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Amanda can’t sleep in the hotel room.
If the circumstances were different, she might be able to. It really is a nice room, with silky sheets and fluffy pillows far nicer than the ones they have at home.
“Not gonna ask Liv what she spent on this,” Sonny said when they walked in, his eyebrows shooting up as he dropped his bag into the chair in the corner of the room.
“Well, technically, it’s the New York City Victim’s Fund,” Amanda quipped, the words echoing strangely in her head, the reverberation from all the times she’s said it to survivors in the cases they’ve worked surging at the same time.
“Mhmm,” Sonny nodded, crossing back over to where Amanda was standing, her arms folded in front of the bed that was absolutely not going to see any of the action they’d had planned for their bed at home. “We got the unis stationed right outside the door, too.”
He was trying to comfort her, judging by the softness in his eyes as he reached for her—and it worked for a few seconds, the slight pressure in the way he gently squeezed her arms grounding her just long enough for her head to stop spinning.
But the roar started up again a heartbeat later, a consequence of the reminder that they have cops guarding their door because the person who did this to them still hasn’t been caught.
“Hey,” Sonny said, brushing his thumb along her lip, interrupting the way she was working her lip between her teeth. “I’m okay. The kids are okay. You’re okay.”
If he says that last bit enough times, Amanda thinks, she might start to believe him.
Four hours later, she’s awake again, pacing around the room, scrolling through her work emails on her phone as she tries to think of exactly which perp from her past cases would be brazen enough to break into her home.
“Amanda.”
Sonny’s voice makes her freeze mid-stride, the glow of her phone illuminating the room just enough for her to see the worry lining his expression.
“Hey,” she says, locking her phone quickly, swallowing down the guilty lump that rises in her throat. “Thought you were asleep.”
“I was,” he says, the pointed look he throws at her just visible in the sliver of moonlight coming through the curtains.
“I’m sorry,” she says, walking back over to her side of the bed, letting Sonny drape his arm around her shoulder as she tucks her head into his neck. “You need sleep.”
“And you don’t?”
No, she needs to be out there looking for the man who did this to them.
“Closing my eyes is not a good idea right now,” she says instead, because that is true. “Every time I do, it’s just – ”
“You see the kids?” he asks, the catch in his voice making clear he’s seeing the same thing.
“Yeah.”
Her mind gives her a mix of all three of her children, alone and together, but the universal feature of all of the nightmares is the knife, gleaming against each of their throats. Sometimes she gets a shot off, and she rushes to wrap her babies in her arms. Most of the time she doesn’t, and she falls to her knees with an anguished scream and wakes up drenched in sweat.
“Me too,” he whispers, kissing the top of her head, drawing it out until her heart rate evens out again.
Wordlessly, Amanda pulls up her phone, closing out the emails and moving to the text thread they’ve got with his parents, scrolling through the three pictures Serafina sent them last night—one of each of their kids, tucked tightly into their respective beds at their grandparents’ house, all blissfully unaware of the danger they could’ve faced if they’d been home.
“They’re okay,” she whispers—though whether she’s trying to reassure Sonny or herself more, she’s not entirely certain.
“They are,” he echoes, and she’s pretty sure they’re going to stay like that until the alarms neither of them need go off—that is, until their phones each light up with the same text.
Jesse, up before the sun like usual, writing to them from the phone Amanda still can’t believe she’s old enough to have.
When are you guys coming to get us?
Amanda’s stomach drops, and she can feel Sonny tense beside her. As far as any of their children know, their parents are coming to get them before lunch and making the most of their day off from school, still blissfully ignorant of the cop cars stationed outside their grandparents’ home or the crime scene tape that’s still covering the front door of their apartment.
Billie and Nicky will take it in stride, but Jesse’s their worrier, and she’s been through too many of her parents’ near-death experiences to not suspect that something’s up, especially because they aren’t coming home until the man who did this is safely behind bars.
