Chapter 16 In the Open #4
He did it without hurry, a man getting up from a desk, and he didn’t look at Wright at all.
He looked at me. Across the bullpen, over the heads of everyone we worked with, he found me and asked, without a word, the thing we’d promised each other in that kitchen: that neither of us would ever decide for the other again.
It’s yours too. Say no and I’ll bury it.
I’d spent most of my life being careful even when rumors circled.
I stood up, and I heard my own chair roll back, and I crossed the bullpen with every face in the division turning as I went.
I came to stand next to him at the bare desk by the copier.
It was the longest walk of my life, and it took about four seconds.
“He’s right,” Ryan said. To the room. His voice even, carrying, unhurried.
“First true thing he’s ever said.” He looked over at Wright then, one time, like something he was walking past. Then he looked back at me, and the rest of the room went out of his face.
“I love him. We’ve been together for months, and Murphy’s known.
And Adam Wright remains an asshole until the very end. Remember that.”
And he took my hand. In front of the superintendent and the Standards officers and Brar and Reid and Chen and the whole watching room, Ryan Carlson took my hand, laced his fingers through mine, and held on.
“Questions go through him,” Ryan added, nodding sideways at me.
It wasn’t much of a joke. It didn’t have to be.
The laugh that went through the floor was mostly relief, a room finding out at the same moment that the thing was allowed to be ordinary.
Wright shouted something else from the stairwell door.
I genuinely don’t know what it was. It had no shape by the time it reached us, just a voice going away down a stairwell, getting smaller, and then the door closed on it.
What I remember about the minute after is the ordinary noise coming back.
A phone rang at the far end, and somebody answered it, because somebody had to.
Chen turned back around, and I heard the mutter, finally, pitched to be heard, and two desks laughed, and that was the whole verdict of the floor on all those years of him and four months of us. Finally, and back to work.
Reid crossed over with his hand out before the laugh had even died. He shook Ryan’s hand, then mine, and he grinned at me, wide, delighted, nothing held back.
“Worst-kept secret in the division,” he said, which was a lie, and a kind one. Nobody had known. I think he just needed us to believe it had cost nothing.
“You could have told me,” Chen said, arriving behind him, arms crossed, not meaning it as a question.
“No,” I said. “I couldn’t.”
“This morning. When I offered you my cousin. You let me hang there!”
“You offered him a paralegal,” I said. “He had a superintendent, a forensic analyst, and Murphy. Not many people offered anything today. I won’t forget that you did.”
Chen looked at me a moment longer, and then the arms came down. “The big one pays for drinks,” Chen said, to Ryan, with a chin at me. “He’s been leaving me on read for a week.”
Doyle didn’t come over. Doyle caught my eye from two rows down, nodded once, the smallest thing, and went back to work, and that was Doyle’s whole speech, and it said more than most of the floor managed.
Murphy came out of the glass room last, folder under his arm, and stopped at Ryan’s desk on his way past. He looked at our hands, still joined, and found nothing he could object to, which seemed to irritate him.
“Your gun comes back tomorrow,” he said to Ryan. “The complaint won’t survive its author. The punch is a different conversation, and we will be having it, in my office, at length.” He looked at me for a second, then back at Ryan. “Don’t ever hand me one of those again.”
“No, sir,” Ryan said, and meant it about as much as he ever meant anything he said to authority, and Murphy knew that, and left it, because it was the best either of them was going to get.
The floor came back to life around us in pieces, and we stood at the bare desk in the middle of it, and I waited for it.
The fear. The cold drop that had come every time being known got too close, the reflex that had folded me up small once in an evidence room with my heart slamming.
Every face out there knew now. It was done and could never be undone, the exact thing I’d built my whole careful life against.
It didn’t come. I stood there holding his hand in front of everyone, and there was nothing.
There was still a weight in me somewhere. I’d carried it so long I’d stopped feeling it as weight at all. It hadn’t moved, and I didn’t reach for it. But the fear went down the stairwell with him.
Ryan squeezed my hand once and let it go so we could both pretend to work, and as he turned back to his photocopies I caught it again, the thing from the binder, some last piece of the day he was keeping to himself, and he was careful with it, the way he was careful with things that were mine.
Whatever it was, it could keep until home. Everything could keep until home now. That was the part I couldn’t get used to.