When he came home he went straight upstairs; Kathy insisted on sleeping in their bed but she still couldn't manage the stairs herself, and he figured that since the sun had just started to rise she'd probably be up and wondering where he was, wanting him to come to her and help her come down for breakfast.

He was right about that; when he walked into their bedroom he found his wife sitting upright in the bed, watching him with a world-weary expression on her face.

"Is there any point in asking where you've been?"

No, he knew; there was no point. She could ask, but he would not answer; he'd sworn to keep his secrets, made his promises to the Marshals and to Liv. He wasn't gonna tell Kathy the truth, not until she was back on her feet, not until she was strong enough to take it, to hear his confession and decide for herself what she meant to do about it.

It all seemed so simple while he was lying in bed with Olivia, but now that he was face to face with Kathy he found the doubts had begun to creep in. It wasn't that he'd changed his mind about ending his marriage, about trying to pursue Olivia; he was still sold on that score. It was the timing of it he doubted. Was it really wise - was it even possible?- to keep living with Kathy knowing he meant to leave her and yet acting as if nothing were amiss? It was for Kathy's sake he'd decided to wait; he wanted to cushion the blow. But was he really doing her a favor by lying?

What he really wanted was to talk to somebody about it. About this mess he'd found himself in. To talk to someone who knew him, someone who understood him, someone who could see all the shades of grey that painted his life, who wouldn't reduce the whole thing down to black and white the way the priest had done.

In the old days, the early days, it was Kathy he'd talk to. If he had a problem they'd work it out together. Over the years things had changed and they'd talked less and less; talked often, always, about the kids, about finances, about chores and car payments and plans for Christmas, all those problems they solved together, even when they were keeping secrets from one another. It might be nice, he thought, to talk to Kathy now. Maybe she could help him solve this problem, even if he didn't tell her everything.

"Can I ask you a question?" he said, settling heavily down on the side of the bed next to her.

"Why not?" she answered. It was a hesitant sort of response, a wary one, not ayesor ano,but he decided to go ahead and say what was on his mind.

"Are you happy here?"

He didn't think she was, but what did he know? What if he was just making assumptions, giving Kathy credit for an unhappiness she did not feel?Christ,what would he do if he was wrong, if she said she loved it out here?

"Am I happy here?" Kathy repeated incredulously, the sharpness of her tone making it obvious that he'd been right, about her feelings towards Omaha. "Are you kidding me? What do you think, Elliot?"

I think you've been unhappy for a long, long time.

"I'm just…I'm trying to understand," he said slowly. "From the minute we got here you've been pissed off and I just don't understand why you agreed to move in the first place."

They'd talked about it. Before he signed on with the Marshals, before they listed the Queens house for sale, he and Kathy had hashed the whole thing out. How much it would cost, how they'd feel about being that far away from the rest of their family, whether she'd need to get a job or if she could stay home with Eli, they'd talked about all of it, examined the move from every angle, and by the time he signed on the dotted line his wife was on board. Kathy hadtold himshe wanted to make the move, but the second they walked into this house she'd started complaining, and she hadn't stopped since.

"I agreed to it because you're my husband," she said simply. "Because where you go, I go. You said you had a job here so here's where we are."

That wasn't fucking fair, he thought, her putting it all on him, like he'd made this decision all by himself.

"You wanted me to take this job."

"I did," she allowed. "The private contracting work…it was good money, but you were never home. I felt like I was a single parent. I wanted Eli to know his dad." That cut him to the bone. He'd missed so much, during the time he'd spent working overseas, had often felt as if he were nothing more than a paycheck to his family, but to hear Kathy say it so plainy lent credence to his fears. Maybe he'd walked out on his marriage four years ago, and just hadn't realized it until now.

"And since we moved out here you've been home so much more but…you're not really here. You're not really with us. I don't think…I don't think you've said one honest thing to me in the last eight years. We were in a good place, before Eli -" they had been, he knew. Before she came up pregnant with Eli the two of them had worked out child support and custody and everything else, and Kathy was working and Elliot was making sure she could afford the mortgage and he saw his kids as often as he could and they never fought, about anything - "but when we got back together…" Her voice trailed off, but he knew what she meant. They'd been comfortable, before he found his way back into her bed. Everything made sense, and the time they spent together had beeneasy, free of responsibility and guilt, but then he moved back home, and all the old problems had come rushing back with a vengeance.

"I feel like I don't even know you, and I'm not sure I want to."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded, taken aback by her brutal honesty. "You're not sure you want to -"

"You keep secrets from me. You don't tell me things but I don't even know if I want you to, anymore. I don't know if I want to hear what you have to say. I keep thinking…that day, at your office, when I told you I was pregnant…you were ready to walk away from me, weren't you?"

