Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Los Angeles, September 2018

The bathroom light buzzed softly above him, flickering. Tim stood still in front of the mirror, a cheap plastic dye brush frozen mid-air, poised above his scalp. Grey dye pooled against his knuckles, dripping in slow trails onto the porcelain.

His reflection stared back, too sharp around the edges, too young where it shouldn’t be. Not after everything. Not after war, police academy and a long marriage. He’d lived more than most men twice his age, and yet the face in the mirror kept betraying time.

Men in his family always aged quickly, their hair turning silver early. His father’s temple had gone white two months after Tim’s twelfth birthday.

His mother noticed before anyone. Tim had caught her staring at the new streaks one morning—hopeful, tentative, like silver meant something sacred. She thought it was her. Thought maybe, after everything, their marriage was finally softening into something true again.

She started cooking breakfast again. Tim remembered the way she smiled—soft, like something was healing. Like maybe the worst was finally over. Like he’d finally come to his senses.

But Tim knew better.

Two months before that first grey hair, he’d seen his father kissing the neighbour in their garage. Quick. Passionate. Practised hands. A familiarity that didn’t come from guilt.

That silver wasn’t born from love or years of hardship shared with his mother. It was the residue of betrayal—two months of late nights with someone else.

That was the day Tim learned aging didn’t mean anything.

A floorboard creaked behind him.

“Still playing the part, huh?”

Isabel’s voice was slurred but soft, dragging just like her steps. She leaned against the doorway, her shoulder pressed to the frame like it was all that was holding her up. Her cheeks were sunken, lips dry. And the heavy makeup she wore to try to feel—and look—alive had already half-melted down her face.

Yet, she looked beautiful. Tim smiled softly, eyes flicking to the mirror where hers met his.

But he didn’t turn. He couldn’t. He kept his focus on his own reflection—on the faint crease that lived between his brows, the only visible mark of time. No crow’s feet. No laugh lines. Nothing that said he’d lived. People called it luck. Good genes. You’re aging like fine wine.

They meant it kindly. Meant it as praise.

But to Tim, it felt like a sentence.

Especially when his wife, standing just behind him, looked like time had already passed her by.

Like she was growing older alone.

“You know, you look prettier like this,” Isabel said, stepping into the room. “Like the boy I feel in love with.”

Her arms slid around his waist from behind, unsteady. She pressed her face to his back, and for a second, he let himself feel the weight of her—bones and warmth and all that history. The pain they’d both kept trying to outrun.

He closed his eyes. “Isabel…”

“You smell so good,” she murmured. Tim could feel her smile against his skin. “God, I love you so much. Even if…” Now, her voice was barely a whisper. “Even if it’s fake.”

The brush slipped from his grip. He stared at the grey streak running through his hair.

She was high. Again.

Sober Isabel would never call it fake. She wouldn’t have stood in the doorway, eyes glassy and voice soft, asking why he still looked like the boy she fell in love with.

No—sober Isabel made it a mission. She pored herself over books, chased down specialists, dragged him to veteran groups when some psych floated the theory that PTSD might delay aging. A trauma response. Something about the mind refusing to accept connection or love, explaining why time had etched onto her skin and not his.

Sober Isabel looked for answers.

This Isabel looked defeated.

“No. No… It’s not fake,” he said, quietly. God only knew how much strength it took to keep his fingers from trembling as he brushed her hair behind her ear. “It’s complicated, love. I’m—there might be something wrong with me. A mutation. Remember?” He paused. She nodded, slow and foggy.

She watched him like she was seeing someone else’s face wearing his skin. Like she was trying to find the man she fell in love with in spite of what she saw now.

“But you’re a boy,” she whispered. “You’re still…”

The word broke off. Hung in the air like a ghost.

Tim tried to breathe through it. Tried to smile. “Shhh,” he said, fingers brushing lightly against her jaw. “What we have—it’s real. Even if the rest of it is… still figuring itself out.”

He believed that. He had to.

Because if it wasn’t a mutation…

If it meant something else—

He wasn’t ready to face it.

Not then. Not with her slipping further each day, not with the weight of his badge anchoring his spine. Not with the job that left no space for unravelling.

So he kept bleaching his hair and dying the grey in. Painting on the years. Reapplying the lie. Every morning in the mirror, he told himself he was doing it for her. For them.

It wasn’t until four months later, walking through the sterile halls of a Pasadena rehab center, that the lie began to rot.

Pasadena, January 2019

Tim barely recognized her at first.

Isabel sat by the window, sleeves pulled over her hands and legs tucked beneath her like a teenager waiting for the bell to ring. The sun hit her skin, no longer pale, and for a second, he thought it was a mistake. That this girl wasn’t Isabel.

But she looked up.

And the look in her eyes was exactly the same one she gave him the first time they kissed.

“Hey,” she said, voice a soft rasp but clear. Present.

He walked closer, slow, every step punctuated by a drumbeat of confusion in his chest. Her hair had regained its shine. Her face… it wasn’t just healthier. It was younger. Smooth. Bare. She looked eighteen again. Like the girl he met at the police academy, smiling like the world was made of dreams and nothing could wreck them.

“I feel good,” she said, smiling. “Better.”

He sat across from her, the sunlight catching the gold in her hair—her real hair, no longer messy from neglect. Her skin glowed, her cheeks rounded out, and her eyes... God. Those were the eyes he’d fallen for a lifetime ago. Bright. Alive.

Eighteen again.

Tim forced a smile, willed his ribs to unclench. “You do?”

Isabel stretched her arms overhead, her sleeves slipping back to reveal wrists no longer shadowed by bruises. “Yoga’s been helping. And—” She hesitated, her gaze flicking to the window where the rehab center’s garden sprawled, lush and untamed. “There’s this instructor. Really helpful… He says trauma lives in the body until you release it.” A laugh, soft and unfamiliar. “Guess I needed to let go.”

Let go. The words slithered under his skin.

She turned back to him, luminous. "I feel aligned now. Like my soul's finally..." Her breath caught. Found, Tim's mind supplied instantly, desperately. But Isabel exhaled: "Free."

Isabel reached for her tea, her wedding band catching the light. It looked too heavy in her hand. Too heavy for someone who looked so young as she did now.

She looked younger than him now.

And that—

That was impossible.

Tim felt something crack, quiet and invisible, somewhere beneath his ribs.

Ice flooded his veins. The specialists' voices echoed in his skull like a taunt: Unexplained cellular arrest. Trauma response. Possibly genetic. Bullshit. All of it. Every grey hair he'd painted in, every "mature" outfit he'd forced himself to wear, every fucking lie he'd told himself staring at the mirror— his "salt-and-pepper" temples, bleach and box dye from CVS.

He'd been so sure he was the broken one.

But the truth was worse.

She’d always been eighteen.

The drugs had carved valleys into her face, the sleepless nights had bruised her eyes—but time? Time had never touched her. Not really. And now that the damage was sloughing away...

She was exactly as she'd been the day they met.

"Tim?" Isabel's spoon clinked against her saucer. Her brow furrowed—smooth. Unlined. A stranger's face wearing his wife's expressions. "What is it?"

The truth clawed up his throat, acidic. He wanted to scream it: You were never mine.

Instead, he watched his own distorted reflection in her tea—a man trapped in a glassy, unmoving surface—and forced a smile. "Sorry. Just... thinking about work."

Her fingers brushed his wrist. A touch that once set him aflame. Now it burned for all the wrong reasons. "Some tea?" she offered, pouring him a cup he knew would taste like ash.

Los Angeles, April 2019

Isabel filed for divorce four months after rehab.

Weeks before the papers came, Tim came home to find her suitcase by the door—half-packed, deliberate. He pretended not to notice how she’d only folded the new clothes, the ones she’d bought after rehab. Bright colors. Light fabrics that moved with her. None of the old things. None of before.

He'd known this was coming. Had known since the first night she'd slept facing away from him, the careful inch of mattress between them feeling wider than the ocean.

So he didn't ask, didn’t call for her, didn't search the apartment. Just walked to the kitchen, bones aching from the night shift, and made coffee for two even though he knew she’d stop drinking hers.

Naive, he'd thought that was the worst of it. That when she would leave, she'd at least be alone. That there'd be some sacred space between him and whoever came next.

Then he saw the envelope.

Cream colored, sitting on the counter, addressed to Isabel in elegant, looping script. Beneath it, the letter itself lay open, as if she’d read it and forgotten to put it away—or wanted him to see.

His gaze snagged on the salutation at the top:

Namaste, trouble—

Tim’s fingers twitched. He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t.

But the envelope was already open. All he did was nudge it aside.

“Namaste, trouble,

Already miss you at sunrise.

By the time you read this, you’ll be home. But I hope you still feel the morning sun the way we shared it.

You asked me once why your hands stopped shaking in my class. I didn’t tell you the truth then. You needed to heal.
But you deserve it now. My soul recognized yours. The moment you walked in, I felt time sigh. Like it had been waiting.

You’ll know what to do next. Listen to that pull. Even if it hurts.”

 

Tim’s throat closed.

Time sigh.

He’d heard that phrase before—in hushed conversations at the VA, in the pseudoscience blogs Isabel used to read when she still thought he was the anomaly.

When soulmates meet, time exhales.

A floorboard creaked. Isabel stood in the doorway, her yoga mat rolled under one arm. Her eyes dropped to the letter in front of his eyes.

For a heartbeat, neither moved.

Then, softly: “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

Tim carefully picked up the letter, the paper whispering between his fingers. It smelled like sandalwood and citrus—him. The edges were feather-soft, expensive. Nothing like the drugstore notepads they used for grocery lists, the ones where Isabel would doodle hearts next to milk and eggs.

He looked at her. Really looked.

The Isabel who’d once pressed ice to his split knuckles after really bad shifts. Who’d sewn his name into his academy uniforms because he kept mixing them up at the laundromat. Who’d kissed him in the rain outside the courthouse after they married, her lips cold but her hands warm.

Now she stood before him, trembling not from withdrawal but from guilt.

Tim shook his head.

“Is this why you’re leaving?” His voice came out steady. A miracle.

Isabel’s fingers tightened around the mat strap, her wedding band catching the light. A flicker of gold he’d once kissed every morning. “I think you’ve known why for a while.”

The coffee maker gurgled, oblivious.

“You look alive again,” Tim said instead of screaming. Instead of begging. “Guess that’s all I wanted.”

Isabel’s breath hitched. She took a step forward, then stopped, her hand hovering in the space between them like she couldn’t remember how to bridge it. “Tim…”

He turned toward the counter, the letter slipping from his fingers onto the counter. “Listen to the pull, Isabel.”

“I’m so sorry—” Her voice frayed. She moved closer, footsteps feather-light, and for a wild, heart-stopping moment, he thought she might reach for him.

But her fingers found the letter instead, her thumb tracing the edge where my soul recognized yours curled in elegant script.

“I loved you,” she whispered. “I did.”

Past tense.

Tim exhaled sharply, a laugh or a sob trapped in his throat. “I know.”

God, he knew. He’d loved her too. Loved her still—with every scar she’d bandaged, every midnight panic attack she’d talked him through, every anniversary he’d spent scouring alleys and shooting galleries for a glimpse of her.

He loved her even as the universe insisted she wasn’t his to love. Even as her skin glowed and her eyes brightened in ways no detox could explain. Even now, watching her clutch that damn letter like a prayer, he loved her with the same desperate hope that had made him dye the grey from his hair for years.

But the truth had come the day they'd finally given her a real mirror—not the warped plastic rectangle bolted to her rehab room wall, but honest glass that showed what time had done. Rather, what it hadn't. She stood there, eighteen years young in a way no detox could account for, running fingertips over unlined skin like she was rediscovering her own face.

And Tim? He saw what it did to her.

How her laughter turned careful. How she'd started measuring the space between them in breaths instead of touches. How she flinched now when he reached for her, like his calloused hands might leave marks on this new, unscarred version of herself.

"You deserve the real thing," he said hoarsely.

Isabel's eyes welled, but no tears fell. "You were my home," she whispered. The fracture in her voice split wide open as she added: "But I think... I think I was just borrowing someone else's."

The truth crystallized in the air between them, as fragile and inevitable as the steam curling from their forgotten coffee cups—two cooling relics of what they'd been.

Tim's jaw flexed—a single nod.

“You should go,” he murmured. “Before I make it harder.”

She hesitated—just for a second—then pressed a kiss to his shoulder, her lips lingering like a vow she couldn't keep. The scent of her shampoo—something floral and unfamiliar, not the coconut one she'd used for a decade—filled his nose.

"I'll… come back later for my stuff, okay?" Her voice was small, already halfway out the door.

Tim didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just watched the emptiness where she'd stood, already feeling the outline of her absence hardening in his chest.

Later that night, the bathroom light buzzed like a dying insect as Tim stared at his reflection. The harsh light flickered above the mirror, casting shadows across his face, deepening the lines he didn’t actually have.

He closed his eyes, a breath caught in his throat. The truth pressed in like a cold stone: time had slipped through his fingers, but he had been frozen, stuck in a standstill while everything else moved on.

Beyond the door, the whisper of fabric being folded, zippers sealing shut. The methodical dismantling of a life.

The hardest part wasn’t losing Isabel. It was understanding, with sudden, brutal clarity, that the clock had never restarted for him, but now was finally moving on—without him.

His knuckles whitened around the dye bottle. They'd laughed about it at first, when they were celebrating twenty-six with still-teenage faces. "Late bloomers," they'd whispered between kisses, ignoring how time didn’t seem to catch up to them.

His fingers trembled as he lifted the brush, the dye’s acrid sting biting his nostrils. For the first time in years, he hesitated.

"Tim?" A knock. "I left your key on the counter."

He did it anyway.

Outside, the muffled thud of a box being set down. The jingle of keys she wouldn’t need anymore.

When he emerged, the bathroom reeking of ammonia and denial, the last of her things were gone. Only the indentations in the carpet remained, the shape of where her bookshelf used to be.

A stack of personnel files sat untouched on his nightstand. Grey's latest batch of rookies, that he'd been pushing Tim to "pick one before they're all taken."

He opened one of them.

As if he wanted to babysit some idealistic overachiever with a 98% clearance rate, top marks in interrogation tactics, and—he flipped the page. Christ—an undergraduate degree in psychology. Another wide-eyed believer who actually annotated her copy of the patrol manual and probably still believed in justice, soulmates and happy endings.

He tossed the file aside.

The last thing he needed was some rookie's misplaced optimism staining his life worse than the hair dye staining his sink.

Chapter Text

April 2019

For most of his teenage years, Tim Bradford didn't believe aging meant anything.

Not in the way people talked about it—breathless and reverent, like it was salvation. Not in the way the world seemed to believe it, this grand cosmic choreography he'd been taught about since childhood, where biology became destiny and strangers became soulmates at the tick of some invisible clock.

No. Love, he believed, was more than biology. More than a timer running down in your cells.

His mom never aged.

Not in a natural way, anyway.

And she was loved. Deeply. Just not by the father of her children—but how many women could say they were?

Her hair stayed that same careful shade of copper, every strand in its place like she'd painted it on each morning. Her skin stayed smooth well into her forties, untouched by time or worry. For years, Tim thought it was just good genes. Maybe vanity. Maybe the kind of stubborn pride that ran in his family, always having to look perfect.

But then came the surgeries.

Quiet procedures, spaced out like she thought nobody would notice. But kids notice everything, especially the things their parents try to hide.

"Is Mom sick?" Genny asked one day after dinner. She was probably eleven, curled up on his bed with that notebook she carried everywhere.

Tim kept his pencil moving across his homework. "She's fine."

"She looks different." Genny's voice was small, uncertain. "This morning… she looked scared."

She was, Tim wanted to say. She is.

Instead, he shrugged. "She's just taking care of herself. She’ll be back tomorrow."

The lie tasted bitter, but it was easier than the truth. Easier than explaining that their mother was fighting a war against time itself, and losing.

It lasted until the divorce. After that, there was no hiding it anymore. Dad showed up with the neighbor like he hadn't burned Mom’s whole world down. And Mom smiled while she played gracious hostess, no matter if her heart bled out on the kitchen floor.

"At least you get the real thing," she told him once, her voice cracking around the words. "You deserve it."

Tim wanted to break something. Wanted to scream that she deserved it too, that Dad didn't deserve jack shit, that the whole system was rigged and rotten, but he simply got up from the dining table without a word. That night, he filled out the enlistment papers he'd been carrying in his backpack for weeks.

His Mom?

She never found her real thing. Not with Dad. Not with anyone.

These days, people mistook Genny and Mom for sisters. Sometimes strangers thought Tim was the older one. And still, he never told her that he’d grown to understand her desperate fight against the mirror.

Because if back then he'd thought she was weak for staying and pretending everything was fine when it clearly wasn't, now he knew better.

Life has a way of slapping you with your own hypocrisy.

Every morning brought the same ritual—standing in front of the mirror, searching for changes that never came. A single hair, the first hint of crow’s feet. Every night, he'd lie awake wondering if tomorrow would be different.

Ten years of marriage. Twelve years together. And nothing. No gray hair. No lines. No proof that time was moving at all.

But Isabel had aged.

Apparently, at least.

God. He didn’t know if he felt sad, or ridiculous or just… lonely.

He'd loved her. Loved her enough to think maybe forever wouldn't feel like a sentence. Lover her enough to think she would feel the same. There were couples like that. They both knew. People who weren't soulmates and made it work anyway, building something real out of choice instead of cosmic fate.

Why couldn’t they be one of them?

They could be one of them.

But Isabel found him. And she wanted him, even if it meant setting fire to a shed of curated lies, make up tutorials and CVS receipts.

Even after alcohol, pills, cocaine, and everything Tim never knew about. Even after all he did to help, and everything she didn’t, he still hoped she would stay.

But she didn't.

And now she was aging somewhere in Pasadena, probably planning a future with someone whose time actually moved forward. Someone who could give her the life Tim never could. Babies. And cemeteries. And a shorter forever.

And Tim?

Tim was left cataloging the ghosts she'd left behind.

The pale rectangles on walls where her paintings used to hang. The empty spaces on shelves. The indent in the carpet where her bookshelf sat for a decade.

All the proof that someone had lived here, loved here, and decided it wasn't enough.

Some mornings he cooked—eggs that tasted like nothing, toast that burned while he stared at nothing. Some mornings he didn't bother. Those days, he survived on precinct coffee and whatever was left of his pride.

This was a don't-bother morning.

He stood in the kitchen, fork halfway to his mouth, staring at his phone like it might bite him. Three missed calls from Mom. All at 6 AM—her usual time to check on him. She knew she would find him awake.

Tim was just like his mother.

An early bird. Half a soul.

The irony wasn't lost on him. How alike they were. How cruel he'd been when he watched her cling to lies because the truth was too sharp to hold.

All those years, he'd wanted her to choose herself. To walk away from Dad's betrayal and build something better.

But she never did.

And now Tim had done the exact same thing—stayed too long, lied too much, pretended everything was fine.

The reasons didn't matter, now. Whether it was pride, fear, or just a willful blindness to the Pandora's box of truth he refused to open, the weight of it sat in his chest like a stone.

All that rage he'd thrown at her, all those times he'd made her cry trying to explain why she picked loneliness over the chance at something true… He knew she would never throw it back at him, but oh, didn't he deserve to taste it?

"Late for work. Can I call you later?"

He typed it fast, deleted it twice, then sent it before he could change his mind again. The phone went face-down on the counter next to eggs he wouldn't eat.

Outside, the sky was that dull, waiting gray that matched him almost to perfectly. Traffic hummed its usual song. A neighbor waved from across the parking lot—Tim nodded back but didn't slow down.

At the precinct elevator buzzed overhead, casting weird shadows on the metal doors. His reflection looked like hell—pale, hollow-eyed, like someone who'd forgotten how to sleep. There was a smudge under his left eye where concealer had given up the fight.

He didn't fix it.

The bullpen was already alive with the morning chaos. Voices bounced off walls, papers shuffled, someone laughed too loud near the briefing room. The ordinary mayhem. The only place Tim felt like himself anymore.

6:51. Enough time to grab coffee and slip into roll call without anyone asking questions. He'd planned it perfectly—three minutes of buffer before protocol required silence, just enough time to blend in without conversation. But Angela was already there, sharp eyes tracking his every move, and Tim knew his careful timing had failed him.

"You look like death," she said, not bothering with pleasantries.

"Good morning to you, too."

She leaned back, arms crossed. "Isabel still with her sister?"

The lie came automatically. "Yeah."

"Baby’s still cooking?"

Tim's coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth. "What?"

"The miracle spawn?" Angela's smile could cut glass. "The reason your wife disappeared for weeks?"

"Right." The words felt like ash. "Due end of the month, I think.”

"You think."

Tim didn't answer, just drank coffee that burned all the way down. Good. He deserved it.

"Must be nice," Angela continued, tapping her pen like a metronome. "Sister's couch, no job, no stress. Just waiting for the baby to show up. Could use some of that vacation myself."

"Why'd she want to keep it anyway?" The question came out casual, but her eyes stayed locked on his face. "She's on her own, right? After everything that happened—"

"Didn’t ask. Not my place," Tim cut her off, jaw clenched so tight it ached.

Angela nodded once, filing something away for later. She knew when to back off.

Bishop slid into the conversation like she'd been there all along. Just the faint scrape of the chair, and her voice. "You know, since Isabel's out of town, you should come out with us. Blow off some steam.”

"I'm fine."

"You're falling apart," Angela said bluntly. Tim rolled his eyes and set his cup down harder than necessary. "Look at the state of you—"

"Maybe you should mind your own business."

"Nah." Angela grinned, completely unrepentant. "You look like you need someone to call bullshit on you."

Bishop leaned forward, softening the blow. “Come on, Tim. Just drinks. Nothing crazy."

"I said I'm fine."

"And I said you're lying," Angela shot back. " When's the last time you did anything that wasn't work or sitting alone in that house?"

Tim's jaw worked. She wasn't wrong, but that didn't make it her problem.

"Look," Bishop tried again, "we're not asking you to drown whatever’s going on with tequila. Just... get out. Be around people who aren't asking you twenty questions about your personal life."

Angela snorted. "Speak for yourself."

"Angela," Bishop warned.

"What? He's clearly miserable. His wife's been gone for weeks, he looks like he hasn't slept since Christmas, and he's sitting here lying to us about baby due dates like we're idiots."

Tim's hands went flat on the table. "Enough."

"Or what?" Angela's eyes glittered with challenge. "You'll storm off and brood some more? Really showing us how fine you are there, Timothy."

The silence stretched between them, thick with unspoken truths. Tim could feel his control fraying at the edges, and Angela knew it. She always knew exactly where to push.

“Come on, man," Bishop said quietly. "A beer. That's it. If you hate it, you can leave."

Tim looked between them—Bishop's weirdly genuine concern, Angela's relentless certainty that she was right. They weren't going to let this go.

"One beer," he said finally.

Angela's smile was triumphant, but something flickered behind her eyes—curiosity, maybe. Like she'd tasted blood in the water and wanted more.

Then, the briefing room door swung open.

"Alright, everyone, let's get started."

The room shifted, officers straightening and reaching for notepads. Tim followed suit, but he could feel Angela's eyes on him—one last look before she settled back in her chair.

"Today's Christmas for our training officers," Grey announced. "Rookie Day."

Tim's stomach dropped. He'd almost forgotten.

His eyes found the front row—three backs turned toward him, but their files were burned into his memory. A widower who decided to join the Academy in his forties. A wide-eyed girl with something to prove. The son of a commander who'd grown up hearing cop stories at dinner.

He didn't want any of them. Didn't want to see his own pain reflected in the widower's eyes. Didn't want to babysit someone's daughter. And training the commander's kid? That was a special kind of nightmare.

He'd told Grey he wasn't training this year. ‘Too much going on at home’, he'd said. Grey hadn't pushed then. But when they'd talked again two weeks ago, Tim couldn't voice the real reason—that he was barely holding himself together, let alone ready to shape someone else, so he just accepted his fate and let Grey pick his new trainee.

“After six months together in the Academy, you’ve earned the right to be here. But you’ll have to prove yourself to stay.” A beat. “The way we do things matters. Protocol and tradition—they’re the metal from which every cop in this city is forged. Understand?”

The rookies echoed back, “Yes, sir.”

“Take a seat, now. Time to play the Training Officer match game.”

A ripple of amusement passed through the room. Tim didn’t smile.

Grey’s tone sharpened, just a fraction. “Our contestants: Lucy Chen—a hotshot who made her first arrest before clocking in for work. Jackson West—broke all his dad’s records at the Academy. And John Nolan, who apparently found true love before disco died.”

"And the winners are..." Grey's voice carried across the room, his eyes met Tim’s before he spoke again. "Officer Bradford, you get our hotshot."

Chen turned, and something shifted in Tim's chest—not pain exactly, but a flutter, like his heart had forgotten its rhythm for just a second. Her eyes found his across the room, dark and curious, and that flutter became a hum.

And when she approached later, extending her hand for a handshake, voice low and nervous, "Looking forward to working with you, sir,” the hum became a thunder.

The moment their skin touched, thunder broke.

Heat shot up his arm like electricity, settling deep in his chest where it spread like wildfire. His pulse hammered against his throat, loud enough that he was sure everyone could hear it. Her fingers were warm—alive in a way that made his feel like they belonged somewhere outside his body.

Her notebook slipped from her other hand, hitting the floor with a sharp thud.

"Sorry, I—" she started to pull away.

But Tim's grip tightened without his permission, his thumb brushing across her wrist where her pulse beat fast and steady—and Christ, it was syncing with his own, like their hearts were trying to find the same rhythm.

He dropped her hand like it was on fire.

"Right—Here's the deal, boot." His voice came out rough, scraped raw. The ghost of her touch burned across his palm. "On my watch, you keep it together. Save the nerves for your own time."

Her face went carefully blank, but not before he caught the flash of something—surprise, maybe hurt. She bent to pick up her notebook, movements suddenly precise and controlled. "Understood, sir."

The formality in her voice should have been satisfying. Instead, it sat wrong in his chest. Tim turned away, but his body was betraying him completely. Blood roared in his ears. His shirt stuck to his back with sweat. The air felt thick, like breathing underwater.

"Tim—" Angela's voice cut through the haze just as Bishop appeared at his elbow, fingers finding his wrist to check his pulse.

"You good?" Bishop's voice was steady, professional, but her grip tightened when he swayed.

The room spun. For one horrible moment, he saw double—the fluorescent briefing room and Chen's concerned face layered on top of each other like a bad photo exposure.

He yanked free. "Caffeine crash," he ground out, wiping his hand on his pants like that could erase the memory of her touch. "I'm fine."

"You don't look fine." Angela’s eyes were narrow. “Tim—”

"Don't you have a rookie to torture?" The words came out sharper than he meant, but the buzzing under his sternum was getting worse, spreading down his arms like static.

Angela looked like she wanted to push, but she just nodded. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm sure." He stepped back.

But there, the big brow eyes, curious, worried, swallowing him whole. Christ. He turned around. Before she could see him swallow hard, before she could read the panic written all over his face.

"Boot." The word scraped his throat raw. "With me."

Tim didn’t wait to see if she followed. Every step felt like walking through a minefield, each footfall sending fresh tremors through his ribs. Behind him, he heard the soft shuffle of her boots, the whisper of her duty belt.

The buzzing got stronger.

Tim clenched his jaw until his teeth ached and tried to remember how to properly breathe.

"This is our shop," Tim said, his voice clipped and professional as he approached the patrol car. "Your home for the next however-long-you-last."

Chen nodded, pulling out that same notebook from the briefing. The sight of it made his jaw tighten. Of course she takes notes.

"I repeat. Our shop. It's not a cop car, squad car, or black-and-white. It's a shop. It's where you work." His tone was sharp, instructional. "Every day before we roll out, you inspect the shop. Every. Day. I don't care if you watched the last shift do it, I don't care if it's the same car you drove yesterday. You check everything like your life depends on it."

"Yes, sir."

That voice again. Clear, steady, no tremor of nerves. Tim's chest did that annoying flutter thing, and he clenched his teeth.

Focus.

"First, we examine the exterior for damage. Any nicks, scratches, dents, or dings, you write 'em up. Got it?” A nod. A beat. “Start with the front end.” He stepped back. “Walk me through it."

Obediently, Chen moved to the front of the car. Arms at her sides, spine straight and shoulders squared.

"Headlight housings intact, no cracks in the lenses.”

Tim nodded absently, but his focus had already started to drift.

Why isn't she nervous? More importantly, why was he thinking about why she wasn't nervous instead of focusing on her work?

She was saying something about fog lights, and he couldn't stop himself from noticing the stupidest things about her. The curve of her neck and the tattoo peeking through as she moved. The small strands of hair framing her face. How her fingers moved with unnerving certainty, never hesitating. How she didn't look at him—not once.

Most rookies would be stealing glances at him, looking for approval, validation. But Chen was completely absorbed in her task.

"...tread depth looks good, no visible wear patterns..."

Background noise to a mind falling down a spiral.

Isn't she feeling it too?

Ever since that moment it hadn’t stopped. The electricity. The burning in his skin.

She'd felt it too, hadn't she? She had to have felt something.

But there was no sign of it now. Nor never. No stolen glances, no nervous energy. Just complete, maddening professionalism.

"...door handles secure, no damage to the hardware..."

Tim's eyes tracked her movements as she tested each door. The way she gripped the handles, firm but not aggressive. The small smudge of dirt on her cheek from the wheel well inspection. She was close enough now that he could smell that citrus scent again, could see the faint line of concentration between her brows.

What the fuck is wrong with you man?

His pulse quickened, and he had to force himself to look away. This was ridiculous. She was a rookie. His rookie. He was Tim Bradford, for Christ's sake, not some—

"Sir?"

The word cut through his spiraling thoughts like a blade. Tim's head snapped up to find Chen standing by the rear of the shop, looking at him expectantly.

