Page 96 of In the Dark of the Past

“Good.” I exhaled. “Because I don’t have it to give right now.”

“I know.”

“But I’m here.”

Something moved through his face. I saw both relief and grief. The combination of a person who had been told the truth about where they stood and found it was more than they’d let themselves hope for.

He stepped back from the doorway.

I went inside.

He made coffee, and I sat at the kitchen table and watched him do it, taking in the familiar mechanics of the pot and the filter and the exact amount of grounds he measured without looking at the scoop. A person’s kitchen habits were one of the most genuinely intimate things about them. They happened below the level of performance.

He set a mug in front of me and sat across the table.

We didn’t talk about the case.

That was a conscious choice we were both making, silently, and we both knew it. It wasn’t because the case didn’t matter—it mattered enormously—but because the case had been all we’d talked about lately, and this hour was for something else. For being two people in a kitchen instead of two people inside a conspiracy.

“Tell me something that has nothing to do with any of this,” I said.

He considered it. “My personal truck’s been making a noise for three months that I keep telling myself is the heat shield.”

“Is it the heat shield?”

“Almost certainly not.”

I almost smiled. “What do you think it actually is?”

“Something expensive.”

“That’s very specific.”

“I’ve been a cop for a long time. I know how to assess a situation.”

And there it was. A small, ordinary thing, with both of us recognizable inside it. The ease we’d always had together, the one that had survived nine years of absence and this reunion of revelations and one conversation in a dead woman’s bedroom that had taken apart an entire story.

Still there.

I looked down at my coffee.

“I’m going to be angry for a while,” I said. “Not constantly, and not at you specifically every minute. But it’s going to come and go, and I need you to know that when it does, it doesn’t mean I’m leaving.”

“Okay,” he said.

“And I need you to try not to fix it when it comes. I need you to just let me have it.”

“I can do that.”

“I know you’ll want to fix it,” I said. “That’s what you do with things that are broken. I’m not broken. I’m just…working through something real. And the working through is mine to do. You can be there while I do it. You just can’t do it for me.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I’ve been trying to fix it for too long,” he said. “Not with you—you were gone. Just…internally. Building a version of the story that made it survivable.”

“I know,” I said.

“I don’t think I can stop wanting to fix it.”