Page 30 of Trust my Heart

Not Wright. Going to Wright was exactly what whoever sent this wanted, and I wasn’t going to give it to him.

Not Luke either. Not this morning, and not like this, and that was the hard part, so I made myself think it all the way through. If I woke him now, I wouldn’t be handing him a case. I’d be handing him a nightmare. The man who used to watch him is back, and look what he got. Wright had spent weeks working on the one thing in Luke’s past that still hurt him most. If I came in with a strange story and three photos that showed up under the door, Luke would hear his past coming back for him, and everyone else would hear the jealous boyfriend who couldn’t let it go. I already knew what my word was worth with Wright’s name in my mouth. I’d found that out in front of the whole floor.

I would wait. When I finally brought it to Luke, it would be more solid. Something he could stand on, not something he had to take on my word, when my word was the one thing the building had already decided not to trust. And then the two of us would take it into the open together.

But waiting cost something, and I felt it the second I chose it. Wright didn’t send one envelope and go home. This was a move in a longer game, and he’d make the next one when it suited him, not me. Every quiet day I spent building was a day he got to keep playing, on ground I couldn’t see. So I had to be fast. Whatever I was going to put together, I had to have it before the next thing came under the door.

That was the plan, and it was a good plan, and one part of it was rotten, and I knew exactly which part, but that couldn’t be helped for now.

I stood up to hide the envelope, and my hands stopped halfway.

In this kitchen, we had our first major fight since I’d known him, because I investigated without telling him. Because I decided for him what he could handle. You should have trusted me, and the door slamming, and days of silence between us. We’d only just finished paying that off. And here I stood in the same kitchen at dawn, sliding an envelope behind the cookbooks we never opened, about to run the same play again. The worst part, the genuinely funny part if you had the stomach for it, was that yesterday he’d done the same thing to me. He’d walked in with that kiss on him, looked at my face, and decided, I had to guess, that I was better off spared. We’d made it all the way back to each other last night with his secret already in the room, and now there’d be one of mine right next to it.

“Ryan?” From the bedroom, half a voice, still mostly asleep. “You up?”

“Getting water,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

A pause, sheets moving. “Time is it.”

“Early. Nothing’s wrong.”

Nothing’s wrong. First words of the day, and look at them.

I rinsed my cup and set it in the rack next to our plate from last night, and I went back down the hall and stood in the bedroom doorway. He’d rolled into the middle of the bed the way he always did when I wasn’t in it, staking out both sides, one arm thrown across my side like he was holding my spot. The light through the blind had gone soft and pale. He looked big and harmless and completely at peace, and I stood there loving him past all reason, this man who’d shoved his past off him on a street corner and then walked back in here and put his heart back in my hands without saying a word about any of it.

I was in it too now. He just didn’t know yet. I was going to climb back into that bed and warm my cold feet on him and let him believe for a while longer that the worst thing in our lives was behind us.

He grumbled when my feet found him. He pulled me in anyway, mostly asleep, one heavy arm coming over me and pinning me there, and his heart went slow and even under my ear, a man with nothing in the world to fear.

Chapter 11: On the Record

Ryan

Murphy’s street was the kind where people still washed their own cars.

Small brick houses, close together, porches a step off the sidewalk, an east-end block that had gone up a century ago for factory workers and never learned to show off. I parked two houses down and sat for a minute with the engine off. I didn’t look at the folder on the passenger seat.

Luke was at the gym. That was the one clean thing about tonight. Three evenings a week he went down to the club on Parliament and hit the bag until he got all the day’s or week’s frustrations out. He’d left with his hands half taped and told me not to wait up, and I hadn’t had to say a single word that wasn’t true.

I got out and walked up.

The porch light was on. Before I could knock, the door opened, and a woman looked at me through the screen. Tall, dark hair gone silver at the front and loose down her back, silver rings on half her fingers, a streak of dried paint up one forearm and a loose rust-colored shirt over her jeans, bare feet on the cold floor. She looked at my face for about one second and seemed to recognize whatever she found there. I was staring, and knew it, and took a second too long to stop. Whatever I’d pictured for Murphy’s wife on the drive out, someone gray and sensible to match him, this wasn’t it. She was beautiful. Not for her age, not the way people say it to be kind. Just beautiful, with paint drying on her arm, and she watched it land on me and didn’t look surprised.

“You’d be Detective Carlson,” she said, and opened the screen door.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He said you were the funny one.”

“Not tonight, I don’t think.”

“No,” she giggled, like I’d confirmed the weather. “Coffee’s on. Come in before the moths do.”

Inside smelled like coffee and turpentine under the lemon dish soap. The front room was small and lived-in, a couch with a bright woven throw over the back, canvases stacked and hung up the walls that I didn’t look at too hard.

Murphy came out of the kitchen in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, no uniform anywhere on him, reading glasses pushed up into his hair. Out of the building he looked smaller and older and harder to lie to. I still couldn’t get the two of them into the same house. Him gray and square and closed for the night, her all loose hair and rings and paint. A veteran on the force in the city of Toronto, and this was what he came home to. It made me trust him more, and I couldn’t say why.

“Carlson.”