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Amanda’s had a lot of different Friday nights in her forty-five years, from the wild chaos of Fridays in her twenties to the quiet, sleepy ones with her family now.
This particular Friday night started as the latter—pizza and Moana with the kids and Sonny—even if it’s taken a turn she didn’t expect when the week started; it’s ending with her standing in front of the bookshelf in the living room, an empty cardboard box at her feet and what was, until this week, her favorite row of books in front of her.
Her head’s still spinning, trying to reconcile the joy she once had every time she got her hands on a new one with the disgust rolling through her now at the sight of the name Claire Morgan.
Sonny interrupts her thoughts before she can will herself to move, his arms settling around her hips and his head tucking into the space between her neck and shoulder. “Guessin’ you’re a no on Love Island?”
“No, I still want to,” she says, leaning into him. “I just – I saw these and couldn’t really stand to look at them anymore.”
But actually moving them to the box isn’t happening, either, and Sonny notices it, his arms tightening around her and his lips pressing against her cheek. “There’s no way you could’ve known, Amanda.”
“No,” Amanda shrugs, but there’s a bitter taste of guilt in her mouth anyway, knowing that every dollar she spent on the books in front of her directly enabled an abuser—and that, done with Claire Morgan as she is, there’s still a distinct sadness stopping her from getting rid of them.
Still, the steadiness of her husband behind her gives Amanda the strength to lean forward, grabbing the first one, its dusty pink and gold cover standing out from the rest of them.
“This one’s older than Jesse,” she says, chewing on her lip as she remembers the first time she saw it.
Sonny’s the one who handed it to her, actually, because her bed rest meant that she wasn’t allowed to bend over, and the delivery drivers were ignoring the sign on her door asking them to leave boxes on the ledge in the hall instead.
He’d carried it in during his nightly visit—though they’d promised to change off the squad members who came to see her, Sonny made it over the most often, and Amanda let herself believe for far too long it was just because he was the least tied down compared to Liv and Fin.
There’d been so many bags in his hands when he came through her door that night—the takeout she’d been craving for a week, another care package from his mother (“I’m not supposed to look at whatever’s in this one,” he’d said, and her cheeks had flushed later when she found the bottle of nipple cream inside it), and a fresh bag of groceries full of his dinner plans for the next week—that Amanda missed the box at first.
Sonny did too, focused instead on asking how she was feeling— “Shitty as ever,” she told him, but she’d still smiled when Jesse’s foot stretched against her skin—and got her loaded nachos out of the bag.
“Oh,” he said when she was halfway through them, a chip weighed down with cheese and tomatoes dangling from her hand. “You got a package, too.”
“Oh,” she echoed between bites, far too hungry to care about the manners her mother would threaten her for not displaying, her brows furrowing as she tried to remember exactly what it was she ordered.
“I got it, don’t worry,” Sonny said, ripping open the box at her island, ignoring her protests that he could wait until after he ate his dinner, reaching inside and pulling out a book with a pink dust jacket, artwork of crow feathers dancing across the spine.
(Oh right, the smutty fantasy book she ordered to distract herself from the insane boredom of bed rest. Perfect thing for her very Catholic partner to pick up.)
She’d heard about them from someone in an online gambling support group—one of the only other women there—when she asked about ways to actually keep herself distracted. Boredom is especially dangerous for her, and bed rest had way too much of it, and even if Amanda knew without a doubt she wasn’t relapsing again—refusing to do to her baby girl what Jim had done to her—she still wanted her mind to have somewhere to run to.
That was all way too much to share with Sonny, who was still only her partner back then—and far too pure for Amanda’s messy, chaotic life.
“Oh yeah,” she said, feigning disinterest, her cheeks pinking as she turned back to her nachos. “Forgot I ordered that.”
“My sister loves these,” he continued, and even more heat flooded Amanda’s face, because depending on which sister, Sonny might have already known the very much less than saintly reputation the book he’s holding has. “Bella’s read them all, I think.”
Bella. Thank God.
Amanda didn’t know much about Sonny’s family then, not in the way she does now, but she knew without question that Sonny’s youngest sister wasn’t the type to share exactly what was in the books she was reading with her brother, and the tightness in her chest loosened.
