Maura is impatient for the happy ever after.

She thinks each step will be the final one they have to take; will be the one that solidifies their "happy."

But it seems that each hurdle that they clear only reveals more steps. It shines more light on another level they have to struggle through, like in the video games that her mother never allowed her to play.

Maura believes that she has made her peace with the woman that Jane is now. She believes that what they have is better, is greater. It includes Isla, and therefore it cannot be bad.

She is not frustrated with her job.

She does not miss Boston, does not miss talking about it. She does not mind sharing the center of her universe with another person.

With several other people.

She doesn't mind. She doesn't miss.

She is glad and thankful and just as strong as the other women in her life, and she does not hurt.

And then, all of a sudden, she does.

.

It is Constance who causes this change. She visits them in New York, an intense, appraising, designer-clad presence, who nods at Jane and accepts Isla's tentative hug.

"That's my other grandmother?" Isla asks Jane. They are together in the kitchen getting the pasta ready for the table, and Maura hesitates, wanting to hear the full conversation.

"Yes," Jane says.

"She's beautiful," Isla says, and Maura feels a mixture of pride and trepidation that melts entirely into pride with her daughter's next words.

"I love her," Isla says earnestly.

"She's gonna love you too, chick," Jane says affectionately. "Take this to the table."

.

But Constance states at her over breakfast the next morning and says, "you're losing yourself to that woman.

Maura doesn't have to ask what this means.

"I love her," she says quietly.

"That is no excuse," Constance says. "And it's of no use to anyone if you're no longer living."

Maura looks up ready to argue, but Constance waves her away.

"I mean thriving," she says, as though this should be obvious.

"My job," Maura begins, but again Constance interrupts her.

"Don't be dense," she snaps. "I didn't raise you to be stupid. Or to throw away something like what you have."

Maura just gapes.

Constance sighs again and for a moment the silence is heavy over both of them.

"Your father was a damaged man," she says finally.

"Daddy?"

Constance nods, not looking up from her food for a moment. "You didn't see him much growing up, and...I'm sure you resented him for that but," she pauses again. "It was largely my doing."

Maura can only continue to stare at her mother. She feels like she's on uneven ground, that it could cave underneath her at any moment. She cannot remember the last time she and her mother spoke intimately about anything, let alone Constance's relationship with her husband.

"I loved him," Constance says, "before he went to war, and after, though he came back...changed."

"Jane...isn't damaged," Maura hears herself say.

Constance doesn't answer this, though she levels her inscrutable gaze at her daughter for a long moment.

"I sacrificed several things in my attempt to stay with him," she continues, "the most important thing being a relationship with you."

Maura flinches, despite herself. "I...didn't feel sacrificed," she says. "Not exactly."

Constance studies her. "Perhaps I've perfectly prepared you for this life, then," she says quietly. "Maybe you will be lost no matter what I do now."

"Mother-"

"Maura. If you love her, you will demand that she love you back in the way that you deserve. For you, for that little girl, for Jane."

Constance takes a deep breath. "I hated your father," she says, "at the end."

The confession looks hard for her, despite the decade that has passed since his death.

"I hated him," she repeats. "And I don't want that for you."

Maura bursts into tears.

.

And so there are not just a couple of steps left to their happy ever after, but an entire winding staircase.

They set ground rules and then break them immediately. "Don't go to bed angry," barely lasts the full week after therapy. They get about two hours of sleep in forty-eight hours and end up laughing hysterically over one of Maura's autopsies.

But "don't fight on an empty stomach" does stick, as does "Walk away, but don't walk out."

They've spent so much time 'not really fighting' that the eruptions feel good. They feel cathartic and honest and like digging in, instead of giving up.

They see Dr. Royer as their couples counselor until Jane yells that it feels like Maura is stealing her, spitting toothpaste in her haste to release the build-up of anger.

Maura yells back that the therapist is biased. That she never sees Maura's side because her years with Jane have softened her.

And who wouldn't love you after watching you come back from all of that, Jane? Sometimes I'm weak with the affection of it all. But that means she doesn't listen to me.

So they get a new therapist. And then another when they both agree that this one is sexist and possibly homophobic.

It feels good to slide into bed next to Jane that night. She doesn't resent their daughter when she slides in between them hours later, shoving Olaf into the space between Maura's head and the headboard, mumbling sleepily about alien invasions.

They fight and they make-up, and they compromise and they fuck like teenagers who have just met.

Other times they hold hands and order take out, and they tuck their daughter in together, and they make love until one of them is crying.

