Page 54 of Faking the Heat

“It’s a small thing I watched happen forty times, so I stopped filing it as small.” Her voice gentles. “She liked being with a man who ran into buildings. She did not like a man who came home smelling like one. Those aren’t the same person, Sterling, and she only ever wanted the first.”

“She told me that at the end. More or less.”

“I know she did. And then you took it and filed it and decided the lesson was that you’re a bad bet. When the actual lesson was that she was.”

I don’t say anything. Out in the bay somebody’s radio crackles and goes quiet.

“Ask me what the difference is,” Becca says.

“What’s the difference.”

“Priya never saw the job. She saw the parts of the uniform that photograph well.” A beat. “You just told me Mandy put her hands under the water and got the grit out from under your fingernails. Do you understand that you led with that? Out of everything that has happened in the last two days, that’s the part you called me about at one in the morning.”

I sit there in the red light with my elbows on my knees.

“There was a kid on Tuesday,” I say. “Thirteen. We worked him for forty minutes.”

“Sterling.”

“I’m not telling you for the reason you think. I’m telling you because I came home with him still on me and she didn’t ask me one question. She got me in the water. And when I couldn’t stand up in it she took the soap out of my hand.”

“And Priya,” Becca says quietly, “would have asked whether you’d be all right for a dinner on Saturday.”

“That’s unkind.”

“Is it wrong?”

The honest answer is that it is not wrong, and she knows it is not wrong, which is why she asked it in that particular shape.

“So what am I supposed to do with this,” I say.

“You know what you’re supposed to do with it.”

“She has a job offer in New York, Bec. There’s a deadline on it. Her parents are asleep in my guest room believing a thing that isn’t true, her father has started using the word intentions out loud, and in four days this is supposed to be over and she goes back to some other unit the landlord has scraped together for her and we go back to Thursday movies.”

“And you think saying it out loud makes that worse.”

“I think saying it out loud hands her one more thing to manage,” I say. “She has a mother picking venues and an ex who treated her like a renovation project and a career she’s been apologizing for since she was twenty-two. If I put this on the pile she’ll do what she always does, which is put everybody else in front of herself and then wonder in six months why she feels like a stranger in her own life. I’m not going to be one more person she has to accommodate.”

Becca is quiet a moment.

“That is the most generous-sounding cowardice I have ever heard,” she says.

“What the fuck, Becca.”

“I’m serious. It was beautiful. You should write it down.” Her voice sharpens. “You’ve dressed it up as protecting her. But listen to what you actually said. You decided on her behalf, without asking, what she is capable of carrying. You made a call about her interior life from the outside, the way you’d size up a structure from the sidewalk. And the reason you get to do that is that if you never ask, you never have to hear no.”

I don’t answer.

“You’re not protecting the friendship,” she says. “You’re choosing a slower kind of loss because it’s quieter, and because you can tell yourself it’s noble.”

The ventilation cycles. Somebody two bunks over turns onto his side and mutters something into his pillow. But none of it can distract me from the truth of this conversation, no matter how badly I want it to.

“Say it,” Becca says.

“I’ve said it. I’ve said it to you in a hundred shapes in the last twenty minutes.”

“You’ve said things adjacent to it. Say the actual sentence. Once, out loud, to me, at two in the morning, where it costs you nothing.”