Page 50 of Trust my Heart

The floor came back to life around us in pieces, and we stood at the bare desk in the middle of it, and I waited for it. The fear. The cold drop that had come every time being known got too close, the reflex that had folded me up small once in an evidence room with my heart slamming. Every face out there knew now. It was done and could never be undone, the exact thing I’d built my whole careful life against.

It didn’t come. I stood there holding his hand in front of everyone, and there was nothing.

There was still a weight in me somewhere. I’d carried it so long I’d stopped feeling it as weight at all. It hadn’t moved, and I didn’t reach for it. But the fear went down the stairwell with him.

Ryan squeezed my hand once and let it go so we could both pretend to work, and as he turned back to his photocopies I caught it again, the thing from the binder, some last piece of the day he was keeping to himself, and he was careful with it, the way he was careful with things that were mine.

Whatever it was, it could keep until home. Everything could keep until home now. That was the part I couldn’t get used to.

Chapter 17: The Good Ones

Ryan

Pat had pushed two tables together without being asked, which at Conroy’s counted as a state occasion. He’d never had this many of us in the place at once.

I was three drinks in before I let myself look around properly. Same narrow room the color of weak tea, same long bar, same hockey game running silent in the corner, same fryer smell worn so far into the walls it had stopped being a smell. The last time I’d sat in here, I’d been alone at the rail, three blocks the wrong way from home. It was the one place nobody who knew me would think to look. I’d been drinking hard enough to frighten even Pat. A rookie I barely knew had come through that door anyway, talked to me like I was worth talking to, and poured me into a cab. Tonight that same rookie was up on the rung of his stool with his glass in the air, trying to get eleven cops to shut up at once. It was the one bar in the city no cop had ever drunk in, until I brought them. I was at the end of the table with Luke’s knee warm against mine, where nobody could see it and nobody would have cared if they could.

That was the part I couldn’t get past. Nobody would have cared. I still couldn’t stop checking the room for it.

“Okay. Okay. Hey.” Reid banged his glass on the table twice. “I want to make a toast.”

“You’ve made four,” Chen said.

“This one’s different.”

“That’s what you said about three.”

“To the good ones,” Reid said, ignoring her, and swung his glass in a wobbly arc that took in the whole table. “Every single person here kept their head when it counted. Nobody at this table drank the evil sergeant’s coffee.”

“I drank the coffee,” Doyle said.

Reid froze mid-toast.

“It was good coffee. He was a liar, not a bad barista. I never refuse good coffee.” Doyle lifted a glass an inch. “To the good ones.”

“To the good ones!” the table shouted, more or less together, and drank, and the noise picked back up.

The good ones. Reid’s phrase, coined on the walk over, already sounding like it had always existed. It wasn’t the whole floor, tonight. It was the people who’d earned the invitation without ever knowing there was a list: the ones who’d kept their eyes forward during the frozen-out weeks, who’d routed the staged war around us without joining it, who’d looked sick instead of entertained when Wright went to work on me in public. Chen. Doyle. Reid. A handful of others from the division who’d never once made it worse. Luke had named the list in the stairwell this afternoon without hesitating, which told me he’d been keeping it the whole time, the way he kept everything.

Wright’s name had come up exactly twice all night, and both times the table had let it drop. Nobody drank to him. The mood wasn’t victory. It was relief, all the way down the table.

“I want it noted,” Chen said, sliding into the chair across from us with a drink that had at least five things in it, “that I’m putting this on the big one’s tab.”

“Noted,” Luke said.

“And the next one…”

“How many of those things are you planning to have?”

“That depends on how long the tab stays open, and the tab stays open until I stop feeling things about what happened.” She stirred it with the little straw, watching us both. “I offered your boyfriend my cousin, Hawley.”

The way she said it, with the drink in her, it came out sounding like a different kind of offer, and I laughed into my glass before I could stop it. Luke shook his head.

“She means Marco,” Luke said, dry, to her and not to me. “The paralegal. Legal counsel, for the records case. I knew exactly what you meant when you offered him at my desk, Chen. And I know what you mean now. You can put your cousin’s honor away.”

“I stood at that desk with my whole heart out,” Chen said, riding straight over the both of us, “and offered you Marco, for him, and the entire time the two of you had a superintendent and a forensic analyst in your pocket.”

“Yeah,” Luke agreed.