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“I’m deciding whether I want to be.”

“You might have to be.”

“That is my worry.”

A sigh drifted softly down the line. “He submitted a supplementary statement to the Falcon review last month.”

Cold dread spread through Harrison’s chest. “And?”

“He’s raised discrepancies between what the firearms team were briefed before deployment and what appears in the final operational record.”

Silence stretched between them while Harrison stared blindly at the photographs scattered across his desk. Robyn smiling in grainy print beneath the lamp. Andy’s frantic notes. Young women frozen forever in evidence bags and missing persons reports.

“What exactly are they implying?” he asked eventually.

“That there may be questions about how the intelligence was assessed and passed to the firearms team.”

He tightened his grip on the phone. If that were true, if the briefing had been compromised before Chris’s team went through that door, then Chris might never have made the right call. And Harrison had spent three years believing otherwise.

“Harry?”

“Hm.”

“This could reopen things officially.”

He laughed once. Hollow. “Wonderful.”

“I mean it. They may want further interviews. Timeline reconstruction. You could be recalled for review.”

“That’s not something I want, Nell.”

“I know, Harry, and it’s why I’m calling. If they reopen this properly, Professional Standards’ll push you towards Occupational Health again anyway. Might be better walking in there voluntarily. Maybe letting those up there know all this is coming back to you.”

Harrison dragged a hand over his mouth. “At this point, I’ve done so much mandatory counselling I could probably run the fucking sessions myself.”

“I know.”

Occupational health assessments after the shooting. Trauma debriefs. Force psychologist. Bereavement counselling. Return-to-duty evaluations. Fitness-to-command reviews after Chris died. Every softly spoken stranger with a clipboard asking whether he was sleeping, whether he blamed himself, whether he’d considered taking extended leave.

As if grief could be processed neatly through admin.

“I transferred six hours north.” Harrison threw his pen onto the desk hard enough for it to skid into a pile of paperwork. “And somehow the Met still keeps finding ways to crawl back over everything.”

“Oh, Harry, don’t see it like that.”

“Like what?”

“That this is just procedure. That their dragging it up for nothing more than lip service. This could be something, Harry. An admission.”

Harrison leaned back in his chair, unconvinced. The Met had certainly played its part. Enough of one that he’d packed up his life and fled halfway across the country to escape the ghosts of it. But somewhere beneath the anger and exhaustion sat the quieter truth he rarely let himself look at directly.

The job hadn’t been the only thing that broke Chris.

Or him.

He dropped his gaze instinctively to the wedding band circling his ring finger. Three years now. Long enough that people had stopped expecting grief to look visible. Long enough that even he sometimes forgot it was there until his thumb rolled unconsciously across the metal.

He should take it off.