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Sonny Carisi’s youngest child is a little more than an hour old the first time he gets to hold him.
Amanda goes first, because she did all the work—so much work that Sonny doesn’t entirely understand why people keep congratulating him, like he did anything at all—but when they bring the baby back after getting his measurements, Amanda turns toward Sonny when they offer her the baby.
“I think his daddy needs a turn.”
Daddy.
That’s the title Sonny will always be proudest of, no matter how many other ones he has—he remembers exactly what he was doing the first time each of the girls said it, and there’s still a rush of wonder in his chest every time he hears it.
There’s something uniquely special about hearing it in a delivery room, though, and knowing that this time it’s not a mistake as the nurse carefully lays his newborn son in his arms, a tiny piece of the exact brown hair Sonny was also born with sticking out from underneath his hat.
“Hey, buddy,” Sonny whispers, the words sticking in his throat, “I’m — I’m your dad.”
The baby—still unnamed, because he came before his parents could resolve their months-long debate about what to name him—doesn’t seem as awestruck by that particular bit of news as Sonny is, stretching his face into a yawn, passing gas into the newborn diaper the nurses just put him in.
It’s the most beautiful sound Sonny’s ever heard.
He’s back in Sonny’s arms just under two hours later, after he’s eaten and burped and Amanda’s fallen back asleep for an incredibly well-deserved nap.
The baby’s asleep too, leaving just Sonny alone with all the wonder that comes from looking down at the tiny person in his arms and realizing that he helped make him with the woman he’s loved for nearly a decade.
As if he can read his father’s thoughts, the baby opens his eyes—the ones that are an exact replica of his mother’s—looking up at Sonny curiously.
“Hey there,” Sonny says, a grin spreading across his face. “Not tired anymore, huh? You exhausted your Mama, though. We gotta let her sleep some more.”
The baby’s expression doesn’t really change, though, his nose just scrunching and the same confusion lining the corners of his eyes.
“You know your mom,” Sonny says, brushing his thumb against the baby’s cheek. “She’s been talkin’ to you for nine months—singin’, too, when she thought I couldn’t hear her.”
The baby gurgles, a happy little sound that Sonny’s already in love with, but the curiosity on his face stays, just as Sonny realizes that there is, in fact, a lot his son doesn’t yet know about his mother, because Amanda Rollins has never been very good at talking about how wonderful she is.
Luckily, Sonny’s got that covered.
He starts from the beginning, because there’s no other place to start—and because he knew he was a goner from that very first “Where you from?”
“Oh, your mom was way out of my league back then. Take it from me, bud—if your sisters ever try to tell you it’s a good idea to show up to your new job with an awful mustache, they’re pulling your leg.”
The baby doesn’t seem very impressed, instead stretching his mouth in a wide yawn.
“You’ll understand when your mother shows you the pictures, I promise,” Sonny says, because Amanda and Liv have an entire collection of them they bring out without warning.
(“I had that thing for two weeks, tops,” Sonny groaned when they pulled them out at the baby shower, alongside a few jokes about if the baby was going to inherit that from his father. “I don’t understand how you guys even have one picture, let alone thirty.”
Amanda smirked back at him, but she dropped the picture she was holding back against the table so she could stretch up to kiss him. “Maybe I just knew they’d come in handy one day.”)
“I don’t know if she was thinking about us ending up here, exactly,” Sonny clarifies, casting a quick glance over at his wife’s sleeping form. “I wasn’t even there yet when they took those pictures.”
The baby doesn’t seem convinced, though, his eyebrows furrowed in a skeptical expression that is so Amanda it steals Sonny’s breath for a second.
“Okay, you got me. I’m Catholic, we picture marriage with every crush we have. But I didn’t know it was the real thing then. Didn’t figure that out until your sister came along.”
Luckily, Sonny’s got experience with telling the G-rated version of the story of both how Jesse came to be and her dramatic entrance into the world—and even more experience with talking about Amanda’s strength during it all.
“Your mom’s the bravest person I’ve ever met,” he says, because Amanda’s face that day is still burned into his brain. There was fear, of course—on Sonny and Liv’s faces, too—but in the set of her chin and the pupil of her eyes, there was a determination, the kind of fire that drew Sonny to her from the very beginning.
That fire was the first thing there when she woke up from the C-section, too, when she tried to sit up so fast the nurses were worried about her pulling on her stitches.
“The baby’s fine, Mama,” they told her, getting her settled back down against the pillows before Sonny could really move, too afraid of jostling that very baby, curled up in his arms because she couldn’t be in her mother’s. “Her Daddy’s got her.”
