It's another sweltering, sun-drenched day when they arrive at the graveside service, where Vanessa Mayer's family and friends have gathered to mourn her mother.

Elliot, in a baby-blue cotton button-down and tie, sleeves rolled up, glances at Olivia in profile, taking in her stoic demeanor. Just as he feared, she was rattled this morning when she put on the black dress, only to discover that its scoop neck exposed several of her still-healing cigarette burns. "You could wear something else," he suggested, when he caught a glimpse of her stunned, bereft face.

"I don't have anything else," she pointed out. They were at his place, not hers. She stood in front of the mirror for the better part of two minutes, finally turning to him. "What you said last night, about these marks, do you really believe that?"

"Yes," he replied, quickly. Truthfully.

"Let's go then," she said. "Even if I had a sweater, it's way too hot to cover up."

"You're sure?"

She turned to him, cupping his arms. "Elliot." Her gaze trained on him. "You were right. They're just scars. Either I accept them or I don't go out in public until winter."

Startled, he bobbed his head, putting his own hands on her shoulders. "Okay," he said. "But what I said, it doesn't mean you don't have the right to feel – "

She put a finger to his lips, silencing him. "Please let's go before I change my mind."

In the elevator, he gently ribbed her. "I'm proud of you."

Now, as they stand at the back of the gathering, Olivia's scarring flesh is the least of his worries. Noting again that her breathing is labored, he offers her his elbow. She accepts it quietly, pretending that it's just a gesture. But she puts weight on him.

"Two family funerals in one week," she comments. "Talk about having a lot to deal with."

Elliot frowns, amazed and dismayed by how reflexively she subordinates her own pain. "Who's the second?"

"They buried Vanessa's father last week," Olivia tells him. "It was the day of my surgery. Otherwise I would've gone."

"The father was killed too?"

"Lewis murdered him right in front of me. The second we walked in the door. Then he hunted down the mother."

Elliot whistles. "Liv, I'm sorry. I didn't know that part."

As Vanessa begins her eulogy, Olivia lets out a sudden sob. A few heads turn, but otherwise the ceremony proceeds.

Elliot turns to her. "Are you okay?"

Tears streaming down her cheeks, she nods.

He lobs his arm around her waist, leans in. "Listen, you made your appearance. We don't have to stay."

She sniffles. "I'm fine." But she doesn't shrug him off.

He swipes a bead of sweat off his brow, the heat wave starting to get to him. He is regretting wearing a button-down, thinking he should have just worn a cotton tee, and to hell with decorum. He can't remember what cool weather feels like. Glancing at Olivia again, he chides himself for not having thought to bring any bottled water.

When it's Vanessa's teenaged brother Michael's turn to speak, he feels Olivia shift her weight from one leg to the other.

But poor Michael can't hold it together, and halfway through his eulogy breaks down, causing Vanessa to rush up to him. Brother and sister stand together in front of the coffin, supporting each other.

It's at this point that Elliot feels a collapse next to him, followed by wrenching sobs. Olivia descends to the dusty, parched ground, crouching awkwardly with her knees hovering just above the dirt. Luckily there's enough of a breeze that her wails are drowned out, and since they're standing at the back, her breakdown only attracts the attention of a handful of people.

He crouches down on the dirt with her, holding her sideways. "Let's step away for a few minutes, okay?" he whispers to her.

She glances up. "It would be rude."

"No one's paying attention. We're not family. We'll just go a few yards away, so we can talk."

He guides her away from the gathering, to the edge of the row of graves, where there's a dirt path. She continues to weep unreservedly. When they're safely out of earshot from the group, he pulls her into his arms. "Shhh …. Shhh…."

"I keep thinking about that final time he burned her." She hiccups into his chest. "Right on the breast. There was this sizzling sound. She cried out in agony. I'd never heard anyone sound like that before. And she made eye contact with me, Elliot. And I could see what she was thinking. How could you close your eyes?"

He pulls back, tries to look her in the eye. "Listen to me, Liv. I know how much sympathy you feel for this family, but you went through just as much hell as that woman did. You barely survived yourself. You haven't begun to process it, let alone to heal. You can't carry the burden of their suffering too. It's too much."

She shakes her head, looking at the ground. "I wish I would've been stronger."

