Page 69 of Faking the Heat

“I think this isn’t about Mandy at all.” She says it gently, which is worse. “I think this is about Priya.”

“Priya was two years ago.”

“Priya was a woman who liked being with a man who ran into buildings and did not like a man who came home smelling like one. And when she left you took that and you filed it, and somewhere in the filing it stopped being a fact about Priya and turned into a law of physics.” Her voice drops. “Sterling. You have decided in advance that Mandy is going to work out what the job actually costs and go. So you got out ahead of it. You gave her the exit before she could ask for one, and you’ve been calling that being decent.”

“Somebody had to be decent.”

“Nobody asked you to be decent. She asked you to be there. Like she was.”

I get up. I take the plate to the sink because my hands need somewhere to be, and I stand with my back to my sister and run water over a plate that does not need it.

“You want to know the actual reason,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong.

“Yes.”

“When I was six years old somebody signed a form and I stopped being a case number and started being a Hayes.” The water runs. “And I worked out very early that the way you make sure that never gets reversed is that you make yourself the one they can’t do without. You be the guy who shows up. You be the guy who fixes it. You never, ever be the one who needs something, because the second you’re a person who needs something you’re a cost, and costs get reviewed.”

Behind me, nothing.

“I have been useful to that woman for six years,” I say. “I moved her furniture and I fixed her sink and I showed up at two in the morning about a spider. And then for three weeks I got to be something else, and it was the best thing that has ever happened to me, and then I told her the truth and she didn’t say anything, and I thought, well. There it is. Reviewed.”

The tap is still running. I turn it off.

When I turn around Becca is crying, silently and furiously, wiping at her face with the heel of her hand like the tears have personally inconvenienced her.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Shut up.” She wipes her face again. “I’m allowed. I’ve been waiting nineteen years to find out that’s what you thought.”

“Becca.”

“I was five years old when I came into that house and you were seven.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “Two years, Sterling. Two. Same forms, same judge, same everything. And it has never once occurred to me, not for one single hour of my life, that I was on probation in there. So explain to me how you looked at an identical set of paperwork and concluded you were being assessed.”

I don’t have anything for that.

“And I can tell you exactly why it never occurred to me.” She wipes her face with the heel of her hand. “Because you were already standing there. I was five years old and there was a boy in that house who had decided it was his entire job to put himself between me and every door in it, and I have never once in my life had to wonder whether I was safe. You built that, Sterling. You built it out of being frightened, and I got to grow up inside it, and you have never let yourself live in it for a single day.” A breath. “And now there’s a woman in this city who watched you come home wearing the worst call of your year, and put you in the shower, and got the grit out from under your fingernails. And your considered professional read on that is that she was reviewing you.”

“That’s not-”

“That’s exactly what you just said.”

I sit back down. I sit down because my legs have made an independent decision.

We stay like that for a while. The light comes in low and yellow across the floor, and the loft does its late-afternoon thing where it looks enormous and empty and like somewhere a person could get lost.

Eventually Becca gets up, blows her nose loudly, and starts walking around my apartment with the flat professional interest of someone reading a chart.

“What are you doing.”

“Assessing.” She stops at the counter by the door, where the mail has been accumulating since roughly the beginning of the month. She picks up the heavy cream envelope on top of the pile and turns it over. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s got a crest on it.” She opens it, because she has never asked permission for anything in her life. “The Chicago Fire Department Annual Firefighters’ Ball. Saturday. The Hilton.” She looks up. “Sterling, this is Saturday.”

“I’m not going.”

“Why not.”