“That should help stop you from going too crazy, huh?” Sonny asked, his voice light and blissfully innocent as he dropped it on the coffee table, where all of her entertainment stayed for those long several weeks when she couldn't really move too quickly.
“Yeah,” Amanda nodded, trying desperately not to think about the ache that had been burning between her legs the last few weeks, and the way she’d been told by several reviews online that every book in this series would let her do something about it—and did, once she was alone with them. “A nice distraction.”
That’s where they left it, thankfully, shitty reality TV taking over. But when Amanda did read the first one—and the second, and the third—the idea of Sonny Carisi was still there, in the male leads of every book and the devoted, tender way they fight for the women they’re in love with, the way she knew Sonny Carisi would be for whoever he wound up marrying.
She’d never entertained the possibility that it could be her.
The way some women talked about the books online, putting themselves into the role of each heroine, asking when they’d get their own prince, was embarrassing enough on its own, and if Amanda ever got caught up in the same way they did, all she had to do was look down at her swollen belly—or later, her tiny baby girl—the man who’d helped make her drowning himself in undercover work halfway around the world.
Amanda wasn’t a princess, and the books were just that—stories meant to entertain, not to come true.
Except, of course, that for Amanda, one did, as evidenced by the warmth of her husband behind her, his arms still keeping her close.
“I remember,” he says, and there’s a warmness in his voice, nostalgia shaping the warm press of his lips against her cheek.
“You do?”
“Amanda, I don’t think you understand how bad my crush on you was back then,” he says, tilting his head so that he can meet her eyes. “I wanted to know about everything you liked.”
The earnestness of it makes Amanda’s cheeks flush. It’s still something, even after all this time, to know that someone actually cared—is still caring, actually—about anything she likes.
“You had a crush on me, huh?” she teases, her voice light as her eyebrows raise.
“Mhmm,” he hums in her ear, his arms tightening around her hips. “I actually still have a crush on you, Sergeant.”
“You’d better,” she says, leaning back into his touch, loosening her grip on the book in front of her at the same time.
It falls into the box with a definitive thud, the front cover staring back at her the same way it did ten years ago, and a distant part of her aches, her muscles tensing at the same time.
“You okay?” Sonny asks her, something soothing in his voice that gets her to let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding.
“Ask me again after I’ve done that ten more times,” she says, tilting her head toward the full shelf and the full rainbow of Claire Morgan novels it holds.
None of them can stay, Amanda knows, but that doesn’t do much to ease the lump in her throat, her muscles still frozen in place as she looks to the shelf they’ve lived on since she’s been in this apartment, three days after Billie made her entrance into the world.
Sonny had helped her move the books then, too—by then, Amanda had eight of them, lined in a row on a stark white bookshelf that was worth more than her entire annual salary. Al never knew they were there, given how little attention he paid to anything in the house, and the movers had done a good job of blending them in with everything else, but the bright pastel covers marked them as unquestionably hers, and she wasn’t leaving anything that she owned in that apartment.
“These need to go too, right?” Sonny asked her, his brain a step ahead of hers, courtesy of his blissfully hormone-free body.
“Yes, please,” she said, wincing as she sat down on the edge of the miserably uncomfortable couch, Al’s preference for style over everything else wreaking havoc on her incredibly sore lower half.
“Hey, you okay?” Sonny asked, haphazardly dropping the book against the shelf, kneeling in front of her with concern in his eyes.
“Fine,” Amanda said with gritted teeth, breathing out through her nose. “These couches are just – not postpartum friendly.”
“I’m sorry,” Sonny said, pressing his lips together sympathetically, and Amanda had to bite her tongue to stop herself from telling him not to be.
She was, after all, the one who chose this, who decided to keep Billie knowing the man who made her was useless, and then chose to leave that man—in the delivery room, of all places—bringing another baby into what her mother liked to call her “broken home.” A little bit of pelvic pain didn’t even begin to touch the karma she deserved.
Sonny, of course, wasn’t thinking anything like that, something tender in his eyes as he looked at her. “Couches my ma’s got coming to you are much softer, don’t worry.”
