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It’s the call Sonny hoped he would never get.
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Paternity never mattered when Amanda was alive. When Beth Ann took the girls before their mother was even buried, the brownstone he’d bought for the four of them was left to one and the dog. It wasn’t necessarily out of spite. He could still see Jesse and Billie, but legally Amanda’s mother was their next of kin and she wasn’t quiet about how the girls belonged with their grandmother.
The ring that Sonny got long before the house screamed through walls quieter than before they moved in. She never saw it, but he still planned on letting her have it forever, tucked away in satin surrounded by oak.
---
He leaves his office as fast as he enters it, having taken the call from Captain Benson before he sat down to work. An arrest went south and Amanda got shot. It was all Olivia would tell him. It was all she could tell him.
He runs through the DA’s office like he’s on a street chase from before the fancy shoes and when she ran beside him.
---
Her burial was a month before Jesse’s birthday. The girls came with Beth Ann but stood on the grassy hill in Queens with the man that raised them. A breeze picked up their blonde hair and tickled the wrists of his hands that they grasped, and it was like their mother was with them as the American flag around her casket disappeared into the ground.
Sonny bowed his head and watered the grass beneath his feet. He waited forever for someone like Amanda and she’d always be his, even if the stone above her wouldn’t bear his name.
He took the girls for hot cocoa in the city and their cups fell cold before the liquid could provide comfort. It would be a long time before such a thing, but Jesse and Billie would spend the night, eat lasagna from a sheet pan, and mourn the woman who gave them life and made Sonny’s worth living.
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There are no cabs outside Hogan Place so he keeps running into the city until yellow catches his eyes and he grabs the first open cab that’ll take him to Mount Sinai Hospital. On the way uptown, they get stuck behind a funeral procession and Sonny wants to rip out of his skin.
The driver glances at the rear-view mirror and marvels at the complexity of life, stuck behind a hearse, driving a man to a hospital who is visibly nervous.
---
When Beth Ann got sick a year after Amanda’s death, Trevor Langan helped bring Sonny’s girls home for good. The judge was happy to restore justice that was taken away from someone who fights for it daily. Their family was reunited except for the one who made it possible.
The girls went to school and Sonny went to work and once a month when the weather was clear, the trio visited Amanda and her grassy hill in Queens. He kissed the top of her headstone every time they left and as Jesse got older, learning about their love and how heartbroken her father always would be was bittersweet.
It wasn’t long before Billie understood it too - how happy Uncle Sonny made her mother even if she had fewer memories of it than her older sister.
Every year In the spring, dainty white flowers bloomed where her headstone met the earth. Even in death, she was beautiful.
---
Sonny’s almost at the hospital when Amanda makes it into surgery, her heart frantic from the trauma but still beating, the doctors trying to stop the bleeding. He sprints into the building, ready to roll up his sleeves to fill her veins in an eerily familiar way. On the sterile floors that reflect the harsh light into his eyes, his shoes slide as he barrels down the endless corridors.
He sees Benson, then Velasco, and then the deep red splotches on the detective’s sleeves.
“What happened? Where is she?” Sonny pants, each question harsher with his breaths.
“Rollins got shot twice. She’s in surgery,” Velasco answers.
“Please tell me she was wearing…”
“She was, she was wearing a vest,” Beson quickly reassured, “but the first bullet hit her leg. They were worried it nicked an artery.”
---
It wasn’t easy being a single working father, and that’s how he stayed raising the daughters the love of his life bore. Having grown up with a houseful of sisters, the growing pains were the easy parts. He handled first loves and maxi-pads with grace, and people called him a saint, but Sonny was only ever burdened with the fact that Amanda didn't get to experience it with them.
---
Sitting in the waiting room, his clothes feel tighter with every breath he takes not knowing if she is too. His mind continues to spiral thinking about a life without Amanda, so he fills his thoughts with prayer. For years his faith has been shaken. If God takes her, Sonny’s unsure what he’ll believe in.
---
He continued to count on her for guidance. The room they once shared in the house now empty was his church, a sacred ground where his family was whole. Jesse studied pre-law at an Ivy League school upstate and Billie took a gap year to see the world. He was the widower that never was who danced with her ghost like she never left.
