Page 57 of Falling For You

I stared at her. "You're serious?"

"We did."

Four years. Andy Walsh spent four years with that guy?

"He's the reason I moved across the street. We broke up."

She told me everything. That he was her field training officer. That he asked her out the day the program ended. That he asked her to keep the relationship a secret the whole time.

"About a year in, he told me he was going for sergeant. He needed something big on his record to stand out." She stopped picking at the thread. "He'd been tracking something on his beat for months. Drug activity. He was trying to build it into something big enough to get noticed, but he couldn't put the pieces together. He'd come home and talk about it. What he was seeing, who kept showing up, what didn't add up. One night I noticed a connection he'd been missing. Something in the pattern that tied everything together. After that, the whole thing came together. It turned into the bust that got him promoted."

The night she told me about the colleague who took credit for her work. "I helped that guy get where he is," she'd said, and shook her head like there was more she wasn't saying. I thought she was talking about a bad sergeant. She was talking about the man she'd been seeing for four years.

"When he made sergeant, he told me he couldn't have done it without me." She paused. "I was proud of what we'd accomplished together. I didn't care that my name was never on the report. I didn't need anyone to know. Knowing that we were building something together was enough for me."

Four years. Andy loved this man for four years, helped him build his career, and never once thought she deserved anything for it.

"After that, he changed. Any time another cop came to me for my opinion on something, he'd lose it. At first I thought it was jealousy. Like he didn't want other men around his girlfriend." She stopped. "Looking back, I don't think that's what it was."

She pressed her lips together. Her fingers stopped on the thread. She held still for a second, like she was bracing.

"He cheated on me with a woman named Kim. I know because she texted me a few weeks after we broke up to apologize. She knew the whole time that Elliot and I were together and she still saw him anyway."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

I moved closer and put my arm around her. She didn't pull away. She leaned into me, her forehead against my shoulder. I felt the full weight of her settle against my body like she'd been holding herself up for a long time and had just decided to stop.

"Did you text her back?"

She shook her head against my shoulder. "She can have him."

"But what hurt the most wasn't that he cheated on me." Her voice cracked. "It's what he said after."

Her thumb pressed into her own palm, slow and hard, like she was holding herself in place.

"He turned it around on me. Said the only reason guys at the precinct came to my desk was because I was sleeping with them. Every detective who asked for my read, every officer who came to me for advice. He said that's what it was. Four years of me taking the job seriously and he reduced it to that."

I already didn't think much of Elliot Handler. Now I knew for sure. Whatever small chance he had of ever earning my respect died on that couch.

"As if I didn't already have enough reason to want to punch him." It came out before I thought about it.

She laughed. Small, wet, half-buried in my shoulder. But it was a laugh.

We sat like that for a while. The news had moved on to something else, the volume low enough that I couldn't make out the words anymore.

"I hate myself for it," she said. "But sometimes I still think about the man he used to be. Not whoever the hell he is now."

She was quiet for a second.

"Do you miss her?" she asked. "Your wife?"

"Lillian?" I thought about it. "Sometimes. It was hard at first. Really hard. But Gus was there every day. And Barb. They got me through the worst of it." I looked across the room. "When I look at Birdie, I think about what Lillian would want me to do. Raise our daughter well. Be present. That's the compass."

Andy didn't say anything. I could feel her against my side.

"Does it scare you? Thinking about being with someone again?"

On the TV, the news had ended. Some sitcom was playing. A laugh track going off every few seconds. Neither of us reached for the remote.