Trying To Forget (A Law And Order: SVU Fanfic)

Chapter 45: It's Never The End

Three months later.

She kept her word and returned to work at the 16th precinct. It was hard to leave her daughters at three months old, but in a way, she felt whole again to walk through the precinct doors and be warmly greeted by familiar faces. It had been a month since then but she still got a chuckle out of Fin's wide eyes upon her entering the bullpen. She'd kept in contact with them all while on maternity leave and even had them over at various times, but to see the muted disbelief across most of their faces was interesting to her because while it was hard to leave her children and re-enter the dubious world of SVU, it was still very much a part of her. So much so that she felt a little giddy on the drive into work—a feeling that she was unsure if she'd ever felt before.

The months away hadn't been uneventful in her mind as in the early stages her resolve and commitment to return at the end of her leave waned a bit. It happened in the quiet daytime moments as she and Derek their daughters when Elliot went back to work or the evening moments when she and Elliot did the same. She would wonder if it was selfish to still want to work after being given the most important job in her life. Was she asking too much of Derek and Elliot to eventually pick up the slack that would be left when she ultimately return to work?

Of course, then she was bombarded with thoughts of Mary Michaels and what she had ultimately done to her own daughter. She wondered if her choosing not to remain at home meant that somehow she would grow detached from her own daughters as Mary did hers.

She feared that as the months went by and her stance in motherhood was further cemented that she'd grow to understand Mary's decision. That her relationship with Derek or maybe even Elliot would morph into something so unrecognisable and vile that the thought would so much as cross her mind. She'd known that Mary's wasn't a universal thought pattern from the lamentations of parents in the office—some of who hated their co-parent to an unnatural extent—that they would never resort to what she did, but she thought that maybe they were missing something. Something that she feared that she'd find in Derek or maybe in her own min.

She hadn't, of course, because in the three months that they'd been alive, she only grew to love them more and more and she couldn't imagine taking their lives to keep them from their father. He wasn't perfect but he wasn't a monster, either; and neither was Cassidy. They were only three months into a lifelong commitment so she tried not to get ahead of herself, but three months in they had a good grasp on what it meant to be a co-parent. They disagreed on major and minor things, whether it was the temperature of bathwater or whether to pierce the girls' ears or not but she couldn't imagine that even at his worst most neglectful form and her most resentful that her solution would be to kill their children.

In fact, the unfathomable nature of her crime meant that for months and months she evaded even the tiniest bit of suspicion and even when she was indicated and surveilled she'd done a good job of keeping low, too. They knew that she'd done it, it made sense that she'd done it, but even if her minor slip-ups they couldn't get her.

That was until the freezer.

Even then she'd done a pretty good job of cleaning the majority of the appliance as though the outside and inside luminesced, there was no useable DNA to even determine whether it was human or animal blood. Her downfall, however, had been her size and stature because as a 5-foot 3-inch 100-pound, frame disallowed her from inspecting the underside of the freezer completely where they found a considerable amount of dried blood, which was later identified as Eddie's. Blood that she insisted—through her counsel—demonstrated Eddie and her husband's guilt even more as she continued to allege that she and Eddie had had little to no contact.

Then she stopped talking, again. Even when they were finally able to link her and Eddie's phone on the night that he was last seen or discovered more evidence of communication between them she still didn't budge.