"What?" The word came out sharper than he intended.

"I asked about the lights check," she repeated, that same steady tone. "Should I get in the driver's seat now, or did you want to finish the exterior first?"

Tim stared at her for a beat too long, his brain scrambling to catch up. How long had he been lost in his own head? How much had he missed?

"The lights," he said finally, his voice rough. "Yeah. Get in the car."

Chen's eyebrows raised slightly—the first crack in her professional composure all morning. She'd caught him not paying attention. The boot had caught her training officer spacing out.

Tim's jaw clenched.

Perfect. Just perfect.

Headlights. High beams. Turn signals.

Her foot was about to meet the ground again when Tim noticed the first mistake of the morning.

"Hold on," Tim called out as he positioned himself behind the car. "Brake lights."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Chen said, settling back into the driver's seat. She pressed the brake pedal, and the lights flashed red in the morning sun. "Good?"

"Yes. Move on to reverse lights. Then hazards."

A white light hit him, and then amber. Tim stared into it, watching how it glistened on his wedding band.

Focus.

"All good. What's next?"

"Emergency equipment?"

Tim nodded curtly. Chen popped the trunk, started to reach for something, then stopped and looked back at him over her shoulder. "Should I—what am I checking for?

Finally. Familiar territory. Procedure, protocol, the things he could recite in his sleep. Tim stepped closer to the trunk, his voice settling into the practiced cadence of instruction.

"First aid kit," he said, pointing to the red case. "Check the seal, make sure it's intact. Then… bandages, antiseptic, splints. Everything has to be accounted for and in date."

Chen nodded, pulling out a small notepad. She opened the kit methodically, checking expiration dates on packets.

"Flares next," Tim continued, feeling steadier now. "Should have six. Check the striker caps, make sure they're not cracked. Road flares are useless if they won't light."

"Six flares, check striker caps," she repeated, making notes.

"Fire extinguisher—check the gauge, make sure it's in the green. Reflective triangles, emergency blankets. Everything has a purpose, and everything has to work when you need it." He watched her write. "They didn't cover this at the academy?"

"No, they did. Just—first day, you know?"

"In the field, you learn by doing. Not taking notes, Chen."

She looked up, frowning. "Just making sure—"

"Making sure what? That you remember how to count?" Tim's voice was sharper than he intended. "This isn't a classroom. When someone's bleeding out on the highway, you're not going to have time to check your little notepad."

Chen's pen stopped moving. She studied his face for a moment, and Tim saw something shift in her expression—confusion giving way to something cooler.

"Got it," she said quietly, closing the notepad and sliding it into her pocket. "No notes."

The silence stretched between them. Tim felt the weight of her stare, the way she was clearly trying to figure out what his problem was. He couldn't blame her. He was being an ass, and they both knew it.

"Fire extinguisher," he said finally, his voice more controlled. "Check it."

She tested the gauge, checked the weight, gave him a quick nod. "Good to go."

"Close it up."

The trunk slammed shut with a metallic thud. Tim walked around to the driver's side, Chen to the passenger door. The interior of the Crown Vic smelled like coffee and industrial-strength air freshener. Chen settled into her seat, pulled out the computer terminal, started logging in with quick, practiced keystrokes.

Tim watched her navigate the system—no hesitation, no fumbling around asking for passwords or procedures. She'd done her homework. Top of her class at the academy, he remembered from her file. Commendations for leadership, tactical thinking. The kind of student who actually listened, who volunteered at a crisis hotline during college—years talking people off ledges while studying for her psych degree. Too much heart for this job, he'd thought when he read it. The kind of bleeding-heart idealism that got cops killed.

But watching her now, the steady way she moved through the checklist, he couldn't shake the image of her voice in some stranger's ear at 2 AM, patient and calm while they fell apart.

Either way—

"One more thing," he said, as the Crown Vic's engine rumbled to life.

She looked at him expectantly.

"I don't care what you've heard about me. I don't care what your Academy instructors told you. I don't care if you think you're ready for this." His voice was flat, cold. "You're not. Nobody is. So you do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, and maybe—maybe—you'll make it through your first month without getting yourself or someone else killed."

"I can't train her," Tim said, not bothering to knock as he pushed into Grey's office.

Thankfully, the Sergeant was alone—just him and the perpetual tower of case files that seemed to multiply on his desk. Grey's gaze lifted from the reports, those sharp eyes taking in Tim's disheveled appearance with the kind of practiced patience that came from two decades of shepherding hot-headed cops through their personal crises.

"Good morning to you too, Officer Bradford." Grey's voice carried that familiar thread of dry amusement as he leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking softly. "Coffee's fresh if you want some. Though you look like you've already had enough caffeine for one day."

Tim remained standing, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, every muscle in his body coiled tight as a spring. "I'm serious, Sir. Chen—Officer Chen. I need you to reassign her.”

"Uh-huh." Grey set down his pen with deliberate care, the small click echoing in the quiet office. "And this is based on what, exactly? Your extensive—" he glanced at his wrist, "—thirty-seven evaluation of her performance?”

"She's not—" Tim's voice caught, the words dying in his throat like smoke.

What was he supposed to say? That Lucy Chen made his skin buzz with electricity every time she was near? That he couldn't think straight when she looked at him with those impossibly big eyes? That every carefully honed instinct he'd built in his almost ten years on the force was screaming at him to run before she unraveled everything he'd worked so hard to keep locked away?

"She's not what, Tim?"

Tim ran a hand through his hair, the gesture sharp and frustrated. "I don't know, Sir. I just... I can't train her. Give me the legacy. The weeping widower, hell, I don't care who."

"You had your chance to pick."

"Yeah, well..." Tim's jaw tightened, the admission scraping out of him. "I would never have picked her."

Grey's eyebrows rose slightly, and when he spoke, his voice was deceptively casual. "And why's that?"

Tim's mouth opened, then closed. The words stuck in his throat like glass. Because how could he explain that Chen made him feel like his own skin didn't fit anymore? That one handshake had scrambled years of carefully constructed walls?

"She's..." he started again, grasping for something that wouldn't sound insane. "Overconfident. Takes notes like she's still in school. Acts like she knows everything already."

Grey's eyebrows rose slowly. "You mean she's prepared? Thorough? Those sound like qualities you'd normally appreciate in a rookie." His eyes narrowed. "Tim, I've known you for ten years. What's really going on? Are you having some kind of medical issue? Panic attacks? Because if you are—"

“What?” Tim cut him off, but his voice sounded strained even to his own ears. "I'm not having panic attacks.”

"Then what? Because Angela said you looked like you were going to collapse this morning and—” Grey's tone grew more concerned. "That's not normal, Tim. That's not you."

“Yeah, well—” Tim felt trapped, cornered*. Fucking Lopez.* "Maybe I'm just having an off day."

"An off day?" Grey's voice rose slightly. "You're asking me to reassign a rookie after half an hour because you're having an 'off day'?"

“Sir—” Tim felt his hands tremble slightly, and he shoved them into his pockets. "I just don’t think she’s ready for the street," he said, but the lie tasted bitter.

He knew it was a lie even as he said it.

"Based on what evidence?" Grey's voice carried that dangerous edge that meant he was running out of patience. "Because from what I observed this morning, Officer Chen handled herself with remarkable composure. Even when you were…" Grey paused, choosing his words carefully. "Less than welcoming.”

Heat flushed up Tim's neck.

"Look, I don't know what's going on with you today," Grey continued, leaning forward. "But Lucy Chen scored in the top five percent of her academy class. She's got a psychology degree, crisis intervention training, and glowing recommendations from every instructor she worked with. She's exactly the kind of cop this department needs."

"Then give her to someone else."

"Why?" The question came out flat, no-nonsense. "Give me one good reason why.”

Tim's hands clenched tighter. Because she made him forget how to breathe. Because when she looked at him, he felt like she could see straight through all his carefully maintained defenses. Because something about her made him want to be the kind of cop who still believed in saving people, and that terrified him more than any armed suspect ever had.

"I just—" He stopped, dragged a hand through his hair. "My instincts are telling me this is wrong."

"Your instincts." Grey's tone was skeptical.

"Yes."

"Then maybe," Grey said slowly, "what your instincts are really telling you is that Officer Chen is going to challenge you in ways you're not comfortable with and, honestly, Tim, I think you’re in need of it.”

Tim felt his jaw clench. "That's not—"

"I know you're having some trouble with Isabel, but you're a good cop, a great Training Officer, and I'm sure Officer Chen will thrive under your guidance."

Tim's entire body went rigid. "Don't." His voice came out low, dangerous. "Don't bring Isabel into this."

"I'm not bringing her into anything. I'm pointing out that you've been distracted for weeks, and now you're trying to dump a promising rookie because you can't get your head on straight." Grey's voice hardened. "Your personal life is affecting your professional judgment, and that's a problem."

"This has nothing to do with Isabel." The words scraped his throat raw. Isabel was a completely different kind of chaos—a marriage falling apart, an empty apartment, the indentation on carpets. This thing with Chen was... some cosmic sick joke.

"Doesn't it?" Grey leaned back. "Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you're running from anything that might complicate your life further—"

"With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about, Sir."

"Then enlighten me. Because I've got a rookie who deserves a fair shot, and a training officer who's acting like she's some kind of threat." Grey's eyes narrowed. "What exactly are you afraid of, Tim?”

Tim stared at the floor, his chest tight. What was he afraid of?

Isabel. The failed marriage built on lies he couldn't take back. The box dye staining his sink. The fact that he was still just some eighteen-year-old kid playing dress-up in a cop's uniform, fooling everyone—including Grey, the man he respected most in the world.

If that handshake with Chen meant anything, then everything would have to come out. The lies, the deception, all of it. And he wasn't ready for that.

He might never be ready for that.

"I'm not afraid," he said finally, but the words felt hollow.

"Prove it." Grey's voice was quiet but firm. "Train her. Give her the same chance you'd give any other rookie. And if she washes out, it'll be because she couldn't handle the job, not because you decided she was too much trouble before she even got started."

Tim looked up, meeting Grey's steady gaze. There was no backing down from this. Grey had made his decision, and Tim knew better than to keep pushing.

"Fine," he said through gritted teeth. "But when this goes sideways—"

"It won't," Grey interrupted. "Because you won't let it. You're too good at your job to let personal issues interfere with a rookie's training." He paused. "Aren't you?"

The challenge was clear. Tim straightened, pulling his professional mask back into place. "Yes, sir."

"Good. Now get back out there and do what you do best. Train a cop." Grey picked up his pen, effectively dismissing him. "And Tim? Whatever's going on with you—figure it out. Don't make it her problem.”

Tim didn't trust himself to respond. He just nodded and walked out, closing the door behind him with more force than necessary.

Chen was waiting by their shop, arms crossed, studying something on her phone. She looked up as he approached, and Tim had to fight the urge to look away from those dark eyes.

He'd left her there—practically fled after they'd gotten locked in the shop together and the air had become impossible to breathe. One moment they'd been going through the equipment check, the next the confined space had felt charged with something he couldn't name, and he'd muttered "forgot something inside" before almost running to Grey's office like a coward.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Fine." The word came out clipped. "Ready to go?"

She pocketed her phone, opened the passenger door. "Ready."

As Tim slid behind the wheel, he caught that citrus scent again and had to grip the steering wheel to keep his hands steady. This was going to be the longest probationary period of his career.

Chapter Text

When the dispatch call crackled through the shop, Tim Bradford almost said a prayer. Not that he believed in any god — in fact, Tim Bradford was a man of little faith—but the silence, and the burning that refused to leave his skin, somehow buried in his whole soul, made it unbearable to breathe in that closed space.

Lucy Chen, it seemed, didn’t feel any of it.

The call came twenty minutes after they’d left the station. They were rolling through the familiar endless maze of palm trees, Tim noticing how the sky was shifting into a gold-tinged blue, not as grey as it had been that early morning.

"7-Adam-19, domestic disturbance, 751 South Mansfield Avenue. Neighbours report shouting, possible 415."

Tim reached for the radio. Possible 415. He almost wanted to laugh. Nothing like a couple at each other’s throats to drag him out of his own head—away from the ache that wouldn’t leave his chest, the raw thought of his soon-to-be-ex-wife somewhere in Pasadena with—He felt Chen’s eyes on him, a flicker at the edge of his vision. It cut through the burn like cold water on a fresh bruise. He dropped the thought, throat tight, and gave her nothing but the nod she’d already learned to read as stay steady .

“7-Adam-19, show us en route,” he said, his voice flat but steady enough to anchor him to the moment. He slipped the mic back into its cradle, fingers steady on the wheel even if nothing else was.

Beside him, Chen shifted in her seat. He caught it—that tiny fidget, the press of her thumb over her palm. He’d been training rookies long enough to know what it meant.

“Nervous there, boot?” he asked, letting the question slip like an afterthought. He watched her face transform and her fingers stall, just through the corner of his eye.

“I think anxious is the right word.”

“Hm.” The burning still echoed inside him. A pull. Something weird enough to make him want to ask questions, and actually listen to the answers. Yet, he stuck to what he knew best. The professional, solid façace that held him together.

“How should we handle this?” he asked, eyes back on the road.

"Ahm...separate them first?” she tried, the hesitation small but there. He could hear her running through scenarios and flashcards, the academy still too fresh in her mind.

“Right,” he nodded. “First rule: separate. Calm the noise. If they’re still going at it when we arrive, don’t wedge yourself between them. Always control the scene first.”

She nodded—he could feel it even without looking.

“And?” Tim pressed.

“Interview them apart. Figure out who’s the primary aggressor, if there’s any. Look for marks…”

“Good.” He glanced at her, just enough to catch the flicker of her focus. It pulled at something in him, again — the ache burning under his ribs since their eyes first locked, since he’d stormed into Grey’s office asking to be rid of this rookie he couldn’t stop watching. “Listen for inconsistencies. People lie. A lot.”

He drummed his thumb against the wheel, a soft staccato that barely cut through the buzzing under his skin. Chen said nothing. Her fingers tapped at the MDT, eyes flicking over the screen like it mattered more than him.

“If it goes sideways?” he asked, sharper now. Silence. Just the click of keys. “Chen.”

Her head snapped up, the glow of the screen painting her face in blue and green. “Sir?”

“When I’m talking to you, you listen,” he said, voice low, too controlled. “I expect that — especially on your first day.”

Something flickered across her face — apology, maybe. “Yes, sir. I was just…” She glanced at the screen. “I was running a comprehensive check, sir. Social services history shows two calls in the past month — both resolved without incident, but there’s a pattern of escalation. Marcus Reeves lost his job at the automotive plant a few months ago. Janet works full-time at the elementary school, and part-time at a dinner. Financial stress, unemployment… Those are all valid reasons for him to snap and—”

“I knew you were going to do that.”

“Do what , sir?”

“Chen.” He looked at her as he turned into the driveway. Ahead of them, a black sedan was parked crooked at the curb. In the yard, a kid’s goal net, three half-deflated balls. A bicycle tossed sideways on the porch. Life, right there, messy and sharp. “These are people. Not your college homework.”

Chen’s jaw twitched. “With respect, sir, I know they’re people. I’m just—”

“—Running data. Making up a story.” He cut in, sharper than he meant. The heat under his ribs flared so hot it made his teeth ache. He hated how she made him notice everything . The curve of her voice when she got stubborn. The tiny line between her brows that appeared when she thought too hard. She made him feel cracked open and wrong in his own skin. “It’s not real . You’re building a picture in your head—one that’s gonna get you real hurt when the facts don’t play along.”

Her lips parted like she might bite back. He almost wanted her to. Maybe it’d break this thing that kept pulling at him, deeper every second. But she didn’t. She should have .

“I know that,” she said instead, her voice tight—no more polite rookie sweetness, just raw nerve. “I’m trying to be prepared . That’s my job too, isn’t it?”

“Prepared for what ?”

“For what might happen—” She pushed on before he could cut her off again, words tumbling fast like she was back in a lecture hall instead of his shop. “People are patterns, sir. There’s always something—stressors, triggers, escalation points—”

He barked a humourless laugh, nothing warm in it. “Save the psych major, Chen. This isn’t a term paper. This is a real middle-class family, on a school day, tearing itself apart behind that door. There are at least two kids in there who need you ready to act when someone decides to throw a broken lamp at your head.”

“Sir, I was just analysing risk—”

“You were guessing ,” he shot back, the word almost a snarl. He could feel how close they were in the Crow Vic, the way her sharp breath filled the tiny space. The way her pulse jumped at her neck. All of it fed that burn under his ribs, hot enough it felt like it might kill him. “You think you can read people? Good. But right now, you read me . And I’m telling you— don’t guess . See . React . Stay alive.”

She blinked hard. Her jaw set. Her fingers drummed once on the laptop, defiant. “So what—you want me to just stop thinking? Stop using my brain because you say so?”

“Yes.” Tim’s hand clenched around the door handle so tightly it hurt. He didn’t trust himself to look at her—didn’t trust the part of him that wanted to snap or worse , to stay in that shop and keep talking just to hear her voice. To keep escalating her to see how much deeper her voice would become. “When it’s time to think, you think. When it’s time to act, you act. If you can’t tell the difference, you’ll die. Or I will. Clear? ”

They locked eyes—hers too wide and bright, his flat but burning underneath. She looked like she might spit his words right back at him. God, he almost wished she would. Give him a reason to keep it going. To feed the rage. To make the ache make sense.

“Wanna say something?” he ground out.

Chen's mouth parted—he saw the comeback forming, sharp and young and too sure of itself. Tim blew out a breath through his teeth, shoved the door open so hard it rattled the frame. The morning air was too warm to do him any help.

“Don’t,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Out. Stay close. Behind me.”

He didn’t wait for her answer—just slammed the door and headed for the porch. The domestic might be routine. Might be hell. Either way, it was better than the static between his ears when she looked at him like that.

Tim stepped in front of the door first, fist meeting the red painted wood with three sharp raps.

“LAPD!”

Chen looked. Attentive. Still pissed at him, for sure. The lines on her forehead had not disappeared.

Footsteps approached from inside—hesitant, shuffling. Tim could hear muffled voices, a woman's voice saying something unintelligible. A child's voice asking a question. A man’s voice, loud and gruff, approaching.

"What?" Eventually, he was close enough to be understood. "What's this about?"

Tim kept his voice professional but firm. "Sir, we received a call about a disturbance. We just need to speak with you and make sure everything's okay."

"There's no disturbance here.”

"Then there should be no problem opening the door and talking to us," Chen said.

Tim shot her a warning look. Too fast, too direct. He could hear the shift in the man's breathing on the other side of the door. Tim raised his eyebrows, and Chen just nodded, her tongue piercing through her lips. Tim waited for a “sorry”, but she said nothing.

“Go away,” the man's voice came back, louder now, with an edge of aggression creeping in. "I don't have to open my door for nobody.”

"Sir, we're not here to cause any trouble," Tim said, his tone deliberately calm. "We just received a call from a neighbour who was concerned. If we can just talk for a few minutes, we can clear this up and be on our way."

Chen was already tensing beside him. Hand on her belt, over her taser. Tim looked at her, a soft weight on his gaze, a tilt of his head. Sometimes, the best de-escalation was just being patient, letting the silence do the work.

The muffled voices inside got more urgent. Tim caught fragments—a woman's voice, pleading. The man telling someone to "go to your room, now." The kids were inside. He looked at his watch. They should be in school by now. Tim's jaw tightened.

"Mr. Reeves?" Chen called out. "We know you have children in there. We just want to make sure everyone's safe."

Tim closed his eyes. Rookie mistake. Never let them know how much you know until you're face to face.

The silence stretched long enough that Tim started counting heartbeats. One. Two. Three.

Then the deadbolt clicked.

The door opened just wide enough to reveal half of Marcus Reeves' face—unshaven, eyes bloodshot, a fresh scratch running down his left cheek. His body blocked the rest of the doorway, but Tim could see movement behind him in the dim hallway.

"How do you know my name?" Marcus's voice was quieter now, dangerously quiet.

Chen opened her mouth, but Tim cut her off with a subtle hand gesture. "We ran the address, sir. Standard procedure. As I said, we just want to make sure everyone's okay."

Marcus's visible eye flicked between them, calculating. "Nobody called you. My neighbours mind their own business."

"Sir, we—" Chen started.

"Who called?" Marcus's voice rose again. "Was it the Hendersons? That old bitch next door?" He turned his head, shouting back into the house. "Janet! Did you call the cops? Did you fucking call the cops?"

A woman's voice, thin and frightened: "No, Marcus, I didn't—"

"Then who?" He spun back to face them, and now Tim could see the whole picture—the scratch wasn't the only mark. There was swelling around Marcus's left eye, and his knuckles were scraped raw.

Chen's hand drifted toward her radio, and Tim knew she was thinking about calling for backup. But movement meant escalation, and escalation with kids in the house meant—

"Daddy?" A small voice from somewhere inside. "Daddy, what's wrong?"

Marcus froze at the sound of his child's voice, his whole body going rigid. For a split second, Tim saw something crack in the man's face—a flash of shame, maybe even horror at what his kid was hearing.

"It's okay, baby," Marcus called back, his voice suddenly gentle. "Daddy's just talking to some people. Go back to your room with your sister, okay?"

But the damage was done. Tim could see it in Marcus's eyes—the realization that his children had heard him screaming, had seen whatever happened to leave those marks on his face and hands.

Tim shifted closer to Chen, cutting off her next move before she could make it. She was reaching for her radio—rookie instinct, procedure. He brushed her hand aside firmly, his eyes never leaving Marcus.

Not yet. Not with little ears still pressed to doorframes.

"Mr. Reeves, my name’s Officer Bradford. This is Officer Chen," Tim said quietly, extending his hand. "Why don't you step outside with—"

"I'm not leaving my house." Marcus's grip tightened on the door frame, not even leaving it to shake Tim’s.

Chen shifted her weight. Impatient. Nervous .

It wasn’t an ordinary call. They didn’t arrive at a textbook scenario. But it was her first call, and she seemed like she was still clinging to her tidy narrative. The unemployed, aggressive husband. Even when he was very much hurt.

“Sir, we can’t leave without talking to any of you,” Chen said, voice softer now. “Those wounds look fresh. Are you hurt?”

She didn’t seem convinced. She just seemed like she was trying to fit what she was seeing into what she had expected . Tim tried not to look at her too much, but he needed to see her face move as she took it in. As Marcus’s hand went up, almost embarrassed, fingers brushing the scratch on his cheek.

The truth was all over his face—this wasn’t what the neighbours thought they’d heard, or what Chen’s analysis had primed her for.

“I’m fine,” Marcus said, but his voice cracked as a crash sounded from deeper in the house—shattering glass, then silence. “Shit!” Marcus breathed, flinching toward the sound. “Janet? Janet, what—”

The door swung wider as Marcus moved aside. Tim saw the living room—two chairs knocked over, family photos on the walls. Through the kitchen doorway: a woman half in shadow, pressing a towel to a probably bleeding hand.

Chen shot Tim a look, uncertain, thrown off. He could see it as clear as day: the file in her head falling apart. Unemployed husband, financial stress—pattern, pattern, pattern . And yet here was Marcus with clear defensive wounds, and the wife hiding in the dark.

“Ma’am?” Tim called, stepping past Marcus, eyes flicking for weapons. “You need medical attention?”

Janet’s voice floated back, shaky. “I’m fine. Just… dropped a glass.”

Chen’s mouth parted, her framework dissolving. Tim saw it happen—her neat, psych-major analysis replaced by the messier truth: real people, real pain, no clean lines.

“Sir…” Chen’s voice was softer now, gentler. Tim could hear it even from inside. “Do you feel safe here?”

“Yeah, I—” Marcus turned, eyes down. “Since I lost my job, she’s been… I don’t know. It’s been rough. She’s just—different. And…” Marcus’s eyes darted to the kitchen, then back. His voice was barely a whisper. “The kids came down. They saw… I didn’t know what to do.”

Tim nodded once, decisive. “Officer Chen, take Mr. Reeves to the living room. Janet—right?” He flicked his eyes at her. Marcus just nodded, small, ashamed. “We’re going to sort this out, sir. Chen—by the book.”

Chen blinked, then found her voice. “Mr. Reeves? Living room okay?”

Marcus glanced toward the overturned chairs. “It’s… It’s a mess in there.”

“That’s okay.” Chen’s tone softened, her rookie edges showing as she bent to pick up a few cushions. “We’ve seen worse.”

Tim watched Chen for half a second—the soft edge in her voice, the naive hope that kindness alone might fix something this broken. He wished it could. He really did.

Then he stepped deeper into the house, boots crunching over stray glass near the dining table—juice cups tipped over, applesauce smeared on the floor where kids had probably run through the chaos. Janet hadn’t moved. The lights were still off, blinds drawn tight, the stale sweetness of Dolce & Gabbana clinging to the air, cut with cheap vodka and something sour underneath.

He stopped at the kitchen doorway.

“Mrs. Reeves?” he called, voice low but clear. “I’m Officer Bradford. Mind if I come in? Maybe turn on a light?”

A beat. Then, dull but resigned: “I suppose.”

Tim stepped in, his fingers finding the switch on the wall. The light flickered on, harsh against the gloom. He took it in fast—broken glass glittering by the sink, an empty bottle shoved next to the coffeemaker, Janet Reeves pressed back against the refrigerator like she could melt into it. The dish towel around her hand was wet and dark with blood.

She was smaller than he’d pictured—five-four, tops, hair pulled back in a careless ponytail. Her eyes were glassy but not gone—there was something behind them. Fear, shame, anger. Maybe all of it at once.

“How’s your hand?” Tim asked, tone neutral.

Janet glanced down, like she’d just remembered it was there. “It’s fine. Just a cut.”

“Mind if I take a look? I’ve got some first aid training.”

She hesitated. Then, slowly, she unwrapped the towel. The cut was deep—ragged, bright red against her pale skin. It needed more than a bandage.

“Mrs. Reeves, that needs stitches,” Tim said. “When’s the last time you had something to drink?”

She barked out a laugh—dry and mean around the edges. “What time is it?”

He checked his watch. “Eight twenty-five.”

Her smile twisted, bitter. “Then I guess about an hour ago. Maybe I never stopped.” She rewrapped the towel, wincing. “Look, Officer—this isn’t what you think. Marcus didn’t do this.”

“I didn’t say he did.”

Her eyes snapped up, sharpening through the haze. “So you think I did.”

Tim held her gaze, steady. “I don’t think anything yet. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

Janet’s eyes flicked past him, toward the hallway where Marcus’s voice was murmuring—Chen’s too, soft and steady. Then back to Tim. She hugged the bloody dish towel closer to her chest like it was armour.

“I’m not sure I want to,” she said. Her voice wasn’t defiant—it was tired. Bone-deep tired, like this was just one more thing she couldn’t hold up.

Tim stayed where he was, hands visible, voice calm. Don’t crowd her. Don’t push too fast.

“That’s your choice,” he said evenly. “But here’s the thing, Janet—right now you’ve got two kids in this house, you’re bleeding, your husband’s got fresh scratches on his face, and something got broken loud enough for the neighbors to call us. So, whether you talk to me or not, I still have to figure out if everyone’s safe in this house today. Especially those kids.”

Janet flinched at the word kids . Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. Tim waited. Silence was better than pressure—he’d learned that the hard way on too many doorsteps like this.

Finally, she dropped her eyes to the floor. “It wasn’t Marcus,” she whispered.

Tim nodded once, slow. “Okay. Then, what happened?”

“I—I didn’t hit him—” Janet’s voice cracked, frustration boiling out in half-finished thoughts. “I was just pissed , okay? He’s been out of work six months— six months —and all day it’s him on the couch, him on the laptop pretending to look, him telling the kids we’re fine—while I’m working three goddamn jobs just to keep the lights on. And my mom— God , my mom keeps saying, He’s your person, you have to stick it out .”

She let out a sharp, humourless laugh that sounded too big for the dark kitchen.

“ My person. Like this is fate, like I’m supposed to be grateful . How am I supposed to be grateful for this?” Tim didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. “But—I didn’t touch him, I just... kicked a chair, the kids got scared, they ran upstairs, he yelled at me for scaring them, and I—”

She broke off, staring at the floor.

Tim let the silence breathe. “The glass?” he asked gently.

“Yeah—I threw it. At the sink. Not at him.” Her voice cracked on not . “Just—stupid. Missed. Glass everywhere. I cut my hand trying to clean it up.” She sniffed so hard it rattled in her chest, eyes shimmering under the cheap kitchen light.

Tim didn’t soften. “Why were you trying to clean it up when we knocked? Trying to hide it?”

“No—God, no. I just—” Her breath hitched, a wild little laugh that caught halfway. “I just wanted it to look normal, okay? For five minutes. A clean sink. A clean house.”

“Mrs. Reeves.”

She dragged her palm over her face, smearing tears. “It’s all a mess. It’s all a mess. I clean inside, he’s supposed to do the yard but he forgets , and then the kids fight because they can’t find their toys, and there’s no food in the fridge except boxed shit, and I’m so tired —” Her shoulders jerked like a sob tried to get out but only made it halfway. “I come home and there’s toys everywhere and they want me to read them stories but I’m too damn tired from pulling doubles. And my crochet—” She let out a sharp, broken sound that might’ve been a laugh. “My crochet . I haven’t touched it in months. I can’t even do something quiet and pretty for myself because there’s always another bill, another shift, another— goddamn day .”

Tim didn’t move. “So you drink.”

Her eyes snapped to his, wide and wet. For a second, her mouth moved, but nothing came out—then she pressed her lips tight, shoulders folding in like a house caving under snow.

He waited. Didn’t blink. Didn’t let her look away.

“No,” she shook her head. “I started drinking because every time I look at him I think… This is it? This is my person? ” She choked on a breath that might’ve been a sob. “You’re supposed to feel lucky. I bet you feel lucky, Officer. Blessed. For ageing. And growing old together and… But I don’t.” She shook her head. “I feel—trapped. I hate myself for it.”