He sighs. "If you closed your eyes, it's because you were physiologically incapable of keeping them open. It wasn't a choice. He knew that. He'd put you in that state on purpose to set you up so you'd think it was your fault she was being tortured."

"Elliot, the only reason he went after her was because he had me."

"Not true," he admonishes gently. "She wasn't a random person off the street. She was the mother of his defense attorney. If anyone should feel guilty about bringing that psychopath into that woman's life, it's her daughter, not you."

"I do feel guilty," says a voice from behind.

Startled, Olivia pulls away, swipes at her eyes. "Vanessa."

Elliot whips his head around, looking up at the attractive young redhead, her own eyes red-rimmed and brimming. She is wearing a maroon sleeveless dress, her hair done in a bun. Her cheeks are stained with mascara.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean – " he stammers.

"I deserve it," Vanessa says to Elliot. She addresses Olivia. "I wanted to thank you for coming today. I know it couldn't have been easy for you."

"I, uh, I appreciate that."

"And I wanted to … apologize to you."

"For what?" Olivia asks, genuinely mystified.

Elliot knows.

"For … accusing you of having a vendetta against him."

"You're a defense lawyer," Olivia says. "You were just doing your job."

Vanessa shakes her head. "But I believed it. And to be honest with you, if he hadn't gone after my family, I'm not sure I would've believed … what he did to you."

Then you're an idiot, he thinks. He keeps his mouth shut. The poor woman has just buried both her parents.

"He's manipulative that way," Olivia says, more magnanimous than he. "It's how he got away with doing this for so long."

Vanessa nods. "You can't imagine how … foolish I felt, I feel. I hope you can forgive me, Olivia."

Elliot watches as Olivia stands flatfooted, staring at Vanessa through tear-stained eyes. "It wasn't your fault," she says. "And I am so so sorry for your loss. For both losses."

He marvels again at her capacity for forgiveness. It was her fault, he thinks, angrily. Stupid, gullible woman.

"My mother asked about you," Vanessa says.

"She did?"

"When she was in the hospital, and you were still missing. All my mother wanted to know was whether you'd been found. She told me how hard you were trying to help her."

Olivia looks at the ground. "I let her down."

"Liv," Elliot starts, squeezing her shoulder.

"No," Vanessa replies. "No. Before she died, she made me promise to tell you. That she knew. She knew how hard you tried. She told me to thank you."

"To thank me?"

"She said that he took the tape off your mouth right as he was about to rape her. She said that you tried to talk him out of it. She said you taunted him, so it would take attention away from her. He backhanded you across the face but you kept trying to get him to focus on you instead of her. In the end, he clubbed you with a poker from the fireplace and you went flying back in your chair."

"I, uh, don't remember that," Olivia says softly.

Elliot puts his arm around her, pulling her in. Jesus, he thinks.

Vanessa nods. "She told me to tell you that you're the bravest person she's ever seen. And that she knew he was just manipulating you. That it didn't matter what you did, that he was going to do it anyway."

"I appreciate your saying that to me, Vanessa."

"It's the truth."

As a silence passes, Vanessa points a thumb behind her. "I, uh, should get back."

"Okay," Olivia squeaks, trying to hold it together. "Take care of your brother. He needs you."

"And you take care of yourself, Olivia," Vanessa manages, her voice breaking. And then she turns her back and is gone.

Elliot turns to Olivia in awe. He nods ahead at Vanessa's fading form. "Did you hear what she just said? Not a lot of people would have done that."

"I'm a cop," she murmurs, eyes cast to the ground.

"Not in that situation, you weren't."

"Elliot." She sighs. "Stop trying to convince me I'm some kind of hero."

"You are. And I don't even know why it should take convincing."

"You would have done the same thing."

"In that situation? Me against Lewis? Sure, maybe. Because Lewis probably isn't stronger than I am and wouldn't be interested in raping me. But if, hypothetically, some guy twice my size and twice as strong as me were threatening to rape me? I'm not sure I would have the courage to do what you did."

She lets that sink in. "I think you would," she says softly.

He pulls her close, into his arms. "It's time to stop sacrificing yourself, Liv. You don't have to do that anymore."

"That's not … " She trails off. She looks at the ground.

Elliot leads Olivia down the dirt path, towards the entrance to the cemetery, where he hopes to be able to hail a cab quickly. They took the subway here, but he doesn't think she is in any condition to go back that way. With so much energy spent on her emotional state in recent days, it's easy to forget that she is still also recovering from multiple rib fractures, a concussion and lung surgery. And it's 98 degrees outside.

