Chapter 12 Playing the Part
Ryan
By the time Wright came down the sidewalk with his gym bag on his shoulder, I already looked like a man coming apart, and the ugly part was how little of it I’d had to fake.
I was parked on a street. There was a gym up the block with its name painted big across the glass, and Wright kept to it every Saturday, out at the same time, alone. He liked being seen taking care of himself. I’d counted on that.
I didn’t look at him. That mattered more than anything else I’d do in the next hour.
If I turned and caught his eye and then got up and left, he’d smell it.
He’d start asking himself why I happened to be here, on his Saturday, on his block.
If he didn’t know I’d seen him, he had nothing to be suspicious of.
I was only breaking down in public, alone, on the worst morning of my life, and here came the one person who’d enjoy it most. Wright wouldn’t leave that on the sidewalk. Not him.
So, I watched him in the side mirror, and when he was close enough that he couldn’t miss me, I got out too fast, like I couldn’t stand to sit in it another second, and I stood there with a hand over my mouth looking at nothing.
In the edge of my sight he stopped walking.
I couldn’t see his face and I didn’t try, but he didn’t start again.
He stood there. Then I turned and went into the bar on the corner, and I never once looked his way.
I knew the bar. The man who owned it had known me back then, and it stayed dead on a Saturday until dark, and there was a door in the back that opened on the alley if I ever needed one.
I’d picked it when I discovered Wright’s pattern and I took the booth against the far wall where I could watch the front, and I pressed my palms onto the table, so they’d stop shaking, as I waited for the door.
The only thing I had going for me was tonight.
Tonight I was going to sit Luke down and tell him everything, from the envelope to this bar, and let him decide what to do with me.
I’d stopped being able to breathe around the secret.
All week I’d come home and been fine, cooked him dinner, asked about his shift, gone to sleep under his arm.
He throws it over me the second he’s out, every night, and he’d swear he doesn’t.
I lay under it all week with everything I hadn’t told him, and never said a word.
Smiling at him had gotten easy, and the easy was the part I couldn’t do one more day of it.
So tonight it ended. Which left this morning for the other kind of lying, the useful kind, and I meant to spend every minute of it before I gave it up for good.
My father taught me to cry on cue the year I turned nine.
He said a man who could turn it on and off could get anything he wanted out of anyone, and where I grew up that mattered more than the money, and there was plenty of money.
I’d spent my whole adult life not being him, and now I was going to be exactly him for one hour, for a man he’d have admired.
The door opened and let in daylight, then closed, and Wright stood just inside it while his eyes adjusted. Then he found me. He came across slow with the bag still on his shoulder and stopped at the end of the booth, and his face was doing worry, the kind that looked completely real.
I looked up and let him watch it hit me, the one man alive I least wanted to see, here, catching me like this. The flinch cost me nothing. Half of it was true.
“Detective.” He said it like he’d found a friend. “I didn’t expect to see you all the way out here.”
“I came here to be alone. So fuck off!”
I meant every word of it, which was the point of saying it.
He’d known what I thought of him since the day I stood up on the floor and said it in front of everyone, and if I’d sat here soft and glad of the company he’d have known something was wrong with me.
The hate was the true thing. It was also the reason he’d stay.
He didn’t go.
“There’s the true personality I suspected you had,” he said, low and pleased. “I’ve wanted to meet him properly since my transfer.”
“Damn you’re an asshole. Get out!”
“You don’t want me to.” He slid into the booth across from me, in no hurry, like I’d held the seat for him.
“Look at you. You drove to the far end of the city to fall apart where nobody would see, and the man you hate most in the world sits down across from you, and you stay. You don’t want to be alone, Detective.
You want someone to scream at. I’ll take it. I can afford to.”
I gave him nothing back, and behind my face I marked it, cold.
There it was already. The hate hadn’t chased him off.
It was why he stayed. He wasn’t done with me yet, and watching me finish breaking was worth his whole morning to him, and he wasn’t going to miss it.
Good. He wanted the fight still in me. I’d give it to him, and then I’d let him have the end of it.
