Page 52 of Trust my Heart

“Okay,” Reid said. To the glass. Then he stood, collected his chair, and pulled himself together and frowned. “This conversation never happened.”

“It never does,” Luke said.

He went off to the bar with his ears still red. Pat set a glass of mostly ice in front of him, and a few minutes later a plate of wings, which nobody had ordered. That was Pat.

The table loosened after that. The property crimes guys got into an argument about a call from four years ago. Chen and Doyle fell into the low, contented shorthand of two people who’d worked together forever. The noise stayed high and happy, and it left our end of the table quiet. Nobody was listening to us. Luke and I sat with our shoulders almost touching.

I could have stayed like that for the rest of the night, but something nagged at my mind. I had planned to do this at home, but somehow it had found its way here anyway.

“Luke.” I put my glass down. “There’s one more piece from all of it I need to give you. I don’t want to carry it through the rest of the night. Okay?”

His eyes came up. The table roared at something down the far end.

“Okay,” he said.

“The pictures of you and Adam at the corner. The kiss.” He nodded, once. “There was a car parked across the street that night. I traced the plate back, and it was quick to get the rest of it.” I kept my voice low. “It’s a photographer. Freelance, works for cash. When I pulled his old jobs, there was a name in them I already knew.”

I made myself slow down. This was the part.

“He’s the same man who shot you and Adam. Years back. The pictures that started all of it.”

Luke didn’t move. I gave him the rest a piece at a time.

“There was never a watcher, Luke. It was Adam. Both times. He hired the camera, he picked the nights, he mailed the envelopes to your desk and his own.” I stopped and let him take the last step himself, because I knew he would. “So that when he ended it, he walked out the one who’d protected you. Not the one who left.”

He looked at the middle of the table for a while. Around us somebody started singing, glasses went somewhere, and none of it touched him.

He breathed out, long and slow. For a second he looked like the man who’d spent years grieving that relationship, the old hurt reaching for its old place. Then it didn’t find it, and it passed. A sigh, and that was all.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “But I’m not surprised. That’s the strange part. Six months ago that would have flattened me. Tonight it’s just data. It fits everything else I’ve learned about him.”

“I went back and forth on telling you,” I said. “It’s long done. It changes nothing. You were having a good night.” I watched his face. “Should I have kept it for myself?”

“No.” He didn’t take a second on it. “No. I don’t want anything about that man living in your head. We made a deal about that, didn’t we?” He turned his glass and set it back down on its ring. “I mourned him, Ryan. When he left, I grieved it like a death. And the whole time I was grieving a man who never existed.” He shook his head, slow. “Mostly I feel like a fool. I read people for a living. That’s what stings. I couldn’t read one of mine.”

“Everybody missed it, Luke. Not just you,” I said. “Brar rode next to him for years and never saw the shape of it. Even Murphy never caught this one, and Murphy catches everything. He was good at this, Luke. Maybe the best manipulator either of us will ever see. You weren’t a fool. You were the one who loved him, which made you the easiest to work and the last to see it. It was never your eyes that were the problem.”

His hand slid off the table and turned over on the seat between us, palm up, where nobody could see it. I put mine in it. He closed his fingers around mine. We sat like that while the table argued, laughed and drank.

“There’s one more thing,” I said, after a while. “And then I’m done, and we’re just at a bar.”

“Go.”

“I’m sorry about today, about confirming that we were together in front of everyone at work.” His mouth moved a little at that. “Not for the declaration, but for taking you by surprise, not having discussed any of this with you. I should have guessed that once cornered, Wright would have become nasty. I should have warned you, and not put the spotlight on you all on my own.”

Luke was quiet for a moment. Down the bar, Pat rang the bell for somebody’s round.

“Ryan. Do you know what I’d have done with warning?”

“Tell me.”

“I’d have overthought it to death.” He said it without bitterness. “Give me a week’s notice and I show up with a plan. We tell Murphy first, then the union rep, we pick a quiet day, maybe I write something up. I’d have shrunk it down until it felt safe. That’s what I do, Ryan. I’ve been doing it since he left. Give me time to think and I’ll talk myself out of anything I actually want.” He turned his head and looked at me straight on. “Four seconds, forty people. No time to chicken out. That was the only way I was ever going to do it. And you did it. So don’t apologize.” His hand tightened on mine, under the table, once. “I’d do it again anytime for you.”

The night wound down slowly after that. The property-crimes guys peeled off first, arguing their way out the door about the same call from four years ago. Doyle left the way Doyle did everything, suddenly and without ceremony. Chen called for the total on Luke’s tab, examined it, announced to the room that she felt avenged, and hugged Luke on the way out, quick and hard, before he could arrange a defense. He allowed it. From him, that was a speech.

Reid went last. He stood at the end of the table swaying gently and shook my hand too long, and then shook Luke’s.

“The good ones,” he said. “That was a great toast. I’m going to be honest, I don’t remember most of the other ones.”