Sonny’s cheeks flushed, because he’d really been hoping he’d be the one to explain the white lie he’d had to tell the nurses to let him see the baby—the one made all the more believable by his constant vigil at her bedside all day.
“Oh,” Amanda said softly, the confusion in her voice only muted because of the anesthesia, turning toward Sonny and softening as her eyes landed on the baby in his arms. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
He apologized once the nurses were gone, but Amanda brushed that off (along with his offer to leave while Amanda did skin-to-skin), even if her eyes didn’t leave Jesse the entire time they talked. “I never would’ve forgiven myself if she was alone. I’m – I’m really glad it was you, Carisi.”
“See, Mama loves you and your sisters so much that sometimes she gets a little silly and thinks she’s not doing a good job, instead of remembering that she’s the best mom in the whole world. Think we can remind her of that when she forgets?”
The baby doesn’t answer, his eyes already half closed, and Sonny presses a kiss to his forehead, relishing in the soft newborn smell that emanates from him. He knows better than to stop talking entirely, though, too familiar with what happens when babies in the first stage of sleep lose their white noise.
“You know how many nights I spent with your sisters just like this?” he asks, shifting further back in his chair so his elbow can rest on the arms of the chair. “Your Mama did a lot more, though, and she was by herself for most of it."
The baby startles himself back awake then, letting out a disgruntled noise of protest that Sonny quiets, shushing the baby gently and rocking him in the same way he used to do for the girls.
“C’mon, I said most of it, not all. I helped your mom out, don’t worry.”
“You said this was going to help,” Amanda groaned the first time he came over, the irritation in her voice very carefully trying to cover up the cracks threatening to send her into tears.
“It will, it will, it just – ” Sonny tried, cut off by another loud wail coming from Jesse’s room.
“I can’t do it,” Amanda said, practically jumping off the couch where she’d been sitting, practically curled into the fetal position with her hands over her ears to try to drown out the noise.
She returned a half-minute later, a red-faced Jesse tucked against her shoulder, a couple of tears escaping her own eyes.
“I can’t do it,” she repeated, her voice hollow as she sat down with the baby, quieting Jesse with soft murmurs and repeated whispers of “Mama’s here.”
The tenderness of it made affection swell in Sonny’s chest again, the feeling he’d had at the hospital—the one that made it feel like everything in his life had been leading to her—cresting again and rendering him voiceless for a few beats.
Amanda waited until Jesse was quiet again before she spoke, whispering so quietly her voice was barely audible. “I know you said it’ll help her, but I can’t listen to her like that, Carisi. There’s already so many ways I’m failing her.”
“No you’re not,” Sonny said, crossing the room so he could sit next to her, tentatively placing a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, c’mon Rollins, you’re doin’ a good job.”
“Her father doesn’t even know she’s here,” Amanda muttered, bitterness laced into it. “I – I sent him a text when we left the hospital, and I haven’t even heard back.”
It was the most she’d shared about how Jesse came to be—Sonny was still two months away from discovering that Declan Murphy was the focus of the quiet rage that burned inside him at the injustice being done to his goddaughter—but Sonny didn’t push it any further.
“That’s on him, Amanda, not you.”
“Yeah, her only parent who can be bothered to show up,” Amanda scoffed, working her lip between her teeth, “and I can’t even get her to learn how to sleep through the night.”
“She’s gonna get there.”
“Not with Ferberizing,” Amanda said, swallowing hard as she looked down at Jesse’s sleeping form. “Sorry I dragged you all the way out here for nothing. You can – you can, uh, go whenever you’re ready.”
“Nah, c’mon, I’m not leaving,” he said, stretching his hands out to reach for Jesse. “I promised I’d let you get some sleep; go ahead, I’ll hold her.”
Amanda looked at him skeptically for a few beats. “You’re really gonna do that?”
“I promised, didn’t I?”
Sonny’s made a lot of promises to all three of his Rollins girls since then, none more important than the ones he made to the girls when he legally became their father—but that’s getting ahead of the story a little bit.
“Your mom and I spent a lot of nights like that when your sister was little,” he tells their youngest, warmth baked into every inch of it. “It was the first time in my adult life I felt like I had a home.”
He lets that one linger for dramatic effect, so the baby can understand exactly what Amanda Rollins means to his father, but his son seems to be beyond that already, his nose wrinkled with a question Sonny can practically hear already.
“Why did it take you five more years to get together, then, Dad?”
Sonny breathes out a laugh—easier to do now than when they were on the other side of this. “Well, there’s something else you need to know to make this story make sense. Your dad? He’s kind of an idiot.”
