Page 68 of Faking the Heat

“Oh, I know you texted her about the boxes.” She pulls her feet up onto the rung of the stool, and for a second she looks about fifteen. “I know exactly what that text said, because I have received about four hundred of them over the course of my life. Warm, brief, entirely about logistics, with a little joke at the end so nobody can accuse you of being cold. It’s a beautiful piece of work. It’s a wall with a welcome mat in front of it.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man who has been awake for most of a week.”

“I know. I’m going to say worse. Do you want a sandwich first?”

“Yes.”

So she makes me a sandwich, in my own kitchen, with food I did not know I had, or she probably went and bought, and she does badly, and I eat all of it.

It is only when I am finished that she starts.

“Tell me what happened,” she says. “Not the version you’d put in a report. The one underneath it.”

And here is the thing about my sister. Jake would make it a bit, because that is how Jake loves people, and I would let him, because that is how I let people love me. Kayla would probably tell Mandy. The Chief would look at me across a desk with a pamphlet in his hand. Becca is the only person on this earth who knew me before I built the thing I am currently standing in, and she has never once agreed to admire it.

So I tell her.

I tell her about the ring in the velvet box at the anniversary dinner and the way Mandy’s whole face went white and formal. I tell her about the drive home and the loft and the fight that wasn’t a fight, the one where I finally said the thing out loud, all of it, six years of it, standing in my own kitchen with my hands shaking.

And then I tell her the part I have not said to anybody.

“She didn’t answer,” I say. “She stood there. And I watched her not answer, and I decided that was the answer, and then I picked up my bag and went to work.”

Becca is very still.

“How long,” she says.

“Three days.”

“You confessed to a woman you have loved for six years and then you did not come home for three days.”

“There was a shift. It was legitimately on the roster.”

“Sterling.”

“And then I picked up another one.”

“There it is.” She lets out a long breath and pushes the stray black curls back off her face with both hands. “Okay. Okay, I need you to hear the next thing I say, and I need you to hear it as a person and not as a military lieutenant. Can you do that?”

“Probably not.”

“Try.” She leans forward. “You are grieving a silence that you built. You said the hardest thing you have ever said, you didn’t wait four seconds for her to find her feet, and then you removed yourself from the building for seventy-two hours. And you have spent the nine days since then telling yourself the story that she left. She didn’t leave, Sterling. You went to work.”

The refrigerator cycles. I look at the crumbs on the plate.

“She moved out,” I say.

“Into what, exactly? Into a place she’d been waiting weeks for while you were unreachable. Into her own apartment, which is a thing adults are allowed to have.” She spreads her hands. “You’ve dressed up an ordinary logistical fact as a verdict, because a verdict is easier. A verdict is finished. A verdict doesn’t require you to do anything except be sad in a very organized way, which happens to be your single greatest talent.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Is it wrong?”

It is not wrong. It has not been wrong once, all afternoon, and I am beginning to remember why I stopped answering the phone.

“You want to know what I actually think,” she says.

“I suspect I’m going to find out.”