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It’s been hours. He’s called his mother twice. His suit jacket and tie hang over the back of his chair. The surgeon enters the waiting room and Sonny jumps to his feet.
---
The day Sonny gave Jesse away at her wedding, all he could imagine was her mother. God, he wished he could have seen her in a dress like that. Two decades and a whole life without Amanda, not marrying her soon enough was his biggest regret, but they left a big enough impact together for their girls to know what real love was.
Under a mirrorball in a Staten Island banquet hall, father and daughter danced and dried each other's tears to an old country song dedicated to mom.
---
They stopped the bleeding. She’s resting and expected to recover. Anything that came after that was muffled by the adrelinable of relief, like being underwater but invincible to drowning.
“Carisi?”
Olivia had called his name multiple times, a hand to his back finally getting his attention, and he drifted to shore.
“They said you could see her.”
“Right,” he exhaled. “ Thanks.”
Sonny’s jaded from all the time he’d spent with death. He knows how fast things can change, he’s seen it, but seeing her makes him feel less green.
It’s been a day filled with deja vu, but none as strong as Amanda inclined in a hospital gown, resting peacefully despite what she’s been through. He pulls over a chair to sit by her bedside, his elbows atop his knees, and when she opens her eyes, the blurry white figure beside her gradually turns into a man hunched over in silent prayer.
The sheets rustle, Sonny lifts his head, and he empties his lungs before reaching for her hand. He squeezes her little bones tighter than he should, but she doesn’t flinch.
“You scared me there a minute,” he finally says.
“I’m okay,” Amanda croaks in response.
“I know.”
---
He’d imagined a whole world where she wasn’t.
---
The anesthesia wears off and Amanda further stabilizes, but she requires more tests, so Sonny takes a few calls outside in the autumn air now that he can breathe. He explains to his boss what happened, cancels a few meetings, updates his mother for the third time, and tells Sienna to hold onto the girls and maybe bring them to the hospital in a few hours.
When she can have visitors again, Benson and Velasco keep her company and then say their goodbyes when Sonny returns. She already looks better, seated upright and drinking from a paper cup. Her leg is elevated on a pillow.
“Close the door?” she asks, putting her water aside.
He’s taken aback by the request but pushes the heavy door until the metal clicks.
“Sit down.”
“Amanda, what’s goin’ on, what’s wrong?”
Again, he follows her order, but he feels heat rise in his palms. The way she’s looking at him, he expects her to tell him she’s going to lose her leg or that she has cancer. Amanda takes a deep breath and her lip trembles.
“I’m…pregnant.”
His eyes widen and he’s grateful for the chair. “What?”
“It’s something they test for in emergencies…I’m six weeks. I-I didn’t know.”
“I…wow, okay…Amanda, honey…a baby…wait, wait, a baby, the baby’s okay?”
Her face lightens with a gentle smile and she nods, moving her hands over her abdomen. “So far. I saw him…her.”
“Good, good…that’s good news, right?”
“Yeah.” But it doesn't sound sincere. She stares down at her hands and clenches the sheets.
Sonny gulps. “You don’t want…”
“No, no.” Amanda shakes her head and swallows down a whimper. “I don’t…I don’t want to leave SVU.”
“What?” he almost laughs. “We worked together through both of your pregnancies.”
A tear trails down her face. “I can’t leave three babies like this. I know I'll be okay, but Carisi if I wasn’t wearing my vest…”
He stretches to wipe it away. “Don’t think like that. Trust me.”
“I love my job, it’s the last thing I want to do, but another baby worrying I’m not gonna come home…and I could have lost this one. I still could.”
There’s trauma she experienced that he’ll never understand, but what he does understand is the fear of losing his family. Sonny scoots his knees to her bedside and holds her hands over her stomach.
“Amanda, whatever you want, I’ll support you, but you don’t have to decide that now,” he says. “Let’s just get you better and see what’s best for the five of us, okay?”
He’ll have her back forever in partnership, no matter her job. He can't imagine her never working.
She glances down but draws a line up to his face, and her expression warms. “Five’s a nice number.”
“I’m really gonna be a dad, huh?”
Amanda squeezes his hands.
“You already are, Sonny.”
He reaches to cup her cheek and then stands to kiss her forehead, the thoughts of her gone replaced with the idea of their new future, no matter how SVU fits into the picture.