Brody slid a folder toward me. Not with ceremony, just an offhand flick of his wrist like it wasn’t something that had been sitting in a box collecting dust since before I was born.
“He kept everything,” he said. “Weird, right?”
I opened the flap.
Inside were old notes, clipped articles. A few faded printouts from training sessions. A ticket stub from a Tigers game from decades ago. My chest pulled tight around a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
“Seemed like he had a good life,” I said quietly, thumbing a photo of three uniforms standing arm in arm in front of the old station. “People respected him.”
Brody nodded. “Yeah. That was the thing. Out there, in the public eye, he was different.”
I glanced at him.
Brody leaned back in the chair, ankle hooked over his knee, elbow resting on the edge of the table like we were just shooting the shit after a shift, but his jaw had gone tight.
“I mean,” he went on, voice measured, “he could be a hard-ass. He was rigid. Ran his precinct like it was the damn Marines. But the guys here? They looked up to him. They called him honorable.”
I swallowed. “That’s not the word I’d use.”
He huffed a sound that might’ve been agreement. Or regret. Maybe both.
“I keep trying to reconcile it,” he said. “This version of him and the one you got.”
I nodded, slow. “Me too.”
Silence settled. Not awkward—just impossibly heavy.
I looked down at the folder again. Nestled between two sheets was a picture I hadn’t noticed before. It was folded in half, like someone had carried it in a wallet too long.
I opened it carefully.
A boy. Maybe six or seven. In a Halloween costume—some kind of superhero getup with a crooked mask. He was standing in a front yard I didn’t recognize, holding up a plastic pumpkin like he’d just pulled off the heist of the century.
“Is that you?” Brody asked.
I nodded, my mouth tipping in a wry smile. “First grade. My mom sewed that cape herself. She said if I wanted to save the world, I needed to look the part.”
I held the photo a second longer, then set it gently back in the folder, still confused as to why my dad had held on to it at all.
Somewhere in the distance, a phone rang. A door opened and closed. A printer choked out a few pages and fell silent again.
I rubbed the back of my neck and stood, stretching out a cramp in my shoulder.
“I should probably get going,” I said, not quite checking the time.
Brody nodded but didn’t move.
“I know it doesn’t change anything,” he said quietly, “but for what it’s worth ... I’m glad I know you now.”
That one caught me right between the ribs.
“I’m glad too,” I said, meaning it more than I expected.
He stood and clapped a hand on my shoulder, firm and brief—like any more than that would tip the moment into something we wouldn’t know how to carry.
I walked back out into the chill of late afternoon with the folder tucked under my arm and a strange ache behind my sternum.
The sky was softening, low and gray at the edges. My phone buzzed in my pocket, a calendar alert flashing across the screen.
