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She's triple checking - patting her pockets and digging through her bag and reaching for her holster.
She's forgetting something.
But no – her keys and her phone and her gun are all in place.
Her reports are filed and her rent is paid. Ella's birthday presents are purchased and Rachel's calls are returned. The latest catastrophe isn't exactly resolved, but it's getting there: Astrid is helping Walter with the body and Broyles is fully briefed. There are no new leads to follow. There are no new stones to turn.
A dozen times a day, Olivia ticks off these lists. Everything is always accounted for.
And yet, Olivia is keenly aware that she is in the act of forgetting.
She can feel that something is slipping through the cracks. She can feel the anxiety building each day, along with the conviction that, if she doesn't identify this thing soon, it will vanish.
It will be lost forever.
She won't be forgetting something anymore; she will have forgotten it.
It would be easy to blame her job, chalk this feeling up to vague, cosmic dread. It would be easy to pretend that she is simply bending under the weight of two dimensions on her shoulders.
It would make perfect sense.
But, if she's honest with herself, this unease has been lurking since before she discovered the prophecy or the Other Side or even the cortexiphan trials.
It's something else – something vital - dancing an elusive tap dance around the edges of her mind; clicking a beat she can't quite catch and can't quite ignore.
She stays up at night, listening for it.
She hasn't had a decent night's sleep in years.
She thinks that maybe - if she could just concentrate hard enough - it would find her, make itself known, materialize.
And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the tapping will reach her shoulder and demand her attention. She'll freeze. She'll stop mid-stride, mid-sentence, gripped with the certainty that a window has briefly opened and whatever she is missing is temporarily within reach.
" Wait. Just … wait." She'll hold up a hand and close her eyes.
But then the window will close and she'll find herself shaking her head, feeling as if she could cry in exasperation.
In these moments, her mother is prone to insist , "If you can't remember, then it must not have been that important, dear."
" You don't know." Olivia thinks, maddened by her mother's condescending tone. "How can you possibly know?"
There are days when Olivia can't help but frantically scan her office, her apartment - unsure of what she is looking for but sure that she needs it.
" If you needed it, you wouldn't have forgotten it." Charlie used to tease when she would empty out her desk or run back to the car in search of something elusively unnamable.
" You don't know that." Olivia would think, irrationally angry at the dismissive way Charlie would shrug his shoulders. "You don't know anything at all."
But then, she never expected Charlie to understand.
She never expects anyone to understand.
" You just haven't met the right guy." Rachel likes to say on the rare nights when Olivia is drunk enough to hint at these thoughts.
" It's not about a guy. That's not what I meant."
" I know." Rachel patronizes. "But when the right one comes along-"
" John-"
" I know John was a good guy." Rachel interrupts quietly. "But that doesn't mean he was the right guy."
Olivia wishes she disagreed.
" The right guy doesn't exist." She mutters on the rare nights when she's feeling just the right mix of lonely and combative – and truthful.
" Don't be ridiculous." Rachel recites her line on cue. "He's out there somewhere."
" Oh yeah? Where?"
" Somewhere, Liv. You have to believe that."
Olivia doesn't believe it for a second.
There's no one out there for her. No one will ever understand this gaping, inexplicable hole in the pit of her being.
No one exists who can fill it.
Olivia knows this - the same way she knows that her step father is still tracking her every move and that her doppelganger is patently untrustworthy and that white tulips must haunt her dreams for a reason.
She just knows.
It doesn't matter anyway. She doesn't want a husband or a boyfriend or fling.
She's forgetting something.
All she wants is to remember.