Work Text:
They do not ask about the picture on her desk.
But she catches them looking nevertheless.
Their smiles, when they focus back on her, are sometimes warmer, sometimes stretched and rigid, as if a coat-hanger had been twisted into shape inside their mouths.
Reed doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t give an explanation, doesn’t pepper her conversations with: “my partner thinks that…” or: “Stella and I went…”
She didn’t talk much about her personal life before, why would she now? They know she has daughters and they know she’s divorced, although she never volunteered the latter information. But Belfast isn’t that big and people talk.
Let them.
The picture is on her desk. And she leaves it there.
Reed had taken the photograph out of the blue, the day she accompanied Stella to Sarah Kay’s house, when they still barely knew each other. Stella was turning round to look at her, and the moving mix of resilient sadness in the detective’s eyes, had prompted Reed to lift her camera and take the shot.
“For your eyes only, I assume?” Stella had teased, her blue eyes dancing.
Reed had quickly looked away before taking way too many unnecessary shots of Sarah Kay’s shoe cabinet.
Over the months, Reed had grown very fond of that picture.
She has grown increasingly fond of the woman in the picture too.
Sometimes, people who used to work with Stella drop by for work-related inquiries.
Matt Eastwood spots the framed picture almost immediately, raises an eyebrow, clears his throat, and, holding her gaze evenly, gets down straight to business. There’s a faint smile playing on his lips as he leaves her office. A smile Reed’s pretty sure she isn’t supposed to catch. But she does.
PC Ferrington squeezes her shoulder before leaving, lets her hand rest warmly a fraction longer than is necessary. Reed feels a flutter down the pit of her stomach. This simple gesture feels like a broader welcoming into the Sisterhood, if there is such a thing. Reed likes the idea that there is.
They do not ask about the picture. But…
“I learnt an awful lot from her.”
Reed looks up at McNally, startled. She got so used to people not asking, that she’s also stopped expecting people from commenting at all.
Gail doesn’t say anything else, just taps her index finger on the opened file in front of them, indicating where Reed is supposed to sign. After a beat, Reed lowers her gaze back to the paperwork, tightens the grip on her pen and gets the job done.
“It’s good. The two of you,” Gail says as she steps outside, “she deserves happiness after everything she went through here.”
Reed dips her head and smiles, as McNally disappears down the hallway.
She walks back to her desk to pick up her phone.
“Hey, I’m almost done, what time will you be home?”
She lets one finger run idly over the picture frame’s glass, traces the contour of Stella’s face while she waits for an answer.
It is good. The two of them.