Somewhere behind them, Marcus’s low voice floated in from the living room—he was talking to Chen, too soft to make out every word. But one line carried clearly: We can’t lose each other.

Janet heard it too. Her shoulders dropped like all the fight had slipped out of her bones.

“And he says that all the time,” she whispered. “ We can’t lose each other. Like it’s a promise. Or a threat. Or maybe both.” She looked at Tim then, eyes dull but defiant. “It’s not supposed to be like this. Soulmates aren’t supposed to feel like this.”

“I know,” he said.

“I know you do.” She nodded.

But Tim didn’t. Not really. He only knew how to keep other people’s kids safe, how to talk someone down when the glass was already broken and the house half-ruined. He didn’t know what it felt like to stand in front of the person fate gave you and want to run. If anything, he’d been ready to trade immortality—infinity itself—just to feel the opposite.

He just knew she wasn’t lying.

“And his hands? His knuckles—”

“Don’t—” Again, she shook her head. “He didn’t hit me. I promise.”

Upstairs, the house felt too quiet for all the voices drifting up from below—the paramedics’ boots, Marcus’s low apologies, the radio crackling with the arrival of another unit. Tim paused just inside the doorway to the kids’ room. The walls were papered with bright cartoons, a messy scattering of toys littering the floor, but the mood was tender and still.

Chen was seated cross-legged on the floor, her knees tucked close, her voice low and warm against the hum of the morning outside. The little girl was pressed into her side, shoulders trembling with each hiccuped sob. Her hair was done in messy braids, blonde curls forming a loose, uneven crown around her head.

Tim lingered quietly, letting the scene settle like a fragile bubble around them. The boy sat nearby, cheeks flushed, excitedly explaining something about cars.

“My favourite car colour is red,” he declared with certainty. “Because red makes the car faster.”

“No, it doesn’t,” the girl said between shaky sobs.

The boy lowered his voice conspiratorially. “It does! Doesn’t it, Officer Chen?”

Chen chuckled softly, the sound surprisingly light in the quiet room. “Actually... I don’t know much about cars, so I’m not sure.” Her voice was gentle, almost a whisper.

“I do know. A lot .” The boy perched himself on his sister’s bed, a red car in his hand. “They go fast.”

Despite Chen’s smile, Tim could see she was struggling. He watched as she bent down and brushed a tear from the girl’s cheek with her thumb. “Sweetheart, your braids are so pretty. Did Mommy do them for you today?”

The girl sniffled and shook her head against Chen’s side. Her brother spoke up, voice thin but certain. “Daddy did them. He always does ’em when Mommy’s tired.”

“He did a really good job.” Chen shifted slightly and tugged at a loose braid, gently tightening a tiny elastic band. The girl flinched, then relaxed, letting Chen smooth a stray curl behind her ear. “But they are a bit messy. Can I help fix them a little?”

The girl nodded, eyes still shiny but trusting now.

Tim stepped further into the room, careful not to startle anyone. He crouched down quietly near the boy, who looked up briefly and gave him a small, hopeful smile.

Chen glanced up and gave Tim a brief nod, then resumed braiding with careful fingers.

“You know,” Chen said softly, “my mom used to braid my hair before school, too. Sometimes she’d braid it so tight my eyebrows went all the way up here.” She raised her eyebrows exaggeratedly. The boy giggled, and even the girl let out a tiny laugh, wiping her eyes.

Tim watched them, the fragile normalcy in the middle of a house falling apart. He wanted to say something—to fix things with words or a plan—but for once, he just stayed quiet and let the moment breathe.

Chen looked up at him then, eyes meeting his with a mix of gratitude and something like relief.

“They’re a bit scared,” she said quietly.

Tim nodded. “That’s normal.” He glanced down at the two kids. “Did you eat anything already?”

“Just abblesauce,” the girl mumbled.

“Applesauce?” Tim corrected gently, a small smile tugging at his lips. “Was it enough?”

Both kids shrugged, tiny shoulders rising and falling like they hadn’t thought about hunger until right then. Tim crouched down lower, making sure he was closer to their level. “Okay, then, you two—we’re going to get you something to eat soon, and then you’re going to school. Auntie Maria will pick you up from there, alright?”

The girl’s lip trembled, and the boy’s eyes flicked nervously toward the doorway.

“Because… my mommy’s going to jail?” the girl asked, voice barely there. The boy’s eyes went wide, like the thought hadn’t landed for him yet.

Chen met Tim’s eyes before she turned back to the girl, her voice soft but certain. “No, sweetheart. Mommy’s not going anywhere like that. She just got hurt and she’s going to the hospital to get fixed, that’s all.”

The girl hugged Chen’s arm tighter, clinging to that promise like it might hold the whole house together. Then, like it was a secret too big to carry, the boy leaned in, voice a shaky whisper. “ Oh. It’s just that… **Mommy broke a jar… She tried to hit Daddy with it.”

The girl nodded, solemn. “It was really loud.”

Chen brushed a stray curl from the girl’s cheek, then took the boy’s small hand in hers, her thumb tracing over his knuckles. “You’re so brave for telling us.”

They didn’t say much after that. There wasn’t much left to say—not to two kids who’d already heard too much. Chen coaxed them up to find their backpacks and slip into little sneakers. Tim helped, handing over a lost lunchbox from under the bed, zipping a coat that caught on the girl’s hair until Chen gently fixed it.

They made it look normal. Or at least they tried. Like any other morning rush before school. Like there hadn’t been broken glass on the kitchen floor. Like paramedics weren’t carrying their mother out the front door.

And when they were ready, Tim motioned to Chen.

“Back door,” he mouthed.

Chen, her hand brushing his wrist as he took the boy’s hand from his, looked up with a nod. “I got them.”

Tim stayed by the staircase as Chen guided the kids out through the narrow hallway that led to the yard. He heard the back latch click open, Chen's calm voice floating back in little reassurances.

“Yes, pancakes. We can get you pancakes.” The tiny voices were almost impossible to understand. “We just need to wait for Officer Bradford, okay?”

The boy peeked back through the doorway, lifted a tiny hand, and waved. Tim lifted his in return—a half-wave, a promise to hold the line while they were gone. Chen gave him a small smile, a flicker of softness in all the noise, before the door swung shut behind her.

After that, just her muffled voice, “Let’s see if we can spot any birds. You like birds, right?”

And then the quiet cracked. The buzz came back—that low, electric hum rising from somewhere deep in his chest, filling the empty spaces Chen’s voice had pressed calm into.

Outside, the paramedics were guiding Janet onto a stretcher, her head turned away from Marcus, who sat hunched on the porch steps facing Nolan and Bishop. Tim could hear the muffled drone of a dispatcher calling out another unit. The house felt cold again — a place for statements and reports and bruises that never really stayed hidden.

Upstairs had felt— God, it had felt peaceful . For a heartbeat, it had almost felt easy .

He took a breath, squared his shoulders, and stepped outside. The work was waiting.

Tim stepped out into the warm morning, the heavy door groaning on its hinges behind him. Marcus turned at the sound, shoulders hunched, eyes red. Nolan and Bishop took two silent steps back, giving Tim room to come down off the warped porch.

It wasn’t a pretty sight—Marcus hunched on the bottom step, forearms braced on his knees like he was trying to fold himself small enough to disappear into the weeds and scattered toys. The yard was a wreck—patchy grass, kids' toys lost between weeds and dirt, two LAPD units idling next to an ambulance that hummed low in the heat.

Bishop’s eyes flicked between Tim and Marcus, waiting for a cue. Tim just jerked his chin — I’ve got it. They backed off without a word, boots crunching gravel.

Marcus shifted sideways, giving Tim room to sit, but he stayed where he was, boots planted on the gravel, broad shoulders blocking out the sun.

His voice was flat, almost casual. “Your kids told me about the jar.”

But he didn’t reply. Did not even look up. Marcus picked at what looked like a splinter by his show and kept silent.

“Did she swing it at you, Marcus?” Still nothing—just a small, miserable shrug. “Are you telling me you don’t remember? Or that your children are liars?”

Marcus's jaw flexed. Finally .

He looked up, eyes narrow, bitting his lip. “I’m telling you that it doesn’t matter. She missed.”

“Okay.” Tim paused. “And that’s what you’re hanging your whole life on? She missed ?”

There were two kids inside. Two kids who’d been a few feet away from the same kitchen tile where that jar shattered. And this man, old enough to know better, was sitting here trying to fold it all up like a bad dream that’d just blow away with the morning heat.

Tim let the silence stretch, the hum of the ambulance cutting through the buzz in his head. His throat felt raw, his tongue dry as dust. He crouched so they were almost eye to eye, shadows and sun stripes flickering across Marcus’s face.

“Someday,” Tim said, voice steady but coiled tight, “she won’t miss. You think she’ll miss you next time? What about them?” He jerked his chin at the yard where plastic trucks lay half buried in the grass. “What happens when that jar lands on your son’s head, huh?”

Marcus’s shoulders tensed but he wouldn’t look up, eyes fixed on the dirt like he could dig a hole through it with his guilt alone.

“It’s not like that,” Marcus muttered. “You don’t know her.”

Tim barked a soft, humourless laugh. “No. I don’t. But I know you’re the only damn thing standing between your kids and whatever she turns into when she drinks herself sideways.”

That hit. Marcus flinched like Tim had flicked a lit match at him.

“You gonna press charges?” Tim pressed, leaning closer, voice low but sharp. “Or you gonna let them grow up dodging flying glass and hoping Dad’s gonna be enough to stop it?”

Marcus’s eyes finally snapped up, wet and furious. “She’s my soulmate , Officer. You think I’m gonna put her in jail? You think I’m gonna ruin her life— our life—because we’re going through a rough moment?

Tim’s teeth ground together.

There it was .

That word— soulmate —like it was a shield big enough to excuse bruises and broken jars and wide-eyed kids with trembling hands.

“You’re gonna let her ruin them to protect her ?” Tim hissed.

He could feel it—every lie he’d told himself about what a soulmate was supposed to mean. All of it cracked open, leaking into this mess of cheap grass and rotting toys and a man too scared to stand up for his own kids.

“Stop bringing my kids into this!”

“They already are in it, Marcus. They’re in it every damn time you wipe her puke off the floor. Every time you lie to the neighbour about the noise. You’re telling me she’s your soulmate? You’re telling me that excuses this?”

Marcus’s voice cracks. “I can’t put her in a cage. You don’t get it— it’s her . She’s—”

Tim barks a laugh that sounds like it hurts his ribs. “You think I don’t get it?” His eyes flash, and for a split second, it’s not Marcus he’s looking at, it’s himself at his kitchen table, reading down his divorce papers in silence. “You think you’re special? You think you’re the first dumb bastard who’d rather eat glass than admit your fairytale’s dead?”

Marcus flinches. Doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.

Tim lowers his voice to a razor’s whisper. “You won’t press charges? Fine. But someday that jar’s gonna land. And maybe it’s you. Or maybe it’s your boy. Or your girl. And then it will be us dragging her out in cuffs. So do it now. While they’re still just scared and not mourning any of you.”

Marcus shook his head, a tiny, miserable movement. “I can’t. I won’t do that to her. Not my soulmate.”

“You know I need to report all of this, right? Especially the fact that your kids were in the room when it happened.”

Marcus flinched but didn’t move, didn’t speak. His hands scrubbed over his mouth, his eyes darting toward the other end of the house, toward the kids Chen was keeping calm and busy.

“Marcus.” Tim dropped his voice lower, deadly calm now. “If you don’t press charges, it still goes in the report. CPS is gonna see it. You think they’re gonna look at this and walk away? They’ll come back. And they’ll come back again . And maybe next time, they won’t leave your kids here.”

“I’ll handle it,” Marcus rasped, shaking his head so hard his shoulders trembled with it. “I’ll fix it. She just needs help—she’s sick, she needs—”

“She needs you to keep pretending she didn’t almost crack your skull open in front of your kids?” Tim’s voice cracked—just a hairline fracture in the calm he’d fought all week to keep sealed shut.

“You wanna bury your head in soulmate bullshit?” Tim bit out, softer now but edged like a blade. “Fine. But don’t make your kids pay for it.”

He stepped away before Marcus could answer, boots grinding over the gravel. His radio hissed—Chen again, her voice gentle and steady like she knew exactly how to slip under his armour when he least needed it: “Sir, how much more do we need to keep them here? They’re hungry.”

Tim squeezed his eyes shut.

He thumbed the radio, gaze boring into Marcus, who wouldn’t meet his eyes anymore and hadn’t moved from that splintered step.

“I’ll take the car into the back alley in five. Just that long.”

And then he turned away, shoulders hunched, the sun too hot on his back as Marcus folded in on himself—still clinging to a word that was about to cost him everything.

Chen sat at a desk now, the overhead fluorescents too bring on her tired face. Tim hates the fact that his eyes seem to be locked onto her features. The big cheeks, the curious eyes, the deep frown as she complains about the ridiculous amount of paperwork.

Around them, statements, evidence bags, printed photos and a coffee that’s gone cold. That’s his. Hers is still warm, in a thermos she clutched around all day.

Tim hovers nearby, pretending to check the scene photos. He’s not pretending well. His eyes refuse to look down at everything on the table.

“I still don’t get it,” she mumbled.

“Neither do I, boot. But be happy I’m helping, today.”

“Not about the paperwork,” she looked up. Tim looked to his right, to the photos of Marcus' knuckles, which, later in the morning, they found out were raw from punching one of the walls. “I don’t get why he didn’t press charges. Did he tell you why?” Her voice is gentle—too gentle. It slides under his ribs like a dull blade. Tim doesn’t answer right away, so she keeps pushing. “He could’ve. The kids saw it. And that’s probable cause for us to—”

“He wouldn’t.”

The words drop like bricks. She blinks up at him, pen frozen mid-note. “Why?”

“ Why? ” Another Bradford’s humourless laugh to add to the countless of them that day. “Because they’re thirty-five and they believe they’re meant to be together.”

Chen watches him like she’s reading a crime scene—slow, methodical, missing nothing. “But—what? So he’d rather risk the kids getting hurt than admit she—”

“He’d rather keep the fantasy alive, Chen.” Tim snaps it faster than he means to. He scrubs a palm over the back of his neck, eyes flicking to the glass wall that separates them from the rest of the bullpen. “He’d rather tell himself that she’s the one , so anything she does is just—” He gestures vaguely at the stacks of statements, the photos of the dented drywall, the broken glass. “—meant to be. Fixable. Not real. A sacrifice.”

Chen pen taps the desk once, twice. “But that’s not how it works.”

Tim’s jaw ticks. He hates how young she sounds when she says it—like she still half-believes in all that soulmate crap herself. Like you did . He tries to bury that thought, but it kicks at the inside of his ribs.

“You ever wonder,” he says instead, voice low, steady, dangerous, “why people think it works that way? You touch someone’s hand and suddenly it’s magic, right?” He pauses. His hand is still buzzing. His whole being taken by a hum, since that very moment their gaze met. “And doesn’t matter who they really are. Doesn’t matter if they break your nose or your kid’s arm or your front door every other week. Because hey— it’s fate. ” He shakes his head, huffs out a bitter laugh that doesn’t even make it halfway up his throat. “Soulmates are just another excuse to stay stuck. That’s all it is. Soulmates, ageing… It means nothing.”

She stares at him, too long, too searching. He can see the moment she tries to fit that into the box in her head where she keeps the little she knows about him. But she can’t make it fit. The line between her eyebrows is deep.

“But you—” she starts, frowning. “You’re married. You’ve met her. You—” She stops herself, mouth halfway open. 

Tim’s head snaps up. For a breath, there’s nothing but raw panic in his eyes — like he’s forgotten his own lie. The file in his hand creases under his grip.

Chen tilts her head, uncertain now. “Haven’t you?”

Tim’s gut twists so fast he almost chokes on it.

He hadn’t meant to let that mask slip. Not here. Not with her.

The hum in his ears drowns out the bullpen for a second — just static and the taste of old grief he hasn’t swallowed.  Chen's lips move like she might ask more, push harder. But then she glances over his shoulder, and he sees her eyes catch on something. He turns just in time to spot Angela hovering by the door, file in hand, brows raised like she’s been there long enough to see too much.

“Beers later?” Angela asks him, voice careful. Light, but not really.

Tim scrapes a hand down his face, avoiding Chen’s eyes now. “Yeah. Just—” He jerks his chin at the mess of papers. “Let me close this up.”

Angela gives Chen a small, knowing smile that she tries to return it but doesn’t quite pull it off—her eyes snap back to Tim, but he turns around, picking up a couple of photos he’s not clearly paying attention to.

“I’ll meet you there,” Angela says before turning around and disappearing into the bullpen.

Chapter Text

When one decides to become a cop, they have to come to peace with the idea of dying alone in some alley.

It’s one of the first things the job drills into you, though not in so many words. They’ll tell you about service, sacrifice, the weight of the badge. But in the quiet corners, between bad calls and good lies, it comes to you plain:

You’ll bleed out alone someday, and you’d better make your peace with that now.

Tim did. A long time ago.

Long before the Academy. Before his first patrol ride.

He did it overseas, half buried under dust and adrenaline, in sand-worn places no one back home cared to picture. He made peace in the deserts, young and invincible and already bracing for the day his luck would run out.

So he didn’t think about dying when the shots rang out.

Didn’t think about what would come next when Shelby lifted the gun, wild eyes, finger tight on the trigger, and shot tore through the alley, splitting the air and Tim’s side.

No warning. No second to duck. No place to hide. Just breathe and instinct.

He expected pain. Or the blank silence of nothing.

What he didn’t expect was her .

Chen.

A sudden blur, a fierce shove that slammed into his side, stealing his breath and forcing a sharp moan from his lips. Behind them, a gunshot cracked the air—wild, missing its mark.

She was there, wide-eyed, adrenaline sharp and steady, voice cutting through the chaos.

“7-Adam-19. Officer down. Shots fired. Alley of Bellevue and Clinton. I repeat, officer down! Please send help—now!”

“Don’t worry about me!” he barked, a stubborn spark flaring despite the heat spreading in his side. “Shoot back!”

But her eyes—they held him like a lifeline, refusing to let go. Focused, unblinking.

The world tilted sideways, then straightened again as Nolan’s hands pressed against his side, trying to staunch the bleeding. The sharp sting of pain became a dull roar under the pounding in his skull. Any words Nolan was saying, or anything Tim managed to say, were nothing but noise.

You’re supposed to be alone in this, the thought whispered in the back of his mind, cold and sharp. A rain of bullets and a car catching fire, and he thought that his luck had finally run out. But Chen… She was nothing like the silence he’d made his home for so long.

She didn’t hesitate.

Chen grabbed him, pulling him hard around the side of the car, dragging him to safety. He could think about how he didn’t deserve it, how he was ready for peace and some rest, but his mind was locked on something else—the steadiness of her hands, the calm in her voice as she coordinated, commanded, refused to let panic take over.

That night, when the chaos finally faded and he lay in the sterile glow of the hospital, Tim felt something he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in years: hope .

Not the naive kind. Not the fool’s hope. No, this was quieter, more fragile—the kind that seeps in through cracks when someone dares to reach for you, even if you don’t realize you were waiting. The static ringing in his ears was louder than ever, his body feverish from something beyond his injury, something deeper than tissue and bone.

Again , the pull, faint and unspoken, like a thread stretched taut beneath the surface.

"Isabel isn't coming back home to check on you?" Angela's voice cut through the ambient noise, sharp with the kind of concern that came wrapped in interrogation.

The question hung in the stale air of the bar, lost in the sound of the voices that blurred into the classic rock the jukebox wheezed out. The overhead lights cast everything in amber shadows, making the worn wooden tables look older than they probably were.

Tim knew Angela would eventually circle back to the subject, especially after she'd caught him ranting to Chen a few days back about how soulmates were 'just another excuse to stay stuck.' He'd escaped that night by getting Angela drunk before they could talk alone, and the following night, a bullet had provided the perfect excuse to avoid everything. But tonight? The determined set of her jaw and the way she leaned forward told him she wasn't letting this go.

Despite all that, Tim's attention drifted to Bishop returning to their table—two beers in hand, condensation already beading on the bottles in the humid air. The dim lighting caught the amber liquid as she set them down, and Tim immediately reached for one.

"Nope." Angela's hand snapped out, intercepting his reach and claiming the bottle instead. "You got shot two days ago. You should be home . It's a stretch that I let you be here instead of dragging you there myself, so don't think you're drinking tonight."

"I'm not an invalid. I'm just..." He gestured at his side, where the bandages pulled tight beneath his shirt, the fabric catching slightly on the medical tape. "Slightly hurt."

"Right." Bishop slid into the chair next to his. "You took a bullet, Bradford."

"It went through clean," Tim said, his voice climbing higher than he intended. "No major damage. I'm fine."

Angela just shrugged, unmoved by his protests. "You're not fine. And you're deflecting. Isabel?"

The name settled between them like heavy fog. Tim had been avoiding talking about her. He’d been avoiding thinking about her—about the divorce papers sitting on his kitchen table, about the empty spaces on the shelves and the indentations in the carpet, about the way she'd moved out without looking back.

And in those last two days? After his injury? He wasn't even sure if she knew about it. He hadn't called to tell her. She hadn't called either. The last he'd heard was a text from a week back, asking for 'the papers.' Before that, just a Facebook post—a lovely selfie with a cryptic message, Tim didn't have the time or enough self-hatred to decode.

"She's... with her sister," he said finally, the lie scraping his throat. "And, you know, it's not like I'm—"

"What? It's not like you were injured in the line of work, and Isabel , as a former cop , should know better than anyone to at least show up to help?"

Tim's jaw tightened, his hand unconsciously moving to his side where the wound throbbed in time with his heartbeat. "It's not like I'm about to give birth any minute now. I told her not to come."

"Of course you did," Bishop said quietly.

Angela leaned forward, her expression shifting from interrogation to something gentler, more genuine. The bar's dim lighting softened her features, making her look less like a detective and more like the friend she was trying to be. "You know we're here for you, right? You can talk to us about whatever's really going on."

Tim rolled his eyes and, despite the aching in his side, he leaned back against the worn leather of his chair, making it creak under his weight. Whatever Angela thought her concern could accomplish, it wasn't going to crack him open. She was circling like she did with suspects—patient, persistent, looking for the crack in his armour. And Bishop, despite her careful neutrality, was watching him with those sharp eyes that missed nothing.

But Tim wasn't ready to give them what they wanted.

Hell, he wasn't even ready to face it himself.

He hadn't told his mom about the separation. Hadn't called Genny to explain why Isabel wouldn't be at the boy’s games anymore.

Because once he said the words out loud, there would be so much more than divorce papers to explain.

"Look, it's not—" He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture automatic, desperate. "We're fine. She's just... busy—"

"Tim..." Angela's voice was patient but persistent, the way water wears down stone.

"Her sister's been having a really hard time with the pregnancy," he cut her off, the lie growing easier the more he spoke, each word building on the last. "Isabel's basically living there, helping out. It's... It's what she does now. She helps people. The only way she can, now that she had to leave the force."

Bishop and Angela exchanged a look that Tim pretended not to notice, but he caught it in his peripheral vision—the kind of silent communication that comes from years of working together.

"She didn't have to leave—"

"Lopez." Tim's voice went flat, dangerous. His eyes locked on hers, jaw set in a way that usually ended conversations. "Enough."

"And you're okay with that?" Bishop asked, her tone carefully neutral. "With her being away while you're recovering?"

"Yes! I told you. I told her not to come." The words came out too fast, too defensive. "I mean, what's she gonna do? Hold my hand? I'm not dying . It's just a flesh wound."

"But when you were in the hospital—"

"She called and I told her to stay there," Tim interrupted, the lie flowing smoother now, practised. "Now, something that actually matters: how's my rookie doing?"

The deflection was so abrupt, so obviously desperate, that both women just stared at him for a moment. The silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant sound of pool balls clacking and someone's laughter from across the bar. Angela's mouth opened like she wanted to push further, but Bishop caught her eye and gave a subtle shake of her head.

“Chen's fine," Bishop said finally, her tone careful, measured. "She's been asking when you'd be back , actually ."

"Why?"

"She's stuck with Wrigley. Probably going crazy by now." Angela's lips quirked into a half-smile. "But you should know—she handled herself really well these past two days. Didn't let his lazy ass drag her down like you thought she might."

"Since when?" His voice climbed in genuine surprise, and Angela laughed—the sound sharp enough to cut through some of the bar's heavy atmosphere.

" Please . Of course, you had her assigned to him." Angela's knowing look made his stomach tighten. She could read him like a damn case file, and that honestly unnerved him more than he cared to admit. "But she's not that kind of cop, Tim."

"I know she's not." The words came out rougher than intended. "She—She holds her own out there. Keeps her head, follows protocol, thinks on her feet—"

"Saved your life?" Angela cut him off, eyebrows raised in challenge.

Something flickered behind Tim's eyes—gone before either woman could pin it down, but there all the same. A tightness at the corners, a barely perceptible catch in his breathing. "Don't oversell it. She did her job."

But even as he dismissed it, Tim could feel the weight of memory settling in his chest. Chen's eyes, steady and unflinching as she'd worked to stop the bleeding. Her hands, rock-solid when bullets threatened to rain down on them. And something else—something he couldn't quite name. A pull, a shift in the air around her that had felt like tuning into a frequency he'd never quite caught before.

"I'll swing by tomorrow," he said, pushing himself up from the table. The movement sent lightning through his injured side, and his hand moved instinctively to press against the bandages beneath his shirt. He couldn't quite mask the wince. "Make sure she's not picking up Wrigley's bad habits."

"Tim—" Angela started, but he was already pulling bills from his wallet, dropping them on the scarred table with unnecessary force.

"Thanks for the drinks I didn't get to have," he said, aiming for lightness but missing by a mile. The joke fell flat in the heavy air between them. "I'll see you both tomorrow."

He turned and walked toward the exit, his gait careful but determined, each step measured to avoid jarring his injury. The bar's atmosphere seemed to close in around him—the smell of stale beer and fried food, the sticky feel of years of spilled drinks on every surface, the way other people's conversations seemed to mock his inability to have an honest one.

Through the sounds of clinking glasses and the raspy music from the jukebox, Tim could only hear one thing as he reached the door.

"He's lying."

"I know."

The words followed him out into the night, where the cool air hit his face like a slap and the truth he'd been avoiding waited for him in the darkness.

He was too sober when he got home. The painkillers did nothing for the real ache—the buzzing under his skin that had started the moment Chen's hands touched him. All he could think about, hammering against his skull like a relentless drum, was her name. Her eyes. Her voice.

'Officer down' still echoing in his ears, and how wrong it had sounded coming from her lips. How impersonal. How fucking raw.

Tim kicked off his boots at the entrance, the sound hollow in the empty apartment. Isabel's scent had finally faded, replaced by his cologne and the sharp bite of bleach he'd used the night before.

He pressed a hand to his bandaged side, thinking of the curious looks from the ER staff. The same looks he'd been getting for years now—confusion masked as professional interest.

"You have young blood," they always said with a smile. Usually a pitiful one, befitting a world where aging meant love, and staying young meant being left behind.

But to him, it always led to questions. Every hospital visit was a gamble. Each time he crossed those hallways, he wondered if this would be the time they figured it out. But after a few questions, he'd mumble something about PTSD, drop the name of the shrink he'd seen exactly twice, and watch the doctors' interest shift—leaving the doubt and confusion at the door.

And Tim welcomed that shift.

The façade. The lies.

God, what a liar he was becoming.

He could fake everything. The graying hair, the carefully practised grimaces over 'bad knees' and an 'aching back'—those were manageable lies. But not the blood, the life coursing through his veins, frozen at eighteen and refusing to move forward.

He made his way through the small hallway. No art on the walls, no pictures whatsoever. Someone else's house entirely. And he found himself in the kitchen, dark and warm, the light from the streetlamps outside creeping inside to illuminate the manila folder on his table.

Tim had ignored it for weeks.

The instructions had been clear—simple signatures. No disputes. Clean process.

Easy as breathing, supposedly .

Because it held him across the room, his hand unconsciously moving to twist the gold band around his ring finger. The metal had worn smooth over the years, a groove carved by habit and hope. He'd thought about taking it off a dozen times since Isabel left, had even gotten as far as working it past his knuckle once. But something always stopped him.

Maybe the remainders of his love for her, maybe his lies anchoring it there.

Tim stared at the folder until shades blurred together and the contours of it blurred onto the table, but his mind kept pulling away. Back to the hospital. Back to Chen's hands on his side, steady and sure.

Officer down. Officer down.

Damn it.

He couldn't get her out of his head. The way she'd handled herself under fire, the way she'd looked at him—calm as still water. Too calm. Like she felt nothing at all, while that buzzing crawled under his skin every time she got close.

What kind of cosmic screw-job was this?

Tim twisted his wedding ring harder, the metal biting into his finger. If Chen was supposed to be... whatever this was... why didn't she feel it? She'd touched him, worked beside him, saved his life , and she looked at him like he was just another assignment.

He should be proud of it. The detachment. The strict professionalism. It's exactly what he'd drummed into every rookie who'd ever ridden with him—keep it clean, keep it distant, do the job and go home.

But not now. Not when his life was crumbling, divorce papers staring him down from across the table, and instead of thinking about the years he'd built with Isabel, all he could think about was the less than twenty hours spent with a rookie who treated him like a case number, a training officer, another stepping stone in her career.

Chen had looked at him like he was made of flesh and blood and mistakes, not like someone whose very existence might be tied to hers in ways neither of them could control.

But nothing ever lined up right in his life.

Why would this be any different?

It didn't make any sense, but Tim sat in his truck outside the diner, engine idling, watching the familiar rhythm of yet another morning in Los Angeles through his windshield. The morning sun caught the glass doors of the building as people filtered in and out, but his attention was fixed on someone yet to arrive.

