Page 36 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“Oh,” Micah says softly. Just that.

“I keep thinking,” I start, and then I stop, because what I’m thinking isn’t something I should say out loud to anyone, least of all him.

“Tell me,” he says.

“It’s not appropriate.”

“Tell me anyway.”

I look at the ceiling. “I sat here after she left and I felt glad. That those men are dead. I felt glad and I couldn’t find the outrage for it. And I’m supposed to be the person who finds the outrage. That’s the whole job. That’s the whole point.”

He’s quiet for a moment.

“You’re not glad they’re dead,” he says. “You’re glad someone cared about those boys. That’s not the same thing.”

I don’t answer that. I’m not sure he’s wrong. I’m not sure being right makes it any better.

“Are you still at work?” he asks.

“Interview room.”

“Go home,” he says. “When you can. And eat something that isn’t from a vending machine, because I know that’s what you’re going to do otherwise.”

Something in me loosens without permission.

“You can’t know that.”

“I know you’ve got a certain self-punishing streak.” A pause. “It’s one of the things that makes you, well, you. It’s also the thing that’s going to break you if you let it.”

I sit with that for a second.

“Micah.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know why I called you.”

Another pause, warmer this time. “I do,” he says quietly. “It’s okay.”

I’m not sure it is. I’m not sure anything is, right now, in this room, with a cold cup of tea on the table and the ghost of Oliver Osei’s name sitting somewhere in my chest where it doesn’t have anywhere to go.

But his voice is warm in my ear, and outside the window London is doing what it always does, carrying on without asking whether it should, and for right now that’s enough to keep me vertical.

For right now, that’s everything.

Chapter seventeen

Lennox

I’m staring at the ceiling. I’ve been staring at it for an hour. Maybe longer. The dark has that particular quality it gets in the small hours, thicker than regular dark, the kind you become aware of as a physical thing rather than just an absence of light.

I’m thinking about what I admitted to myself today.

I’m rooting for the Vigilante.

I turned it over all evening, the way you turn something over when you know it’s going to cut you and you do it anyway, because you’d rather the cut than the not knowing.

I sat with it through dinner, through the news, through whatever was on television afterward that I watched without seeing a single frame of. I’m rooting for the Vigilante. I felt satisfaction when those men died.