Chapter Text
March
Elliot bought her a ring.
Well, kind of. Not really. The ring was purchased, and Elliot had paid for it, but there were some missing links along the way, missing links that filled out into the shape of perhaps the most pathetic thing Olivia has ever done.
Some people had birthday traditions. For Olivia, it was usually Chinese takeout and a few beers with the squad, maybe. Cragen would go on a fishing trip by himself, Fin would take the day off and do God-knows-what, Munch would bring donuts, and Elliot would usually complain about how tired he was, how old he was getting, and how he didn’t understand why Kathy expected him to celebrate when he got home. She didn’t know what he did once he actually got there. She knew what they did for Kathy’s birthday, though, because Elliot had a tradition of buying her jewelry. Except, it wasn’t Elliot who ever actually purchased it. Elliot never even set foot in the store after that first year, when Olivia had told him that one pair of earrings was clearly superior to the others, so he’d chosen those ones, and Kathy hadn’t taken them out for months. Every April, he would hand Olivia his credit card, and at some point in the next few days, he would have a lovely gift to take home to his wife on her special day.
He always handed her the card with a dimply smirk and a “get yourself something nice, too,” and that was why Olivia kept doing it.
Before Kathy left him, that meant a hot dog. She’d pick out a stunning necklace or bracelet, then she would find a street vendor and treat herself.
The first year after Eli, when Elliot had produced his credit card from his wallet with an almost sheepish expression, Olivia had accepted it with some disdain. She thought she hid it well, but the fact remained that the reanimation of this particular tradition marked the end of something. The end of hope. That stubborn, precious hope that had lived in her chest for the past few years like an inoperable tumor. That hope that had grown and grown from the moment Kathy left Elliot, that hope that had shriveled that day in the courthouse when he told her Kathy was pregnant, that hope that had split right in half when she’d held Eli in the back of that ambulance. The credit card was nothing, really, just going back to the old ball and chain, only the chain was fine silver and the ball was a diamond.
She’d missed those hot dogs, though, the ones she would never buy for herself anymore but justified under the guise of a friend doing something nice, so she accepted his card without complaint.
Only she didn’t get a hot dog that year. That year, she bought herself a steak dinner, took it home, and ate it in her darkened kitchen. Maybe, she’d thought, if she didn’t turn the lights on, she could pretend she wasn’t as pathetic as she was. She could pretend it was a grocery store rotisserie chicken, that it was no big deal, or she could pretend she was dressed to the nines at a Michelin star restaurant, that there was someone there with her who cared about her, who wanted to woo her, who wanted to see that she ate well. In the dark, it wasn’t as embarrassing as it should have been.
The next year, she splurged, and bought herself a $200 bottle of cabernet. If Kathy’s earrings were a little bit smaller that year, oh well. Blame it on the recession.
She spent weeks feeling guilty for that wine, though. It sat unopened for months, collecting dust on top of her refrigerator. She still remembers fighting her own anxiety not to throw up the steak and potatoes she’d spent Elliot’s hard-earned money on. She wasn’t good at this, this game of spite, and she didn’t really care to examine the reasons she was playing it.
In any case, it was snowballing, and this year, she’d really gone and done it. It was always the same routine: go to the jewelry store, get something for Kathy; go to the bodega or the sidewalk or the park, and get something for Olivia. She didn’t want to be the bodega girl. She didn’t want to be the hot dog cart and she didn’t want to be the steakhouse, even. She wanted the whole damn thing. She wanted the jewelry store.
So, that April afternoon, she walked out of the precinct and straight to the subway, up the stairs and into the store, right up to the counter and left a big, fat fingerprint on the glass, pointing to a ring.
“That one,” she said, hovering over a simple, solid-gold band.
The man at the counter tried to explain that it was a men’s ring, and it would probably not be well-proportioned on her slim finger, and she ought to pick a different one; one with a diamond, one with several diamonds, maybe, and she knew he was trying to upsell her but she also knew part of him was right.