That day; Christ, he remembered that day. Fin's nephew on trial and the defense attorney was digging up dirt on the entire squad, and everything was falling apart, and Elliot had been ducking Kathy's calls for days. They slept together after the Royce case, when thoughts of losing his children left Elliot weak with the longing to see them, when Kathy opened her arms to him and he fell into her readily, grateful for the comfort, for the taste of something familiar, for the trappings of home. They slept together, but then Kathleen caught him, and said something that shook him. It was his own child, calling him out for his unsteady heart, telling him he needed to decide where he wanted to be, that made him realize how badly he didn't want to come home. Malcolm Royce's marriage was over and he'd killed his family rather than let them go, and Elliot didn't want to be that man, and Kathy tracked him down and he had his mouth open to tell her he wasn't coming home but then she'd told him she was pregnant and all his thoughts of making a fresh start vanished in an instant, replaced with duty instead. Yeah, he wasn't gonna forget that day any time soon.

But he really, really didn't want to tell her that.

"Kath-"

"You were the one who was pushing me to see you, pushing me to get back together," mea culpa, he thought, mea culpa, "and then we slept together and you disappeared and the way you looked at me that day…you wanted to tell me it was over. Didn't you?"

"Kathy -"

She glared at him from the other side of the bed, wounded and righteous.

"Tell the truth," she demanded.

"Yes."

Yes. Yes, he'd meant to tell her it was over, but he never got the chance. How different might things have been, he wondered, if he'd called her before that day, if he'd told her the truth, and hadn't hidden from it?

"I knew that, Elliot," she confessed. "I could see it in your face. And I had to tell you I was pregnant before you got a chance to tell me you didn't want me. I felt…I felt so trapped, at that moment. And I keep thinking, if I'd have been just a little bit braver, none of this would've happened."

"You can't tell me you think this is your fault." He reached for her then, reached for her because she was his wife, and he loved her, if not in the way that she deserved. He caught hold of her hand, and held on tight, and listened as for the first time in eight years she told him the truth of what she'd been feeling that day when their lives changed forever.

"It's not all my fault, I know that," she said, shooting him a dark look. "You're…I don't know what you are, Elliot, but you aren't blameless. But back then…I could've figured it out, you know." She sounded almost wistful when she said it, like she wished she had, figured it out, wished she had tried to make a go of it on her own instead of reaching for him. It had never occurred to him to wonder if she regretted it, taking him back, raising Eli together, but he knew the truth now, and it cut him to the quick.

"I could've figured out how to have a baby without a husband. I could've called my mom or my sister or…I could've done a lot of things. But I was ashamed. I was embarrassed and I was scared and I went back to you because I knew that we could handle it. We'd raised babies together before, I knew what that would look like. I was so scared, and I just went back to something that was familiar. But you can't…you can't sit there and tell me we did the right thing."

"We did the right thing," he said emphatically. He had to believe that it was the right thing, going back to his wife, not leaving her alone with a baby to raise. How would that have even worked? His heart would've ached for Eli every second of the day, and Kathy couldn't have afforded daycare and the mortgage, and couldn't have afforded not to work. They always took turns, with a baby, took it in shifts so one of them could always be rested; how would she have managed without him there?

"We did," he insisted. "We did the right thing for our son -

"Did we?" she responded sadly. "Which one? How do you think Dickie feels? He knows you left when he was a kid and now he sees you insisting on sticking by Eli -"

"It's not like that -"

"Of course it is, Elliot. You wanted to get it right with Eli. It was too late for the older kids but Eli was gonna be the one that fixed everything. Don't look at me like that, I did the same thing. I know I baby him. I'm too soft with him. And so are you."

She's right, he thought glumly. She's right about all of it. Right, that maybe they'd had more choices as the time than they'd let themselves believe, right that maybe it hadn't been fair to the older kids, the way they'd devoted themselves to Eli. Hell, Eli was essentially an only child; he couldn't remember a time when he'd shared a house with his siblings, received his parents' full and undivided attention at a time when Elliot was making more money than he ever had before, when Kathy and Elliot could afford to give their youngest son things their oldest son had only dreamed about. Eli's life at eight years old could not have looked more different from Dickie's at the same age, except that they were both watching their parents' marriage crumble.

"So what…what do you want, Kathy?" he asked her slowly, terrified of her answer and longing for it at the same time. It would be so much easier, leaving her, letting her go, if heknewshe wanted out, if he could assure himself it wasn't entirely his own doing. Except that it was, really, entirely his fault, because he had never been the husband she needed him to be.

"I mean really, what do you want?"

"I want to go back in time twenty years and take you out of the department. I want a version of us where you never worked SVU and you never met Olivia -"

"What does Olivia have to do with anything?" The sound of Olivia's name in his wife's mouth sent him spiraling, left him feeling dizzy and anxious, his heart pounding in his chest. Whatever happened here, whoever's fault it was, he did not want Olivia to factor into the conversation, but Kathy had just gone and said it, and he had no idea what was going to happen next.

