When the numbers on the face of her phone read 4:30, Elliot would come to her. She didn't really understand how it all worked, the steady climb of the numbers, the way it seemed to stop and start over again and again, but Malcolm had shown her the clock and she could count. She knew enough.
Enough to know when to expect Elliot, if not to know why it was she wanted to see him so badly. The question ate away at her, sawed and sawed against the column of her spine like a knife against bone. Malcolm's words from earlier in the evening ricoched through her mind like so many bullets; it might be good for you to learn more about your life here. Why was it, she kept asking herself, why was it that the truth of her life back in New York compelled her, consumed her so completely, while she could muster no more than idle curiosity regarding the truth of her life here? This house, this small town, the club, Malcolm, Rosie; they were her life now. The life she'd been living at the moment of the accident, her life as it was, not as it once had been. Surely that should've been more interesting to her than the puzzling events of years gone by.
Maybe it was just that her life now wasn't very interesting. It was simple, easy to wrap her mind around. She did not work, choosing instead to fill her days with her son and her friends. Was that enough to make a life? Breakfast in the morning, take Noah to daycare, come home to…to what? To clean? To read her books? Lunch with the ladies at the club, pick Noah up from daycare, bring him home, have dinner, give him a bath, go to bed, rinse and repeat. Friday nights tangled up in the sheets with Malcolm, Saturday mornings at the park. What else was there to know?
No, it was the before that haunted her. Before, when she'd had a job, a purpose beyond the four walls of her home. Before, when she had so many more friends, and enemies, too, if the marks on her skin were any indication. Before, when her name was Liv and she carried a gun on her hip. Before, when she'd met her husband, fallen in love with him. Before she'd lost him.
Like a ghost she drifted through the corridors of her home, trying to move as silently as possible, not wanting to wake Malcolm or her sleeping child, not wanting to hear their questions. The numbers on the face of her phone read 3:15; it would be a while yet before Elliot's arrival, and she had no notion of how to fill the time, knowing only that sleep was out of the question. She paused in her pacing near the front door, her eyes falling to the picture of her and Ed on their wedding day.
That wide happy smile splashed across her face was a beautiful, terrible thing to behold; beautiful, to see such joy sparkling from her own eyes, and terrible, to know that joy had been taken from her. Who are you? she asked the man in the photograph, trailing her fingertips over the protective glass of the picture frame, studying Ed's face. There was something dignified about him, she decided. It wasn't just the grey in his close-cropped hair, the wrinkles around his eyes; there was something stoic, certain, reassuring in his face. Here, she thought, here was a man who must have made her feel safe. Must have taken care of her, loved her, a man she must have loved.
And yet, she knew nothing about him, and had not asked. Malcolm had already said everything he knew, that Ed was a good friend, a good man who adored his family, even if he was a shit golfer. That was it; at the end of Ed Tucker's life, all Malcolm could say was he was a good man. As far as eulogies went it was a decent one, but it was so sparse. Had Malcolm ever even really known the man at all?
Had he ever really known her?
He's the one you chose, she reminded herself. She'd chosen Ed, and there must have been a reason for that. It was clear from the photos that they weren't young when they married, that she had not rushed headlong into a relationship with all the brash certainty of youth, only to have her dreams dashed as real life began to take its toll. No, she'd married Ed when she was all grown up, comfortable in her job and in herself, and Olivia thought that must have meant she'd been sure. Sure that Ed was what she wanted, that she'd found the man she would happily share the rest of her life with. She'd chosen him. Not Elliot, with his blue eyes and his gruff voice and his arm looped gently around her shoulders; she'd chosen Ed. Chosen Malcolm, too, chosen him to share her bed and her secrets, what few of them she dared give him, and having tasted the sweetness of his kiss she was beginning to understand that choice, at least. It felt good to be held, to be wanted, to sink into the warm embrace of another, and Malcolm had treated her kindly and refused to push her too far, been a perfect gentleman. Maybe that was the right choice.
But when all her memories had fled, when she did not know herself or her story, when she was lost and reeling, it was not Ed, was not Malcolm, whose face comforted her in the darkness. It was not their voices she recalled when all else was lost to her. It was Elliot.
