He led her away. Away from the fountain and the pall of smoke and the strange man sitting alone on the bench, away from the joggers and the nannies and the loudly squealing toddlers, away from the hard asphalt track and the barren grass, away to the welcome shelter of a small copse of trees.
The moment their feet came to a stop Olivia tore open her coat as if she were wildly overheated, fanning herself with one hand while the other rubbed and rubbed and rubbed against the golden skin of her chest, bare above the uncharacteristically low neckline of her sweater. She was gasping, breaths steady and uneven, her eyes wild and roving all around as if in desperate search of an escape. Running would do her no good, Elliot knew; this sudden flush of panic was seeded in her bones, and it would follow her wherever she went.
"Olivia," he called her name, stepped up close to her, though he did not dare touch her, not yet. Olivia had been hurt, in ways he did not understand, and he feared the weight of his hands might only increase her distress.
"Look at me," he said sharply.
She didn't; her eyes fluttered closed instead as if she could not face him, as if she did not want to.
Damn it all, Elliot thought. The morning had been going so well, and now Olivia was lost in horror, and he did not know how to bring her back. For a second, two, ten, he gave her space and time to breathe, looked on her with a heart full of grief.
Looked, and saw. Beneath the press of her hand he saw her scars once more, up close and visceral. Over and over again she dragged her palm against those scars as if the pressure of her hand alone might be sufficient to blot them out, and as he looked Elliot began to understand. The size and the shape of those scars betrayed the manner of their making; Olivia had been burned with cigarettes. Burned deep, burned bad enough that the scars still lingered years later. Her mind had forgotten but her nose remembered; it was no wonder, he thought, that the smell of the smoke had set off this chain reaction. Olivia's body recalled a pain her mind could not comprehend, and without memory to guide her she was lost now in shadow.
Fuck it, he thought.
"Look at me," he demanded once more, and this time he touched her, caught her by the wrists to still the frantic movement of her hands.
That did it; as he touched her a frightened gasp slipped out from between her soft lips, and her dark eyes flew open, confusion and terror swirling in their depths.
"You gotta breathe," he told her. "Breathe with me, ok? With me."
And she did. Unsteadily, too fast at first, she breathed, and looked at him. He could see it, could see her struggling to match the tempo of her panting breaths to his slower ones, could see her fighting to come back to herself. They stood, unblinking, eyes locked together, his hands around her wrists anchoring her to him, to this fragile, desperate moment. Slowly, slowly she came back to herself, and the second her shoulders relaxed Elliot released his grip.
"What happened to me?" she asked him in a ragged voice.
I wish I knew, he thought. It shouldn't have been him standing with her now; it should've been Fin. Should've been someone who knew how to answer her questions, someone who had rescued her from this darkness before, not the man who had abandoned her to it.
"Someone hurt you," he said, a painful oversimplification. "The cigarette, the smell, it reminded you of that."
"I don't remember anything!" Olivia burst out angrily. "It didn't remind me -"
"It did, Liv. Somewhere in there, somewhere deep down, you remember."
And God help him, but he wished she didn't. Wished he could take this pain from her, forever. When she'd held her gun the day before she'd remembered her attacker hitting her with it; what else would she remember, given enough time? And what would it do to her if she remembered now, in this moment of panic, of fear?
"When I close my eyes it's like…I can almost touch it," she said breathlessly. "I remember being somewhere dark. I couldn't move. I remember…I remember hurting. I remember his eyes. But I don't remember what he did."
And no one else could remember for her. No one else knew the true scope of her wounding. Fin could tell her the man's name, could tell her what he saw, but there were parts of her ordeal that only Olivia was privy to. What would happen if she never remembered? Forgetting what had been done to her would not make it go away; surely this fear, this unknown, would be worse even than her remembering.
"You don't have to remember right now," he told her carefully. "Don't worry about where you've been. Just remember where you are."
She looked around, at the trees that surrounded them, at the crunchy brown leaves beneath their feet, at him, and as he watched tears gathered in the corners of her dark eyes.
"I don't know where I am," she told him, and the sorrow in her voice shattered something in him. He reached for her on instinct, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close. Olivia went with him willingly, tucked her head beneath his chin, buried her face in the crook of his neck and hid from the world in the shelter of his embrace. With no one there to bear witness but the silent trees Elliot held Olivia close, and prayed for God to take this pain from her.
She wanted to kiss him. Wanted to chase this feeling of unrelenting horror with something soft, something gentle, something sweet. Wanted to curl up, safe within the protective circle of his arms. Wanted to banish the darkness of half-forgotten pain, replace it with something beautiful instead. He smelled so good, and he was so warm, so true and so kind and so real, and she wanted more of that. More of what was good, and less of what hurt.
