Chapter 8 I Took the Fall for You
Luke
“Signatures on the Dorion package,” Ryan said. “Tab three and tab seven, both of us. The Crown wants it by Thursday.”
“I’ll walk it over Thursday morning.”
“Thanks.”
Ryan set the folder on the corner of my desk, square to the edge, and went back to his own. That was the whole conversation, and it was the longest one we’d had in days.
We had gotten good at this fast, which was its own bad news.
Files crossed the gap between our desks clean and on time.
Court dates got confirmed. When a call needed two detectives, we took it, and we worked it well, because we knew how to work together better than anybody on that floor, and none of that knowledge had anywhere else to go now.
Every sentence between us carried a case number.
Nobody watching us would have seen anything wrong, and nobody did, because the floor had never seen what we were like before.
That was the part I kept arriving at. We were doing an impression of ourselves, and the only people who could have caught the difference were the two of us.
Home was the same work in different rooms. Every morning now of moving through that apartment on schedules we never discussed, using everything we knew about each other’s routes to never be in the same part of the kitchen.
He made coffee for two out of habit; I was out the door before it finished.
Separate bedrooms now, closed doors, lights out fast. Nobody had packed anything.
Nobody was dramatic. The bedroom doors got opened the next morning and that was the only thing that had reopened, and for days I had half believed the rest would reopen the same way.
It hadn’t. It was weighing on me in a way I didn’t have good tools for, because my whole life I had waited things out, and this was not getting better with waiting.
It was getting practiced, and that was the part I couldn’t stand.
Two things kept coming back at me.
The first was my own voice. I had raised it.
In the middle of our own kitchen, at the person I lived with and loved, loud enough that afterward, through the door I’d just slammed, I heard the glasses rattling in the cupboard.
I wasn’t sorry for the substance of anything I’d said.
I had gone over the substance a hundred times and it held.
But the volume was new. I had never owned a voice like that, not through the worst years, not once.
The second was Ryan’s face. I’m not jealous of him.
I’m afraid of the damage he could cause.
I had decided the same night that it was jealousy, dressed up in the language of the job.
In daylight that held. At night it came open again, because I knew what jealousy looked like on a face, I’d worked enough domestics, and what had been on Ryan’s face wasn’t that.
I kept putting it away and it kept coming back.
The day went the way the four before it had gone.
We closed out a break and enter. I sat in on a Crown pre-trial call and gave the timeline twice.
At end of shift Ryan stood, took his jacket, and left with a nod aimed at the middle distance between me and the window.
Leaving separately was new too. We’d walked home together every day the weather allowed since the program chained us to each other, and we had never once discussed stopping. It had just stopped.
I gave the Dorion package a last pass I didn’t need to give it, and decided to call it a day.
The floor had thinned out without my noticing.
Down in the lobby the shift change was running, day people heading out in twos and threes with their bags, night people coming in with coffees, everybody holding the doors for everybody.
An ordinary end of an ordinary day. The desk constable gave me a nod on the way past and I gave one back.
Adam was in the stream with everyone else, over by the doors.
Coat already on, off to the side of the entry, reading something on his phone the way half the shift did on the way out. He looked up when I came through, and put the phone away.
“Luke. Good, I caught you. Do you have a minute?”
“For what?”
“I never wanted to be a problem between you two.” He said it straight, no preamble.
“And lately I made everything worse when I thought I was making it better. I’ve been sick about it since.
Let me buy you a coffee and apologize properly, off the property, in the open, and then I’m out of your way for good.
” He paused. “Ten minutes. You can pick the place.”
I looked at him and thought about the month I’d just had. Every week since the spring this man had been ten feet from my desk, and I had managed it the way I managed everything. However, what I wanted, standing in those doors, was to be done with it.
“There’s a place on Broadview,” I said. “The one that used to be the doughnut shop.”
Something crossed his face and was gone. He knew the place. That was why I picked it, and I couldn’t have said, then, whether I picked it to let him in or to test him.