With about six rows to go before the edge of the cemetery and the main boulevard, Olivia stops in her tracks.

"What's wrong?" he asks. He would kill for a bottled water.

She nods to her right, points. "My mother is buried right there."

And so she is. She leads the way through the row, to Serena's grave. Olivia parks herself in front of it, silent.

With the sun beaming down on them, he stands with her, wondering what she's thinking. He wants to get her out of this heat, but he knows he can't rush her.

He looks at her in profile, her body perfectly still in front of the grave, her hands clasped behind her back. Tears stream down her face. "Are you okay?"

"Mm-hmm…" she manages.

"How long has it been since you were last here?"

She shakes her head. "A few years."

In his pocket, his phone buzzes. He reaches in, hits the side button to quiet it, not wanting to break Olivia's moment of peace.

"She was supposed to go to this conference at Oxford," she starts.

"What?"

"The night before she died, when she fell down those subway steps, she was going to this … symposium on English literature, at Oxford University, in England. She was supposed to fly out to London the next day."

"I wasn't aware you were on regular speaking terms with her during that time."

"Oh, we were. That's why her death caught me by surprise. She was a guest speaker, it was a huge honor. There was no reason for her to drink that night."

"Why did she do it, do you think?" He is curious. This woman, who was so cruel to his partner as a little girl, still meant something to her as an adult. Whatever her flaws, his partner knew her mother in a three-dimensional way. This woman was an honored professor. She was exalted among her peers. She had a vibrant professional life. Olivia, it seems, was a footnote, but she was still her daughter.

Olivia shrugs, and he sees fresh tears fall down her face. "I have no idea! You don't know how many times I've gone over our last conversation in my head, wondering, you know, if maybe something I said upset her."

"Or maybe it had nothing to do with you."

"I had mentioned the case we were working on, you know, the girl raped in the hotel? I always wondered if that spooked her, you know? Because she was going to stay in this fancy new hotel in London overnight before she took a train to Oxford and – "

"But that case – "

"I know!" she interrupts. "I KNOW, Elliot. That stupid girl STAGED the entire attack. And I never got to tell my mother that."

"Liv, you can't know how she would or would not have processed that information. Or if it even would have mattered to her."

Inside his pocket, his phone dings, signifying a text, but he resists pulling it out.

"You know that hippopotamus?" she says suddenly. "That stuffed animal in the picture? From the letter?"

"Yeah …"

"It was my favorite stuffed animal when I was a little girl. I carried it around everywhere I went."

"You remember it?" He is intrigued.

"Yeah. I had show and tell at school one day. I was five, maybe? And I told my mother I was going to bring it. She flipped out."

"Over a stuffed animal?"

Olivia lets out a short laugh. "Yeah. And now I know why. She was jealous that I loved this thing that this other family had given me."

"What did she do?"

"She tried to convince me to bring a storybook instead. I don't even remember what book it was, just that she made this big deal about how it was this first edition and it had been a gift from her thesis advisor. I didn't know what the hell a thesis advisor was. Just that it was somebody important – more important than me. But I wanted to please her, so I agreed. When I came home from school that day, the hippopotamus was gone. She told me I was too old for it and that she'd thrown it down the trash shoot. Along with all my other toys."

"She was punishing you."

"I was devastated. I didn't know what I'd done wrong."

"You didn't do anything wrong. You were collateral damage."

She chortles. "Yeah, and it only took me forty years to figure that out."

"How could you possibly have known? You were just a little girl."

Olivia narrows her eyes. "And do you know, at her funeral, that same thesis advisor, her name was Linda Garralos, she had the gall to come up to me and tell me that my mother had really been looking forward to this Oxford trip, like it was somehow my fault that she'd gone on a bender the night before and fallen down a flight of stairs?"

"What did she mean?"

"I asked her. And do you want to know what this woman told me?" Her voice is laced with anger.

"What?"

"That back in 1979, my mother had been invited to Oxford for an interview. That it would have been a promotion from her position at Columbia. Department Head, or something like that. That she was all excited to go, and that it was down to her, and some jackass at Harvard."

"She would've moved you to England?" Elliot asks, taken aback.

"Yeah," she says, scornfully. "I was ten. She didn't even tell me."