But though desire flared through her veins she did not act on it; to kiss him now, to push aside this fear in favor of an altogether more pleasant sensation, would be unfair to both of them. He'd made it plain that he would not let her use his body to vent her uncomfortable emotions, and she knew he'd turn her down now if she pressed him once more. But it wasn't only the knowledge of his inevitable rejection that made her hesitate; some deeper instinct had awoken the second she scented the smoke, and that instinct whispered to her now. Told her that it would be dangerous to run from her fears rather than face them.
Running away wasn't working. Turning her back on her old self, focusing on the present, making herself over into a new woman, wasn't fucking working, because deep inside her heart the old Olivia remained. The ghost of the woman she had been haunted her bones, still, reacted in terror to the memory of wounds she could no longer recall. Whether Olivia ignored the voice of that ghost or not, still it whispered to her, warned her that if she did not remember she would be doomed to a life of unpredictable panics just like this one.
"I need to know," she breathed into the weathered skin of Elliot's neck. The grip of his arms around her tightened as she spoke, as if he meant to protect her even from her own reckless heart.
"I need to know what happened to me."
"I can't tell you that," Elliot answered in a broken voice. "But we can find out together."
How he meant to do that she wasn't sure, but when he spoke she believed him.
The box was back on the kitchen table. Elliot emptied it out himself; there were more photographs, a snow globe, paper files he was pretty sure Fin wasn't supposed to remove from the 1-6. It was the files that interested Elliot; a particularly thick one bore a label reading Lewis, William, and something about that name made him feel a true and inexplicable fear.
While Olivia sat at the table flipping through the photographs Elliot opened the Lewis file, and saw at once that he was right to be afraid of it. There was a stack of Polaroids inside, pictures of Olivia, her face bloodied and her eyes eerily vacant. Pictures of her chest, her belly, her thighs, pictures of burns and cuts and bruises. He did not want to show her the pictures; he knew he had no choice.
"This is it," he told her hoarsely. "If you want to know what happened, this…this is it."
The file would contain witness statements and field notes, forensics reports and court records. Everything the police had learned about Olivia's ordeal, and none of the secrets she'd kept for herself.
"I don't want to know," she told him sadly. "But I…I think I need to know. I feel like…I feel like my body isn't mine. Like someone took it away from me. If I remember, maybe I can take it back."
How many times had he heard victims say the very same thing? Searching for meaning, searching for closure, searching for healing and a chance to reclaim their agency? Fifteen years in SVU had prepared him for this moment; he had done this before.
"I'll let you read it," he said. "What happened…that's your story, Liv. And I won't read about it if you don't want me to."
This Olivia, this strange, brazen creature, faelike and unpredictable, she might not have cared whether he read those pages or not. But the old Liv, the Liv she had been, the Liv he loved, would rather die than let him see the evidence of her attack, and he knew it. Years ago something had happened at Sealview and she'd never, ever told him what it was; this new horror was worse than that, he thought, because of the scars, because of the trauma that still lingered in her veins. She'd refused to discuss Sealview and he was pretty sure she'd have cut out her own tongue before she told him about William Lewis.
"I think….I just need some time," she told him.
"I'll be in the living room when you're done."
He didn't intend to do it. He just did it, just leaned over and kissed the top of her head, the way he would've done for Kathy when they were married, the way he would've done for one of his daughters, offering a reassurance to himself as much as to Olivia, a piece of affection he never would've dared to share with her before the accident, and yet it came to him so easily, as naturally as breathing. He kissed the top of her head, and when he began to move away she reached out, and caught him by the hand.
"Thank you," she told him earnestly.
"I'm right here," he told her. "Whatever you need."
With each word she read the sense of horror rising in her gut only grew.
How could this have happened? she asked herself, over and over. How could this have happened; how could a man be so evil? How could one person cause so much devastation, on purpose? What kind of world was she living in, where demons like William Lewis walked free, enacting unimaginable cruelty at will? And how could a decorated detective with so many years on the job, so much experience at protecting herself and keeping others safe, have fallen prey to his machinations?
There was a part of her that felt pride, knowing that she had survived, that she was still living while William Lewis was not, that from the ashes of this conflagration she had built herself a new life, a better life, a life full of family and love. She had been brave, and strong; she had faced a demon, found the fortitude to break her own wrist in her attempt to escape, beat him bloody while she was drugged and weak and starving. Pride, fierce and undeniable, surged through her veins, but it was not enough to drown out the shame.
She was ashamed, of her own failure, her own weakness. Ashamed that she had let herself be caught, that she had not been strong enough to stop Lewis until it was very nearly too late. How could he have slipped past her defenses, brought her so low? How could she have allowed this to happen?
The photographs were damning, a violation in their own right. The most intimate parts of her body on full display, nowhere to hide beneath the fluorescent lights of what must have been a hospital, undeniable proof that this man had taken her body for his own, used it for his own purposes and left her broken and bleeding. Even the way he died seemed to be evidence of his victory over her; it wasn't Olivia who killed him, wasn't Olivia who ultimately beat him. Lewis had removed himself from the picture and nearly gotten her arrested for his murder in the process. She could almost hear him laughing at her from hell.