Maura stops looking for the moment when she can say that everything that went so wrong is now righted.

She has come to see that that is a moment that has never, and will never, exist.

…

Sometimes, Maura wonders what their lives would have been without Dominic's interference. Not without Isla. She can't even begin to consider a world without her, but a life in which the depth of Jane's trauma was something to overcome rather than manage.

They could have overcome Hoyt. They could have overcome Angela's disapproval and the stares and whispers at the precinct. They were overcoming when Dominic struck.

"What do you remember about that day?" Jane asks her one night.

They are currently managing the trauma by sleeping in a different bed than the one in which they've been intimate. What is growing between them now, in the separate space, is not something Maura is sure she has a name for. She hopes that one day it will make it into their sex.

She knows what day Jane means immediately. The day she went missing.

Day One.

She thinks, trying to pull apart the panic that came later, and the despair, sharp like an icicle, at the moment she understood what had happened.

"I remember it was windy," she says finally. She can feel Jane near her, although the darkness has fully obscured her face. "I remember, that morning, you told me to wear my hair up because it was windy. I didn't. And looking at that van, I remember having to push it out of my face repeatedly."

"I think I said you'd contaminate the crime scene," Jane murmurs. Her breath washes over Maura's collarbone, closer than she'd anticipated.

"Yes," Maura smiles. "I wouldn't put it up, and you said-"

"When our body has one honey blonde hair. When you test it and find it's been treated with Pantene Pro-V, sunshade action conditioner, with lock-in bounce protection..."

Maura laughs. "I can't believe you remember all of that. Those aren't even real things a conditioner can do."

Jane chuckles. "When you're implicated, doctor," she continues lightly. "Don't come crying to me."

Maura slips an arm around Jane's waist. "I remember that it was windy," she whispers. "And you were gone. And I was confused."

Jane threads her hands through Maura's hair. Her sigh sounds like relief.

"You put too much perfume on that morning," she says like she knows Maura was wondering if she should return the question. "You put too much on because I was rushing you, and your hand slipped. Or you forgot you put some on and did it twice. You scolded me in that way you have. Kinda makes me want to do whatever it was again."

Maura squeezes Jane briefly. I love you, and I'm listening, and please don't stop talking.

"We kissed at the turnstile, right before you went to the morgue, and I thought….I'll be smelling her for the next month, at least."

Jane pauses, and Maura knows what's coming before the words leave Jane's mouth.

"And I did."

…

Violet Williams is nine and angry when she arrives on Jane and Maura's doorstep on a freezing day in March. It is her third home in eight months, yet she travels with only a backpack and the clothes she is wearing.

Isla is thirteen and beloved.

It is inevitable that problems will arise.

"You are not her mother," they tell Isla repeatedly. "You are not responsible for her wellbeing, emotional or otherwise."

Violet will not ever leave them, she will never be sent away, but neither woman can quite square this promise with the fact that Isla remains a priority.

"Do you remember my first trip to Boston?"

Jane and Maura are standing in the kitchen watching Isla try to interest Violet in the array of books fanned out on the dining room table. The question catches Maura off guard.

"Yes?" she asks it like a question.

"We went to the closing, and my Ma was there, and she seemed to think that me being in Boston meant that she could treat me just how she had when I'd lived there."

"Yes," Maura says. Irritation prickles her hairline at the memory. She is about to comment on the stern conversation that she and Angela had at the end of that trip, but Jane speaks again before she can.

"Isla kept stepping in between us," Jane says. Her eyes don't leave the scene in the dining room. "She kept moving so that she was in between me and Ma, and at first I thought she was just there by happenstance, you know? But then I realized that she was doing it on purpose. She was protecting me."

Maura searches Jane's face for some idea of her feelings surrounding this memory.

"She loves you," is what she finally settles on. "She would do that for either of us."

Jane's smile is a little absent. "Yeah. I know...and since she learned about - about Dominic, she's been so great, and so…"

"Isla," Maura supplies.

"Yeah," Jane says.

In the dining room, Violet's hands come out and snatch a book off of the table.

"This is mine," she says.

"Okay," Isla says. "I read that one once and it's really-"

"No!" Violet says, her voice rising slightly. "It's mine."

Two nights ago they discovered three days of leftovers in the back of her closet, wrapped with aluminum foil and numbered in the tiny, wobbly hand of an undereducated nine-year-old.

Maura had purchased several Tupperware containers and a small mini-fridge. Violet had spent the evening putting her name on all of it with a brand new sharpie.

Jane pushes off from the counter and moves into the dining room.

