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Some nights, Olivia stacks her dishes in the dishwasher in a technique so lacking in order and precision, she’s sure 1PP would fire her if they knew while her squad would question her remaining faculties. In fact, her 7-year-old has questioned her on it and would likely be doing so now, if he wasn’t so utterly entranced by his new gift from one of her oldest friends.
She drops the last fork somewhere in the spot for forks and closes the dishwasher door, then watches as her son carefully pliés, his right hand gently placed on the new barre behind the couch. Both boy and barre are judiciously arranged so as to be seen from the iPad standing on the kitchen counter.
“Did you see it, Uncle Munch? Did you see it?” Noah asks giddily, as he sprints back to the tablet and grabs it, flipping the camera around so Munch can see him while they talk. “And they fit perfectly. How did you know my size?”
John’s voice comes through the speakers, a little tinny and a lot gravelly. “I’ve got ears everywhere, little man.”
Noah frowns. “I thought that was the government?”
“It is, my learned friend, but I have my spies too.”
Noah pauses, then his mouth twists and he huffs, unimpressed. “Was it Mom?”
“Not this time. But smart thinking all the same.”
Olivia laughs as she notes the time. 8.50pm. Past his usual bedtime, though usual has taken a long slow dive out the window lately. “Noah, time for PJs and teeth, okay.”
For once, he doesn’t argue, too delighted with his shoes. She doesn’t even have to prompt him to be polite. “Thank you, Munch! Love you!” he shouts, as she takes the tablet from him across the countertop.
“Back at you, kiddo.”
Noah blows a kiss towards the tablet, then cautiously tugs his shoes off, placing them on the coffee table and making sure their elastic was tucked inside, before dashing into his room. Olivia watches him go, then turns her attention to the tablet, standing it back on the counter. “Did you get your kiss?”
John purses his lips at her, his head in the camera frame supported by two hospital pillows, and blows her a kiss back before breaking out into a grin. “Absolutely.”
“You know you just made his year, right?” she asks. She keeps an eye on the screen as she pulls over her glass and the pitcher of water to pour a drink, hoping he realises just how much his present – and the implicit approval of Noah’s dancing – means to her kid.
“You know me, Liv, I always endeavour to bring happiness and joy to the little people in order to brighten their day.” His voice is light and his eyes twinkle, but he gives a slight nod, and she knows he got the message. “What about his mom?”
She grabs her water and moves to the dining table, sliding into the chair as she props the tablet up in front of her, slips on her glasses and smiles. “Oh, you always brighten my day, John Munch. Except for when you’re a pain in the ass.”
“Well, I always endeavour to be that too.” He breaks off into a small coughing fit, his fist bunching against his mouth as his eyes start to water.
The smile drops from her face as she carefully observes him. “You are doing better?”
He shakily reaches out off-camera, his tablet shifting with it, then brings back a plastic cup and takes a small sip of water. He swallows, then takes another sip and his mouth chews for a moment in an apparent attempt to moisten it. “Think so. They’ve got me on a new steroid and the lungs are feeling lighter.” He raises his eyebrows as the cup disappears again and he turns back to the camera. “How do I look?”
Like shit, she doesn’t say. John’s always been skinny, but now he’s gaunt, even skeletal, the pallor of his face matching the bleached sheets behind him. Still, he looks healthier than he had four nights before, when they had spoken for five minutes and she had quickly realised she hadn’t been so afraid of the sounds coming from someone’s lungs since Noah had been admitted with the measles and pneumonia.
But humankind has spent a couple millennia with the measles and the doctors had known how it could go; they’ve had maybe five months with COVID-19.
Bright side, John’s smiling again. Maybe there’s a little more pink in his cheeks than the sheets.
“Pretty as always,” she says instead. “Fin’ll be jealous.”
“Good to know I’m still number three behind you and Rollins.”
She shakes her head. “Ah, but you haven’t met my new kid yet.”
“Ah, but she is but a child while you are a woman, my dear Olivia.” She wrinkles her nose at him. “What was that face?”
“Kat’s a year younger than Kathleen.” And isn’t that just something she’s been frowning over since she first realised.
“So that’d make her, what? A year older than you when you joined the squad? The same age as Rollins?”
She’s a little surprised he had the math memorised – or at least, close enough – then curls her upper lip at that math. “Thanks for that.”
“Time marches on, my friend. At least you have become wiser with it. I’ve just gotten wrinklier.”
“You were born wrinkly.”
He shrugs. “Such is my lot in life.”
She’s distracted for second as she hears the water in the bathroom turn on, and she listens to check there’s no screaming. There isn’t, for once.
A thought occurs.
