Chapter 21 A Bright New Day? #2
So we walked. College east into the noise of it, the lunch carts setting up, a man arguing with a delivery bike, the ordinary unkillable racket of a city.
We turned south after a while, down toward Cabbagetown, toward home and the division past it.
Half an hour on foot, give or take. I’d have walked twice that on this sunny Toronto day.
“It took the couple of weeks I told you it would,” I said. “Murphy must have leaned on it the whole way.”
“He did. He’s been on the phone about you every day this week. He won’t say so. He told me to mind my own files.” Luke drank his coffee.
I had to look at the road for a second after that.
“Beaumont offered me 52 back,” I said. “On the way out. The whole speech. Better work, better address, the promotion, come home and draw a line under it.”
He stopped walking. Just for a second, but he stopped, and something crossed his face before he could catch it. Not jealousy. Closer to fear. The look of a man assessing whether the thing he’d just got was about to walk back across the city to a glass tower and a better desk.
“What did you tell him.” He kept it even. He didn’t quite manage it.
And God help me, it softened something in me to watch it. This man who’d gone into a laneway against three men with a bat and said it was nothing, thrown sideways by the idea of me taking a posting. I let myself enjoy it for one beat, the grin coming up.
“Relax,” I said. “I told him I prefer the cops at 51. And that Murphy fought for me when he didn’t. Right to his face.”
The breath went out of him slow, like he was hoping I hadn’t caught it. I’d caught all of it and my chest felt warm.
“You thought I’d take it,” I said.
“For a second.” He looked at the road. “It’s the better job, Ryan. On paper. I wasn’t going to be the one who told you not to.”
“It’s a glass tower full of Beaumonts. I’ve had my fill of those for one lifetime.” I knocked the back of my hand against his. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me so better deal with it.”
Luke huffed a laugh through his nose, the last of the tension going out of him. “You’ll have made a friend for life there.”
“I’m collecting them. Whitfield, my father, Beaumont. At this rate I’ll have to start a club of my own.”
“It is a win,” he said. “It’s just the kind that doesn’t feel like one until later. Most of them are.”
“Look at you. So wise, and on a work day.”
“I have my moments.” He bumped my shoulder with his, careful, before letting his arm stay against mine for half a block because there was no one on this stretch who mattered and nothing left to hide from.
That was the part that got me, walking down toward our street in the cold.
Not the badge. Him. The fact that I’d burned the whole gilded thing down, the name and the money and the future they’d kept warm for me, and what was left, walking next to me with a paper cup, was the only part I’d ever actually wanted.
A job that was mine. A man who came across the city on his morning off so I wouldn’t ride home alone.
A bad stair and a third floor and rent that was reasonable.
“Murphy wants to see me when we get in,” Luke said. “Us, I think. He said stop by his office.” He said it lightly, but I’d been reading him too long to miss the thing under it. “Didn’t say what about.”
“Today? On my first day back?”
“That’s the part I keep thinking about.” He kept his eyes ahead. “The probation program runs out around now. Ours. I did the math on it last night.”
The probation program. The reason any of this had started.
The brass had taken the disgraced transfer and the detective nobody could read and bolted us together, partner to partner, one shared posting and one cheap shared apartment, the whole thing watched to see if either of us washed out or straightened up.
And I felt the ground tilt a little, walking there in the sun.
Because if the program was ending, the thing the program had handed us could end with it.
The apartment. The partnership on paper.
The official reason two grown men shared the same space.
What we had become, a couple, was new, and it felt about as sturdy as wet paper, and I did not want a man with a clipboard deciding where I slept the same week I’d finally decided it myself.
I must have gone somewhere on my face, because Luke’s hand found mine, and he pulled me sideways off the sidewalk, into the gap between a shut bakery and a brick wall, out of the foot traffic.
“Hey.” His other hand came up to my jaw. “Stop. I can hear you doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Building the whole disaster before anyone’s said a word.” And he kissed me, there in the cold between the two buildings, unhurried, like there was nowhere either of us had to be, and the disaster I’d been building went quiet.
He pulled back an inch.
“I love you,” he said. Plain. The way he’d taught himself to. “Whatever Murphy wants, we handle it. Same as we’ve handled every other thing that came at us so far. We find the way through. Our own one. We always have.”
“And if they split the posting. Move one of us.”
“Then we deal with that too. I’m not doing this without you, program or no program.
” His thumb moved along my cheek once. “You signed away a kingdom to keep me. I think I can survive a conversation with my own inspector. And I doubt said inspector would throw you out after going the extra mile to save you.”
I let out a breath I’d been holding.
“Okay,” I said.
We stepped back out into the light and kept walking.
“There’s a practical problem,” I said. “My father took back the Yorkville condo. The family owned it, I just had the lease. I haven’t got a place to land if our 402 goes.”
“I sublet my apartment to do the program. So I’ve got nothing either.” He shrugged, easy. “We’re a matched set.”
“A matched set of homeless cops. Very romantic.”
“We stay at 402 a while longer. Both of us.” He said it like it was already settled, which I suppose it was. “If the program’s done and they want the unit back, we ask Murphy. He’s bent harder rules than a lease for us already.”
“You think he’d help with that?”
Luke drank the last of his coffee. “The man’s terrible at pretending he doesn’t care. We ask him.”
And it came out clean, as we walked the rest of the way toward the division like two men with nowhere they’d rather be, which, for once, was the simple truth of it.