So she looked at the women’s rings. The ones with the sparkling stones and the dainty gold and silver bands and the gulp-inducing price tags.
She couldn’t go crazy. She knew there was no way she could buy herself a diamond. If she went and spent thousands of dollars, Elliot would know, and he’d kill her. No, she needed a typical, one-item sized jewelry store purchase on the books, and that wouldn’t be found in the engagement rings.
“What about birthstones?” She asked, “Do you have any opal? Or-or amethyst?”
The man behind the counter smiled, and led her deeper into the store, a few cases over. There was a lovely emerald piece, but she had no connection to the month of May, and the sapphires were pretty, too, but September held no significance, either. No, Olivia had two options. Amethyst if she was selfish, opal if she was certifiably insane. There was one that caught her eye, encrusted with minuscule little amethysts, and it was gorgeous, she thought, but she looked at it and envisioned one of the crystals falling out, followed by the others, one by one until she had no resolve left, no hope, and no sanity. It didn’t matter how well made the ring was, or how respected the brand’s reputation, she knew that this ring was a talisman and she was going to poison it, so she wanted it to be sturdier. Tiny gems would not do, pretty as they were.
“I actually have a pretty physical job, I don’t want any of the stones getting damaged. Do you have anything simpler?”
The man behind the counter— Stephen, she finally checked his name tag— nodded, and guided her down a few more cases.
“The infinity collection,” he proudly stated, presenting her an array of silver and gold rings and necklaces with representations of the infinity symbol, the designs ranging from elegant to gauche. "I was thinking this ring," he said, plucking a gold one out of the case, "might look lovely on that hand of yours."
Weird way of putting it, Stephen, but he was right. It was subtle, it was sophisticated, and it was perfect. Two bands around the back, crossing in the middle around the front, molded together seamlessly and sparkling in Stephen's fingers. Nothing flimsy about it, no stones to fall out, no impossibly dainty bits of metal to bend and break. Just a stunningly vague depiction of the infinity symbol. An almost forever.
What the hell.
“You know what? I’ll take it. Size 7, please.”
She bought herself a hot dog, too, just to cover all her bases.
Then, of course, there was the matter of Kathy’s gift, which Olivia had formulated a plan for weeks before Elliot’s credit card ever left his wallet. The steak had been impulsive. The wine, too. This ring was premeditated, thought out for weeks, and Olivia had been stewing over it so much that she felt excited, giddy, like she was getting away with something. Kathy would have a beautiful gift, too, and it was currently inside a wooden box on the top shelf of Olivia’s closet.
Her mother’s jewelry box.
She didn’t open it much—hadn’t opened it in years, actually—but she knew its contents well. It was the same box that’d lived on her mother’s dresser for Olivia’s entire childhood, the one she would sift through when she was home alone, full of delicate bracelets and earrings she would gingerly slip on when she knew her mother had passed out. There was a bracelet with a big fat pearl in it that Olivia knew was an heirloom, passed down from Serena’s mother, and her mother before that, and when you get married, her mother had told her, you must wear this bracelet, so make sure your dress won’t clash. The possibility of that bracelet ever going down an aisle again was getting slimmer and slimmer, Olivia thought, what with the only ring in her possession being the one she bought for herself with a married man’s money.
On tiptoes, Olivia pulled the heavy mahogany case out of the closet, and sat right down on the floor. The case was only about the length and width of a shoebox, but it was a few inches higher, and made of thick enameled wood. It was a nice jewelry box, all things considered, and Olivia might want to use it for her own accessories, had it not carried inside it the memories of so many lonely nights when she’d childishly tried to glean some of her mother’s strength from a brooch or a pendant. A losing battle, always. There was nothing strong about a piece of jewelry, and sometimes, shamefully, Olivia thought there hadn’t been much strength in her mother, either.
