Page 22 of Trust my Heart

“Stop.” The word came out sharp. “Listen to what you’re doing. You found one cop at the end of her career, and you’re building a case out of her bad memories.”

“She wasn’t bitter. She warned me to stay away from him.”

“And I rode with him for four years.” His voice started to rise. “Four years, Ryan. That is longer than I have been with you. I know the man. I know him on night shifts and at funerals and on the worst calls this job has. You think I don’t know he’s careless with reports? I fixed half of them myself. I told you that, on the couch. Careless is not a crime. Being bad at paperwork is not the same as falsifying police files, and you’re accusing him of a crime based on an impression.”

“The flags are real!”

“The flags are the system. Murphy said so. IT said so. That program loses entries in every division in this city, and if it lost yours, that isn’t Adam’s fault either.” He spread his hands. “Nothing you’ve brought me tonight would hold up for a minute. Nothing.”

I listened to him defend the man, and somewhere in the middle of it I finally understood. In four years, Luke had never been shown anything worth doubting. Brar got the worst of him. I got that too. Luke got the best of him, every day, on purpose. That wasn’t luck. He had built it that way. I knew how that worked, because I had done the same thing myself, this morning, on the walk.

He took his plate to the sink untouched. Halfway there he stopped, came back, pushed the other plate across the counter at me, and kept going, and neither of us said anything about that.

“And he caught me at the doors on my way out tonight.” His back was to me at the sink. “To apologize. For the position I’d been put in today. For his part in it. I stood in the lobby of our own division and accepted an apology from Adam, on your behalf, and thanked him for it, because anything else would have been a second show for whoever was watching. So don’t tell me any part of today was for me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For how I did it. For every night I didn’t say it. I mean it.”

“I know you are.” He turned around. “It’s not the same as it being okay.”

“Luke.”

“For what, Ryan?” His voice went up then, and stayed up. I had never heard him raise it before, not once. “What is it you think he’s taking from you! He’s the past. You’re the one in my arms. You have nothing to be jealous of, nothing, and instead of believing me you drove across the city looking for something wrong with him, because me choosing you every single day apparently isn’t proof of anything!”

“I’m not jealous of him!” My voice came up too. I couldn’t stop it. “I’m afraid of the damage he could cause.”

That stopped him for a second.

“Afraid,” he said. “Of Adam.” He laughed once, without any humor in it. “The man spent today apologizing. To the floor, to me, for you, for himself, for taking up space. And you’re afraid of him.” He shook his head, and his mouth set. “I can’t do this tonight. I can’t even look at you tonight.”

He walked out of the kitchen. The bedroom door shut hard enough to rattle the glasses in the cupboard.

I stood where I was for a long time. The plate went cold on the counter. The bedroom door stayed shut. After a while I turned off the kitchen light and stood in the dark with everything I hadn’t said.

Chapter 8: I Took the Fall for You

Luke

“Signatures on the Dorion package,” Ryan said. “Tab three and tab seven, both of us. The Crown wants it by Thursday.”

“I’ll walk it over Thursday morning.”

“Thanks.”

Ryan set the folder on the corner of my desk, square to the edge, and went back to his own. That was the whole conversation, and it was the longest one we’d had in days.

We had gotten good at this fast, which was its own bad news. Files crossed the gap between our desks clean and on time. Court dates got confirmed. When a call needed two detectives, we took it, and we worked it well, because we knew how to work together better than anybody on that floor, and none of that knowledge had anywhere else to go now. Every sentence between us carried a case number. Nobody watching us would have seen anything wrong, and nobody did, because the floor had never seen what we were like before. That was the part I kept arriving at. We were doing an impression of ourselves, and the only people who could have caught the difference were the two of us.

Home was the same work in different rooms. Every morning now of moving through that apartment on schedules we never discussed, using everything we knew about each other’s routes to never be in the same part of the kitchen. He made coffee for two out of habit; I was out the door before it finished. Separate bedrooms now, closed doors, lights out fast. Nobody had packed anything. Nobody was dramatic. The bedroom doors got opened the next morning and that was the only thing that had reopened, and for days I had half believed the rest would reopen the same way. It hadn’t. It was weighing on me in a way I didn’t have good tools for, because my whole life I had waited things out, and this was not getting better with waiting. It was getting practiced, and that was the part I couldn’t stand.

Two things kept coming back at me.

The first was my own voice. I had raised it. In the middle of our own kitchen, at the person I lived with and loved, loud enough that afterward, through the door I’d just slammed, I heard the glasses rattling in the cupboard. I wasn’t sorry for the substance of anything I’d said. I had gone over the substance a hundred times and it held. But the volume was new. I had never owned a voice like that, not through the worst years, not once.

The second was Ryan’s face. I’m not jealous of him. I’m afraid of the damage he could cause. I had decided the same night that it was jealousy, dressed up in the language of the job. In daylight that held. At night it came open again, because I knew what jealousy looked like on a face, I’d worked enough domestics, and what had been on Ryan’s face wasn’t that. I kept putting it away and it kept coming back.

The day went the way the four before it had gone. We closed out a break and enter. I sat in on a Crown pre-trial call and gave the timeline twice. At end of shift Ryan stood, took his jacket, and left with a nod aimed at the middle distance between me and the window. Leaving separately was new too. We’d walked home together every day the weather allowed since the program chained us to each other, and we had never once discussed stopping. It had just stopped.

I gave the Dorion package a last pass I didn’t need to give it, and decided to call it a day.