“Hey, John?” she says, as her gaze slips back to the tablet to find Munch’s beaming face. Who would have thought, twenty-two years ago, that that was a descriptor she would use for him. “I love you.”
“So much sentiment for an old man,” he laughs, resting his hand against his heart and his chest, when it’s suddenly followed by another short cough. The plastic cup returns and he takes another drink of water, then stops to examine the empty container before dropping it down beside him. He smiles at her, fond and doting with his eyes crinkling, and she quickly grabs a screenshot. “Love you too, Liv.”
She opens her mouth, to ask him another question, when there’s a crash of glass against tile, the water shuts off, and a long Moooooom? emerges from the bathroom. Olivia softly sighs then grins back at the iPad. “Call you tomorrow?”
John’s still smiling. “It’s a date.”
*
The knock comes after midnight.
Olivia doesn’t register it at first. She’s standing in the doorway to Noah’s room, his new nightlight casting faint stars against the wall as she watches him, just to make sure his chest keeps rising and falling. It’s almost a form of meditation as she instinctively matches his breaths.
There’s a quiet panic underlying everything now – admittedly, not so different from what has been underlying her life for years. But it’s new for the city, new for the planet, and she has to remind herself sometimes that not everyone had already possessed this baseline level of cope, with the hard-gained methods of how to do so learned through cruel lessons and a whole lot of therapy.
Still, she finds herself watching Noah sleep more often than before. It helps. It always has.
Another soft knock and she lifts her head, before she pushes away from his doorway and softly pads towards the entrance, taking a second to peek through the peephole. It’s Fin, slowly pulling his mask off, and she rests her head against the door as twin spikes of fear and adrenaline shoot up her spine.
She brushes her hand against her cheeks and chin, then reaches for the locks and handle and opens the door to find a taut frown on Fin’s lips and pained glassy eyes that do nothing to assuage her anxiety.
“Can I come in?”
She hesitates.
“Liv,” Fin says slowly and blinks, the skin near his eyes sinking into sharp waves, and she suddenly thinks she’s never seen him so tired. “I showered. Had a clear test two days ago. I’m always masked and was only outside to drive here. I don’t even have to go past the entry.”
She stares at him, for a moment confused, because no, that’s not what this is. Well, it is – Noah’s safety and health is always there at the back of her brain and her neck, wrapped tight around her heart and pitched low in her stomach – but she will clean, and wash, and wipe things down, and sanitise – hell, she’ll find matches and burn things, because she knows she is going to need Fin right now. Because she knows, she knows, what he’s about to say – what she doesn’t want him to say.
Not this, not again.
But she doesn’t say any of that, just opens the door wider, because all she can get out is, “When?”
“Eleven. His brother called me.”
“But I just spoke–”
“I know.”
She swallows hard against the desert wind choking her throat. “He said his lungs were clearing.”
“Wasn’t his lungs. Heart attack. Maybe a clot.”
She closes her eyes and takes a minute to breathe. Fin shuts the door behind him. She can hear the swish of his jacket being removed, the squelch of the hand sanitiser, metal striking metal as the locks turn, and then he grabs her left arm and slowly leads her to the couch, his right hand lying in comfort against the back of her shoulder.
She sits on the couch and curls her legs up, pressing her head against her wrist as she tries to push it all away. Fin’s hand stays on her shoulder.
“Liv,” he starts, then stops, clears his throat. “He was asleep. It was quick.” He exhales softly, long and low. “He had an order for no intubation, no CPR. He knew it was coming.”
She lifts her head and turns to watch him. His chin is cupped in his left hand, elbow on the couch arm, his eyes resting on an old picture on the bookshelf, one of her and John sitting in the squad room. It’s a slightly awkward photo, but she loves it. They look happy. There isn’t always enough of that in that room. “How do you know?”
“Half an hour before he called you, he called me. He spoke to Nick this morning, maybe Cassidy too, and Amanda said she talked to him last night after some toys and books showed up at the door for the girls.”
“Top Ten Ways of Sticking It to The Man?”
“How to Raise Baby Paranoid Fruitcakes.”
She coughs out a shaky laugh, and sighs. “Noah got new shoes and a barre for ballet this afternoon.” She looks down, rubs her hand over her thigh. “Maybe he was just bored. He’s never done well with bored.”
“Liv. He knew.”
She can barely whisper her last protest, his promise. “He said we’d talk tomorrow.” And that’s it, she’s done, and she can’t stop the quiet tears, try as she might with her eyelids and her hands and the neck of her sweater.
Fin doesn’t say anything, just gently sits with her, and when the tears slow and she eventually catches herself, she looks at him to find a damp sheen on his cheeks too. He pulls Noah’s ballet shoes into his lap and examines them before returning them to the table. “How’s the little dude doing?”
