Page 69 of Second Alarm
I close my eyes. I sleep for an hour and a half.
When I wake up, the barbecue is in thirty-six hours and I'm trying hard not to think about the fact that there will be eighty people in a parking lot with grills, and Cal will be one of them, and so will Derek's rubber chicken, and so will we.
Riley shows up at Station 7 in civilian clothes, which is an event. Riley in civilian clothes mid-shift means Riley is here on what I'll call investigatory leisure.
She finds me at the coffee pot without looking like she's finding me, which is part of why she's good at her job.
"Brennan. Got a second?"
It's not a question. I get a second.
She walks me to the apparatus bay and leans against Engine 7 with a posture that says nothing, looks at me with an expression that says nothing, and asks mildly, "You sleeping okay these days, Brennan?"
"Yes."
"Eating okay?"
"Yes."
"Whose toothbrush is in your bathroom?"
I open my mouth. I close it. I don't say anything for two full seconds, which is two seconds longer than a man not hiding something would have needed.
Riley smiles — not a friendly smile, the smile of a woman who has just confirmed a hypothesis without asking the question that would have confirmed it.
"That's all I needed." She pats me on the shoulder, walks back to the kitchen, refills her coffee, and leaves the building. The whole encounter takes minutes.
I stand in the apparatus bay for a full minute trying to recover something, and I can't, because Riley Pritchard has just interrogated me without asking a single question that would have held up in court. She knows what she knows. There is, as far as I can determine, nothing I can do about it.
Chapter 13
Hanna
Isend the text at four fifty-one in the morning and then I sit at my kitchen table in the dark for forty-five minutes and try to think of a single good decision I've ever made.
I can't think of one.
The list of bad decisions is, by contrast, robust. I can name them chronologically. Age nine: attempting to iron a dress while it was on me. Age fifteen: not looking at the coffin. Age eighteen: convincing Cal he could drive home from a party when neither of us could feel our feet. Age nineteen: Ty Brennan, three months, a supply closet, a twin bed, a shirt I took with me to Portland and never once wore again because every time I looked at it I couldn't breathe. Age nineteen through twenty-nine: Portland, Portland, Portland, a series of bad dates shaped exactly like whichever part of Ty the man in front of me wasn't.
Age twenty-nine: Copper Ridge. Home. A linen closet. A kitchen with a dying-bug porch light where I told the man of my life I couldn't promise him a date for telling my brother.
Age twenty-nine: a text at four fifty-one in the morning that readI'm not going to let you leave the bed.
I stare at my phone.
Okay,he sent back. JustOkay.
I know Ty Brennan's okays better than I know most people's full sentences. I've been cataloguing them since I was nine.Okaywith a period is patience.Okaywithout is agreement. ThisOkayhad a period. ThisOkaywas a man holding a door open and not telling me how long he could hold it.
I drink two glasses of water in a row, then do what I've been refusing to do for weeks —weeks since a Saturday night in the station kitchen when I kissed him and he kissed me back and neither of us said it out loud, weeks of linen closets and kitchen conversations and the specific discipline of pretending in public — walk into my own bedroom, close the door, lie face down on the pillow, and think about Ty.
Not think about the conversation about Ty.
Think about Ty.
The way he looked at me in my kitchen two hours ago. The way he saidI'm not built for thatand I knew, the way you know when a kettle has gone quiet, that he meant it. The way he drove across town on a Thursday and sat at my table and asked for a thing he's earned the right to ask for, and I said I needed tonight, and what I've done with tonight is spent it refusing to let myself have the thing that brought him to my kitchen in the first place.
I pick up the phone. I don't text him.
