Chapter 10 Under the Door #3
The window over the sink had gone from grey to almost-morning, and I sat back and looked at what the night had turned into on my kitchen table.
Three prints. A plate number. A copy of the footage that nobody could erase out from under me now.
I opened a new folder, gave it a name so dull nobody would ever click it, and put all of it inside, with the map and the times written out plain.
Then I thought for a minute and added one more thing.
The two file errors under my name, the ones Murphy kept wanting to blame on the records system.
If the photograph was a signature, so were those, and the same hand had signed all of it.
For once I knew exactly what to do, and I knew it because of the worst thing about me.
I grew up in a house where this was the family business.
Patience, and paper, and letting the other man think he was winning while the folder got thicker.
I’d hated my father with my whole heart and taken his training anyway, and I’d spent my adult life trying not to use it.
Sitting at that table with the coffee cold at my elbow, I decided I’d use it one more time, at the man who’d bought a camera to aim at us.
Wright wanted to play it deniable and patient.
Fine. I’d been raised by patient and deniable.
He was an amateur who’d had a good run against honest people.
I worked out the order of it while the ceiling got lighter.
Not Wright. Going to Wright was exactly what whoever sent this wanted, and I wasn’t going to give it to him.
Not Luke either. Not this morning, and not like this, and that was the hard part, so I made myself think it all the way through.
If I woke him now, I wouldn’t be handing him a case.
I’d be handing him a nightmare. The man who used to watch him is back, and look what he got.
Wright had spent weeks working on the one thing in Luke’s past that still hurt him most. If I came in with a strange story and three photos that showed up under the door, Luke would hear his past coming back for him, and everyone else would hear the jealous boyfriend who couldn’t let it go.
I already knew what my word was worth with Wright’s name in my mouth.
I’d found that out in front of the whole floor.
I would wait. When I finally brought it to Luke, it would be more solid. Something he could stand on, not something he had to take on my word, when my word was the one thing the building had already decided not to trust. And then the two of us would take it into the open together.
But waiting cost something, and I felt it the second I chose it.
Wright didn’t send one envelope and go home.
This was a move in a longer game, and he’d make the next one when it suited him, not me.
Every quiet day I spent building was a day he got to keep playing, on ground I couldn’t see.
So I had to be fast. Whatever I was going to put together, I had to have it before the next thing came under the door.
That was the plan, and it was a good plan, and one part of it was rotten, and I knew exactly which part, but that couldn’t be helped for now.
I stood up to hide the envelope, and my hands stopped halfway.
In this kitchen, we had our first major fight since I’d known him, because I investigated without telling him.
Because I decided for him what he could handle.
You should have trusted me, and the door slamming, and days of silence between us.
We’d only just finished paying that off.
And here I stood in the same kitchen at dawn, sliding an envelope behind the cookbooks we never opened, about to run the same play again.
The worst part, the genuinely funny part if you had the stomach for it, was that yesterday he’d done the same thing to me.
He’d walked in with that kiss on him, looked at my face, and decided, I had to guess, that I was better off spared.
We’d made it all the way back to each other last night with his secret already in the room, and now there’d be one of mine right next to it.
“Ryan?” From the bedroom, half a voice, still mostly asleep. “You up?”
“Getting water,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
A pause, sheets moving. “Time is it.”
“Early. Nothing’s wrong.”
Nothing’s wrong. First words of the day, and look at them.
I rinsed my cup and set it in the rack next to our plate from last night, and I went back down the hall and stood in the bedroom doorway.
He’d rolled into the middle of the bed the way he always did when I wasn’t in it, staking out both sides, one arm thrown across my side like he was holding my spot.
The light through the blind had gone soft and pale.
He looked big and harmless and completely at peace, and I stood there loving him past all reason, this man who’d shoved his past off him on a street corner and then walked back in here and put his heart back in my hands without saying a word about any of it.
I was in it too now. He just didn’t know yet. I was going to climb back into that bed and warm my cold feet on him and let him believe for a while longer that the worst thing in our lives was behind us.
He grumbled when my feet found him. He pulled me in anyway, mostly asleep, one heavy arm coming over me and pinning me there, and his heart went slow and even under my ear, a man with nothing in the world to fear.