It took him roughly fifteen minutes, but Chen and Wrigley appeared on the sidewalk together, spines straight and attentive. At least hers. Even from a distance, he could see the way she scanned her surroundings, always alert. Good habits.

Tim knew Wrigley's schedule by heart. The man disappeared religiously at lunch, claiming he needed to "check on the wife" but really just wanted to eat his sad mac and cheese at home while watching sports highlights in his underwear. It left Chen to fend for herself, which normally wouldn't bother Tim except...

No. Not going there.

He followed at a distance as she entered Mama Rosa's—a small Italian place wedged between a dry cleaner and a pharmacy. The kind of family-owned restaurant that survived on cop business and comfort food. Red checkered tablecloths were visible through windows that hadn't been updated since the eighties. After five minutes of white knuckles around his steering wheel and a heated argument with himself, Tim followed her inside.

He knew it was stupid. He knew he should go home, rest, and let Chen eat in peace. She didn't need him hovering, checking up on her like some overprotective...

His side twinged as he paused on the sidewalk, half-turned back, reminding him why he was really here.

The bell above the door chimed as Tim pushed inside Mama Rosa's, the familiar smells of garlic and oregano hitting him immediately. The lunch crowd hadn't arrived yet, leaving mostly empty tables covered in red and white checked cloths. A few regulars sat at the counter, and in the back corner booth—the one with a clear view of both the front door and the kitchen—sat Chen.

She looked up from her menu as he approached, surprise flickering across her features before settling into something more guarded. Professional.

"Officer Bradford." She started to slide out of the booth, probably intending to stand, but he waved her back down.

"Chen." Tim slid into the seat across from her, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at his stitches. "Mind if I join you?"

Her eyes immediately tracked the careful way he'd moved, cataloguing the signs of injury with the same attention to detail that made her a good cop. Not pity. Not curiosity. Just assessment.

"Of course. Are you sure you should be—"

"I'm fine," he said automatically, then caught the defensiveness in his own voice. That was becoming a reflex, and it bothered him more than the injury. "Just grabbing some food."

She nodded, but he could see her processing his presence here, in this particular restaurant, at this particular time when she happened to be eating alone. Too smart not to connect the dots, too polite to call him on it.

"I live nearby," he explained, though she hadn't asked. "Good coincidence."

"Sure." A polite smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"How's Wrigley treating you?" The question came out more casual than he felt.

"He's... fine." The pause was telling. "Different teaching style than yours."

"That's one way to put it." Tim almost smiled at her diplomacy. "He's making you work, or just letting you coast?”

She hesitated, then seemed to decide on honesty. "I think I'm putting him to work."

"I heard." Something shifted in Tim's expression—not quite approval, but close. "You giving him trouble?"

Her eyes snapped back to his, a slight flush creeping up her neck. "I'm not trying to be difficult. I just... I don't know how to coast. I mean, I do know how, but I can't make myself do it." She fidgeted with her napkin. "Is that going to be a problem?"

Tim studied her for a moment, trying to ignore the way that flush made her look younger, more vulnerable. The way her fingers worried at the napkin's edge. The way her smile had shifted from polite to something more genuine, unguarded.

Focus. Stay professional.

"With Wrigley? Probably ." A pause. "With me? No. That's not going to be a problem."

Her smile eased, reaching her eyes this time. "Good," she said, and that familiar buzzing intensified—the same electric pull that had been driving him crazy for days.

Tim scrambled for something to say. Some excuse. Some topic that wouldn't sound completely insane. Christ, this was his stupidest idea to date. But the waitress appeared like divine intervention—an older woman with kind eyes who poured him coffee without asking and refilled Chen's water glass.

"You eating, honey?" she asked Tim. "You look like you could use a good meal."

Tim glanced at the menu, and though he wasn't really here for the food, he ordered the first thing his eyes landed on—chicken parmesan—and waited until the waitress moved away, using the time to get his head straight. To remember why getting involved was a bad idea when his life was already falling apart.

The silence stretched between them, comfortable in a way that surprised him. Outside, traffic moved in the lazy rhythm of late morning. The restaurant hummed with quiet conversation and the distant clatter of dishes being washed.

Normal sounds. Safe sounds.

"How are you feeling?" Chen asked finally. "Really?"

The question caught him off guard—not like a rookie checking on a superior officer, but like someone who actually cared about the answer.

"Sore," he admitted. More honesty than he'd given Angela or Bishop. "Tired of people asking me that question."

"Sorry."

"Don't be." Tim ran a hand through his hair. "It's just... I'm not used to being the one who needs help."

Chen studied him, her head tilted slightly. She saw more than most people gave her credit for. "Maybe that's not always a bad thing."

Before Tim could figure out how to respond, the waitress returned with his food. The chicken parmesan looked exactly like every other plate he'd been served here—generous, nothing fancy, but filling.

"It’s not. But what about you?" he asked, picking up his fork. "How are you holding up with everything?"

"Everything meaning Wrigley , or everything meaning my TO getting shot while I was supposed to be watching his back ?"

The bluntness surprised him. Most rookies— screw that , most officers would dance around that kind of responsibility, make excuses. She faced it head-on.

"It wasn't your fault," Tim said firmly.

"I know." Immediate. Matter-of-fact. "But that doesn't mean it doesn't affect me."

Tim paused, fork halfway to his mouth. There was weight in her expression—not guilt, exactly, but something heavier. The same weight he'd been carrying, maybe, just from a different angle.

"You did everything right, Chen."

"I know that, too." She took a sip of water, buying time. "But knowing something and feeling it are different things."

That hit closer to home than he expected. How many times had he told himself Isabel leaving wasn't his fault? That the divorce papers on his table were just life happening? That the hair dye in his bathroom was just a needed lie? Knowing and feeling. Yeah.

"They are," he said quietly.

They ate in comfortable silence, the afternoon stretching between them like something they both needed but hadn't realized they were looking for. Tim found himself watching her between bites—the methodical way she worked through her salad, the way she kept glancing toward the window, how she seemed to relax by degrees.

"Can I ask you something?" Chen said finally, setting down her fork.

Tim nodded, though something in her tone made him brace himself.

"Are you actually okay? Beyond the injury. You seem..." She paused, choosing her words. " Different ."

Tim's first instinct was to deflect. Give her the same casual dismissal he'd given everyone else. But something about the way she asked—direct but not invasive—made him pause.

"Define okay," he said finally. "And different."

"Sleeping. Eating. Not trying to push yourself back to work before you're ready—”

The accuracy was unsettling. Tim set down his fork and really looked at her, trying to figure out when his rookie had become so perceptive about things that had nothing to do with police work.

He cut her off. "You've been talking to Angela."

"I have eyes," Chen said simply. "And I've been a person longer than I've been a cop."

That almost made him smile. Almost. "Yes. But you've known me for five minutes."

"Long enough to notice you're not sleeping. That you're favouring your right side more than you should be if you were just sore—”

Tim's jaw tightened. "Right. The psych major." He took a deliberate bite of his chicken parmesan, chewing slowly. "Almost forgot about it. Let me guess—you're going to analyze me now? Tell me I have abandonment issues and recommend I talk to someone about my feelings?”

"I wasn't going to—"

"Because that's what you people do , isn't it? Everything's a syndrome. Everything needs to be talked through and processed and given a fancy label." His voice stayed level, conversational, but there was an edge to it now. "Can't just be that I got shot and I'm tired."

Chen's expression didn't change. Didn't get defensive or apologetic the way most people did when he got like this. She just waited. And that—well, it didn’t sit right with him.

"You done?" she asked finally.

The simple question caught him off guard. "What?"

"With the deflection. The attempt to make me back off by being an ass." She took another sip of water. "Because I'm not going anywhere, and you're not nearly as intimidating as you think you are when you're sitting in a diner eating comfort food."

Tim stared at her. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me." Chen set down her glass with a soft clink. "Look, I get it. You’re what? A decade older than me? More?” Tim's frown deepened around his mouthful of food. He wasn't about to fight her on his age— honestly , it wasn't a topic he wanted to get into. "Most cops don't like therapists. And I bet you think psychology is touchy-feely bullshit. Fine . But don't insult my intelligence by pretending you came here by coincidence."

"I live nearby."

"Do you?"

"Yeah, right down the street. I come here all the time. You heard her call me 'honey', right?"

Chen nodded, having another sip of her water. "Okay. I'll believe you."

"As you should, boot."

"And I won't ask any more questions, but know I'm aware something's going on with you."

"Good," Tim said, though the word came out rougher than intended. He took another bite, using the silence to study her face. No judgment there. No pity. Just... awareness. Like she'd filed away the information and moved on. That should have been the end of it. Should have been enough to satisfy whatever compulsion had driven him here in the first place. But instead of relief, Tim felt something else settling in his chest—disappointment, maybe. Or loneliness.

"You're not going to push?" he asked finally.

Chen shrugged. "Would it work if I did?"

"No."

"Then why would I waste both our time?" She speared a piece of lettuce with her fork. "Besides, I'm just a rookie. What do I know about anything?" There was something in her tone—not quite sarcasm, but close. Like she was testing him, seeing if he'd take the bait and dismiss her again. Tim found himself almost smiling despite everything.

"You know enough to spot when someone's not sleeping."

Her eyes widened. “So you’re not sleeping.”

“Because I got shot , boot.”

"Okay… But… It’s all basic observation skills." Chen met his eyes across the table. "Though I have to admit, the psychology degree doesn't hurt. Especially when my Training Officer is so…"

"Thought you weren't going to analyze me."

"I'm not!" She paused, considering her next words. "Thought all that resistance makes me want to try.”

Tim's coffee cup froze halfway to his lips. "Excuse me?"

"Nothing." Chen's smile was innocent, but there was something mischievous dancing behind her eyes. "Just that you're making this very interesting from a behavioral standpoint."

"Chen."

"I mean, the defensive deflection, the consistent redirection when anyone gets too close to anything personal—"

" Chen. "

She pointed with her finger. "—and now you're using my name like a warning, which is fascinating because usually you just call me 'boot' when you want to shut me down, but 'Chen' suggests I've hit something more specific—"

"Are you seriously psychoanalyzing me right now?" Tim set his cup down harder than necessary, the clink echoing in the small space between them.

"I told you I wasn't going to." Her grin widened. "But you keep giving me such good material to work with."

Tim stared at her, caught somewhere between irritation and something that might have been amusement. "You're enjoying this."

"A little," she admitted. "You're not nearly as mysterious as you think you are, sir. And the more you try to keep me out, the more obvious it becomes that there's something worth keeping me out of ."

"That's—" Tim stopped, running a hand through his hair. "That's not how this works."

"How what works?"

"This. The job. Training. You don't get to—" He gestured vaguely between them. "— analyze your TO."

"I'm off duty," Chen pointed out reasonably. "And technically, Wrigley's my TO right now."

" Temporarily ."

"Still counts." She leaned back in the booth, looking entirely too pleased with herself. "Besides, you're the one who sat down at my table."

Tim opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. She had a point, damn it. He had sought her out. Had followed her here, made some excuse about living nearby, and then proceeded to have exactly the kind of conversation he'd been avoiding with everyone else.

"This is not how rookies are supposed to behave," he muttered.

"How are they supposed to behave?"

"Respectful. Deferential. They're supposed to listen and learn and not—" He waved his hand again. "— this. "

"What's 'this'?"

"Smart-ass comments. Psychological profiling. Acting like they know something about—" Tim caught himself before he could finish that sentence.

"About what?" Chen's voice was gentler now, less teasing.

Tim looked at her across the table— really looked at her. The way she held herself, calm and centered, even when she was pushing boundaries. The way she watched him, not with pity or curiosity, but with something that looked almost like understanding.

The buzzing under his skin intensified, that strange electric pull that had been plaguing him since the shooting. And for the first time since it started, he wondered if maybe—just maybe—she felt it too.

"About things that are none of their business," he finished finally.

"Fair enough." Chen nodded, but her eyes stayed on his face. "But just so we're clear, I wasn't trying to analyze you. I was just... noticing things."

"Such as?"

"Such as the fact that you came here to check on me, even though you're supposed to be recovering. Such as the way you keep touching your side when you think I'm not looking. Such as—" She paused. "—the fact that you actually seem to want to talk about whatever's bothering you, you just don't know how."

Tim felt something shift in his chest. A crack in the wall he'd built around the whole mess of his life.

"And what makes you think I want to talk about anything?"

Chen's smile was soft now, knowing. "Because if you really wanted to avoid this conversation, you would have finished your food and left ten minutes ago.

Tim stared at her, that crack in his defenses widening despite his best efforts to shore it up. She was right, and they both knew it.

He could have left. Should have left.

But here he was, trapped by his own contradictions and a rookie who saw too much.

"You're dangerous," he said finally.

"How so?"

"You make people want to talk." Tim picked up his coffee, more for something to do with his hands than because he wanted it. "That's not a good quality in a cop."

"It isn’t?" Chen tilted her head, eyes open wide. "I would think getting people to open up would be pretty useful in this job."

"With suspects, maybe. Not with—" He gestured vaguely. "—other cops."

"Why not?"

Tim nearly laughed, but it came out as more of a bitter exhale. "Because cops don't talk, Chen. We compartmentalize . We lock it up, we move on, we do the job. We don't sit in diners having feelings about our personal lives."

"Sounds lonely."

The simple observation hit him like a physical blow. Tim set his coffee down carefully, fighting the urge to walk out right then and there. Because she was right about that, too, damn it . It was lonely.

Had been lonely for longer than he cared to admit.

"It's practical," he said instead.

"Is it working for you?"

"What?"

"Being pratical .” She paused. “ Compartmentalizing . Locking it up." Chen's voice was gentle but relentless. "Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like whatever you're trying to keep locked up is eating you alive."

Tim's jaw tightened. "You don't know what you're talking about."

“I don’t. You’re clearly making sure I don’t.” She shrugged. "But I know what I see. And what I see is someone who's carrying around a lot more than just a bullet wound."

The words hung between them, heavy with implication. Tim found himself studying her face again, looking for something—judgment, pity, the kind of professional distance he was used to. But all he saw was that same steady awareness, like she was holding space for whatever he might say next.

Officer down. Officer down. Officer down.

And the buzzing. Christ, the buzzing. And her hands—not gentle, not careful, but sure and strong and anchoring him to something solid when everything else was spinning out of reach. Like she'd reached into the chaos and pulled him back to earth through sheer force of will.

"Why do you care?" he asked finally.

The question seemed to catch her off guard. Her composure flickered for just a moment, and Tim caught a glimpse of something underneath—uncertainty, maybe. Or vulnerability.

"I don't know," she admitted. "I just... do."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." Chen looked down at her hands, then back up at him.

Tim felt that buzzing under his skin intensify, like a frequency finally finding its match. The sensation was so strong it was almost disorienting, and for a moment, he wondered if he was having some kind of reaction to the painkillers.

"Chen—"

"Maybe I should get going," she said suddenly, her voice tight. Different. She started to slide out of the booth, movements quick and jerky—nothing like the calm control he'd come to associate with her. "Wrigley—"

"Will take another half hour," Tim finished, his hand shooting out instinctively to catch her wrist. "Sit down."

The contact sent that electric buzzing straight up his arm, and he saw her freeze— actually freeze—like she'd been hit with the same shock. Her eyes went wide, pupils dilating slightly, and for a split second, she looked as disoriented as he felt.

"I should—" She swallowed hard, but didn't pull away from his touch. "I'll see you when you get back to work, sir."

Sir. Like they were back to being strangers. Like the last twenty minutes hadn't happened.

But Tim could see it now—the way her breathing had quickened, the slight tremor in her voice, the way she kept glancing at where his fingers circled her wrist. Whatever this was, whatever was happening between them, she felt it too. And it scared her.

Hell, it scared him, too.

She looked so young sitting there, brown eyes wide and searching his face for answers he didn't have. Hopeful and terrified at the same time, like she was standing at the edge of something she didn't understand but couldn't step back from.

But how could she understand? She was looking at a man who appeared to be in his thirties, wearing a wedding ring. In her mind, as well as in the whole department's, he'd already found his match.

She couldn't know that underneath the carefully maintained facade, behind the gray he touched up every few days and the lines he'd learned to fake, he was exactly her age. That his body had been counting the same seconds as hers for days now, marking time in a way it hadn't done in over a decade.

She couldn't know that every moment since that first day she'd walked into roll call, something inside him had been waking up, coming alive, aging .

And he couldn't tell her. Not without explaining everything else—the lies, the deception, the years of pretending to be something he wasn't.

She was looking at him like he might have answers. Like he might be able to explain why the air between them felt charged, why a simple touch could make the world tilt sideways.

Tim wished he could.

Instead, he stood up and let go of her. “I’ll see you. Have a good day.”

Three days later, Tim was cleared for light duty. Three and a half days later, he was arguing with Sergeant Grey about getting his rookie back. Four days later, he was standing in the garage, checking his gear with movements that had become automatic over the years, when Chen walked in.

"Officer Bradford." Her voice was carefully neutral, professional. Like their lunch had never happened.

"Chen." He didn't look up from his gun, though he was hyperaware of every movement she made. The way she opened the trunk of the shop, the rustle of fabric as she pushed the war bags inside, the hard sound of the trunk being closed.

The buzzing was back, stronger than ever. Four days of separation hadn't dulled it—if anything, it had intensified, like his body was making up for lost time.

"Ready to get back out there?" she asked, and Tim could hear the effort it took to keep her tone light.

"Been ready." He finally looked at her, noting the dark circles under her eyes, the way she held herself just a little too stiffly. "How was Wrigley?"

"Educational." A diplomatic non-answer if he'd ever heard one.

Tim almost smiled. "That bad?"

"Let's just say I'm looking forward to getting back to proper training." She shouldered her gear bag, movements crisp and efficient. "Speaking of which, I've been practicing my driving—"

" No ."

"—and I think I'm ready to—"

" Absolutely not."

Chen stopped and fixed him with a look. "D riving is part of my training. You know that, right?"

"Trying to teach me how to do my job, boot?" Tim turned to her, elbows propped on his duty belt.

"I'm trying to learn how to do mine." Her voice stayed level, but there was steel underneath it now. "Which includes all aspects of patrol work, not just the parts you feel like teaching me."

Tim turned to face her fully, and immediately regretted it. The space between them felt charged again, that same electric pull that had sent her running from the diner. But this time, she held her ground.

"My shop, my rules," he said, falling back on authority when everything else felt uncertain.

" Your rookie, your responsibility," she countered. "Which means making sure I'm prepared for every situation I might encounter. Including the ones where I might need to drive."

They stared at each other, the tension thick enough to cut. Tim could see the determination in her eyes, the way her jaw was set. She wasn't going to back down from this.

And part of him—a part that was getting harder to ignore—respected the hell out of her for it.

"Fine," he said finally. "But you're driving to the first call only. After that, we'll see."

"Thank you." The victory was small, but her smile was genuine. "I won't let you down."

"You'd better not." He paused. "Because if you so much as scratch my paint job, you'll be writing reports until your fingers bleed."

"Understood." She moved toward the door, then paused. "Sir?"

"Yeah?"

"It's good to have you back."

Tim looked at her standing there in the garage, uniform pressed and perfect, hair pulled back in regulation style, looking every inch the competent rookie cop he knew she would become. But underneath all that, he could see traces of the woman who'd sat across from him in Mama Rosa's, who'd seen through his defenses with uncomfortable accuracy.

"Good to be back," he said, and meant it more than he should have. And then he threw her the keys.

For the next two months, Tim saw her flourish.

It started small—the way she handled domestic disturbance calls with a calm authority that took most cops years to develop. How she remembered details from previous shifts, connecting dots between seemingly unrelated incidents. The way she asked questions that cut straight to the heart of things, bypassing the usual rookie tendency to get lost in procedures.

"Chen's got good instincts," Grey mentioned during their weekly evaluation meeting, glancing up from her file. "Better than good , actually . She's thinking like a cop already, not just following protocols."

Tim nodded, keeping his expression neutral even as something warm settled in his chest. Pride, maybe. "She's learning fast," he agreed.

"Learning, or teaching herself?" Grey's look was pointed. "Because from what I'm hearing, she's been taking initiative that goes beyond what most TOs would expect at this stage."

Tim thought about the night before—a burglary call that had turned into a domestic violence situation when Chen noticed the victim's injuries didn't match her story. How she'd gently coaxed the truth out of the woman while Tim dealt with the suspect. How she'd known exactly which resources to offer, which shelters to recommend, like she'd been doing this for years instead of weeks.

"She's thorough," Tim said finally. " Pays attention. Has good instincts.”

Grey set down her file and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. There was something in his expression—satisfaction, maybe. "This is the moment you tell me you were wrong and it was a good decision to keep her working with you. It's not going sideways."

Tim's jaw tightened at the reminder of his initial panic, the morning he'd stormed into this office demanding Chen be reassigned. That felt like a lifetime ago now, though it had only been a month. A month of watching her handle calls with increasing confidence, of seeing her natural empathy tempered by street-smart pragmatism, of fighting the growing pull between them that seemed to intensify with every passing day.

"She's..." Tim paused, choosing his words carefully. "She's exceeded expectations."

"High praise from you." Grey's smile was knowing. "Remember when you told me she was overconfident? Complained about her taking notes and…"

Heat crept up Tim's neck. Those criticisms felt petty now, transparent even to himself. "Yeah, I may have been... hasty in my initial assessment."

" Hasty ," Grey repeated the word like he was tasting it. "That's one way to put it. Want to tell me what really changed your mind?"

Tim thought about Chen's composure during the jewellery store hostage situation just days ago. How she'd moved with precision that had taken his breath away, her tactical awareness beyond anything he'd seen in a rookie. How she'd looked at him afterwards, adrenaline-bright and trusting, like she knew without question that he'd had her back.

He thought about the buzzing under his skin that had become a constant companion, the way his body came alive whenever she was near. The way she sometimes caught her breath when he got too close, like she felt it too but didn't understand what it meant.

"She handles herself well under pressure," Tim said finally. "Stays calm. Thinks before she acts."

"And?"

"And she's got natural instincts for the job. Sees things other people miss. Connects with victims in a way that gets results."

Grey nodded, still watching him with those sharp eyes. "Anything else?"

Tim hesitated. There was so much else—how Chen challenged him to be a better cop, how she made him remember why he'd wanted this job in the first place. How she looked at him like he was worth something more than the carefully constructed lie he'd built his life around.

But he couldn't say any of that.

"She's going to make a good cop," he said instead. "Better than good."

"I'm glad to hear you say that. Because there's something else we need to discuss." Grey closed Chen’s file. "You've been looking much better."

Tim's hand stilled on the paperwork he'd been pretending to read. Grey's words hung in the air between them, casual but weighted with meaning.

"Sir?"

"Less..." Grey gestured vaguely. "Tight. More like yourself again. Haven't seen you snap at anyone in weeks, which has to be some kind of record."

Tim felt heat creep up his neck. He'd hoped his gradual shift in demeanor had gone unnoticed, but Grey saw everything. Always had.

"Just focusing on the job," Tim said carefully.

"Right. The job." Grey's tone suggested he wasn't buying it for a second. "Wouldn't have anything to do with your rookie helping you remember what that actually means, would it? Especially after Isabel—”

The question hit closer to home than Tim was comfortable with. Because the truth was, Chen had changed something in him. Made him remember the cop he'd been before Isabel, before the lies and the constant vigilance had worn him down to sharp edges and defensive walls. Before being struck with all the truth, being crushed under the lies.

Riding with Chen was— good .

“Sir, Chen’s been a positive influence on my approach to my job and training, actually ” Tim said, defaulting to the safe shape of bureaucratic language. It gave him somewhere to put his hands, his eyes, his guilt. “After everything that went on, I was reluctant to train new officers but —”

Grey’s silence pressed harder than any follow-up question could. The older man didn’t move, didn’t blink—just waited, letting the truth scrape its way out on its own.

Tim cleared his throat, tried to fill the space. “Chen… she reminded me what this job’s supposed to be. What I’m supposed to be.” He hated how raw that sounded. Too honest. He added quickly, “I mean—She’s sharp. She listens. Picks things up fast. Doesn’t let things slide. I think we make a good team.”

Grey arched a brow. Doesn’t let you slide , the look said, though he didn’t bother saying it out loud.

Instead, he asked, mild as anything, “And Isabel? She’s still up north?”

Tim hesitated. Just a flicker—just long enough. “She’s, uh—Coming back this weekend , actually . I’m gonna drive up to bring her home.” The lie tasted stale on his tongue. He hated lying. Especially to Grey.

Grey nodded. “Good. Maybe you two should have dinner with me and Luna sometime. Just to catch up. Make sure you’re both… managing.”

There it was—bait and hook. Tim felt it snag something deep under his ribs. He forced a small, professional smile. “I’ll ask her. I’m sure she’d like that.”

Grey leaned back, studying him the way a mechanic studies a faulty engine. One piece breaks, the whole machine follows. “Tim. You’re a good cop. One of the best. But you’re no good to me half-buried under this mess. Compartmentalizing only works so far.”

“With respect, sir, my personal life’s handled. It won’t touch my work.” The lie came smoother this time—practised.

Grey almost smiled. Almost.

“Son, your work is your life. Don’t forget which part’s supposed to keep the other standing.” He paused. “Whatever's going on, just make sure it doesn't affect Chen's training."

Tim held the stare a beat too long before nodding stiffly. “Yes, sir."

Grey watched him for another heartbeat, then gestured at the door. “Go on. And, son—” Tim paused, hand on the knob. Grey’s eyes softened, just a fraction. “Be kind to yourself for once.”

Tim said nothing. Just nodded once, sharp, like an order. But Tim was already looking past the glass walls of Grey’s office, out to where Chen sat in the bullpen, laughing at something Jackson had said. Young. Whole. Still fixable.

He focused on that. On her. On the job. It was the only thing that didn’t lie back. The only thing that he didn’t lie to .

For a moment—just a moment—Tim let himself stand just outside Grey’s door, seeing Chen not as his responsibility, not as his rookie, but as the one thing he hadn’t yet ruined, the only Tim saving him from the mess he’d carved for himself.

Then she looked up, met his eyes, and smiled at him — real and unguarded.

He looked away first.

“Boot!” he barked, voice back to its usual steel. “Gear up. We’ve got work to do.”

The building was old, mostly cracked plaster and stale air—the kind of place where sound carried but light didn’t. Tim led the way, weapon up, steps measured, listening for the echo of Chen’s boots at his six. She mirrored him perfectly. They didn’t even need the hand signals anymore; she read him perfectly.

He ghosted along the wall, felt more than saw her cover his blind spot as they approached the corner. He raised two fingers. She nodded low, tight, steady, and then she did exactly what he’d shown her: leaned with her shoulder first, angled her weapon, cleared high and low in one smooth arc.

Nothing. Clear. They moved on.

Tim felt it then, the charge under his ribs, the one he used to chase on patrol before the world got heavy. He’d worked with a lot of good cops. But none who fit the seams of his movement like Chen did. She didn’t just listen—she understood . She anticipated.

When they cleared the last room and holstered up, she grinned at him: bright, flushed with adrenaline. Rookie. And yet, not at all.

“Nice work, Boot,” he said. It almost sounded like a compliment. For him, it was practically a love letter.

She bumped his shoulder on the way out. “Thank you.”

They stopped for coffee at a little bodega after. It was a rainy day, uncommon for Los Angeles, especially in May. Chen was already talking before even taking a sip.

“Jackson thinks Nolan’s basically the dad he never asked for,” she was saying, laughing into her cup. “They bonded at the Academy—you know, stress makes weird friendships stick. Some people think that’s more important than soulmates anyway.”

Tim raised an eyebrow. “You don’t buy into all that soulmate stuff?”

She shrugged. “I mean—I don’t know?” And in his eyes, he knew she had more to add, but decided not to. She blew on her coffee, eyes on some far shelf. “I just think they’re not everything. I mean—Nolan’s a widower, you know that. And he still deserves love. That’s the point, right? It’s not like we only have one chance at it…”

“So what? You think he will settle for someone that he knows it’s not right for him?”, he asked, half-teasing, half-genuine.

Chen laughed, but there was a line of something real under it. “I mean. I almost did.”

“You did?”

“Yup,” she pressed her lips, nodding. “Back in college. I was gonna marry this guy. Perfect on paper, definitely not my soulmate.”

Tim frowned. “Then why—?”

“Because I wanted to. For that time, that season. I thought, why not give myself that small infinity? Something I could hold for a while. A break on time, you know?”

He shook his head. The coffee on his mouth warm and strong. “I don’t.”

“I mean—”

“You’d just… what?” He shook his head, incredulous. “Put your soulmate on hold while you played house with the wrong guy?”

“Maybe?” Chen smiled, unapologetic. “I knew my soulmate would still be out there waiting. But I was lonely, and needed the love he was willing to give me… Maybe I felt like I had to learn something, live something before the real thing…”

“That’s selfish,” Tim said bluntly.

Chen didn’t flinch. “I know. But it’s human, too.”

They stood there in the humming quiet of the bodega. Tim was trying to work out how a heart could be that open and ruthless at the same time, Chen sipping cheap coffee like she hadn’t just confessed to rewriting fate on a whim.

Outside, the city moved.

Tim looked at her. “You said ‘the real thing’.”

“I did.”

“So you believe it’s—”

She cut him off. “I believe it will be stronger. I mean—everyone says it is, right? What can you say about it?”

“Me? Why me?” She looked at him like it was obvious. And it was. For outsiders. “Right,” Tim said, but it came out quieter than he meant it to. He stared at the scratched counter, the flickering fridge lights, anywhere but her eyes. “Isabel was it. The only one.”

Chen watched him for a beat, reading him in that way that made him itch under his skin. “So… was it different? With her?”