And if he wondered what I was doing out on his street on a Saturday, he didn’t wonder long.
A wreck this good was worth more to him than the answer, and I’d built the whole morning on that being true.
He raised a hand and ordered himself a coffee and, without asking, a whiskey for me, one decent colleague looking after another where the owner could watch him do it.
I wrapped my hand around the glass and drank just enough to sell it.
The one thing I couldn’t afford to lose this morning was thinking straight. Everything else I’d give him.
He let the quiet run for a while. When he spoke again it was soft, the voice he’d use on a family that had just lost somebody.
“You’re not well, Detective. Everyone sees it.
You come in gray and you leave worse. You had a beer at lunch last week, and by the end of shift half the division had heard, and worried.
Reid’s stopped asking if you’re all right, because you never answer him.
That’s where you are now. They keep a quiet count of you, and not one of them will say it to your face.
” He tapped the cup without drinking from it.
“You’d know what they’re saying. You’re the one behind it.”
“I’ve never said a word about you.” Not a flicker of the kindness moved.
“That’s the part you can’t stand, isn’t it?
I’ve never once had to. You did that all by yourself.
The man who came back cleared, and then came apart tainted.
All I do is show up and stay decent to you where they can see it, every single day.
Every time I do, you look a little worse to them and I look a little nicer. You built that yourself.”
I sat there and took it, because the man I was being had no answer to it, and neither did I. He wasn’t wrong about a single piece of it.
“So no, I won’t be leaving you alone,” he said. “The rest of them will, in the end. That’s the part that should keep you up at night, Detective. Not me.”
I took a swallow instead of answering and let him think he’d found the soft place. Then I took the copies of the pictures out of my coat and set them on the table. My hand wasn’t steady, and I didn’t try to make it be.
“Somebody put these under our door in the night,” I said. “While we were asleep twenty feet away. You know what’s in them.”
He looked at them for a long moment. He didn’t touch it. His face did the surprise, then the sorrow, both of them clean, neither of them real.
“I didn’t send you those.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“Then why carry them with you?”
“Because it pissed me off. Because I wanted to shove them in your face.” My voice broke on the word. “It’s you with your mouth on him. I’ve been carrying them around for days. I take them into the bathroom at work so he won’t catch me looking.”
He started to tell me it wasn’t what it looked like. I didn’t let him finish. My hand came down flat on the table hard enough that the owner glanced up, and I let the sound of it pull my voice up after it.
“Don’t you sit there and tell me what it is! I have looked at it until I can see it with my eyes shut! Every version of it! Him leaning in. Him not pulling away.” The breath went then, for real, and I let it take me the rest of the way down.
Wright lifted two fingers toward the bar, an easy little motion, he’s all right, I’ve got him, and the owner went back to his paper like he’d been asked to. A stranger shouting in the back booth, and one gesture from Wright settled the room.
“All right,” he said, gentle again. “You’ve looked at them long enough. So ask me.”
That was the whole morning, right there.
If he decided I was too composed under it, too clever, I’d walk out with nothing and he’d know I’d come for something.
So I didn’t argue. I did the worse thing.
I broke the rest of the way, in front of him, on purpose, and it came easier than it had any right to, because all I had to do was stand in the parts that were true.
I put my face down into my hands and let him hear my breathing go wrong, and I stayed there, out in the open, where he could have all of it.
“There’s nobody else I can ask.” It came out wet and I left it that way.
“Everyone I’d take it to is already yours.
You saw to that. I say your name out loud and I’m the jealous one who lost it on the floor.
So, it’s you. That’s what I’ve got left.
The only person who’ll tell me the truth about my own life is the one who did this to it. ”
He watched it happen, and he believed it, because it was true, only not the way he was hearing it.
He decided I was no threat to him, and I watched him decide it.
He slid a paper napkin across the table with one finger, and I took it and wiped my face with the thing his hand had just touched, and I’d have done a great deal worse than that for the hour it bought me.
“How long.” I made it ugly. “How long has he been going to you behind my back?”