"You don't have to raise your voice, hon," she says to Violet. "No one's trying to take the book from you. You can keep it in your room if you want."

Violet slides down off of the chair and heads for her room. She stops in the hallway, half out of view, and turns back to the three of them.

"Sorry," she murmurs.

And then she vanishes.

The door to her room clicks closed quietly.

Maura puts her arms around Isla's shoulder. "Your mother and I are immensely proud of you. Have we said that today?"

"Only like seventy times since breakfast," Isla says, not even pretending to be grumpy. "She said sorry."

"Yeah," Jane takes Violet's vacated seat. "Baby steps."

Isla's smile fades. "I don't think she likes me."

Jane shakes her head. "I doubt she likes anyone, tiny. No one's really shown her how."

"I mean…" Isla pauses. "I think maybe she resents me. Since…" Isla bites the inside of her cheek and doesn't go on.

She doesn't have to continue. They all know what she's saying.

Jane leans forward, elbows on the table. "Hey. Her upbringing is not yours to fix. It's not any of ours to fix, okay? All we can do is love her."

Isla makes a face that Maura is unable to read. "I'm going to do more than that," she says resolutely. She sees Jane open her mouth to protest, and she shakes her head, smiling.

"I'm not overstretching, Mama," she says. "I'm just gonna do more than that. Just like you did."

And then she gets up and heads in the direction of her own room.

"But first I'm gonna call Gio, okay?"

"Gio?" Maura calls. "What happened to Xavier?"

"He told me I should wear more skirts," is the reply. "So...y'know...that's done."

Jane watches her daughter go in silence, and when she turns back to Maura she is wearing an expression that says, quite clearly, did we raise that? Or is it a miracle."

Maura leans across the table to kiss her. She can do things like that now without a second thought.

"A little of both," she says out loud.

"A little of both."

….

Olivia sets a box down on the shelf just inside the door and wipes her forehead with her sleeve.

"Remind me," she pants, "that next time my doctor friend asks for help moving, that I am sick."

Maura laughs.

"You are a lieutenant!" Jane's voice calls from the adjacent room. "Don't you have to pass fitness tests?"

"The next time a fitness test requires lugging the entire medical history of the world up four flights of stairs, I've got it nailed," Olivia says darkly.

Jane appears in the doorway, sweaty in her tank top and running shorts, Isla on her back.

"Moving day!" she calls from her perch. "Hello, Mommy!"

"Hello my love," Maura calls. "How was school."

"The best," Isla slides down to the ground. "I told everyone how we're moving in all together, and they were all happy."

"We called Allie and Henry on the walk home," Jane says to Liv. "They said they'd come help."

"Thank God."

Jane rolls her eyes. "What a baby!"

Isla giggles.

Maura feels like she might cry.

"Okay, bug," Jane says. "What did I say you had to do the moment we stepped inside the door?"

"Arrange my room!" Isla squeals. She takes off down the hallway.

Jane follows her with a chuckle, but she stops long enough to kiss Maura shyly on the cheek.

"Welcome home," she murmurs as she pulls away.

Maura puts her hand to her cheek as Jane walks away, mostly to catch the tear that's there, but also to try and press the impression of the kiss into her skin.

Next to her, Olivia makes a knowing sound.

"I don't...know how all of this happened," Maura says, more to herself than to Olivia. "I feel like I've dreamt this so many times that this...can't possibly be real."

She is talking about all of it. The friendships she's forged here, and the job she loves a little more every day.

The three bedroom apartment that she shares with her family.

Maura looks around to see Olivia grinning at her. "You deserve all of this," she says, turning back towards the front door.

"Well," she pretends to reconsider. "Maybe not the last three boxes of books."

And Maura laughs wetly and moves to follow her. "I'll carry some," she says.

Olivia raises an eyebrow. "Dressed like that?" she asks.

Maura rolls her eyes. "What is with the two of you?" she chides. "These are my work clothes."

…

They move for what Maura thinks will be the final time three days after Violet's eleventh birthday. They follow a UHaul across the Brooklyn Bridge and down into Carroll Gardens where their new brownstone sits waiting for them.

Maura's been promoted and Jane has started working for herself, and the girls fought constantly over the bathroom and the study, and so this move felt both right and overdue.

"Hey, guys," Jane says into the silence, looking over her shoulder at Isla and Violet in the backseat. "I want to talk to you."

Both girls pull their earbuds out of their ears simultaneously. "Huh?"

Jane sighs. "Kill the music for a minute," she says. "We want to talk to you guys about something."

