Page 55 of Trust my Heart

My hands weren’t flat on my legs anymore. I didn’t remember moving them.

“When his file landed on my desk,” Murphy went on, with a small tilt of his head at Ryan, “and the brass wanted him gone, and the program was the compromise, everyone assumed I’d pair him with some patient old hand a year from a pension. I had a list. Your name wasn’t on it. I put you in that car anyway, and I let the whole building believe the program was for him.” He picked the glasses back up and cleaned them on his tie, slowly, and I had the sense the next part needed his hands busy. “It was never only for him. I had two files I wasn’t prepared to lose. I put them in the same car, and I hoped. Nothing in policy supports it.” He put the glasses on.

The ordinary morning went on outside the door, phones and printers and somebody laughing two offices down. I sat there going back over years of my life, seeing all of it differently. The transfers he’d approved without one question. The overtime he’d signed, year after year, so the apartment could stay nothing but a place I slept. I’d thought I was invisible. The whole time, I’d been in plain view of exactly one person, and it was the one whose job it was to do something about it, and he had.

“You never said anything,” I managed.

“Said what?” His voice stayed level, which I was grateful for, because soft would have finished me. “That I was worried about you. You’d have transferred by spring, and you know it. Some things only work if nobody says them out loud.”

“You told me he was steady,” Ryan said quietly. “Day one.”

“He is. I didn’t lie to either of you. You needed steady. He needed somebody who couldn’t be run off, and you have never once in your life taken a hint.” Murphy leaned back. “You were both right for the job. It is not my fault that you were also right for each other. I planned none of that, I noticed it long before either of you did, and I refuse to take credit for it in front of the superintendent.”

Ryan laughed, one low breath of it. My eyes were stinging. There was nothing to be done about it in a room this small, and Murphy had already seen everything else.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t.” He said it fast, before the words were all the way out of me. “You did the hardest part yourselves. I chose the seating.” He took a single form from the thin file and set it in the middle of the desk, facing us. “Now. The actual item, and then you can go be shaken somewhere that isn’t my office.”

“Continued partnership, by request. Conflict of interest declaration attached, since your particular conflict is on the record with me and, as of this week, everyone else. Both signatures, my endorsement, it goes up, it gets approved.” He laid a pen on it, straight. “I’ll say this part once. Nobody is assigning you anymore. Not to a car, not to a unit, not to each other. Whatever you keep from here on, you keep because you chose it. The book says I should send you home to think.” He looked at me straight, and for once the dryness wasn’t hiding anything. “The book has been wrong about you two since the day I broke it on your behalf.”

I looked at the form. One page. All of it had been picked up and handed back to me inside of forty minutes, and I found out what I reached for first.

I picked up the pen.

“I’m not taking it home to think about,” I said. “I told somebody last night what thinking does to the things I want. I’ve been assigned to this man during the program. I’m not going to spend the remainder of the month pretending I need to decide whether to keep him or not.”

I signed my name on the left line. Whatever my hands had been doing a minute ago, they were steady for this.

I slid the form and the pen across the desk. Ryan picked up the pen without taking his eyes off me.

“You’ll want to read it first,” Murphy said. “You read the reprimand top to bottom.”

“Nothing in it to weigh.” Ryan signed his name under mine without once looking down at it, then set the pen aside and looked at Murphy straight on. “For the record, since he likes the record. Cross out by request. It isn’t one. We’re partners. Send it up whatever way the book needs it sent, but it goes up, and it does not come back off.”

“It goes up as written,” Murphy said. “There’s no box on the form for non-negotiable. I already looked.”

Murphy took the form back, checked both signatures the way he checked everything, twice, and added his own at the bottom without ceremony.

“The apartment,” Ryan said. “End of the month?”

“End of the month.”

Ryan looked at me. I already knew what my face was doing, because for once I wasn’t managing it. The apartment had held every fight we’d ever had and every repair we’d ever made, and it had never been ours. Not the lease, not the furniture, none of it. It was the last thing on the list still assigned.

“It was never ours,” I said. “We’ll get one that is.”

“There,” Murphy said, to the file he was already opening, “is the assessment I’d have written if the form had room. Get out. Some of us still work here.”

We got up. At the door, Ryan stopped, because of course he did.

“Sir. The list of names, for my partner. Who was on it?”

“Get out, Carlson.”

Ryan went, grinning. I was half through the door when Murphy said, “Hawley.”

I stopped and looked back. He was already down in his files again, glasses on, pen moving, a man with a division to run.