Page 40 of Second Alarm
I reach for the deflection. I reach for the joke.
On any given day I have a hundred possible jokes at my disposal. The joke about his glasses. The joke about his Le Carré phase. The joke about his hoodie, his reading, his face.
None of them come.
I open my mouth, close it, open it again. My brain reaches for punchlines and returns empty-handed. I haven't been unable to find the joke at the moment I needed it since I was fifteen years old and my father's captain came to the door and said there has been an accident. That was the last time. In the fourteen years since, I've always had the joke. I cultivate jokes the way other people cultivate gardens. I don't fail at this.
The silence stretches — the way water stretches when you fill a glass past the rim and the surface tension is the only thing holding it in place, a millimeter above the glass, and everyone watching is holding their breath.
I look at my coffee.
I don't look at Ty.
Across the shop, Micah is wiping down the espresso machine. His eyes aren't on the machine. They're on the booth by the window for one long second before he goes back to the espresso machine, and his face does nothing, and cold horror settles in my chest — because Micah knows. Micah has always known. Micah, who's served Ty Brennan black coffees every morning for eight years and is now serving me, has been standing behind that counter with the silent awareness of a man watching a very long inevitability finally line up its last pieces.
"Hanna." Ty's voice is very soft.
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"Yeah." I stare at my cup. "That's the problem."
"Okay."
"It was a good line. You can't just drop a line like that in a coffee shop."
"I wasn't — "
"'I know you do.' That was — "
"I was just — "
"You were just saying a true thing. I know. That's why I can't get a joke to work right now. You're — you're functionally a — you're a — "
I trail off, take a breath, close my eyes. I count backwards from ten, because I have a method, because I've worked on this method for a decade in Portland, and the method works every time. The method isn't working right now.
"Hanna."
"What."
"Breathe."
"I'm breathing, Ty — "
"You're not."
"I'm — "
"You're not." He doesn't push it. He just waits.
I breathe. The breathing, it turns out, is the thing I wasn't doing.
My phone rings.
It rings with the timing of a rescue boat arriving exactly when needed, and I grab it. My mother. I answer.
"Hi, Mom."