Maybe that was why she could not spare a thought for the now, why she kept returning, again and again, to the question of before. It was the memory of Elliot that survived the punishing inferno in which all else had perished, and she wanted to know why. Why him?
He'll be here soon, she told herself. Maybe you can ask him. Maybe he'll know.
There were a lot of things she hoped he'd know.
The roads were deserted and Elliot made good time, flying up the highway towards Olivia. The drive helped settle his nerves, somewhat; he kept the radio off, hands so tight on the wheel his knuckles had turned white, and devoted himself to his own thoughts.
You have to be cool, he told himself. You have to keep it together.
He could do that, he thought. For her, for Liv, he could control his emotions. Tuck his horror way down deep and keep his voice steady as he tried to answer her myriad questions. It was the same thing he tried to do for his kids - what he tried to do for them now, what he'd failed to do for them before. When the big kids were younger he'd scared them, he knew, his passionate desire to protect them manifesting in something that looked like anger. It was different now; he was older, and so were they, and he was trying, really he was, to be steady. To be someone they could talk to, not someone they feared. If he could do that for his kids, he could damn sure do it for Liv.
But I should've Googled her before I left, he thought glumly. It would've taken, what, ten minutes? Do a quick search, check the headlines. See if there was anything there about the man who'd hurt her - there had to be, he thought, had to be something about a guy who'd inflicted that kind of violence on a cop, a guy who was dead, and however that had come to happen Elliot was sure it must've been news. If Fin wasn't willing to tell him - and it really seemed like he wasn't - the archives of old news articles could've filled in the gaps. Hell, maybe there would be something in there about her marriage, too. If he'd just looked, he could've known all this already, could've prepared himself better for seeing her again. He hadn't looked, though. Had been in too much of a hurry, too eager to see her face, the face of an Olivia who needed him, and not an Olivia who hated him.
Sure, he could've looked her up before now. When he first came back to the city, got back on the force, took the job with OCCB, he could've looked her up. Could've found out for himself what she'd been doing while he was gone, and then he would've known she was retired before Fin had to tell him. That burned him up, just a little, the knowledge that she'd left the force. The second he'd taken the OCCB job he'd begun to formulate a plan, told himself that he'd do this UC stint and when it was done he'd officially be back in the NYPD's good graces and then, once he'd established himself, once the dust had settled on the divorce and he and Kathy had the custody arrangement for Eli all straightened out and Elliot was no longer a pariah among his peers, then he'd go down to the 1-6 with a cup of coffee and a mouthful of apologies for Liv. Now he knew that if he had followed through on his plans he would not have found her there; while he was dreaming of seeing her again she'd been long gone, turned her back on him and on their history, on everything they'd built together and never looked back.
But he hadn't looked, either. Hadn't searched for her. It was just that Googling her felt like a betrayal, somehow, an invasion of her privacy. At least, that's what he told himself. Maybe the truth was just that he was too scared of what he might find.
Anyway, he hadn't done it, and now he was as lost as she was. They were going to have to find their way through this together, the way they always had. Maybe that was for the best.
The miles slipped away, and at last he pulled up in front of a small, neatly tended craftsman on a quiet street. He checked the address Fin had given him, confirmed this was the right house number, and fired off a text to Liv. He wanted to see if she was awake first, didn't want to go banging down the door and scare the shit out of her and her kid.
Her kid. Jesus.
I'm coming, she texted him back almost immediately, and so he clambered out of his SUV, locked the door behind him and made his way up the walk to her front door. His feet had no sooner settled on the wood boards of the porch than the front door flew open, and he found himself face to face with Olivia for the first time in years.
It was like something from a dream. Beautiful and half-remembered, the same and yet not, a familiar face made hazy by the inaccuracies of recollection. There were more lines on her beautiful face than he remembered, and her hair was a little shorter. Wilder, too, not carefully styled the way she liked to wear it but loose and big around her shoulders. No makeup on her face, not even the swipe of mascara and faint shine of lipstick she favored while she was on the job. No leather jacket, no aviators, no gun at her hip; she wore a pink satin pajama set, shorts and a little button down shirt, her tits loose and heavy beneath it, long legs bare and going on for miles. Had he ever seen her in shorts before? He didn't think so. Her feet were bare and there were flakes of chipped pink polish barely clinging to her toenails.
