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When she hears Chris singing, it's like a kick to the gut. At first Lucy isn't sure what she's hearing. Then it hits her, and then it soaks in, and then it stays.
Most of the time, in her ordinary life, she's an ordinary person. She gets up, she goes to work. She goes out to dinner with friends and watches movies while Tamara scrolls her phone in the background and provides snarky commentary. She worries over some of the victims she meets at work and regrets moments in the day where she moved a moment too slow or made a decision too quickly. She doomscrolls at three in the morning and regrets it when she's on shift; takes the ragging from her fellow officers. “Up late with the boyfriend?”, Smitty has been known to ask, and Lucy always brushes it off with a laugh.
Ordinary, in other words.
Today, she's not an ordinary person.
It's ridiculous, Lucy thinks. Nearly two years of therapy, meditation, sitting with her discomfort, and talking through her feelings like she's going to get an “A” grade for them. Keeping to a routine; planning things with her friends when she feels isolated.
It's kind of funny, kind of laughable. How quickly it all gets stripped away.
Tamara leaves with her cute boy, and Lucy walks out of the office with her arm threaded through Chris's. She's smiling at him, he's goofing around, making plans for the evening she knows she can't keep. She's tired, she tells him when they get to her car. The day's really taken it out of her and she's working tomorrow. Leftovers and HGTV really seem like the best plan for her night.
He offers to share that too. He really is a nice guy – he doesn't expect much from her, he doesn't criticize her, he's fun to be around and kind.
Lucy smiles again and apologizes. “I think I really just need to sleep,” she says.
“You're sure you'll be okay?” he asks her earnestly. “I don't know, you've had a pretty rough day.”
I've had rougher, she thinks but doesn't say. Instead she smiles again. She's bright and cheerful as the sun.
“I'm fine,” she tells him. “Really, I'm okay.”
He doesn't know her very well, she muses as she drives away.
There's a giant pink teddy bear in her closet. A jar of forgotten sun tea on her windowsill; it will have gone bitter by now. A printed photo of her and Nolan and Jackson framed on her wall, all of them in long sleeves and smiling like the future will never happen. Her apartment seems off and liminal, dust motes circling, like no-one actually lives here.
She doesn't know when she got quite so uncomfortable with silence. It scratches at her like a physical pain. Luckily or by design, she's in the kind of work that's usually on, usually loud. There's background noise all the time in her apartment – Tamara chatting or playing ClipTalks on her phone, singing along; music in the background; Lucy's TV always on for company. She leaves it all aside tonight and listens to the sounds of the city outside her windows, the traffic like white noise.
Lucy has been waiting for this day for weeks. She's talked about it in therapy, talked through her nervousness and dread. It's completely normal. Any ordinary person would feel the same. The trick is framing it all as something to get past. When the deposition prep is over, things will be better. When the new trial is over, Rosalind Dyer will be locked up in a cage forever and ever and Lucy will be free.
Funny, how that's worked out.
There are spots of egg-grease on her counter top and a thin film of coffee, now cold and metallic-skinned, in the pot. Cleaning is not Tamara's forte.
Lucy scrubs everything down until it looks like it was never used. When she opens a cabinet, she notices a box of cereal that's almost of out of date. She gets a trash bag and starts sorting. She opens all the cabinets until it looks like her apartment ghost has returned. Throws the sun tea in the bag, jar and all, with some force. Picks things up and throws them away. She doesn't need that. Doesn't need that. Doesn't need any of this.
The streetlights are on. Lucy's apartment doesn't have much of a view – most of what she sees through the window is the parking garage next door, another building across the street, a little of the sky. It's close and dark gray, heavy on the city's shoulders.
She thinks about Chris; about the images that must have been going around and around in his head this week. The tune that hooked into his brain. She's known that song since she was a little kid, and the lyrics are stored so far back in her memory she didn't consciously know they were there. It's a sunny kind of song, she'd always thought, light and bright. She hopes he's all right.
When Lucy's finished cleaning, she picks up her phone to text him, but then she changes her mind, turns it to silent and puts it back down.
In another life, she'd be with Chris, at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, maybe. The night would still be warm and she'd take off her sweater and lean back in one of the cracked leatherette chairs, her filmy blouse sticking to her back, and she'd check the menu for allergens and Chris would smile and hold her hand across the table and they'd talk about their dream vacations and who was going to win the baking show this year.
Instead, she can't talk to him, and she thinks he's in love with her.
It's getting chilly in here. She puts on leggings and socks underneath her summery skirt and pulls the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands.
It's not really Chris's fault that he doesn't know what she needs. She's not sure herself.
She's not exactly great dating material, even leaving aside the whole cop thing.
It's fine, she thinks, it's really fine. The buzz in her stomach is nothing; the vice around her ribs is not a problem. The worst day of her life was over long before today. Today didn't even come close.
