An Unfinished Sentence

There are sentences partners do not finish. The unfinished sentence is its own form of testimony — more reliable, often, than the sentences that complete themselves, because the place where the words stop is the place where the truth was about to become inconvenient.

The break room had been chosen by neither of them, exactly. It had been chosen by elimination. Bullpens have audiences. Sergeants' offices have hierarchies. The corridor between them has neither privacy nor permission. The break room — flickering fluorescent, half-empty vending machines, mismatched chairs — was the only space in the building where two officers who should not have been at work could meet without the building intervening.

Sarah should have been at home with the curtains drawn and her concussion easing through the seventy-two hours her doctor had specified. She had come in to file an incident report whose careful fictions had been guided into existence at eight that morning by a sergeant whose normal allergy to creative paperwork had, on this particular morning, been suspended for reasons he had not chosen to explain.

Karl should not have been at work because the man who had walked into the previous afternoon's bedroom no longer trusted the instrument doing his perceiving. He was at work because Charlie Claiborne had given him seven days, and seven days was too short to spend any of them sleeping.

Both of them were wearing their damage where it could be seen. Sarah's bandage was fresh and white and the colour of evidence. Karl's wrist cuts were red and recent and the colour of confession. They sat opposite each other across a table whose accumulated scratches had been collecting under cold coffee for years, and the silence between them carried more weight than the conversation that was going to attempt to interrupt it.

What was said is less important than what was attempted and refused.

An apology was attempted and refused — not denied, just deferred, because Sarah had not yet finished holding what had been done to her and was not willing to release it on Karl's schedule. A confession was offered: that Sarah had lied in an official report with her sergeant's active participation, that the version of events now sitting in Tasmania Police records contained no broken window and no struck partner and no whisper from an empty room. Karl said he did not deserve that loyalty. Sarah agreed without softening, and then — after the kind of pause that contains decisions — added that they had done it anyway, and the word anyway carried the part of the answer she was not yet ready to deliver in any other form.

A hand was extended across the table. Tentative. Slow. Asking permission rather than assuming it. The hand was not pulled away immediately, which was something. It was withdrawn after a beat or two, which was something else. The withdrawal was not rejection. It was the truthful reporting of a sensation that had not survived the preceding twenty-four hours intact.

And then the sentence.

The Karl Jenkins she knew, Sarah said, would not have lost control like that. The Karl Jenkins she knew — the man I — and there the words stopped. Sarah caught the next noun before it could leave her mouth and substituted it with a safer one: the Karl Jenkins she had been partners with. Partners was the word the break room could hold. The word Sarah had swallowed back was the word that belonged to a vocabulary the break room was not equipped to host, and that Sarah, with a bandage on her hand and a concussion behind her eyes and an official lie filed under her own signature, was not going to deploy in fluorescent light at half past nine on a Monday morning.

Karl heard the absence and did not press it. Pressing would have shattered the small thing that had survived the previous afternoon, and the small thing was the only currency either of them still had to spend on each other.

The conversation ended on a pronoun. We. Two o'clock. Sarah's desk. The case files would be reviewed by both of them, together, because Sarah had decided — without quite deciding — that the partnership was not yet finished, even if the noun that would have defined it more precisely had to remain unspoken for now.

She walked away from the table with a careful gait Karl did not see, because Karl was still watching the empty chair where she had been sitting, and the unfinished sentence was still suspended in the air between them like the only clean piece of evidence the break room had produced — pointing, as the best evidence always pointed, to the thing nobody had yet been brave enough to name.