Page 82 of Faking the Heat

“Not yet,” I say.

I do not embellish it. I don’t say I’m in the process of, or I’m looking at spaces, or any of the four cushioning phrases that arrive in my mouth uninvited. I have spent my entire adult life padding the truth so nobody has to catch it, and I sit in my kitchen with my hands shaking and I let two words go out flat and unaccompanied.

Diane starts laughing.

“Oh, thank God,” she says. “I thought you were about to tell me you had a whole team.”

“I have a cat.”

“Everyone has a cat.” She puts the headset back on, which is the single best thing that has happened to me in nine days. “Right. Here’s what I’m taking into that room at four. Consultant, not staff. Chicago. You keep your book, and before you argue, we’ll want first refusal on anything in our sectors and I’m not moving on that. Quarterly, on us, and I mean actual travel, not a bus.”

“That’s,”

“I haven’t finished.” She’s typing. “If we’re going to have a person in Chicago, then I don’t want a freelancer with a laptop in a rented flat. I want an address I can put on the website. So I’m going to ask for a fit-out budget and a twelve-month underwrite on a storefront lease, and you are going to find me a space and send me photographs of it, and if it’s got a window I can put a name on, so much the better.”

I cannot speak.

“Mandy.”

“Sorry. Yes. Sorry.” I am crying, which is unprofessional and entirely beyond my control. “Diane, I hadn’t asked for that.”

“I’m aware. That’s why you’re getting it.” A shrug, on a screen, eight hundred miles away. “You asked for the thing you actually wanted instead of the thing you thought you could get away with asking for. Do you know how rarely that happens? I’ll call you tomorrow. Go and have a drink.”

The call ends and I sit in my kitchen looking at a black rectangle with my own blotchy face in it.

The weight that has been sitting on my chest since the morning of the fire, the pressure to perform, to be the perfect daughter, the successful designer, doesn’t lift. It evaporates.

I am not going to New York. I am also not turning it down and calling that a sacrifice. I have gone and got a version of it that fits inside my actual life, and I did it on a Tuesday afternoon at my own kitchen table with a cat asleep on the chair opposite, and nobody handed it to me and nobody arranged it for me and there is not one single person on this earth I have to be grateful to for it.

It is mine. That’s the whole thing. It’s just mine.

And there is exactly one person I want to tell.

I get as far as the car keys.

Then I stand in my own hallway with the keys in my hand and I think about a man in a doorway on Michigan Avenue counting people out of a stairwell at one in the morning, and I think about his sister saying he’ll want a shower and eleven hours and he’ll be no use to anyone until tomorrow afternoon.

So I put the keys back on the hook.

Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow I will drive to the loft and I will knock on that ridiculous industrial door and I will say all of it, out loud, with nothing to hide behind and nothing arranged in advance and no script and no notebook.

I feed the cat. I go to bed at nine o’clock and I sleep for eleven hours like somebody put me down.

I do not get to go to him tomorrow.

Because at ten past eight the next morning, somebody knocks on my door.

Chapter thirty-five

The Space Between

Sterling

The fluorescent lights of the briefing room hum at a frequency that feels like it’s trying to vibrate my skull apart. I’m sitting in a plastic chair that’s seen better decades, staring at a brown water stain on the whiteboard that looks vaguely like a lung. It’s fitting, given that my entire internal architecture is currently crumbling. I’m physically present, my body occupying space at Firehouse 99, but I haven’t processed a single word of the department meeting since Chief Miller started talking about budget allocations for new turnouts twenty minutes ago.

My mind is three miles away, anchored in the guest room of my loft, the room that should have been hers, but was only ever a temporary waypoint. Specifically, my thoughts are on the nightstand where Mandy left her battered sketchbook. I can almost feel the texture of the paper under my thumb, the way the spine is starting to give because she’s filled it with so much life. She stood up to Derek at the ball. She looked him in the eye and chose me, even for a moment, and then the alarm had rung. I let the bell pull me away before I could say the only thing that mattered. I’m a man of action, a person who runs into burning buildings because the logic of a fire is simpler than the logic of a heart, and yet I’m paralyzed by the silence that’s grown between us like a thick layer of soot. Every second that passes feels like a timber cracking in a house that’s already been red-tagged.

“Hayes? You with us?” The Chief’s voice cuts through the fog like a foghorn. He’s looking at me with that tired, knowing expression he reserves for the younger guys who haven’t learned how to leave the job at the station. Beside me, Jake shifts in his seat, his eyes darting to me with a look of pointed concern. The rest of the crew is focused on the slide deck, but Miller has always been able to smell distraction from a mile away.