She paces her apartment, thinks about things she should be doing. When she hears a knock at her door, she just about jumps out of her skin.
Lucy opens the door a crack, and realizes she shouldn't really be surprised - of course it's him. Bradford's standing on her doorstep, looking impatient. It's not an unfamiliar look on him – she seen it a lot over the years, including right now, after keeping him waiting for approximately fifteen seconds.
She opens the door fully. “Hey,” she says.
He's in a gray t-shirt and jeans and his five o'clock shadow has tipped into evening. He looks worn, but it's well after his shift was supposed to end; Lucy herself rarely goes home with energy left to spare.
“You okay?” he says, and basically lets himself in.
Her hands are trembling a little, she notices. She pushes the door closed firmly behind him.
“What's up?” she says.
“I was in the neighborhood,” he says, turning around. There's more gray in his hair than the last time she saw him, she thinks, even though the last time she saw him was yesterday.
“On your way to-?”
He doesn't answer. She sees him clocking the exits; the doorway to her bedroom. He moves like a cat; even post-watch tired, he's alert.
She used to envy him that.
“You're alone?”
Lucy raises an eyebrow.
“Okay,” he says, softening the line of his shoulders. “That wasn't a – judgment. A question.”
“I'm alone,” she says, after a beat. “No roommate. No boyfriend. No hidden serial killer, if that's what you were concerned about.”
“Not exactly,” he says. “I texted you. Three times.”
“Oh,” Lucy says, and her stomach drops. She snatches her phone off the side table and sees the alerts. “Oh. God. I put it on silent. What happened? Who's hurt? Is everyone-”
He raises a hand. “No-one's hurt. I was just checking in.”
“Checking in?” she repeats.
“I texted you to see if you were okay. You didn't reply, ergo maybe you weren't okay. You shouldn't leave it on silent. Put it on vibrate or something.”
“Did you just say 'ergo'?” Lucy says, and backs out of his way so she can gesture him toward her couch. “Do you – want to stay a bit? I have beer.” She thinks she has beer, anyway. There have been a lot of casualties in her kitchen clean-athon.
“Sure,” Tim says. “Sounds great.”
Lucy kicks the trash bag by accident when she's opening the fridge, hitting her socked toe on something hard. There's a clink of glass from within, and she can't remember exactly what she's thrown in there. But there's still Coronas and limes on the inside of the fridge door. She cuts the fruit, takes a mouthful from each bottle, and pushes a quarter of lime into the neck of each. She's not really sure she's in the mood for beer herself, but the only other options are coffee or chamomile tea. It's too late in the day for coffee and the thought of the tea makes her inexplicably angry.
“Salud,” she says, handing Tim his beer over the back of the couch.
She takes a drink, sits down, crossing a leg underneath her. He's still examining his beer.
“It's half gone,” he complains. “Do you do that to all your guests?”
“Only the ones who turn up unexpectedly,” she says.
“Three texts, Chen.”
“Yeah,” she says, softening. “I'm sorry. I needed some space. Not from you,” she quickly adds. “Or from everyone. Just-” She trails off, not sure what she really wants to say.
“I thought you'd be out with Sanford.”
“I- Wait, did he-” Lucy starts, and then stops to think about it. “No. Tamara called you.”
Tim drops eye contact for the merest split second before raising his chin, almost imperceptibly. He probably thinks she doesn't notice. “Why would Tamara have my number?”
She wanted you to check on me, Lucy thinks, narrowing her eyes. “I told Tamara I was going out with Chris.”
Tim spreads his hands. “Okay, it was Tamara.”
Caved in a second, Lucy thinks. No wonder he never went into UC work.
“She wanted me to check on you today. I just texted,” he adds, a little defensively.
“But when I've been on a date there's always a possibility that I've been abducted,” Lucy says. “That's your line of thinking, right?”
She's pushing him; being snippy and irritable doesn't do much for her stomach lining, but it helps a little bit with the itch underneath her skin.
He looks at her evenly. “I know about today, Lucy.”
Lucy stops. He knows; of course he knows. It's not exactly a secret, everyone at Mid-Wilshire knows what's going on with the Rosalind Dyer case. It's water cooler talk at this point, even if people tend to quiet down about it when Lucy's around.
“I wasn't keeping it quiet,” she says. “I just didn't want to talk to everyone about it right away.”
He nods, and raises the bottle to his lips and drinks.
She's really thirsty, she realizes, watching him swallow. She takes a long gulp from her own drink, and because if anything it makes her want more, she keeps on drinking. She stops after a long minute, for air, but when Tim puts his bottle on the coffee table she doesn't follow suit. She holds it in her hand, instead, feeling the solidity of the glass against her fingertips.
She waits a moment for her stomach to settle, then drinks again.
When she looks back at him, he's watching her evenly. He nods toward the bottle in her hand.
