after shift, he knows he'll probably work overtime, just for the distraction and to funnel his stress and anxiety into something productive.
He knows he'll pick up some TV show to watch to distract him from the lonely evenings, probably something endless and familiar like Doctor Who.
At least he has Genny and his nephews nearby now, he has Kojo, and Angela and her family.
He knows he'll await the news of her check-ins (or at the very least, knowing that she has not missed a check-in), living in peace for a few hours after each one, able to get a breath in, before enough hours have passed by that something could've happened and he has to start anxiously waiting again.
He knows he can get through the constant worry, he knows he can hold his breath for a long time, he knows he can bide his time until she comes home.
It's not necessarily his first choice in how to spend portions of his life, but he knows he can do it, and he will do it, for her.
Isabel had commented that she couldn't believe he's dating another UC and he'd smiled and laughed when said he knew, because really, he couldn't have ever imagined putting himself in this position again.
But Lucy's different, he'd said, causing Isabel to make a joke about how she's not a junkie in waiting, then apologizing and remarking that seeing him brings it all back.
(Which is exactly what he told her would happen the day he said it was over.)
What he'd meant is that Lucy is worth the risk of living through all this again. When he asked her out, it's not like he didn't know her love for undercover work and her desire to move forward with it in her career. She'd sat across from him outside the station and said that she was scared, because if they did this and it didn't work out she'd be ruining the most important relationship of her life, so maybe it wasn't worth the risk.
Unless it is, he'd said, and in that moment he'd accepted the fate that he would live the life of someone with a partner undercover once again. He'd promised this would be worth the risk, and he knew her UC work came with the package. He's been prepared for this.
Of course, he's still worried about how going undercover could change Lucy, too, but Lucy is not Isabel. He knows it won't turn out the same way. He knows it can still affect Lucy, affect them, in its own different way, but he's going to have faith and ride it out with her and see how it goes because he already committed to doing this again.
He and Isabel had other problems, problems that he hadn't really been aware of until the end. He had never known how pressured she felt to live up to his standards, how she'd always felt she was failing to do so. Sometimes he wonders if that's why she buried herself in the undercover work, why she volunteered as soon as she could to go UC, to begin with. He's come to realize that had she not gone undercover, not fallen victim to the drugs, their problems would have caught up with them anyway because it's hard to live a long happy marriage when you feel like you can't live up to your husband's standards whether they're asking you to or not, when you're apparently putting that kind of pressure on your wife without ever realizing it.
He doesn't know where this will take them, how it will affect their future. But it's always been Lucy's chosen career path and he would never ask her to step away from what she wants to do.
She'd said that day outside Mid-Wilshire maybe it wasn't worth the risk, and he knew then that living this life again was part of the risk he was taking, too. It was a risk, knowing how it had turned out last time, how hard it was. But she was worth it.
She shifts next to him and he can tell she's not sure, not confident in his words, but the truth is they both know it's going to hurt to be apart in this way and that's just the truth of it all. There's no sugarcoating it and maybe she's just starting to realize the reality of going under and being in a committed relationship, a combination she's never really had to face before.
But he'll be fine.
Lucy's different.