Erin cut her off, voice quiet, tight. “It’s fine.” She turned before Jamie could stop her, boots splashing through puddles as she strode back toward the street.
Panic surged through Jamie’s chest. “Erin, wait… please!” she called, stumbling after her into the downpour. The rain blurred her vision, soaked her clothes until they clung heavy, but none of it mattered. She caught up just enough to brush her hand against Erin’s arm, voice breaking. “I didn’t mean it like that. Please, can we just talk about this?”
Erin stopped. For a moment she stood still, shoulders rising and falling with a sharp breath. Then she turned, rain dripping down her face, her expression set like stone even as her eyes betrayed her.
“No,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Just… forget it happened.”
The words hit harder than the rain. Jamie opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Erin gave the barest shake of her head, then stepped back, putting space between them again. “Goodnight, Jamie.” Her voice cracked just enough to make Jamie’s chest ache.
Nineteen
The station never felt stranger than it did on a weekend. The bullpen looked like a set after the crew had gone home. Lights on, chairs pushed in, a few jackets left on the backs like the people who wore them might return at any moment. The air had the flat chill of stale coffee and disinfectant. In the distance a copier rattled and then gave up. Somewhere down the hall a door clicked shut and the sound carried too far, like it had been dropped into an empty church.
Erin sat at her desk and pretended her pen strokes meant something. She underlined, circled, and drew neat arrows between paragraphs in a crash report that didn’t need her attention on a Saturday afternoon. Her eyes skimmed the same sentence again and again. None of it stuck. The words slid off her focus like rain off a slicker.
Her phone buzzed across the desk. Jamie’s name lit the screen. Erin’s chest hitched, then tightened into a knot that felt practiced, like a muscle that remembered an old injury. She turned the phone face down and set her palm on top of it until the vibration stopped. She didn’t pick it up. She didn’t breathe for a count of five.
I can’t.
The words had lodged behind her ribs on Friday night and refused to leave. They felt cool and absolute. Jamie’s voice had not been cruel. It had broken on the second word. That should have meant something, except Erin couldn’t make it mean anything she could hold. She had reached up without thinking, brushed a wet lock of hair from Jamie’s forehead, and felt like a live wire in a storm. Jamie had leaned, or Erin had imagined it, and then the space betweenthem had snapped back into place. Jamie had stepped away. Jamie had said she couldn’t.
Erin pressed the pen harder than necessary and left a drop of ink where there should have been a clean underline. She capped the pen before she turned the paper into a bruise.
A text banner slid across the top edge of her phone. Then another. She refused to read them. She pulled a fresh legal pad closer. She made a list of tasks that didn’t need to be completed until Tuesday. She numbered each line, then alphabetized it. She planned a new template for press briefings and added a column for weather notes that she knew she would never use. She opened the template again and changed the font. Then she changed it back.
The quiet didn’t help. The lights hummed and the hum threaded through her skull. When she closed her eyes she could see rain droplets clinging to Jamie’s jaw, then moving, then vanishing under the collar of her jacket. She opened her eyes again and stared at a stapler for a full minute like it might offer an alternate outcome.
Her phone buzzed a second time. Then a third. She pulled the top drawer open and slid the phone inside before the fourth vibration began, as if she could lock the sound in with the pens and sticky notes and spare batteries. She shut the drawer and leaned back. The chair squeaked. The sound felt too loud, like a hand on a mirror.
PIOs do not cross lines. They do not get sloppy, even in the rain, even when someone smiles like that across a table and tells a joke that lands a little too close to the heart. They do not reach. They do not want. They do not mistake warmth for an invitation. Erin had told herself those rules for years and believed them more often than not. Last night she had put her hand on the exception and it had moved away.
By late afternoon the light through the high windows had turned the color of old coins. Erin stood, stretched until her shoulders popped, and took the long way around the bullpen that didn’t have anyone in it. She refilled her mug even though the coffee had been sitting for hours and tasted like cardboard. She drank it anyway, lips pressed to a chipped rim, eyes on themuted TV that cycled B-roll no one had asked to see.
The phone in the drawer buzzed once and went still. Erin counted to twenty, then thirty, and told herself she had learned something. She told herself she could learn it again on Sunday.
Sunday looked the same, only her eyes felt sanded down. She logged case notes that had already been logged. She audited a spreadsheet, changed two cells, and changed them back. She drafted a release about a briefing that wouldn’t happen and filed it under a folder titledSomeday. When she caught her reflection in the dark TV screen she almost didn’t recognize the set of her mouth. It looked like her father’s when he was trying not to argue. That made her look away fast.
At noon she took a walk around the block without her coat. The air had that damp spring weight that Boston carried even when it was not spring anymore. She let the cold touch her bare wrists and tried to think of something other than the way Jamie had said the wordcan’t. It was not a rough word. It was not even a loud word. It had been a thin wire that held everything together. Erin wanted to hate it. She couldn’t summon that either.
Back at her desk she opened her email even though there was nothing to check. She sent two notes to herself and flagged both with red. She typed a message to Jamie that saidI’m sorryand then closed the draft before she could add anything else. Another message formed under her fingers without permission.I shouldn’t have reached for you.She highlighted it. She deleted it.
She stayed until the edges of the room felt soft and the silence felt like a pressure on her eardrums. Only then did she go home, but only because her body told her it was time.
By Monday evening, the apartment felt like a place she had once lived in and was visiting now. The last smear of light had left the windows. The city moved on the other side of the glass without asking her to come with it. Erin set her keys on the counter and listened to the familiar clink.
Leo trotted in from the bedroom with his favorite toy, a limp canvas fox that had lost one ear and all of its stuffing. He dropped it at her feet and sat with polite expectation, eyes bright. Erin bent and rubbed the line where his skull met his ears. His tail thumped once against a cabinet.
“Hang on,” she said. “We have our Monday thing.”
She had not meant to make it a ritual when she started it. It had come after a cluster of weeks that had taken more from her than she had planned to give. She had ducked into a bakery because the smell had been warm and ordinary, and she had bought a cannoli because the person behind the counter had said it was the best thing they made. She had taken it home and split it with Leo. He had liked the shell more than the filling. She had liked the quiet more than anything. The next Monday she had gone back. Then the next.
She pulled the white box from the paper bag and slid the loop of gold string loose. The lid lifted with a soft pull. Sugar dusted the edges. She carried the box to the coffee table and sat on the floor so Leo could feel like they were equals for the ceremony. He curled beside her and rested his chin on her knee as if to bless the proceedings.
She broke the cannoli in half. He got the larger part of the shell without the filling, because he did better that way. He crunched with delicate enthusiasm, eyes half-closed like this was proof that life could be good. Erin smiled without feeling it land.
Her half tasted exactly like it always did. Crisp shell. Cream that hit first with sugar and then with something that wanted to be citrus. Chocolate in small chips so they surprised you instead of insisting. She swallowed, waited for the familiar lift, and felt only a thickness at the back of her tongue. She took another bite and managed a small sound that was not quite a laugh.
