Page 27 of Take the Fall
“Come home,” he said into the quiet, taking it for the start of a yes. “Let the thing run its course and stop bleeding yourself over it. Come home and take the place your grandfather built this firm to hold for you. Give it a year and no one remembers there was ever a question. You won’t be a man the police were finished with. You’ll be back as a Branford who gave some years to public life and came back to his own. That is the offer. It is a great deal kinder than the one the review has waiting for you.”
The wordnowas so close to the front of my mouth that I nearly said it before he finished. I held it. I let him finish.
Then I said it.
“No.”
He held my eyes. The gray in his was very even, very steady, the eyes of a man who has heardnoin many registers and does not let it move him until he has decided how much of his own position it actually changes.
“That’s your answer.”
“That’s my answer.”
“For today.”
“For any day you ask it.” My voice had come up and I let it climb. “You have been wrong about exactly one thing in thirty-one years, and it happens to be the only thing that ever mattered. I am not playing at this. I am not wearing it to spite you. I’m good at it. Not good for a man with my name. Good. The way you’re good at what you do, except I didn’t inherit it and I didn’t buy it. I walked into a squad room at twenty-three and knew, before I had the word for knowing, that I was finally standing in the one place that was mine.” The words came faster, the control going out of them. “You call it charm. You call it needing to beliked. You have never once watched me work, so you don’t get to tell me what it is. It is the only room I have ever stood in where I was not performing for you, or for anyone. You think that’s the flaw. You’ve got it backwards. It’s the one part of me you never managed to get your hands on.”
He started to speak. I didn’t let him.
“And you just told me you asked a man to make sure I’d go under.” I leaned in over the table. “You don’t do that to a son you’re sure can’t swim. You do it to one you’re afraid will.”
He was very still through all of it. Not tense. Not defensive. Still the way a man is still when he’s decided the current phase of the conversation has arrived where he expected it to and is waiting for it to complete.
“Are you finished,” he said.
“I’m not finished. Your hands off it now. No more calls. Not to sink me, not to save me, not to make sure nobody else does either.”
“What do you mean by that.”
“I mean you stay out of it. You, and the friend you just told me about, and anyone else who’d take your call. Leave the review to run clean and land where it lands.”
“And if I told you that would produce a result you won’t like.”
“Then I’ll live with the result. I’d rather the process run clean and go against me than run dirty and come out your way.” I put both hands flat on the table, the way I’d practiced keeping them. “And I want the people at my division left alone.”
Something shifted in his expression. Very small. Less than a raise of the eyebrow. More than nothing.
“Your division,” he said, with a specific, careful weight.
“Everyone at 51 Division. Anyone connected to the review, connected to me, connected to my case. You leave them alone. You make no contact, you apply no pressure, you put no callin to anyone who could make their professional lives more complicated. That’s what I want from this meeting.”
He was looking at me with something I’d rarely seen on his face. Something assessing, not hostile. The look of a man recalibrating an estimate he thought he had right.
“What is it that’s keeping you there,” he said.
“The job.”
“The job.” He didn’t make it an argument. He made it a question, and the question had the particular shape his questions always had. A space in it that expected you to fill it, the way a room with a fireplace expects you to come in from the cold. “You’ve always been good at the work. I’ve never denied that. But a man who is only attached to his work does not phone a father he hasn’t spoken to in years and come across the city the same afternoon to ask me to leave his division alone. He looks after himself. He protects his own position. He doesn’t come here worried about the people around him.” A pause. “There’s something else keeping you in Cabbagetown. I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to pretend I don’t see it.”
“Stop.”
“I’m not asking you to name it.”
“Good. Because you don’t get it.”
“No,” he said. Quietly, without argument. “I probably don’t.” He held my eyes for another moment, and I held his, and the thing we weren’t saying sat in the middle of the table between us like a third presence that neither of us acknowledged. Then he picked up his napkin, folded it once, set it aside. “The offer stands. That’s what I want you to carry out of here. Not as a threat and not as an ultimatum. As a fact about what is available to you, whenever you decide you want it.” He stood. The performance of a meeting concluded properly. “I meant what I said. I’m not your enemy, Ryan.”
“Then act like it.” I stood too. “Stay out of it. No more calls, either direction. Let it run.”