He scoffed, trying to mask the truth in a shrug. “It was… what it was. There’s no comparison.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He shot her a look, the don’t push me look, but she didn’t back down. She never did.

“It was everything,” Tim said finally, the words tasting like old metal. “Meeting her was… like feeling time sigh.” He hated himself for borrowing the yogi’s words, the same words he’d used to steal Isabel right out from under him. But the words sat heavy on his tongue because they were true. Not about Isabel.

About Lucy .

Lucy , who was watching him so closely that it almost made him flinch.

“It was like my whole body went into cardiac arrest,” he went on, voice low, forced. “Like I could’ve died just from a touch.”

Silence. The hum of the soda fridge, the rattle of the old ceiling fan, the city pressing in outside.

He risked a glance. Chen hadn’t looked away—hadn’t laughed or softened it or cut the tension to spare him. She just held him there, pinned by the truth he hadn’t meant to say. Or maybe he had.

“That’s what you think it’s supposed to be?” she asked, quiet.

Tim shrugged stiffly. “Isn’t it?”

Lucy’s smile was sad and sharp all at once. “Sounds more like a panic attack than a soulmate.”

Tim let out a breath, half a laugh, half a scoff. “Yeah? And what do you think it’s supposed to feel like, then?”

She tipped her head, studying the worn tile floor like the answer might be hidden in the cracks.

“I mean… I like to think it will feel like… like breathing. Like just knowing that’s your person… No drama. No…” She giggled. “No mortal danger.” She looked at him again. “Just… clarity .”

For a moment, he almost hated her for how easy she made it sound. For how much sense it made.

“That simple, huh?” he muttered.

“That hard,” she corrected, too fast for him to miss. “I’ve been eighteen for like… ten years. It sucks.”

“So you’ve never felt it?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

Tim’s mouth pulled into something that was almost a smile but didn’t reach his eyes.

Of course, she hadn’t felt it.

Or—she didn’t know she had.

He’d watched her at Mama Rosa’s—watched her eyes flick over his face like she was seeing something she shouldn’t. For a second, he’d been sure she’d felt it too. The spark. The thing that made his chest hurt when he looked at her for too long.

But she didn’t.

Or at least, she didn’t understand it. And he couldn’t tell if that made him relieved or sick to his stomach.

“You’ll know,” he said finally, too gruff, the words scraping out like sandpaper.

Lucy looked at him confused .

Lucy .

When had he started to call her Lucy?

“When it happens. You’ll know.”

Her grin softened into something thoughtful, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. “Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just pick someone who makes me feel… calm. Clear.” She lifted her eyes to him again. “Maybe I’ll just choose. Like I almost did before.”

Tim snorted—not unkindly. “Selfish.”

“ Human ,” she shot back, and her laugh made the humming bodega feel too small.

Somewhere outside, a car backfired, a reminder that they had calls waiting, corners to clear, perimeters to run.

Tim cleared his throat, slipped the rest of it back behind the walls he’d built so well. “Come on, boot. Let’s go. City’s waiting.”

She grinned, wide and easy and so bright it made his ribs hurt. “Yes, sir.”

Later that night, Tim sat in his truck outside his apartment building, engine off, keys heavy in his palm. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets slick and reflecting the amber glow of streetlights. Inside, he knew the divorce papers were still waiting on his kitchen table—unsigned, gathering dust like everything else he'd been avoiding.

He thought about Lucy's words, the way she'd described her almost-marriage with such casual honesty. I wanted to. For that time, that season. Like love was something you could choose, something you could hold temporarily without breaking it or yourself in the process.

Selfish, sure. Or brave .

Maybe she was just braver than he’d ever been.

Brave enough to admit that sometimes love wasn't cosmic or destined—sometimes it was just two people deciding to be kind to each other for as long as they could manage it.

Isabel had been his choice, too, in a way.

Not his soulmate, not the electric pull that made his chest tight and his hands shake, but a choice. A safe harbor . All his lies were his choices. He hadn’t just been brave enough to be proud of them.

And the terrible thing, the thing that kept him sitting in this truck instead of going inside to sign those papers, was that Lucy was right. About clarity . About knowing.

He did know.

Had known since that first day their gazes crossed during roll call, though he'd spent weeks convincing himself otherwise. Had known when their hands met. Had known when she'd looked at him across the table at Mama Rosa's and told him he wasn't as mysterious as he thought.

The buzzing under his skin wasn't panic or injury or some delayed reaction to trauma. It was recognition. His body aging in real time for the first time in over a decade, finally finding its match.

But she didn't know.

Couldn't know .

Lucy looked at him and saw a married man in his thirties, someone whose time had already been claimed, whose story was already written. She talked about her soulmate like he was still out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

Tim leaned his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes against the weight of it all. The lies, the deception, the impossible situation he'd created for himself. Isabel deserved the real thing. Lucy deserved better than a training officer whose entire existence was built on pretending to be someone he wasn't.

And maybe that was the real difference between him and Lucy. She was willing to choose love, even if it wasn't perfect, even if it wasn't forever. She was brave enough to reach for happiness when she found it.

Tim had been running from it his whole life.

He pulled out his phone, Isabel's number still in his favorites . Genny’s. Mom’s. He could call them—Mom or Genny. Any of them. Could try to explain the inexplicable, could ask them to come meet him and help him figure out how to untangle the mess he’d made of his life.

But the phone went dark in his hands. Through his windshield, the city moved on—the endless rhythm of people trying to figure out how to love each other without breaking in the process.

Tomorrow he'd see Lucy again. Would watch her clear corners with that perfect precision, would feel that electric pull every time she got close, would lie by omission every moment they spent together.

But tonight, he could sit in this truck and finally admit the truth to himself: he wasn't afraid of dying alone in some alley—he was afraid of living alone with the knowledge that he'd found exactly what he'd been looking for, and it was too late to do anything about it.

Chapter Text

Tim never liked doing dishes, but lately, it had become almost therapeutic.

Not for the warm water on his hands, or the clink of plates against porcelain—God knew he wasn’t sentimental enough for that. It was the boredom. The way the minutes stretched out, unremarkable. A stretch of time where no one was aiming at him, no one was asking for answers he didn’t have, and no one was close enough to notice what he wasn’t saying.

A dishwasher was one of the few requirements he had when he moved in with Isabel. But, just like her, it had given up on him, and Tim hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. Not for lack of money, but because the thought of driving to an appliance store and making small talk with some overeager salesman sounded worse than just… washing by hand.

So, for now, this was the routine.

The lazy soundtrack of a Sunday afternoon filtered through the open kitchen window. A baseball game drifting in from someone’s TV. Kids laughing in the apartment next door. Cars rolling by.

He should go out. Do something. Sit in a park, a lounge, somewhere with a beer and a view. He’d already been out that morning—for a run, sure, for a task . Enough to check the box. He’d felt the sun. Felt his heart hammering as he pushed uphill, pretending the buzzing in his chest was from exertion, not the thoughts he couldn’t afford to follow.

So he could afford a silent afternoon.

A game, some beer, and proper alone time.

He finished the last cup and left it to air-dry beside the sink, and went to sit on his couch. His gaze wandered around. Empty. Foreign. Cold. Not even the TV, the baseball, or the laughter from the kid next door made Sunday feel like it.

An inning slipped into another.

The commentary turned into background noise, his thoughts circling the same track until they merged into a blur. The light from the window shifted, fading from the pale gold of afternoon to the dim blue of evening without him ever getting up from the couch. And suddenly, Sunday evaporated.

Not that he was wasting time, losing chances or opportunities. He was stuck in time. Frozen.

He stepped into the bathroom.

Since his shower that morning, he had avoided the few mirrors left in the house. If he looked, he would see stubborn acne and taut skin. The soft brown roots emerging.

But now, in the dim light filtering through the frosted window, he caught his reflection anyway. The careful silver highlights Isabel had taught him how to achieve were growing out in uneven patches, revealing the natural brown underneath.

The medicine cabinet hung slightly ajar, revealing the neat rows of bottles and tubes of failed experiments. Anti-acne treatments that never quite worked. The expensive aging cream Isabel had special-ordered from some clinic in Switzerland. All of it there, gathering dust.

The only thing that really worked was the Rhytidox.

It had been Isabel’s idea, a few years after the wedding. She’d come home from an undercover op with a wild, reckless hope for their future. They talked baby names, browsed new houses, upped their life insurance. All perfect and theirs. And then, somehow—

“Have you seen Lieutenant Morrison lately?” She asked.

Tim didn’t look up from his laptop. “No... Why?”

“I saw him today," she'd said, settling beside him on the couch.

Tim looked up to see her. Isabel was fresh from the shower; her wet hair fell loose, and her face was wiped of all the makeup. Even without the makeup, the hair, and the clothes that made her appear more mature, her skin had begun to show the first signs of wear—a slight dullness that hadn't been there before, tiny imperfections that no longer disappeared with sleep. Her eyes, once sharp and bright, had developed a faint cloudiness around the edges. Tim smiled as he noticed.

"He looked... different.”

“Different, how?”

“Older, more… distinguished . I asked him about it.” She paused, studying Tim’s face with that analytical look years of being a detective had perfected. “He’s been getting rhytidox treatments. Says it’s helped with…” She paused. “Credibility. You know how young he used to look for his rank.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She leaned over and flicked his laptop closed. "Because it's really simple. Just a few injections along the forehead,” her index finger traced his hairline, "around the eyes, here ,” she kissed his jawline and then his lips, “and here, around the mouth. It tightens the right muscles so they bunch a little… creates some lines." She paused, eyebrows raised, daring him to argue. "It lasts six months. And you'd look… seasoned."

There was a silence. "And why do I need to look seasoned?"

“If you’re thinking about becoming a T.O., it makes sense to look more… experienced.” It was reasonable and  logical, really. "Morrison said it changed everything for him. People started taking him seriously in meetings, especially the ones that didn’t work with him daily… You know how it is.”

“This has nothing to do with your family’s comments last Christmas?”

Her mother's voice echoed in his memory from last Christmas—the little jokes that had started becoming pointed. "Tim, you must tell me your skincare routine," with that laugh that wasn't quite a laugh. It was concern. Her father’s comments about him not being rightful committed to the relationship. Her sister’s fiancé’s shock when Tim told him they’d been together for almost five years.

“No, no…” She shook her head. “I just—Morrison's results were so impressive, and when I thought about your situation… it seemed like a perfect solution.”

“Love, are you not comfortable that I’m—”

“No! Nothing like that.” She smiled and let her hand fall onto his thigh.

But he'd caught the micro-expression—the brief tightening around her eyes, the almost imperceptible flinch.

The truth was, Tim was uncomfortable going out with her. Isabel had begun to show her years—lines around her eyes, a weariness in her posture that seemed bone-deep, subtle changes that made her look like she belonged in her rank, her position, her life. Meanwhile, Tim looked exactly the same as the day they met—as the day he'd enlisted, as every photograph from the past decade.

The contrast was becoming impossible to ignore.

"But I know you're struggling with this," she went on softly, and he noticed how her voice had gained a slight rasp lately. "I know you’re doing great work with Dr. Reeves, but… what if your cells never… heal?”

Tim had been seeing Dr. Reeves for six months back then, ever since Isabel had found an article about PTSD and arrested aging in combat veterans. She’d highlighted passages and left the magazine on his nightstand with a sticky note. “ This explains a lot. We should get you help."

And Dr. Reeves had been kind, professional, eager to discuss Tim’s tours, his adjustment to normal life, his days in the force, and ultimately, to understand all the ways trauma could manifest in his body. Isabel had been relieved to have an explanation for what she called their "divergent aging". Tim was… grateful to find answers, but the relief came wrapped in shame.

His body's refusal to age wasn't some mysterious quirk—it was damage . A malfunction.

Despite Isabel, he didn’t tell anyone else. How could he? How could he explain to his colleagues, his friends, his family that he was weak enough to let trauma carve itself into his DNA?

"People will notice," Tim said finally.

"Will they?" She frowned. "They start with small doses, then increase them if they need to. And honestly, Tim, people are already noticing... Not in a good way.”

They were. Tim knew they were.

But was he going to just give up what was left of his pride?

"I don't know..." He hesitated, getting up from the couch. "It's... fake."

Isabel knelt on the couch and caught his hand, not letting him pull away. Her grip was firm, desperate in a way that should have been a warning.

"Babe, what’s not?" she said, but her lightness felt forced now. "It’s all fake. Undercover work, most of your press conferences, half the marriages we know... If it makes you feel better, who cares?"

She kept talking—about how distinguished he'd look in a few years with a little grey at the temples, a touch of stubble gone silver, faint lines around his eyes that would match the wisdom she was sure he'd earned. She bet he'd age like fine wine. Her voice took on that dreamy quality he'd heard before, when she talked about futures that felt more like fantasies.

Tim wasn't sure who wanted that transformation more—her or him. But the way she described it, with such vivid detail, such hunger in her voice... it felt like she'd been picturing this version of him for months.

She must have seen the hesitation flickering across his face, because she tugged him back down and settled herself on his lap, her hands cupping his unchanged features like she was trying to mold them into something else.

"If you want, we can work on your posture too. Lower your voice a bit more, change how you carry yourself..." She smiled, and he could see hope blooming in her expression, as if she was already picturing the finished product. "I help people with this all the time before ops. We can make you look like the man you are inside.”

And then it hit him—she had it all mapped out before he'd even said yes.

The treatments, the voice coaching, the posture adjustments. This wasn't a suggestion born from casually seeing Lt. Morrison. This was a plan she'd been nurturing, waiting for the right moment to present it as the obvious solution.

He smiled anyway, and she kissed him with a fervor that felt like gratitude. Later, in bed, her hands framing his face in the darkness, he'd thought maybe she saw the same future he did. No matter how fractured he was, Isabel always seemed to have a solution to make him—make them —fit the world's expectations.

By the end of the month, he had a standing appointment at the clinic. Rhytidox every six months. After a couple of years, his hair was dyed to the perfect shade of “distinguished” (which had become Isabel's favorite word whenever she looked at him with satisfaction). Makeup for the days closer to his appointments, when the rhytidox had already worn off and his natural face threatened to emerge. Slowly, he built a kit in the bathroom drawer—concealer, powder, a fine brush for painting in stray grey hairs if the dye faded too soon.

Over the years, it became automatic. Just part of the morning. Just another piece of the uniform.

The Crown Vic felt familiar—cramped, smelling of pine air freshener that couldn't quite mask the scent of Lucy's floral perfume and worn vinyl that had absorbed years of coffee spills and demanding shifts. Chen's perfume, he corrected himself.

For twenty minutes, they drove the grid in comfortable silence, the kind that came from roughly three months of working together.

Slowly, the ritual of patrol washed over him.

Check the liquor store that got tagged last week—the owner waved from behind bulletproof glass. Wave at Mrs. Park, walking her ancient chihuahua. Circle back past the school zone. Tell Chen about the time that same chihuahua made Lopez run for her life. A traffic stop for expired tags—routine, professional, done in ten minutes. Lucy talking about a new restaurant opening down the street, something about Korean fusion tacos the owner had let her taste when she walked by a couple days back.

Normal. Routine.

The kind of predictability his personal life had lost completely.

Tim let himself sink into it, the way you might sink into a warm bath after a long day.

He needed this. The quiet. The peace.

They had time to stop for coffee at Bill's truck—a battered coffee truck parked on the same corner for longer than Tim could remember. Lucy wasn’t a fan.

"I'm just saying," she said, accepting her cup anyway, her fingers curling around the paper warmth, as she looked around, "there are actual coffee shops with health department ratings visible to the human eye."

"And oat milk hipsters rewriting screenplays," Tim replied, taking a sip of the admittedly questionable brew. "Here it's just a buck for coffee, and you go to work."

"Right," Lucy wrinkled her nose after her first taste, her expression scrunching in a way that was becoming awfully familiar. "I get why you're so bitter now."

Tim almost smiled.

They walked the beat after that, the LA sun warming their shoulders. The concrete radiated heat through their boots, and somewhere a sprinkler system kicked on, sending the smell of wet asphalt and jasmine into the air. Lucy pointed out changes—new graffiti tag on the corner market, a storefront that had changed hands from a dry cleaner to a cell phone repair shop, a woman two houses down who'd given birth recently and was already back to walking her older kids to school.

Three months in, and Lucy was getting to know the neighborhood.

"D'you think he's lonely?" she asked, out of nowhere, nodding toward a man on a bench not far ahead.

Tim glanced over. Same bench where he usually found him when walking this beat, same small brown dog with graying fur around its muzzle.

"Maybe." Tim shrugged, but his eyes lingered on the scene. "How the hell would I know?"

Lucy looked at him sideways, and he knew her enough now to recognize when something in his tone caught her attention. Her steps slowed slightly.

“You wouldn’t. But you’re a cop,” she paused. “You know these people. How long has he been alone?”

"Ever since I can remember."

"That's—"

"A lot of time, yes. He's a widower." The words came out flat, matter-of-fact. "His wife used to be with him every morning. Saw her a couple times during my first year in Mid-Wilshire. Always wore this bright yellow shawl. Hard to miss." His voice stayed steady, but his jaw relaxed just slightly. "One day, just him and the dog."

"When?"

"Eight, maybe nine years ago."

Tim’s hand moved unconsciously to his radio when a car backfired a few blocks away—just a twitch of habit or a gift from his PTSD, but nothing urgent. He didn’t even break stride. Years of hypervigilance had made it automatic, like blinking against bright light.

Lucy noticed, though. Of course she did.

When he looked at her again, she was watching him with something soft in her eyes. Something closer to respect. Admiration . Like she was taking mental notes. Like maybe, just for a second, she saw him as something more than a guy who barked orders and pointed out her flaws.

It made him uncomfortable.

He remembered being exactly where she was once. Looking at a T.O. like they had all the answers. Like experience made you bulletproof. Like time on the job translated into some kind of moral clarity.

It didn’t.

All it had given him was callouses. And worse—doubt.

Still, he remembered what that kind of respect felt like. The way you didn’t even mean to show it, just couldn’t help yourself. He remembered watching his own training officer sip burnt gas station coffee, leaning against the hood of their shop, going through some tough case, and thinking: One day I’ll know things like that. One day I’ll be that steady.

He wasn’t. Not really. He didn’t feel that way.

And although Lucy looked at him like he was, Tim just didn’t see himself like that.

But then again, he had a pretty terrible idea of himself.

It was mundane now, all of it—carrying these stories, knowing which benches belonged to which ghosts, remembering who used to walk beside whom, being someone’s Training Officer, but some days, when he looked at the mirror, a boy fresh from the army stared back.

His experience meant nothing.

His years in the field were just armor.

Because no cop serves only on experience or technique. Good cops care .

The job tells you that you can’t. That you shouldn’t. Well, that you should , but just in the right amount . You care to the point of doing good, not to the point you break.

Tim cared to the point that Miss Lola's worry about her godson had stopped being just another call to log—it became something he carried, made him check on her next shift, look for the kid in every drug raid. He cared to the point that he started noticing which kids walked home alone and which porches had broken lights.

The army, the academy, the years in the force taught him patterns, but it also taught him people, and how to care for them despite everything.

It worked. Truly. It made him a better cop. And, at the same time, an even more tired person.

Isabel had never understood that. How you could come home worn thin by someone else’s grief. How a report wasn’t just a report, but someone’s worst day on repeat. How the job followed him home, slipped in through the front door, and sat next to them at dinner like some unwanted guest.

But Lucy, with this glint in her eyes, and the warmth Tim felt in his bones since the moment their gazes crossed... she got it. Maybe more than she should.

Lucy cared too much already, wore her heart so close to the surface it was a miracle it hadn't been torn apart yet. She didn't need to know that the weight she was starting to carry would only get heavier, that it would settle into your bones and stay there.

Yet, it was his job to tell her.

But not now. He was enjoying this. Walking around, sharing a coffee and some stories. Hearing her laugh. Looking at how the sun caught her skin and eyes, how the wind made her baby hairs dance against her cheeks.

He would do it. But not now, that everything felt good.

For a while, they just walked, and Tim truly thought she’d let it go. But after a few steps, she glanced back over her shoulder.

Tim’s gaze followed hers—the old man was still there.

“Does he have family?”

Tim nodded once. “Two kids that barely visit. And a grandson. College kid. Comes by with groceries once in a while.”

Lucy was quiet, her brows pulling together just slightly. He could see the wheels turning. The same way they had when she asked about the lack of community projects a few weeks back, or why nobody fixed the busted swing in the park.

"We should check on him more," Lucy said, her voice taking on that determined edge he was learning to recognize. "Maybe once a week? Set a calendar and—"

Yup.

He sighed.

Lucy’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

“You can’t adopt every lonely person in LA.”

"But he's old and—"

"And independent," Tim cut in, stopping to face her. The sun had climbed higher, making their uniforms stick to their backs as the conversation grew heavier. "He's got his dog. He's out here every day, doing his thing. Just because someone's alone doesn't mean they need us.”

Lucy frowned, like the concept personally offended her sense of justice. Her fingers tightened around her coffee cup, knuckles going white. Tim didn't say it, but he could feel it too—the old man's silence, his ritual, the rhythm of it all.

Alone didn't always mean lonely. It could mean stable . Safe .

Or, damn it, yes , it could mean lonely. Sometimes it meant you'd learned to live with the parts of life that didn't go to plan. Like losing your life-long partner. Like co-living with divorce papers that sat somewhere on your kitchen like a death sentence.

"But what if he does need help and…” She hesitated. “Maybe he’s too proud to ask.”

Again, he sighed, and then pressed his lips together, nodding once—not agreeing, just acknowledging that he'd heard her.

“And what exactly are you planning to do? Adopt him?”

Lucy gave him a look. Not snide or sharp, but quietly disbelieving.

Tim took a breath, feeling the weight of her disappointment like a physical thing.

Rookies and their ideals.

He used to enjoy crushing them—not out of cruelty, but as a kind of necessary tempering. Maturity through fire. Hard truths sharpened into tools they'd need one day. Break them down, build them back up stronger. It was practically a science.

But with Lucy…

It was different.

Partly because she was Lucy —he thought of her that way now, whether he said her name out loud or not. More than that, she believed in people. In the job. In doing good. She saw good where most people stopped looking, found hope in places where Tim had learned to expect disappointment.

She was good.

Genuinely, stubbornly, dangerously good.

And maybe that's what made this harder. Maybe that's what made him want to protect that goodness instead of systematically destroying it.

"Maybe just... I don't know. Stop by more often. Say hello. Make sure he's okay. That he has food, and takes his meds and—"

"Chen, we've got actual calls to handle. Real problems that require police intervention."

"This is real," Lucy said, her voice taking on a slight edge. "Elderly people die alone all the time because no one bothers to check on them."

Tim felt his jaw tighten slightly. There it was—that earnest idealism that was going to get her eaten alive. "And that's tragic. But it's not police work."

"Isn't it, though? Protect and serve?"

"Protect and serve doesn't mean we're social workers, Chen." Lucy fell quiet, but Tim could feel her processing, disagreeing.

The silence stretched between them, not uncomfortable exactly, but weighted with unspoken tension. And so, they went back to their walk, Lucy next to him, coffee in hand, steps falling into sync with his despite the tension between them.

This was something Tim had started to notice. Their steps. The way they often reached for the door at the same time. How she'd hand him evidence bags before he asked, or how they'd both turn toward the same sound without speaking. Little moments of alignment that felt too natural to be a coincidence, too consistent to ignore.

It should have bothered him how this easy intimacy had developed without his permission or efforts.

Instead, it felt like the only thing that made sense anymore.

A car passed by, music thumping low through the windows. The street settled again into that particular LA morning quiet—not peaceful, exactly, but temporarily free of crisis.

“I just think…” Lucy started, then hesitated, glancing at him. “If we’re here anyway, walking the beat, what’s the harm?”

“We can walk back and talk for a few minutes,” Tim said, “but what comes after that?”

“God, you’re so insensitive.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course, you don’t get it.”

Tim stopped walking and turned to face her. This time, he really looked at her. Young. Sharp. Still whole in ways he'd forgotten were possible. Still hopeful in that stubborn, unshakable way that made him want to both protect her and prepare her for disappointment.

His expression wasn't angry, but it was serious in a way that made Lucy straighten slightly.

“You think I don’t get it?” His voice was quiet, but the edge underneath made her straighten. “You start caring about every lonely old man, every struggling family, every person who might need help… where does it end?”

“Is that not the point —”

“No, Chen. The point is surviving in this job. You think you can save everyone, but you can’t. One day you’ll find a dead baby. Maybe murdered by his own parents. You’ll meet people who kill for fun. Find an old woman who’s been dead for weeks before anyone noticed. And *when—*not *if—*this happens you'll have two choices."

She swallowed. “Which are?”

“Quit… or learn to live with it. And part of learning to live with it means walking past people who need help, because there’s something worse waiting down the block.”

“This isn’t that, though—”

“No,” he admitted, “but if we go back there and check in, it ends there. We can’t start running errands or taking care of his dog. That’s not our job.”

“With all due respect, sir, that was not—”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done it if he asked.”

Lucy opened her mouth, then closed it.

He started walking again, and she fell into step beside him. “Compassion’s not the problem, Chen. It’s the thing that’ll make you good at this job. But if you don’t figure out where to put it, it’ll eat you alive.”

She didn’t answer. But he could feel her thinking — turning his words over, testing them against the kind of cop she still believed she could be.

He started walking again, and after a moment, Lucy followed. The easy rhythm they'd found earlier was gone now, replaced by something more cautious, more careful.

"Sir?" Lucy said after they'd walked half a block in silence.

"Yes?"

"Have you always felt that way? About the job?"

Tim didn't answer right away.

He could feel her watching him, waiting for honesty. And for a second, he almost gave it to her—the full picture. The younger version of himself who thought he could outwork the darkness, outrun the compromises. Who thought grit and decency were enough. Who thought the job could fix what broke at home, or maybe the other way around.

But he didn't say any of that.

Instead, he exhaled through his nose, gaze steady ahead. "No, I haven't."

Lucy didn't press.

God , Tim wanted her to be good. Wanted her to be hopeful, to wake up with that glint in her eyes he'd started to see in his dreams. That stubborn kind of brightness that refused to dim, no matter how brutal Tim got.

But he didn't want her to break.

That was the line he walked every day now—his job wasn't just about keeping her alive. It was about preparing her for what would try to hollow her out. What had hollowed him out.

I have to hurt you a little now so the job doesn't destroy you completely later.

He had to make her see the world for what it was, even if it meant sanding down her shine, one truth at a time.

Maybe that made him cruel. Or maybe it just made him responsible.

The truth was, Isabel's leaving had taught him the most brutal lesson of all—he had no control over anything. Everything he'd taken as his, everything he'd believed was permanent, had simply vanished. The most pure feeling he'd ever known, the love he'd had for her that he'd vouched for as if it were cosmic, had been nothing but illusion. Every challenge he'd taken to protect that love, every compromise, every lie he'd told himself and others, meant nothing now.

The sandwich felt like cardboard in Tim's mouth as he sat in the Crown Vic, watching Lucy scroll through something on her phone. They'd found a decent spot outside a small deli, parked under the shade of an old oak tree that had somehow survived decades of LA urban planning. The sandwich had been decent enough five minutes ago—turkey and swiss cheese on sourdough, nothing fancy but edible. "Tim's special," Lucy had joked. Now it might as well have been sawdust.

The easy rhythm from their Monday morning patrol had settled between them again. Neither of them mentioned the earlier conversation—the caring, the old man on the bench whose pain none of them could really understand or fix. But Tim had taken a second to study the broken swing in the kids' playground while Lucy hit the bathroom. Mentally, he'd made a little list of what he needed to grab before they walked this beat again: WD-40, maybe some new chain links, a wrench set that actually fit the bolts.

Lucy's phone buzzed with a notification, and something shifted in her posture: she angled the screen slightly away from him, and a small smile tugged at her lips as she read whatever message had just come through. Her thumb moved across the screen in quick, practiced swipes, typing a response with the kind of easy confidence that made Tim's jaw clench.

He took another bite of his sandwich just to give himself something to do, and nearly choked on it.

God, he knew he shouldn't be watching.

Shouldn't care about who was making Lucy— no —who was making Chen , his rookie , smile like that. Soft and real and private in a way that had nothing to do with him or the job or the careful professional distance Tim forced between them in the shop.

It was none of his business.

Chen was his rookie, his responsibility to train and keep alive, nothing more.

And then she laughed—actually laughed out loud at whatever response she'd gotten—and quickly pressed her hand over her mouth, glancing at him with something that looked almost like guilt. "Sorry."

Tim's chest tightened with the realization that it wasn't true. None of it was true.

He'd known for weeks now, maybe longer. The buzzing. The dreams he'd started having where Isabel's face morphed into Lucy's halfway through, leaving him confused and aching when he woke up. The way his heart seemed on the verge of bursting whenever their skin touched by accident—passing files, checking each other's gear—split seconds when her fingers brushed his and the whole world narrowed to that single point of contact.

This ugly, desperate twist in his chest was just another piece of evidence.

The jealousy felt like acid in his throat. The way she looked at him sometimes was like she could see straight through all his carefully constructed walls to whatever broken thing was left underneath.

Before Tim could say something—either a casual "no problem" or something rude and cold and brutal, because that stupid jealousy was feeding something dark that lived in him now—the shop's radio crackled to life.

"All units, we have a 211 in progress at Jana Healthcare Pharmacy, 5233 Melrose Ave. Armed suspect, possible hostage situation."

His hands were already moving before Lucy had dropped her phone, muscle memory kicking in like a switch flipped. The engine turned over with a reluctant growl.

Sirens, lights, the familiar noise that drowned out everything else—including whatever conversation Lucy was having and all of Tim’s emotions about it.

"7-Adam-19, responding," Lucy called into the radio, her voice steady despite the adrenaline making her fingers twitch as she fumbled with her seatbelt. “We’re four blocks out.”