“You have to be one of the dumbest people on the planet, Sonny,” Bella said, setting her drink back down on the bar with a shake of her head. “You really thought dating someone while you’re in love with someone else was going to turn out well?”
“I’m not – ” Sonny tried, but the piercing look Bella gave him told him that lie wasn’t going to cut it. “That’s not even why Arielle and I broke up.”
“Oh, so she does have a name,” Bella scoffed with a raise of her eyebrows. “Gina and I were beginning to think you made her up to get Ma off your back.”
“Did you come here just to rub this in my face or what?” Sonny asked, gripping his beer bottle even more tightly.
“No, c’mon,” Bella said, and, to her credit, a shadow of guilt passed over her face. “We’re just saying, Sonny, that it didn’t make a lot of sense that you were dating her. Not when you clog up the family group chat with of pictures of Amanda’s daughter.”
“Jesse’s my goddaughter,” Sonny protested weakly, but there’s a reason he’s never been able to lie to his younger sister, and he folded before he could even finish with his next breath. “Amanda’s not ready for that, Bell, and I’m not gonna be the one to push her.”
Bella pressed her lips together, the answer to her question in her eyes even before she asked it. “Did she tell you that?”
Sonny tensed, folding his eyes protectively over his chest. “She’s been through more than you and I can even imagine. It’s a miracle she trusts me like she does.”
“Doesn’t answer my question,” Bella countered, but her expression was soft as she looked at him. “You’ve gotta ask her, Sonny.”
That was the thing. Sonny had tried to, more than once, but every time he got the words in the right order in his brain, there was a screaming baby or a phone call from Liv or a dog that needed to go to the bathroom—and the fear in Amanda’s eyes, the worry of if what he was about to tell her would completely change the friendship they enjoyed.
He couldn’t tell his sister that, but he could promise her something close.
“I’ll try.”
The baby sighs in Sonny’s arms, nestling his head even tighter into the crook of his elbow.
“That’s, uh, that’s actually not the end of it, buddy,” Sonny says, his cheeks flushing as he does. “Remember when I said your daddy’s kind of an idiot?”
He pauses then, glancing over at Amanda long enough to watch her take one of the quiet snores she still tries to swear she doesn’t make.
“I wasn’t exactly wrong about your mom needin’ more time, but the stupid part is the way I talked to her about it. Well, actually, I didn’t technically ask her anything.”
Sonny has to stop again, because he’s trying to figure out how exactly to spin this one—there’s not exactly a G-rated version of that night in West Virginia, and Amanda and Sonny have never breathed a word of it to anyone else.
“Mommy and Daddy get to have some things to themselves,” he breathes, brushing his thumb along the baby’s plump cheek. “I messed some things up, and that’s all you need to know. But it led to your other sister bein’ here, so I wouldn’t change a second of it.”
“Do feel like I have to warn you, though,” he continues, “Billie might get a little jealous of you. You gotta remember, she’s always been a Daddy’s girl.”
Sonny Carisi didn’t plan on being in the room for Billie’s birth, but he was—because unlike the man half-responsible for Billie’s existence, he keeps his promises.
He couldn’t get to the hospital fast enough when Amanda told Al was gone, using the siren in his squad car in a not exactly 1PP-sanctioned way to make it there in time, letting her squeeze his hand through the worst of it like he was the one who did this to her—like the dreams that had been haunting him since Amanda told him she was pregnant were actually true.
It was a little over an hour after his youngest goddaughter entered the world that Sonny even bothered to glance down at the notifications on his phone beyond texting Liv and his mother, just to let her know that her prayers worked, and only because the wait for the elevator downstairs to meet the delivery driver bringing Amanda's favorite pizza was painfully slow.
There were a lot of messages repeating the same thing, variations of “let me know how she is” and “tell me when the baby’s here,” but what caught Sonny’s eye weren’t the texts but the missed calls—five of them in a row, all from his mother.
“Shit,” he muttered, but before he could move his fingers to call her back, his screen lit up with another call.
“Gina?” he answered, abandoning the elevator for the stairs. “Is Ma okay?”
“She’s fine, except for her only son not answering the phone,” Gina bit back, turning the fear that had made Sonny’s stomach drop to irritation. “She wants a picture of the baby. We all do, honestly.”
“She’s not even two hours old,” Sonny groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Amanda hasn’t even eaten yet, let alone – ”
“So she does look like you, then?” Gina cut him off, her tone so accusatory it made Sonny freeze on the landing he was crossing.
“What?”