Maura glances in the rearview mirror in time to see terror flash across Violet's face. She makes a mental note to talk to Jane about her choice of words.

"I was listening to a Podcast," Violet says. She's not really arguing, but she still doesn't like for anyone to ascribe anything to her that isn't the truth.

"Okay," Jane says. "That's fine."

"What's up," Isla asks. She's taken out her other earbud, but she's still looking at her phone. Maura thinks about the school drama her daughter had spent hours detailing last night at dinner. She's still not sure who any of the main players had been, and she knows that she'd made "hmm" noises when she was supposed to say "oh!"

"Isla," she calls now, "look at your mom."

Isla does with only the smallest sigh.

"So…" Jane pauses, working herself up to the announcement she and Maura had decided upon last night. "Mom and I are going to get married."

For a moment, both kids just stare at her like she has two heads. Then Isla lets her head fall back against the seat, a great puff of air escaping her lungs.

"That's the announcement?" she asks incredulously.

"Yeah," Jane says. "We were thinking about this Summer. Nothing fancy, just the regular crew."

Violet is frowning deeply, looking between them all. "You're not married?" she asks finally.

Maura feels her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. "No," she answers before Jane can. "We're not. I thought you knew that?"

Violet is quiet for a moment. "I guess I assumed," she says finally. "Since we all live together."

Jane smiles faintly. "Your mom has proposed like, 1,000 times," she tells Violet. "But I was too chicken up until now."

"My sperm donor pretended they were married," Isla says to Violet under her breath.

Jane's breath only catches a tiny bit.

"Right," she says. "So...what do you two think."

Isla begins putting her earbuds back into her ears. "I think it's lame that you made me pause Troye Sivan for that non-announcement," she says. "I will be Mommy's maid of honor, of course, so don't interrupt me again to ask, okay?" she nudges Violet with an elbow.

"Tell Mom you'll be her maid of honor or she'll make you pause Marc Maron."

Violet looks a little taken aback. "Me?"

Jane grins. "Yeah you," she says. "If you want."

Violet puts her earbuds back in and turns on her podcast before answering.

"Yes. I do."

Jane spins back around in her seat, grinning at Maura. "Well," she says. "How anticlimactic."

"I told you it would be," Maura reasons. "And why should it be big news. What can a piece of paper tell us about our family that we don't already know?"

"Then why do it?" Jane asks. "If it doesn't mean anything.

Maura shakes her head. "I didn't say it won't mean anything. I said it won't change anything. I want to marry you because I want to profess my love for you in a ceremony in front of our friends and family."

Jane chuckles. "And you want the honeymoon."

Maura smiles. "I am not against you in a bikini. You're correct."

Jane takes her hand over the gearshift.

They are moving into a house that is bigger. It has a bathroom for each child ("the indulgence" Liv had joked), and a guest room where Allie, heavily pregnant and less inclined to ride the subway at night, can stay over when she came to visit.

It has a tiny yard for the tiny dog that Maura heard Jane promise the kids some evenings when she did good night rounds. It has a full dining room for the Sunday night dinners that sometimes bring the Rizzolis all the way in from Boston.

What it doesn't have is the hole in the wall that Violet made with her shoe during her last major tantrum. It doesn't have the kitchen windowpane that rattled during thunderstorms or the fire escape where the upstairs neighbor's cat would sit and stare mournfully in at their supper.

Maura finds as she gets further away from the old apartment, that she misses those things more than she'd thought she would.

"Ma?" Isla has taken out an earbud.

"Oh!" Jane pretends to be shocked. "Have you stopped Troye for me? An honor!"

Isla rolls her eyes, looking just like her mother. "Can we paint a chalkboard in my room?" she asks. "Remember when I had that? When I was little?"

Jane is momentarily speechless. "You remember that?"

Isla makes a disgruntled face. "Of course I remember that," she says. And then, like an afterthought, she murmurs. "Isla-bean. Mommy loves you more than anything."

Jane looks stunned enough that she might lose consciousness.

"Can I have one too?" Violet pipes up.

It is at that moment that the pull into the driveway of their new house, and without waiting for an answer, both kids jump out of the car and run toward the front porch.

Maura and Jane are left in the car, just sitting.

"She remembers that," Jane says softly.

"Of course she does," Maura answers. She pulls their linked hands to her lips. "Ready, lovely?"

There is still nothing better than watching Jane's eyes slip shut at that endearment.

"Yeah," Jane says. She reaches into her jeans pocket and pulls out a set of house keys, handing them over.

"Welcome home."