“Did you eat?”
“Yes,” she says definitively. “Tamara made me breakfast.”
Tim looks at her oddly. “It's nine p.m. Did you eat since then?”
“Nine?” she asks. She pauses; thinks. She remembers coffee. Lots of coffee. She doesn't remember food.
“I'll order,” he says, pulling out his phone. “Ramen?”
“No, I – okay, fine, ramen. Ask for extra hot sauce, I think I threw mine away.”
She gets a return of the look, and then he turns back to his phone.
It's quiet; it's too quiet.
“You and Ashley didn't have plans tonight?” Lucy asks, to fill the space. She should have asked before, she realizes.
“Don't worry about it,” he says.
“Which means yes,” Lucy surmises. “Okay, now I feel bad. What were you going to do? Dinner? You should go, it's not too late yet. You can just tell her I'm an idiot who forgets to check her phone. But I'm fine, and you guys should not change your plans because of me.”
“We didn't have plans, Lucy.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, maybe you should call her then. It's not too late to do something.”
He could take Ashley dancing – he's actually a surprisingly good dancer – or now that Kojo's settled down around her, they could take the dog out for a walk. Pick up dinner and talk to each other about their days, about their vacation leave, about future dates, about each other.
“Chen,” he says, evenly. “I'm not going out with Ashley. I'm staying here with you, and you're going to tell me what happened today.”
“How's she doing? I haven't seen so much of her lately.”
He closes his eyes momentarily. “Good,” he says slowly. “She's great.”
“Oh, good,” Lucy says. “That's great. Uh. How was-”
“Lucy,” he says quietly.
She stops, and the silence stretches out. She looks down and picks at a sleeve. Suddenly she doesn't really feel like talking any more.
“Didn't Tamara give you all the details?” she asks finally, and it comes out angrier than she expected.
She looks up. He doesn't move. Lucy sighs.
“I went in for prep for, uh, the deposition I was giving against Rosalind Dyer.” She stops herself. Laughs a little, self-deprecatingly. “You knew that. Um, obviously. Of course you knew that. Everyone knows. It's just-” She looks at him again, expecting something; expecting nothing. Blows out another breath. “I knew it would be – tough. Today. I didn't expect it to be- I didn't think-”
“Take your time,” Tim says, and she's heard him use that tone before, when he's quiet and polite like this, waiting for a victim to tell him their story. It makes her suddenly, irrationally furious, that he would treat her like this.
“Chris saw the video,” she says, curling her hands into fists. “The video from the barrel. I watched it too. I watched it today.”
“I see,” he says, still so preternaturally calm.
“It's on his laptop,” she says, and at this point she's not sure why she's still talking, if she's trying to finally get a reaction from him or if she just needs to lay out everything that's happened. It's so horrifying she could laugh. “It's – half his office have watched it. For the trial preparation, you know? He's watched it a lot. They've all watched it a lot. Multiple – for evidence. It's on his laptop. Like it's a ClipTalk video or something. Like it's-” she trails off.
“You watched it?” he asks. His eyes are dark in the gloom. Lucy should turn on a lamp; light a candle.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Do you think that was a good idea?”
She pauses; thinks. “I don't know,” she says. “I think I needed to, though.”
“Okay,” he says simply.
“Okay,” Lucy says. “It's just a piece of evidence, a part of a case. Like any other-” and then stops. She holds up a hand.
She barely makes it to the bathroom and slams the door before she's puking Corona into the sink.
She rinses her mouth and washes out the basin. There are spots still dancing in front of her eyes, so she sits on the floor for a few moments, hearing her own heartbeat, feeling the cool tile beneath her hands.
There's a gentle knock on the door.
“Give me a minute,” Lucy says, and gets up to brush her teeth.
It's more like ten, once she washes her face and brushes her hair and gets a firm grip on herself. She puts on lip balm and examines herself in the bathroom mirror. There are shadows beneath her eyes; she looks like she's been on a long watch herself.
When she comes out, he's back on the couch. The beer bottles have been cleared away and he's closed all the kitchen doors. On her coffee table he's left her a glass of water and a cup of tea, steam rising from it in a curlicue. That fucking tea.
Lucy turns on the lamps and searches through drawers for matches. Maybe she threw them away, too.
“What do you need?” Tim asks, after she's been rummaging for a while.
“Lighter,” she says.
He reaches into his jeans pocket, takes something out and throws it to her. Lucy catches it and it's cold against her palm. When she opens her hand, it's an antique metal lighter, dented but beautifully carved. She examines it – it's older than Tim himself, she thinks, and wonders if it was his father's, but of course Tim carries a classic lighter. Of course he does.
She lights her candles, and it does soften the dark a little.
“You should get better lighting in here,” he says. “Nolan could probably hook you up with a system. He's replaced half of Angela's house at this point.”