Jesse doesn’t buy their explanation of an urgent case that Aunt Olivia really needs them to work. One look at her face through the phone screen, her lips pursed the same way Amanda held hers every time Kim promised she’d really stay sober this time, and Amanda can tell that they’re in for a lot of pointed questions when they make it out of this.
“Daddy and I are fine, baby, I promise,” Amanda says, biting her lip to stop her eyes from darting toward the bandage on Sonny’s arm. “We’ll be there for you as soon as we catch this bad guy.”
To make good on that promise, Amanda gets to work two hours early, coffee and the muffin Sonny had insisted she eat in her stomach as she flips through almost a hundred case files looking for the man who forced her to make it.
It’s well past dinner time when she makes it back to the hotel room, but Sonny tells her he has room service on the way regardless.
“When’s the last time you ate something?” he asks when she tries to tell him she’s not hungry, the length of time between his question and her answer—the peanut butter crackers she grabbed out of the vending machine a little after four—making her cheeks flush.
“Amanda, you have to eat,” Sonny says as he crosses the room, his hands settling on her hips and his lips landing on hers before she can even think of protesting.
“It’s Henry Mesner, Sonny,” Amanda says, her jaw tense. “He tried to kill you last time. He talked to Jesse.”
“I know,” he says, and there’s a shadow falling over his expression that matches the ache that’s buried deep in her chest.
As he once said, they’d take a bullet to protect each other—but they’d burn down the world for their children.
They’re safest on Staten Island, where they’re not only spared from the large targets on their parents’ backs, but surrounded by local police who are fiercely loyal to their grandparents.
(“Every time Ma bakes, she brings them her extras,” Sonny explained, and Amanda didn't have any more questions.)
But their children staying safe on Staten Island also means that they’re not with them, and that’s what’s making the buzzing underneath Amanda’s skin so intense.
“He did this, and we’re not safe until I figure it out,” Amanda says, pressing her hands together until they hurt.
Sonny’s the one who stops her, placing his hands over top of hers and gently pulling them apart.
“He’s not doing anything in the ten minutes it takes you to have a BLT from room service, hon.”
She’d like to argue with him on that—especially because he’s going to draw it out to the eight hours of sleep he’ll insist she needs—but her stomach betrays her, audibly growing just as her lips start to form the word no.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he says, leaning in to kiss her softly, and she lets him, because he’s still there for her to kiss.
But he almost wasn’t, and the second she closes her eyes to try to lean into this, she’s greeted by a vision of the knife pressing against Sonny’s throat, and her entire body tenses.
“Hey,” Sonny says, and she opens her eyes to his face framed with worry lines. “Are you okay?”
“Just flashbacks,” she says, waving her hand like it’ll stop Sonny’s brows from knitting together. “Huang said I’m fine, Sonny.”
(Technically, he just cleared her to work, but Amanda’s not going to point that out for him.)
There’s a bit of relief in the way he looks at her then, and she can’t blame him, because she’s familiar with worrying about his mental state after a trauma like this one—but there’s also a bit of worry still, the kind he always gets when he thinks she's getting a little too invested in a case.
(He doesn’t tell her that, of course—and he’s been endlessly supportive of the revolving door her career has taken the last few years—but there’s an extra layer of protectiveness in the way he looks at her when she gets absorbed into cases this way.)
“Huang didn’t tell you to skip meals, Amanda.”
“No,” she mumbles, chewing on her lip. “But we can’t go back to normal until we solve this case, Sonny. I want to go home. I want our kids back.”
“I do too,” he says, and the pain in his voice as he says it reminds Amanda that he really is the only other person in the world feeling the same way right now. “But you’re not gonna catch him if you don’t get some sleep, Amanda. You can let the night shift do a little bit of work.”
“The night shift cops are idiots.”
Amanda would call them out by name if any of them stayed any longer than six months, presumably exhausted by the shifts they only ever seem to use as an excuse to call in one of the SVU detectives, always seeming to choose Amanda on the nights when Billie’s been repeatedly jamming a foot into her back.
