Chapter 2 What I Never Told You #2
Ryan’s hand wasn’t still anymore. It had closed hard around mine. His voice dropped low and flat. Angry, holding it down. “Somebody watched the two of you for months. Photographed you. Mailed it to your door, on purpose, to hurt you. And then walked away clean.”
“Nobody could prove it was anybody,” I said.
“That’s not the same as nobody doing it.
” His thumb pressed hard against the back of my hand, once, like he had to put the anger somewhere.
“Somebody made a project out of hurting you, and every person who could have stopped it looked the other way. I get to be angry about that. I am pissed about that.”
He snarled, once, and made himself set it down, because I wasn’t finished and he knew it.
“What happened next?”
“It didn’t break the way you’d think.” This was the part I understood least, even now, so I went slow. “Nobody dragged him into a room and made him choose. It was quieter than that, and worse, because I had a front-row seat and all I could do was watch.”
“Watch what?”
“Him coming apart.” I made myself keep going.
“The pressure got into his work before it got anywhere else. He’d always been the one who could walk into any room and own it, and now he was walking into rooms and losing the thread of why he was there.
Small things at first. A detail missed on a canvass.
The wrong time written into a statement.
Then not small. He leaned too hard on a witness we needed, spooked the man into lawyering up, and a case we should have closed came apart in our hands.
That follows you in this job. People started watching him, wondering what was wrong with him, and the wondering was its own kind of danger. ”
I stopped. I’d never told this part to anyone, because telling it meant admitting I’d watched it happen and couldn’t stop it.
“I tried to help him.” It came out rough.
“I caught his mistakes before they made it into the files. I ran the calls he wasn’t sharp enough for anymore and let him take the credit.
I carried the paperwork, the follow-ups, anything that needed a clear head, so all he had to do was show up and be the face of it.
The part he’d always been good at.” My jaw had gone tight again.
I worked it loose. “It didn’t help. It made it worse.
Every time I stepped in, he saw it. That I was holding him up.
That the golden boy needed the cold one to keep him standing now.
It took something out of him I never got back.
He started keeping away from me. Not the careful kind of distance, the kind we’d practiced.
The other kind. The way you keep away from a mirror. ”
Ryan’s thumb stopped moving on the back of my hand.
“You were going under too,” he said. Low. “The whole time you were keeping him breathing. Who was keeping you?”
“That wasn’t the part that mattered.”
“It’s the part that matters to me.”
“He ended it on an ordinary night. No shouting, no scene. He sat across from me and told me, flat, that he couldn’t carry it anymore.
Any of it. Us. The watching. Waking up already tired every single morning.
He said the two of us were going to cost each other everything if it kept on, and that he’d rather lose me now, on his own terms, than stand there and watch it take us both down.
Then he put in for the transfer.” I had to stop. “And then he was gone.”
Ryan didn’t fill the silence. He waited until I could pick it back up.
“He must have told himself it would stop once he was gone.” I heard how it sounded even as it came out of me.
“That’s the version I’ve kept, anyway. That he left to make it stop.
That taking himself off the board was the last decent thing he had in him, so there’d be nothing left worth photographing and nobody worth following me home for.
I’ve believed it a long time, because believing it is easier than the other version.
” I made myself give him the other version too, because he’d asked me for the truth and that was half of it.
“The other version is that he was a coward who ran and left me holding a mess that was half his to carry. There’s a piece of me that has never once stopped being furious at him for it.
Small and mean and low to the ground, and I’m not proud of it, but it’s there, and most nights I don’t let it get a word in.
Tonight I’m too tired to keep it quiet.”
“Luke.” Just my name. Low.
“He requested a division clear across the city,” I said, softer now. “I heard later he’d told people there he’d left 51 over burnout. Nobody in his new division knew any different. I stayed. I got quiet, quieter than I already was, and people stopped asking me to things, but the rumors persisted.”
“Did anyone else know? At 51?”
“Only Murphy. Some of the others probably suspected something. Saunders continued to taunt, which I’m sure you’ve already noticed.
” I almost managed something close to a laugh.
It didn’t quite land. “Murphy never asked for more details. I think he knew enough not to need to. He just made sure nobody put anything in writing that could follow either of us around, and he kept giving me cases, which was its own kind of mercy.”
The room had gone very quiet. Outside, the streetlights had come on. Somewhere below us a door shut, and the old stairs creaked under somebody who wasn’t us for once.
“I shut the door on all of it after that,” I said. “Not just him. The whole idea of letting anybody else in that close. I decided it cost too much, and I was probably right, after what it had already done to me.”
“I know now why you got that nickname of The Bear,” Ryan said.
That got something out of me that was almost a real laugh, small and rough, but real. He must have felt it move through me, because his hand tightened on mine, just slightly.
“I fought you, you know. At the start.” I hadn’t meant to say it, but he’d earned it.
“Harder than you ever saw. And I want you to understand why, because it wasn’t about you, not really.
Part of it was that you reminded me of him.
Not your face. You don’t look a thing like him.
But you’re easy the way he was easy. Good with a room, quick, the kind of man people decide to trust before he’s done anything to earn it.
Every time you turned that on me, I felt the ground I’d spent years getting solid start to move again. ”
He didn’t say anything. He let me get it out.