“Renting,” she reminds him. “Plus, I kind of like it. It sets a mood.”
“If the mood you're going for is poor security,” he mutters, and she laughs, a little, in spite of it all.
Tim's phone chimes.
“Food delivery's here,” he says. “I'll take the trash down with me. What were you doing, spring cleaning?
She rolls her eyes. “I can take my own trash out whenever I feel like it.” She looks at him for a moment, and then, much more softly, adds: “Thanks.”
He's piled the cushions to her end of the couch, leaving a cushion-free zone for himself. He always sits straight; posture impeccable. No one else ever sits like that on Lucy's couch. It's a couch made for slouching; for TV marathons and sushi; for late-night tea and occasional crying; for talking for hours wrapped in blankets until someone's half asleep. She and Jackson – but she shuts that thought down as soon as it arrives. Jackson's not something she can afford to think about tonight, and she sends out a silent apology through the universe.
Lucy's left the door cracked open, thinking she'll save herself from having to get up again. Her building's in a nice area, she thinks, and Tim's just stepped downstairs. Serial-killer lightning doesn't strike the same person twice, anyway. Right?
Still, she jumps when he pushes the door open, and feels like an idiot.
“Hey,” she says, a little too loud, a quaver in her tone.
Tim, being Tim, doesn't comment, and just says “hey” back, while he puts the delivery bags on the table.
Lucy checks her phone and turns the volume back up. She has a text from Tamara: “Don't wait up!” and an emoji. She turns the phone over in her hand, holds it out for Tim to read.
He squints a little as he reads it, cracking the lid on Lucy's ramen. “Think we should see if she's all right?”
“Um, Tim, I don't know if things have changed since you were young-” Lucy starts.
“Chen,” he says with a hint of warning.
“-But I think these days when the young people say don't wait up, it's a kind of intricate code that actually means if my two cop friends come in and bust up my date, I will never speak to them again.”
“So, you're definitely waiting up, right?”
“Oh, obviously,” says Lucy. She leans across him to snag a snow pea between chopsticks. She isn't really hungry, but the scent is fresh and green, and she feels a little more like eating. “You would, too,” she says with her mouth full.
“Of course I would,” he says. “You and I, we know what the world's like. But don't forget she does too. She'll be careful.”
“You and I,” Lucy says slowly. “Know that careful isn't always enough.”
“Yeah,” Tim says. He leans over, takes the phone from her hand. Their fingers brush. There's a frisson as his fingers ghost the side of her palm; Lucy's skin is hot and electric. It's nothing new. It's normal.
The man literally brought her back to life, and he doesn't seem to own a loose-fitting shirt. At this point, it would be weirder if she didn't have a crush.
She's behind the conversation. “Sorry,” she says. “I missed what you said.”
“I said, what does that emoji mean, anyway?”
Lucy double-checks it. “It's just a blushing face, Tim, there's no deeper meaning there.”
“I was worried it was like the eggplant thing,” he mumbles. She almost doesn't catch it.
“Um, I feel like there's a story there.”
“No story,” he says so quickly that she knows there's a story, and then: “Why does it smell like a unicorn threw up in here?”
“The candles are called Cotton Candy Dreams,” Lucy says, with dignity. “I figured, who doesn't want cotton candy dreams?”
Jackson's anniversary is coming up. It's been almost a year. She and Nolan and Lopez plan to drink beer and tell stories. Sometimes Lucy feels like she's dealing with it well, and sometimes it just hits her – he's gone, he's not ever coming back, and it feels like a hole through her heart.
Maybe she's too young to fully process it. Maybe everyone's too young.
“Doesn't seem fair that everything just keeps going on without him”, she'd texted Nolan a few weeks ago. And Nolan, who's never loved a sentence containing less than twenty words, Nolan who talks when he's asleep, just sent back: “I know”.
“So,” she says, over the back of the couch. “What did you do today? You look tired.”
“Everyone's a critic,” he says, helping himself to another beer out of the fridge. “There was a hostage situation at Douglas Shaw. Nolan and I caught it.”
“Oh shit, really? What happened? Are you okay? Is Nolan okay? Did anyone get hurt?”
“He's okay,” Tim says. “We lost one of the patients. Nolan did CPR, but – anyway, rough day.”
“I'm sorry,” Lucy says, sincerely. “I didn't realize. I've been so caught up in my own thing-”
“You had plenty to deal with today, Lucy.”
“Still. He must feel awful.”
“He did the best he could.”
Lucy hunts for her phone. “I should text him, see if he's all right.”
“Oh, Nolan you'll text,” Tim says.
“I'll text you too,” Lucy says. “Hold on.”