“They can hold it together for one night,” Sonny says, and she’s about to protest, to remind him that it’s Henry Mesner, but he gets there first. “He’s in a maximum security prison, Amanda. He’s not going to get out of there in the next ten hours.”
Ten hours is a bit of a stretch—Amanda’s hoping to keep it around six—but room service is at their door before she can point that out, and then there’s a sandwich in front of her that her stomach starts screaming for, and for twenty blissful minutes she forgets all about everything else but this.
“See, don’t you feel better?” Sonny asks, leaning his head against hers as they lay in bed, the room service tray with empty plates abandoned at their feet.
She shoots him a pointed look rather than answering, because he already knows the answer is yes. They've been together for almost five years now, and friends even longer than that—he knows exactly what a full meal does to her after a day of hyperfocus on a case like this.
There were years before he came into her life—her entire time in Atlanta and those early years in New York—when she ended nights like these with a beer and a cigarette rather than food because that was all Amanda had in the house. The state of her pantry would’ve changed when she had Jesse no matter what, but the size of her own meals—and quite honestly, the fact that she had them as regularly as she did—were the result of Sonny Carisi and his insistence on cooking for her as much as he did for her daughter.
Not for the first time, she thinks about how lucky she is to have him and how much worse her life would be if she’d never swallowed her fears and kissed him that night on the Hudson.
It’s a life they got perilously close to losing last night, her stomach flipping over at the reminder, and she knows that even with Sonny’s arms around her, she’s not really sleeping until she finds the man who did this to them is behind bars—and she plans on putting the cuffs on him herself.
“But Mommy, I don’t understand why.”
Billie couldn’t have aimed better for Amanda’s heart even if she’d been a grown adult with a knife, the sting in her chest made worse by the redness in her middle child’s eyes.
“Mommy and Daddy are helping Aunt Olivia on a case, baby,” Amanda says, forcing air into her voice like her stomach isn’t a lead brick. “You just have to stay with Nonna and Nonno a few more days, okay?”
“But it’s Sunday,” Billie protests, her lip quivering in a way that pierces Amanda’s heart. “We’re supposed to make spaghetti tonight.”
Both her girls have been Sonny’s sous chef since the days they were born, but Billie hasn’t shown as much interest as Jesse until recently, and she's been very accustomed to the simple routine of it.
“We’ll still make it, baby, don’t worry,” Sonny says next to Amanda, leaning in so that his face is captured in their end of the FaceTime call. “When we finish this case, we’re gonna make so much spaghetti, I promise.”
There’s a quiet edge in his voice as he talks, and she reaches for his hand with her free one, grounding herself just as much as she is him.
Billie doesn’t look convinced, but she disappears from the camera before either of her parents can say anything else, replaced instead by Jesse’s face, her expression far more skeptical than her sister’s.
“What about school tomorrow?”
Of their three children, Jesse’s the one most like a detective—and the one with the most memories of her mother nearly dying on the job and the perilous weeks after, when they spent days visiting her in the hospital instead of school.
“I’m gonna come drive you,” Sonny says, conveniently leaving off the police escort they’ll have the entire way into the city or the unmarked cars that will stay outside their school.
(Even with all the safety measures, Amanda’s still a little uneasy about it, given that Phillip Wingate is still out there, but the way Jesse’s face relaxes, the worry she’s far too old for disappearing from her expression, lightens the heaviness that’s been weighing down Amanda’s limbs.)
“And pick us up?”
“Of course,” Sonny promises, because the only thing on his work calendar tomorrow is a handful of low-level arraignments, and even if—when—Amanda catches Wingate, he can’t prosecute.
(The fact that Amanda’s still investigating this case at all is a testament to how much Liv trusts her, and the fact that no one understands Henry Mesner—and this deranged superfan of his—the way she does.)
“And then we get to go home?” Jesse asks, the edge of desperation in her voice a kind that Amanda hasn’t heard from her eldest since she was begging for tickets to the Eras Tour.
