The beard came as a surprise.
In the photos his face was always clean shaven, his hair dark and close cropped, his shoulders broad, his chest thick with muscle, his eyes bright and blue. In person he was bald, and sporting a bushy salt and pepper beard. In person he seemed huge, a bare few inches taller than her but big, still. Even more muscular than he looked in the pictures. Time had left its mark on his face, just like hers; when he smiled at her his eyes crinkled into a warm nest of crow's feet. The eyes were the same, she thought. His eyes hadn't changed.
Now that he was here, standing right in front of her, she found herself somewhat at a loss. This man was a stranger to her; different from her faded memories, different from the crinkled photographs in the shoebox at the back of her closet. Fin warned her of complications, and Malcolm urged her to be prudent, to take her time, but she had bulled ahead, impatient and eager to meet her old friend, and now the man was standing in front of her, and she had absolutely no idea what to do next.
Neither did he, it seemed; their first introduction had been warm and kind. He'd urged them inside but deferred to her on the matter of his shoes. Kicked them off like she'd asked him to, but as she watched he seemed to freeze, his entire body going rigid and hard as he stared incredulously at something on the little table across from the door. The beard hid his mouth but it did nothing to disguise his expressive eyes, and what she saw there was shock, and something that looked, just a little, like anger.
"Everything all right?" she asked him, reaching out on impulse to touch the sinewy muscle of his forearm.
"Huh," he cleared his throat awkwardly, tearing his eyes away from the table to meet her gaze instead.
"Is that -" he coughed again - "that's - uh - that's your husband?"
He pointed an unsteady hand at the photo of Olivia and Ed on their wedding day, and she smiled softly, sadly.
"Yes," she said. "That's Ed. I guess you didn't know him?"
They'd discussed it, on the phone. He had asked if Malcolm was her husband, and said she wasn't married the last time they saw one another. It was one of those things he'd missed, like the scars on her chest, one of those things that happened after he left, during the dark time when they weren't speaking for reasons she didn't yet understand.
"Uh -" does he normally stumble over his words this much? she wondered - "I knew him. I didn't know you married him, but I - uh - yeah, I knew him."
What a gift it seemed to her in that moment, that she'd found this man, this man who knew so many of her secrets, who could help her untangle the mess of her life. An hour before she'd been staring at the picture herself, wondering what sort of man her husband had been, wondering why Malcolm didn't have more to say about Ed, and now Elliot was standing in front of her, another person who'd known her husband, another person who might be able to fill in even more of the gaps in her memory than she'd originally dreamed.
"Can you tell me about him?" she asked eagerly. "Ed and I, we haven't been living here very long, and no one seems to have known him well."
"Why don't we sit down?" Elliot asked, a pained expression on his face. It looked like talking about Ed was the last thing he wanted to do, but he wasn't saying no.
"Of course."
Olivia led him away from the door, into the living room. He plopped onto the couch with a sigh and she settled herself down on the opposite side from him, leaning back against the arm rest and drawing her knees up to her chest. As they settled Elliot's eyes danced over her, questioning and sad. It felt as if he were studying her, taking note of the changes in her face the same way she'd done with him. I wonder if likes what he sees, she thought; did he look at her, and lament for the changes time had wrought, for the years they had lost, or did he like what he saw? The man in front of her was older than the man in the photos but she thought he was more attractive now than he had been in his youth; was he thinking the same thing about her, or did he miss the person she had been? Maybe he was just trying to make himself believe that it was real, that he was really sitting next to her. That she could understand; she found herself caught in a strange, dreamlike cloud, struggling to reconcile herself to the fact that after all her dreams of him the man himself was now sitting with her, huge and imposing and radiating warmth. It comforted her, having him near; maybe she was a comfort to him, too.
"So," she prompted him when he remained quiet a little too long for her liking. "Tell me how you knew Ed."
This earned her a hard, strange sort of chuckle.
"Ed," he muttered, running his hand over his bald head. "Never heard anybody call him that before. Everybody always just called him Tucker."
That was the name in her phone, she remembered. Her own husband was saved in her phone under his surname. Tucker, not Ed.
"We were cops, right? And cops investigate when people commit crimes. But sometimes cops break the law. And there has to be someone there to investigate the cops. We called those people IAB, and Tucker was one of them."
Not sex crimes, then, like Olivia and Fin and Elliot. Ed was a cop who investigated cops. It seemed to her a noble calling; someone had to hold people in authority to account.
"I guess that didn't make him too popular," she mused. Nobody liked being told what they were doing was wrong, did they?
"That's…an understatement. Tucker - uh, Ed - he rubbed people the wrong way. I hate to tell you this but a lot of people had problems with your…with your husband."
It looked like it hurt him to say the word husband.
"He was just doing his job," she murmured, feeling a powerful urge to defend a man she couldn't remember.
"Yeah," Elliot said darkly. "Sometimes his job meant threatening other people's. I can't - Liv, I'm sorry, but I don't think I'm the guy you should talk to about him."
"You said you knew him," she protested. They were only just getting started here, but it seemed she'd already done something wrong, something to make Elliot uncomfortable, something to close him off from her. That wasn't what she wanted; he'd driven all this way in the dark just to be with her, and she was so glad to have him close, but his face was thunderous and she could feel the tension in him from the other side of the couch.