“It’s still there?”
“It’s a coffee place now.”
We walked over. It took eleven minutes and we talked about nothing, the roadwork on Gerrard, a sergeant’s course he was grading papers for, and he let the nothing run the whole way there.
The place had been our end-of-nights spot, back when it sold doughnuts and burned coffee and nobody ever took the corner table because the heat vent over it rattled.
New owners had sanded everything and hung plants in the window, and the corner table was still there, and he took it.
We used to close out paper at that table at the end of bad nights, him talking, me writing, splitting whatever was left in the case.
I had not been through the door in years.
It smelled like a different place, but it felt like the same one.
He came back with two coffees and put mine down black, no questions. That he still knew how I took it landed harder than anything he’d said on the floor all month.
“Thank you for this,” he said. “I mean it. You didn’t owe me ten minutes.”
“Say what you came to say, Adam.”
He turned the cup a quarter turn, and this time he didn’t dodge into a story. He started where he’d said he would.
“Thank you for saying yes to this. I wasn’t sure you would.
” He turned the cup back. “I’ll give it plain, because you never had any patience for the other kind.
Last week I tried to take the air out of that floor and I lit a fire instead.
I wanted the whispering and nasty gossips to stop.
What I did was set you and your partner against each other in front of everyone you work with.
That’s mine. I’ve been sick about it since it happened. ”
I didn’t say anything. He took the quiet as room to keep going.
“You two have to be right with each other out there,” he said. “Partners who aren’t get people hurt. Nobody in this city knows that better than I do. Whatever I am to you now, the last thing I ever wanted was to be the thing standing between you and the man you go through doors with.”
He looked at the table a moment, and when he spoke again it had dropped lower.
“You remember the rooming house on Kipling. The man who came out of the back with the length of pipe.” He wasn’t performing now, or if he was I couldn’t find the edge of it.
“You went down, and I lost sight of you for ten seconds, and I have never been out of my mind the way I was in those ten seconds, before or since. I went through two men to get to you. I’d have gone through the wall behind them.
” He shook his head, slowly. “I’ve ridden with good people in the years since.
Every one of them could do the job. Not one of them was somebody I’d have gone through a wall for. You don’t get that twice in a life.”
He turned the cup, and left it, and looked up at me.
“Do you ever miss it, Luke? Not the work. Us. Who we were to each other?”
And there it was, the real question.
“No.”
He didn’t move.
I had meant to leave it at the one word. I’d planned to. But he sat there with his hands around the cup at our old table, asking did I miss it, gentle, like it was a small question, and something I’d kept down for years came up before I could stop it.
“You want to know if I miss it?” I kept my voice down.
“When you left, it nearly put me on my knees, Adam. I want you to know that, since we’re doing this.
Not slowed me down. Knees. One conversation, your papers already in, and you were gone across the city by the end of the month.
And I didn’t get to fall apart about it like a person, because the same thing that was ending us was eating the job too.
I was holding my career together with one hand and my life with the other, and you took the life half off the table and called it kindness? For my sake?”
He started to answer. I wasn’t finished.
“And here’s the part I never said out loud.
All that pressure, the threats of having our relationship revealed by whoever, that’s not what broke us.
You ended us. You looked at what it would cost to stand next to me and you decided it cost too much.
I never asked you to come out. I wouldn’t have.
That door was yours to open or keep shut, and I respected it.
But there’s a difference between staying quiet and leaving.
You could have stayed and been quiet and mine, and you left, and you didn’t fight for one inch of us.
You picked your name in that building over me.
That’s what I got to find out I was worth. ”
My throat had gone tight. I stopped and waited it out, because I was not doing that in front of him.
“So no. I don’t miss it. I survived it. Those are two different things.”
It did not come out level. I’d had years to write it, and it came out with my throat closing on the end of it anyway. But it was true, every word, and even shaking, it felt like setting something down.