Page 39 of Faking the Heat

A guy in the dark with nothing to save. That is what he called himself. To me. Out loud.

And then the candle burned down and we stopped talking, then everything that happened after that, and in the days since we have not said one word about any of it. Not the confession. Not the rest of it.

Here is what I have actually been researching, if I am being honest, which at a quarter to one on a Tuesday I apparently have to be.

It’s not how to help him.

It’s whether I am the second one.

Whether I am another woman who liked the shape of him, the hero, the safe harbor, the man who shows up with a spare room when your apartment burns down and would fold the first time she was asked to hold something heavy. Because his ex is a doctor. She is a doctor and she still could not do it, and I am a woman who chose an ivory over an ecru for a boutique last month and considered it a hard week.

Kayla would say I am spiraling.

Kayla would be correct.

I get up, put the laptop on the coffee table, and stand at the window with my arms crossed, looking down at a street where nothing is happening.

And I think about the bar.

I have not told anybody about the bar. Not Kayla. Certainly not Sterling.

Saturday night at the Steiner, after I stood in front of a painting about the silence of the universe and told the person who matters most to me that we were better as a lie, I gave it eleven minutes and then I went to find him. I do not know what I was going to say. I had nothing. I just could not stand in that corner one second longer with the thing I had said still hanging in the air where I had left it.

He was at the far end of the gallery with his back to me. My father was on the stool beside him. And I stopped about fifteen feet short, behind a pillar and a woman in sequins, because my father had just said her mother and I worry that it isn’t stable, and Sterling said, Neither is running into buildings.

I stood there and listened to a man I had just turned down explain and defend my career to my father.

I didn’t go over. I stood behind that pillar with a glass of wine going warm in my hand and I let a man defend me to my own father twenty minutes after I told him we could not be real, and then I walked back to the corner and looked at the indigo painting until my mother came to find me.

That is what I have been researching. That is what all forty-one tabs are actually about.

The industrial door groans on its hinges.

I turn, and Bowie lifts his head as Sterling comes in.

He does not turn on the lights. He gets three steps onto the concrete and stops, and even in the dark I can see it, the way he is standing, the specific shape of a man carrying something in his shoulders. He is filthy. Grey to the elbows, soot in his hairline, station blues stiff with dust, and the smell comes across the room ahead of him, thick and acrid, dust that used to be a ceiling.

“Mandy?” His voice is a wreck. Sandpaper and gravel. It does not sound like him.

“I’m here.”

He crosses the kitchen and I see his eyes go to the coffee table, to the laptop I did not close, to the screen still glowing with its bolded headers in twenty-point type. Firefighter PTSD. Secondary trauma responses.

I watch him read it.

I have never wanted to be able to fold time backward as badly as I do in that second. I reach for the lid but he is already looking away, and the not-saying-anything is worse than anything he could have said.

“You’re home,” I say. It comes out at a whisper.

He drops his gear bag. The thud goes through the whole floor. He walks to the island, puts both hands on the marble, and leans there like the counter is the only thing holding him at that height.

“Partial collapse,” he says, to the countertop. “Old warehouse in the West Loop. Squatters. Ten hours.” A pause with something in it. “Two didn’t make it. One was a kid. Maybe thirteen.”

I set the laptop aside and stand up.

Every single thing I have read in four days evacuates my head at once. All of it. The forum posts, the clinical language, the list I actually wrote in my Notes app of things not to say. Gone, instantly and completely, because there is a person in my kitchen and he is shaking.

I can see it from here. His hands on the marble are vibrating, a fine fast tremor that makes the soot on his knuckles look alive.