“Does she look like you?” Gina repeated, like the problem was that he didn’t hear her instead of the actual words she said. “Because Ma’s got a whole album of baby pictures to pull from for comparison.”
“She’s not going to look like me,” Sonny said, struggling to keep his voice even over the pit opening up in his stomach. “I’ve been very clear with you and Ma about that.”
“We know you’re protective of Amanda,” Gina started, and the gentleness in her tone did nothing to calm Sonny. “But Son, you’ve been in love with her for years and you’re the one at the hospital with her? We’re not stupid.”
His sister couldn’t have known how much the words were cutting into Sonny, the possibilities of what could have been somehow even sharper from her mouth than they were in his late-night thoughts.
“She’s not mine, end of story,” he said, in a voice that was far gruffer than the one he usually saves for his family, ending the call and leaning back against the wall as his head spun, trying to figure out which she he actually meant.
When he made it back to Amanda’s room, hands wrapped carefully around the pizza box, there was a nurse he didn’t recognize doing measurements on the baby who smiled at him as he walked in.
“Ah, Daddy’s bringing us dinner, huh?” she asked, cooing back down at the baby. “Not very hard to see where you got that height from, huh, girlie?”
She left fifteen minutes later, congratulating the baby on being in the ninety-fifth percentile for height, a practical miracle given how early she was, and with the burning in Sonny’s chest nearly double what it was on the phone with GIna.
The only thing that could’ve stopped it was holding his youngest goddaughter, trailing his hand along the curve of her chin, not a drop of Al Pollack to be found.
“She looks just like you, Amanda.”
“And you, apparently,” Amanda said, voice quiet as her eyes stayed locked on the pizza slice in her hand.
Sonny couldn’t quite read the edge in her voice, stuck somewhere between despair and wistfulness, his heart jumping in response. “If you want me to stop ‘em, I can – ”
“No,” Amanda said quickly, her voice so sharp the baby jumped. “I just… I can’t take any more questions about Al, Carisi.”
The next words left her lips in barely a whisper, so quiet Sonny had to strain to hear them. “Besides, I wish it was true.”
“See, Billie never even considered anybody else being her Daddy,” Sonny tells his youngest, who seems to be fighting sleep already—nothing, of course, that a few gentle rocks from his father can’t handle. “Jesse, too, but she was a little older by the time your Mama and I finally got it together.”
The baby almost seems like he’s considering the words, his head tilting and his mouth moving—and then he lets out a cry, a pitifully quiet whimper that makes Sonny’s breath catch.
“Hey, bud, it’s okay. The story’s almost over, I promise,” Sonny says, standing so he can properly bounce from the knees. “C’mon, you don’t want to miss the best part.”
The baby fusses for a few more seconds, each of his cries hitting Sonny square in the chest, but he quiets quickly enough, even if he has to purse his lips and suck on nothing to do so.
Sonny hazards a glance back at Amanda, who’s still except for the rise and fall of her chest, getting the rest she deserves more than anything, and he breathes out a sigh of relief. “See, the other thing you’ve got to know about your mom, little man, is that she’s worked so, so hard to get where she is. We’re really good about talkin’ about our feelings now, but there was a very long time where we weren’t.”
There’s a lot of context Sonny leaves out of the retelling for this one—they don’t tell their kids the details of their cases for a reason, and the baby doesn’t need to hear the exact words his parents said to each other in the squad room after one of the longest weekends of their lives.
He shares the happier part of that story, instead—the moment he felt something fundamental shift between them.
Sonny wasn’t expecting anything when Amanda walked him to the elevator—his pounding head was grateful for the quiet, actually—but she met his eyes just before she pressed the button, a pained expression on her face that made him pause.
“I’m sorry for yelling at you like that,” she said, exhaling the words on a breath, guilt worked into her lips as they pressed together.
The look made Sonny’s heart twist, and his fingers itched to reach for her, only stopping because he was even more unclear than he usually was about the boundaries between them and what lines he could cross.
“It’s been a really long weekend,” he shrugged, leaning against the wall. “It happens, Rollins.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Amanda said, tightening her grip around her middle, her fingers curling into the flesh of her arm, and Sonny already knew her well enough to know exactly what she was thinking of, the fighting she grew up seeing that she works so hard to make sure Jesse and Billie never live through.
“Yeah, Amanda, it does,” Sonny countered, and he risked placing a hand on her shoulder, tenderness washing over him when her expression softened in response. “You know how many times Teresa and Gina nearly screamed down my house when I was growin’ up? An hour later they were doin’ each other’s hair like nothing happened.”