“As long as Aunt Liv and I find this bad guy, okay?” Amanda says, her breath catching at the way Jesse’s face falls. “We’re really close, I promise.”
Jesse looks like she wants to respond, some kind of sharp-witted question on her tongue, but she’s cut off by the shout of her name in the background.
It’s a voice they all know well, the newest one in their family, and Amanda always loves hearing it, even when it’s as loud as his father’s, but she was half hoping not to hear it on this call, if only because the voice’s owner is going to have a catastrophic meltdown when he realizes his mother still isn’t coming to get him.
There’s a thud on the other end of the call, a yelp of protest from Jesse as she disappears from view and gets replaced by her brother, his hair—the color stolen from Amanda and the unruliness stolen from Sonny—sticking in several different directions.
“Mama,” he grins, and then they’re looking at just one of his eyes, the phone perilously close to his face.
“Hey, buddy. Did you take the phone from your sister without asking?”
“No,” Nicky says, at the same time Jesse practically shouts “yes” somewhere behind him.
They spend the next few minutes trying to parent remotely, forcing Nicky to give the phone back to his sister and making Jesse include him in the frame of the video (and then Billie, too, when she drops her tablet to come back over), so everyone’s a little weepy already when Nicky asks the question Amanda knew was coming.
“Mama come get me?” he asks, the pleading look in his eyes making Amanda’s stomach drop.
Nicky takes the “no” harder than either of his sisters, devolving into a tantrum that Serafina has to step in for, waving off their apologies with something they can’t quite make out about how Nicky doesn’t hold a candle to his Aunt Gina this way.
And then the call ends, and they’re left staring at Amanda’s lockscreen, a picture of all three kids at Christmas, when their family was safe and whole together.
“Well, that fucking sucks,” Amanda says, chewing on the corner of her lip to stop tears from forming, because she knows that no matter what happens today, she’s going to see her kids’ teary faces through all of it.
Amanda’s not surprised that she blows up at Ruby. The girl, traumatized as she is, is sitting there holding back information that’s keeping a murderer out of prison.
But she is surprised that she blows up at Liv.
The words pour out of her faster than she can stop them, acrid and burning on the way out, in a way they haven’t done since well before she started therapy.
So then what was the trigger? A voice inside her—Hanover’s voice, to be exact—asks.
My husband almost dying? Amanda counters back in her head, glaring at Griffin across the squad room like he’s the one who asked it.
Not quite. What did Liv say that made you so upset? not-Hanover asks.
Amanda would rather do just about anything else than replay this conversation—except perhaps the paperwork she’s been pretending to do for the last ten minutes while the rest of the squad works her case—but she knows not-Hanover won’t shut up until she does.
There’s a brief moment where she thinks she can get out of it through a failure of her memory, the words disappearing before she can examine them. But of course, her mind preserved every word, the same way it used to do when Kim called her late at night, strung out in some trap house Amanda needed to come rescue her from.
It takes Amanda less than a minute to pinpoint exactly what Liv said that made her feel like she got kicked in the stomach.
“She’s a victim of Henry and Philip, and quite frankly, so are you.”
“I’m not a victim,” she mutters to no one in particular, keeping it quiet enough that no one else hears her.
Aren’t you? not-Hanover asks. You went through a home invasion.”
Yeah, but I wasn’t the one with the knife to my throat, Amanda silently answers, her knee racing to a gallop underneath her desk.
Still a trauma.
Yeah, that I invited, Amanda retorts, so confident that she’s bested the imaginary version of her therapist that she ignores, just for a few beats, the way the bottom drops out of her stomach when she realizes what she said.
No one else knows what she said to Henry Mesner the last time she saw him, the promise she made to kill him if he ever came near her family again, in the same way she knows that a threat like that leads to obsession in a mind like his.
No wonder Liv genuinely believes he didn’t have anything to do with this.
