Chapter Text
1986
It was surrounded by the acrid smell of disinfect, below flickering rows of long fluorescent bulbs, her friend Matthew’s hand clutched in her own, that only weeks after her 16th birthday Emily gave birth to a little girl. She had pressed the memories deep down inside her, hidden where no one could find them, but they had a way of surfacing every time she walked into a hospital. Pushed to the surface on the tide of familiar sounds and smells.
The nurses and the doctor encouraged her to push, switching between English and Italian as she screamed, tears rolling down her cheeks. Most of the memories she had from the hospital were just pain and blackness, her mind blocking out the trauma of it all. But there were flashes sometimes, that came to her in moments when she least expected them. The memories would come on sudden and strong, leaving a pain and emptiness in her abdomen where once, a life time ago, a baby had grown. Sometimes they were memories she didn’t even know she had, so far repressed in that empty black space she had hidden them, that even she’d forgotten they were there.
“I can’t do this,” she’d said. “I can’t, I don’t want to.” They were the desperate pleas of a little girl. I want my mom. She’d wanted to say. But her mom was in the hall, sorting out paperwork for the adoption, paying who needed to be paid so that no one who mattered would ever know the stain that Emily had placed on her family. Her mother’s disappointment, her fury at Emily for potentially ruining her image kept her from being in the room with her failure of a daughter as she brought her own daughter into the world.
But, it was the after that was the most painful. When she heard her baby cry, a long high wail, it was then she broke. She cried in both relief and despair as they cut her baby away from her and that bond was forever severed. Emily’s part was done. Once outside of her body, she knew the baby was no longer hers.
“Can I hold her?” she had pleaded. “Just once. Per favore.”
She doesn’t know if they just felt sorry for her, or if it was because her mother wasn’t in the room to insist otherwise, but a nurse placed the baby on her chest. Small, wrinkled and red, fingers curled into tiny fists, her daughter settled against her. She was beautiful. The most beautiful creature Emily had ever seen.
Emily stroked the crown of black hair, ran her finger gently down her baby’s tiny nose and breathed her in for the first and last time. The tears came in earnest then. This will be the last time I get to hold you, to feel that you’re alive and mine, she thought.
“You’re perfect baby,” she’d said. “I wish I could be perfect for you, but I’m not. I’m broken and ruined and not a mom. You deserve a mom, Anna.”
“Anna?” Matthew asked, she’d forgotten he was still in the room. “Full of grace?”
Emily nodded.
“It suits her,” he said. But they both knew that didn’t matter, Emily didn’t get to chose the name but she needed something to call her. She needed to give her a name that was from her, something concrete to hold on to.
Anna.
***
2012
It feels like a life time since that day, the first and last time she ever saw her child. She wonders about her sometimes, but mostly she tries to forget. Emily has never had the desire to have any more children, sometimes she thinks whatever maternal instinct she may have left her when Anna did. She doesn’t even date much, contents herself with work and a solitary life.
It was after losing Anna that Emily began building walls around herself. Not letting anyone in, not letting any part of herself out. It’s why she has been so willing to jump at an opportunity to take a job where she was someone else, where she didn’t have to be Emily at all. Lauren Reynolds never had a baby she couldn’t keep.
Then she died and came back, and she remembers when she was living that new life, back in Europe, not as Emily or Lauren anymore but as another someone altogether risen from the ashes, while Emily was dead. During that time she let herself wonder if she would run into her child on the streets of Paris, a young Italian tourist. She’d be in her twenties, that golden age for travel. She let herself imagine what she might look like. Dark hair and eyes like her, she was sure of that. But the rest of the details she could never quite get right.
But then she was back and was Emily again and she made herself forget. To put all those thoughts back in their box and tuck them away again.
But the past always has a way of finding you. Haunting you.
The feeling starts one day when she’s jogging in the park before work. She bumps into a young women, a nanny maybe, who was bending down to retrieve and errant toddler shoe kicked off in an act of defiance.
“I’m sorry,” she says, holding her hands out to steady Emily, who is wobbling to avoid falling on her. “I’m in the way.”
“No, it’s my fault. I wasn’t looking. Sorry,” Emily says in, righting herself back onto the path.
The woman, who Emily would guess is somewhere in her early to mid twenties, with dark hair and eyes, a smattering of freckles across her cheeks, smiles. It’s big and bright, genuine and Emily feels a strange flood of familiarity. It’s a heat that fills her chest and settles there. It feels like deja vu. It feels just like that single solitary moment she had with her daughter.
From that moment onward, she can’t stop thinking about her. About her child, about Anna. Long lost to her. When she imagines what she looks like now, it comes together like pieces of a puzzle. It’s the girl in the park, every time. With dark hair— not quite raven black like Emily’s, more mahogany— and dark eyes that are almost black yet bright and full of light, her nose is small, rounded and nothing like Emily’s. Thank god she thinks, because she’s always hated her nose. And as beautiful as the day she was born.
She realizes, with a bit of shock, that she’d be twenty-five now— turning twenty-six this year— which makes Emily feel extremely old. Her daughter would be only a few years younger than JJ and Reid, who she considers friends, colleagues. She was there for Reid’s 25th and 26th birthdays, she’d met JJ at around that age too. How could she have a fully formed adult child?
She starts noticing other twenty-somethings with the same hair and eye colour. But it never feels the same, there isn’t that same feeling of knowing.
After two weeks, she’s able to start forgetting again, begins to sink back into her regular life.
But then there she is, the young woman from the park. She’s at Quantico, in the BAU standing at JJ’s desk talking like old friends. She’s got a laptop and an official FBI file folder tucked under one arm, her other hand resting on JJ’s desk as she leans in to chat.
Emily has to do a double take to make sure that she’s not imaging her, because this girl who she only saw for less than a minute has been haunting her thoughts for weeks. But she’s really here, in the FBI. In fact, based on the folder, the FBI ID badge clipped to the lapel of her blazer and the casual way she is just standing in the middle of the bullpen Emily would say she works here.
Logically, she knows that this is not her child, can’t be. Her daughter was adopted twenty-five and a half years ago just outside of Rome, but she can’t help the thought that maybe she has some kind of motherly instinct. There is this itch under her skin she just can’t scratch, and this warmth of knowing when she sees her.
Maybe a mother always knows her child. Or maybe she’s gone completely mad.
She decides it’s madness when she feels a weird pang of jealousy at the ease of which JJ is talking to the mystery young woman, like they’ve been friends for years. It hurts on a few levels, Emily has missed that ease of friendship with JJ, it has been difficult to find it again once she returned to the BAU and because she felt like if this girl was her daughter — though she knows it is impossible— she should be the one who knows her, who has easy conversations with her, who proudly introduces her to her coworkers. And she would be proud, no matter what she’d always want her daughter to know she was proud of her. She wouldn’t have been like her own mother.
“Hey,” Emily says a little louder than she intends, interrupting the two younger women.
The one from the park, JJ’s new friend, startles but smiles brightly when she turns around and sees Emily. “Hi!”she says.
“Hey Em,” JJ says. “This is Annalise, she’s a friend from when I was at the State Department. She just transferred to the FBI a few months ago.”
“On JJ’s recommendation,” Annalise smiles again, holding her hand out for Emily to shake. “You can call me Anna.”
Anna.