Page 64 of Second Alarm
The phone buzzes.
Hanna: Now?
Me: Now.
Hanna: Ty.
Me: Now, Hanna.
A pause. The three dots appear, disappear, appear again. I don't breathe for what I'd estimate is the length of a short documentary.
Hanna: Fine. Use the side door. Cal's not here.
Cal isn’t there. Cal is at the Watershed with Beck and Aiden because tonight is Thursday. Hanna knows this. I know this. Hanna saying "Cal's not here" is her way of acknowledging we're both still pretending in writing, because pretending in writing is safer.
I get in the truck.
This time I invited myself. That's the first thing that's different. The second is that I drove across town on a Thursday night to have a conversation I've been not having for weeks, and I'm out of grace periods, and I'm out of patience, and I'm specifically out of the kind of patience that lets me sit in a booth at Peak Grounds with a Le Carré and pretend I'm not here to say what I'm here to say.
She opens the door in sweatpants and the soft gray t-shirt with the Portland Fire crest bleached almost off, hair wet, andlooks at me the way people look at a bill they've been avoiding in the mail.
"Come in."
"Thanks."
"Kitchen."
She turns and I follow her down the narrow hallway without touching her. I could touch her. The geography is there. I specifically don't, because touching her is how we got into this conversation and I'm not going to let it get us back out.
The kitchen has a single lamp on over the stove, a plate in the sink, a half-finished glass of wine on the counter, a novel on the table face down with the spine cracked. Hanna gestures at the table. I sit. She stays at the counter, arms crossed, leaning against the sink — her combat posture.
"Talk."
"I'm done."
"Done with what?"
"This." I put my hands flat on the table. "I'm not doing the secret again. Not the linen closet. Not two a.m. texts we delete. Not Peak Grounds with Micah pretending he's looking at an espresso machine. I'm not doing any of it."
"So, what is this? What am I looking at?"
"You're looking at me telling you I want the real thing."
"And the real thing is — "
"Public."
She exhales. It's not a laugh — it's the thing her face does before deploying the joke that's going to protect her.
"Right. Because going public worked out so well in my previously imagined scenarios — the ones where I tell my brother, who punched a guy at a bar in Portland for the sole offense of standing too close to me, that I've been lying to him for ten years about sleeping with his best friend? Let me picturethis. Cal is at the Watershed. I sit down. I order a beer. I say, 'Hey Cal, funny story, remember that one night at the academy — '"
"Stop."
" — and Cal says, 'Oh Hanna, tell me more,' and then Big Jim brings out a sheet cake that says 'Congratulations on the Ten-Year Betrayal' in buttercream, and Riley flies in on a dove, and — "
"Stop, Hanna."
She stops. Her hands are shaking. I don't think she knows.
