Hope You'll Be Mine : Part I | A Short Story by Rehan Azam

Hope You'll Be Mine : Part I

by Rehan Azam

Chapter One

Maren

The body was found at 5:40 in the morning, laid out on the steps of a courthouse like an offering nobody had asked for. Maren Hale stood over it with her coffee going cold in her hand and thought, not for the first time, that the dead man had gotten off easy.

His name was Devon Wray. Eighteen months ago a jury had spent four hours acquitting him of what a hospital record and two witnesses said he'd done to his wife. He'd walked out of that courthouse smiling for a photographer. Now he was back on its steps, and someone had made sure the world would remember why.

"Same signature," said her partner, Reyes, crouching by the chalk-white hands folded neatly over the chest. "Precise. No struggle. He knew this one was coming and didn't even fight it."

The press had already named him. The Reckoning. As if a person could be a sentence handed down from somewhere higher than the law. Maren crouched, studied the careful arrangement of the body, the almost tender way it had been left, and felt the old exhaustion settle into her spine. Three men now. Three men the system had let go, and someone patient and clever was correcting the record one throat at a time.

She should have felt only horror. She told herself she felt only horror.

But some small, unlawyered part of her, the part that had sat across from Devon Wray's wife and watched her hands shake around a paper cup, understood exactly what this killer thought he was doing. That understanding scared her more than the body did.

"We get a psych profile going," she said, standing, forcing her voice back into procedure. "And we go back through Wray's known associates. Whoever did this needed to know he'd be here, alone, before dawn."

Reyes nodded, already reaching for his phone. Maren looked once more at the folded hands, the strange gentleness of the kill, and turned away before the thought that had been circling her all morning could land: someone out there thinks he is doing good.

Chapter Two

Adrian

Adrian Cole washed his hands twice before he unlocked the café at six, the way he always did. Once for what needed washing off, and once for the ordinary reason, because the woman who came in for her espresso and biscotti liked to see him behind the counter with clean hands and a clean apron, the same as any other man who made a living pouring coffee.

He liked mornings. He liked the particular hush before the city woke, the smell of grounds and steam, the small rituals of flour and milk and cups set out in rows. He had built this life carefully, the way he built everything, brick by brick, so that no one looking at Adrian Cole, café owner, would ever think to look twice.

He thought of Devon Wray only once, briefly, while he steamed the milk for the first order of the day. Not with guilt. Guilt implied a debt owed to something he still believed in, and he had stopped believing in the law's ability to settle debts a long time ago, back when a judge had looked at evidence of what had been done to his sister and called it insufficient. He had watched the man who did it walk free, watched his sister disappear into herself over the following two years until there was almost nothing left to disappear.

The law had had its chance. Adrian had simply stopped waiting for it.

He did not think of himself as a monster. Monsters were chaos. Adrian was the opposite of chaos. He chose carefully. He verified thoroughly. He never touched anyone the system hadn't already failed to touch. It was, in its way, the most disciplined thing he had ever done, more disciplined than the coffee, more disciplined than the quiet, patient man he wore over the other one, the one underneath, the one with steady hands and a long memory.

The bell over the door rang. He looked up, wiping his hands on his apron, ready to be Adrian Cole, café owner, for whoever walked in.

He did not know yet that today the woman who walked in was the reason the last eighteen months of careful work were about to become complicated in a way he had never planned for.

Chapter Three

Maren and Adrian

She came in at half past nine, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour, and ordered a coffee she said she didn't even want, just needed. Adrian recognized the particular flatness in her voice. He heard it often from people who spent their mornings around bodies, though of course he didn't say that.

"Rough one?" he asked instead, sliding the cup across the counter.

"You could say that." She managed a small, surprised laugh, like she hadn't expected to laugh today. "Sorry. You don't need my whole morning."

"I make coffee for a living. I have nothing but time for other people's mornings."

She looked at him properly then, and something in her shoulders loosened, just slightly, the way a person relaxes around someone who asks nothing of them. He liked that he could give her that, even for five minutes. He told himself it was only kindness. He told himself several things, that morning and over the following days, that were true enough to believe and not quite true enough to trust.

Her name was Maren. She came back the next morning, and the one after that, and by the end of the week they both understood, without saying it, that the coffee had become an excuse.

"What is it you do," he asked her once, already half-guessing, "that puts that look on your face?"

"Police work." She said it carefully, the way people do when they're used to it changing how someone looks at them. "Detective."

"That explain the tired eyes or the good ones?"

"Depends on the day." She smiled at him over the rim of her cup, and for a moment she looked, to him, unbearably unguarded. "What about you? Café owner your whole life, or did you fall into it?"

"Fell into it," he said, which was true, in the sense that every lie worth telling has a true bone somewhere inside it. "Wanted something quiet. Something with my hands. Something that couldn't hurt anybody."

She laughed at that, not knowing why it wasn't funny, and asked if he'd like to get dinner sometime, since apparently they'd been having breakfast together all week without calling it anything.