"He hated my guts, Liv," Elliot told her grimly. "And I gotta tell you, I didn't like him much, either. But you married him, and that means there must be something I don't know. A lot of things, probably. You should ask Fin when he gets here."
"I'll do that."
Everything kept pointing back to Fin. Fin who was already here, who had already begun the process of unraveling her life for her. Fin would know how she got her scars, Fin would be able to tell her more about her husband. What could Elliot tell her, then? Why had he rushed to her side in the small hours of the morning just to tell her to wait for Fin?
"Tell me something Fin doesn't know," she said. Tell me why I remember you, and no one else.
"I can do that," Elliot said. He rubbed at his chin, looked like he was thinking hard for a moment, and then he smiled.
"Your boy," he said after a moment. "Noah. He's a cute kid, even if I didn't care too much for his father."
"Elliot -" she started to warn him, to ask him, exasperated and looking for answers, but he just shook his head, and carried on.
"You always wanted kids, Olivia. You always wanted a family of your own. That was your dream. And for a long time it didn't happen. I think you'd kind of given up on it. And that's something Fin doesn't know. He doesn't have any idea how badly you wanted a child, how happy that boy must've made you. I mean, I'm sure he knows you love your son, but that kid…I guess that's why you retired. You finally had everything you ever wanted."
A family. From what Fin had told her she'd grown up lonesome, no family to speak of besides her mother, and that was the kind of family that hurt. Noah and Ed were different; she'd wanted them. Desperately. She loved her son, she knew she did; even when she didn't remember him, one look at his face was all it took to make her love him, with everything she had. But that love took on a kaleidoscope of new colors, knowing now that Noah was her dearest dream made real. Some people had children accidentally, didn't they? Ended up pregnant without meaning to be, found their children to be an inconvenience, the way Olivia had been an inconvenience to her mother. It was good to know that Noah wasn't an inconvenience, that he was wanted, desperately.
"Why did it take so long?" she wondered. It wasn't like she really expected Elliot to answer; she was pretty sure that kind of question didn't have any answers at all.
"It was hard to make time to meet someone, to settle down, when we were working. Christ, Liv, we slept at the station some days. Up all hours of the day and night, constantly getting called out to work. The job didn't leave much room for anything else."
Maybe that was why she'd married Ed; maybe the only person who could really understand her was another cop.
"Is that what happened to you?" she asked. When she called him at 2:00 a.m. he did not hesitate to answer, had immediately jumped in his car and driven straight to her, and that seemed to Olivia to be evidence of just how small his own life was. A man with a wife and children wouldn't have done that for an old friend he hadn't spoken to in years.
"Eventually, yeah," he allowed. "I tried my best, I really did, but…the job got between me and my wife."
Oh.
So he had been married, once. Was he married when they were partners? The pictures, his arm around her, his voice echoing in her dreams; she hadn't thought, before now, that he might've been married. She'd thought he was like her, that all they had was the job and each other. Not so, it seemed; all those years they worked together he had a wife, and Olivia had nothing at all. The thought left a bitter taste in her mouth.
"I'm sorry," she said softly. "Did you - do you have any children?"
Elliot ran his hand over his head again, looking almost embarrassed.
"Five of 'em," he said, and her stomach swooped unpleasantly. She'd been wondering if maybe she and Elliot were lovers, but now she found herself hoping that they weren't. Five children and a wife; she didn't want to think she was the kind of person who could take a man away from his family. But he said the job got between him and his wife; maybe she'd slept with him after the divorce, and felt no guilt.
But five children?
I had it all wrong, she thought, looking at Elliot over the rise of her knees. They weren't in love, her and Elliot. Couldn't have been. They were partners and friends, but he had a wife, and five children, and she couldn't imagine, even after his divorce was finalized - whenever that might have been - that she ever would have felt like anything other than a homewrecker if she'd slept with him. He belonged to them, to his children, same as she belonged to Noah. Her and Elliot, they did not belong to each other.
She would not begrudge five children their father or another woman her husband, but it did make her feel sad, just a little. Sad to know that this strong, handsome man had not loved her, not in the way she thought he might. It simplified things a little, though. Knowing that whatever had been between them was not romantic put her at ease; she wouldn't have to worry now, about him being jealous of Malcolm, about whether she'd ever broken his heart. They'd never been lovers; they were only very old friends.
"Will you tell me about them?" she asked. "Your kids."
"If that's what you want," he said. "But I didn't come here to talk about my kids, Liv."
"What did you come here for?"
He leveled a serious, steady gaze in her direction.
"I came here for you," he said. "Because this is what we do, Liv. We show up for each other."
That's not true, she thought. It sounded good when he said it, sounded reassuring, sounded like devotion, but Elliot didn't know she was married, didn't know she was married to Ed, didn't know how she'd gotten her scars, had told her himself that they hadn't talked in years.
So why was he lying? Because he wanted her to believe it, or because he wanted to believe it himself?
Maybe I was wrong, she thought. Maybe they'd never slept together - she really didn't want to be the kind of woman who slept with someone else's husband - but maybe that didn't make things any less complicated. Maybe that just made things worse.