Trust my Heart (Apartment 402, #3)

Chapter 1 The Man Who Knew Him First

Ryan

The handshake went on too long. That was the first thing I had on Adam Wright, before he’d said a word I could hold against him: a grip that landed warm and dry and friendly and then stayed, a half-second past the place a handshake closes, while he looked at me like we’d already had this conversation once and enjoyed it.

“Carlson.” My name, said like he’d been keeping it somewhere good. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“All of it slander, I hope. I’d hate to think the truth got out.”

He laughed before the line was all the way down, easy and a beat early, the laugh of a man who’d decided to like me and was letting me catch up. Cheap. It worked anyway.

Somehow, Murphy’s office felt stifling, and keeping a relaxed expression was harder than I thought.

Wright let go of my hand and turned a half-step, and the turn put his shoulder to Murphy and his whole face back on Luke, where it had been aimed from the start. Nobody else would have clocked it. I did.

Luke had gone still beside me. Not the still he wears into a scene, the one that takes a room apart and gives you nothing back.

A worse one. His shoulders had come up and stayed, and his eyes had found a spot on the wall an inch past Wright’s ear and dug in, and he was holding his face so carefully the holding had become the only thing on it.

“It’s good to see you, Luke.” Soft, that, pitched down between the two of them like the rest of us had been asked to step out.

“Sergeant.”

One word, flat as the floor. I knew what it cost him to keep it there. I left my own hands in my pockets, which cost me something I’ll keep to myself.

“Word travels, you know.” Wright went on, warm, a gift he was glad to be giving.

“People are saying good things about you. The Internal Affairs business. That ring you helped pull down.” He shook his head, fond.

“I always knew it’d be you they noticed in the end.

You did the work while the rest of us were learning how to look busy. ”

Nobody picked the compliment up. It hung there with nowhere to go, and the only sound in the room was the printer chewing through somebody’s report.

“You look well,” Wright said, quieter.

“You said.”

“You don’t know how this place brings back memories.

You remember the warehouse off Dufferin?

” Wright said it light, like it had drifted up on its own.

“You went to the side, I took the front, and we had him before he’d got an arm into his coat.

” A small, private laugh, the kind you keep for one person in a room.

“Best week I ever had on the job. I still tell it.”

“I remember.” Two words and Luke shut the door on them.

Wright let the door stay shut, easy, like it cost him nothing, and turned back toward the desk.

Murphy stood up.

“Sergeant Wright came over to us this morning,” he said. “Monday he’s on the floor. I’ll want him made welcome.” He put welcome on me and held it a half-second too long with nothing on his face, which out of Murphy is a paragraph.

“Naturally.”

“His own request.” He set it down flat, a stone he wanted me to feel the weight of. “He asked to come back to 51.” He didn’t say why. He squared a stack of folders that were already square and let the quiet finish it.

“I know how it looks.” Wright got out ahead of it, rueful, brave enough to name the awkward thing before it could be named at him.

“Coming back where I’ve got history. I won’t make it the unit’s problem.

I’m here to work.” He let it warm and aimed it at Luke.

“We were a good team once. I’d be glad to settle for good colleagues. ”

Clean. It put the history on the table and made him the big man for being the one to put it there, and it handed Luke a choice of two bad roads, gracious or grudge, in front of the boss, in his first hour back beside a man he’d buried years ago. Cruel, dressed up as generous.

“Generous,” I said, before Luke had to take either one.

I came up smoothly, the old reflex, the one that’s kept me standing in worse rooms than this.

“You’re in luck, Sergeant. We’re collegial to a fault around here.

Practically a hugging culture. Ask anyone.

” I let the grin do the lifting, and the room’s eyes came off Luke and onto me, which was the whole point of the exercise.

“Welcome to 51. Burnt coffee, low expectations. You’ll be right at home. ”

He gave me the smile at full power and held my eyes a beat, and I smiled back before I’d voted on it. By the time I noticed I was doing it he’d gone back to looking at Luke.

“He’s in good hands, I see.” A hand to Luke’s shoulder, brief, the way you’d touch a thing you used to own, and Luke let it land and didn’t lean and didn’t flinch and then it was gone. “Monday, then. It really is good to be back.”

He saw himself out, all warmth, and the door gave him to the bullpen, and the room got its air back.

Murphy looked at the shut door. Then at Luke.

“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.