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Lizzie walks into the precinct with a box of files held at her hip, stray papers sticking up out of the top. “The next time you forget something at home,” she says in lieu of a greeting, “call Maureen.”
She dumps the box on Elliot’s desk, lifts a hand to smooth out her hair, and crosses her arms over her chest. Elliot turns away from his conversation with Bell to greet her. “Your sister was busy.”
“So was I!”
Elliot rolls his eyes, kicks his foot against the ground to slide his chair toward her. “Actually busy,” he says. “You weren’t.”
“I was at rehearsal,” Lizzie tells him. She’s still dressed for it, too; clad in only a pair of tights and a grey t-shirt, an old jacket she’d stolen from Dickie thrown over the top.
“Exactly.” Elliot grins at her and pulls the box toward him, unfazed by Lizzie’s glare. “What are you even rehearsing for? Broadway’s shut.”
Lizzie sighs as Elliot starts digging through files. “They still have events,” she says. She drops her arms back to her sides and sits on the corner of his desk. “Mostly gallery stuff. They’re really hard to come by.” She lifts her leg and kicks at Elliot’s, waits until he looks back toward her. “If I suck, it’s your fault.”
“You won’t suck.” It’s an auto-pilot response, the kind expected of a father. Lizzie rolls her eyes.
“Whatever,” she says, stepping away from his desk. “I have to get back. I’ll see you later, yeah?”
Elliot nods. “Yeah, hey—” He rolls toward her, gets out of his chair to wrap her in a loose, one-armed hug. “Thanks,” he tells her. He squeezes her gently, places a kiss against the side of her head. “And sorry.”
Lizzie scrunches up her face. “It’s fine.” She hugs him back, stays there for a moment. They’ve all been doing more of that, lately. Ever since… “Good luck with your case.”
Elliot hums and lets her go, and Lizzie hurries out of the room, back out the way she came. By the time another voice is asking after her, she’s too far away to hear it.
“Who was that?” Jet asks, peeking out between her computer screens. She’s playing at disinterested, trying for her usual monotone, but there’s an edge to her voice that gives away her genuine interest.
Elliot gives her a look as he returns to his seat. “My youngest daughter,” he says, spreading more files across his desk.
He’s too focused to catch Jet’s quiet, responding, Huh.
“We need the shipping logs for both companies.”
“Copy.”
“Twenty-third to the twenty-ninth. Maybe back to the twentieth.”
“Copy.”
Elliot looks from the report in his hand to where Jet is sat at her station, fingers flying over a keyboard. “Did you get anything off Olsen’s burner?”
Jet shakes her head. “Data’s still decrypting. Looks like there’ll be a few GPS hits. Bell gave me—” Her phone chimes, and she breaks off almost instantly, slows her typing to check the notification. When she sees the text, she stops entirely.
Elliot watches as Jet pulls the phone toward her, a small, barely contained grin breaking out across her face. When it becomes clear she has no intentions of continuing their conversation, he lifts his hand and clicks twice in the space beside her ear.
“What did Bell give you?”
“What? Oh.” Jet shakes her head to focus, puts her phone on her desk and rolls to the other end of her station, plucking a thick folder off a pile of paperwork. “Company call logs,” she says. “There’s a bunch of after-hour calls. Bell says it looks sus.”
Elliot thumbs the folder. “You think it’s connected to the—” he breaks off, does a double take at Jet’s phone, and falls into a stunned silence when he sees the name that lights up the screen. He looks at Jet, the phone, back again. “Elizabeth Stabler,” he reads, not missing the way Jet’s face freezes, then heats, her blush obvious against such pale skin. “You’re texting my daughter?”
Jet shrugs, pulls a knee up to her chest, wraps her arms around her leg. “Her studio runs events at the same gallery I showcase my art,” she explains. “We ran into each other.”
Elliot looks at her like she’s grown a second head, the Olsen case entirely forgotten. “Ran into each other,” he repeats. “You think I was born yesterday?”
Jet grins, rests her chin against her knee. Can’t help it. “Not with that hairline.”
Elliot gives her look. Jet knows it’s only Bell’s presence at the top of the stairs that stops him from using the folder of call logs to smack her over the head.
“What are you two doing?”
In unison, two heads turn toward him. Elliot looks to where Dickie sits at the breakfast bench, a series of Tupperware containers laid out in front of him, before he turns to Lizzie. She looks more frazzled than her brother; a stained apron hangs off her neck, wisps of hair sticking up every which way. Elliot arches an eyebrow.
“You’re living off bad Chinese takeout again,” Lizzie says, as if it explains everything. Elliot looks to her brother for help.
“Meal prepping,” is all Dickie has to offer.
“Yeah, I got that.” It’s not the first time he’s come home to his children in his kitchen, though it hasn’t happened in a while. The memories are still burnt into his brain: Lizzie, near tears, coming to him after the intervention. You can’t live like this, she’d told him, voice cracking as she stirred the pot on his stove.
She’d made enough food to feed a family of twenty, and he’d ended up taking labelled containers to work for lunch for weeks. Ayanna had had a field day.
Sighing, Elliot looks to the pan on the stove, the tray in the oven, the small stack of containers already prepared at Dickie’s side. “Exactly how much do you think I eat?” he asks, shrugging out of his blazer. He chucks it over a stool and steps around to peek into the pan, but all he gets is a glimpse of bubbling liquid before Lizzie pushes him away.
“Touchy,” Elliot sings under his breath, and Dickie snorts. Elliot takes the seat beside him. “Your idea, or d’you get roped into it?”
Dickie meets his eye. “What do you think?”
“I can hear you,” Lizzie calls, but Dickie only smiles.
“Kathleen was busy.”
