Page 75 of Take the Fall
“And Whitfield’s retiring. Personal decision, or so it says.”
Luke looked at me for a second, reading the whole of it off my face the way he does, and didn’t bother with the things a lesser man would have said. He just nodded, slow, taking the weight of it on with me instead of trying to talk me out of carrying it.
“Let’s walk back to work together,” I said.
So we walked. College east into the noise of it, the lunch carts setting up, a man arguing with a delivery bike, the ordinary unkillable racket of a city. We turned south after a while, down toward Cabbagetown, toward home and the division past it. Halfan hour on foot, give or take. I’d have walked twice that on this sunny Toronto day.
“It took the couple of weeks I told you it would,” I said. “Murphy must have leaned on it the whole way.”
“He did. He’s been on the phone about you every day this week. He won’t say so. He told me to mind my own files.” Luke drank his coffee.
I had to look at the road for a second after that.
“Beaumont offered me 52 back,” I said. “On the way out. The whole speech. Better work, better address, the promotion, come home and draw a line under it.”
He stopped walking. Just for a second, but he stopped, and something crossed his face before he could catch it. Not jealousy. Closer to fear. The look of a man assessing whether the thing he’d just got was about to walk back across the city to a glass tower and a better desk.
“What did you tell him.” He kept it even. He didn’t quite manage it.
And God help me, it softened something in me to watch it. This man who’d gone into a laneway against three men with a bat and said it was nothing, thrown sideways by the idea of me taking a posting. I let myself enjoy it for one beat, the grin coming up.
“Relax,” I said. “I told him I prefer the cops at 51. And that Murphy fought for me when he didn’t. Right to his face.”
The breath went out of him slow, like he was hoping I hadn’t caught it. I’d caught all of it and my chest felt warm.
“You thought I’d take it,” I said.
“For a second.” He looked at the road. “It’s the better job, Ryan. On paper. I wasn’t going to be the one who told you not to.”
“It’s a glass tower full of Beaumonts. I’ve had my fill of those for one lifetime.” I knocked the back of my hand against his. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me so better deal with it.”
Luke huffed a laugh through his nose, the last of the tension going out of him. “You’ll have made a friend for life there.”
“I’m collecting them. Whitfield, my father, Beaumont. At this rate I’ll have to start a club of my own.”
“It is a win,” he said. “It’s just the kind that doesn’t feel like one until later. Most of them are.”
“Look at you. So wise, and on a work day.”
“I have my moments.” He bumped my shoulder with his, careful, before letting his arm stay against mine for half a block because there was no one on this stretch who mattered and nothing left to hide from.
That was the part that got me, walking down toward our street in the cold. Not the badge. Him. The fact that I’d burned the whole gilded thing down, the name and the money and the future they’d kept warm for me, and what was left, walking next to me with a paper cup, was the only part I’d ever actually wanted. A job that was mine. A man who came across the city on his morning off so I wouldn’t ride home alone. A bad stair and a third floor and rent that was reasonable.
“Murphy wants to see me when we get in,” Luke said. “Us, I think. He said stop by his office.” He said it lightly, but I’d been reading him too long to miss the thing under it. “Didn’t say what about.”
“Today? On my first day back?”
“That’s the part I keep thinking about.” He kept his eyes ahead. “The probation program runs out around now. Ours. I did the math on it last night.”
The probation program. The reason any of this had started. The brass had taken the disgraced transfer and the detective nobody could read and bolted us together, partner to partner, one shared posting and one cheap shared apartment, the whole thing watched to see if either of us washed out or straightened up.
And I felt the ground tilt a little, walking there in the sun.
Because if the program was ending, the thing the program had handed us could end with it. The apartment. The partnership on paper. The official reason two grown men shared the same space. What we had become, a couple, was new, and it felt about as sturdy as wet paper, and I did not want a man with a clipboard deciding where I slept the same week I’d finally decided it myself.
I must have gone somewhere on my face, because Luke’s hand found mine, and he pulled me sideways off the sidewalk, into the gap between a shut bakery and a brick wall, out of the foot traffic.
“Hey.” His other hand came up to my jaw. “Stop. I can hear you doing it.”
