Page 67 of Faking the Heat

Next of Kin

Sterling

There is somebody in my kitchen.

I come up out of sleep the way I have come up out of sleep for six years, all at once and already sitting, feet on the floor before the rest of me has finished the assessment. Sounds: a cupboard, the tap, the particular shriek of the drawer that sticks. Time: 2:20 p.m. by the clock on the stove, which means I got five hours, which is two more than I planned on. Threat level: low, on the grounds that burglars do not historically stop to run the tap.

Then I hear humming, and I know exactly who it is, and my chest does something I do not have a name for.

Becca is standing at my counter in a Brown sweatshirt with her hair scraped up off her neck, making tea in my last clean mug. A duffel bag is slumped against the island like it walked here on its own and then quit.

“You’re in Providence,” I say.

“I am demonstrably not in Providence.”

“Becca.”

“You stopped answering your phone.” She doesn’t turn around. “Four days. I called you six times. On the seventh I called Jake, who told me you were fine in a voice that made it extremely clear you were not fine, and then I looked at flights.”

“You have rotations.”

“I swapped with a man named Todd who owes me for something I will take to my grave.” She turns around and looks at me properly, and I watch her do the intake, the same three-second sweep I do on every patient I have ever knelt next to. Skin. Eyes. The way I am standing. “God. You look like something they’d pull out of a river.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m being kind. Sit down before you fall down, and don’t tell me about the double shifts, I already know about the double shifts, Jake sang like a canary.”

I sit down. It seems easier than the alternative.

She puts the tea in front of me. She has made it the way our mother made it, which neither of us has ever discussed and neither of us is going to start discussing now, and she sits on the stool across from me with her hands around her own mug and lets the silence go on long enough that I understand it is deliberate.

“How did you get in,” I say.

“You gave me a key.”

“I gave you that key six years ago.”

“And I have never once used it, and I want you to think for a second about what it means that today is the day I did.”

I drink the tea. Outside, a truck goes past on Ashland and the windows shake in their frames the way they always do, and I am aware that she is doing an inventory of my apartment and that she is very good at inventories.

It does not take her long. There is not much to find, which is the problem.

“There are two mugs in your drainer,” she says. “You live alone and you have been on shift for three days.”

“Becca.”

“There is a bag of cat food in the cupboard above the fridge. I saw it when I got the tea. The cat has been gone for nine days, Sterling, and there is an open bag of expensive cat food in your kitchen.” She sets her mug down. “Also there’s a sketchbook on the nightstand in your guest room. I looked. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.”

“She’ll want that back.”

“She will,” Becca agrees. “So why is it still there.”

I don’t answer.

“You’ve had nine days and a working phone and a truck,” she says. “You could have driven it four blocks.”

“I texted her about the boxes.”