She reads the texts from Tim first, starting with a polite “how-are-you-just-checking-in”, progressing to “Lucy-are-you-okay-text-me-back-as-soon-as-you-get-this”, and ending with a terse: “I'm coming over”. She replies to his latest with “Hi Tim!”, and hears his phone chime as she scrolls to Nolan's name on her contact list.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees him take his phone out of his pocket and check it. He catches her eye for a moment, and his lip twitches, the way it does when he's trying not to smile at her. Then he puts his phone away.
“It's just evidence,” she says, and then realizes she's spoken out loud. The ramen's mild; she's left the hot sauce to the side. It's settling her stomach a little, but she goes slowly, carefully.
Tim nudges the tea cup closer to her with the back of his hand, like she's not going to notice. She picks it up, takes a too-hot sip.
“It'll warm you up,” he says, looking at her socks.
They are some pretty thick socks.
“It's not even cold,” she says, on a little laugh. “I know. I just felt – off. Or something.”
“Shock does that to you.”
“I'm not in shock,” she says automatically. “The things we see during a day. We see the worst days of people's lives. We're there for it and we're a part of it. It makes me think.”
“What do you mean?” Tim asks, after a moment.
“Chris probably watched it over coffee. The rest of the team, they probably watched it while they were having lunch, or, or, I don't know, thinking about picking up the kids from school or the laundry they had to do when they got home.”
“They're professionals,” Tim says quietly. “They would take it seriously.”
“I know,” Lucy says. “I know that. Have you seen it?” Her voice sounds small, even to herself. She can barely hear herself.
He shakes his head. “I haven't. There's no reason for me to see that.”
“It shouldn't bother me, it's just a part of the case. If it was you-” she trails off.
“If it was me, what?” he asks gently.
“It wouldn't upset me so much if it was you, if you saw it. You know me. You saw me after,” she says. “You saw me when – when you brought me out of the ground. I was – I know I wasn't breathing. That I -”
“You just needed help,” he says steadfastly. “I saw the light reflecting. I saw your ring. You did that. We found you because you never gave up.”
“I don't -” she says, her breath coming shorter. There are black spots around the corners of her vision. She leans forward, trying to catch her breath.
“I-” It comes out as a panicked squeak; like a rat in a trap. She tries to take another breath; hears her lungs rattling in her ears. The black increases in her eyes; she focuses on the floor, hears another deep score of breath but she can't get air; she can't -
Tim's hands are on her back before she's aware. It's thick as fog in here, she's underwater, she's swimming -
“Breathe,” he's saying. “Lucy. Slowly.”
She hauls in another breath. He doesn't understand. She can't breathe.
“Sit up,” he says, and he straightens her upright in a way she'll think is embarrassing when she thinks about it later. “Lucy. It's a panic attack. It's just a panic attack.”
His hands; suddenly she's very aware of his hands. He strokes down her back.
“We've been here before,” he says. “And survived. You know the drill. Breathe in, hold -”
She waves a hand at him, ends up hitting his chest, pushing at him hard. He's an immovable object.
“So do it,” he says, forcefully, almost irritably, and there's more than a touch of old-school Bradford there.
I don't know if I can, she wants to say.
Later she realizes maybe a minute goes by; maybe two. In the moment, it feels like a year, struggling through the undercurrent, sure at every second she'll pass out; she'll die; that this time no-one will save her. She loses feeling in her hands and feet; forgets, for a while, that she's a person; forgets everything but the scream in her lungs and the weight of it all; the dark and the dark -
And then it recedes, a little at first and then more. She breathes a little more, remembers to hold it, then breathes out more calmly.
“How's the therapy going?” he asks her, a little awkwardly. His hands are still on her back, and that's awkward too. It's all awkward.
Lucy laughs, hollowly, and he moves his hands, places them back resting on his knees. He leaves them there a moment, then picks up his beer again and twists the neck slowly in his hands.
“Today may not be the best day by which to judge,” she says. “But I'm still going, if that's what you mean.”
“And it helps? The panic attacks, and everything?”
“This is my first panic attack in a long time,” Lucy says. “But, y'know, each one feels like the first.”
“And you're doing the – breathing exercises? The stuff your therapist gives you.”
“Yes, sir,” Lucy says, a little irritably. “Since when do you care about breathing exercises?”
“Of course I care,” he says. “It works, so you should do it.”
“Can't say I ever expected you to weaponize cognitive behavioral therapy.”
“I did learn from the master,” he says, tipping the neck of his beer bottle toward her.
“Ha,” she says.
There's a long silence.
“I think there's things I need to ask you,” she says.
Tim looks a little startled, but he goes with it. She's reminded of the days after; of waking up to see him at her bedside in the hospital, of the times he wouldn't leave her alone and he treated her like cut glass. She wonders if anyone ever gets through something like what happened to her, if they don't have a Tim.
“You can ask me anything,” he says.
“The day you found me,” she starts. She's learned to say it like that, not the day I was taken or my day of death or that time a serial killer buried me alive and I literally died. It's better for her, and it stops people doing that uncomfortable look-away they do when she's a little too honest. “I know I wasn't breathing. By then.”
