Page 58 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

The problem is that the past version of me didn’t care about the future, didn’t believe there was one.

I was never going to walk away from this. I’ve been more careful than anyone had any reason to expect, but I was never under any illusion that careful meant forever. The evidence exists. It accretes. A detail here, a connection there, eventually someone paying attention in the right direction at the right moment. It was always going to catch up with me. The only variable was always when.

Stopping tonight doesn’t change that equation. Everything that’s already happened still happened. The existing evidence still exists. Stopping doesn’t unmake any of it. It just means I go to prison with the list unfinished and David Carrow in his Surrey house, and those two facts together are something I cannot live with any more than I could live with the alternative.

So I put the plates on the table and I pour the coffee.

I hear him before I see him. The particular shuffle of someone who is upright but not yet fully committed to the concept. I’m in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room when he appears from the bedroom, still in what he slept in, hair conducting its own agenda, approximately sixty percent present.

His eyes find the table first. The plates, the fruit, the coffee. Then they find me, leaning in the doorway with the mug I made for him, and something happens to his face that I am going to be thinking about for a very long time.

He looks like a man seeing something he had stopped believing was possible. Like something he filed under not for people like him, not something that actually happens, has just materialized in his own living room on a Wednesday morning, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with it yet.

I hold the mug out.

He crosses the room and takes it, and for a second neither of us says anything, and I smile at him, and he looks at me over the rim like he’s looking at something he’s decided to keep.

I have never in my life felt so completely, so hopelessly, so irreversibly conflicted.

Tonight I have an appointment.

This morning I have him.

I don’t know what to do with either of those things.

Chapter twenty-seven

Lennox

He arrived yesterday.

It doesn’t feel like yesterday. It feels like the flat has always had his charger on the kitchen counter, his shampoo in my bathroom, the embarrassing crime thriller book on the arm of the sofa with a receipt from a Hackney coffee shop tucked inside as a bookmark. It feels like the reading lamp has always been angled slightly differently because he prefers it that way.

One day, and already the particular small reorganization of a life that happens when a person becomes part of it, and I have found, to no great surprise, that I’m not fighting any of it.

He made breakfast this morning, actual breakfast, on my ancient cooker with mismatched pans and ingredients he ordered before I was even awake. He stood in my galley kitchen and made it with the same focused ease he brings to everything, and I sat at the table in the living room and drank coffee that was considerably better than anything I make myself, and felt, for about an hour, like a person who has someone to be with.

I’m reading the news on my tablet, or I’m holding it and looking at the words, which is not quite the same thing, when something in the quality of the room changes.

I notice it before I know what it is. Micah has been on the sofa for the last hour, editing something on his laptop, half listening to the television, the comfortable quiet of an evening that has decided what it wants to be. And then, around seven, he goes somewhere inside himself. A small private withdrawal, barely visible, the kind you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention.

I am, of course, always paying attention.

He closes the laptop. He sits for a moment. Then he goes to the bedroom.

I carry on reading.

He comes back fifteen minutes later wearing a jacket I haven’t seen before and dark clothes that have nothing distinctive about them, nothing that would earn a second glance or help someone describe him later. My chest does something I have the sense not to examine too closely.

“I have to go out for a bit,” he says. “A friend is having a bit of a crisis.”

His voice is even. His eyes are slightly too steady, the look of someone maintaining a specific expression rather than just having one. I have spent years watching people tell me things that aren’t entirely true, and I know exactly what it looks like, and I know exactly what this is.

“Is everything alright?” I say.

“Should be. Just needs someone to talk to.” He’s fidgeting with the jacket, checking his phone with the particular focus of a man making sure he has somewhere to be. “I won’t be late.”

“Which friend?”