He said I wanted to forget. I want to know why.
"Uh," Fin said, shooting a sideways look at Elliot, a look that Olivia did not like, not one little bit. "I don't think you wanted to forget," he began slowly. "I gotta be honest with you, Liv, I don't know the whole story. I don't think anybody can answer that question but you."
"You must know something," she said, waving her hand impatiently. "I must've said something about why I wanted to leave."
Fin, Amanda, the other faces in the photograph he'd shown her, they were her friends. People she cared about, loved, even, who did the job with her, the job she'd given all of herself to, and it didn't sit right with her, the thought of leaving them. What could've happened, what could've been so terrible, that it made her want to leave them? Leave, and never look back, uproot her family and move to this little town so far from home, only sending the occasional text message to let the ones she'd left behind know that she was still alive? What kind of person could do something like that?
"I can tell you what you told me," Fin said in answer to her questions, blissfully unaware of the turmoil that gripped her.
"You'd just gotten married. Tucker found out he had lung cancer. Noah was barely two, and you wanted more time with your family. You and Tucker both qualified for your pensions and he sold his house for a fortune, you moved out here for a quieter life."
That didn't sound so bad, she thought. It actually made sense; she didn't remember Ed, but she knew that she'd loved him, and she knew she wanted to care for the ones she loved. If he had lung cancer, if he was very sick and in need of help, she couldn't imagine continuing to work a demanding job that kept her away from him all hours of the day and night. Of course she would want to be with him, to be with her husband and her young son, to watch her child grow and spend time with the man she loved.
Wouldn't she?
"That doesn't seem so complicated," she mused.
"That's what you told me," Fin said. "But what happened was different. You left with no warning. One day you were with us and the next day you were packing up your desk. You didn't even take everything you had with you, just what you could carry in one box. A week later your apartment was empty and you were gone. I can't tell you why you did it like that, Liv. I can't tell you why you moved so fast. All I can tell you is that you went, and I've been wondering why ever since."
It was even worse than she imagined, the story of her leaving. She'd abandoned them, and she hadn't even told them why, and now she couldn't remember, and might not ever remember again. It hurt, the knowledge that she had done this, and could not even justify it to herself.
"I'm so sorry," she said, reaching out impulsively to cover Fin's hand with her own. "That was…unkind of me, I think."
"Sometimes a clean break's better for everyone involved," Elliot rumbled at her from across the table. "Talking doesn't always make things better. Sometimes it just makes things worse."
Fin scoffed, a stifled little sound that might've been an incredulous laugh before he tried to play it off as a cough. What is that about, she wondered. She added it to the nearly endless list of questions she meant to ask him later.
"Was it the cancer that killed him? Ed, I mean?"
How tragic that was, she thought, that she and Ed had only just gotten married when they found out he had cancer, a cancer that took him from her two years later. Was that really all the time they'd had together, just two years? Two years in their cozy little house, two years of golf and dinners at the country club with Rosie and Malcolm, two years of watching Noah grow? Two years was more than none, and she was certain that if she could only remember those two years she would treasure them, but weighed up against the enormity of her life, those two years felt small. Two years of love, two years of family, did not tip the scales against forty-eight years of loneliness.
"Uh," Fin said, shifting uneasily in his seat. "Not exactly."
"Maybe we don't do this here," Elliot said, glancing meaningfully around at the coffee shop and the other souls gathered there, and though he did not explain himself Olivia found that she understood. Elliot was afraid of whatever Fin was about to say. Elliot was afraid of what Olivia might do when she heard the truth, and Elliot didn't want any witnesses to her reaction.
"Tell me," she said to Fin. The two of them, they kept saying it was up to her, that it was her decision what she learned and when, and she'd made up her mind. Olivia would have her answers, whether Elliot wanted her to or not.
"The doctors got the lung cancer out, but it moved to his brain. He was…he was real sick, Olivia. He was losing his memory."
"Like me?"
The table went real, real quiet at that. Elliot and Fin were frozen, staring down at their half-drunk coffees and refusing to meet her gaze. What aren't they telling me? She wondered.
