Page 73 of Take the Fall
“They’re not so bad anymore,” I said.
I eased out of him careful, both of us catching a breath at the loss of it, and stripped the condom off and knotted it and dropped it in the bin, and reached for the towel and wiped up the mess he’d spilled on the sheet, the small practical mercy of it while he lay there boneless and let me. Then I rolled him into me, this man who’d given up a kingdom and come home to make a joke about rent, and let myself have it. The weight of him. The warmth. The fact of him staying. He tucked his head under my jaw. I could feel his pulse coming back down.
“Stay,” I said, into his hair. Which was a foolish thing to say to a man who’d just signed his whole life away to be able to.
“I live here now,” he said. “Apparently. I hear the tenant’s a catch.”
“Go to sleep, Ryan.”
He did, eventually, gone heavy and warm and finally still against me. I lay there in the dark of a room that had stopped being only mine, and I thought about Voss’s shaking hand on the cup, and the two men at the top we’d never been able to reach, and the air I kept turning to find him in all week, and how it wasn’t empty anymore.
It came apart clean, I thought. The whole machine. That almost never happens.
And then the better thought, the one I let myself have last, with him breathing slow against my heart: it had come apart clean, and he had come home, and for the first time in longer than I could name, there was nothing left in the dark for either of us to go and do.
I held on, and I slept.
Chapter 21: A Bright New Day?
Ryan
The badge sat on the table between us, face up.
Mine. Same number, same nick near the top where I’d dropped it on a curb my first year and never bothered to buff out. They’d kept it in a drawer somewhere, and now it sat on a laminate table in a room with no window, and a woman from Internal Affairs I’d met twenty minutes ago slid it three inches toward me with one finger, like she was handing back a pen.
“Detective Carlson.” She read from the folder, not to me so much as at the room. “The review of the matters under file is concluded. The findings that formed the basis of your suspension have been set aside. Your warrant card and service badge are reinstated as of today. You’ll return to full duties at 51 Division once the fitness sign-off clears.”
That was the shape of it. A chapter of my life, set aside.
I waited for the rest.
I want to be honest about that, because I’d promised myself I wouldn’t want it. I’d come in braced to refuse the apology if itcame, the way you stiffen for a hit. I had a whole flat little speech built for it.Save it.I’d run the speech in the cab on the way over. And then I sat there in the plastic chair while she squared the pages, and the apology didn’t come, and I found out the speech had been the easy part. The hard part was the room going quiet around the place wheresorryshould have been and never filling it.
They’d thrown me out twice. Once at 52, once at 51. Voss was in a cell. Reeves had signed her statement. Somebody had finally read the 52 files next to the real ones and seen where the dates didn’t match. The whole frame had come apart in daylight, and the conclusion they’d drawn from a frame coming apart was this:the findings have been set aside.Passive. Tidy. Nowhere in any of it the sentence: Sorry,we’ve been wrong.
My father corrected the world the same way. He didn’t apologize, he adjusted. I grew up thinking that was what power sounded like, the flat voice that never has to say it made a mistake, and here it was again across a laminate table, wearing a different suit.
So that was the wound it opened, sitting in that chair. It was that I’d spent my whole childhood waiting for one man to look at me and sayI was wrong about you,one time, with nothing hooked to it, and he never did, and now a whole institution was going to hand me my name back and decline to say it too.
“There’s a sign-off sheet,” she said. “Here, and here.”
I signed here, and here.
And somewhere between the two signatures the strangest thing happened. The want got up, looked around the windowless room, and sat back down. Because I knew, with my pen still on the page, that if she’d said it, if she’d looked at me and saidwe did this to you and we were wrong,it would have changed nothing about what I’d do next. I wasn’t going to do anything for her approval. I just hadn’t noticed I’d put it down.
I picked up the badge. It was lighter than I remembered. They always are.
“There’s one more thing for your awareness as it regards your case,” she said, closing the folder. “Deputy Chief Whitfield has tendered his retirement, effective end of month. A personal decision. I mention it only so you’re not surprised reading it elsewhere.”
A personal decision. I almost laughed.
That was the win. I want to be clear about the size of it and the shape of it both. I got my name back. I did not get justice. Those turned out to be two different countries.
“Thank you,” I said, because my grandmother raised me to, and stood up.
I clipped the badge back on my belt where it had lived. It settled into the old worn spot like it had never been gone, and I hated how good that felt, and I let myself feel it anyway.
He was waiting for me in the corridor, which was the first wrong thing.
