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He’s kissing her.
He’s kissing her, and Mrs Mayer is screaming and Mr Mayer is choking and the handcuffs are tearing through her wrists and control while the cigarettes, the wire, the flame burn and burn. She wants – she needs – to scream, to yell, but the pain steals her air and the duct tape forces her lips so tight, so firm she can’t even gasp.
Olivia rips the mask off her face.
*
She swallows.
She breathes.
She counts the stitches in her rug, runs her hands over her knees, recites the colours of her walls, takes a long drink of cold water from her glass.
She kneels on her floor, sits on her heels.
She tries again.
*
Her phone is ringing, and Lewis takes it, and Olivia knows it’s Brian, and she knows he will be here, and she knows this will end, and she will be oka—
Olivia opens her eyes and her phone on the floor says Rollins. The clock on the phone says you went longer this time. Before she thinks it through, habit says pick it up and Olivia answers the call.
“Liv…” Amanda begins, and whatever she was going to say is lost to the ether as she stares at Olivia and frowns. “Liv, you okay?”
Olivia blinks at the screen, and her brain takes a moment to register that she had answered a video call. She had an answered a video call and her mask was on her face. She pulls it off, holds in her desperation for oxygen, sets her phone against her glass on the coffee table.
She smiles at the camera.
She tries to smile at the camera. “I’m fine, Amanda.”
“Liv, you’re flushed. Your eyes are red. Why were you wearing your mask?”
“I’m okay.”
“Liv.”
Olivia wonders when they got to this, this point where Rollins became Amanda became a person Olivia could choose to confide in. Sometime after Nick left. Sometime after she left Ed. Sometime after too many farewells, the lack thereof, relationships lost to a long war of attrition. Or maybe it was after the kids, a want born out of need, out of a slow recognition of another survivor with a similar longing for a family that cared. A family that stayed. A family that supported you and helped you and to whom you didn’t always have to give, only to receive so little in return.
The phone screen lights up at her.
Amanda is still there.
Olivia makes a choice.
*
“Noah and I went for a walk yesterday.”
“Okay...”
“We got caught in the rain.”
Amanda watches her. Olivia squeezes the leg of the coffee table, her hands out of sight.
“My hair was wet.”
She doesn’t think Amanda knows enough to do the math on that sentence. She hadn’t been in court for Olivia’s testimony, none of her colleagues had, not until closing arguments. Only Cragen had heard her first statement, Barba on review, and then, after everything, all the records had been sealed. Amanda’s response during that wait for the trial for Annabeth Pearl suggested she had little idea of the specifics of Liv’s… experience, beyond what the tales from and of Lewis’ prior victims and Olivia’s old apartment had told her.
But that was how Olivia had wanted it to be. No one wanted those images. No one needed those images. No one could understand those images, the same way a single line typed on a report would never reflect what happened, never reflect that sharp stench of her mother’s drink as it rained down on her, the booze and hard fingers tearing through her hair, the sticky strands plastered against her neck, her skin, stinging her burns.
And that was the least of it.
Amanda’s forehead crinkles in confusion, not excess concern. She didn’t know.
“My hair was wet,” Olivia repeats. “Which is fine, but with the mask–”
She takes a deep breath, blows it out through pursed lips, takes a moment to find her sentence and her steady factual voice. Her cop voice. Her captain’s voice.
“Lewis poured vodka on me, in my apartment. I had duct tape on my mouth. The rain with the mask, it threw me into a flashback.”
She’s never discussed the PTSD with her squad. She’s never had to. The change in her behaviour had not been subtle, and they’d all taken extra care not to notice when she faded out, no comments beyond a strident repeat of her name, an almost nothing acknowledgement of her instinctive I’m sorry. Cragen excepted, but that was his job.
Fin had been there for Harris, had never needed nor wanted to bring it up again beyond careful looks and a refusal to touch her without checking first. She was the one to initiate most contact between them, had been ever since Sealview, and he had doubled-down on that.