"Not exactly like you," Fin said finally. "Some of your memory's coming back now, and you're making new ones. He couldn't do that. He'd forget what you told him five seconds after you said it. And what he lost, he wasn't gonna get back. It was just gonna keep getting worse until he couldn't speak, 'til he couldn't do anything."
"What are you saying?" she asked slowly. Fin was talking about what would have happened, not what did, and that distinction scared her.
"He decided he didn't want to go out like that and he…he ended things on his own terms."
Fin was being so, so careful, but it didn't matter; there did not exist words gentle enough, kind enough to soften this particular blow. Olivia understood what he was trying to say, and her heart recoiled in horror at the very thought.
"He…he killed himself?" she asked in a small voice.
Her husband, the man she loved, the father of her child, the one person who had promised to stay by her side, always, had left her, on purpose. Even here, even now, on this beautiful day, the specter of a great and terrible violence reared its head; every moment of her life seemed somehow soaked in blood, and she didn't know how to get clean of it.
"Yeah," Fin said heavily. There was nothing more he could say; Olivia understood, now, and she was beginning to wish she didn't.
"How…how could he do that? To me? To Noah? Just take himself away like that?"
To her horror she could feel her lower lip beginning to tremble as a rush of tears threatened to overwhelm her. Not tears of sorrow, of unspeakable grief, or not only that; there was an anger in her, a great and terrible thing. Anger at all the ones who'd loved her and left her, at the cruelty of a world that could do this to her, time and time again, give her the thing she wanted most and rip it away from her.
What kind of life is this? She wondered. And then she found herself thinking I don't want it.
"What - what the fuck is wrong with us?" Olivia demanded sharply, and when Elliot looked at her, really looked at her, he saw that there were tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, and he reached out, slipped his hand beneath the wealth of her dark hair and squeezed gently at the nape of her neck the way he sometimes did when he was trying to reassure her.
"What kind of people live this way?" she continued breathlessly. "All this violence, all this death, all this pain, everybody just walking away without a word, just hurting -"
"Olivia," he called her name in a low voice, eyeing the other coffee shop patrons warily. None of them seemed to have noticed the unusual trio in the corner, and he prayed to God that none of them would.
"Why does it hurt so much?" she demanded, looking up at him with eyes so full of sorrow it grieved him to see it. "Is…is life supposed to hurt this much?"
"No," he said gently. "You - " we, he thought - "got more hurt than most. But there's good, Olivia. There's so much good. You are so good, and you have done so much good for other people. Hell, Tucker did, too, probably. I never liked the guy but he did something that made you love him. That's the part you're supposed to hold on to. Not the hurt. The love."
"Is that what you told yourself when you left me?" The words came out bitter, so bitter, and it made him wonder; just how much did she remember? Only what he'd told her, that he'd cared for her and left her, that they'd barely spoken, or was there something else? Did she remember the silence, the devastation of each unanswered phone call, the impotent rage he must have inspired in her? As much as the bitterness he heard in her voice terrified him he was grateful for it, too; before he'd learned of the accident, when he'd been dreaming of seeing her again, he'd imagined her like this, angry and bitter with a tongue set on wounding him, and in a way it was good, to see that anger in her, that flicker of her true self fighting to break free, even if it killed him in the process.
"I'm gonna…go…be somewhere else," Fin said, rising slowly to his feet. "You got this, Stabler?"
Fin knew something that Olivia didn't, that the question of Elliot's leaving - the how and the why and the what of it, what it had done to her and to him and still was doing to them, even without her knowledge - was a battle for the two of them to face alone.
"Yeah," Elliot said, never looking away from Olivia's face. "I got this."
"Is that how it is?" Olivia asked darkly as Fin drifted away from the table, heading for the bathroom. "He leaves so you can handle me?"