There was one piece in there, though, which carried a majesty that the others did not. Beautiful, delicate, interwoven white gold chains with countless diamonds embedded through it, and then a slightly larger, teardrop-shaped one hanging from the center. Decades old and in absolutely pristine condition.
Olivia still remembers the day her mother got this necklace. She was twelve years old, and Hal came over to the apartment. Serena had never been trusting with men, never dated many, so there were never any near-stepfathers in Olivia’s orbit, but she had memories of Hal. Met him a few times, mostly at Hudson. He was on faculty too, a tenured professor in the anthropology field. Olivia remembers him telling her of his ethnography, his trips to Tibet and Nepal and Burma, how he had come close to winning a Pulitzer, not once, but twice. She didn’t care about any of that at twelve, but Hal had made it all sound very important, and her mother looked at him with something like affection in her eyes, so Olivia had decided that Hal must be an important person.
She wondered if she would have to come close to two Pulitzers, too, if that’s what it would take to have her mother look upon her with such staunch pride, with such regard.
Hal’s importance was on display that day in the apartment. Olivia remembers the sharp knock at the door, remembers looking through the peephole at Hal’s sharp jaw and prominent adam’s apple and letting him in, and then how she had been ushered into her bedroom, instructed not to disturb them. After that, she’d heard angry voices and a door slamming and the unmistakable sound of her mother crying, and hours later, when Olivia finally dared to emerge from her room, Serena had drunk herself into a stupor, her fist clenched around the gift Hal had brought. A parting gift, an apology gift, Olivia hadn’t been sure. But it was breathtaking, the necklace. The one with the diamonds and the chains that looked artfully, intentionally woven rather than tangled. It glinted in the lamplight and she remembered that so clearly, how beautiful it looked hanging from her mother’s fist, though Olivia never would see it around her neck.
She remembers how she’d put her mother to bed and all the while listened to Serena’s slurred grumbling about Hal being a liar, a bastard, about his stupid-bitch-whore wife, and Olivia didn’t meet another one of her mother’s boyfriends ever again.
Lovely necklace, no fond memories: she had the perfect gift for Elliot’s wife’s birthday.
The perfect gift for herself, too, she thought, as she twisted the ring around her middle finger. Certainly better than something fleeting, like a steak or a bottle of wine or a fucking hot dog. Something that could stay.
She set the necklace on her dresser, put the box back in the closet, and slid the ring off of her finger. It couldn’t make its debut tomorrow, that would be obvious. After a few weeks in her underwear drawer, though, it would be perfect.
A few days later, she presented the necklace to Elliot with a half-assed explanation, “they tried to charge me extra for a box, you’ll have to figure something out," he looked at it appraisingly for about half a second before saying, “Looks great, Liv. Thanks," and tucking it inside his jacket pocket.
She would be irritated at how little he cared, maybe, if that wasn’t exactly what she wanted this year. She smiled a you’re welcome, then said, not not grimly, “Tell Kathy I said Happy Birthday.”
May
“Let me take you home,” He says. Not drive you home. Not walk you. Take you. It sounds possessive, and part of her bristles even if the bigger part preens.
“The subway is two blocks from here,” she protests.
“And we’re chasing our— what— thirteenth subway assailant? Not happening, Liv. Not tonight.”
“I can protect myself.”
“I know. You don’t always have to, though.”
Yes I do, she thinks, fingers itching to twist the ring on her left hand. The reminder of how stuck she was, that however long she remained stuck like this, tethered to him, she’d have to protect herself, because he was the only other person who could, and she couldn’t have him. She’d bought the ring almost as a joke with herself. She hadn’t expected it to feel so much like a weight.
She gets in the sedan without any more protest.
The drive to her neighborhood is spent in intervals of light conversation and comfortable silence, and it feels good to just be there with him at the end of a long day. She hates how good it feels, how right, and the tendons in her neck are basically straining with the effort it takes to keep herself from looking over at him and starting to wish things.