He doesn't move. “That's right,” he confirms.
“The video. It clarified some things I think I'd forgotten. I think I blocked it out.”
“Maybe you should talk to Sanford,” Tim says gently. “It's just part of the case, we all get that. But it's really bothering you that he's seen the tape.”
“It is,” she says, and twists one hand in the other. “He didn't say. I didn't even know he'd - he saw me – how do I take that back? I was trying not to breathe. Trying to calm down. Crying, begging.” She laughs, bitterly. “Not exactly my finest hour.”
“I'm not sure I agree,” Tim says, and then, after a moment: “Did you watch the whole thing?”
“Yeah,” she says, puzzled over what he means. “I mean I guess I could have fast-forwarded. I already know how it ends-”
He doesn't smile. “That was going to be my point,” he says. “But with less sarcasm. You can't avoid remembering. Or being scared. But when you are scared, you need to focus on the fact that you got out.”
She listens. Nods. Glances out of the window at the charcoal night.
“Do you ever,” she starts and hesitates. “Did you ever wake up, when you've been really deeply asleep, and you don't know where you are. It's dark, and quiet, and you're alone, and – it's stupid. Forget it, you'll think it's stupid.”
“Try me,” he says simply.
She shakes her head. “I want it to be over. I want to be over it.”
“I don't think it works like that,” he says. “It takes time.”
“How much time?” she says, raising her voice and hearing it crack. “How much longer until it stops – being part of everything in me? Until I can be normal, be in a normal relationship? I'm going to therapy, I'm drinking calming tea and doing fucking breathing exercises and - It's not fair that I have to spend a week being sick to my stomach because they want me to testify. It's not fair that an office full of people have seen the worst moments of my life while they took notes and drank their coffee. None of this is fair.”
There's a long, silent moment.
“I know,” he says finally, and that's when she really starts to cry.
There are little pieces of Jackson still around the apartment. A few months ago she found his Baby Yoda thing under the couch. Again, cleaning is not Tamara's forte – maybe not Lucy's, either.
Last week, she was folding her laundry and found one of his giant socks in her laundry basket. No idea how it got there. She'd thought they'd cleaned everything out.
Jackson's the only person she's ever met who folded his socks. Lucy wasn't sure what to do with it. It's not exactly the kind of thing she'd need to pass on to his parents, and she couldn't put it in the trash. In the end, she folded it and put it in one of her bedside drawers.
Maybe all houses are a little bit haunted.
Big cities don't sleep, Lucy's worked enough night shifts to know. They wind down though; they rest. The traffic outside has hushed, the sounds of people moving and making noise on the streets around is muted and very far away, like someone is speaking to her in a dream.
Tim finds Kleenex in a drawer so she doesn't have to keep wiping her eyes with her sleeves. He doesn't say much, but when she reaches for a second tissue, he picks up the box and holds it out for her.
Her tea has gone cold. She gets up and goes to her bedroom, taking a throw rug out of her closet for Tim, who's still in a t-shirt. She pets the teddy bear as she passes.
“You think I should text her?” Lucy asks.
“Obviously,” Tim says.
“Okay. Okay, but I'll be cool, right? This is not the cops narcing on you, asking if you're all right and if you need a ride. This is your cool friend, Lucy. Being cool.”
“Do you know what narcing is?” Tim asks, pulling the blanket off his side of the couch and putting it over her. “Just text her. No point starting to be cool now.”
“Starting?” Lucy says, slipping her hands out from under the blanket and leaning over her phone.
The night keeps winding, down and down. Lucy's phone is ridiculously loud in the room. She checks her texts. Five thumbs-up emojis from Tamara. Followed by a fish emoji, an umbrella, a smiling cat, and some more thumbs-up.
She shows Tim.
“What does it mean?” he asks.
“I think it means she's good,” Lucy says. “I'm not sure about the fish.”
“If I wasn't – me,” she starts.
He looks confused, so she tries again.
“If you found someone, like you found me. Saved their life. Or if you watched a video, like that video. And you didn't know them before, or didn't know them well. It would affect how you looked at them, right? Could you ever just – look at them, like they were an ordinary person? Think about them without remembering what it was like to hear them cry when they thought they were dying, when they'd held out hope for so long but-” She stops. Takes a breath. “How do you get past that?”
“I can't-” he says, and she looks at him, searching; searching. “Lucy,” he says. “I don't think I can help you with how you should feel about your boyfriend.”
“Why not?”
There's a long moment. Finally he says: “It's complicated.”
“Your hands were scratched,” she tells him from the kitchen. She refills their water glasses. “When I was in the hospital,” she clarifies. “When you stayed with me all night. I remember.” She does. She remembers the sun through the hospital windows, and she remembers Tim's smile when he saw she'd woken up, and how softly he'd looked at her, as though he'd missed her face for years.