Her chest tightening and stomach heavy, Amanda stands up from her desk, moving before she can change her mind, her vision very purposely trained on the exit and away from Benson’s office.
“I’m going to lunch,” she says to no one in particular, not bothering to stick around to see if anyone believes the lie.
She realizes Henry’s full of shit thirty seconds after entering the same room as him.
He’s too eager to see her, a peculiar kind of loneliness in his eyes that dims when he realizes it’s her.
Seeing that desperation is all Amanda needs to know that all the power she gave him in her head was imaginary, that when she put the cuffs on him years ago, she was sealing his fate for the rest of his life—the cell he lives in is all he’ll ever see, the letters he ignores are the only communication he’ll get, and the concrete and barbed wire walls forever keeping him away from her family.
Which means that Amanda will never have to make good on her promise to him.
She can’t promise the same for Philip Wingate.
Liv gets there first, though, and Amana’s grateful to be spared what would’ve been a pretty painful IAB investigation—but even more grateful for the way Liv nods at her, the quiet acknowledgement that she’s forgiven, that they’re once again on the same side.
Sonny’s waiting for her in the squad room. Of course he is.
Even though Huang’s house had exigent circumstances and they didn’t need a warrant, Liv kept him in the loop anyway, both about the case and Amanda—especially when her “lunch break” turned into four hours away from the squad room.
He’s sitting on the top of her desk, long limbs stretched out practically to the next one, but he jumps up when he sees her, stopping her before she’s more than halfway to him.
“Amanda,” he says, and there’s nothing but relief in it, his expression the one she sees on him after every “shots fired” call she’s even remotely involved in.
“Hey,” she breathes, and she lets him wrap his arms around her, resting her cheek against his chest and listening to the steady beat of his heart underneath it. “I’m okay, I promise.”
“I know,” he says, pulling back to look at her fully, his hands cupping her face gently. “Doesn’t mean I can’t worry about you.”
“Philip was pathetic, he was never going to do anything to me,” Amanda says, shrugging off the raised eyebrows Sonny throws her way.
“He killed two people, Amanda.”
“But I had him where I wanted him,” Amanda counters. “Realizing that Henry never even knew who he was, that he’d done all of this for nothing.”
She’s saying it like they don’t both know that psychopaths like Philip are at their most dangerous when their delusion is challenged, that without Liv’s intervention, they might be having a very different conversation right now.
“Can’t say he didn’t deserve it,” Sonny says, his right arm brushing against the spot on his left where the bandage sits, covered by his sleeve.
“And I didn’t even have to make good on my promise to Henry,” Amanda smirks, delighting in the relief of that knowledge for a few satisfying beats before she remembers –
“What promise?”
– that she never told Sonny.
“Um,” she starts, looking around the precinct, where there are far too many cops within earshot for her comfort. “Maybe it’s something we can talk about at home?”
She says this with the hope that he’ll forget all about it by the time Liv is processed and the paperwork is filed and they’ve made it back to the hotel room they get to finally leave tomorrow—but her husband has always been thorough, and he asks about it the minute she’s out of the shower.
So she tells him, her gaze wholly focused on her nails and the drops of moisture evaporating from her skin, doing the lightest touch she can over the first unauthorized trip she made to Henry’s cell, because there’s no sugarcoating the words she said to him.
“Explains why you thought it really was Henry, huh?” Sonny asks, not an ounce of surprise in his voice—or, when Amanda looks up at his face, in his expression.
“That’s all you’re gonna say?” she asks, breathing out something between a laugh and a sigh. “No lecture about how dangerous it was? All the legal hot water it could put me in?”
“I can give you one if you want,” he teases, eyes bright as they look at her. “Pretend to be surprised, the whole nine yards.”
“I’m that predictable, huh?” she asks, something like dread, the anxious kind she used to have at the beginning of their relationship, when she faced the daunting prospect of meeting his picture-perfect family and explaining her messy life, gnawing at her.
