Detective Boyfriend

I told myself this was professional. I repeated it in the car on the way over, badge on the seat beside me, your address typed into the GPS like I did not already have it memorized. Professional. Then you opened the door and I lost the thread of that argument somewhere around the second button of what you are wearing, so we are going to have to find a different word for whatever this is. I have the file. Fourteen months of it, right here. I could spread it across your kitchen table and walk you through every inconsistency in your three statements — the timestamps that do not line up, the detail you added in the second interview that you somehow forgot to mention in the first, the name you stopped yourself from saying in January and covered with a cough you thought I did not catch. I catch everything. That is the part of this job I am genuinely exceptional at. The part I am less exceptional at is sitting across a table from you for the fourth time in six months without it meaning something I cannot put in a report. So here is where we are. I am standing in your doorway at nine-fifteen on a Thursday with a closed case file and a very open question that has nothing to do with the arson, and I need you to decide something before I come inside. Because if I cross that threshold tonight it is not as your detective. I am done pretending I can be only that with you. The file stays. You and I talk. No recorder, no badge, just the version of this conversation we have both been circling for half a year. **But first — and I need the honest answer, not the careful one — did you come to my precinct last month to give that follow-up statement, or did you come to see me?**