Page 66 of Second Alarm
"Then we have a problem."
"Don't you dare give me a timeline."
"I'm not giving you a timeline. I'm giving you a — "
"An ultimatum. That's the textbook definition of an ultimatum. I learned it in a magazine when I was seventeen."
"You didn't read magazines when you were seventeen."
"I read one magazine once. It covered ultimatums. This is one."
"I'm not giving you an ultimatum. I'm telling you what I can and can't do. I can't do the secret again. That's the information."
"That's an ultimatum with better phrasing."
"Maybe."
She stops pacing. Her eyes are the eyes I saw in the hallway at the station at midnight, when her back was against the wall — I've tried for six weeks not to think about those eyes, and I've thought about them every time I've closed my own, and thinking about them now isn't helping me keep my voice even.
"I can't lose Cal." Her voice drops. "Ty, I can't. I can't be the person who broke my brother."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I know better than anyone, Hanna."
"Then why are you — "
"Because I can't keep him either. Not like this." The thing happening to my voice — it isn't working correctly and I can hear it. I take a breath and make it work. "I can't look at him on Sunday with you next to me at his mother's table and pretend I haven't had my mouth on you in a hallway two days prior. I can't take his check for the fundraiser and shake his hand knowing I'm lying to him with the same hand. I can't be his brother and your secret. One of those has to go. I want it to be the secret."
"Ty."
"I'm not asking you to do it tomorrow. That was a bad choice of words. I'm asking you to agree we're going to do it — before he finds out another way. Because he's going to find out another way, Hanna. The barbecue is Saturday and half the station has an eyebrow up, and Gemma — "
"Gemma?" Her head comes up.
"She found us. Wednesday. In the linen closet."
"Oh my god, I forgot."
"She was cool about it. She's a friend. But she's the canary. We're out of canaries. Derek is going to figure it out by accident by Saturday. Cal is going to figure it out because his best friend and his sister are making a face he hasn't seen either of us make. His radar isn't going to be broken forever, Hanna — it's broken because the input is him."
She's staring at me. "You've been thinking about this a lot."
"I haven't been sleeping."
"Okay."
She sits down across the table and pulls the novel toward her with one finger, spinning it in place the way she used to spin a pen when she was thinking. I recognize the spin. I'm not going to comment on the spin.
"I'm terrified," she says. "I'm specifically terrified of a very specific thing, which is that I tell Cal, and Cal looks at me the way people looked at my dad's funeral — like the thing they want to fix is already done — and he says something like 'I understand,' and he doesn't, and then we have a Christmas where he doesn't come, and my mom has to pretend, and the whole Larsen thing — the whole house, the whole — "
She trails off.
The thing she isn't saying — the thing under the thing — settles on me. Because I know exactly what the rest of the sentence is. I've been living inside the rest of that sentence for ten years.
Cal's family, since forever, has had three legs: his mother, Hanna, and me. Not me in any conventional sense — me by Sunday dinners, by the chair his mother set out the first year and never put back, by the funerals and the barbecues and the casseroles I've eaten at her table for a lifetime. If I become Hanna's husband, I stop being Cal's chosen brother and becomeCal's brother-in-law, which sounds like a small change and isn't, because brothers-in-law aren't what brothers are. Brothers-in-law are what the man who used to be your friend becomes after he marries your sister. Cal's going to do that math in about four seconds when she tells him. He's going to look at me and at Hanna and at the chair, and he's going to subtract me from the chair, and he's going to be down to two legs in a week. That isn't enough legs for a stool, much less for a family.
