Except she wasn't mine anymore.
Hadn't been for eight years.
I picked up the most recent clipping. Housing discrimination in the outer boroughs. Her prose was sharp, precise, relentless—the same qualities that had drawn me to her in a coffee shop near Columbia.
She was twenty-two. Arguing with a barista about a wrong order. I'd stepped in. She'd turned that fire on me instead.
I was gone before she finished her sentence.
The memory surfaced before I could stop it.
Sloane in our first apartment. Boxes everywhere. Laughing because I'd packed my turnout gear but forgotten dishes.
Sloane's face when I opened the ring box. That look of wonder and joy I'd carried with me through every bad shift for two years.
I'm pregnant.Her eyes were bright with a future neither of us could see clearly.
I put the articles down.
Washed my face.
Stood in front of the bathroom mirror again.
The man I'd become in the years since she left stared back. Harder. Quieter. So careful about keeping people at arm's length, I'd forgotten how to let anyone in.
She was out there somewhere. Same city. Different lives.
I turned off the light. Went to bed in an apartment that had never felt like home.
Maybe, I told myself,that's how it should stay.
But I didn't believe it.
I never had.
CHAPTER 2
Sloane
Some mistakesyou can apologize for. Others you just have to live with.
I'd chosen to live with mine by burying myself in work so deep I didn't have time to think about them.
Deadlines instead of memories. Bylines instead of regrets.
Most days, it even worked.
I'd been lying in the dark for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling, running through the story I was chasing. Housing discrimination in Sunset Park. A landlord was systematically evicting elderly tenants to flip units to market rate. Three sources were willing to go on record, but I needed a fourth. The city housing authority wasn't returning my calls.
Which meant I was getting close to something they didn't want me to find.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and reached for my phone. Overnight news alerts first. Twelve emails, three flagged as urgent. A text from my editor that just saidCall me when you're in.Nothing that couldn't wait for coffee.
Coffee was the one indulgence I allowed myself. Expensive beans from a roaster in Red Hook, ground fresh every morning,brewed in a pour-over that took exactly four minutes and produced something close to a religious experience.
I drank it standing at my kitchen counter, scrolling through headlines, letting the caffeine hit my bloodstream like a key turning in a lock.
Six miles through Brooklyn, rain or shine. My body moved on autopilot while my brain worked.