(It wasn’t a perfect analogy—he and Amanda have a very different dynamic than his sisters did with each other, no matter how many times they try to persuade everyone they didn’t, but it worked enough, the tension in her jaw lessening and the ghost of a smile on her face.)
“Gotta get better at using my words, I guess,” she said, running a hand over her face, exhaustion lining every inch of it.
“Well, technically, you did,” Sonny said, breathing out the words on a laugh.
“Haha,” Amanda deadpanned, folding her arms across her chest as she leaned against the wall, her lips pressing together. “It’s just weird, not having you in the squadroom anymore.”
It was a little more than weird for Sonny, and something in Amanda’s expression told him she was thinking the same thing, a quiet desperation in her eyes he’d grown used to seeing in his own mirror.
That, more than anything she’d said in the squadroom, made his heart skip, the love that he’d always kept simmering for her on the backburner roaring to the front again.
“The next season of The Bachelor starts soon, doesn’t it? No one else is gonna watch it with me.”
“Jesse has been clamoring for a spaghetti night,” Amanda said, a quiet smile growing across her face that Sonny couldn’t help but mirror just as the doors to the elevator opened.
“I’ll be there.”
“Your mama worked so hard after that,” Sonny tells the baby now, tossing an affectionate glance at his still sleeping wife. “Her brain sometimes plays tricks on her and tries to tell her she shouldn’t be happy, and she had to teach herself how to not listen to it.”
There’s not a lot he tells the baby about the next year and a half, not because nothing happened then—quite the opposite, actually—but because he doesn’t need to traumatize his son before he’s even a day old by telling him about his mother being abducted , his grandfather nearly dying, or his father being stabbed by a psychopath.
“All you need to know, bud,” he says, “is that Mama and I were doing a lot of thinkin’ about what we wanted out of life, and it kept looking like each other.”
Sonny had been there for a while, of course—so long that it sometimes became hard to see that vision until it smacked him square in the face, like the last New Year’s they both spent single.
Billie had woken up not long after he got there, not ready for the noise blowers and banging pots coming from the living room. Sonny went to get her, and there was something about the way she buried her face into his neck and the quiet way she whispered Uncle Sonny against him that made his heart feel whole again—and when he carried her out to the living room and his eyes met Amanda’s, he couldn’t imagine spending his life being anywhere but there.
Maybe something would’ve happened that night, too, if the Amber Alert hadn’t come through—the air warmer between him and Amanda than it had ever been and the tension in his heart close to bursting as she dozed on his chest.
But in the morning light dumped a bucket of cold water on that idea, the prospect of actually crossing that bridge once again too risky to even consider, even as his entire chest ached with the desire to kiss her goodbye when he left her apartment the next morning.
Serafina made a pointed comment a few weeks later about wanting to still be alive when her only son got married, and he bumped into Nicole at the coffee shop outside the courthouse the day after that, and he twisted his mind into believing it was some kind of sign.
“I’m an idiot, buddy, remember? That never stops being important to this story,” he tells the baby, who’s stopped fussing for now, his eyes half-open and looking up at Sonny. “Your Mama’s not, though. She’s the smartest, bravest person I know. It’s because of her that we made it here.”
The beginning of the weekend that changed Sonny Carisi’s life is a blur to him now, less because of a lack of sleep and more because of the absolute clarity with which he remembers everything that came after that.
Amanda was wearing perfume that night, a sweet, floral scent that the wind carried to his nose as she crossed her way over to him, just as he turned to catch a glimpse of her, looking like everything he’d ever wanted—the very vision of the woman he’d been thinking about as he spent an entire night rewriting that speech.
In truth, he’d been so nervous about the ceremony because he knew the speech was a love letter to Amanda, and there was no hiding that from her or the squad, and his knees buckled every time he thought about getting through the entire thing and still waking up alone the next morning.
He’d hoped there was a good chance of that not happening, though, and while he was leaving that decision entirely up to her, he hoped that his speech might have some sway, that he could meet Amanda’s eyes while he was giving it and tell her just how much he meant every single syllable.
Amanda had the better idea, though, because while his voice shook more than it would’ve for the actual ceremony, there was something uniquely special about reading those words to the only person they were truly meant for, the most direct he’d been about his feelings for her in a very long time.
He wasn’t sure if it was working, because his heart skipped several beats every time he risked looking away from his paper to her eyes, and the sweltering tenderness hanging in the air between them as he wiped her tears had been there so, so many times before.