He pulls into a spot around the corner from her building, a one-way side street, and she shoots him a look of silent thanks before reaching for the handle, but his eyes meet hers and there’s something there, something that makes her chest constrict with fear and longing, both at once, and makes her freeze.
“We ever gonna talk about it?” He asks, very quietly.
“What?” And really, what could he possibly mean, because the list of things between them that they do not talk about is long , and it’s not like she could throw a dart at it blindly and just discuss whatever it lands on. No, the list ranges between the innocuous and the life-altering, and she’s not too keen to talk about most of it in a parked car at 11:57pm on a Thursday.
“The necklace,” Elliot answers, and she blanks for a moment.
“Julia’s?”
“What— the victim’s? No. No, Kathy’s necklace, Liv. The one from this year. Maureen looked it up. Cartier special edition, less than a thousand made, hasn’t been sold since 1981. You telling me you bought that at Bloomingdale’s last month?”
“I…” She actually can’t think of anything to say. She’s never wanted out of a space more than she wants out of this car.
“It’s worth thousands of dollars, Olivia,” she presses, and he doesn’t sound mad, really, but he definitely sounds confused, and more than a little concerned. Which, yes, Olivia recognizes that her behavior is confusing, is concerning, she’s confused and concerned herself. She’s confused and concerned enough for the both of them. New York Fucking City is not big enough for both of them to harbor this amount of confusion and concern.
She scoffs. “You can’t even buy your own wife’s birthday gifts for over a decade and suddenly you wanna use those detective skills to investigate a favor? Why does it matter how much the necklace is worth? You wouldn’t know the difference between Cartier and Claire’s.”
“A favor? That necklace costs more than six months of my mortgage. I didn’t ask you to do that. Where the hell did you get it?”
“Elliot—“ She looks at him, a warning he doesn’t heed.
“I know you didn’t get it from the store, because I checked my bank statements. You only spent four hundred dollars.”
She swallows, nods. She can’t even think of a lie, so she’s left with the truth.
“It was my mother’s.”
He pauses. They both pause.
The pause is long enough to break her, and she suddenly finds that she cannot be in this car anymore, cannot be seated. Even though she’s bone-tired from the day they’d had, she’s suddenly buzzing with anxious energy again, and she slams his car door louder than she intends. She’s barely stepped onto the curb when she hears the drivers’ side door slam even louder, and then it’s the soles of his shoes slapping on the pavement until they’re directly in front of her.
“You gave my wife your dead mother’s necklace? Are you insane? You could’ve sold it, or pawned it, or, I don’t know, kept it—“
“I didn’t want to keep it! And I didn’t give it to Kathy, okay, you did— I just picked it out. Isn’t that what I always do? I’m the stylist, I’m the personal shopper, and you placate me with cheap hot dogs to keep me quiet about our dirty little arrangement.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a hot dog anymore, last time I checked. I know about the wine, okay? And the Sparks dinner. Hell, I even knew when you just used my card to get your tires rotated.”
She’d forgotten about that one.
“So this whole time, you didn’t trust me? What, you thought I’d go around scamming you, using your credit card to pay my rent?”
“No, I didn’t trust that you’d actually complete the whole favor, and get something for yourself, too. I never knew what the hell to get Kathy, why would I know what to get you either?”
“You’re under no obligation—“
“I wanted to! I wanted you to know! How much I appreciate you, how much I—“
“Jesus Christ, Elliot.”
“I just wanted you to get something out of it. That’s all. And at least you got to pick it out yourself. So I’m not mad about any of it, okay? But I gotta know—“
“No, you don’t.”
“If that necklace was your mother’s, then what the hell did you buy at the jewelry counter?”
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. She has never felt this trapped, this embarrassed, this utterly stuck in a sinkhole of her own fabrication. She’d been so caught up in the source of the necklace that she’d forgotten about the expense that was supposed to explain it. She’s surrendered to half of the truth, already, but she can’t just tell him she went and bought herself a ring. She can’t admit to him that she’d come up with a plan that she’d thought was so foolproof, but only because it’d hinged on the idea that Elliot didn’t actually care about his wife’s birthday presents, at least not enough to check with his bank about them. Or google them, for that matter.