"So what happened?"

"Well, the morning of the trip, one of her graduate students shows up in our apartment. This girl was like twenty-three and chain-smoked cigarettes and had these mousy glasses and greasy hair and a sour face. I had never even met this person and my mother was going to dump me on her for four days."

"She was going to have some grad student babysit you?"

"Yeah. But just as my mother's about to head out the door to the airport, this girl notices spots on my face."

"Spots?"

"Yeah." Olivia laughs. "Turned out I had the chicken pox. My mother had to cancel the trip."

"Did you remember any of this when Linda was telling you?"

"I remembered the babysitter and the chicken pox. My mother didn't even tell me she was going anywhere, let alone to fucking England. Linda told me that next thing my mother knows, the guy from Harvard is being offered the position and that my mother is crushed. And that she – Linda – was too, because she had considered herself my mother's mentor and had personally recommended her to the hiring committee at Oxford."

"She was telling you all this … at your own mother's funeral?"

"Yeah," Olivia scoffs. "It was the most passive-aggressive, self-pitying thing. I was furious."

"Liv, that's terrible."

"After that canceled trip – and this, I do remember, very vividly – my mother went into this deep depression. She started drinking again, hard core. She would beat the hell out of me over anything and everything. I went the rest of my childhood, all the way up to the day of her funeral, never knowing what had triggered it."

"Till Linda."

"Till Linda," she echoes. "She told me that this symposium at Oxford was my mother's chance to finally shine."

"Finally?"

"Yeah. Finally. As in, she could finally have her prestigious, glamorous trip to England without her damn daughter thwarting it. Because, you know, I was finally an adult."

Shaking his head, Elliot puts both his hands on her shoulders. "Listen, Liv, that thesis advisor, Linda, she can go to hell."

"Well, she's 99 years old."

He lets that sink in, then can't help a chuckle. "Okay, well – "

She grins. "She lives in some ratty nursing home in Bayside."

He sighs. "All right, we'll give Linda a pass then."

She giggles. "Yeah, I think she needs it."

They stand, laughing for a full minute, the tension release a godsend.

As she grows serious once again, he waits a second before completing the point he was trying to make. He gestures at the grave. "But look, as for your mother, you have to stop trying to prove to this dead woman that you're worthy of her love."

"That's not what I'm doing."

"That is what you're doing. That's what you've been trying to do your whole life."

His phone buzzes again. Hearing it, Olivia turns to him curiously. He shakes his head, puts up a finger – one second – and again pushes his finger into his pocket, presses the button to silence the damn thing.

And then her phone starts buzzing, and though she, too, ignores it, it breaks her reverie. "Think it's important?" she asks, seemingly assuming they share a caller.

He sighs. "I'll check." He pulls out his phone, aware that she's looking at him expectantly. He tries to keep his expression neutral as he looks at his screen. It's a text, from Cragen, all in caps. CALL ME. URGENT.

He grimaces, hoping his face conveys annoyance, rather than alarm, hits Cragen's number, as Olivia looks on.

The voice on the other line is straight to the point, and desperate. "Are you with Olivia?"

"Yeah, she's right – "

"Where –

" – here."

"Where's here?" Cragen demands.

"Don, what's going on?"

"Where are you?" Cragen barks. "Don't play games. Need to know."

"Queens. All Faiths Cemetery," Elliot says, bewildered. Olivia watches him, her eyes widened. Elliot shrugs, points at the phone, trying to downplay the alarm in Cragen's voice. He hopes she can't hear.

"Exact location, Detective. Now."

The use of Elliot's old title is either Cragen's shorthand because he's too exasperated playing Twenty Questions, or it signifies he's getting dementia. Elliot looks around the endless rows, trying to think how to describe his location. "The B's. In front of her mother's grave."

"Mt. Olive Crescent and Metropolitan Avenue," Olivia pipes up.

Elliot nods, starts to repeat.

"I heard," Cragen interrupts brusquely. "All right, listen to me. Take Olivia, sit down in front of that grave, and don't move a single muscle till we get there."

"How long? I mean, there's no shade here and it's like a hundred degrees and – "

"Elliot. I don't care. I'm sending local unis. They should be there in less than ten minutes. I'm on my way, will be there inside thirty."

He sighs. "All right then. Copy."

"And Elliot."

"Yeah?"

"Do NOT let Olivia out of your sight."