Luckily for him, Amanda knew exactly what he needed—an unmistakable green light—and that’s exactly what she gave him, even if he’s pretty sure his heart stopped from the moment she laid her hand on his chest, only to thunder back to life when he felt the press of her lips against his and he got to wrap his arms around her like he’d always longed to.
They broke apart only because they needed to breathe, and even then, Sonny couldn’t bear to move any more than necessary, his lips staying a hair away from Amanda’s and his hand around her waist only tightening.
She spoke first—Sonny was still in so much shock he had trouble remembering to breathe—her voice just as shaky as Sonny’s had been,
“Really good speech, Counselor.”
His face broke out into a wide grin, his thumb brushing over Amanda’s cheek just long enough to watch her expression relax again before he surged forward to kiss her again, deliberate and all-encompassing.
“That’s what did it, huh?” he asked when they broke apart, more teasing than anything, but Amanda’s eyes turned serious as she wrapped her fingers even more tightly around his suspenders.
“No Dominick,” she said, the way her voice rolled over his given name making him regret all the years he’d spent resenting being named after his father. “Definitely not just that.”
“This is the part where I tell you we live happily ever after,” Sonny grins. “Of course, you were at our wedding, so you already knew that.”
He’s skipping over a bit of the story, but on purpose—the bumpy road he and Amanda took to disclosing is their secret alone, and the baby doesn’t need to hear about the gunshot that nearly turned the story into a devastating one until he’s much older.
“We wouldn’t have gotten there without your mom, kiddo. If she didn’t make that move, I’d probably still be standing there looking stupid, hopelessly in love with her. You kinda owe her your whole existence, kiddo—y’know, beyond the obvious.”
The baby doesn’t seem impressed, though, his mouth stretching into a wide, toothless yawn that makes Sonny’s heart melt.
“You’ll get there, I promise,” Sonny tells the baby, keeping his voice low even as he catches the blankets on the bed starting to shift. “You’re gonna figure it out soon enough—your Mama is the bravest person in the whole world. She worked so, so hard to make sure she was the best mommy in the world for you and your sisters.”
He’s interrupted by a sound from the hospital bed in the middle of the room, a sniffling noise that’s not nearly as quiet as his wife seems to think it is.
“And,” Sonny says, dramatically reaching into the tissue box on the table next to him, “your Mommy also likes to pretend she never cries.”
“Because I don’t, normally,” Amanda lies, her eyes full of tears. “These stupid hormones are your fault.”
“Does it help if I say I’m very sorry about that?” Sonny asks, moving to sit on the edge of her bed, using his free hand to place the tissues where she can reach them.
“You’re not, though,” Amanda says, taking a tissue from the box and wiping it across her face.
“You aren’t either,” Sonny teases, leaning in toward her, keeping his arms tightly wrapped around the baby as his lips find her temple and lingering there.
“No, I’m not,” she whispers, reaching out to brush her hand over the baby’s cheek. “Not when it means I get to see you two like that. Sharin’ all our secrets, huh?”
There’s so much tenderness in the way she says it that it threatens to make Sonny’s own eyes water, but he manages to stop just shy of that.
“Not all of ‘em,” he breathes against her skin. “We were just talkin’. Somebody’s gotta tell him how wonderful his Mom is.”
Amanda’s lips press together, the words she would’ve said about herself years ago staying buried. “Hope you talked about his Daddy, too.”
“Don’t worry,” Sonny grins, “my stupidity is a very important part of this story.”
“Your stupidity?” Amanda asks, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah,” Sonny hums, pointedly ignoring the way his wife rolls her eyes. “Did I not miss several of the hints you dropped my way?”
“It’s not like I was making ‘em super obvious,” she says, her voice light as she nuzzles her head further into the space between his shoulder and his cheek, addressing her next comment to the baby. “Your Daddy picks up more than he thinks he does. He was the first person to realize you were coming.”
“C’mon, you knew too.”
They’d been married for exactly nine days when Sonny Carisi brought his wife home a pregnancy test.
It wasn’t exactly how they thought they’d be spending the middle of their unofficial honeymoon, but Amanda woke up so sick she could barely get out of bed, so when Sonny came back from dropping the girls off at school and daycare, he had a brown paper bag from CVS in one hand and a twelve pack of ginger ale cans in the other.
“Hey,” he whispered as he settled on the edge of the bed, leaning over to kiss his wife’s forehead. “I got you somethin’.”
She spotted the ginger ale first, her lips curving into a tired smile as she leaned against his shoulders. “My hero.”
“There’s, uh, there’s something else, too,” he said, holding up the brown paper bag with a sheepish expression on his face. “Figured we could look at it together.”