Serafina had worked her networks before Amanda and Billie were discharged, somehow finding a family moving to California who were more than happy to part with their furniture for a price within Amanda’s very limited budget.
“Thank her for me,” Amanda said, forcing herself to smile despite the brick in her stomach—she’d done far more than Amanda’s own mother, still stuck repeating “but he was a doctor, Amanda, he would’ve provided for you,” had even attempted.
“Of course,” Sonny said, standing to go back to her boxes, and something about the softness in the way he looked at her threw her into a parallel universe.
It’s a vision of the life she could’ve had, the one where the nurse was right when she called him Papa and he pressed a kiss to her temple in addition to holding her hand. That world, though, didn’t belong to Amanda, it belonged to women like the ones in Claire Morgan’s novels, bold women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to go after it—not women like her, too afraid to admit any of their feelings, leaving a trail of hurt in her wake.
As if to punctuate her point, Billie let out a shrill cry then, a noise Amanda already recognized as her attention-seeking one, not her hungry one.
“Come here, baby,” she whispered, lifting her out of the pink-lined bassinet spending its first—and only —day in Al Pollack’s living room.
Billie’s cries faded to whimpers in her arms, but only briefly—even with Amanda pressing a kiss to her baby’s forehead, Billie’s face stayed pinched, only growing redder.
“She just ate,” Amanda said, pinching the bridge of her nose with the hand not supporting Billie’s neck. “C’mon baby girl, you’re okay.”
Billie didn’t seem to think so, though, her whimpers transforming back into wails, her legs kicking in angry protest that made tears start to well in Amanda’s eyes too.
Forget her instability to give Billie a father—Amanda couldn’t even give her second baby basic comfort.
“Here,” Sonny whispered, crossing the room and crouching in front of her a second time, holding his hands out for the baby. “I got her, Amanda.”
Of course he did. Much more than the man who made Billie ever would.
Billie seemed to know it, too, quieting almost instantly in her godfather’s arms, happy little gurgling noises escaping her barely a minute later.
“How the hell did you do that?”
“Easy. You gotta bounce from the knees,” Sonny said, so much love on his face as he gazed at the baby in his arms that Amanda did, in fact, let a tear or two roll down her cheeks. “She’s like her sister that way.”
Billie proved him right, falling asleep long enough to let Sonny get the rest of Amanda’s things boxed and into his truck, passing through the doorframe of Al’s apartment for the final time with her cheek pressed against the left side of Sonny’s chest.
Later, sitting in her new apartment on a bed that was far softer than any she’d had previously, Billie at her breast and Jesse curled up next to her, Amanda’s eye trailed over the books again, this time in a box on the floor, Sonny’s unpacking interrupted by a phone call from Liv.
He’d looked a bit stricken when he left, apologizing a few times over, but Amanda waved him off, saying that he’d already done more than enough for her. After all, he wasn’t on paternity leave, and if she wanted him to be, she should’ve made some different choices.
The kinds of choices the women in the novels make, ones where their babies have fathers ready for them on day one and they grow up in stable, happy families.
Fat chance of that happening for Amanda’s girls.
But when Amanda dreamt that night, in between Billie’s feedings and diaper changes, it was of exactly that—visions of her girls, older than they were then, in a warm, open room of one of the castles in her novels, a fire going somewhere that highlighted their faces as they sat in front of a man she knew without question was their Dad just by the way whatever story he was telling them sent them into a fit of giggles.
“Time for you two to go to bed,” the man said, so much love flowing through it that it wrapped around Amanda like a blanket. “Your Mama and I are overdue for some quality time.”
And even without seeing the man’s face, she knew it was Sonny Carisi.
“Nice reminder of how stupid I was back then, at least,” she scoffs in the present, grabbing the next two books on the shelf, holding the weight of the in her hand. “Having dreams like that on the regular and still couldn’t work out my feelings for you.”
“Think we got there, though,” Sonny says, tapping the gold band on her left hand, a reverence on his face that melts the tension building in Amanda’s shoulders. “Besides, you think I wasn’t having the same kind of dreams back then?”