They were close enough that Tim could see the scene unfolding before they'd even parked. Some civilians were pressed against the storefront across the street. The younger ones with their phones out, the elders talking to each other.

Tim pulled up next to the other two shops already there. Red and blue painted the afternoon in urgent, anxious colors.

"What do we do?" Lucy asked, and there was something different in her voice now. Not fear—never fear with her—but a kind of focused intensity that reminded him she was still learning.

Right.

“We assess the situation first,” he explained, automatically checking his weapon, his radio, the dozen small rituals that meant the difference between going home or not leaving the call at all. “Then, we try to keep everyone alive.”

Lucy followed him out of the shop.

"What do we have?" Tim asked one of the officers.

There were two of them, and both looked like they'd rather be anywhere else. The first one, slightly taller than Tim, nodded at him before speaking. Officer Martinez, according to his nameplate. The second officer—younger, with nervous energy radiating off him like heat—barely acknowledged Lucy's presence. Officer Huston.

"Leonard Reyes, thirty-eight, unemployed. Apparently going through a messy divorce," Martinez said, consulting his notepad. His eyes stayed on Tim, as if Lucy wasn't standing right there. "Lost his job a few months ago, been fighting his ex-wife for custody for almost a year. Lives right down the street." Martinez glanced at his notes again. "Neighbors say he's been... struggling. Not eating, not sleeping, drinking heavily. They see him talking to himself.”

Officer Huston stepped forward. "Witness said he came in asking for pills. When the pharmacist refused—no prescription—Reyes pulled a gun. Been screaming nonsense inside ever since.”

"Screaming about what, exactly?" Lucy asked.

Huston's eyes flicked to her briefly, then back to Tim as if waiting for him to repeat the question. Tim just nodded. "Like I said—nonsense… How nothing mattered anymore, how the whole system was designed to keep people like him suffering."

"People like him? Does he—" Lucy started, then caught herself. "Is anyone inside with him?" She corrected her question, shooting a quick glance at Tim.

Martinez turned to Tim. “Yes, there’s an elderly woman inside. She was picking up her meds when Reyes came in. About seventy… Name's Margaret Walsh. Lives alone, but someone has already called her son. He's on his way."

"And why did he say 'people like him'?" Tim asked, picking up on Lucy's question. "What do we know about his situation?"

Something shifted in Lucy's expression. A quick flash of what might have been validation or relief. He made a mental note to ask her about it later—and to have a conversation with these two about professional courtesy.

Officer Huston shifted uncomfortably, consulting his notepad like it might contain answers to questions he didn't want to ask. "He's clearly altered. I don't know if it's drugs or just... the stress. But witnesses say he was ranting about the system… We haven't had time to actually check…"

"Jesus," Lucy breathed, understanding flooding her features. "No one here knows him? You didn’t think about asking ?"

"All we know is—" Martinez started, then stopped mid-sentence when Lucy held up a hand.

"Has he hurt her?" Lucy interrupted as soon as she looked inside. Tim followed her gaze, but noticed how both officers looked to him for the answer, as if Lucy hadn't asked the question herself.

"Answer Officer Chen," Tim said quietly, his tone carrying just enough edge to make both men straighten.

"He hasn't hurt her," Martinez said, finally addressing Lucy directly for the first time since they arrived. "That's the thing—witnesses say he's been... gentle with her. Keeps apologizing to her, saying she's safe. That he'd never hurt someone innocent. But he won't let her leave. Keeps talking about how God wouldn't let anything happen to someone who didn't deserve it..."

"Then why is she still inside?" The question came out sharper than Lucy probably intended. "Why does he need her? How much time—"

"Because he's not making sense, at all…" Officer Huston said, his inexperience showing in the way his voice cracked slightly. "Witnesses say he's completely unhinged. Yelling about fate and divine intervention. Says his wife leaving him was never supposed to happen according to the natural order… "

Tim stared at the pharmacy's barred windows, at the shadow moving back and forth inside like a caged animal. Leonard Reyes. Thirty-eight. Divorced. Fighting for his kids. Another man whose life had fallen apart.

The folder of unsigned papers in his kitchen felt heavier from afar.

The parallel felt too close for comfort.

"How much time have they spent inside?" Tim asked again. This time, both Martinez and Hudson looked at him.

"Not even five minutes. He let the cashier out shortly before you arrived."

"We go in?" Lucy asked, her hand instinctively checking her weapon.

"No," Tim said without hesitation, though every instinct he had was screaming at him to move, to act, to do something other than stand here while an innocent woman sat trapped with a madman. "We contain and wait for SWAT. It's a barricaded suspect with a hostage. We don't have enough intel to go in blind."

The words felt professional, correct, but hollow .

Every minute they waited was another minute for Leonard Reyes to spiral deeper into whatever hell he was already living in.

"How long until SWAT?" he asked Martinez, though part of him wasn't sure he wanted the answer.

"Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty with traffic."

Tim nodded, his mind already calculating containment strategies, escape routes, all the variables that could turn this sideways in a heartbeat.

Fifteen minutes for Leonard Reyes to decide whether he wanted to surrender or go out in a blaze of meaningless glory.

Fifteen minutes for an elderly woman to sit in terror.

"Let’s set up a perimeter," he ordered, falling back on procedure because it was all he had. "Everyone!" He called to all the officers around. "Cover all exits. We hold the line until SWAT gets here. Martinez, check on the son. Hudson, check on the hostage—don't take your eyes off her." Then, he turned to the small group of officers. "And somebody find out if this guy has any history of—”

The side door of the pharmacy exploded open before he could finish the sentence.

Wood splintered against brick. Reyes burst into the afternoon light like a man fleeing the gates of hell—wild hair, manic eyes, a gun clutched in one trembling hand, and a small brown paper bag—pills, probably—in the other. The weight of what he'd done seemed to hit him all at once.

He froze when he saw the line of patrol cars, the officers taking cover behind open doors, the red and blue lights that painted his face in alternating shades of desperation and rage.

Tim saw it happen in slow motion.

The recognition in Leonard's eyes. The twitch of his gun hand.

"Gun!" Tim shouted, but Leonard was already moving.

The first shot cracked through the air, high and wild but close enough to make civilians dive for cover behind parked cars. A storefront window exploded, raining glass onto the sidewalk like deadly snow. Tim grabbed Lucy's shoulder and yanked her down behind the Crown Vic just as a second shot sparked off the hood, leaving a crater in the metal that would have been in her chest if she'd been standing.

"Suspect's running!" Lucy called into her radio, her voice steady. "Armed male, brown jacket, moving southbound on foot!"

But Reyes wasn't just moving—he was running like the devil himself was chasing him, which maybe wasn't far from the truth. Tim forced himself up from behind cover, his body fighting the instinct to stay down, to stay safe, to let someone else handle the man with the gun who was disappearing into the maze of LA streets.

The phantom ache in his side where his own bullet had found its mark flared like a warning, but Tim pushed through it. This wasn't about him. This was about stopping Reyes before he hurt someone else, before his pain became everyone's problem.

"Chen!" he called, but Lucy was already moving, already ahead of him.

By the time Tim caught up (fairly quickly, the only upside of his eternal eighteen years), they were two blocks deep in the chase. Reyes zigzagged through pedestrians like a desperate animal, vaulting over trash cans and careening off parked cars with the kind of reckless agility that came from having absolutely nothing left to lose. His jacket flapped behind him like broken wings, and Tim could hear him now—ragged breathing mixed with sounds that might have been sobs or laughter or both.

"Where's he heading?" Lucy called out.

Tim's mind worked the angles, reading the streets like a map burned into his memory through eight years of walking these beats. Reyes was running scared, not smart—making choices based on panic instead of strategy, but the geography was going to trap him whether he knew it or not.

"The alley between Hobart and Ogden," Tim said with certainty. "It’s a dead end. If he goes in there, we've got him."

“How are you sure—”

"Trust me," Tim cut her off, adrenaline sharpening his voice. "Take Melrose, come in from the north. Drive him toward the alley. Fast!"

Lucy peeled off without more hesitation.

Tim felt that familiar surge—pride and terror twisted together like barbed wire in his chest. Pride that his rookie was reading the streets like a veteran, moving on pure instinct. Terror that if he'd miscalculated by even seconds, she'd be cornering an armed man who'd already decided he had nothing left to lose.

He sprinted hard, lungs burning, dodging between parked cars as he closed the distance. Fifty yards. Thirty. Close enough to hear Leonard's ragged breathing echoing off brick walls.

Then—

The gunshot split the afternoon like lightning.

The sound didn't just reach him—it hit him, a physical blow that made his knees buckle mid-stride. The phantom pain in his side exploded white-hot, dragging him back to that moment when he'd been the one bleeding out on concrete, Lucy's hands pressed against his wound, her voice calling his name through the fog of shock and pain.

Lucy.

Tim forced himself to keep running, but his legs felt like lead. Every step toward the alley was a step toward finding out if he'd just gotten his rookie killed. The radio stayed silent—dead air that stretched like eternity.

"Officer Chen." He called on the radio.

Nothing.

"Officer Chen!"

Why wasn't she responding? Why wasn't anyone talking?

“Shots fired,” Tim spoke, calm but urgent. “Alley between Hobart and Ogden.”

Tim forced himself forward, pressed his shoulder against the brick wall at the alley's mouth. His hands were steady—training overriding the trauma—as he drew his weapon and peered around the corner.

And there, not too far from him, Reyes stood like a cornered animal against the chain-link fence that marked the end of his running. His gun hung loose at his side, his whole body shaking as the reality of his situation crashed over him like a wave.

Nowhere left to run. Nowhere left to hide.

Nothing left but the choice between surrender and destruction.

And where the hell was Lucy?

Tim's eyes swept the alley—overturned trash cans, fire escapes, shadowed doorways where she could be taking cover or lying wounded. His heart hammered against his ribs as he tried to spot any sign of movement, any flash of LAPD blue.

"Chen," he whispered into his radio, barely breathing the words. "Where are you?"

Echoing in the alley, his own voice, tainted by electronic static.

“Hostage secured,” the radio crackled. “All clear on my end. Suspect still at large, cornered in the alley.”

“Shut that thing down!” Reyes screamed from here he stood.

Tim looked for it. For Lucy’s radio. But nothing. Wherever it was, wherever Lucy was, it was out of sight. And the fact that it was working, but she wasn’t responding, meant one of two things: she was unconscious, or she was hiding and couldn't risk making noise.

Neither option was good.

“Limit radio traffic. Suspect’s listening. Request RA for Officer Chen. No comms. No visual. She could be hurt.”

He could see Leonard more clearly now—the man's chest rising and falling in rapid, panicked breaths. His gun hand trembled as he stared at the dead-end fence. Tim ignored him for a while. He wasn’t doing anything. All his focus was on the shadows, the doorways, the dumpsters, looking for either a trace of Chen or her blood.

Nothing.

"LAPD!" Tim called out, his voice carrying the authority of someone who'd done this a hundred times before. "Leonard, I need you to put the weapon down!"

Reyes spun around, gun swinging wildly, eyes wide with panic.

“Stay back! Stay the fuck back!” His voice cracked like glass, raw and tired.

“Nobody’s coming closer.” Tim kept his weapon lowered but ready. “It’s just me talking. That’s all.”

But even as he said it, his eyes kept searching. Kept looking for any sign of his rookie in the maze of shadows and debris that filled the narrow alley.

Come on, Lucy. Give me something. Anything.

"Don't want to fucking hear anything!"

"I know," Tim said, his voice carrying steady through the narrow space between brick walls. "But I'm going to talk anyway."

Reyes’ laugh was bitter, unhinged. "You fucking pigs have some trouble hearing a no."

"I can't say I've been exactly where you are. But I know what it's like when your whole world crumbles." Tim waited for something from him—any response, any sign Leonard was still listening. But nothing. His eyes swept the shadows behind a dumpster, looking for any flash of movement. "Let's not make it worse, okay, man?”

“You don’t know shit,” Reyes spat.

“Thirty-eight. Divorced.” Tim took a half-step forward, just enough to show his face. “Wife decided to move out. Life’s been shit. How close am I?”

Reyes’ gun hand trembled harder. "You don't know anything about—"

"House feels too empty, now?" Tim pressed, hating every word that came out of his mouth. These were truths he'd never said out loud, certainly not to Lucy (that despite everything, he was hoping was alive and listening), and here he was spilling them to a stranger with a gun. "Too many settlements? Lawyers bleeding you dry while your ex gets to play house with someone new?”

Something shifted in Reyes’ eyes. Recognition. The terrible kind.

"Shut up."

"The worst part isn't even losing her," Tim continued, his voice steady even as his chest felt like it was caving in. "It's realizing you never really had her to begin with. That she was already gone long before she packed her bags."

"Shut the fuck up!" Reyes’ voice cracked, but the gun dipped slightly.

Tim saw his opening. "What were the pills for, Leonard? Do you need money?"

Leonard let out a broken laugh. "Money? You think I—" He wiped his nose with his free hand, smearing tears and snot across his face. "I bought this—” he jerked the gun in his hand, “What? Three weeks ago. And y’know what I found out? I'm too much of a fucking coward to pull the trigger on myself. Even to die, I'm a goddamn coward!”

"So the pills..." Tim said quietly.

"Easier way out." Leonard's voice was lower; Tim had trouble understanding it. "Thought maybe... maybe if I took enough, maybe…” He looked up, his brown eyes finding Tim’s. “Maybe I could just... go to sleep. Not wake up.” Reyes shook his head. “But even that—even that I couldn't do right. Couldn't even get the fucking pills.”

"So you held up a pharmacy," not judging, just stating a fact.

"I wasn't gonna hurt anybody!" Leonard's voice shot up an octave, desperate for Tim to understand. "I told them that. Kept telling them. I never meant—" His breath hitched. "I just wanted something .”

Tim nodded slowly. "But then you saw all the cars outside."

"Yeah." Leonard's laugh was hollow. "Saw all you and it—I can’t go to prison. I couldn't even kill myself right, and now I was gonna rot in a cell for the rest of my miserable fucking life? No. Fuck no." He wiped his face again. "So I ran.”

There was a pause. And then he shrugged.

“Figured maybe you'd do what I couldn't."

"Suicide by cop," Tim said quietly.

"At least then it wouldn't be my fault, right? At least then maybe... maybe my kids wouldn't think their dad was a complete failure who couldn't even—" Leonard's voice broke completely.

Tim felt his heart clench. This man wasn't a criminal—he was someone who'd been pushed past his breaking point and couldn't see any other way out.

"Leonard, your kids don't need to lose their father today."

"They already lost him." Leonard raised the gun again, but this time Tim could see the truth—he wasn't aiming at Tim. He was slowly turning it toward himself. "They're better off without me."

"No." Tim took another step forward. "They're not."

"Yes, they are. They—I'm sick and—"

"Hey—" Tim shook his head. "You're their dad, no matter what."

"Their dad's a fucking failure who can't even kill himself properly!" Leonard's voice was raw, broken. "Their dad held a gun on two innocent women today because he was too chickenshit to aim at himself. What kind of father does that make me?"

"The kind who's still breathing. That can redeem himself." Tim said firmly. "The kind who can still call them tonight and tell them he loves them.”

Leonard was crying openly now, the gun wavering between his temple and the ground. There was a metallic click—the sound of a safety being disengaged. Tim rushed further into the alley, gun drawn.

“Don’t!” Do do anything—”

"Back!" Reyes swung the gun toward Tim. Breath harsh and erratic, hands shaky. Fingers dancing dangerously close to the trigger. "Stay the fuck back!"

Tim nodded, but didn’t move.

“Leonard, hear me first,” he said, fighting everything to remain calm.

Suddenly, it was easier. Like his body had calmed itself. It started in his ribage—a low thrum. A familiar buzz, drowning out everything else for a split second before his training reasserted itself.

Lucy .

Somewhere close.

His eyes followed the pull, that invisible thread drawing his gaze past the fire escape, past scattered debris, until—

There . Crouched behind the dumpster, weapon drawn, brown eyes steady on his face.

The breath Tim didn't realize he'd been holding rushed out of him in one sharp exhale. The buzzing intensified, warm and insistent, flooding his system with relief so profound his knees nearly buckled. She was whole. Moving. Alert . A dark stain spread across her right pants leg—blood, but not enough to pool, not enough to panic over. A scrape, surely.

But she wasn't looking at her injury.

She was looking at him .

The warmth in his chest spread outward, part relief, part something deeper he'd never let himself name. She had his back. She was safe. She was here .

Tim's jaw tightened as he fought the urge to close the distance between them, to check that wound himself, to feel with his own hands that she was okay. Instead, he gave her the barest nod— I see you, I'm good, stay put —and turned his attention back to the man with the gun.

"Twenty years," Leonard’s voice broke; he was hyperventilating now. The metallic clicking of the revolver filled the alley like a death rattle. "Twenty years of looking like a teenager while everyone else grew up around me. And when I finally found her, when I finally started aging—" He pressed the gun harder against his temple. "It was supposed to mean something! It was supposed to be forever!"

Tim felt the words like a punch to the gut. "But it doesn't work that way, does it?"

"No." Leonard's laugh was bitter. "The universe gives you your person, and then what? She decides she doesn't love who you became? She takes the kids and leaves you with a face full of wrinkles that prove you were stupid enough to believe in fairy tales?"

"I know," Tim said quietly, and the admission felt like swallowing glass.

“You do…” Leonard echoed. The gun wavered slightly in his grip. "You have kids?"

“No… We—We never had kids but..." Tim's voice caught, something raw bleeding through. "We dreamed of them, and I think she took that away, too. And it doesn’t make sense. I know it doesn’t.”

Leonard was staring at him now, the gun forgotten for a heartbeat.

“Believe me, man,” Tim said, his voice steady but low, carrying a kind of hard-won weight. “You don’t have to do this.”

Leonard’s eyes moved to the floor. “I do.”

“Look at me.” He looked up. “You don’t .”

“You thought about it, too.” It wasn’t a question.

Tim’s gaze flicked to Lucy, still crouched behind the dumpster, still bleeding, still watching him with those unflinching brown eyes.

He didn’t flinch from Leonard’s question. He knew the pull of it—the quiet imagining of what it would be like to stop, to let the pain finally run out. The army. His father. Isabel. Every session with his shrink, every night he’d tiptoed along that edge, trying to understand the dark, trying to survive it. Not really wanting to die—but knowing how easy it could feel to expose himself to it, to flirt with it, to let life itself break free.

And yet, here he was. Speaking, urging, grounding, someone off it, like he didn’t fantasise about it, too.

"I have," he admitted. “So believe me when I tell you why.”

The buzzing in his chest thrummed like a lifeline he had once been too afraid to grab—and now he offered it to someone else.

Leonard shook his head, tears streaming down his face.

Tim let his mind wander for a moment, thinking of Lucy watching him that morning, looking at him like he had all the answers. Thinking of the broken swing he wanted to fix. Thinking of his mother, waiting. His nephews. Thinking of all the small things that maybe added up to something bigger than his own pain.

"Because the universe isn't done with me yet." Tim's voice was steady now, sure. "And maybe it's not done with you either."

"How do you know?”

“I don’t…” Tim shrugged, his eyes zeroed in on the man in front of him.

And he took a second to assess the man before him. Designer jeans, even torn and dirty now. A watch that probably cost more than Tim's monthly salary. Clean nails, manicured. This was a man who'd had everything—the house, the car, the family, the life that looked perfect from the outside—and watched it all crumble anyway.

"You had it all, didn't you?" Tim said quietly. "Good job, nice house, beautiful family. The kind of life other people look at and think, 'That guy's got it figured out.'"

Leonard's laugh was hollow. "Six-figure salary. House in the hills. Kids in private school." His voice cracked. "And none of it mattered. None of it kept her from leaving."

“But it took you years to build. Twenty, wasn’t it?”

Leonard nodded. “Twenty years waiting for her.”

"And you built something worth having," Tim continued, his voice gentle but firm. "You didn't just stumble into success. You worked for it. Made something of yourself. That doesn't just disappear because she left."

"Feels like it does." Leonard's voice was barely a whisper. "Feels like everything I built was just... set dressing for her life. I did it all thinking about the day she would appear. Now it feels like... none of it was really mine."

Tim understood that feeling too well—the way Isabel had redecorated their house until it felt foreign, the way everything he did somehow became about making her proud instead of making him feel accomplished.

"But those twenty years? That ability to build something from nothing—that's yours . She can't take that with her."

"But what’s the point?” His hand kept shaking. The metallic click echoed. Tim felt his chest hurt from how much he braced for the moment he would accidentally pull the trigger.

“The point is you ,” Tim took another small step forward. "Now, you'll build something that's yours first . And maybe you'll find someone who wants to build alongside you instead of just moving into what you've already made."

Leonard looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. “No one wants this .”

“You know that’s not true…” Tim walked further. “It will be better.”

“You really believe that?”

There it was. The buzzing. The big brown eyes in his peripheral view. “I'm starting to."

"Even after everything fell apart?"

" Especially after everything fell apart," Tim said. "Because now I know the difference between building a life for someone else and building one for myself."

For a moment that stretched like eternity, Leonard stood frozen between choice and surrender. The gun pressed against his temple, his finger on the trigger, his whole body trembling with the weight of a decision that would echo through his children's lives forever.

Leonard looked at him then—really looked—and Tim saw something shift in his eyes. Not surrender exactly, but maybe exhaustion. The kind of bone-deep weariness that came from fighting a war you couldn't win.

"I don't know how to do this," Leonard whispered.

"Neither do I," Tim admitted. "But we can find out. Give me the gun."

Leonard’s arm was drifting down, the muzzle sliding off his temple toward Tim’s open hand. Relief loosened his fingers, and his whole frame seemed to exhale.

The jolt came first.

Leonard snapped forward as if a cord had been cut.

Then, the sound arrived. Hard. Loud. Flat.

Metal skittered across concrete. Leonard's body folded. Blood began to pour. Slowly. Inevitably. It reached the asphalt. Then, his boots.

Tim didn’t move. Couldn’t. The revolver lay near his boot, painted red and pointed at nothing.

Time stalled.

He heard something. Boots on gravel. Lucy reappeared in his vision. He blinked. She was on her knees, her body hiding most of Leonard’s chest. Her hands on the wound. Then, his neck. He blinked again. Her eyes, wide and worried, looking up at him.

Fe turned.

At the mouth of the alley, Hudson stood locked into his stance, face blanched, young and stunned.

“He was aiming at you!” Hudson said, voice pitching high. “I saw— I thought—”

"At the GROUND!" Tim's voice exploded. "He was aiming at the GROUND! You murdered him!”

"Tim—" Lucy's voice came from behind him, steady but strained. "Tim, Sir—"

"Get over here!" Tim's whole body vibrated with rage. "Get the fuck over here and look at what you did! He was surrendering, you trigger-happy piece of shit!”

Hudson stood at the alley mouth, service weapon still drawn but lowered, his young face crumpling as the reality of what he'd done hit him. "I—I saw him with the gun—"

"YOU SAW WHAT YOU WANTED TO SEE!" Tim was moving toward him now, each step making Hudson flinch backward. "You wanted your fucking moment and you took it!"

"I thought—I didn't mean—"

"NO! You didn't THINK!" Tim got close enough that Hudson stumbled backward against the brick wall. "You can write your report. You can lie about what happened. Tell yourself whatever story helps you sleep at night, but that man's blood is on YOUR hands, and his kids are going to grow up without a father because YOU couldn't wait thirty more fucking seconds!”

"I'm sorry—" Hudson's voice broke, tears starting to stream down his face. "Oh God, I'm so sorry—I thought he was going to shoot you—I saw him pointing the gun at you—"

"He was HANDING it to me!"

"Tim." Lucy's voice was quiet but firm. "We need to step back."

But Tim couldn't. Couldn't look away from Hudson. Couldn’t turn back and look at Leonard. Couldn’t turn back and look at her . So, he ignored her. He focused on the scene evolving in front of him. Martinez descending from a shop that Tim didn’t notice arriving. An ambulance going past him.

"Pray I never see you again," Tim said to Hudson, his voice deadly quiet now. "I will remember this moment for the rest of my fucking life."

Lucy grabbed Tim's arm. "Tim, please—"

Tim whirled on her, and when he saw her face—the pity, the concern, the way she was looking at him like he was broken—something inside him snapped.

"What you heard back there," his voice was ice-cold now, "about my marriage, my tho—" He couldn't even say it. "You forget it. All of it."

Lucy's eyes widened. "Tim, I would never—"

"Don't." He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a whisper that was somehow more terrifying than shouting. "Don't you dare look at me like that. Like I'm some pathetic broken-down has-been who can't handle his own life."

"I don't think that—"

"I see it in your face, Chen.” He pointed a finger at her. "You breathe one word of what you heard to anyone—ANYONE—and I'll destroy your career so completely you'll be lucky to get a job as mall security."

Lucy flinched like he'd slapped her. "You don't mean that."

"Try me."

Behind them, Hudson was still crying against the wall, and Leonard Reyes was still dead on the concrete, but Tim couldn't see past the humiliation burning in his chest, the shame of being exposed, of being seen, of having his most private pain was now shared with the one person who was supposed to look up to him, not pity him.

Tim's hands were still shaking when he walked into the station. He'd washed Leonard's blood off, but he could swear he still felt it under his fingernails. Lucy hadn’t spoken all the way back. She’d insisted she didn’t need to go to the hospital. The paramedics cleaned her wound, and before Tim could leave, she was back in the shop. Now, entering the bullpen, the noise hit him like a wall—phones ringing, keyboards clicking, normal conversation—and it all felt obscene after watching a man die.

He made it exactly three steps towards the break room before Grey's voice cut through everything.

"Bradford. My office. Now."

Tim's jaw clenched. He didn’t have to tell Lucy to get started on the paperwork. She just did. Which left him free to follow Grey into his office. Every muscle in his body was wound tight; his mind kept replaying those final moments.

He was brought to the present as Grey closed the door.

"Sit down."

"I'm good standing."

"Wasn't a request." Grey's voice had that edge that meant he wasn't fucking around. Tim sat, but his leg was bouncing under the desk. "What happened out there was a clusterfuck. IA's already crawling all over it. Hudson's suspended pending investigation."

Tim's hands clenched into fists. "Good."

"They're going to want statements from you and Chen. Full debrief. Every detail."

"Fine." Tim's voice was too sharp, too quick.

Grey leaned forward. "Tim, what Hudson did—"

"What Hudson did was murder an unarmed man who was surrendering." The words came out like bullets. "And I would really like to know who trained him, because that was some bullshit. Whatever the department decides to do won’t be enough to—”

"Tim." Grey's voice was firm. "If you need to talk to someone—”

"No. I’m fine."

“Well, son, you don’t look—”

“With all due respect, I can handle my shit.”  Tim interrupted.

"This isn't optional. After what you witnessed—"

"Have you seen the body cam footage?" Tim interrupted, his voice strained.

Grey paused. "Not yet. IA's got everything locked down. Why?"

Tim's throat felt raw. "Just...” made some pretty heavy confessions that I really should warn you about. But instead, “I wanted to see what it looked like. From different angles. Analyse it, maybe..."

Something flickered across Grey's face—concern, suspicion.

"Tim...” He shook his head. “You’re taking the rest of the day. And that's not a request either."

"I don't need—"

"You’re on edge, son. Go home. Isabel just got back this weekend, right? Go be with your wife."

The words hit Tim like a sucker punch to the gut. Isabel .

Fucking hell. He’d told Grey he was gonna drive up this weekend to bring her home from her sister’s. He’d told Angela he couldn’t make it to dinner on Saturday because he would be meeting his new nephew.

Tim felt his chest constrict.

He had no one.

Today. Or any other day.

And it was his own fault.

He couldn't tell Angela or Grey about the trainwreck his life had become. All the lies. All the deception. Dr. Reeves was out—he'd canceled his sessions the second he left the rehab center, after visiting Isabel and seeing her looking as fresh as eighteen and realizing there was nothing wrong with him, despite the fact that he was a fool. He couldn't tell Genny, not after spending his whole teenage years blaming their mom for everything she did to try to keep the façade alive, only to become the biggest hypocrite of them all.

But his mom… He still had his mom.

"Yeah," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "Yeah, okay."

Grey's expression softened slightly. "Take tomorrow too if you need it."

Tim stood up abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor. "I'll be fine."

But as he walked out of Grey's office, past the curious stares of his colleagues, Tim knew he was anything but fine. And the hour-long drive to his mother’s house felt like the longest journey of his life.

The 134 gave way to the 101, headlights bleeding into streaks against the dark, the radio murmuring some talk show he couldn’t follow. His hands were clamped so tight around the wheel, his knuckles had gone white somewhere near Sherman Oaks, and they stayed that way through Calabasas, through Agoura Hills, through the slow rise of the grade that meant he was almost there.

Home.

Not the quiet little flat he’d moved in with Isabel, not the four walls that still felt temporary. Home was still the two-story in Simi Valley with the cracked stucco and the lemon tree out back that his dad had planted when Tim was six. Home was still the place where his mother kept his high school baseball trophies on the mantle and made too much food every time he visited, like he was still growing.

He felt heavy. Like he shouldn’t be heading there.

Leonard Reyes's blood was still under his fingernails, metaphorically if not literally. The sound of the gunshot still echoed in his ears. Lucy's hurt expression played on repeat behind his eyes.

But mostly, it was the weight of the lie.

Four months of telling his mother that everything was fine, that Isabel was fine, that they were fine. Four months of deflecting questions about when they'd visit, when they'd give her grandchildren, when they'd stop being so busy with work and life and everything else. Years of injections. Make-up, hair dye, and deception.

"How's Isabel, sweetheart? I haven't talked to her in so long."

"She's good, Mom. Just busy with work, you know how it is."

Except Isabel had moved out four months ago. Except the divorce papers were sitting on his kitchen counter, corners dog-eared from his restless handling.