"I'm not sure there's anybody alive who can handle you," Elliot muttered. Pretty as a picture, deadly as a bullet, by turns righteous and petulant, fierce and fragile, Olivia was too much for any-goddamn-body to handle. She didn't need handling; she couldn't be handled. All she needed was someone to yell at, a body to hit when her anger needed somewhere to go, and Elliot could be that for her. Her punching bag, and a soft place for her to land after, when the adrenaline and the rage left her with nothing but a sadness too heavy for her to carry on her own.
"None of this makes any fucking sense," she grumbled. "I think I'm allowed to be pissed."
"Hey, you remembered how to curse, that's something," he said. In response she rolled her eyes, but she wasn't throwing any punches, and so he dared to continue.
"It's good and bad both," he said. "That's life. It's all of it. We can't just pick and choose what we get. When you love somebody, the way you…loved Tucker," just saying those words, love and Tucker in the same sentence made him want to puke, "it's not good all the time, but there's enough good to outweigh the bad. How it ended with Tucker, that's bad. So don't hold on to that part. The end isn't the story, it's just the end. The story is everything else."
"Everything I don't remember," she said sadly.
"You will," he told her. "And you and me, we're…we're more than how we ended, too."
"Did we end?" she asked him, and just like that she stole the breath from his lungs.
No, he wanted to say. Time and distance did not separate him from her, not really; seven years without a word from her, and no, they had not ended. Were never going to end; he carried her with him, everywhere he went. She was his very heart, his conscience, the best parts of himself, and he could hear her voice echoing in his mind every time he closed his eyes.
"I think we're just getting started," he told her. Thirteen years together, seven years apart, and now here they sat, right back where they had begun, learning how to walk side-by-side once more.
"I want to go home," she told him then. She'd drunk enough coffee to float a navy and it was starting to show, in the restless way she spoke, bouncing from one topic to the next, in the nervy fidgeting of her hands, shredding a napkin on the tabletop.
"Back to the city, I mean. I feel like…I feel like that's where I belong. That's true, isn't it? This isn't my place. This is just…this is just the place where Ed died. It doesn't mean anything to me. The city is my home."
She's right about that, he thought. In his heart they were the same, Olivia and the city; two of his greatest loves, both trying to kill him and trying to hold him at the same time, and it was impossible to think of one without the other.
Olivia was winter in New York. Olivia was pink cheeks chapped from the cold and the crunch of dirty snow under black boots. Olivia was a steaming cup of coffee and cracked lips, a chin tucked beneath a soft scarf on a blustery day. Olivia was a black outline against a grey sky. Olivia was the only thing warm enough to thaw his frozen hands.
Olivia was winter in New York; he couldn't picture her in a sundress. He was pretty sure she'd never owned a pair of flip flops. She used to keep brochures for all-inclusive trips to the Bahamas in her apartment and he used to laugh, thinking about her on a beach; he couldn't picture it somehow, Olivia in a bikini, warming her skin under the burning sun. She belonged back home with snow melting in her hair.
"We'll take you there," he said impulsively. "Not right this minute," he added quickly, seeing the sudden sparkle in her eyes. "You got Noah to think about, and we'd have to make some plans. But you can go there, Olivia. Any time you want, you say the word, and we'll make it happen."
"Tomorrow?" she asked hopefully.
"How about Saturday?" he hedged. Fin would be fucking livid if he found Elliot planned to abscond from this place with Olivia and her boy in tow tomorrow, and probably he would be right to be pissed. The city would be overwhelming, he was sure, and he didn't really know how he was going to keep her safe there, but he knew that winter was coming on, and he did not want to face a winter in New York without her.
"Yeah, that'd be good," she said.
Yeah, he thought, that'd be good. Just him, and her, the way it used to be, walking the streets of the city. Maybe once her feet were on more familiar ground her memories might come back to her; maybe with the shadows of the skyscrapers looming over her she might remember who she was supposed to be. Maybe she'd hate him, if those memories ever did return, but it'd be worth it, he thought. Worth it to look into her eyes, and see the woman he remembered staring back at him.
Not that there was anything wrong with this woman, this woman with her bare shoulder and her soft lips, watching him with sparkling eyes over an empty cup coffee. He kinda liked this one, too. Kinda liked her a lot.