Page 11 of Trust my Heart

And what would I tell him, tonight of all nights. That I had a feeling. He’d just let go of it, after all that time, partly because I told him there was nothing there. I wasn’t going to wind him back up over a look I couldn’t even name and a question that would sound, said out loud, like good manners. Maybe it was longing. Maybe an ex says one decent thing to the new man, once, and that’s the end of it.

But the question stayed. I hope it’s enough. I’d asked Luke a version of it myself, a week and a half ago, on our couch, and he’d answered it, and it had stayed answered. Wright had found it in one try. Or he’d meant nothing by it, and I was the jealous boyfriend after all, no evidence required. I couldn’t tell which.

I typed the report. I ate the noodles. And when we walked home through the cold, Luke did something he almost never did: he talked. I said mhm in the right places and watched our breath go out ahead of us under the streetlights.

He let me be quiet the whole way home. It was usually the other way around.

Chapter 4: The Long Way Home

Luke

Court took the whole day. The Micallef trial, an armed-robbery file from two years back when I still worked alone. I was the detective of record, so it was mine to sit through, and I sat through it. Forty minutes on the stand and five hours of hallway. The defense spent his forty minutes asking me the same three questions in different orders. I gave him the same three answers in the same order every time, and eventually the Crown said I could go. Nobody tells you that the talking is the exhausting part of a day like that, all of it, the stand and the hallway and the small polite exchanges with lawyers by the elevator. Ryan can do eight hours of that and come out the other end with new friends. I came out the other end wanting to not say words for a week.

Ryan had texted twice from the division. The first said the vending machine had eaten his loonie and that he wanted it on the record that he died as he lived. The second was about dinner. I grinned at the first and answered the second one.

By the time they let me go, the rain had settled in for the night. I drove back east with the wipers on high and the streetlights coming on early, and I wanted exactly two things: to hand in the pool car and to go home to Ryan.

Chen called when I was five minutes out.

“Where are you?”

“Coming up Front.”

“Good. Sergeant Wright’s broken down. Shuter Street, off Parliament. The tow gave him a forty-minute wait, and I’ve got nothing to send but scout cars. Pick him up and bring him in.”

There was a second where I didn’t say anything.

“Hawley?”

“I’m turning around,” I said, and turned around.

It wasn’t a big thing. That’s what I told myself at the light. A colleague was standing in the rain next to a dead car, and I was six blocks away with a live one. There was no way to say no that wouldn’t have needed explaining. Colleagues get picked up. I’d spent two weeks deciding the past was going to stay the past, and this was just that decision, in the rain.

He was at the curb on Shuter with the hood up. No umbrella, soaked through the shoulders, not doing anything about it. His own car, a gray sedan a few years old, civilian plates. They hadn’t assigned him an unmarked yet; it seemed he’d been running his own in the meantime.

I pulled in behind him and got out into the rain.

“It turned over twice this morning,” he said, instead of hello. “Then nothing. Now it won’t even try.”

“Battery?”

“It’s ten months old.”

We bent under the hood together anyway, rain coming off the metal, and I turned the key while he watched the engine, and we got one click and then not even the click. Dead. He shut the hood, took a canvas bag off the back seat, and got into my passenger side. I got in after him and the doors closed.

We hadn’t been alone, the two of us and a shut door, since the night he ended it. Neither of us said so. The wipers went. I put the car in gear.

For the first while nobody talked. The radio was off and I left it off, and then I wondered whether leaving it off said something, and turned it on low, and it was the traffic report, which said rain. He looked out his window. I drove. Years ago, we could sit in a car for an hour without a word and it was comfortable. This was the other kind of quiet.

He broke it on procedure, which was the right call.

“Thanks for this. I’m guessing Chen didn’t give you a choice.”

“She gave me one. It had paperwork on the other side of it.”

He laughed, once, easy, and some of the weight went out of the car. We did the small things after that. Left the keys for the tow company in the gas cap and would meet them at a repair shop in Scarborough tomorrow. The car had never done this before. He’d had it two years and was rethinking the whole relationship.

He was dripping on my passenger seat and apologized for it, and I told him the seat had survived worse, and he said he didn’t doubt it, this being a pool car, and named the two worst things he’d ever seen happen in one, both of which I’d also seen, one of which I’d cleaned up. The windows started to fog, and I put the defrost on. It was ordinary. Two cops in a car in the rain, complaining about fleet vehicles. If you had watched us from the sidewalk you’d have seen nothing at all.