Page 83 of Faking the Heat

“Yeah, Chief. Loud and clear,” I say, the lie tasting like dry ash. My voice sounds hollow, even to my own ears. Miller grunts and moves on to the next slide, something about hydrants and winter maintenance, but I’m already gone again.

I’ve been in love with her since she spilled that double-shot latte on my favorite boots six years ago. I can still see her face, flushed pink, eyes wide with horror as she spent ten minutes trying to rub the stain out with a napkin that only made it worse. I knew it then, in the middle of a crowded cafe, that I was done for. And I’ve spent every day since building a fortress around that truth so I wouldn’t lose the only person who makes the world feel quiet. I called it friendship because friendship was safe. Friendship didn’t end in a pile of charred rubble and insurance claims. But there’s an empty seat beside me in the briefing room, and the fortress I built has become a prison. I’m the hero, right? The guy who protects things. Yet, here I am, letting the most important thing I have slip through my fingers because I was too afraid to hold on too tight.

The meeting finally breaks, the sound of chairs scraping across the linoleum like a series of small explosions. I stand up, my joints stiff and protesting, and head for the locker room. My skin feels too tight for my body. I need to move. I need a call, a fire, a high-angle rescue, anything that requires my hands to be busy so my head doesn’t have to be. I need to be ’Saint Sterling’ because the ordinary man underneath the uniform is currently drowning in things unsaid. I need the noise of the sirens to drown out the sound of my own heartbeat.

I’m halfway through the bay, the scent of diesel and rubber heavy in the air, when a hand clamps onto my shoulder, firm and immovable. It’s Jake, and he’s not wearing his usual happy-go-lucky grin. He looks like he’s about to deliver news about a fallen brother. He steers me toward the small alcove behind Engine 99, away from the prying eyes of the crew who are currently arguing over whether to order pizza or Thai. The engine’s massive tires loom over us, and the air here is cool and smells of iron.

“Sterling. Stop,” he says, his voice low, skipping the usual banter. “I just got off the phone with Becca. She’s been talking to Kayla.”

I feel a cold prickle of dread crawl down my spine, worse than any backdraft I’ve ever faced. “And? Is Mandy okay?”

“She’s fine. She’s better than fine.” Jake shifts his weight. “Kayla says she took a call yesterday afternoon. With New York.”

The bay goes very quiet, or my ears do.

“And?”

“And Kayla wouldn’t tell me what came of it. She said, and I want to be accurate here, that it isn’t hers to hand over.” He rubs the back of his neck. “So I don’t know, Ster. Nobody’s told me anything. But Becca said to tell you one thing and she made me repeat it twice.”

“Go on.”

“She said: it’s already done. Whatever it is, she’s already done it. She didn’t wait for you.”

I stand there in the cool iron-smelling air behind Engine 99, and something goes through me that I have to stop and identify, because it is not what I expected.

It isn’t panic. It isn’t the bottom dropping out.

It’s relief.

She didn’t wait for me. She had a thing to decide about her own life and she went and decided it, on her own, at her own kitchen table, without a single one of my opinions in the room. She did not stand in a doorway waiting for a man to come across a street.

“You’re smiling,” Jake says, accusingly. “Why are you smiling? That could be extremely bad news.”

“I know.”

“She could be on a flight.”

“I know.”

“Sterling.”

“If she’s on a flight,” I say, and I hear my own voice come out steady for the first time in nine days, “then she got on it because she wanted to, and not because I stood in my own kitchen and told her she was better off without me and then went to work for three days.” I pick my keys up off the workbench. “That would be a thing I could survive. What I can’t survive is another week of this.”

Jake looks at me for a long moment.

“Chief’s going to ask where you went.”

“Tell him I went to say a sentence.”

“That is a terrible thing to tell a chief.”

“Tell him whatever you want. Tell him I’m getting a coffee.” I’m already walking. “Jake.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks. For the couch. For the sandwich. For calling my sister behind my back, which we are going to discuss in detail at a later date.”

“Worth it,” he calls after me. “Absolutely worth it.”