51 Division was the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in a long time. I came through the side door with Luke a step behind me, and the bullpen rolled through its morning noise, and for one second nobody clocked me, and then somebody did.
Reid was first. He came up out of his chair so fast it rolled back and hit the desk behind him, and he crossed the floor with that whole open face of his doing something it couldn’t decide on, and stopped just short of me like he’d run out of plan halfway.
“You’re back,” he said.
“I’m back, Reid. Officially this time.”
“They gave it back.” He looked at the badge on my belt and his throat worked.
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it the way I hadn’t been able to mean anything upstairs. “Truly. For more than today.”
He went red and looked at his shoes.
Karen Chen was next, unhurried, the way she does everything. She didn’t make a production of it. She just stopped by me on her way to somewhere, gave me the once-over she gives everyone, and let the smallest approval into her face.
“Carlson.” A nod. “I don’t care who you were at 52, you know that. Here it’s what you do that counts.” She let a beat go. “You did all right. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Sergeant.”
“You would. But you’ll keep it in line.” And she went, which from Chen was a parade.
Saunders was at his desk pretending he hadn’t noticed any of it, which was how I knew he’d noticed all of it.
Greg Saunders, who’d called me Golden Boy and Pretty Boy and Poster Boy across this bullpen since I arrived, who’d needled me on the worst mornings of my life because his cousin got passed over for the job I got and lost. I couldn’t help it.
I was back, my name was clean, and the old performing part of me, the part that had kept me upright through worse rooms than this, came right back up.
“Saunders,” I called over. “Nothing? No welcome back? After everything we’ve been to each other?”
I expected the sneer. The line about cologne, about Bay Street, about whether I was sure I was in the right division. I’d have welcomed it. It would have meant the world was the right shape.
He looked up. And he smiled.
It was a bad smile. Not the snarl. Something almost pleased, almost kind, which on Saunders read like a dog standing on its hind legs.
“Welcome back, Carlson,” he said. “Genuinely. Enjoy it.” He turned back to his screen, and then, like an afterthought, the worst part: “Things are about to get real interesting around here. You picked a good week to come home.”
I stood there a second. Something in it didn’t sit right, the way a thing doesn’t when a man who hates you wishes you well and means it.
“What’s that supposed to mean,” I said.
“You’ll see.” He didn’t look up again.
I let it go. I shouldn’t have, but I had a homecoming on, and Luke had a hand light at my back steering me on, and Murphy’s door was open down the end of the bullpen with the light on behind it.
Murphy’s office seemed even more hectic with an overloaded desk and strewn files.
Other things didn’t change such as the same dead plant on the filing cabinet that he’d been not-watering since before I got here, the same blinds, up today, the morning light coming in gray and ordinary.
He was behind the desk, and he stood when we came in, which he doesn’t do usually, and that was the second wrong thing of the day.
The first was the man already standing at the window with his back half to us.
Mid-thirties, give or take. Lean, a runner’s build, the regulation cut grown out a careful half-inch, the kind of face that knows exactly how good-looking it is and has learned to bank it.
He had a smile ready, the way you have a smile ready when you’ve rehearsed the room before you walked into it. And the smile wasn’t for me.
It was for Luke.
I felt Luke go still beside me. Not the cop stillness, the one he puts on like a coat. The other one. The one a body does when an old wound gets hit.
“Luke.” Wright said it warm, easy, the rehearsed weight all the way through it, his back half to Murphy so only Luke and I could see the rest of his face under the smile. “It’s been a long time.” A beat, perfectly placed. “I’m Adam Wright. I was Detective Hawley’s partner. Before the transfer.”
I saw the rest of it. I saw what the sentence was for, and who it was aimed at, and the small bright thing in Wright’s eyes that was checking to see where it landed.
I saw Luke take the hand because there was nothing else a man could do in that room with his inspector watching, and I saw the cost of it move once across his jaw and disappear.
So I did the only thing I had. I stepped in, easy, back in form, coming up smooth and certain, and I put my hand out next.
“Welcome back to 51 Division, Sergeant,” I said.
And the smile turned to me, and the handshake held a beat longer than it should have, and that’s when I remembered, or more correctly, I connected the dots. Wright...
I remembered Saunders, nasty insinuations, loud across the bullpen with his audience watching.
The Bear likes pretty boys. Or so the rumors say.
And then, warming to it: Everyone knows why your last partner requested transfer.
Couldn’t handle how you looked at him, could he?
And now they’ve given you a pretty new toy.
I’d stepped in and shut his mouth that day and never once stopped to think about the man buried in the taunt.
The last partner. The one who’d asked to be moved.
And Luke, in the kitchen that morning, telling me: Come to bed and I’ll tell you my whole sordid history. A past love story he’d half-handed me before the phone rang and he put the lid back on it. His last love. The story he never finished telling me.
Here it was, finishing itself. In a good suit, by Murphy’s window, with its hand in mine and its smile bent at the man I loved. That wasn’t only Luke’s former work partner. It was his former lover.
Ryan and Luke have stopped running. After everything it cost them, they finally have the thing neither believed he’d ever get to keep: each other, and a small, ordinary life that’s started to feel like home.
Now the past has come to test the one thing they’ve never quite managed: trusting each other with all of it, the tender and the ruined both. Loving each other was never going to be the hard part. Staying is.
The story of Ryan and Luke concludes in the final volume: Trust My Heart… the ending they fought for, and the one they finally get to keep!