And, as it turns out, she was right about that. He didn’t check her work because of what she was buying for Kathy. He checked because he wanted to make sure she was buying something for herself, too. That she was taking care of herself. That she was taking him up on his offer, because he meant it.
“Elliot, don’t do this. Please.” She whispers, feeling incredibly small. He just looks at her, shaking his head like he’s confused again, like he doesn’t know what she’s thinking, and that’s confusing, it is, because they’re always so in sync. He doesn’t often look at her with questions in his eyes that he doesn’t already have the answers to, that she doesn’t have the answers to. She could tell him what she bought, sure. But his next question, why, would be much harder to answer. She couldn’t answer it if she tried.
They can’t just keep standing here, though. They’re in the middle of the sidewalk, just outside the glow of the closest streetlight, and multiple people have sidestepped them even at the late hour. Elliot’s eyes are fixed firmly to hers, still, the blue of them so deep, but bright, somehow, in the darkness, and the crease between his brow, the concern of it, finally breaks her. She shrugs her shoulders, a floppy motion of defeat that shakes her whole upper body, and she catches her left hand in her right, twisting the ring off of her middle finger. It sticks on her knuckle for a moment and she ignores the biting pain, and then the little gold ring is in her hand, and she’s shoving it towards him. He’s looking at it, and then it’s in his hand, small in the center of his palm, and she’s walking away from him as quickly as she can without breaking into a jog.
He’s calling out her name from behind her, but she’s not listening, the words away away get away reverberating in her brain as she turns the corner in front of her building. He must’ve broken into a jog, though, because he catches her around the bicep, turning her towards him with near-centrifugal force, and its magnetic, the way she wants to fall against him, the way she did that day in the hospital, the urge to collide with him close to irresistible. She manages, though, swaying on her feet only slightly, frozen in the meager few feet between his solid body and the brick wall behind her.
His hand is still gripping her upper arm, his fingerprints burning through the leather of her jacket, somehow, and then he’s sliding his hand down, over her elbow to her wrist, pulling her hand up towards him, and he shifts his grip, and that’s when she realizes he doesn’t have the ring in his hand anymore, because he’s got her left hand in his and he’s sliding the ring onto her fourth finger and she can’t breathe. It had been on her middle finger before, a meaningless finger, just a ring, but now it’s on the finger, of the hand, and there are too many emotions swirling in his eyes for her to parse out any singular one, and for her part, she’s torn between slapping him and kissing him.
He has no right. No right to put that ring on her finger. On that finger.
And she’d had no right to buy the ring in the first place.
“Elliot,” she breathes, but all the air is stolen from her lungs when one of his hands moves to the back of her neck, and the one that had slid the ring onto her finger finds its way around the small of her back, both anchoring her to the spot. She sways into him a little more, raises her hand higher because she means to push him away, put some space between them so she can take a fucking breath, but when her hand meets his chest it doesn’t push, it grips the fabric of his shirt and it pulls him closer, until their foreheads are touching.
“Liv,” he says, as quiet and broken as she’d been.
“Elliot, don’t.”
“You saved my son, Olivia. You saved my son and you saved my wife and you saved my daughter, too, ‘cause you got through to my mother when I couldn’t do shit. You saved my family, my whole life, Liv, God, you’re my whole life. Every day— every day you’re next to me, you’re savin’ me. You hold me together. And what have I done for you? Christ, Liv, what have I done?”
She realizes she’s crying when the hand that’s holding the back of her head moves to wipe away a tear, and she presses her face into his palm, her forehead into his, not wanting to lose any of that rare contact.
“You didn’t do anything, El. You can’t. That’s the problem.”
“I know it is,” he says, his voice gone all deep and gravelly, and she opens her mouth to say something in response when his mouth descends upon hers, and she can’t say anything at all.