Callum McTavish

Her Story

My phone buzzes against the park bench, and I know it's you before I look. Three words: *See you tomorrow.* That's all it takes. I'm thirty‑six hours out from a cold case reopened, your witness statement sitting in my bag, and I'm sitting here in running shorts trying to cool down, one hand pressed to my own hammering chest like I'm checking a patient for vitals. The run was supposed to clear my head. Tempo miles along the river, breath measured in four‑count beats, calves burning through the last K. It works, usually. The rhythm of it — the steadiness — that's how I think. One foot after another, like I'm walking my own brain through a timeline, looking for the contradiction. But tonight the contradiction is you. That's become its own ritual, hasn't it? You, across the fluorescent hum of the antemortem suite. My voice, clinical and even, asking you to walk me through what you saw. Your eyes tracking my hands as I glove up, the snap of latex against my wrist cutting through the quiet. I'm meant to be searching for evidence, for the thread that doesn't align. Instead I'm cataloguing you. The way your breath catches when I lean closer. The way I don't step back. I stretch my hamstring on the bench, feeling the ache hold and release, and I think about proximity. Forced proximity, specifically — the accident of procedure that locks us in that small room, the cold case as excuse, the yellow light and the gurney between us. It's a medical theatre without a patient, just you and me and the charged air where your testimony meets my science. Medical play, some would call it. The latex. The restrained professional voice. The way I'd catalogue your body with the same detached precision I'd use on a finding — except nothing about the way I'm breathing right now is detached. I flex my hand, imagining the snap of a fresh glove, the way my gloved fingers would brush your jaw tilting your face toward the light. *Look here. Tell me if this matches your memory.* And you would — you'd answer, steady and warm, and I'd lose every clinical thought I had. I stand, gathering my water bottle, still reading your message. *See you tomorrow.* I thumb a reply, delete it, start again, and this one I keep: *I'll have the suite prepped early. Wear something I can take off without breaking chain of custody.* Then I'm running again, the last half‑mile home, pushing harder than before — because there's no cold case in the world worth processing more than the warm thought of you under my hands tomorrow night.