Page 46 of Trust my Heart

I’d held that hand this morning, before the sun was properly up.

He’d been awake when I woke, lying on his back looking at the ceiling, and I’d taken the hand and turned it over in the grey light, and pressed my thumb, very lightly, next to the split.

“You promised me one thing,” I said.

“I know.”

“One thing. I asked you for one thing. Don’t touch him.”

“Technically it was a fist.”

“Ryan…”

“I know, I know. I broke it.” He watched me hold it. He didn’t take it back. “Go on, scold me.”

“You could have wrecked everything. The op, the complaint, your career, in one second, over words.” I heard my own voice, and it wasn’t angry, and that was the problem. “Some part of me is glad you hit him, and I don’t love what that says about me.”

“The ugly is in everybody,” Ryan said. “He’s spent his whole life finding it in people and using it. Too bad for him, he opened his mouth and found mine in a washroom, that’s all.”

“What did he say?”

The room got very quiet.

“Nope,” Ryan said.

“Ryan…”

“Ask me anything else and I’ll answer it. Not that.”

“I’m not made of glass. I know what he’s like when he wants blood.”

“I know exactly what he’s like when he wants blood.” He turned toward me then, and there was no cover on his face at all, none of the operator, just Ryan at dawn with his hand in my hand. “I’ll tell you this much. What he said, it was filth and I hit him. And after, cleaning my knuckles in that sink, I decided I’m done carrying his filth into what’s ours. He doesn’t get to be a nasty ghost between us. What he said stays in that room. Not because you couldn’t take it. Because it doesn’t deserve to live here.”

And he leaned over and kissed me, slow and sweet and nothing else in it, just a thing being said, because no words were good enough. I let the question go. I’d like to say it was hard, but it wasn’t; that was the strange part. He’d told me no and somehow I’d ended up with more than I’d asked for.

“Besides,” he said, settling back, “you’ll want your anger fresh for today. Don’t spend it on me.”

“About the other thing,” I said. “What I said at your desk. The lonely thing…”

“You don’t have to…”

“I do, though. Playing strangers with you for eight hours is the loneliest work I’ve ever done.” His mouth moved at that, finally. “There’s no version of alone that has you in it. I needed to say that.”

“I knew what it was,” he said. “The second it left your mouth. It still did something to me, hearing you say it.”

Then he laid out the day one more time, flat and short, the way he did when he’d already lived through a thing in his head and was waiting for the world to catch up. And I put my hand on the back of his neck, the way he’d put his on mine before the worst workday of my life, and I held it there and felt him breathe. We drove in together and split up in the garage, one last time, him to his desk, me to mine. If it worked, we’d never have to do that again.

If it worked.

The visitors started arriving mid-morning.

A superintendent I recognized from downtown. Two people from Professional Standards, a man and a woman, carrying the kind of folders that have handles. A civilian I’d never seen before, a small quiet woman wheeling a cart with a laptop and a projector on it, who set up in the glass conference room off the bullpen without asking anyone where to plug anything in. The blinds stayed open. Nobody closed the door.

The floor read it the only way the floor could. Brass, Standards, exhibits. A review board, assembling in full view, for Carlson.

Not everyone took it hard. Wright had his believers, a handful who’d warmed to him since the transfer, who’d decided the sunny sergeant was owed the benefit of every doubt, and that morning they didn’t bother hiding it. Two desks by the corridor had their heads together, and whatever was said there ended in a smirk aimed our way. Somebody, not quietly enough, said it was about time somebody audited Carlson’s caseload. Wright himself only got kinder. He moved between the desks lighter than I’d seen him in years, sorrowful, gracious, sergeant of the year, come to watch it done with a heavy heart.

I sat with a case file open in front of me and read the same paragraph for an hour.