Page 10 of Trust my Heart

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while.” He smiled, and it was the good smile, the one the whole floor had been getting since his first day. “Eleven years doing rounds and he kept doing them after they fired him. You want to laugh and then cry.”

“That about sums it up.”

He nodded. He glanced at the stairwell door, unhurried, and then back at me.

“He looks good,” he said. “Luke. Better than I remember, and I knew him a long time.” Same voice as before. “You can tell a lot from how a man walks into a building in the morning.”

“The job’s been going well.” I kept my eyes half on the report. “Big month for the division.”

“Mm.” A small pause. “It isn’t all about the job.”

I turned my chair. He was watching me with the same open face he gave everyone. His hands had gone still.

“I wouldn’t follow,” I said.

“I think you do.” There was no push in it. He might have been talking about the weather. “I rode with him for years. I know what he looks like when it’s the job going well, and I know what he looks like when it’s something else. I saw it the first morning, in Murphy’s office, before either of you said a word. It’s in his eyes.”

I didn’t answer. Anything I said would turn it into a conversation, and I didn’t want it to be one. I kept my face pleasant and gave him nothing.

“You’re not going to confirm it.” He nodded slightly, like I’d passed something. “That’s fair. It’s his and yours to tell after all. At least you would have the choice to make it official or not.”

Somewhere behind me the cleaner’s cart squeaked, two rooms away, a floor of empty desks between us and it.

“You know about how we were more than work buddies, I imagine,” he said. “Him and me. Partners tell each other things, sooner or later. And if he hasn’t, the gossip will have gotten there first. It usually does, in a building like this.”

“People talk in this building,” I said. “I don’t keep much of what I hear.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do.” And he smiled, the good smile. I sat three feet away and tried to read him. I got nowhere.

There was something under the friendliness. That much I was sure of, but no more. It could have been longing. An ex looking at what he walked away from and saying something kind about it to the man who had it now. Or it could have been a warning, said in the exact same voice. I couldn’t tell which. I read people for a living, and I couldn’t tell. That hadn’t happened to me in a long time.

“I’m glad he’s got somebody,” Wright said. “Somebody who watches him the way you do.” He stood up off the desk. “I hope it’s enough.”

“Enough?” I said.

“For him.” He said it kindly. “Luke needs more looking after than he lets anybody see. I’m sure you’re ahead of where I was.” He held my eyes a half second too long, the same way he’d held the handshake that first morning.

The stairwell door banged, down the hall. Footsteps, and the rustle of a plastic bag.

“And it came off the shelf straight into your face,” Wright said, and he was laughing, and his hands were moving again. The laugh was easy and natural and aimed past me at the door. “Detective. Your partner’s been telling me about the pigeon. So funny.”

“He screamed,” Luke said, setting the bag on my desk.

“I was surprised, come on!” I said. It came out on reflex, at the right volume. I was performing and I knew it, and I let it run, because the rest of me was still stuck on enough.

“It’s good work, the two of you.” Wright shrugged into his jacket, easy to the last, nodding to us each in turn. “A man gets his job back and the paperwork closes same-day. That’s the kind of file this division could use more of. Good night, you two.”

You two. Friendly, easy, nothing in it anyone could ever point at. An hour earlier I’d have heard nothing in it at all. Now I had no idea whether it was a pleasantry or a message. The door let him out, and the bullpen was quiet, and the food was getting cold on my desk in a plastic bag.

Luke pulled a chair around and started laying out containers. He was loose in a way I hadn’t seen him at the division in two weeks, sleeves rolled, unpacking noodles under a desk lamp, and I knew what I was looking at. A man who had stopped bracing. I’d watched him get there one decision at a time.

“You okay?” he said. “You’re quiet.”

“Long day.”

He let it go.

I went over the conversation while I typed, every line of it. That was the trouble. There was nothing in it. A man had said my partner looked happy. Said he could see it in his eyes. Guessed at something private, took my silence politely, said he was glad, hoped out loud it was enough, and went home. Told me, kindly, that Luke took more looking after than he let anybody see, and that I was surely ahead of where he’d been. There wasn’t one sentence I could repeat to Luke as a complaint. I tried them all, in every order, while I ate some noodles.