Page 12 of Trust my Heart

“What were you doing down this end?” I said.

“Headquarters. Transfer paperwork, the benefits thing. Two hours for four signatures.” He tipped his head back against the rest. “So now I sign out at the division, and then I’ll call a cab.”

The light at Queen went green and the rain came across the windshield in a sheet when I turned. A cab, in this, at this hour, could be an hour coming.

“Where are you living?”

“Pape. North of the Danforth.”

“I’ll run you up after,” I said. “It’s filthy out. No sense standing at the door waiting for a cab.”

He looked over at me. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then thank you. For twice in one night.” And he left it there. He didn’t make it into more than it was, and that made it simple, and I noticed that everything with him lately was easy. I was starting to forget it had ever been anything else.

At the division he was in and out in ten minutes, the canvas bag in and back out with him, a signature left somewhere. Through the glass doors I watched him stop to say something to the night-desk constable that made her laugh, and keep moving without waiting to enjoy it.

He came out with his collar up, dropped into the seat, and brought the cold in with him.

“Last leg,” he said. “I owe you a coffee at minimum.”

“You owe me nothing. It wasn’t trouble at all.”

The drive up to Pape was twenty minutes in weather like that. It took us thirty, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped minding.

It started with names. He asked what had happened to Marchetti, who used to run the evidence room and made you sign for staples, and I told him Marchetti had retired to Wasaga Beach and came back once a year to complain about how the room was run now. He asked whether Delorme’s daughter had made the OPP, because Delorme had wanted that more than he’d ever wanted anything for himself. I said she had, two years ago. He said good, quietly, like it mattered to him, and I believed that it did. That was always the thing with him. He remembered what people wanted.

“What was it like out there,” I said. “The other division.”

He took a second. “Quiet. Good people. Smaller board.” A shrug I caught at the edge of my eye. “Nobody knew me. Plenty of work.”

Then it was cases. The bail jumper who hid in the ceiling of his mother’s laundromat and came down on his own at the smell of her cooking. The landlord on Sackville who reported the same tenant for the same thing every full moon, only ever the full moon. I heard myself laughing in the closed car. It startled me.

“Is Murphy still not watering that plant,” he said, somewhere along Broadview.

“It’s the same plant.”

“It can’t be the same plant.”

“Nobody has ever seen him water it, and it has never finished dying. Reid has a theory it’s plastic. Chen says she checked once, and it isn’t, and everybody stopped asking questions after that.”

He laughed at the whole picture of it, the plant, Reid’s theory, Chen checking, and I heard how much of the division he already had.

“You still write plate numbers on your wrist,” he said, at some point.

“When the notebook’s in the wrong pocket.”

“It took me most of a year out there to stop looking left,” he said. He said it flat. “Passenger side. Wherever you were. Partner habits.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t find one that was safe to give.

“We were a good team, once,” he said to the windshield. “Whatever else. That part was real.”

He let it lie there. So, did I. The wipers went.

It was hard to stay careful across thirty minutes of that, and I knew it while it was happening, which was not the same thing as being able to stop it. Part of it was the ease. Part of it was older. I had spent years believing that some of what happened to him was mine to carry, and I had never been any good at staying guarded against a man I thought I owed, a man I had loved.