He said yes before he'd let himself think about it. That, more than anything else, should have told him something was already wrong.

Chapter Four

Adrian

He didn't sleep after their first dinner. Not from anything so simple as nerves. He lay in the dark running the shape of her face through his mind, the way she'd tucked her hair back when she laughed, the way she'd talked about her work with a kind of grief she probably didn't know she was showing him, and somewhere in the middle of all that warmth he made the connection he should have made the moment she said the word detective.

He got up. He turned on his laptop. He didn't need long.

Detective Maren Hale. Lead on the Reckoning case. Her name was in three of the articles he'd read in the last month, the ones he read the way other men read box scores, checking his own work against what the world had noticed.

She was hunting him. And he had just asked her to dinner again on Thursday.

He sat with that for a long time, turning it over the way he turned over every decision, patiently, without panic, because panic was a luxury he had never once allowed himself. A more careful man, a man less far gone than he apparently was, would end it now. Would stop answering her texts, close the café early some morning and simply not come back, disappear the way he knew how to disappear.

He thought about doing that. He thought about it seriously, for almost an hour.

Then he thought about the unguarded way she'd looked at him over her coffee, like he was the only ordinary thing left in her day, and he understood, with the same clear-eyed discipline he brought to everything else, that he did not want to disappear. He wanted, God help him, to keep her.

It would mean managing her. Watching her. Staying close enough to know exactly how much she knew and exactly when to be worried. It was reckless. It went against every rule he had built his second life on.

He texted her back anyway. Thursday works. Wear something you don't mind walking in.

Some part of him, the part still capable of being honest with himself in the dark, understood that he had just made the first mistake of his life that he had no intention of correcting.

Chapter Five

Maren

For three weeks, Maren let herself be happy, and did not examine it too closely, because she'd learned a long time ago that happiness examined too closely tends to come apart in your hands.

Adrian took her walking along the river at night, when the water threw back the city lights in long broken ribbons, and told her the names of things she'd walked past her whole life without noticing, the little architectural details on the old buildings, the particular blue hour when the streetlamps came on before the sky had finished going dark. He remembered things she mentioned once and never repeated, that she took her coffee differently on hard days, that she hated the sound of her own name shouted across a room, that she'd wanted, as a child, to be an architect before life had steered her toward the job that broke her heart on a schedule.

He left a small paper cup of the good pastries on her desk at the precinct once, no note, and she'd known immediately who it was from and had to leave the room for five minutes so no one would see her face.

She hadn't let herself want anything this simply, this completely, in years. Every relationship she'd tried to build around the job had eventually cracked under the weight of what the job asked of her, the late nights, the cases she brought home in her eyes even when she didn't bring them home in words. Adrian never asked her to leave the job at the door. He asked about it, sometimes, gently, and then let her decide how much to give him.

She didn't know, yet, that the reason he never pushed for details on the Reckoning case was not patience but self-preservation.

She only knew that for the first time in longer than she could easily admit, she woke up some mornings already looking forward to something, and that the something had his name, and that she was, quietly, entirely, falling in love with a man who made excellent coffee and asked for nothing she couldn't give.

She would think back on these three weeks later, after everything, as the last unbroken thing she had.

Chapter Six

Adrian

He got very good, that month, at a kind of care that had no precedent in his life, protecting someone without letting her see the shape of the danger he was protecting her from.

There was a night he showed up at her building unannounced, some instinct he didn't examine too closely pulling him there, and found her walking to her car alone in a stretch of parking lot with a burned-out light, the kind of place where anything could happen to a woman with her guard down after a sixteen-hour shift. He didn't tell her why he'd come. He said he'd been in the neighborhood, which was a lie, and walked her the rest of the way, and made a mental note, later, to see to the burned-out light himself, quietly, the way he saw to most things.

There was another night she mentioned, almost in passing, a name, a man from an old case, out on parole now, who'd sent her department a letter that read less like an apology and more like a threat. Adrian said nothing at the time. He filed the name away the way he filed everything, and did not act on it, not yet, because acting on it would raise questions he wasn't ready for her to ask. But he thought about that man more than he thought was wise.

He was aware, in his more honest moments, that he was playing a longer and more dangerous game than any he'd played before. Every kindness he offered her doubled as cover. Every date was also reconnaissance, a chance to gauge exactly how close her case had come to him, whether her softness toward him was love or the patient softness of a good detective letting a suspect feel safe enough to slip.

He didn't think it was that. He would have staked everything he had built on the fact that it wasn't that.

But some nights, watching her sleep with her head on his chest, entirely unguarded in a way she never was anywhere else, he let himself wonder which of them was really doing the watching, and which of them was being, slowly and carefully, taken apart.

Chapter Seven

Maren

The case broke open a little more in the fourth week, the way cases sometimes do, all at once after a long stall. A witness near the third scene remembered a detail she hadn't thought to mention before: a man near the courthouse steps before dawn, unremarkable, calm, carrying what she'd assumed at the time was a to-go coffee cup.

It was such a small detail. Maren almost dismissed it.