There was a beat then, where Sonny tried to put the words in the right order to explain what it was and the change he was pretty certain was about to come into their lives, but Amanda got there first, her eyes widening and her mouth going slack. “No. I’ve been sick for one day, Dominick.”
That wasn’t exactly true; she’d been nauseous off and on since the wedding (something she kept chalking up to the stress of leaving the NYPD), falling asleep on the couch more than she usually did, and getting up to pee in the middle of the night more times than Sonny could count—not to mention the aching back and breasts she’d been complaining about.
“It’s been a little longer than that,” he said, voice as gentle as he could make it, his fingers drawing circles on her shoulder blades to try to draw out the tension he could feel building there.
“I can’t be,” she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears already negating her point.
“Pretty sure you can,” Sonny said, pushing a teasing lilt into his voice. “We’ve been having a lot of – ”
“It’s not that, Carisi,” Amanda interjected, her voice sharp enough to make Sonny pause long enough to see the way her hand has unconsciously moved to hover over the scar in her abdomen. “I thought – I thought I lost our chance. I started thinking about having another baby, and then I got shot.”
The hitch in her voice over the word I told him that wasn’t wholly about what the bullet did to her, and the depth of the pain in her eyes made Sonny’s heart fold in on itself.
“You didn’t tell me you wanted another baby,” he said, trailing his hand along her arm—they’d talked it to death before they got married, and they were both perfectly content with the two they already had.
“It was a nice idea,” she shrugged, biting her lip. “Didn’t really get to think about it before the bullet made that decision for me. Thought that was what I got for waiting so long.”
“Amanda,” he said, pulling back so he could get a full look at her face, cupping one of her cheeks. “You were not bein’ punished for anything. You are allowed to have good things.”
She nodded, tears lining the corner of her eyes. “Easier said than done sometimes.”
“I’ll tell you as many times as you need to hear it,” he said, pressing a kiss against her forehead before leaning back. “Are you gonna be okay with this?”
“Are you?” she echoed, a nervousness in her eyes Sonny hadn’t seen since she leaned in to kiss him for the first time—and it made his breath catch to realize that even if it was her third time being pregnant, she’d never gotten to expect one of her baby’s fathers to be happy about it.
“Am I?” Sonny asked, his eyebrows shooting up and his smile breaking wider. “I’m having a baby with Amanda Rollins. Of course I’m okay.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Amanda said, but Sonny could see the relief working its way through her face, excitement starting to break through in her voice.
Sonny stood up from the bed, crossing to Amanda’s side of the bed and extending his hand for her to take. “Guess we’d better go find out, then.”
“You were there for the rest, remember?” Sonny teases, his smile breaking wider when the baby lets out a soft grunt in response. “Yeah, you do.”
“Well, hopefully not everything,” Amanda says, letting out a breathy laugh.
Sonny doesn’t get the chance to come up with his own quip, though, because at the sound of his mother’s voice, the baby’s face turns red, his mouth opening to let out a wail, the hungry cry that Sonny doesn’t have the remedy to.
He turns toward his wife apologetically, but Amanda’s still smiling as she slips off the shirt she’d thrown on just before falling asleep, reaching her arms out for the baby as Sonny unswaddles him.
The baby seems to have the same amount of patience as Billie, his cries getting progressively louder and more impatient until they get him settled on Amanda’s bare chest and they fade into quiet, pitiful whimpers.
“Ah, I get it, Mommy’s your favorite, huh?” Sonny teases, his voice light even as Amanda opens her mouth to protest. “Mommy’s my favorite too, don’t worry.”
Whatever Amanda was about to say disappears from her expression then, replaced by a softness that makes his whole body warm, a feeling that continues as he watches the baby latch, even as he holds out his hand for Amanda to squeeze.
Amanda’s quiet for a few beats, her fingers brushing against the baby’s cheek, and when she looks back over at him, her eyes are glistening with unshed tears. “Sonny?”
“Yeah?”
“You know what I’m going to ask you,” she says—and she’s right, the softness in her voice and the pleading in her expression would’ve given her away even if she hadn’t said anything.
It’s not exactly fair, her asking him like this. Sonny would already do anything for his wife, and that was before he watched her deliver the baby they made together. Now, she’s looking up at him with that baby attached to her chest, the pleading look in her eyes that makes him cave every time.
“Look at him,” Amanda adds, like Sonny needs more convincing, like he hasn’t already been told the same thing by both of his parents and each of his sisters in the family group chat. “Sonny, he looks just like you.”
She says that like it’s a point for her argument rather than one for Sonny’s, but it’s also not wholly true.