Nick had been on her couch for a week through several nightmares, been woken by her quiet walks out to the kitchen to make a cup of herbal tea, only to take a quick peek over the top of the couch and accept her refusal to talk. Nick knew but he had treated her normally, had trusted her to deal, had let her admit she wasn’t okay on her own time, later on, through the second round.
Carisi figured it out at some point, she’s sure, but by the time he’d joined the squad, the flashbacks had mostly been relegated to that sliver of time between putting her new son to bed and collapsing into an exhausted, finally dreamless sleep.
Amanda. They hadn’t really been friends then. Some days, they’d barely been collegial. But then Amanda had her own issues to deal with, her own crap brought up, and combined with Olivia’s trauma – sometimes thrusting a searing hot pole through Olivia’s trauma – and her new role as squad commander, it had ended up as one hot mess that they had needed time to sort through.
Fortunately, time had worked.
Amanda-her-friend’s eyes widen. “Shit. Liv, are you okay?”
She waves her hand. “It was only for a second. Noah noticed that I stopped and it pulled me out. It had just been a while.”
“Okay,” Amanda nods, accepting, then hammers her on her bullshit. “But how’d you sleep?”
Olivia swallows at her night of nightmares, of Lewis standing over her bed, while Noah and Amelia hide beneath it. “I’m not sure it would qualify.”
“And now?”
“I tried to put my mask on this morning. It… wasn’t good. Noah realised we didn’t go for a walk today.” She looks at the mask on the coffee table for a moment, at that slip of material that had rapidly flipped from a measure of safety to a harbinger of danger. “He’s in bed. I’m trying again.”
Exposure therapy was a solid concept – homemade exposure therapy not ideal. But her urgent phone appointment isn’t for two days, Lindstrom a busy man in a turbulent time, and Noah won’t last that long inside. Neither will she.
And Olivia has been dealing with her own shit for a very long time.
“How’s that going?”
“Not well.”
“If it makes you feel better, Jesse only made it five minutes today.”
“It doesn’t,” Olivia says lightly.
“How’s Noah dealing with them?”
Calmly, with grace. With straight shoulders, his head held high, a dancer’s carriage. With a grumble of it sucks but otherwise a level of composure that had left her wondering just where her baby had gone. “Oh, he’s fine. He wants to get a few to match his clothes. And a Captain America one.”
“Takes after his mom, then.”
“I was more Wonder Woman.”
“But matching his clothes?”
“I plead the fifth.”
Amanda laughs, but it quickly drops from her face and she focuses just below her phone. She tilts her head, seems to make a decision, then looks straight at the camera.
“Liv… Does it help if you think about it differently?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, yeah, it’s gonna be mandated, but you’re choosing to do this. To protect Noah, to protect us, the city. I mean, that’s kinda your thing.”
Olivia shakes her head, feels the furrow form in her brows. “What is?”
“Protection.”
Her next breath gets stuck in her chest, in her heart, her soul. Olivia doesn’t know what to say.
Amanda continues on. “And Liv… if it’s really getting bad, just take an office day or something. God knows you spend less time in there than Cragen ever did.”
“Cragen had a full complement of detectives.”
“And less itchy feet,” Amanda responds and gives Olivia her trademark smirk. Then she takes a second, and her bravado fades. “Or try… singing?”
“Singing?”
Amanda’s gaze slips somewhere to her left, to a spot where Olivia is sure Billie’s playpen is located. “I sing sometimes.”
“For the girls?”
She shakes her head slightly, eyes still on the playpen. “For me.”
Olivia hears the undertone and she accepts that gift.
*
She imagines an open apartment window sending Singing in the Rain to the street, Noah showing her his favourite ballet positions as they stroll outside the park, a fresh sun shower glistening off a sunflower, a hint of petrichor in the air.
Lewis is buried deep beneath the dirt.
Olivia pours her water over her head.
She tries again.