Except that two nights later, lying in Adrian's bed while he slept beside her, she found herself staring at the ceiling turning over something he'd said weeks ago, in passing, about a court case years back, a sister, a man who'd walked free from something he shouldn't have walked free from. He'd told it to her the way people tell old grief, worn smooth by handling, offered without weight, and she'd held his hand and told him she was sorry and hadn't thought about it again.

She thought about it now.

She told herself it was nothing. Plenty of people had a story like that; the world was full of people the law had failed. She told herself she was a detective on a hard case going a little paranoid, seeing shapes that weren't there because that was what long cases did to a mind.

But the detail sat in her the way a splinter sits under skin, small and impossible to ignore, and somewhere underneath the part of her that loved Adrian Cole, a colder, more practiced part of her, the part that had made her good at this job in the first place, quietly began keeping a list.

Chapter Eight

Maren

She didn't tell him. That was the part that cost her the most, in the days that followed, more than the late nights at her own desk after hours, cross-referencing his café's opening dates against the timeline of the murders, more than the quiet, careful call she made to check whether a man named Adrian Cole had ever appeared in any file connected to a case involving his sister.

He had. Seven years ago. A case that had gone nowhere, a man acquitted on a technicality, and a sister who had, according to the file, taken her own life eleven months after the trial ended.

Maren sat with that printout in her lap for a long time in an empty office at eleven at night, and felt something in her chest fold in on itself.

It didn't prove anything. She told herself that over and over. Grief didn't make a man a killer. Plenty of people carried old injustices without ever lifting a hand over them.

But she was a detective, and she knew, the way she knew the weight of her own badge, that she was no longer looking at a coincidence. She was looking at a shape. And the shape had Adrian's face on it.

She didn't confront him that week. She told herself she needed more before she could ask the question she was afraid to ask, but the truth, underneath that, was simpler and harder to admit. She wasn't ready yet to lose the last unbroken thing she had.

So she kept seeing him. She let him make her coffee and walk her home and hold her at night, and underneath all of it, quietly, without his knowledge, she kept building the file that might undo them both.

Chapter Nine

Adrian

He felt the change before he could name it. A held-back quality in the way she looked at him, a half-second delay before she answered him now, the particular carefulness of someone choosing her words instead of simply speaking them.

He had spent his whole life reading rooms for danger. He did not need her to say anything to know that she had found something.

He thought, again, about disappearing. He thought about it with more seriousness than the first time, lying awake beside her, listening to her breathe, and understood that he could be gone by morning, could leave nothing behind but an empty café and a story about a man who'd simply moved on. It would hurt her. It would be safer for her, in every way that mattered.

He didn't do it.

He told himself it was because running now would only confirm whatever she suspected. The truth, underneath that reasoning, was smaller and far less strategic. He didn't want to leave her. He had built a life around never wanting anything he couldn't afford to lose, and somewhere in the last two months he had gone and wanted her anyway, recklessly, completely, in a way that made every careful instinct he owned useless.

So he stayed. He kept pouring her coffee and walking her home and telling himself, with the last of his old discipline, that whatever came next, he would rather she hear it from him standing still than chase him down running.

He did not know, on the last ordinary night they had, that it was the last ordinary night they would have. He only knew, watching her across the small kitchen table, that she was looking at him the way a person looks at a question they're finally ready to ask.

Chapter Ten

Maren and Adrian

She came to the café after closing, when the chairs were already up on the tables and the espresso machine had gone quiet, and she didn't sit down.

"I need to ask you something," she said, "and I need you to not lie to me. Not tonight."

He set down the towel in his hands. Something in his face had already gone still and resigned, the particular calm of a man who has been waiting a long time for a conversation to finally arrive. "Ask."

She laid it out for him, quietly, without theater, because there was no theater left in her for this, only exhaustion and grief and a terrible, aching hope that he would somehow have an answer that made all of it not true. The witness. The timeline. His sister's file. The eleven months between a trial and a funeral.

When she finished, the café was very quiet.

"Tell me I'm wrong," she said, and her voice broke on the last word in a way she hated herself for. "Please. Tell me I got this wrong."

Adrian looked at her for a long moment, the way he might once, before any of this, have looked at someone he was deciding whether to trust with something true.

"You're not wrong," he said.

She had known, somewhere underneath the hope, that he wouldn't lie to her. It didn't make the words land any softer. She stood in the doorway of the place where she had fallen in love with him, looking at the man she now understood she had been chasing for months without knowing it, and felt something in her that she couldn't yet name, grief, fury, and beneath both, unbearably, love that refused to simply stop because the truth had arrived.

"Maren," he said, and reached toward her, and stopped, because he saw in her face that reaching was no longer his to do.

"Don't," she said. "Don't you dare."

Neither of them moved. Outside, the street was quiet, the ordinary quiet of a city that had no idea it was, in this small closed café, deciding the shape of two lives.

End of Part One

© Rehan Azam,'Hope You'll Be Mine : Part I' An Short story by Rehan Azam , All Rights Reserved.

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