Page 2 of Trust my Heart

“He put in for a lateral. Approved upstairs before it ever reached my desk.” Flat, nothing under it to soften the drop. “It wasn’t mine to refuse, Hawley. It isn’t yours to fight, either. He’s on the floor Monday. We deal with it.”

Luke didn’t move. Whatever he did with it, he did somewhere I couldn’t follow.

“He asked for one thing more.” Murphy let a beat go by. “To be put back with you. His old partner.” He shook his head, once, done. “I said no. Carlson and you are still on the program, and that doesn’t change until I say so. I don’t pull a partnership apart in the middle of that.”

He didn’t say the rest of it. Murphy never says the rest of it. But he held Luke’s eyes through the not-saying, and what went between them in that second had years folded up in it and a weight I couldn’t find the bottom of, and Luke gave the whole of it back to him without opening his mouth. I stood there and read the two of them and got everything but the thing itself. Murphy knew. Whatever Wright had been to Luke, Murphy knew it, and he’d just let Luke see that he knew, and told him no in the same breath.

Out on the floor, Wright had already started in on the room. Three desks deep, a hand on the back of somebody’s chair, easy as a man who’d never been gone. I clocked it the way you clock weather, and let it go, because most of me was turned the other way, on Luke.

The newer faces took to him fast. The ones who’d known him kept their distance and made it look like work. Chen gave him a nod and went back to her screen. Doyle shook the hand he put out and didn’t sit down with him. I caught it all at the edges, because I was watching Luke watch him, and there was nothing on his face you’d put in the same room as the word reunion.

Saunders wasn’t bothering to hide what he made of it. He had himself propped against the file cabinets, arms crossed, and when his eyes came off Wright and found Luke, they sharpened. “Getting the old team back together, Hawley?” Low, easy, pitched to carry exactly as far as he wanted. Luke gave him nothing. But I was close enough to feel him take it, the small set of the shoulders he does when something gets in past his guard, and it landed in me harder than it seemed to land in him.

Reid caught me by the printers, quiet, off to one side. He’d transferred in months after Wright left. The two of them had never met before this morning.

“That’s him?” he said, low. “He came out of Murphy’s office before you did. He already knew my name. He’s Detective Hawley’s former partner, right? That’s what Chen told me.”

“He’s friendly, I guess.”

“It’s strange.” He went red the second it was out, because you don’t call a sergeant strange in a hallway. But he’d said it, because something in him had picked up on it before he could stop himself, and I finished off the last of my coffee and didn’t tell him that I had a strange feeling too.

I went back to Luke.

He’d put half a step of distance between himself and the room without seeming to move at all. To anyone else he was a cop having an ordinary morning. I’d spent these months learning the difference, and this wasn’t calm. It was the stillness of a man keeping everything off his face by main force, and under it he’d gone somewhere a long way back, somewhere I’d never been.

I’d guessed months ago what Wright was to him, the way you guess a thing you’d rather not and then keep it to yourself. Watching him now, I stopped guessing. You don’t go that still over an old partner. You don’t hold your whole face together for a man you only used to ride with. Whatever the two of them had been, it hadn’t ended kind. There were no good memories on his face. Whatever Wright was to him, remembering it still hurt, and it hurt in a way he’d never once handed to me.

It hurt me too, plain and low and physical, an ache for him I’d have done almost anything to spare him. And right behind the ache came something colder, something I didn’t much like finding in myself. There was a piece of Luke’s life I’d never been let into, a hurt with a name and a face, and the name and the face had just walked back through the door and started shaking hands like he owned the place. It wasn’t doubt. I knew how he felt about me and how I felt about him. It was just the ground giving a little under something I’d let myself think was solid.

I couldn’t do anything with any of it here, not with Saunders watching and Wright three desks off. So, I did the one thing the room left me. I put my hand to Luke’s arm, brief, nothing anybody would log, and tipped my head toward the door.

“Come on,” I said, light, as much for the room as for him. “I’m starving, and you’re buying.”

He came. He knew exactly what I was doing, and he let me do it, which is its own kind of trust.

We took the stairs and went out back into the cold.

It was late May in Toronto, but the city hadn’t caught up to it. The cold came in bright and hard and found the gap at your collar. Parliament Street was doing its morning. A streetcar somewhere to the north, the smell of bacon out of Conroy’s, a man fighting a hand truck up over the curb. Luke turned us toward home and didn’t say anything for a while, and I let him have them. That’s the deal.

He doesn’t work out loud while it’s still raw. He goes quiet, lets it settle, and comes back when he can carry it. Push him before he’s ready and you get the flat cop answer that tells you nothing. So, I kept my mouth shut the whole way home, which anyone who knows me will tell you doesn’t come cheap.

We came up through Cabbagetown. The painted houses on Carlton, the wrought iron, the first green pushing up hard against the cold. A woman in a parka was pruning roses that hadn’t done anything yet.

“You stepped in,” Luke said. We were half a block from the door, his eyes on the pavement. He meant the office, Wright’s little trap, gracious or grudge, and the way I’d talked over the top of it before he had to choose.

“Somebody had to do the talking. You’re hopeless at it.”

“Ryan.”

“Yeah. I stepped in.”

A few more steps. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

“Thank you.” He said it low, the way he says the things that cost him. I bumped my shoulder into his, the kind of thing two cops can do on a street without anyone reading into it, and the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The start of one he wasn’t ready to spend. It eased my own tension a little.

We walked another half block.