Faith POV

Detectives don't have partners.

It was easy and nice. Yeah, at the very beginning it was, it seemed as it was.

I had someone who opened the door for me, someone who wanted to pay for dinner and someone who kept telling me all that kind andfluffy things a woman would never admit she wants to hear. And he still does.

John is the perfect man and I am very, very lucky.

He doesn't like beer very much, thank God! He almost never drinks.

He remembers to pay the bills and help me every night with cleaning the kitchen.

He remembers every special occasion, and he always has a gift for me. He usually asks me what I want, to make sure to give an useful gift.

He actually sleeps in a real pajama, with shirt, pants and all. It's good to see such a man in your house when you spent over 20 years with an oversized man in a pair of white boxers and t-shirt, with a new wine or mustard stain on it every day.

See what I mean? It's a good change.

When Fred was in my life, my only way out of bad clothing was Bosco.

He never had a calm spirit, and he never had a good diet in his life. I tried to make him eat broccoli but I failed over and over again.

But he does have good taste with clothes.

I hated him when I had to wait for him to change into his jeans after shift. He was slower then I and I had to watch him while he was putting on his shirt. He could at least have a less muscular chest, but no, he was Bosco. And he could have less large shoulders. A lot of men have a happy life even without that kind of shoulders, but then again, he was Bosco.

And Bosco had always the elastic band of his boxer out of his jeans. He said it was cool and it was another point for his, already complete, sexual life.

Well, maybe it was, but it was a real torture for me and my sexual life.

I never, ever, thought about Bosco in that way. Well, maybe once or twice, but you can't work everyday with the hard cop with puppy eyes and don't fall for him once in your life. By the way, I had too much to think about, thanks to Fred and baby-Bosco.

Yeah, baby-Bosco. There was close-your-eyes-before-his-smile-blind-you-Bosco, old-fashioned-Bosco, jerk-Bosco, you-don't-think-enough-of-me-Bosco, I'm-you're-partner-Bosco and baby-Bosco.

He could be just like one of my children. The only difference is that my Charlie is too young to lie down a woman with two words, and even if he wasn't, I still don't know if it's a normal human attitude or if it's just Bosco. By the way, I was never that woman, but I learned of a new one every day. You see, we were partners and partners always share everything. We shared more then others.

Now I share my house with John Miller. Every night I go to sleep in the bed I share with him, after a cup of tea. He's not exactly breathtaking, but I guess I'm too old for that kind of thinking, right?

I saw close-your-eyes-before-his-smile-blind-you-Bosco a couple of times. It's not something you can forget.

The I'm-you're-partner-Bosco, anyway, was always there, under the surface, while he was stealing my chips, or shining brightly while we were sitting in our car during night shift.

But John doesn't steal my chips, he uses the car instead of running for three blocks to catch a bully and he don't think of Bosco as a threat.

It would be impossible because Bosco and I rarely see each other anymore and when we do it's always work related and John is never around.

It's just the heavy silence right after Charlie asks me if he can go to see uncle B, or when Em tells me to tell Bosco she said hi, or when I ask Charlie to put the rotten food in his fridge in the garbage when Bosco isn't around.

It's a heavy silence, but he never talk about it and it disappear within minutes.

I guess it's just an old habit to think of supplying Bosco with non-toxic food. But John's silence is still strange. Maybe because he's always been good at letting me know how he feels by using words. He seems to know a lot of words.

Bosco and I, we didn't need them and it was a good thing, because half of the time when we were together we didn't know how to use them anyway.

Jerk-Bosco was very predictable. I always knew when he was about to show up.

He was there every time someone made the error to think he could the show away from him, and every time I wasn't in the mood to have a conversation about what was wrong in the world or when I didn't agree with him.

Jerk-Bosco could be directly proportional to you-don't-think-enough-of-me-Bosco that always ended up with a full apparition of baby-Bosco. It was a sick circle.

Now there's a mature man in my life. He's a father. He's quiet. He's already up when the ring goes off, and he finds the time to read the newspaper while he's drinking black coffee.

