Page 51 of Second Alarm
"Night, Hanna," Cal says.
"Goodnight, Hanna." Ty's voice, from the couch. The first thing he's said. The only thing.
I close the door behind me.
In the stairwell I sit on the third step, put my face in my hands for twenty seconds, get up, and drive home to my mother's. I lie in my old bed and think, over and over, about the fact that Ty kept the shirt. He kept it. He wore it. He wore it tonight, on the couch next to my brother, like a man running out of self-discipline.
At eleven forty-two, my phone buzzes.
Ty: The shirt is clean, for the record. I washed it.
I laugh out loud into my pillow in the dark — the real laugh, the unguarded one, the laugh I used with him at the academy under the exit sign in the dorm hallway — and my pillow is wet from laughter or something adjacent to the laugh, and I'm in very, very deep trouble.
Me: How long have you had it?
Ty: Since it randomly showed up in the mail.
Me: Have you worn it?
Ty: Not on purpose.
Me: Ty.
Ty: Go to sleep, Hanna.
Me: I'm going.
Ty: Hanna.
Me: What?
Ty: Thanks for coming by.
I put the phone face down on the nightstand.
I don't fall sleep for an hour.
When I do sleep, I dream about a mall in Portland, and a post office in Beaverton, and a package that wasn't lost.
Chapter 10
Ty
I'm going to tell her.
I haven't decided. I keep telling myself I haven't decided, all the way through shift change Saturday morning, all through truck checks, all through the briefing, all through Beck's standard Saturday reminders about paperwork and the department's current initiative regarding fleet maintenance logs, all through the mid-morning medical that Hanna and Gemma catch on Fourth Street, all through lunch at the kitchen table with Cal next to me rebuilding his tuna sandwich twice because he doesn't believe in a tuna sandwich until he's deconstructed it.
I'm going to tell her.
I haven't decided.
I haven't decided, and I'm going to tell her.
Both of those things are, as of this morning, completely and simultaneously true.
The thing happens around eleven p.m. I'm in the kitchen alone, cleaning up after the post-shift sandwich Harrison made — because Harrison will make sandwiches when he's stressed, and Harrison was stressed at dinner. The sandwich was excellent but also twelve people's worth, leaving enough bread-and-roast-beef debris on the counter to prosecute a case in. Everybody has gone to bed except for the third-shift rotation, the station is quiet, the engine bay is dim, and I'm washing dishes at the sink in the light above the stove.
Hanna comes in.