“If I say yes, am I gonna have to sleep on the couch tomorrow night?” he asks, like she’s ever once wanted him to sleep anywhere but her bed, even when she was mad at him. “Amanda, I would’ve done the same thing.”
“Really?” she asks, eyebrows shooting up, pressing her lips together. “Got a hard time picturing you going to threaten a drugged-out serial killer in his cell, Counselor.”
“If I thought it would protect you and the kids, I would.”
“Before we were even together?”
“I didn’t talk about taking a bullet for you in that speech for nothing, Amanda,” he says, and the wave of tenderness that runs over Amanda has her eyes watering so intensely that her vision goes blurry.
“Hopeless romantic,” Amanda quips, like that’s not one of the reasons she married him in the first place, pausing for a beat before speaking again. “I’m sorry I almost jinxed it. If it had really been Henry, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”
“It wasn’t,” Sonny says, brushing his hand along her cheek, “and from what Liv says, he’s not going to start anytime soon.”
“Not if he wants to keep his good behavior perks. And besides, he’s too desperate for attention to try anything else.”
Sonny’s eyebrows raise again—a bored psychopath is the one most likely to do them harm.
“He knows I’ll never come see him again if something happens to one of you,” she clarifies. “A life sentence is a long time.”
It’s a small comfort, depending on a psychopath’s patience for their safety, but it’s enough that, alongside the extra scrutiny the warden promised Henry will forever be subject to, it’s enough that, for the first time since their ill-fated anniversary dinner, Amanda Rollins sleeps all the way through the night.
“Hopefully, that’s the last we’ll ever have to think of Henry Mesner again,” Liv tells her the next morning.
“Yeah, you can say that again,” Amanda scoffs, grateful for both the warmth in Liv’s eyes and that she didn’t have to lie about regretting what she did this week, because she knows she’d do it again in a heartbeat, even if she hopes with everything she has that she won’t have to.
But they have other cases to get to, other victims who’ve just had the worst day of their lives, and they need Amanda to be at her best, not focused on the latest psychopath who’s decided he’s obsessed with her.
“Where do you need me today?”
Liv tilts her head, throwing Amanda a sympathetic smile. “You’ve got a day off you never got to have, don’t you?”
“Yeah, and about three hours before I’ve got to pick up the kids from school,” Amanda says, dropping in the chair in front of Liv’s desk with a sigh. Should be just enough time for Carisi to finalize this plea deal.”
(This part of the case being the only one the eighth floor will let him touch.)
For all the exhaustion in Amanda’s voice as she says it, though, there’s twice as much relief—the buzzing in her head has stopped, and Jesse’s smile at the end of last night’s video call was enough on its own to stop Amanda’s nightmares.
“So what you’re saying is, you’ll get plenty of rest?” Liv quips.
“More than I did this weekend, that’s for sure.”
“Well, let’s all be thankful for that,” Liv says, a teasing glint in her eye that makes Amanda’s cheeks flush. “Including New York’s criminals.”
It’s a quiet acknowledgement that Amanda’s tactics worked, however much she flaunted the rules to use them—and Amanda’s grateful for it without pushing her luck any further, giving Liv a subdued nod.
“Roger that, Captain.”
Despite what she just said to Liv, Amanda sees Sonny earlier than she’s expecting, barely two hours since she last saw him in interrogation with Ruby.
The judge had no questions about the plea deal, just a few pointed reminders for Ruby about how seriously she needs to take her recovery, and Baxter let Sonny go home early with a reminder that he needs to make sure the house is back to normal for the kids’ sake, and Liv lets Amanda leave early for the same reason.
For all the chaos their apartment saw on Thursday night, though, there’s not much they actually need to do—the crime scene cleanup team moved them to the front of the line, and Amanda would feel guilty if it weren’t for the palpable relief she gets at the sight of the white doorframe, not a drop of blood in sight.
Certainly good enough to convince her children nothing happened, even if there’s a dull echo somewhere deep within her that reminds her that something did.