“Oh,” he says. “They weren't bad. I'm surprised you noticed, given – everything. I was digging through the ground, and it was rocky. We brought shovels – we knew, I knew, you'd been buried.” He stops, looks at her. “Are you sure you want to talk about this?”
She nods. It's hard. She's sure.
“I was looking for you,” he goes on, after a pause. “I couldn't stop. Couldn't wait around. I just knew I had to keep going to find you. When I saw your ring, I called the others, but they didn't get there right away. I knew you were there. All I had was my hands,” he says.
“I didn't wonder until later.”
“You could have asked then,” he says. “If you wanted. You can always ask, Lucy. You have to know. None of us gave up on you for a second.”
“Sometimes,” she says, and hesitates. “Sometimes when I wake up in the dark, I wonder if I ever made it out. If everything that's happened since then is part of a dream. Your brain does that, you know, when you're dying. It gives you something to comfort you. You see a light - it gives you hope that everything's going to go on, that you'll be surrounded by the people you love, that -”
“Lucy,” he says, and she can see the pain in his face. She shouldn't be doing this to him; bringing up all this old dusty hurt. He takes so much responsibility for what happened to her. He carries it all the time; she can see it in the way he's so careful of her, so protective. The way he pushes her to aggravation when she needs distraction, the way he looks out for her. He carries so much. He shouldn't have to keep carrying her.
“You're here,” he says. “I pulled you out of the ground myself. You're safe. It's over.”
“I don't think I thanked you. Not properly,” she says. “I'm sorry. Thank you. But it's not over. It's never over, now. I'm still there.”
“You're not still there,” he says, with what she thinks is infinite patience. He has been so kind to her, through all of this. It hurts her heart, knowing him like she does, his past, his history. Everything she's brought to him has made things so complicated. It's no way for him to live.
She thinks of Jackson; what she thinks his last moments must have been like, closed-in and dark. She hopes he saw a light.
It's complicated.
She doesn't like to push him too much. Yes, she teases him and tests him – Nolan told her early on to figure out what made her training officer tick, and nothing makes Tim Bradford tick quite so much as a challenge. But she's always aware not to go too far, not to push their relationship into something they can't come back from.
Things have changed so much for her. She's lost so much – Jackson, first and foremost, the constant ache in her chest. She's lost something in her that was there before all of this. She thinks about young Lucy Chen, graduating from the academy, bright of heart and convinced she would help people. She's lost that Lucy now; the Lucy in her place is someone different. She's lost a lot of hopes and sketched-out dreams. She's lost friends and homes and a sense of safety, lost the conviction that everything would always work out in the end. She's had Tim, though, and the job. There's a lot of things she can still lose; she can't let herself lose Tim. It's complicated.
“And I woke up,” Lucy says, on a little hitch of breath that she tries to turn into a laugh, only she doesn't think he's going to be fooled. “And – it was so dark in there. I was so alone. I couldn't even see my hands. I couldn't see anything. And then when I woke up – when you saved my life, I mean, the sun was behind you, and everyone was there. I couldn't even look at you – the sun was all around you. It was so bright. I've never seen anything so bright.”
She thinks about the look in his eyes when he'd talked to her about his father; as though he hated and loved him in equal measure. The way the color ran out of his face when he'd seen Isabel on the street. Maybe, possibly, Tim knows something about complicated relationships.
Tim finds the remote and turns on the news, volume turned down low. When she looks at him, he says: “I'm surprised you didn't have some singing, dancing – thing – on in here.”
“I love singing dancing things,” she says, and settles back on the couch. “Not tonight, though.”
The news always makes Lucy's adrenaline spike. There are more protests scheduled for tomorrow – today?; the story of an embezzler from Encino that's becoming a media circus; an ongoing corruption scandal.
“It just keeps going,” she says, so softly she barely hears herself.
Tim looks at her questioningly, but she doesn't repeat herself, and after a minute he settles back. The TV murmurs in the background.
After a while, she drowses.
She jerks awake again at some point, the blanket over her cheek, light from the screen like quiet firelight on the walls. She hears him say softly: “It's okay. Go back to sleep,” and she goes back under.
If she dreams, it's soft and warm, and sweet.
She wakes with a start at a loud noise, and pushes herself upright before she realizes what she's doing. She realizes she's pushing against Tim, that she was slumped against him. He disentangles himself, pulls his arm back to his side of the couch. Did he have an arm around her? Oh God.
“-Home!” Tamara's saying cheerfully.
“Little louder next time, kid,” Tim says. “They didn't hear you in Barstow.”
“Just concerned I might have been interrupting something,” Tamara replies, dropping her bag on the counter and knocking Lucy's candle holders to the floor in the process. “Oops. Fire, fire. Sorry.” She crouches to pick them up, setting them upright back in place, then scrutinizing them. “They're all burned out anyway.”
