Page 5 of Trust my Heart

“Okay.”

He didn’t push past it. He just waited, patient again, until I was ready to keep going.

I gave him one thing I still have from before it went bad, because if all he ever hears about Adam is the wreck of it, he won’t understand any of the rest. “There was a night we sat outside a building for six hours waiting on a warrant that never came. I hadn’t said more than ten words the whole shift. Around two in the morning he reached over without looking and turned the heater vent so it blew on my hands instead of his. Didn’t say anything about it. Just did it and went back to whatever he’d been talking about. I don’t know why that’s the thing that stuck. Out of everything. But it’s the one I still think about when I let myself think about him at all.”

“That doesn’t sound like nothing.”

I gave myself a second before I kept going.

“It wasn’t sudden,” I said. “It built. Slow, at first, and I told myself for months it was nothing, because that was easier than the alternative. He started finding reasons to ride with me on days we weren’t rostered together. Small things. He’d cover a call that wasn’t his, so we’d end up in the same car anyway. He started remembering things I hadn’t meant to tell him, a new shirt I bought, the fact that I hate cilantro, and bringing them up later like they mattered to him, and I couldn’t work out for the longest time whether that was just who he was with everybody, or whether it was something else.”

“He was trying to get you to look at him,” Ryan said with a smile.

“I know that now. I’d never had anybody pay that kind of attention to me before and I didn’t have the first idea what to do with it except be quietly grateful and not ask questions.” I breathed.

“You don’t have to walk me through that part if you don’t want to.”

“I want to get it right. Make it clear for you.” “We talked about coming out or not as a couple once, how we were going to handle it, that relationship. We decided that if people asked, we were just partners who got on well, which was true anyway and made the lie easier to keep. Off the clock we had exactly two places we let ourselves be what we actually were, his apartment and mine, and we didn’t go anywhere in public together that anybody from 51 might walk into. It sounds cold, telling it back like that. It felt like the only way to keep something good from getting taken away from us.”

“Then it was good,” he said. Simple. Like he was just agreeing to a fact and not bracing against it.

He said it so easily that it caught me sideways.

“We were careful. Or we thought we were. You learn fast in this job how to be two people who happen to ride together and nothing more, in front of everybody who isn’t supposed to know. I’d been doing it most of my life already, being careful, so it wasn’t new to me. It was new to him. I don’t think he’d ever had to hide anything before.”

“Somebody saw something, right?” Ryan said. Not a question. He already saw where this was going.

“Somebody saw us.” I said it plain, because there wasn’t a soft way into it. “The parking garage under the division, late, after a night shift. We thought we had the place to ourselves. Somebody had a camera, and they used it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pictures. Us, together, doing exactly what it looked like we were doing.” My jaw was tight. I made myself loosen it. “They came in an envelope on my desk and on Adam’s. No note. No name. Nothing to say who’d sent them or what they wanted for it. Just the pictures, and my name on the envelope.”

“Just the once?”

“No. That’s the part that still gets me. More came after that. Different nights, different places, always just the two of us in the shot, never anybody else. Whoever it was had been watching us a long time before that first envelope ever showed up.”

Ryan’s hand went still around mine. He didn’t move again until I kept going.

“We tried to find out who it was. Both of us. Adam worked it like a case. We went through everybody who might have had a reason, everybody who might have had the chance. We never got anywhere. Whoever was doing it was careful, and we were two detectives who couldn’t investigate our own lives without admitting out loud what the pictures were pictures of.”

“Saunders,” Ryan said. Not really a question.

“I thought about him. I still think about him. He was around more than he had any reason to be, that year, and he always looked like a man sitting on a joke he hadn’t told yet. I went looking for something that would put him in that garage with a camera.” I shook my head. “I never found it. Not then. Not since. A feeling isn’t proof.”

“What did you do?”

“Reported it. The pictures, the not knowing who. I took it straight to Murphy.” I breathed. “He took it seriously. But there was nothing in it he could work with. No prints on the envelopes that led anywhere. No pattern he could put a name to. Nothing he could take in front of a review board and call evidence. He told me flat out there wasn’t a case yet, and he was right.”

“Nothing happened?”

“Nothing happened to whoever was doing it. Everything happened to us.” I stopped again. I’d never said this part out loud, start to finish, to anybody. “We stopped sleeping right. We jumped at nothing. We got so careful we started looking guilty even on the days there was nothing left to hide. People noticed the two of us had changed, even the ones who’d never seen a single picture, and people talk when they notice a thing like that. Rumors started moving around the division on their own, with nothing behind them but the two of us acting strange. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the whole thing went up the chain anyway. I still don’t know exactly how. Maybe somebody official saw enough on their own. Maybe the rumors did what the pictures never could. It doesn’t matter now which one it was.”

Ryan’s hand wasn’t still anymore. It had closed hard around mine. His voice dropped low and flat. Angry, holding it down. “Somebody watched the two of you for months. Photographed you. Mailed it to your door, on purpose, to hurt you. And then walked away clean.”

“Nobody could prove it was anybody,” I said.

“That’s not the same as nobody doing it.” His thumb pressed hard against the back of my hand, once, like he had to put the anger somewhere. “Somebody made a project out of hurting you, and every person who could have stopped it looked the other way. I get to be angry about that. I am pissed about that.”