Page 66 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

I look at the middle distance just past her left ear.

I think about what a scapegoat would look like. A name that could absorb the investigation’s attention for long enough to give things time to resolve themselves. Someone adjacent to the case, someone with a record, someone who couldn’t entirely disprove it. The shape of it assembles in my head with the practised ease of twenty two years of experience, the accumulated knowledge that gives me the specific architecture of how to redirect an investigation.

I dismantle it immediately. I’d rather hand in my badge.

“I’m working on it,” I say.

She holds my gaze for a long moment, long enough to make clear she knows she’s not getting the whole truth and is choosing, for reasons of her own, not to push today.

“Don’t take too long,” she says.

The bench outside the station is three slats of wood on a metal frame and has nothing to recommend it except that it faces the sun at this hour, which is doing something decent with the pavement opposite. I sit on it and I take the paper bag out of my coat pocket.

The note is folded once, the handwriting looping and confident. You look very handsome in that coat. I think you should wear it to bed tonight. With nothing underneath. Also you need to eat more fruit and vegetables. There’s an apple. M x

I read it twice. Then I fold it and put it in my pocket with the same care I’d give something I intend to keep, which is what I intend to do with it, and I take out the sandwich.

It’s good. Really good, the bread doing its job, the prosciutto thin enough, the mozzarella fresh in a way that the place on the corner has never once managed, and I sit in the sun eating a lunch that someone made for me this morning and think about how much ground a person can cover without noticing they’re moving.

I take out my phone.

Me: First lunch break in living memory. The sandwich is the best thing I’ve eaten this week.

The three dots appear before I’ve put the phone down.

Micah: High praise from a man whose fridge contained half a block of butter and one suspicious banana. I’ll take it.

Me: I found the note.

Micah: And?

Me: And nothing. I’m eating the sandwich.

Micah: Sentimental. Is the apple happening?

I look at the apple sitting in the bottom of the bag. I take it out.

Me: The apple is happening.

Micah: I knew you had it in you. The coat thing is happening too. Come home soon.

I put the phone in my pocket. I take a bite of the apple, which is a perfectly good apple, and I look at the pavement and the sun on it and the person across the road trying to reverse park with no success whatsoever, and I think, just for this moment, that things might be alright.

My phone pings.

I’m already smiling when I reach for it. The response already half-composed in my head, something light, something that earns the same lightness back. I pull it out.

The number is withheld. Something is telling me it’s not spam.

The smile stays on my face for a second out of habit and then it doesn’t anymore.

I open it.

He liked the flowers before you interfered.

I stop chewing.

You’re stupid if you think he likes you.