Bosco smashed his alarm clock almost every week, and he needed to run to be at the police station at the start of his shift.

That happen because he's often out at night.

Before all this happened, before I ended up pretending, even with myself, that this is a new life where Maurice Boscorelli isn't needed, I was with him at night. Nothing special, just a beer or two. Well, to be true, I never finished a beer. Usually when we were out of the bar I had the bottle in my hand, but just to play the self-confident woman, and he would let me do that, and paid for me that beer.

That was when he always came out old-fashioned-(gentleman)-Bosco. I would never say it out loud, but he can be kind. I mean, kind in the highest sense of the word.

He had this need to know I was safe, the need to be there at the other side of the street while I entered my building, and he stayed there watching the window of my kitchen until he could see the lights go on.

He always offered me a ride home and his trust.

Right there, when you can mix I'm-you're-partner-Bosco and old-fashioned-Bosco you can see my favourite version of him. The most lovable and scaring to death version of him.

The I'd-die-for-you-Bosco version.

I saw him on a spring day, behind the glass doors of a bank, and in a hospital, during the most horrible day of his life.

And that's when I betrayed him.

I had no intentions to. It's not that I didn't trust him to be a good cop. It's that I didn't trust me to be ready to let him be that cop, knowing he could end up putting his life in front of a gun again.

That's why the I'd-die-for-you-Bosco makes me tremble, and cry, and think a lot about the soft way he whispers to me when I'm sad.

I think somewhere along the way my daughter realized the existence of the I'd-die-for-you-Bosco, too. You know, when you're a young and naive girl and you dream about your hero, who will come on his white horse and offer you his love and his devotion? My daughter met her personal prince with the blue mustang, instead of a white horse, when she was four and she's been luckier than me because she could easily take out the close-your-eyes-before-his-smile-blind-you-Bosco.

Usually, I was trying to sober up my husband, or something like that, and I lived on the danger to come back in the kitchen and find a rough guy being beautifully tender with a little girl who watched him in adoration. The adoration is still there while she tells me to say "hi" to him for her. And it's there every time she comes to me at work and look around for him, thinking I don't notice it. When she manage to find him then close-your-eyes-before-his-smile-blind-you-Bosco would magically appear, and that little, almost invisible, scar can't take away his charm.

My Charlie, anyway, is still loyal to Uncle B. I guess male are simpler then female.

But, in a way, Uncle B. was a hero for him, too.

He still is, in a more mature way.

When Charlie was a child he loved Uncle B. because he had a gun and a car and he played Play Station with him. I could never tell if was Nintendo or Play Station, but I learned.

Now Uncle B. is Charlie's hero because he saved his Mom, and he cancel his dates to watch basketball with him and gives him advices about girls. I don't know how much I can trust him with this last thing, but he never played with girls heart. He always told them his intentions right from the start and I like to think that he can mark my boy with his philosophy 'never touch a woman or a kid'. Fred wasn't always the perfect husband, alcohol influenced his attitude so I'm grateful to Bosco for this thing.

So at last I guess I can understand John's silence, for the things he can't be for me and my kids. I know it hurts him a little but it can't be helped. I mean, it's not so terrible, I still sleep with him, and eat with him, and live with him. I just can't wash away the memories of Bosco and our years together.

Memories don't hurt anyone, right? They are just memories after all.

So, it's no big deal that I freaked out last week when I heard of a car accident where a cop died. And it's nothing strange about that I wanted to know who he was, since it was Bosco's car and it's no problem what-so-ever that I begged Captain Richardson to tell me.

And it's totally understandable if I got mad because of his stubborn line "We don't know for sure. We need to wait before I can tell you anything" and that I told him that I didn't care about that crap and he needed to tell me right then because Bosco is my partner.

John watched me while I calmed down myself, and I felt guilty because of my relief for the death of a cop that wasn't Bosco, and for John's eyes on me.

I was expecting his usual silence, so it was like he slapped my face when he said "Detectives don't have partners".

I could almost feel Bosco next to me asking me if he could give me a ride home after shift.

Detectives don't have partners.

Yeah, but I do.

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