The wind chime on the porch sang when Tim pulled into the driveway. It was shortly after four.

Tim sat in his truck for a long moment, engine ticking as it cooled, staring at the familiar front door with its faded welcome mat and the wind chime they’d built together years ago. Through the window, he could see the outline of his mom’s reading chair where she probably had a book open and a cup of tea growing cold.

The front steps creaked under his weight the same way they had when he was eight, and eighteen, and when he thought he was twenty-eight. Some things never changed. The doorbell still played the same tune that had driven him crazy as a kid.

Footsteps inside. The deadbolt turning.

"Timmy?" His mother's voice came through the door, surprised but warm.

The door swung open, and there she was. Sixty-three years old in an eighteen-year-old body. Silver hair pulled back in the same messy bun she'd worn for as long as he could remember. She was wearing her favorite purple cardigan, and her face lit up the way it always did when she saw him.

"What are you—" she started, but then she really looked at him, and her expression changed. "Oh, honey. What's wrong?"

That was all it took.

Years of lying, of pretending, of carrying this weight alone—it all cracked open at once. His throat closed up, his eyes burned, and he bit down hard on his tongue, tasted copper, tried to force the words out around the knot in his chest.

"I need to tell you something," he managed, his voice breaking on every syllable.

She didn't ask questions. Didn't demand explanations. Just stepped aside and opened her arms, and Tim fell into them the way he had when he was seven and had skinned his knee, when he was seventeen and Sadie Parker had broken his heart at prom, when he took his first bullet and called her from the hospital, barely holding it together.

"Come inside, baby," she whispered against his hair, and Tim let himself be led into the living room that smelled like vanilla candles and the lavender soap she'd used his entire life.

She settled him on the couch—the same brown leather couch that had been there since he was a kid, worn soft in all the familiar places—and disappeared into the kitchen. When she came back, she had two cups of tea and the kind of patience that only mothers possess.

"Now," she said, settling into her chair and folding her hands in her lap. "Tell me."

Chapter Text

Tim lost track of how long he’d talked. The words tumbled out—disjointed, defensive, crooked. Isabel left. He’d gotten treatments to make himself look older. The details snagged in his throat, spilling out in the wrong order or not at all, so much of it making no sense even to him. When he finally ran out of words, the house settled into the kind of quiet that felt heavy. Not comfortable. Not the silent warmth of waking up in the middle of the night and coming downstairs for milk. It was expectant. Crushing. Just his breathing, loud and ragged in his own ears, and the clock his dad left behind—that old brass thing with the pendulum that ticked too loud, sitting on the mantle because his mom refused to throw it away. The sound seemed to fill every corner of the small living room and reverberate inside this ribcage.

The afternoon light slanted through the venetian blinds, cutting the room into golden strips that moved slowly across the worn hardwood floor, across his jeans, across his face. Dust motes danced in the beams, lazy and directionless. And the house smelled exactly as it always had—lavender from the sachets his mother tucked into every drawer, bitter coffee that had been brewing too long in the kitchen, and underneath it all, something musty and lived-in, like old books and fabric softener and the faint ghost of his father's aftershave that no amount of years could quite scrub away.

His mom sat across from him in the faded floral armchair that had been hers for as long as he could remember, fingers worrying the loose threads at the hem of her cardigan. The chair's springs creaked softly when she shifted her weight. She'd done that nervous fidgeting since he was small—when his dad would raise his voice, when report cards came home, when he told her he got in the army. It seemed like anything made the air in the house go thin and careful.

Silent , mostly, but not completely still. Never completely still.

That whole time, she barely moved otherwise. A small intake of breath when he mentioned the treatments. A slight shift in her chair each time he said Isabel's name. She hadn't interrupted once. There was no shock, no anger. Just her eyes on him, waiting. And God, he hated it.

"So that's it?" Tim eventually asked. His throat felt raw, scraped clean. His head pounded. The house felt smaller than it used to, like the beige walls were pressing inward. "Nothing?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know— something ." He dragged his hands through his hair, and they came away damp with sweat. "Tell me I'm an idiot. That you saw this coming—"

"How was I supposed to see anything?" Her voice stayed level, but her fingers stilled on the cardigan. "You never told me a thing. You could have—"

"Right. I could have… " The laugh that came out of him was hollow, bitter. "Because we're such a chatty family."

She winced at that, just slightly. "Tim—"

But he said nothing. There was enough time for the clock to chime five times, interrupted. Tim didn’t say anything. What would he say? Eventually, Mom spoke again.

"When did she leave?"

"Three months ago. Four." His leg bounced against the hardwood floor. He was tired. Physically, mentally. And that exhaustion was taking him hostage, making him feel like he might crawl out of his own skin. "Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

"So you can do the math on how long I've been lying?"

"Tim—" She said his name like she was talking to a child, and Tim wanted to walk out. That tone—soft, patient, like he was still fifteen and caught sneaking out. Like when he'd lie about where Genny was when Dad came home drunk, why she was always conveniently in bed early or at a friend's house.

The memory hit him sideways. All those times. All those careful lies to keep Genny safe.

There was a time lying had been justified.

"I don't know why I'm here, Mom." The admission felt heavy. He pressed his palms against his eyes. "I just—I needed to tell someone. Tell you ."

"Okay," he heard her sigh. And then the ruffle of fabrics. "Tell me, then. What happened?"

"She left me for her soulmate." He let his hands drop. "Met him in rehab. Just... knew, you know? The way people do." The way his mother never had with his father. The way he never had with Isabel. "I spent four months pretending to work on our marriage while she really just waited for the right moment to leave."

"That must have been—"

"I kept getting the treatments," Tim cut her off. His mother's eyes widened slightly—there, finally, a real reaction. "Kept making her breakfast, took time off. Fuck—I even considered taking some kind of leave. A sabatic… Even after I knew. Even after I figured out we weren't...” He couldn’t make himself say it. Not yet. “I kept…”

"Oh, honey, she—"

"Don't." The word came out sharper than he meant. "Don't make this about her. This is about me. About what I did."

His mother bit her lip, a habit he'd inherited. "You were trying to save your marriage—"

"I was lying !" The words exploded out of him, and she flinched—actually flinched. Good. " Before I figured it out.”

“You did what you could to make it work,” she frowned. “You could have… given up. You could have—”

“I should have,” he corrected, standing up. His blood was thick with anger and energy. He felt it radiating. “You know what I did instead? I became you! I learned from you!”

“Tim—”

“No. No! All those times you made excuses for him… even when he got home drunk and treated you like shit. Even when he hit—”

“Your father never hit me,” she whispered, but her voice was shaky.

God. It felt just like before. The careful weighing of parameters like life itself depended on a measured pros and cons list.

"No..." Tim shook his head, his voice going quiet, exhausted. "He just hit me, instead."

The words hung in the air like smoke. His mother's breathing hitched, and she gripped the arms of her chair so hard the fabric bunched under her fingers.

"Son—"

"What? Are you going to make excuses?" The silence was loaded, heavy as the dust-thick air in the room. She just stared at him, eyes watering, lips quivering like she was trying to hold back years of words. Tim couldn't look away from her face, couldn't break the spell of finally, finally saying it out loud. "You knew. I know you knew. You'd send Genny to her room or to Sarah's house. You'd pretend he was just in a bad mood when you knew —"

"What do you think I could have done?!" The words burst out of her, sharp and desperate.

"You could have left!"

"You think I could—"

"Yes! Yes !" It came out raw, torn from somewhere deep in his chest. The floorboards creaked as he shifted his weight. "I prayed for it every single night."

"With what money?" Her voice cracked, and she was on her feet now, the old chair springs groaning in relief. "To where ? I lived for him—for both of you. You and your sister. There was no way—"

"Of course, there was a way!"

The room tilted around him, twenty years of buried hurt finally clawing its way to the surface. His chest felt like it might cave in.

“There’s always a way out! But you stayed! And I was the one who paid for it. And the worst thing is that I can’t even be mad at you because I end up doing exactly the same thing!”

“No, Tim, no—” She took a step forward. “You didn’t. You’re nothing like me.”

"Aren't I?" He laughed, but it sounded hollow even to his own ears. "I stayed with someone who didn't want me. I—I made excuses for her mood swings, for the way she'd disappear for days. I told everyone we were working on things while she was becoming an addict. I lied about her pregnant sister, because I couldn’t tell people she was with someone else." His voice cracked. "And all this time, all this time , I lied to myself about what those treatments were for. I knew they were for her. To appease her. And then... I kept going because I was dumb enough to think she would look at me and... accept me. Accept that we could just... love each other, the non-cosmic way, and still be happy."

His mother's breathing had gone shallow. She gripped the arms of her chair like she might fall.

"And that’s why you’re nothing like me—"

"How?" Tim's voice rose. "How is it different? Both of us just... I—We sacrificed everything for a fantasy."

His mother's face crumpled. "You don't understand—" She paused. "I couldn't leave him because I didn't know how to raise two kids on my own. I couldn't... I had no job, no money of my own. No family around. I knew he was cheating, and God, I hoped that someday he would find someone and leave us . And we'd be happy once he did."

The silence stretched between them, broken only by the persistent tick of that damn clock. His mother sank back into her chair, and for the first time, Tim saw her as she really was—not his mother, not the woman who'd failed to protect him, but just another person who'd been afraid. Who'd made terrible choices because fear felt safer than truth.

"And I thought it would..." She was crying now. "I truly thought it would erase everything but—"

"It didn't," Tim said quietly.

"No, it didn't. And I only realized how much it didn’t a couple years back...” Tim paced the room as she talked. “With Isabel, I... saw the signs," she said finally, her voice barely above a whisper.

Something shifted in his chest. The anger was still there, but underneath it was something rawer, more fragile. He tried to rebuild his walls, tried to find that familiar defensive stance, but his hands were shaking too badly to hold anything together. So he shoved them into his pockets and forced himself not to look at his mother. No matter his age, he couldn’t bear to see her crying.

Tim looked up. “What? How?”

“You think I didn't recognize my own patterns playing out in my boy?" Tears spilled over, tracking down her cheeks, and now she was the one who couldn’t meet his eyes. “The way you'd light up when she called, then deflate when she didn't. The way you'd change the subject when someone asked how she was doing, or how skinny she was getting. The way you'd smile and nod and pretend everything was perfect while she was..." She gestured helplessly, then paused. "You stopped coming around, and I pretended everything was fine because I couldn't bear to ask you and watch you lie. I knew something was not right, but not this ."

"So you knew?"

“I suspected. Alcohol. Drugs. Maybe… I don’t know…Another person?” She paused. “And I kept my mouth shut because I was too much of a coward to admit that you'd learned how to love wrong. That I'd taught you that love meant accepting scraps."

"Mom—"

"No, let me..." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I failed you twice. Once when you were a child. I couldn't—I didn't protect you. And then as an adult. You needed someone to tell you that you deserved better. I should have asked, and pressed, and forced something out of you and helped you out of this situation… And I’m thankful you—"

“ No .”

The room seemed to tilt slightly, shadows lengthening as the sun moved lower in the sky. The familiar surroundings—the braided rug his grandmother had made, the ceramic lamp with the crooked shade, the bookshelf filled with romance novels his mother devoured—all felt suddenly foreign, like props in a play he'd forgotten he was performing in.

"Son..." The gentleness in her voice almost broke him.

"No! I did this to myself." He managed to sway slightly, one hand finding the back of another armchair for support. The fabric was warm under his palm, heated by the afternoon sun. "I chose this—"

"You didn't ."

"I did. Let me be a screw-up, for God's sake!" His voice was getting hoarse. "Let me admit I was a liar, and—"

"Tim..."

"Everything I did, I did because I wanted to. Every treatment, every lie—"

"Son, you don't get it."

" You don't get it! You don't know me! I've lied to you for years . I've been lying to my own mother for years ." The weight of it crashed over him—all those careful omissions that had become blatant lies, years and years of lying on automatic, without even thinking about it anymore. He needed her rage, needed her disappointment; anything but this terrible, patient understanding. "Be angry at me."

His mother walked over to him, her slippers shuffling softly against the hardwood, and Tim tried to straighten up, tried to look strong, but the fake lines around his eyes felt heavy. The smell of her perfume, something floral and old-fashioned that she'd worn since he was little, created a scent that was purely home , purely safe , even when nothing else was.

"You want me to be angry? I am angry! I'm furious!" Her voice broke. "But not at you, baby. Never at you for becoming exactly what we made you."

Tim tried to step back, tried to rebuild that wall, but there was nowhere to go. "It's not your fault."

"It is, Timmy." She reached for his face, and he let her, too tired to pull away. "It is. You chose to fight for her—"

"I chose to lie ." But the fight was gone from his voice.

She shook her head. "You chose to do what it took to make it work. Doesn't mean you did what was right , but it doesn't mean it was wrong, either."

"I—" Tim tried to find words, tried to find that anger again, but all he found was emptiness.

"Shhhh, you deserved better. From her, sure, but from me, too."

The tenderness in her voice, the childhood name, her hands on his face—it all hit him at once. Thirty years of holding himself together, of being strong, of managing his father’s rage, Isabel's moods, and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Of being the one who stayed when everyone else got to leave.

And suddenly, he wasn't strong anymore.

Couldn't be.

The sob that came out of him was raw, animal, like something being torn from his chest. Then another. And another. Until he was shaking with it, years of buried grief pouring out of him in waves.

His mother didn't hesitate. She pulled him forward, and he let himself fall against her, let himself be small again. Let himself need someone for the first time in decades. His face pressed against her shoulder, and he cried like he was eight years old and the world had ended.

"I can't remember the last time I told you the truth about anything," he sobbed into her shoulder. "I can't remember the last time I was real with anyone. I don't know how—I can't—"

And then the words just... stopped. There was nothing left but raw sound—broken sobs and gasps and the kind of crying that comes from somewhere deeper than language. He curled into her like he was trying to disappear, like he wanted to crawl back inside the safety he'd never really had.

Eventually, they sat together on the couch. His mother held him tighter, one hand stroking his hair, the other rubbing circles on his back. The way she might have comforted him as a child if she'd been brave enough then. If she'd known how. Her cardigan was soft against his cheek, and she smelled like home—like safety and missed opportunities and love that came too late but still came.

The house around them seemed to exhale, the afternoon light growing softer and more golden as it slanted through the windows, dust motes still dancing their slow, aimless dance in the warm air.

Incoherent whispers escaped between the sobs—fragments of apologies, pieces of Isabel's name, broken attempts at explanation that dissolved before they could form. The clock kept ticking, steady and relentless, marking time they couldn't get back. He wasn't a man anymore. He was just a little boy, finally falling apart in the one place he'd always needed it to be safe to do so, surrounded by the familiar scents and sounds of a childhood that had been both broken and cherished, both lost and somehow, impossibly, still here.

The crying eventually subsided into hiccups, then exhausted silence.

Tim stayed curled against her, his face still pressed into her shoulder, not ready to lift his head and be a grown man again. His mother didn't rush him—kept stroking his hair, fingers working through the tangles the same way she used to when he was small and stumbled into her bed after nightmares.

Neither of them worried about time passing, probably for the first time in years. Life continued outside—cars went by, a dog barked, the wind made the windchimes sing. And neither of them cared.

When he finally pulled back, his eyes were swollen and red. He felt about twelve years old and probably looked it, too. His mother studied his face with the kind of gentle attention that made him want to hide all over again. Then she smiled, ever so softly.

"I'll get you some tea," she said, standing up. "With plenty of sugar, the way you like it."

Tim watched her move toward the kitchen, the cardigan loose around her shoulders, and for a moment, he could see both versions of her—the woman who'd failed to protect him, and the one who was trying to take care of him now. Maybe they'd always been the same person.

The house settled around him, no longer crushing but simply quiet. The clock still ticked, but it didn't seem to fill every corner anymore. Just marked time, the way clocks were supposed to do.

He wiped his face with his sleeve and tried to remember the last time he'd cried. He didn’t cry when Isabel left. Not out of toxic masculinity, not because he'd learned he shouldn't, but because it felt like his emotions, like time itself, had stalled when he saw her there—sunshine on her face, young and bright.

From the kitchen came the sound of the kettle being filled, the soft clink of mugs being pulled from the cabinet. Normal sounds. The sounds of someone taking care of someone else, simply because they needed it.

His whole life, it seemed, had been him taking care of everyone. Genny. His mom. His squad. Isabel. His colleagues. His rookies. And even the renewed version of Isabel, in the end, though she'd never asked for it and certainly never wanted it.

Tim closed his eyes and let himself have that moment.

Allowed himself to need it.

He knew none of these last minutes would fix what had happened. Wouldn't change the pattern both he and his mom had fallen into, or bring Isabel back, or make his father's ghost disappear from this house.

But maybe this was enough. The clock was just a clock. And he was breathing fine.

A few minutes later, his mom came back with a steaming mug. Tim took a sip and immediately scrunched his nose. "Still tastes like plants died in it."

"Well, you never did have sophisticated taste, did you?" She settled back into her chair with her own cup. "Remember when you insisted on putting ketchup on everything? Even ice cream?"

Despite himself, Tim felt his mouth twitch toward a smile. "I was six."

"You were weird," she said it fondly, and for a moment, the weight between them felt lighter.

They sat in comfortable quiet for a while, Tim nursing his tea and trying to piece himself back together. Shame crept in, its roots tight against his ribs, but all it took was a glance at his mother—the way she looked at him, patient and unguarded—to remember it was safe here.

"Do you want to stay the night?" his mother asked eventually. Her voice was softer now, careful. "Your old room's still there. We shuffled some things around for the boys, but the sheets are clean and..."

"I think so." He didn't let her finish, his hands tightening around the warm mug. "If that's okay."

"Of course it's okay." She paused, studying him over her own cup, steam curling between them. "Have you signed them yet? The papers?"

"No." The word came out smaller than he intended. His leg started bouncing against the hardwood floor again. "I keep meaning to, but..."

"But?"

"What's the point of rushing? It's not like signing them will make any difference." He took another sip of the terrible tea, grimacing slightly. "She doesn't want the house. Doesn't want money. It's a lot of pages to say she doesn't want anything from me."

His mother was quiet for a moment, turning her mug in her hands. The motion was achingly familiar—the same nervous habit from his childhood—but something was different. No metallic clink of a wedding band against porcelain. Just the soft scrape of skin against ceramic. Her habits had stayed the same; life had not.

"Is that really why?" The question cut through the silence. Tim frowned, not following. She drew a breath, her fingers stilling on the mug. "Sometimes the hardest part isn't the letting go. It's… admitting there was nothing to hold onto in the first place."

Tim looked up at her, genuinely surprised. "When did you get so wise?"

"About ten years too late." She gave him a rueful smile, lines deepening at the corners of her eyes. "I went through the same thing. Your father's lawyer made it sound like I was lucky he wasn't asking for custody, and it was so dumb of him, I just signed to be done with it."

Tim had been deployed when his parents finally divorced—got the news in a brief, matter-of-fact email. By the time he came home, it was old business. Dad was living with his mistress, and Mom stayed with Genny. Just like it had been for years before they'd put pen to paper, except now it was official.

His parents had divorced to end their story. Isabel wanted hers to begin.

"Feels like failure," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

"It does." His mother nodded, setting her mug down with deliberate care. "Felt like I'd wasted thirty years on something that was never real. But you know what I realized?" The question hung between them. Tim shook his head. "Your father taught me exactly what I don't want. What I'll never accept again."

"I bet. But what will you accept?"

"Peace. Quiet that doesn't feel like waiting for the other shoe to drop." Her voice grew stronger. Then, she gestured around the living room—the faded furniture, the boys' forgotten toys scattered in corners, family photos crowding every surface. "This. Just this."

It wasn't much, but it felt steady in a way this house never had.

"I should call Genny," he said suddenly, the thought hitting him like a weight. "Tell her what happened."

"You're not telling her this over the phone." His mother's tone brooked no argument. She leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees. "She's coming for Sunday dinner this weekend. With the boys. You could..." She paused, choosing her words. "You could stay until then. If you want."

"Mom, I can't just camp out here for a week."

"Why not?" She shrugged, and for a moment looked almost defiant. She picked up her cup and had a sip. Her green eyes stared at him over the brim. "What else do you have to do?"

"A job." He deadpanned. "I can't just take a week off. Can't leave my rookie behind... Not after we already lost two weeks when I was on leave—”

The words slipped out before he could stop them.

His mother went very still. "Leave?"

"I said that?"

"Timothy." The single word carried thirty years of maternal authority. “No more lies, for God’s sake.”

"Okay, I—I got shot—"

"You got shot ?!" The mug slipped from her hands, clattering against the coffee table and splashing tea across the worn wood surface. She didn't even notice.

"I did. And it was not a big deal," Tim reached for the napkins on the side table, but his mother grabbed his wrist, stopping him mid-motion. “I'm fine.”

"Don't." Her grip was surprisingly strong, her fingers cold against his skin. "Don't you dare clean that up. Don't you dare act like this is nothing." Her breathing had gone shallow, rapid. "When?"

"Mom—"

" When , Timothy?"

He could feel her pulse hammering against his wrist where she held him. "Two months ago? Maybe three." The admission felt like pulling glass from a wound. "A couple of weeks after Isabel left, actually."

His mother's face went white. She released his wrist and sank back into her chair like someone had cut her strings. "Oh my God. Oh my God ."

"It was just a graze. Barely needed stitches—"

"Where?" The word came out as barely a whisper.

Tim's hand moved automatically to his left side, fingers finding the spot through his shirt where the wound had settled into a pale scar. "Here. Just... I was lucky."

"Lucky." She repeated the word like it tasted bitter. Her hands were shaking now, openly trembling as she pressed them flat against her thighs. "My son got shot and he was lucky ."

"Mom, please don't—"

"Don't what? Don't react? Don't be upset that my child was bleeding somewhere and I didn't even know?" Her voice cracked on the last word. "Were you alone? In the hospital?"

"I was, but it was only one night."

"A night ." She stood up abruptly, her chair creaking in protest. Started pacing the small space between the coffee table and the window, her cardigan fluttering with each sharp turn. "You were alone in a hospital bed after being shot and you think that's okay?"

"Mom, please!"

"Please, what ?" She whirled around to face him, tears streaming freely now. "I'm your mother, for God's sake. Did you think I wouldn't care for you?" Her voice broke completely. "Did you think I wouldn't drop everything and come sit with you?"

Tim felt his chest constrict. The image hit him suddenly—his mother in that uncomfortable hospital chair, holding his hand, bringing him terrible coffee from the vending machine. The way she would have fussed over the nurses, demanded extra blankets, stayed awake all night watching him breathe.

"I thought..." He swallowed hard, his voice catching. "Isabel wouldn't be there, and you would ask questions and I would have to lie and... We would have this whole conversation there and—"

"Son..." She sank back down, this time on the edge of the coffee table, close enough that their knees almost touched. Her hands found his face, palms warm against his cheeks. "You could have died," she whispered. "You could have died! And I would have found out from... what ? A phone call from your sergeant? Reading it in the paper?"

"I'm sorry." The words came out broken. "I'm so sorry, Mom."

"My beautiful boy,” she shook her head in disbelief.  “What have we done to you?"

Tim closed his eyes, leaning into her touch. For a moment, he was eight years old again, coming home with a bloody nose and a torn shirt, letting his mother clean his wounds while she murmured about brave, foolish little boys who thought they had to fight the world alone.

"Take the time off," she said quietly. "Please. Stay here until Sunday. Let me make you dinner and argue with you about eating your vegetables. Let me be your mother for a few days."

Tim opened his eyes, met hers. Saw decades of love and worry and fierce protectiveness that he'd somehow forgotten was there.

"What else have these lies cost you?" she asked softly, her thumbs still tracing gentle circles on his cheekbones.

The question hung between them. Tim thought about all the phone calls he'd cut short, the visits he'd avoided, the careful way he'd crafted his responses to "How are things?" Always fine. Always managing. Never needing anything from anyone. All the gatherings he'd skipped, the neighbors he avoided, the flimsy friendships that had withered because he couldn't be bothered to find another excuse for why Isabel hadn't been around.

They'd cost him a lot. And now that he'd come clean, they might cost him everything.

Tim took his mother's hands, gently pulling them away from his face. Her fingers were soft. As soft as when he was a child. "I'll stay the night. And tomorrow, maybe... But I need to go back to work, okay? I'll come by on Sunday." He paused, his throat tight. "Or maybe... I don't know, maybe another time. Without the boys."

His mother's face shifted, understanding passing through her eyes. "You don't want to tell Genny yet."

"I don't know how." The admission felt raw. "She's got her own life, her kids. And this whole thing with Isabel... It's so messy and pathetic. I don't want her to—"

"To what? To know you're human?" His mother's voice was gentle but firm. "Honey, she's your sister. She loves you."

"She loves the version of me that has his life together." Tim pulled his hands free, running them through his hair. "The big brother who always had answers, who enlisted and came back in one piece, who got married and bought a house and looked like he knew what he was doing."

"And you think she'll love you less if she knows you're struggling?"

"I think she'll worry. And she's got enough on her plate…" He stood up, needing distance, needing air. "I can't be another thing she has to manage."

His mother watched him pace, her expression patient but sad. "So you'll just... pretend? Keep going with this whole thing?”

"I've gotten pretty good at it."

The words came out bitter, and Tim immediately regretted them. But his mother just nodded, like she'd been expecting that answer.

"Yes," she said quietly. "You have. Too good." She stood, smoothing down her cardigan. "Well. I can't force you to tell her. But I can make you dinner and fuss over you eating your vegetables. Even if it's just for one night."

Tim felt something loosen in his chest. "Just for one night," he agreed.

"Good." She smiled, the first genuine smile he'd seen from her all day. "Now help me clean up this mess, and then I want to hear about this rookie you're so worried about abandoning."

As they worked together to soak up the spilled tea, Tim felt a strange sense of peace settling over him. His mom hummed to some song, he smiled as he followed her around, gathering stuff from the fridge and bringing it to her in the counter.

“She’s actually the one who saved me,” he said.

“She? The rookie?”

“Yup,” he nodded. “Lucy Chen.”

"Oh, she has a name." His mother glanced at him with raised eyebrows. "Most of them usually don't."

Tim paused, realizing she was right. Over the years, his rookies had been “the boot”, "this guy" or simply "we." Anonymous figures in the stories he'd bothered to tell. But Lucy was different. Lucy ran deep in his bones, settled into places he didn't even know existed until she showed up and made herself at home there.

"Yeah, she's... She's got a name."

Mom laughed, a soft sound that filled the small kitchen. She picked up an onion and started peeling it with practiced efficiency. "Definitely does. Are you going to tell me more about her, or just stand there looking like you swallowed your tongue?"

Tim felt heat creep up his neck. "She's... my rookie. That's it."

"Uh-huh." His mother's tone was maddeningly knowing as she started dicing the onion. "And how long have you been training this rookie who has a name and saved your life?"

"About three months." Tim moved to the sink, washing his hands just to have something to do with them. "Late April. It happened on her second day."

His mother's knife paused mid-chop. "Second day? Jesus, Tim. What kind of introduction to the job was that?"

"She knew what she signed up for..."

"Still, must have been hard."

"She pulled it off."

"You're..." His mom paused, the knife halted in the air, and her eyes narrowed. "All good with this girl?"

"Yes. Why?"

"What are you not telling me?"

Tim dried his hands more slowly than necessary, buying time. His mother had always been able to read him like an open book, even when he thought he was being careful. Especially when he thought he was being careful.

"Nothing. There's nothing to tell."

"Timothy." She set the knife down completely now, turning to face him with that look he remembered from childhood—the one that meant she wasn't buying whatever story he was trying to sell. "You just told me this girl saved your life on her second day. That's not nothing. That's not routine. And the way you're talking about her..."

"How am I talking about her?"

"Oh, boy, don’t act like you’re not aware—" His mother wiped her hands on her apron, studying his face. "I'll ask again. What aren't you telling me?"

Tim felt trapped between the counter and his mother's penetrating stare. He could lie—God knew he'd gotten good enough at it. But after everything they'd shared today, after all the truth that had finally come spilling out, the thought of building another wall felt exhausting.

"Before I came here... I—She—She knows about the divorce. About Isabel leaving."

"Okay, and?"

"I told her if she says anything about it to anyone, I'll... wash her out."

His mom blinked, once, twice, then leaned back against the counter, her expression unreadable. Tim’s throat tightened. Saying it out loud made him feel small—like his father's shadow had slipped into the kitchen. Threats. Control. That ugly part of himself he’d sworn he’d never let out.

“Shouldn’t have said it,” he muttered, staring at the damp towel in his hands. “I sounded like him. Like Dad. The last thing I ever wanted was to put her in that kind of spot.”

“Then why did you?” His mom’s voice was steady, not soft.

“I don’t know. I mean—I do know. If she talks, it’s over. I’ll lose the job. They’d never trust me again. Best case, I get shipped to another division. Worst case, I’m fired. You don’t come back from hiding something like this. A cop who lies—They’d never look at me the same.”

The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the slow scrape of his mom setting the onion aside.

He forced a laugh, humorless. “So yeah. I panicked.”

“Tim—”

“No, I—I talked about it, and I knew she was listening. But it was the way she looked at me—I shut her down the only way I knew how.” He shook his head, shame burning in his gut. “I was wrong. I know I was wrong. But in that moment—” His voice cracked, low and raw. “In that moment, I was truly my father’s son.”

He hated himself for it. Hated the memory of Lucy’s eyes narrowing, not afraid, not cowed—just furious and disappointed, like she’d seen straight through him.

“She deserved better than that. Hell, anybody does. But especially her. ”

The kitchen felt too small, like the walls were closing in on him. Tim kept his eyes on the towel twisted in his hands, waiting for his mom to say something. But she didn't for a while. She just stood there, apron creased, hands braced against the counter.

