Page 53 of Faking the Heat

“Jake made you a what.”

“There’s a crown involved. It isn’t important.”

“It sounds extremely important, but continue.”

“The point is that the system is gone. And I didn’t decommission it. It stopped working sometime in the last three weeks and I didn’t notice until a woman put her hand on my arm and I stood there wondering whether Mandy had eaten anything today.”

Becca lets out a long breath. I hear her moving, the click of a lamp.

“Can I say the thing now,” she says.

“Is it going to be unpleasant.”

“Moderately.”

“Go ahead.”

“You did this with Priya,” she says. “Except backwards.”

The name lands in the dark bunk room like a dropped tool.

“That’s a hell of an opening,” I say.

“You wanted the thing.”

“I wanted a thing. I didn’t specify which.”

“Then I’m picking this one.” She is fully awake now, and a fully awake Becca is a scalpel. “You were with Priya for two years and you never once called me at one in the morning about her. Not once. In two years. You called me when you made lieutenant and you called me when the headstone came back with the wrong dates on it, and you never called me about her.”

I look at the ceiling. There is a water stain up there shaped roughly like Lake Michigan that I have been looking at for six years.

“I was going to marry her,” I say.

“I know.”

“No. I mean I had worked it out. I had a number in my head for the ring and a rough idea of the month. I’d thought about where. I never told anybody that.”

“Sterling, I knew.”

“How.”

“Because you started saying we about the apartment,” she says. “You’d say we’re thinking about the West Loop. You never said that about anything before or since.” A beat. “You have never once said we about the loft, and Mandy has been living in it for a month.”

That one goes in under the ribs and stays there.

“You never liked her,” I say.

“No.”

“You were like twenty-one.”

“I was twenty-three and I was right.” A pause. “Do you want the reason, or do you want me to be diplomatic.”

“When have you ever been diplomatic.”

“Thanksgiving, twenty nineteen. I was a saint.” I hear her shift. “Fine. I didn’t like the way she introduced you. She’d say, this is Sterling, he’s a firefighter. Every single time. Not this is Sterling. Never just your name. The job first, before anyone had asked, and then she’d stand back half a step and wait for the face people make.”

“That’s a small thing.”