“They did a good job with it,” Sonny says behind her, pressing a soft kiss to her neck as his arms drape around her hips. “And so did you, Annie Oakley.”
“Should’ve gotten him a little closer to center mass,” she shrugs. “Might’ve saved us a lot of time.”
(Would’ve been the second person she’s killed in her apartment since moving to New York, but she doesn’t linger on that particular detail, and her husband is way too nice to point it out.)
“Would’ve sped up the house hunt, at least,” Sonny quips behind her instead.
They’ve been half looking for one since Nicky was born, but they’ve both been reluctant to actually commit to it, something too wrong with every listing his mother sends them to even bother putting in an offer.
“Yeah, it would’ve,” Amanda says, laughing for a beat before her breath stops at the involuntary memory of the years she spent in her old apartment cautiously avoiding the spot where Jeff Parker’s body once laid.
Maybe it’s a good thing she didn’t shoot Phillip in the chest, then.
“What?”
Oh, she said that out loud.
“Nothing. Just talking to myself, apparently,” she says, hoping Sonny doesn’t register the edge in her voice.
“Amanda.”
Of course he does.
“Might be good to talk to me, too.”
His voice is gentle, his fingers trailing down the length of her arm the way she likes best, but it’s also very pointedly not a question—it’s a call-in.
They’ve had to do a lot of these in the last three and a half years, moments where one of them (usually Amanda, if she’s being honest), needs a reminder that it’s so much better when they talk through what they’re feeling. That doesn’t mean, though, that her stomach doesn’t feel heavy or that her eyes don’t instinctively track to the floor, rather than to her husband’s eyes, even as she turns around to face him.
“Kinda glad I didn’t actually kill another person in my apartment,” she starts, chewing on the corner of her lip. “Not trying to make that a habit, too.”
“It’s not a habit if it’s self-defense, Amanda.”
Knowing that is different from believing it, though, and while she wouldn’t have lost any sleep over Phillip Wingate, Jeff Parker’s death has given her more than a few restless nights, even if he wasn’t actually a good person.
“Maybe not,” she shrugs,” but it happening twice would’ve been a crazy thing to add to the list.”
“The list?” he asks, the way his eyebrows are knitted together telling her that he’s not following—and in fairness, he doesn’t have the experience Amanda does.
“The list of everything that’s fucked up about me” is how Amanda thinks of it, but if she’s using the language of her therapists, she should call it her “trauma history.”
“You know, the list,” she repeats, like that’s going to clarify it. “The stuff I have to repeat to every damn shrink I see.”
It comes out a little sharper than she means it to, and the change in Sonny’s expression as a result—his forehead wrinkling and his lips pressing together—reminds Amanda of what she hates the most about the list.
The way it makes people look at her.
The way Sonny and Liv have been looking at her this entire case.
“I’m just saying,” she says, breathing out slowly. “It’s longer than a lot of other people’s.”
“Yeah,” he says, voice perfectly calm, like she just told him the sky is blue, “and that’s okay, Amanda.”
“Is it?” she scoffs, taking a step back and folding her arms across her chest. “Cause it really didn’t feel that way these last few days.”
Sonny’s face changes again when she says that, back to the expression he’s had since Thursday night, growing a worried crease between his eyebrows that something deep inside Amanda bristles against.
“Amanda,” he starts, and his voice is gentle as he can make it, and that’s why she’s able to swallow down the sharpness she would’ve responded with five years ago, courtesy of a breathing technique from Hanover.
“It’s just—it’s normal. The way I reacted. I mean, this asshole had a knife to your throat, Sonny. There’s no way I wasn’t going after him.”
(Of course, the man with the knife and the first man she went after were different, but she’s not raising that particular point right now.)
“I know,” Sonny says, reaching for her hand—and Amanda lets him, dropping her arms from their folded position and easing some of the tension in her body. “And I wasn’t gonna stop you from that, babe.”
