Page 77 of Take the Fall

He looked up. And he smiled.

It was a bad smile. Not the snarl. Something almost pleased, almost kind, which on Saunders read like a dog standing on its hind legs.

“Welcome back, Carlson,” he said. “Genuinely. Enjoy it.” He turned back to his screen, and then, like an afterthought, the worst part: “Things are about to get real interesting around here. You picked a good week to come home.”

I stood there a second. Something in it didn’t sit right, the way a thing doesn’t when a man who hates you wishes you well and means it.

“What’s that supposed to mean,” I said.

“You’ll see.” He didn’t look up again.

I let it go. I shouldn’t have, but I had a homecoming on, and Luke had a hand light at my back steering me on, and Murphy’s door was open down the end of the bullpen with the light on behind it.

Murphy’s office seemed even more hectic with an overloaded desk and strewn files. Other things didn’t change such as the same dead plant on the filing cabinet that he’d been not-watering since before I got here, the same blinds, up today, the morning light coming in gray and ordinary. He was behind the desk, and he stood when we came in, which he doesn’t do usually, and that was the second wrong thing of the day.

The first was the man already standing at the window with his back half to us.

Mid-thirties, give or take. Lean, a runner’s build, the regulation cut grown out a careful half-inch, the kind of face that knows exactly how good-looking it is and has learned to bank it. He had a smile ready, the way you have a smile ready when you’ve rehearsed the room before you walked into it. And the smile wasn’t for me.

It was for Luke.

I felt Luke go still beside me. Not the cop stillness, the one he puts on like a coat. The other one. The one a body does when an old wound gets hit.

“Luke.” Wright said it warm, easy, the rehearsed weight all the way through it, his back half to Murphy so only Luke and I could see the rest of his face under the smile. “It’s been a long time.” A beat, perfectly placed. “I’m Adam Wright. I was Detective Hawley’s partner. Before the transfer.”

I saw the rest of it. I saw what the sentence was for, and who it was aimed at, and the small bright thing in Wright’s eyes that was checking to see where it landed. I saw Luke take the hand because there was nothing else a man could do in that room with his inspector watching, and I saw the cost of it move once across his jaw and disappear.

So I did the only thing I had. I stepped in, easy, back in form, coming up smooth and certain, and I put my hand out next.

“Welcome back to 51 Division, Sergeant,” I said.

And the smile turned to me, and the handshake held a beat longer than it should have, and that’s when I remembered, or more correctly, I connected the dots. Wright...

I remembered Saunders, nasty insinuations, loud across the bullpen with his audience watching.The Bear likes pretty boys. Or so the rumors say.And then, warming to it:Everyone knows why your last partner requested transfer. Couldn’t handle how you looked at him, could he? And now they’ve given you a pretty new toy.I’d stepped in and shut his mouth that day and never once stopped to think about the man buried in the taunt. The last partner. The one who’d asked to be moved.

And Luke, in the kitchen that morning, telling me:Come to bed and I’ll tell you my whole sordid history.A past love story he’d half-handed me before the phone rang and he put the lid back on it. His last love. The story he never finished telling me.

Here it was, finishing itself. In a good suit, by Murphy’s window, with its hand in mine and its smile bent at the man I loved. That wasn’t only Luke’s former work partner. It was his former lover.

Ryan and Luke have stopped running. After everything it cost them, they finally have the thing neither believed he’d ever get tokeep: each other, and a small, ordinary life that’s started to feel like home.

Now the past has come to test the one thing they’ve never quite managed: trusting each other with all of it, the tender and the ruined both. Loving each other was never going to be the hard part. Staying is.