Page 68 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“I was going to tell you,” he says.

I hang up.

I look at the phone in my hand.

The sun is still on the pavement. A woman walks past with a dog on a lead, and the dog is very interested in a crisp packet near the bench, and she tugs it along. The world is carrying on at its usual pace, absolutely indifferent.

I stand up. I walk to the wall at the end of the bench. I press the screen of my phone against the brick, with all the pressure that’s squeezing my lungs, and the screen goes dark and doesn’t come back, and something scatters across the ground that I don’t look at.

I stand there for a moment.

Then I walk back inside. I sit at my desk. I look at my computer screen. But I can’t see a thing.

Chapter thirty-one

Lennox

Isit at my desk until half past seven.

Not working. I haven’t been working since I came back inside. I’ve been looking at the screen and occasionally moving the mouse when the screen saver threatens to start, and I’ve been doing that for six hours, and at half past seven something in me decides that’s long enough and I get my coat and I leave.

The drive home is quiet. I don’t put the radio on. I don’t think about anything in particular, or I think about everything in a way that’s indistinguishable from thinking about nothing, the specific numb that comes after something has happened and you haven’t caught up with it yet. The streets do their evening thing around me. I drive them the way I’ve driven them hundreds of times, and I don’t see any of it.

I stop at a phone shop and buy the cheapest handset they have, because I’m a detective and being unreachable is not something I can afford indefinitely, and the woman behind the counter doesn’t comment on my face or what I’m clearly replacing or the time of the evening, which I appreciate.

I call the station and give them my new number.

I park on my street.

I sit in the car for a moment before I go in.

The light is off in the flat, which could mean he’s asleep, or it could mean something else, and I know before I’ve opened the door which one it is, the same way I knew before I opened the text, before the three seconds, before any of it, the way you know things you’ve been trying not to know.

I put my key in the lock.

The flat is dark and quiet and the particular quality of the quiet is the same quality it had before he came, the quality of a space that only has one person’s things in it, and I know before I turn the light on.

But I turn the light on.

The key is on the counter.

It’s sitting in the middle of the counter, not pushed to the edge or left by the kettle, placed deliberately in the center, where I’ll see it the moment I walk in. It’s catching the light from the overhead. Small and silver and cold looking and I know exactly what it cost him to put it there rather than take it with him, the same way I know what it cost him to leave without a note.

I gave him a note when I left. Gone to work. Back later. The coffee beans are in the cupboard above the kettle.

He gave me nothing. Because nothing is kinder than a lie, and there wasn’t a true thing he could put on paper right now that wouldn’t make something worse. I understand the logic of it. I’m standing in my hallway with my coat still on, understanding the logic of it, and it doesn’t help at all.

I don’t touch the key.

I go to the bathroom first. The shelf above the sink has a gap in it now, the specific gap of absent things, the Ouai spray and whatever else he had lined up along there over the last few days. His toothbrush was on the left side of the glass. The glass is there. The toothbrush isn’t. I look at that for a moment, and then I close the bathroom door.

The sofa. The crime thriller isn’t on the arm where he left it last night. I look at the arm of the sofa where it was.

The charger is gone from the counter by the kitchen. The bag I never saw him unpack is gone from the bedroom floor. He’s been here for days, and there’s almost no trace of him left, because he was careful about it, or because he travels light, or because he understood that leaving things behind would be its own kind of cruelty.

The lamp is still angled the way he had it.

I look at it for a long time. It’s pointing slightly right of where I had it before, the angle that works for reading from the sofa when you’re sitting in the middle rather than the left, where I sit. I reach for it. My hand is on the stem.