Who is she? He wondered.
"Elliot," she breathed, and the voice was right, even if nothing else seemed to be. That was Olivia, his Olivia, calling his name.
"I told you I was coming," he said, a tight grin tearing at the corners of his lips.
"Thank you," she said, and then she swayed on her feet, a look in her eyes like she was having some kind of internal debate with herself. Before he could draw a breath, ask to come inside, she flung herself at him, wrapped her arms around his neck and clutched him tight in a fierce embrace. His body reacted on instinct, his arms catching hold of her, drawing her to him, tight, so tight, as if he meant to never let her go. For a moment he buried his face in her hair and breathed her in, lost himself in the relief of holding her once more. How long had he dreamed of this, of seeing her again? How long had he dreamed of her forgiveness? It was sweet, that forgiveness, but he knew it was false, knew he could not trust it. She hadn't forgiven him; she'd only forgotten what he'd done.
And in his arms she was trembling, shaking all over, crying, maybe, and so he pushed aside thoughts of his own shortcomings and focused himself instead entirely on her.
"Hey," he murmured. "It's ok. You're ok."
"I've been so scared," she breathed in a broken voice, her words muffled where her face pressed hard to his shoulder.
"I know," he said. He didn't know, not really, but when he thought about it, about what it must feel like to wake up with no recollection of oneself, he imagined he would feel only terror.
"But we're gonna get through this," he told her firmly. "It's all gonna be ok. Now come on, let's go inside. It's cold out here."
And she wasn't dressed for the predawn cold of upstate New York in October. She wasn't dressed in a way he'd ever imagine her to be, and that made him wonder.
With all of her memories stripped away, what remained? Who would she be, if she had not spent her childhood lonesome and scared in the home of a mother who was by turns affectionate and cruel, drunk and unpredictable, who had wondered aloud, more than once, how it would be possible to love her own child? Who would she be, if she had not grown up in the shadow of the sexual violence of a man against a woman? Was it not the experiences a person survived that most shaped their life, and by turns their behavior? Who was she if she could not remember the formative experiences that made her who she was?
Stripped of every hard lesson she'd ever been taught, every coping mechanism she'd ever developed in response to grief or shame or the world around her, what remained? Fear, certainly, but courage, too, he thought. Or maybe courage wasn't the right word; maybe it wasn't brave of her to reach out to him, open her arms to him, invite him to her home. Maybe it was only the naivety of the initiated, the blind trust of a woman who could not recall how badly she'd been hurt when she placed her trust in the wrong person.
I won't be the wrong person, he told himself. I'll prove she can trust me.
"You're right," she said, laughing. "It's freezing. Come in, but please, be quiet. Malcolm and Noah are sleeping."
Malcolm, he remembered, was not her husband. She'd said the name during one of their calls, told him that Malcolm wasn't her husband, was just there looking after her. That meant Noah was her boy. It was, he thought, a good name. A strong name, a classic name. A name that sounded nice when she said it. The name she'd chosen for her son. He liked it.
"I'll keep my voice down," he promised, and followed her into the house.
"Take your shoes off, please," she whispered as he eased the door shut behind him.
Was it just for the noise, he wondered, toeing off his shoes as he'd been asked to do, or had Olivia become one of those people who spent their days obsessing over the state of their floors? It wasn't like she'd have had much else to do, being retired. It didn't matter, he supposed.
He took his shoes off like she asked and started to slide them under the console table immediately across from the front door, but he froze in the act, his mouth dropping over in horror.
There were three photographs in matching frames sitting proudly in the center of the console table. Two picture of a little boy with a sweet round face and bright blue eyes, and one picture of his parents on their wedding day. Olivia, in a beautiful white dress, radiating the happiness of a blushing bride, and her husband with his arms around her, pressing a tender kiss to her temple.
That man; Elliot knew that man. Knew that face, knew it well. That face was burned in his memory, a face he was never, ever going to forget.
That was Ed fucking Tucker kissing Olivia.
What in God's name is going on here? he wondered.
He had strayed out of his dreams, and into a goddamn nightmare.