“He has your eyes,” Sonny protests, but it’s not like he doesn’t also have blue eyes, and his son did not get his long limbs and brown hair from his mother.
Amanda shrugs, but there’s the tiniest hint of a smile on her lips before her eyes turn serious again. “You’re the reason he’s here.”
Sonny’s eyebrows furrow, his head tilting in confusion. “Babe, I just watched him come out of you.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Amanda says, and there’s a hitch in her voice that makes Sonny pause, the one that always comes right before she’s about to be vulnerable with him. “I did so much of that hard work because of you.”
“C’mon, no you didn’t,” Sonny interjects, a little more quickly than he means to—he doesn’t like to interrupt when Amanda’s like this with him, but he’s also not in the business of denying how wonderful his wife is on her own. “You were makin’ yourself healthy for you and the girls, Amanda, I had nothing to do with that.”
She presses her lips together, giving him a half nod. “But you made me believe that love was possible, Sonny. I didn’t think I’d ever deserve a relationship like this, but you were always there for me, even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“No, you always deserved it,” he says, emphasizing each word—the idea that he’s somehow valiant for loving Amanda, when he doesn’t understand how anybody couldn’t, always makes him bristle.
“You’re proving my point, Counselor,” Amanda says, an intoxicating softness to her voice that has Sonny wondering why he ever said no to her question in the first place. She shifts the baby, angling her elbow more solidly onto the pillow Sonny moves for her, looking up at him with a world of emotion in her eyes. “Please?”
Sonny’s completely done for then, and Amanda knows it, breaking into a smile before the word yes has even left Sonny’s mouth.
“You hear that?” she asks the baby, brushing her hand over his hair. “You’ve got a name, Dominick.”
“And a nickname,” Sonny adds, reaching out to squeeze the baby’s foot—so tiny it steals his breath for a second. “Nicky’s a little bit less of a mouthful.”
(It’s the only possible nickname from Dominick that Sonny wasn’t using and neither of them hated—one of the main sticking points in their conversations about what to name him.)
Looking at the baby now, though, it’s hard for Sonny to remember any of his objections to the name, not while he’s watching his wife whisper it against his newborn son’s forehead as she tells him how much his mommy and daddy love him already.
By the time his mother makes it to the hospital with the girls, it’s impossible for Sonny to separate the name he grew up resenting with the tender affection he has for his youngest, leaving behind only warmth every time it leaves his lips.
There’s so much tenderness in the hours that follow, in fact, that at times, it feels like his chest might explode from the weight of it—seeing his girls again, Billie not even bothering to look in the direction of the baby before she throws herself against Sonny’s legs, and Jesse carefully walking over to Amanda’s side of the bed, stretching on her toes to peer at the baby.
“He’s so cute,” she breathes, bouncing on her toes—but her hands stay at her sides, despite the excited twitch of her fingers.
“You can hold him, baby,” Amanda says, nodding toward the empty space on the mattress in front of her.
Not one to be left out, Billie takes that as her cue to wriggle out of Sonny’s arms, landing squarely on his left foot. “I wanna hold him too, Mommy.”
“You will, too, don’t worry,” Amanda smirks, and Sonny’s breath catches as he watches the way his middle child practically vaults herself onto the bed without any help, the long legs she seemingly pulled out of thin air seeming so much bigger now.
He doesn’t have words for what comes next, either—the emotions that flood him as he watches his oldest daughter hold her baby brother like she’s an expert and not the tiny person who changed his life nearly eight years ago.
Both of the girls have an endless stream of questions about their brother, from why he has dark hair (making Sonny explain that his hair wasn’t always this shade of gray) to why he’s “so little” (prompting Amanda to explain that he definitely isn’t compared to them).
The biggest question, though—the one his mother is going to ask as soon as she gets back from the cafeteria downstairs with the snacks Amanda asked for, a quiet excuse to let them have time as a family of five—comes from Jesse, her arms carefully supporting the baby’s head like she might break him.
“Mommy, what’s his name?”
Amanda smiles even wider then, a warmth radiating from it that Sonny will never tire of seeing there. “Dominick.”
Jesse’s smile mirrors her mother’s—between her, Amanda, and Serafina, Sonny didn’t really have a chance of winning the name debate—but Billie’s a little more confused, her eyebrows furrowing as she glances between the baby and Sonny.
“Just like Daddy?”
“Yeah, baby,” Amanda smiles, brushing her hand over Billie’s hair as she lifts her eyes to meet Sonny’s, a whole world of emotion there that Sonny will lose himself in every time. “Just like Daddy.”