“Uh-huh.” Elliot looks around the mess of his kitchen: there are dirty dishes stacked in his sink, a series of vegetable scraps strewn over his counter, a pile of grocery bags still bunched in the corner. He lets out a low, knowing sigh. “This is gonna cost me, isn’t it?”
Lizzie looks at him over her shoulder and flashes a grin, the kind Elliot knows she inherited from him. “Yup.”
It’s not until later, not until after the kitchen has been cleaned, until after Dickie is already gone, that Elliot remembers the conversation he’d had with Jet earlier that week. He and Lizzie sit side by side on his couch, bad reality TV playing from his laptop—it’s some show Lizzie apparently loves but Elliot has never heard of. All he knows is that it’s filled with a bunch of half-naked twenty year olds and far, far too much screaming.
He’s barely been paying attention, but it’s not until Lizzie laughs during the end credits, her face lit up with a big, bright grin, that Elliot realises she hasn’t been watching, either. He furrows his brow and watches, waits a moment before trying to peek over her shoulder and get a glimpse of the screen.
He’s too slow. Lizzie dives out of the way, phone pressed into her shoulder as she sends her father a scandalised look. “Hey!”
Elliot waves the outburst away, tilts his chin toward the phone. “Who are you texting?”
“No one,” Lizzie responds. There’s a smile playing at her mouth, the stubborn twitch of her lips enough to let Elliot know it’s definitely not ‘no one.’ He scoffs.
“Don’t lie.”
The phone lights up again, and Elliot makes another dive for it. Once again, he’s too slow—Lizzie steps off the couch, stands in front of him, her phone shoved down her shirt and tucked beneath her bra strap.
“Who are you texting?” she shoots back, glancing toward his phone as it chimes for the tenth time that hour.
Elliot slips it into his pocket and tries not to bristle. “No one.”
Lizzie laughs. “Don’t lie,” she says, a perfect imitation of her father.
Elliot grabs the scrunched up disposable mask in his pocket and chucks it at her.
Bell stands in the centre of the squad room, turns to do a sweep of her detectives. “Murphy’s! Saturday night. Who’s in, who’s out?”
Washburn whoops, signifying his agreement. Elliot grimaces.
“Can’t,” he says. “Got the kid.”
Bell nods—any day now, she’s going to know what that’s like. “Slootmaekers?”
“Uh,” Jet says, the consistent clicks of her typing faltering for a second. “I’m busy.”
Bell looks at her between her computer screens, an eyebrow arched. “Busy?”
Jet nods. “I’ve got—” She cuts herself off, clears her throat. “I’m meeting a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” Bell deadpans. If not for the warmth in her eyes, she might’ve looked stern. “Well, that’s two down. Have fun with your friend.”
Her mouth twitches at the last part, and Jet has to duck back behind her station to hide her blush. She will not let them tease her for it.
“Morales! What about you?”
It’s barely seconds after Bell goes searching for Diego that Elliot slides up to her station. “A friend, huh?”
Jet nods. In her peripheral vision, she sees Elliot cross his arms against his chest, catches a glimpse of his narrowed eyes, feels the heat of his calculating gaze. It feels almost as if she’s a perp he’s waiting to crack; she tries her hardest not to fidget.
“You will not date my daughter,” Elliot says, eventually.
Jet doesn’t look away from the computer screen. “Copy.”
He sticks around, watching. Waiting. When Jet doesn’t react—doesn’t crack—he eventually gets up and returns to his desk.
It’s only then, once Elliot has his back turned, that Jet allows herself to smile.
“And this one?”
“We Have Nothing but Thoughts and Memory Between Us,” Jet recites. “It’s inspired by—”
She’s cut off by the vibration of her phone, the sound loud and grating where it comes from her desk. Even before she has the thing in her hand, she knows who the notification will be from.
“My dad?” Lizzie asks, watching with a smile as Jet gets up to check.
Jet rolls her eyes. “Who else?” She clicks open her phone and sighs. “Is he always this neurotic?”
Lizzie snorts. “I’m actually the lucky one,” she tells her. “I don’t date men. You should see what he’s like with my sisters.”
Jet thinks about it for a second and grimaces, typing out her reply. “Glad that’s not me.”
“Mm, you’d be surprised,” Lizzie tells her. She gets up to stand behind her, slips an arm around Jet’s waist and looks over her shoulder to read Elliot’s texts, a laugh bubbling in her chest. “He asks me if I treat you right all the time.”
“Oh, god.”
Lizzie laughs again, tightening her grip as Jet leans back against her. “Ignore him,” she says, placing a quick, fleeting kiss to Jet’s neck. “You’ve got a more interesting Stabler to focus on right here.”
Jet stills, and Lizzie grins against her shoulder as she hears the phone drop back to the desk.
“El, keep looking at your phone and you won’t see Eli’s game.”
“Huh? I’m watching.” Elliot glances up for half a second before glancing back at his phone, to where he’s zoomed in on Lizzie’s smiling face. He can’t deny that she looks happy—happier than she’s looked in a long time.
“For god’s sake—” Olivia sighs, leans toward him. “What is so interesting?”
Elliot hesitates for a second before clicking back to the text thread and handing his phone over. He watches Olivia as she reads Jet’s messages, her smile growing slowly. It breaks into a quiet laugh when she sees the look on his face.
Elliot musters up his best glare. “Not really the response I was looking for, Liv.”
Olivia rolls her eyes, still laughing at him. “Oh, boohoo,” she says. She doesn’t hand his phone back; instead, she tucks it into her coat pocket and gives him a look that lets him know he shouldn’t even try getting it back. “Your daughter got a girlfriend. You’ll live.”
“Not just a girlfriend, my—”
Olivia digs her elbow into his side, effectively shutting him up. “You’ll live,” she says again, then points out toward the field. “Now pay attention. Eli’s got the ball.”