She laughs, then sniffs, wiping her sleeve across her nose. She doesn’t know where the tissues are. “Going stir crazy and taking me with him. Yours?”
He shrugs. “Fine. Jaden’s still cute on facetime. You figured a plan yet?”
She returns his shrug. “Barba and his team are on stand down and he’s working from home. He’s offered to stay on days I have to come in since Lucy’s had to go to her mom’s. But it still runs the risk of me bringing it home, Noah’s high risk, and god, Fin, I just can’t–” She shivers at the thought of this moment, this nightmare, again with her son. “Not to mention, we’re going to have a surge of cases when things settle down and–”
“And we’ll have no evidence. I know. Or no one reports at all.” He presses his thigh against hers, his shoulder against her arm, and grasps her wrist, resting two fingers against her pulse. “Liv. Whatever it takes. We’ll make it work.”
She nods, wipes her eyes with her palms, thinks of their team. They fight, they argue, but in the end, they’ve got her back and she has theirs. Noah’s current favourite movie-on-repeat darts into her brain. It’s little, and broken, but still good. “You’ve got Amanda?”
“Yeah. I was gonna head over there after you.”
She squints at her watch. “At one-thirty?”
“She’ll wanna know. You’ve got Nick?”
“Yeah,” and Brian, she doesn’t say, but Fin can read it anyway.
He nods. “You want, I can call the Captain?”
There’s an odd second where Fin pauses at his offer, his forehead furrowing as a brief look of confusion passes over his face, and a small knowing smile flits over her lips. Because yeah, in this kind of context, with their years and decades of history and that sometimes still instinctual memory of the old team where they were the ones standing side-by-side pulling shit – not the resident parent and uncle and god, sometimes she just feels so old – that’s what Cragen will always be: their captain. Like Elliot, their hothead, and Munch, their resident sage and theorist.
God, John.
“No, I’ll let Don know too.”
It briefly crosses her mind to try to let a few others know as well, but then she figures they’ll learn through the NYPD and supreme court grapevines, both still running at full-speed. Besides, her numbers for most were nearly a decade out of date, much like the friendships, and she’s not even sure if Alex would answer her call either.
Time mostly, some disagreements, and effort on all ends, but after Lewis there’d been enough on her mind than to keep contacting people who’d already refused to return her messages. It still hurt sometimes.
But she has Noah. And Fin and Rafael, Nick, Amanda and the girls. Sonny Carisi, in all the connotations his nickname has. She thinks there’s a chance that Kat’ll end up there one day too – she’s too much like Olivia had been when she was younger, though much better-adjusted and far less desperate for family. Don.
And John.
Shit. She’s crying again.
Fin slings his arm around her shoulder and they sit there for a few more minutes, before she abruptly stands, grabbing his hand to tug him to his feet. They don’t hug, not fully, and she’s suddenly not sure if they ever really have, but they face each other, both holding tight to the other’s elbows, and then he lifts his chin and she clears her throat and they head towards the door.
There were still people, family, to inform, and it was going to hurt more than any official notification they had ever given.
She thinks then of Mike, and there’s more hurt in her heart, and she hopes that, however it works and wherever they are, he and John will be safe now. May his memory be a blessing. And there’s a stray moment where she promises that she will eventually, voluntarily, leave the squad before Fin does. Or demote him if he tries to go first. She doesn’t need another of her sergeants on this list.
Or her brothers. And there’s Simon.
And then, of course, there’s Ed.
She’s so tired.
“Hey, Liv,” Fin says from the hall, just as she’s about to close the door. She pauses, her hand resting lightly on the lock, and he gazes directly at her, forthright and open, that solid trust slowly built over twenty years of shit situations and happy ones too floating across the air. “You’re my sister too.”
She holds out her hand again and he grasps it firmly, giving her palm a squeeze. “Love you,” she forces through a smile and she can feel the tears reforming. Not that they really went away.
His reply is simple. “Back at you.” And then he’s gone.
She closes the door and faces the living room, casting her eyes over their books, Noah’s school things, the barre standing behind the couch, the ballet shoes on the coffee table. She sinks back onto the couch, grabbing the throw to wrap round her shoulders, and swipes her phone off the table.
She scrolls through the list of recent calls – ninety percent being work-related and she makes a mental note to let Melinda know too once the morning had a sun – then presses the number she has been searching for. She takes a breath as the line rings and rings and then that low familiar warmth picks up at the other end, the one that said – still says – you’re safe, I’ve got you, for life, and meant it.
“Liv?"
She leans back against the couch and closes her eyes.
“Hey, Nick. You got a moment?”
*
Fin.