They’ve talked about it before, all the ways their love for each other manifested before they were physically together—both safe for their children’s ears and not—and it always warms something deep inside Amanda, knowing she wasn’t alone with her seemingly uncontrollable feelings.
Still, she doesn’t think they’re talking about the exact same kind of dreams here. “Really? Romantasy setting and all?”
“Not exactly,” he said, shaking his head when she raised her eyebrows, “but you showed up pretty regularly in the courtroom for me. I love you, I love the law—kinda obvious why my brain mixed them together.”
“That why I’m having trouble letting go of these?” she asks, tightening her fingers on the book she’s holding. “Keep looking at them and thinking about you. How I started letting myself think about us being us because of them.”
Sonny throws her a skeptical look, leaning forward to cup her face. “Don’t think that was because of the books, Amanda. Think that was about the work you put in.”
Amanda’s gotten much better about letting Sonny brag about her, so she doesn’t shrug it off like she would’ve a few years ago, taking the compliment for what it is as Sonny leans in to press a kiss to her forehead.
“Probably part of it,” she says, stretching on her toes, dropping the second book in the box so she can wrap her arms around his neck. “But believe me, counselor, the sex scenes in these books definitely helped.”
“Oh really?” he quips, smirking like he isn’t well aware of that, like she hasn’t used it to her advantage more than once. “We’ve gotta get you some new ones, then.”
It’s a vow he would’ve made regardless, she knows, because of what he said the last time her books were the center of their shared attention, this time three years after he’d helped her move them. That time, his fingers trailed over the books once again, a different box between them, one piled high with his law textbooks.
“They don’t make these things digitally, huh?” she teased, bending over to reach for the top one.
“Ah, you don’t understand the quality of the notes I wrote in these,” Sonny grinned, taking it from her and sliding it onto the top shelf, the one just above her row of Claire Morgan books—the shelf he’s been given precisely because he’s the only one who can reach it. “There’s some excellent 2 AM insights in these margins.”
“I remember your 2 AM insights, Carisi,” Amanda grinned, a rush of affection swelling in her chest. “Might want to double think that ‘excellent’ label.”
“Hey, I remember more than one breakthrough over shitty pizza.”
“Don’t think those were about the case, Sonny,” she smirked, watching a similar smile forming on his face. “Do you remember when you told me - ”
But the story she was about to say, the one about the time an incredibly sleep-deprived Sonny suggested that maybe there was a ghost involved somehow, doesn’t escape her lips, because halfway through lifting the next law book, this one twice the size of the first, there was a sharp pain in her abdomen that made her drop it.
“Fuck,” she muttered, pressing her lips togetether as her hand slid to the scar on her right side.
By the time her ears stopped ringing, Sonny was at her side, his hand steady on her elbow, concern etched into the lines on his face.
““I’m fine. It just – it twinges sometimes.”
The worry didn’t leave Sonny’s face, though—it hadn’t really ever left since August, if Amanda’s being honest. She wasn’t ungrateful for it in the slightest—the last time she’d been shot, she left the hospital two days later, and she didn’t bother to tell anyone except her doctors, and it almost made her cry to have him pushing her wheelchair out this time—but she also wanted to be back to normal.
“Hey, I can do the rest,” he said, his gentle voice—the one he used every minute in the hospital, and the one he’d been using every time he thought she was pushing herself too far—making a reappearance. “You can go sit.”
“I told you I’d help,” she protested, but her hand didn’t leave her torso, and she didn’t move as he leaned in closer, pressing a soft kiss to her temple.
“C’mon, I’ll give you a good view,” he whispered, the quiet heat underneath it a reminder that he wasn’t still looking at her as broken.
“You’d better,” she told him, and it was because of the tender hum he gave her in response that she didn’t fight him when he passed her the bottle of ibuprofen she’d been very rapidly depleting over the last few weeks.
Sonny was, in fact, right—it was a pretty nice view, watching his lanky, sweatpant-clad form add an entire row of books to the shelf, his things joining hers like he truly lived there.
Which, as of midnight that morning, he technically did. He hadn’t really slept at his apartment since she was shot, and even before that, he’d barely spent more than two nights a week there, but they were making it fully official now that his lease was up.
