Page 61 of Take the Fall
“Work,” I said.
“Work,” he repeated.
“Murphy needs a statement witnessed and signed. One of my past cases. If it isn’t done in front of the right person it bounces, and he wants it clean.” The lie came out smooth and whole, and I hated how good I was at it, how the years of keeping things shut had taught me to hide a truth inside a single sentence. “Couple of hours. Desk stuff. Won’t be long.”
He held it. I watched him turn it over and find the seams, because there were seams, and he was built to find them. Desk stuff doesn’t have a window that shuts in hours. A signature doesn’t take a man off bed rest at a run. Paperwork doesn’t put that voice in Murphy’s mouth.
He had all of it. I saw him have it.
And he set it down.
“Okay,” he said.
That was the worst lie of the lot, because it was the one he believed least and forgave anyway. He handed it back to me wrapped in trust, a man who trusted nobody choosing to make an exception of me, and it went down onto the pile of things I was going to have to answer for.
“You’re sure you’re up to it,” he said. Not the case. The body. He came and put his hand flat on my chest again, the good side.“Your arm locked up twice. If it goes, you call me, I don’t care what’s on the desk. I’ll come and get you.”
“I’ll call you.”
“And you eat.” He was already moving, pressing a banana and a granola bar into my hand at the door like I was heading into a double shift instead of walking out on him. “Take these. Don’t argue.”
Even the nagging was a kindness I hadn’t earned that morning. I let him fuss. I got my coat on over the marks and over the lie and over the best morning I’d had in more years than I wanted to count.
“Luke.” He caught my arm at the door. The soft thing back in his face, the shy thing, the thing he’d worn when he woke up. “Be safe and come back home. That’s the whole message. Sign your form, come home, and we’ll do the rest of the morning we didn’t get to.”
Come back home.Like it was simple. Like it was a thing I got to keep.
I should have told him then. I’ve stood in that doorway since, more times than I’ll admit to, with a clean run at it. Three sentences.It wasn’t muggers. It’s a case I can’t talk about. And it runs straight through your family.Three sentences, and the whole of it would have been his, and what came after might have been a kinder story.
I didn’t say them. I told myself a few more hours. I told myself Reeves, the window, the man at the top, the case before the comfort, protect him until it’s done. Every word of it true. None of it the reason.
“I’ll be back as soon as possible,” I said.
He kissed me at the door, careful of the split lip, soft and certain, and let me go. I went down the stairs and out into the cold with hiscome homestill in my ears.
Chapter 18: The Seam
Ryan
The thing nobody tells you about working this job for quite some time is that the part of you that notices never shuts off. Not when you go home. Not when you fall in love. It keeps running in the back, quiet, picking up the small wrong things one at a time, and it never tells you what they mean. It just makes you uneasy.
It had been working on me for days. I couldn’t have told you what about. I didn’t know a single thing. I only had the feeling, the one you learn to trust in this work and that I’d been refusing to, the one that says something here is not what it’s pretending to be.
The way Murphy went vague at the hospital and stayed vague. The way Luke laid out the sketchy reason this morning... Luke’s phone always face-down on the table lately, and the way he’d got up to take his calls in the other room, because getting up would have admitted there was a reason to leave the room.
And the math that wouldn’t close. He’d been beaten half to pieces last night. The doctor had said rest. And Murphy, whoknew exactly what shape Luke was in, who had stood in that hospital corridor the same night and fed me bullshit when I came running, had called him in at ten in the morning for paperwork that couldn’t wait an hour.
Paperwork doesn’t have a window. That’s the part I keep coming back to. The thing in my chest had been screaming since the hospital, and every day I’d turned it down, because the alternative was looking the man I loved in the face and asking him what he was hiding, and I did not want to be a man who did that. I’d wanted one ordinary morning before I went and found the thing that would take it apart.
An hour after he left, I put my coat on and went after him.
I didn’t decide it so much as catch myself doing it, already on the stairs.
I was at the division before I could blink, went in the side door. I didn’t stop at the desk. Doyle said my name, bright, and I went past him like he was a coat rack. Somebody else said something and I didn’t hear it. The bullpen did its morning noise, phones and the copier and a man somewhere doing his complainant voice, and I walked through all of it with my eyes on one door.
Murphy’s office. Blinds down. Light on behind them.
I didn’t knock. I have manners most days. I left them in the hall, put my hand flat on the door, and pushed it open.