Finally, she let out a breath. "I don't have the answer, Tim. I wish I did." She shrugged. "At least, you're aware…"

He scoffed. "At least something, right?" Then, softer, "Maybe I should've just kept my mouth shut. With her. With you."

“You know that’s your hard head talking.” She sighed. “Son, you'll know what to do when you see her. There's no shame in apologizing. And there's no shame in going through what you're going through."

He shook his head. "I don't want her to pity me." But even as he said it, part of him craved her understanding, wanted her to see past his walls.

His mom frowned. "Why would she? You think you're worth pity?"

"No. I don't know." His hands clenched and unclenched around the damp towel. "The way she looked at me, Mom… I—I felt like she was looking at a mess. Like I couldn't handle my own life. Like I was… broken. But then—" He stopped, throat tight. "I—”

He stared at the damp towel twisting in his hands, the fabric a lifeline in the tumult of his thoughts. The kitchen felt too small, constricting, the air thick with the scent of onion and the lingering warmth from the kettle. Tim could almost feel the weight of his mother’s gaze as she watched him process the mess he’d made of things. Each breath he took felt like it scraped along his throat, raw from the emotion still swirling inside him.

“You’ll know what to do when you see her.” His mother’s voice was gentle, but there was a firmness beneath it that made him hesitate. How could he face Lucy? How could he explain the tangled web of his mistakes without sounding like he was making excuses?

He shook his head, pushing the thought aside. “You don’t know—”

“I do,” she interrupted softly, and for a moment, he saw that flicker of understanding in her eyes.

Tim could feel the heat creeping back into his cheeks as he met his mother's gaze, the way she studied him with that familiar intensity. He could almost feel the weight of her expectations pressing against his chest like a heavy blanket.

The kitchen felt suffocating in its warmth, the onion's sharp scent mingling with the cloying aroma of the tea still cooling on the counter. The walls, decorated with family photos, seemed to lean in closer, pressing in on his resolve. Each frame held memories—smiling faces frozen in time, a visual narrative of happiness that felt so distant now.

“Mom,” he started, but the words sputtered out, choking him.

“Tim, you can’t hide from this forever,” she urged, her voice an anchor in the storm of his thoughts. “The longer you drag, the worse it will be.”

"I know," he replied, more to diffuse her than out of genuine agreement. “I know.”

Tim slept there that night. In his childhood bed, looking at the same walls he'd sought refuge behind during his teenage years. The room was clean, tidy, but he could see the marks his nephews had left around - crayon scribbles near the baseboards that his mother hadn't had the heart to scrub away, action figures forgotten in corners. Clothes in the drawers he'd left empty when he moved out years ago. Trinkets on the shelves, crowded next to the stuff he hadn't taken with him - old baseball trophies, a faded photo of him and his high school girlfriend, books with cracked spines that he'd read a dozen times trying to escape this house.

It should have felt strange, sleeping in a twin bed when he was used to a king-size. Should have felt claustrophobic, like going backwards. Instead, it felt safe in a way he'd forgotten was possible. The mattress still had the same familiar dip in the middle, and through the thin walls, he could hear his mother moving around downstairs, the soft sounds of someone else taking care of the house, taking care of him.

As always, he woke up before the alarm. It was early, but not early enough to make it back to Mid-Wilshire on time for roll call. He texted Grey, warning and apologizing in advance for being late, that it would never happen again. His sergeant texted back quickly: “ Take the day. We'll talk tomorrow.”

By mid-afternoon, after a slow morning and another home-cooked meal, Tim was behind the wheel, driving through neighborhoods he barely knew. He’d spent a part of his morning on Zillow, cataloging little houses with yards, fixer-uppers, even one bungalow with a porch swing that made his chest tighten in ways he didn't want to examine. And now, there he was, stepping into a task he wasn’t sure he could pull just yet.

He parked in front of a two-bedroom that looked decent from the street. Beige paint peeling in long strips, weeds curling up through the sidewalk cracks. But the windows were wide, and sunlight glinted off them like an invitation he wasn't sure he deserved to accept. Tim stood on the curb longer than he should have, hands shoved deep in his pockets, trying to picture himself there. A dog in the yard, maybe. Hell, maybe even people around a dining table—friends, family, something that resembled the life everyone else seemed to manage.

It felt premature. Stupid, even. He wasn't ready. Wasn't sure he'd ever be ready.

Still, he walked through the open house and smiled at a real estate agent who was all bleached smiles and practiced sales pitch. Five minutes later, and Tim was watching her gesture enthusiastically at the hardwood floors that creaked under their feet, pointing out "original character" and "lots of potential". He nodded when he was supposed to, made the right sounds in the right places, but what he really noticed was how the light fell across the walls in golden rectangles, how the kitchen was big enough for more than one person at a time, how the yard had space for a dog, and maybe some kids.

"The previous owners were here for thirty-seven years," the agent chirped, running her manicured finger along the kitchen counter. "Raised four kids in this house. You can just feel the love in these walls, can't you?"

Tim could feel something, all right. The ghost of other people's happiness, their normal Tuesday mornings and Sunday dinners, their fights that ended in forgiveness instead of legal papers. It made his skin itch.

"What do you think?" she asked, that practiced smile never wavering. "Can you see yourself living here?"

No , he wanted to say. I can't see myself living anywhere .

Instead, he managed, "I'll need to think about it."

By the third place—a craftsman with a broken gate and roses growing wild along the fence—Tim stopped pretending he was actually looking.

He just stood in the empty rooms and listened to the echo of his own footsteps, wondering if someday he'd fill a space like this with something that didn't taste like failure every morning when he woke up.

In what used to be the master bedroom, afternoon light streamed through dirty windows, painting everything in amber. For just a moment—just one—he could almost picture it. Clean windows, a bed that didn’t hold many memories, maybe even someone to share coffee with in the morning.

Then reality crashed back in, heavy and familiar.

He was getting ahead of himself. Again.

When the next morning came and his shift rolled around, Tim shoved the day into a compartment in his mind and locked it away with the practiced efficiency of someone who’d been doing it for years. By the time he walked into the station, the familiar smell of coffee and industrial cleaner hit him, grounding him back in the only life he knew how to handle without completely fucking it up.

And, well —not even that now.

The fluorescent lights hummed their usual tune, casting everything in that particular shade of institutional white that made everyone look either dead or dying. Officers moved through the hallways with the easy rhythm of routine—checking gear, grabbing coffee, bitching about overtime. Normal. Predictable. Safe.

"Morning, sunshine," Angela's voice cut through his thoughts as she fell into step beside him. Her dark hair was pulled back in its usual neat bun, but there were shadows under her eyes that suggested her own demons had kept her up. “Miss me yesterday?”

Tim smirked a little, even if it felt forced. “Not really.”

She snorted. “Figures. So, day off—did you actually relax, or just… not get caught up in more trouble?”

“Something like that,” he said, jaw tightening. Then he added, cautious. “How was Chen yesterday?”

Angela gave him a sideways glance. “Fine? Rode with the Captain.”

“Again?”

“Yeah. Again. She did good. You don’t have to hover, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

As they reached roll call, Tim forced his shoulders to relax and slip back into the skin of someone who had his shit together. The room was already half full, officers settling into their usual spots with the comfortable predictability of assigned seating. Tim chose his normal chair and kept his eyes carefully forward.

Forward, meaning, on the board .

Not on the first row, of course, where Lucy Chen, already with her notebook out and pen poised like she was ready to take notes on the most pressing subject of the universe, was already sitting. Lies . He was looking at her. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, and even from behind, Tim could see the tension in her shoulders. She hadn't looked back once since he'd entered the room.

"Alright, listen up," Captain Andersen's voice cut through the low hum of conversation as she strode to the front of the room. Behind her, Sergeant Grey and a man in a dark suit who screamed federal agent from fifty yards away.

The three of them stood in front of the podium. Then, Captain Andersen continued.

"The Vice President is making an unscheduled visit to our city," her voice carried that particular tone that meant everyone's day was about to get significantly more complicated. "So it's all hands on deck. Agent Danvers will guide you through it."

"Thank you, Captain. As always, the Secret Service appreciates the LAPD's assistance in clearing and securing Redwood's route." Tim mentally rolled his eyes. Even the code names sounded pretentious. "These are your Operation Plan Manuals," Danvers continued, gesturing to a stack of thick binders that looked like they could stop bullets. "Each officer's name has been listed under a specific quadrant and zone, along with your responsibilities. Your Watch Commander will liaison with me throughout the day as issues arise."

Grey stepped forward. "These assignments are your sole priority today. You will not handle field calls from dispatch. Got it?” There was a collective ‘yes, sir’ from the squad. “Captain?"

"Most of you know the drill," Andersen said, her gaze sweeping across the room. "For our rookies, today is going to be ugly."

At that moment, Lucy's head turned. She looked back over her shoulder, scanning the room until her eyes found Tim's. It was the first time she'd acknowledged his presence since he'd walked in, and something flickered across her face—relief, maybe, but something else too. Something harder. Their eyes held for just a second before she turned back around, her jaw set and her shoulders rigid.

Tim felt that familiar twist in his chest, unsure if what he'd seen was concern or something else entirely.

"Everything we do to ensure the safety of Redwood will create gridlock. Traffic will be a nightmare. Citizens will be pissed. The media will be everywhere, looking for any excuse to make us look incompetent." The Captain paused, letting that sink in. "It's important to be patient and vigilant. Watch each other's backs out there. Questions?"

Silence filled the room, the kind of professional quiet that meant everyone was already mentally preparing for eight hours of standing around looking important while civilians yelled at them about being late for work.

"That's all. You're dismissed."

Chairs scraped against linoleum as officers stood and moved toward the front to grab their assignments. Tim stayed seated, watching Lucy stand and smooth down her uniform with nervous precision. She glanced at him. Their eyes met. And this time, he was the one to look away first.

The walk to the armory dragged. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in that familiar institutional glare. Tim stared at his binder, reading the same assignment details for the third time while voices drifted behind him.

"—swear your barber has a personal vendetta against you," Angela was saying.

"Hey, it's called texture ," Jackson shot back.

Lucy's voice filtered through the conversation, lighter than it had been in days. "D'you know a cheap mechanic? My AC died yesterday. Thought I was gonna melt into the seat on the way home."

"I don't, but you gotta get that fixed," Angela said. "Summer's barely started."

"Six hundred dollars." Lucy's voice went flat. "I'm working doubles just to make rent, so..."

Tim's step faltered. Six hundred. He remembered being a rookie, counting every dollar, choosing between gas and groceries. Showering at the station to save a bit more at home. But listening to her talk about it—about working herself to the bone while he'd threatened to take it all away...

“Surprises me your T.O. isn’t saying AC makes you soft,” Angela muttered, throwing him a sidelong glance. Tim knew she was going to bother him with questions later. Lucy and Jackson turned to him. “Nothing to say, Bradford?”

“It… does make you soft,” he admitted, the words sticking in his throat.

Lucy tilted her head, unimpressed.

“And what about the ride-along with the Captain?” Jackson asked, shifting the topic. "What's that, three times now?"

A beat of silence. "Just twice. And it went fine."

" Fine ? Chen, that's like getting a gold star from God himself." Angela patted her on the back. “Doesn’t get better than that.”

"It's not—" Lucy's voice carried that edge she got when she was trying not to seem pleased about something. Despite herself, Tim caught the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. "She needed someone, that's all."

Tim almost turned around. Almost asked how it went, what calls they'd handled. The words were right there.

The armory smelled like gun oil and industrial soap. Tim waved Jackson ahead, picked up his body cam, pretended Lucy wasn't there and she wasn't desperately avoiding him.

"Please tell me there wasn't another black eye," Jackson said as he stepped away from the counter, handing Angela some of their gear.

She actually laughed. "God, no. We mostly just drove around. Took a few calls. It was nice."

Nice .

The duty officer rattled off equipment like he was reading a grocery list. Radio, batteries, flares, tactical helmet, riot baton, heavy vest. Tim's hands were full before he'd gotten half of it. A few pieces—extra batteries, zip ties—ended up staying on the counter.

The garage was cooler, echoing with the sound of engines turning over and officers calling to each other across the concrete space. Lucy fell into step beside him, arms full of the overflow he'd left behind. She didn't say anything about it. Just picked up what needed picking up and moved on.

Jackson was still ribbing her about the Captain. Lucy deflected with that particular brand of modesty that wasn't quite false but wasn't quite honest either. Tim wanted to tell Jackson to lay off, that she'd earned whatever recognition she was getting. But that would mean entering the conversation. And he wasn’t worthy of that.

After Jackson and Angela found their shop, silence was the only company until they found theirs. Tim popped open the trunk and stepped aside. Lucy loaded the gear, and when she finished and stepped back, Tim moved in to arrange his own. He could feel her watching him, her presence like heat against his back. For a second, he thought she might say something—her breath caught in that way that meant words were coming. But when he glanced over his shoulder, she was already turning away, heading for the passenger seat.

"Chen."

She paused, hand on the door handle, and looked back. Eyebrows slightly raised, waiting.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. What was he supposed to say? Sorry I threatened to destroy your career ? Thanks for not reporting me ? I'm falling apart and I don't know how to stop it ?

"Don't fuck it up out there today."

They were assigned to Quadrant One—a homeless encampment that needed clearing before the motorcade route was secured. The drive there was suffocating in its silence. Lucy stared out the passenger window, her jaw set in that particular way that meant she was thinking too hard about something. She didn't look at him. At all. Tim looked at her more times than he wished to admit.

He parked at the edge of the camp, a sprawling collection of tents, shopping carts, and improvised shelters that had grown up along the chain-link fence bordering an empty lot. The morning sun was already brutal, promising another scorching day, and the smell of unwashed bodies and garbage hung heavy in the air.

Well, he was in for a great day.

"All right, listen up," Tim called out, his voice carrying across the makeshift community. A few faces turned toward him—weathered, suspicious, resigned. "Until tomorrow at 3:00 p.m., this stretch of Vine between Melrose and Franklin will be off limits. Sanitation services will be arriving in twenty minutes. You'll have until then to pack up and move along."

A collective groan rose from the camp. An older man with a graying beard and clothes that had seen better months struggled to his feet from beside a shopping cart loaded with what looked like his entire life.

"Come on, man," the man said, his voice hoarse. "We just got settled here yesterday. Where the hell are we supposed to go now?"

"There's a shelter on—" Lucy started, but Tim cut her off with a look.

"Not our problem," he said, his voice flat. "You've got twenty minutes to clear out, or you'll be clearing out from a holding cell."

Lucy's head snapped toward him, her eyes flashing with something that looked dangerously close to anger. But she didn't say anything. Yet.

It wasn’t going to take long. He knew it, and he was waiting for it. He could see it brewing—the lecture about compassion, about treating people like human beings, about how there had to be a better way. All the things that made her a good cop and a decent person, all the things he admired in her more than anything else. But instead, she turned around and walked toward a man sleeping on a piece of cardboard near the fence.

"Sir? Sir?" Her voice was gentle, patient. "Sorry to wake you, but I'm gonna need you to start packing up, all right?"

Tim took a deep breath, something loosening in his chest despite himself. Maybe she was learning when to pick her battles.

The relative calm lasted exactly thirty seconds.

"Bitch! Those are my sneakers!" The scream cut through the morning air. Two women near a cluster of shopping carts were yelling, on the verge of becoming violent. Tim’s hand travelled to his taser and he rushed on his feet.

"Get out!" the second woman shrieked, and suddenly they were on each other, clawing and grabbing with the desperate fury of people who had nothing left to lose.

"Oh, hey! Hey, hey!" Lucy rushed toward them, her hands out. Tim didn’t even notice she was there. "Stop it! Just stop!"

"That's enough!" Tim barked, moving to intercept, but Lucy was already there, trying to wedge herself between the fighting women. "Hey. That's enough."

It happened fast. Lucy managed to grab one of the women, trying to pull her back, but the woman twisted and they both went down hard onto the concrete. Lucy hit the ground. She groaned, rolled, and came up with the woman's arm twisted behind her back. Quick. Looked almost easy. And then, the icing on what was a textbook arrest, she snapped the cuffs on with practiced efficiency.

"Ow. Hey!" The woman complained as Lucy hauled her to her feet.

"Hands behind your back. Don't move. All right. Stand up.”

Lucy pushed the woman towards the shop, walking past Tim. And then he caught it. The sun shining on it, so telling against the dark blues of her uniform. His stomach dropped.

"Chen."

Of course, she ignored him. “Keep walking. Here we go.”

“Officer Chen.”

"What?!" She whirled on him, and there it was—all the anger she'd been holding back, the fire blazing in her eyes like she'd been waiting two days to unleash it. Tim found himself looking down, and he didn't know if it was because he was worried about the needle or because he couldn't stand to look into her eyes and see all that disappointment burning there.

"Stop.” He said, measuring his voice to be nothing but gentle. “Don't move."

Her gaze followed his down to just above her belt, where a dirty needle was sticking out of her uniform like a tiny, venomous fang. She let go of the suspect immediately, her hands falling open and paralyzed in the air like she'd forgotten how to use them.

Tim looked at her face, at the way the anger drained out of it and left only panic, then back at her hands, shaking now.

"Chen." Nothing. She was just staring at the needle like it might disappear if she looked hard enough. "Chen." His voice was sharper now, trying to cut through whatever spiral she was disappearing into. “Chen!”

"I didn't see it," she said, and her voice was suddenly small and shaky and nothing like the cop who'd just taken down a suspect. "I—I swear. I mean, it was—it was probably on the ground, and—I swear —"

Jesus. Was she—Was she worried he was mad at her? Was she actually afraid of his reaction right now?

"It's okay," Tim said, moving closer, his training kicking in over everything else. But his hands were gentler than they needed to be, gentler than protocol required. "I need to pull the needle out."

He reached for it carefully, his fingers steady despite the way his heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest. The metal slid free with barely a whisper, the tip coming out clean except for a dark smear that made something cold and vicious twist in his gut. Blood . Not hers—she hadn't bled through the uniform, which meant it belonged to someone else. Someone whose history they'd never know.

"What's the procedure when an officer is exposed on duty?" His voice was all business now, a mask he pulled on to keep from drowning in the fear that was trying to claw its way up his throat. If he couldn't calm her down by being him —whatever the hell that meant anymore—he would calm her down by being exactly what she expected.

"What?"

"Focus, Chen. What do we do now?"

"You're gonna quiz me now ?" The anger flared back up, mixing with the fear until her voice shook with both. Tim gave her a terse nod. She blinked. " Really ? Right now?"

"Yes, Officer Chen. I am." The formality felt like armor. “Answer me.”

She took a shaky breath, and he watched her force herself back into the shape of a cop. It was like watching someone put on a uniform made of steel.

"Collect the evidence. Transport the officer and the contaminated item to the nearest hospital for testing and prophylactic treatment for bloodborne pathogens."

Her voice was steadier now, but he could see the way her hands were trembling, how she was not blinking, the way she was holding herself too carefully, like she might shatter if she moved wrong.

"And where's the nearest hospital?"

"Shaw Memorial."

Tim turned to another officer who'd been watching the scene unfold with the kind of morbid fascination that came with knowing it could have been him. "Make sure someone posts up here until the VP passes through."

"Got it, Bradford."

He turned back to Lucy, who was still staring at the needle. "Come on. Let's go."

"I can—" She swallowed hard, and when she spoke again, her voice was smaller. More fragile. "I can go alone. Or with any other—"

"I said let's go." The words came out sharper than he intended, edged with something that might have been panic if he let himself think about it too long. But then he saw the way she flinched, just slightly, and he gentled his tone. "Chen. I'm taking you."

For once, she didn't argue.

The antiseptic smell hit them like a wall as soon as they walked through the sliding glass doors. It was the kind of sterile, medicinal scent that crawled into your lungs and stayed there, reminding you of every terrible thing that could go wrong with the human body. Lucy approached the intake desk where a young male nurse looked up from his computer with the kind of bored expression that suggested he'd been there for a while that morning.

"Hi—I need to get my blood tested," Lucy said, her voice steadier than Tim expected. Then she glanced at him, just for a second, like she needed the anchor of his presence to keep from floating away. "Got stuck with a used hypodermic needle."

The nurse—his name tag read "Gino"—handed her a clipboard. "Fill this out. Have a seat in the waiting room, and we'll be right with you."

"You must be new.”

“Sorry?"

“No experienced nurse lets an armed cop sit with civilians. What do you think happens if somebody tries to grab her weapon?" Something sharp flared in Tim's chest, hot and immediate. Gino, or whatever his name was, stuttered something Tim didn’t bother listening to. “Hospital protocol dictates that an armed officer be seen immediately. So set her up in a room right now and find a doctor."

"Yes, sir. Right this way."

Lucy followed Gino down the hallway, her footsteps echoing against the polished linoleum, and Tim followed her. Each step felt like walking deeper into his own nightmare. Because that's what this was— his nightmare. Not hers alone.

Deep down, in places he didn't like to acknowledge existed, he felt every ounce of her panic. Every flutter of fear that made her hands shake. Every terrible possibility that was cycling through her mind like a broken record, echoed in his, too.

It shouldn't have been possible.

He shouldn't have been able to feel the anxious rhythm of her pulse like it was his own heartbeat, shouldn't have known that she was fighting back tears she'd never let him see.

But he did. God help him, he did.

That was his soulmate. His soulmate . And she hated him, was afraid of him, had been wrecked by him.

In the examination room, Lucy perched on the edge of the table, shoulders slightly hunched, hands resting loosely in her lap. Tim leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching her without quite looking. The silence between them stretched, taut and electric, neither willing to break it.

Lucy had her blood drawn. Tim asked for an ETA on the lab results and made up some excuse to step out.

Not that he wanted to. Not really. But he knew she needed space, and he forced himself to give it.

He walked as far as the length of the hallway, making calls to Grey and the officer he’d left supervising the camp. He pretended he could focus on logistics, on the work, but beneath it all, his gut was tight with anxiety. And Tim Bradford was never anxious.

After one last call, he returned to the examination room.

Lucy was hunched over her phone, her shirt draped on a nearby hanger, sitting in nothing but her white tee. The fluorescent light didn’t make her look tan; somehow, it made her look fragile, exposed in a way the street never let her be. Tim felt it in his chest—a pull he didn’t want, couldn’t name—and walked inside.

"Falling down the WebMD rabbit hole isn't gonna change your results," he said.

“HIV is three times more prevalent in the homeless community than in the general population. Hepatitis is five times more prevalent—”

“And cows kill more people a year than sharks. Facts are whatever you make them.” He crossed his arms. “It’s going to be okay.”

Lucy’s head snapped up. “Sure. You can leave, though. I can—” Her voice hitched, then steadied. “I can call when I get my results.”

“What made you think I’d leave you here alone?” Tim stepped forward, dragged a chair across the floor with a harsh scrape, and set it in front of her.

She scoffed. “Are you seriously doing this right now?”

“What?”

“This!” She flung a hand between them. “You acting like you give a damn about me when two days ago you threatened to nuke my career over something you said.”

His jaw tightened. “Chen—”

“Oh, no. Don’t you dare pull rank on me.” Her voice cut clean through the air. “You don’t get to play concerned training officer when you literally told me you’d wash me out if I—”

He flinched. The shame was still raw. “I was—”

“What? Having a bad day?” The words hit him hard. He stepped back, hand dragging over the back of his head, the fight draining before he could form it. “So was I.” She was breathing hard, but her voice was steady. Fierce. “I’d just watched a guy die in front of me. I’d just heard my T.O. admit to some heavy, personal shit. And then I got to watch him turn it into a weapon against me.”

Tim swallowed, chest tight. She wasn’t panicking anymore, at least.

“And you know what?” She slid off the table, eyes locked on his. “I get it. I do. Your life is falling apart. Your marriage is over. You’re carrying things I can’t even imagine. But that doesn’t give you the right to take it out on me.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Why?” She didn’t flinch. “It’s 2019! People get divorced all the time.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pointed a finger, sharp, defensive, trying to rebuild the wall.

She tilted her head, defiant, refusing to give him ground. “You don’t know me, Officer Chen. You know nothing about me. Or my wife. Or my life.”

“Right. Here’s what I know. You’re good at this job. You’re smart and tough and stubborn as hell.” Her chin lifted, her words deliberate, steady as a blade. “You’re a great cop. But threatening me? Belittling me? That’s not strength, Sir. That’s cowardice.”

His hand dropped, like the accusation had slipped right out of him. Her words hit him harder than a punch. Her tone. Her gaze. He inhaled sharply, shoulders stiffening, but no comeback came.

All he could do was stare. He deserved this, after all.

Lucy stepped closer, close enough that he had to look at her. “You don’t get to decide how I see you.” She pressed her lips. “I respect you. Believe I do. But I—” She shook her head. “I’m not going to tolerate this.”

She wasn’t backing down, not even a step. And it terrified him—because she was right.

“Chen…” His voice rasped, stripped raw. “I didn’t mean—”

“Bullshit.” The word came out like a slap. “You meant every word! You looked me in the eye and you meant it. Because God forbid anyone see the great Tim Bradford as anything less than perfect.”

Tim stepped closer, voice dropping to that dangerous whisper. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But she does, a voice in his head whispered. She sees right through you. She’s been waiting for you since the moment she was born.

“You know, I never told you, but… since that day at Mama Rosas?” She paused. Tim didn’t move. Didn’t blink. “I could see you’re so scared of people seeing you’re human that you’d rather destroy yourself than admit you’re in pain. But now I can see you would rather destroy someone who cares—”

“Someone that cares ?” Tim’s laugh was bitter. But even as the words left his mouth, he knew he would lie. She did care. That was the problem. She cared in ways that made his chest tighten, his defenses crumble. She cared for him because that was her calling. She cared for him the same way he cared for her. Innate and God-willing. But admitting that? He couldn’t afford that—not now. “Right. That’s why you were looking at me like I was some broken-down—”

“I was looking at you like I was worried about you!” The words exploded out of her. “I was looking at you like someone who gives a damn because that’s what people do when they hear what you shared! Is that so bad that your rookie cares about you?”

The room went silent except for Lucy’s ragged breathing. Tim stared at her, feeling something crack open in his chest.

“Lucy—”

The name slipped out before he could stop it. Not Chen. Not Boot. Lucy . When had her first name become so natural to him that it just… slipped? When had she stopped being just another rookie and become… this? Someone who mattered in ways that scared the hell out of him?

He clenched his jaw, angry at himself for the slip, angry at how her name felt right in his mouth, angry at how she could strip away every defense he’d spent years building with just a look.

Get it together, Bradford.

“No, just…” She took a shaky breath, voice smaller now, more vulnerable. “Just go, please. I can handle myself.”

Before Tim could reply, there was a knock on the door. And seconds later, a doctor walked in, clipboard in hand, pausing at the threshold, eyes flicking between them.

“Officer Chen? I’m sorry if I—” His hand hovered on the doorknob.

“No, of course. Come in,” Lucy said, straightening quickly, slipping back into professional mode with the ease of someone trained to compartmentalize. “Just—just tell me.”

Tim nodded at the doctor.

Dr. Haddad, middle-aged with kind eyes, stepped fully into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Your initial tests came back negative for any viral infections, like HIV or hepatitis.” Tim felt a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding finally escape. Lucy’s shoulders sagged slightly with relief. “But, your blood work indicates the presence of a staph infection.”

“What does that mean?” Lucy asked, her voice smaller now, earlier fire replaced by exhaustion and worry.

“We need to start intravenous antibiotics immediately. Some strains of staph are drug-resistant, so we’ll monitor for abscesses or cellulitis,” he said, looking between them again. “Good news: we caught it early. Bad news: you’ll need observation and treatment, probably overnight—maybe longer depending on your response.”

“I can’t stay overnight,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “We have the VP detail, and—”

“Lucy, come on—”

Lucy.

“Officer Chen,” Dr. Haddad interrupted gently, “staph infections can turn serious very quickly if untreated. Potential sepsis, organ failure. This isn’t optional.”

Lucy glanced at Tim, vulnerable and uncertain. For a moment, she looked exactly like what she was: young, far from home, leaning on her training officer for guidance.

“I’ll call Grey,” he said, voice rougher than he intended. “Let him know you’re out of commission.”

“Sir, you don’t have to. Maybe I can come back later, right?” She looked at Haddad. “I’m feeling fine.”

“No. She’s staying,” he told the doctor. “I can go back and... We can handle it. Maybe I should get going.  Someone needs to handle the paperwork anyway.” Already pulling out his phone. “Might as well be thorough.”

It was a lie. Grey could manage VP detail without them. The paperwork could wait. But Tim couldn’t leave—not while she looked at him like that, trusting him despite everything.

“Call me if you need anything.” But he didn’t move.

Dr. Haddad cleared his throat. “I’ll give you a few minutes. Someone will be in shortly to get you upstairs.” He retreated, leaving them alone in the sterile quiet.

Tim stared at Lucy—really looked at her—taking in her dishevelled hair, the small tear where the needle had gone through, the exhaustion around her eyes. She looked smaller sitting on the exam table than she ever had in the patrol car or on the street.

Twenty-seven. Tim recalled her mentioning how she’d been eighteen for ten years, already. She’d left home, psychology, everything she knew to become a cop. And some asshole training officer just told her he’d destroy her career because he couldn’t handle his own problems.

“Chen,” he started, then stopped. What was he supposed to say? Sorry? That he didn’t mean it? That the thought of something happening to her made him feel like he was drowning?

“It’s okay,” she said softly, not looking up. “You can go. I’ll be fine.”

But she wouldn’t be. Neither would he. Tim could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she held herself together through sheer force of will. Medically, she’d be fine—the doctors would take care of that. But she rarely spoke about her parents, despite talking about everything else, and with Jackson and Nolan tied up all day, she’d probably be alone in a hospital room for the first time since becoming a cop. Alone with nothing but her thoughts and the memory of his threats, keeping her company.