Everything that Sonny Carisi owned was moving into Amanda’s apartment permanently.
It wasn’t just books he pulled out, either. There was a smaller box he opened when the lawbooks were settled, this one with a “fragile” sticker slapped on the side of it. There were picture frames in that one, enough for half a wall of his studio apartment, but there were a key few that made Amanda’s breath catch in her chest.
There was one of Sonny with each of her girls—Jesse’s soccer tournament from a few months back, Billie’s dance recital—and one of all three of them at Billie’s baptism, Jesse holding tight to the edge of his shirt as he holds her baby sister. There was one of Amanda, too, one of the first he ever took of her with his DSLR.
“Little bit of a duplicate,” he said, holding his copy of the image of her and Jesse on the carousel in one hand and pointing to her copy with the other.
“But it’s a good one.”
“It is,” Sonny nodded, his face echoing her smile, “but I can put this one on my desk. We have to leave some room for all the pictures we’re gonna add.”
There was a whole lifetime of promises baked into the way he said it—promises that, at one point, would’ve scared her so badly she would’ve run from the relationship entirely.
She didn’t feel that way then, because they’d talked it through, Sonny being so careful and so patient, and the possibility of marriage and Sonny formally adopting the girls went from a pipe dream, something that only happened to the women she read about, to moments she was actively looking forward to.
“Yeah, we are,” she said, and there was something about the quiet simplicity of it that made something warm spark in Sonny’s eyes—relief, Amanda recognized. Because, of course, for several hours on that awful August day, he wasn’t sure if they’d even get to see each other again, let alone realize any of their dreams together.
And speaking of seeing -
“You trying to be the only one who looks at those pictures, Dominick?” she asked, watching as he set them in front of the law books, the angle of the frames completely obscuring the bottom half of the images.
“Well, it’s kinda the only space left, babe,” Sonny said, gesturing broadly at the bookshelf, and he wasn’t exactly wrong—between the pictures Amanda already had up and the various toys lining the shelf, there wasn’t much room left for anything else, except for the shelf immediately below the one he’s working on, the one with her brightly colored books.
“What about there, Counselor?” Amanda asked, nodding toward it.
“Those are yours.”
“As opposed to the rest of it, which I’ve never seen before today,” she deadpanned, raising her eyebrows.
“You know what I mean,” Sonny said, pointing toward the row of kids’ books that take up the entire bottom two shelves. “I don’t think you’re exactly the target audience for those.”
“They’re for the girls.”
“Exactly,” Sonny countered, running his hand underneath the romance books. “These are for you.”
Liv had told her once, back when she was first pregnant with Jesse, about the importance of still making time for herself, about having things that were only hers—advice she would realize the importance of very quickly, two weeks into maternity leave and struggling to remember what she’d ever done before endless feedings and diapers.
“You putting pictures there isn’t going to stop that,” she shrugged, biting down on her lip. “Besides, it kind of works. Pictures of our life. Romance books.”
Warmth flooded his eyes, and it was a few beats before he looked away from her long enough to put the frames down, angled so Amanda can just make out the images.
“We’re a romance, are we?” he quipped as he crossed the room, crouching in front of her with a satisfied smirk.
“Mhmm. Might even be enough evidence to hold up in court, Counselor,” she said, leaning in to kiss him, drawing it out slowly.
“Scoot over,” he said, climbing onto the cushion next to her and draping his arm over her shoulder. “Gotta enjoy our couch.”
There was a quiet awe in his voice that Amanda felt reflected in her own chest. “Lot bigger than a drawer, huh?”
“A drawer?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“Just somethin’ I told Fin,” she shrugged, pressing her lips together. “He asked why you didn’t live here yet, so I told him about your drawer.”
“Just the drawer?”
He was right—there were a countless number of other things in her apartment that she could’ve pointed to as evidence that her apartment belonged to him just as much as it did her, from the rows of his suits in her bedroom closet to the appliances she didn’t even know the name of on her kitchen counter.
“Just the drawer,” she echoed, watching an affectionate smile spread across his face. Regardless of how long it took her to disclose, he does love how protective of their relationship she’s been from the beginning.
