Anika has finally delivered herself from the Lyons's den & found love with Malcolm DeVeaux. But a chance encounter with Lucious and Cookie changes everyone's life forever. Takes place roughly a year after episode 209 ("Sinned Against").
Reference: "Not like this, Cookie," [Malcolm] said firmly. - From Déjà Vu
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Standing in front of a decorative mirror, bare-breasted and red-eyed while Malcolm went to get a condom, Cookie could see how out of place she was in the DeVeaux home. Unlike Lucious and Cookie, who had become one person before either of them were old enough to vote or smoke, the photos on the walls of Malcolm and Anika's house told the stories of two people who had lived full lives before ever meeting each other. Anika in Girl Scouts, Malcolm in Little League, college graduations, Malcolm with his fellow SEALs, Anika with her sorority sisters, and so on. They even had those corny frames with every school picture from kindergarten leading up to their senior years in high school, complete with caps and gowns.
Yet anyone who didn't know Anika wouldn't have ever known about her life as an A&R, because there were no pictures of Anika during her Empire years. Cookie's presence had wiped out Anika's entire career, not to mention a good five years of her life. She'd done that, Cookie had...
Cookie picked up a silver double framed picture that sat apart from all the others. On the left was a photo of Malcolm in his full navy uniform and Anika in a lovely champagne-colored dress. They made for a couple so picture-perfect that it was impossible to place Lucious's Anika to this respectable young woman next to the handsome sailor. On the right was a beach picture, obviously from their wedding day. Anika in a blue dress and flowers in her hair, looking up at Malcolm, happier and more radiant than Cookie ever remembered.
And Malcolm, her beautiful Malcolm...no, that wasn't quite right. Not her Malcolm. Malcolm had never looked at Cookie the way he was looking at Anika in their pictures. What Cookie and Malcolm had together in the Berkshires was a drop in the bucket compared what Malcolm and Anika were sharing in that photo. Radiant and loving, free from drama and baggage. Malcolm was in love with a woman that he knew was his and his alone.
The pin on Anika's dress...Cookie knew that pin. It was Malcolm's SEAL trident, the one he kept pinned inside his wallet. His most prized possession, he'd told Cookie once, only now it was Anika's pin because now the most precious thing to Malcolm was Anika. Absentmindedly, Cookie reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet and smiled as she flipped to her own wedding picture. Lucious with that godawful white tuxedo and Cookie decked out in her modified Confirmation dress, thanks to Miss Bertha. It was the only bridelike dress she had to wear.
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Cookie's eyes traveled back up the wall again, back to a picture of Malcolm as a baby, riding on a carousel in the shape of a train. Tears brimmed up in Cookie's eyes as she thought back to her 16th birthday, when Lucious has presented her with a beautiful leather-bound book of trains because he remembered that Cookie said she wanted to be an engineer. He looked so anxious that Cookie never corrected Lucious or clarified that the kind of engineer she wanted to be had nothing to do with trains. For years afterward, Cookie would read to her sons from that book, and as they got older, they would all curl up together, read about the trains and make up stories about where the trains were going and where they'd been. Even now, Andre's hobby was model trains, and little Andrea's nursery reflected that.