“What a tragedy,” Tim says blandly.
“I thought you were Chris,” Tamara says. “Didn't want to be seeing anything I shouldn't.”
Tim frowns. “What kind of time do you call this, anyway?”
Tamara takes her phone out of her pocket and checks the screen. Her hair is tousled. “Three,” she says, innocently. “Why, what time do you call it?”
“Very funny.”
“I try,” Tamara says smartly. “So what's going on here?” She waves a hand between the two of them. Lucy feels color rising in her cheeks. “I just told you to text her. Where's Chris?”
“Lucy told him she was fine,” Tim says.
Tamara visibly winces. “Oh. Wow. Fine? How'd he take that?”
“Honestly?” Tim says. “I think he thought she meant she was fine.”
“He thought fine meant – like, just - fine? Wow,” Tamara draws the word out.
Lucy scrubs at her face with one hand, sure she can feel sleep-lines. “Hey, could you two stop talking like I'm not in the room?”
Tim, at least, has the grace to look sheepish.
Tamara just shakes her head. “Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Did you at least go to dinner before you ditched him?”
“I did not ditch him,” Lucy says indignantly. “I just needed some space.”
Tamara sits beside her, lining up their thighs. She leans across Lucy and picks up her half-eaten ramen bowl. “Understandable, I guess,” she says, taking a chopstick off the table and poking at some leftover noodles. “You didn't order anything for me.”
“I can make you something,” Lucy says, getting up, and then remembers. “Oh. I threw some stuff away. A lot of stuff away, actually. I really needed to do - something, I guess. Sorry.”
“It's fine,” Tamara says. “I'll just starve.”
Tim pushes his plate across the table toward her. Tamara selects a leftover tamagoyaki and dunks it in her bowl of broth.
“I'll go to the store tonight after work,” Lucy promises.
“You're gonna crash tonight after work,” Tim says.
“Yeah, probably that too,” agrees Lucy. “Oh, wait. Oh God. It's three? As in, in the morning? Tim, we're on earlies, and you didn't sleep.”
“You should take a nap,” Tamara tells him, her mouth full.
Lucy pauses. “You can sleep in my bed,” she says, a little awkwardly. “You can catch an hour or two.”
“I'm not sleeping in your princess bed, Chen,” he grumbles. “I'll be fine.”
“Coward,” Tamara says, stealing another egg roll.
“I should get going,” Tim says.
“Wait, I'll make you coffee,” Lucy tells him. “I have a travel cup. Somewhere.”
“Unless you threw that out, too.”
Lucy leaves them sitting on the couch as she goes to make coffee. She can't help stealing a glance at them as she works – Tamara loves an opportunity to needle Tim. It's pretty funny. Lucy's lucky to have them both, she thinks, damn lucky.
“So, what did you do tonight?” Lucy asks loudly, mostly to try and get Tamara off the topic of the military industrial complex, since Tim tends to be a little sensitive about it. “How's the cute guy?”
“So cute,” Tamara says.
Tim rolls his eyes.
“We went to a night display at the aquarium focusing on humane and sustainable aquarium management, and then we went to this really cool bar-” She catches Tim's eye. “-Becue? Barbecue. And met up with some of his friends. And then we all went for a walk on the beach. Crazy windy out there. It was a good night.”
“And morning, apparently,” Tim says. He looks at Lucy. “Makes us look pretty boring.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” she says, pouring coffee into the mug.
Tamara gets up and gathers dishes. She brings them back to the kitchen, passing close to Lucy.
“Hey,” she says, in an undertone. “How are you? Did Tim look after you?”
“I don't need Tim to look after me,” Lucy says, and then, after a pause. “Although, yeah, he did. Thanks. I'm good.”
“What would you do without me?” Tamara asks airily.
“My life would be a lot worse,” Lucy admits, and pulls her into a hug. She buries her face in Tamara's hair, which smells like the ocean. “Tim was worried you'd been kidnapped by a serial killer.”
“Yeah, well,” Tamara says. “Tim worries too much. Although I hear there was this one time-”
“Hilarious,” Lucy says, picking up the cup and securing the lid.
“What? Too soon?”
Tim's getting up. He still looks tired, she thinks, with a stab of guilt. This is going to be a long day for him.
“You shouldn't have stayed,” she says, handing him his coffee. “I'm sorry.”
“No need to get weird about it, Chen,” he says. “Next time, call me yourself.” His fingers close over hers, over the lid of the mug. She thinks, for a second, he'll pull away, or she will. He doesn't though, and so neither does she. The feeling's still there; the pit of her stomach falling away, the hair standing up on the back of her arm, the awareness of every part of her body. The warmth, like sunlight on skin that's been in the dark so long.
Anyone would feel the same, she reminds herself, and says: “I'll walk you out.”