“You were not ‘in the neighborhood’ that many times, Dominick.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to worry about you,” he counters, the look on his face so tender that Amanda smiles despite the weight still heavy in her stomach.
“That’s what you call worrying, huh? Just a normal, regular amount of worrying?”
“When it comes to you? Yeah, Amanda. You’re my wife. I’m always gonna worry about you.”
He looks so certain about it, his eyes so warm as he steps closer toward her, that Amanda almost lets it go.
Almost.
“Just because I’m your wife?” she asks, pressing her lips together.
“I mean, I also happen to love you. We know that’s not true for every marriage,” Sonny quips, but when she doesn’t echo his laugh, he pauses, the crease in his forehead deepening. “Hey, you wanna tell me what you’re actually thinkin’?”
“I just – ” Amanda says, her stomach flipping over. “I worry sometimes. That I’m too much.”
“What do you mean, too much?”
There’s a lot of ways she could answer him: too reckless, too traumatized, too stubborn, all of the problems she’s identified in therapy and worked on (apparently not
But she doesn’t pick from that list, though, going with something else entirely.
“That I'm not the kind of person you want me to be. The kind of woman you thought you’d marry.”
She can’t bear to look at his face after she says it, feigning interest in her cuticles.
When his voice comes, it’s clear and certain, the kind of safety she never thought she’d find from anyone, let alone a man. “Amanda, you know that’s not true.”
And somewhere deep inside her, she does. But she also knows that there’s a list of things he’s changed since they got together:
No more Jack Daniels in the liquor cabinet.
Invitations to bingo fundraisers they have to turn down.
And, of course, leaving his office to (unsuccessfully) talk his wife out of going head to head with a psychotic serial killer.
She shrugs rather than answering, chewing on the corner of her lip.
“I just worry it’s not what you thought it would be. Being married.”
Of the two of them, he’s the one that’s been dreaming of this since childhood, the person who came into this marriage with any kind of preconceived positive ideas about it, dreams that were first cooked up in Staten Island Catholic school, where the kind of life Amanda was living then—and a lot of what she’s lived since—was unimaginable.
“Amanda,” he says, brushing his hand underneath her chin, forcing her to look into his eyes, so much love swimming in there she could almost drown in it. “Of course it’s not what I thought it would be. It’s so much better.”
“Laying it on kinda thick, huh, Counselor?” she asks, forcing out a laugh she hopes will stop the tears welling up in her eyes.
“For you? Always,” he grins, but there’s tenderness in his expression still as his thumb trails across her cheek. “But I mean it, Amanda. All those years I spent thinkin’ about bein’ married, I never thought it was gonna be to someone as wonderful as you.”
“Really? Little Sonny was dreamin’ about marrying a woman who goes chasing after serial killers when her boss tells her not to?”
“I don’t think you understand how rebellious Catholic kids are,” he says, a touch of gravel entering his voice that Amanda makes a mental note to revisit later. “But Amanda, I knew who you were when I married you. It’s kinda why I married you.”
“You did, huh?” Amanda asks, letting the weight in her limbs dissolve as she does.
“Mhmm,” he says, pressing a kiss against her hairline. “Otherwise, I could’ve just given up and married one of the dozens of women my mother tried to set me up with.”
Amanda pulls back, this time creasing her eyebrows as she looks up at him. “Is that supposed to be helping, Counselor?”
“Yeah, cause I would’ve been miserable with them,” Sonny says, reaching for her again, this time wrapping his arm around her hips. “And I’m unbelievably happy with you.”
“You are, huh?” Amanda asks, leaning in to kiss him fully, drawing it out long enough to make it clear that she’s gotten all she needs out of this conversation. “You’re gonna have to show me later—we gotta make use of your rebellion kink.”
He groans when she says that, leaning his forehead against hers. “Hell of a thing to say to me right before we go pick up our children.”
“I know,” she grins, pulling back from him and relishing in the ways his eyes follow her every movement. “But you love me.”
Because if there’s one thing she’s certain of in this life, it’s that.