Page 23 of Trust my Heart

The floor had thinned out without my noticing. Down in the lobby the shift change was running, day people heading out in twos and threes with their bags, night people coming in with coffees, everybody holding the doors for everybody. An ordinary end of an ordinary day. The desk constable gave me a nod on the way past and I gave one back.

Adam was in the stream with everyone else, over by the doors.

Coat already on, off to the side of the entry, reading something on his phone the way half the shift did on the way out. He looked up when I came through, and put the phone away.

“Luke. Good, I caught you. Do you have a minute?”

“For what?”

“I never wanted to be a problem between you two.” He said it straight, no preamble. “And lately I made everything worse when I thought I was making it better. I’ve been sick about it since. Let me buy you a coffee and apologize properly, off the property, in the open, and then I’m out of your way for good.” He paused. “Ten minutes. You can pick the place.”

I looked at him and thought about the month I’d just had. Every week since the spring this man had been ten feet from my desk, and I had managed it the way I managed everything. However, what I wanted, standing in those doors, was to be done with it.

“There’s a place on Broadview,” I said. “The one that used to be the doughnut shop.”

Something crossed his face and was gone. He knew the place. That was why I picked it, and I couldn’t have said, then, whether I picked it to let him in or to test him.

“It’s still there?”

“It’s a coffee place now.”

We walked over. It took eleven minutes and we talked about nothing, the roadwork on Gerrard, a sergeant’s course he was grading papers for, and he let the nothing run the whole way there.

The place had been our end-of-nights spot, back when it sold doughnuts and burned coffee and nobody ever took the corner table because the heat vent over it rattled. New owners had sanded everything and hung plants in the window, and the corner table was still there, and he took it. We used to close out paper at that table at the end of bad nights, him talking, me writing, splitting whatever was left in the case. I had not been through the door in years. It smelled like a different place, but it felt like the same one.

He came back with two coffees and put mine down black, no questions. That he still knew how I took it landed harder than anything he’d said on the floor all month.

“Thank you for this,” he said. “I mean it. You didn’t owe me ten minutes.”

“Say what you came to say, Adam.”

He turned the cup a quarter turn, and this time he didn’t dodge into a story. He started where he’d said he would.

“Thank you for saying yes to this. I wasn’t sure you would.” He turned the cup back. “I’ll give it plain, because you never had any patience for the other kind. Last week I tried to take the air out of that floor and I lit a fire instead. I wanted the whispering and nasty gossips to stop. What I did was set you and your partner against each other in front of everyone you work with. That’s mine. I’ve been sick about it since it happened.”

I didn’t say anything. He took the quiet as room to keep going.

“You two have to be right with each other out there,” he said. “Partners who aren’t get people hurt. Nobody in this city knows that better than I do. Whatever I am to you now, the last thing I ever wanted was to be the thing standing between you and the man you go through doors with.”

He looked at the table a moment, and when he spoke again it had dropped lower.

“You remember the rooming house on Kipling. The man who came out of the back with the length of pipe.” He wasn’t performing now, or if he was I couldn’t find the edge of it. “You went down, and I lost sight of you for ten seconds, and I have never been out of my mind the way I was in those ten seconds, before or since. I went through two men to get to you. I’d have gone through the wall behind them.” He shook his head, slowly. “I’ve ridden with good people in the years since. Every one of them could do the job. Not one of them was somebody I’d have gone through a wall for. You don’t get that twice in a life.”

He turned the cup, and left it, and looked up at me.

“Do you ever miss it, Luke? Not the work. Us. Who we were to each other?”

And there it was, the real question.

“No.”

He didn’t move.

I had meant to leave it at the one word. I’d planned to. But he sat there with his hands around the cup at our old table, asking did I miss it, gentle, like it was a small question, and something I’d kept down for years came up before I could stop it.

“You want to know if I miss it?” I kept my voice down. “When you left, it nearly put me on my knees, Adam. I want you to know that, since we’re doing this. Not slowed me down. Knees. One conversation, your papers already in, and you were gone across the city by the end of the month. And I didn’t get to fall apart about it like a person, because the same thing that was ending us was eating the job too. I was holding my career together with one hand and my life with the other, and you took the life half off the table and called it kindness? For my sake?”

He started to answer. I wasn’t finished.