Olivia wanted to believe that she was brave, that since she'd gotten married and adopted Noah after Lewis's attack that she must have healed, moved on from her ordeal, but she couldn't help but wonder if maybe she was wrong about that. If maybe she and Ed had come to this little town, not in search of a quieter life for their family but in an effort to outrun the ghost of William Lewis. What if it was Lewis's fault that she decided to leave the job; what if he had shaken her trust in herself so completely that she couldn't do the work anymore? What if he'd left her too weak to carry on? What if this quiet retirement was nothing more than capitulation to her own failure?
A failure Ed knew about, in intimate detail. His name was all over the file; it was Ed Tucker who'd taken her statement, after both incidents with Lewis. There were transcripts of the interviews in the file and she read them hungrily, searching for some remnant of the man she'd once loved. The first interview was actively hostile, and she could tell just from the words on the page that she must not have liked Tucker any more than Elliot did. The second interview was different; Tucker was kind, conciliatory, trying to help her, and her responses were less waspish. Was it the knowledge of what Lewis had done to her that softened Ed's heart? Was it his warmth after Lewis that made her look at him as a friend rather than an enemy? Whatever the reason, she had fallen in love with Ed, and Ed had known the origin of every scar on her body.
Malcolm didn't know. Elliot didn't know. But Ed knew. Ed knew her, in a way no one in her life did now, and she missed him so badly she ached with it. Or not him, exactly; she could not recall her husband, did not know what made him laugh, what made him angry, what made her love him, but she longed for him, still. Longed for the one who knew her, for a man she'd never have to explain herself to.
Longed for a man she did not blame for the violence that had been done to her. It wasn't Ed's fault; he hadn't worked in her department, wasn't a member of her team, wasn't the one responsible for watching her back. No, it was Elliot who was supposed to stand strong beside her, Elliot who was supposed to be her partner, Elliot who had walked out on her and never looked back.
How could he have done that to her? Just left her, all alone, without a word? How could he claim to love her, and yet abandon her? How could she believe him when he told her he was here for her now, knowing that he had already left her behind once before?
And how, how could she blame him for what Lewis had done? She wanted to, Christ she wanted to blame Elliot for it, but the evidence in the file would not let her, not completely. It was her fault. Lewis. She was supposed to be stronger than this; she was supposed to protect Elliot as much as he protected her. She was supposed to be better, and she had not been good enough, not by half.
It wasn't only Elliot who'd abandoned her. When Lewis took her, no one came looking for her; when she most needed the help of those closest to her, no one answered the call. For days now she had been wondering at the totality of her own isolation, wondering how it was possible for a woman to have so few human connections, and what she saw in those pages seemed only to prove that her darkest fears were well founded. At the time William Lewis took her Olivia had her squad, a boyfriend, people who supposedly cared about her, and yet when she disappeared it took them days to notice. How different might things have been, she wondered, if only someone had come for her?
Would Elliot have come? If he had been her partner would he have assumed, as Nick Amaro did, that she was safe at home where her Captain sent her? Would he have called her, gone to her apartment when she didn't answer? Would he have burned the whole world down for her, killed William Lewis in cold blood and spared her the horror of her second abduction?
She wanted to believe that he would have. Wanted to believe that he loved her, and that his love might have saved her. But Elliot left her; Elliot left her all alone, and when she was beaten and burned and hurting he did not come for her. He still didn't even know what Lewis had done to her. Elliot made a clean break, and Elliot escaped before this heartbreak stained his hands with blood, and she hated him for that, even as she believed that he would've been her salvation, if only things were different. Strange, how faith and betrayal had twined themselves together in her heart.
Her hands were shaking, her skin itchy and too-tight feeling, her heart pounding out an unsteady rhythm in her chest. Her feet longed to flee, to run like hell and escape the truth that stared back at her from those photographs, but where could she go? There was nowhere she could run where this darkness would not follow; even with all her memories lost the stain of it remained. In the moment she was seized with a sudden desire to shower, to strip off the clothes that felt too restrictive just now and wash herself clean. Water and soap would not erase the scars Lewis had left on her, but she went anyway. Rose to her feet and left the file spread open across the kitchen table, walked away from that place, walked by the living room where Elliot waited for her, ignored the sound of his voice calling out her name in alarm, walked down the hallway and info her bedroom. The moment the door closed behind her she began to tear at her clothes, all but ripping them from her back until she was naked, naked except for Elliot's St. Jude medallion sparkling around her neck. It was not enough, to be bare; she could still feel the weight of her shame and her fear and her sorrow heavy on her shoulders, and with tears in her eyes she stood at the foot of her bed, staring around at a stranger's bedroom, feeling as if she had wandered into a stranger's life, and wishing, with everything she had, that she could turn her back and leave it behind.
If this is my life, she thought, I don't want it.