"Don't be stupid, Elliot," Kathy said darkly. "Olivia has everything to do with this."

That's wrong, he thought. It was wrong.Olivia had never done anything to endanger his marriage; half the time he felt like she was more devoted to his marriage than he was. It mattered to him that they had never crossed that line, that Olivia had never pulled him away from his wife.

Never pulled him away from his wife on purpose, but maybe Kathy was right. Maybe their marriage was doomed the day he met Olivia, the day he met the woman who would grow to own a piece of his soul. The day he met Olivia was the day he met his best and truest friend, the other half of himself, and from the day they met he had begun to share more of himself with his partner than he had ever given to his wife. Maybe all this time, maybe every day from that one to this, he had been walking away from Kathy, and towards Olivia. That didn't make it Liv's fault, but he couldn't pretend that meeting her hadn't changed everything.

"She's the reason you started pulling away and she's the reason -"

"You can't blame -"

"She's the reason you were so messed up when you left the job," Kathy carried on relentlessly, and she was right about that, too, right that it was losing Liv, not just leaving the job, not just killing Jenna, but losing Liv that had demolished him so completely, "and then she died and now she's the reason you can't even look at me. Because you miss her. That's what this has all been about, isn't it? Moving us across the country, lying to me, hiding from me, you're not dealing -"

"Jesus, Kathy-"

"All that talk about needing a fresh start, I didn't understand it until Katie told me Olivia was dead. You wanted to run away from the city because you're grieving and you're not dealing with it. You won't even let yourself admit it. But she's dead and now you've figured out that maybe one day you're gonna be dead, too, and this isn't the life you want to live, is it? This isn't enough for you."

How was he supposed to refute any of that without telling her that Olivia was still alive? That was the last thing he wanted to do just now, admit that Liv was still breathing, that just a few hours ago he'd had his face buried between her thighs; Kathy might not ever let him see Eli again if she found out about that, might be so furious with him that it would ruin any chance they had of an amicable split, and besides, he wasn't allowed to. Telling her the truth could put Liv and her little boy in danger.

And really, he thought, really, was she so wrong? Hadn't he been running, when he decided to take the overseas work, when he decided to move to Nebraska; hadn't he been running away from himself, from his memories, from the ghost of Olivia on every street corner? Olivia wasn't dead but maybe he'd been grieving the loss of her just the same.

"Is it enough for you?" he asked quietly. "You put all this shit on me, Kathy, but what about you? You're the one who kicked me out, you told me you slept with other people while we were -"

"Oh, like you didn't sleep with other people while we were separated -" she was blushing from her neck to the tips of her ears now, though, blushing at the memory of the other man - or was it men? -who'd touched her, and that made the anger flare in his chest.How dare she,he thought, not for the first time; how had she moved on from him so easily, signed the divorce papers and started fucking other people like he never mattered while he had languished alone, wanting her, missing what they had?

"I didn't!" he burst out. "The whole damn time we were separated I never once slept with anyone else."

"I can't believe Olivia turned you down," she said coolly, sharply, like she'd been waiting eight years to throw that accusation in his teeth. Did she really believe that, he wondered; had she really spent all this time assuming he'd fucked Olivia while they were separated? How could she think so little of him, trust him so little? How could she be that ignorant of the truth of his connection to Liv? Did she really think his wedding band was the only thing keeping him apart from Olivia in the old days?

It's like she doesn't know me at all, he thought.

"I didn't ask her," he said tightly.

"Yeah, right," Kathy rolled her eyes. Shit, he hated it when she did that, it always made him see red.

"You believe what you want, Kathy. I've told you the truth."

She tilted her head to the side, watched him appraisingly. Evidently it surprised her, his insistence that he'd never gone to bed with Liv, and that alone might have been enough to end their marriage, to erase any thought he had of working things out with her; even if he hadn't already decided to go, that would've done it for him, the knowledge that for all these years his wife had never really trusted him. That for all this time when he was killing himself trying to be good, and decent, and faithful, she'd just assumed he wasn't.

"You never slept with her? Ever?"

She was asking him for the truth, and the truth had changed. No, he'd never slept with Liv while they were partners, had never even so much as kissed herbefore,but now he'd been inside her three times and he couldn't wait to do it again, could still smell her, taste her, feel her all around him. Now Kathy was asking him for the truth, and he would have tolie,would have to lie to her about the one thing he'd always sworn he'd always be honest about.

"What's that?" she asked, leaning towards him just a little. "That look."

She'd seen it, he realized.

She knows.

"What's that about, Elliot? I thought we were being honest here. Cards on the table. Did you ever sleep with Olivia?"