He smiled, pressing a kiss to her temple, letting it linger. “Think we’re a little more blended than that, babe.”
“Yeah, we are,” she said, turning her head to be able to kiss him soundly, losing her fingers in his hair, neither of them aware that they were a little more blended than they knew at the time, their third baby making himself very comfortable inside Amanda’s womb.
“Now he’s almost tall enough to get these down himself,” Sonny quips in the present, amusement sparkling in his eyes as Amanda’s narrow.
“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” she counters, punctuating it by kissing him gently.
He’s an equal father to all of their children, but there’s something special about the way Amanda can so easily pick out which physical traits her youngest got from his father.
“Definitely yours,” he smirks, stretching one arm as far as it will go, much higher than Amanda will ever be able to reach. He pauses at the shelf, grabbing onto the next book in line. “C’mon, I’ll help you get these down.”
It’s dizzying, how quickly the rest of the series disappears from her shelf, a miniscule fraction of all the time it took her to bring them all together—years of her life condensed into seconds, the book she read during her long bed rest which Jesse resting against the Claire Morgan memoir Sonny just got her for her birthday.
“You okay?” Sonny asks behind her, pressing a kiss to her exposed shoulder, loosening the muscles she doesn’t even realize she’s been tensing.
“Yeah,” Amanda says, leaning back into him. “It’s just, I can’t stop seeing the faces of all the women Claire hurt. ‘Giving’ them to her perverted husband like they weren’t people. And all the money I spent on these helped her pay to keep them around.”
That knowledge is what’s kept her stomach heavy all week, guilt weighing her down even as they worked to ensure both Morgans stayed behind bars.
“And you know there was no way you could’ve known it.”
If there’s one thing she’s learned in her decade and a half with SVU, it’s how good predators are at hiding, how innocuous they can make themselves seem despite the relative horrors they’re inflicting on someone else.
“Yeah,” Amanda shrugs, her expression twisting. “I just thought I had a better radar for men like him by now.”
Sonny knows what she means, obviously, but when she turns her head to catch a glimpse of his eyes, lined with curiosity, she realizes she hasn’t exactly spelled this out for him before.
“You know what it’s like to start at SVU. You start questioning every man you see,” she says, watching recognition flit across her husband’s face. “But then you do it for a while, and you know what to watch out for—at least you think you do.”
Amanda’s never going to pretend that she was ever good at choosing men, but she’s been able to read them for a long time. It’s how she knew, from the very beginning, that Sonny was one of the few actually trustworthy men in the world—which she used to chink meant he deserved better than her.
Mercifully, she gave up on that last thought years ago, which is why she can look down at the hand Sonny has on her hip and catch the gleam of his wedding ring.
She brushes her finger against it, warmth blooming in her chest. “Think it’s safe to say my radar worked at least once.”
“Just once?” Sonny quips behind her, and even without having to turn around, she knows the exact shape of the smirk on his face, the kind that will remind her—correctly, of course—that this isn’t just a one-time thing, that they both wake up every day and choose each other.
“Okay, maybe a little more often than that,” she says, the lightness floating through her disappearing when her eye catches the box again, the brick settling in her stomach again. “But not often enough, apparently.”
“Amanda, you never even met him before this week.”
No, she didn’t, but she bought the picture of him Claire laid out in her memoir and on her social media, enough that she found a kind of comfort in them from afar, trusting that the woman who wrote the stories that helped her believe in love again had the relationship to match.
“Just mad they had me buy into their narrative,” she says, working her lip between her teeth. “Made me think they were like the couples in her books. Like us.”
She slides out of Sonny’s embrace as she says it, kicking the box for good measure.
“All lies, apparently.”
Sonny doesn’t push back this time, instead giving her a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry. I know how much you loved those books.”
Amanda nods, breathing out slowly as she takes her husband’s expression in, letting the tenderness in his expression—the same affection that’s been there since before she ever kissed him, the realest love she’s ever known.
“It’s okay,” she says, closing the gap between them and looping her arms around his neck so she can kiss him soundly. “Besides, this story is a much better one.”