Page 38 of Faking the Heat

“I know you didn’t.” And I do know. That’s the thing about the Petersons. There’s no malice anywhere in the house. There is just a long, patient, decades-deep assumption, delivered warmly, at dinner, with the good napkins. “But she heard it. She hears it every time. She’s been hearing it since she was nineteen and told you she wasn’t going to law school, and she’s built an entire career out of being so precise that nobody could ever call it frivolous, and it still hasn’t worked, because the problem was never the work.”

The kid in the vest finds something to do at the other end of the bar.

“She won a national award last year,” Robert says eventually. “For a hotel. The, ah, the boutique one.”

“I know. I was there. You weren’t.”

It comes out flatter than I intend and I do not take it back.

He is quiet a long time. When he speaks again his voice has lost the boardroom in it. “Her mother and I worry that it isn’t stable.”

“Neither is running into buildings.”

“That’s different.”

“It really isn’t.” I pick the glass back up. “You respect mine because it comes with a helmet. Hers comes with a laptop, so you think it’s a hobby that pays. But she’s the one who gets up at five to fix something nobody will ever consciously see, and then does it again the next day, and nobody hands her a medal or claps when the truck goes by. I’ve been doing this for six years, sir, and I have never once had to be that disciplined about anything.”

Robert Peterson looks at me for a long moment over the rim of his wire frames. Whatever he is looking for, I am too tired and too far past caring to hide it.

“You’re very sure about her,” he says.

I could say a lot of things. Down at the other end of the gallery, in front of a painting about the silence of the universe, the woman I have just been told is better off as a lie is standing by herself.

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

He nods slowly, finishes his drink, and stands. He puts a hand on my shoulder on the way past, the same gesture as an hour ago, and it does not feel the same at all.

“She’s lucky to have you,” he says.

I sit there with the bourbon after he goes, and the joke of it is so complete that I almost laugh out loud. I just made the best case of my life for a woman who told me twenty minutes ago that the truth would destroy us, and I made it to her father, in a bar, where she could not hear a word of it.

The silence of the universe, as it turns out, is much louder than the gallery owner’s bell.

Chapter eighteen

What I Was Reading At One in the Morning

Mandy

There are forty-one browser tabs open on my laptop and not one of them is work.

Firefighter PTSD. Secondary trauma responses. Hypervigilance in first responder populations, which is a phrase I did not know four days ago and now cannot stop reading. A forum where the wives of paramedics talk to each other at two in the morning in a shorthand so specific it makes my throat close, he came home Tuesday and didn’t take his boots off for an hour, does anyone else’s do that.

He does that. I have watched him do that. I have walked past him standing in the middle of his own kitchen still in his boots at eleven at night after working extra shifts. I said something funny about it, because that is what we do, and he laughed, because that is what he does, and I went to bed thinking nothing of it at all.

I close the tab. I open it again ninety seconds later.

The loft is doing its nighttime thing, the radiator ticking and the refrigerator cycling and the streetlights coming through the industrial windows in long amber bars across the concrete. Bowie is asleep on my feet with the total confidence of an animal who has never once in his life worried about anything. It is a quarter to one. Sterling has been on shift since six yesterday morning and the group text from Kayla two hours ago said there is something bad in the West Loop, a partial collapse, it’s on the news, is he on that.

He is on that.

I have not moved from this couch in three hours.

The stupid part, the part I would not admit to Kayla and would rather die than admit to my mother, is that I am not doing this because of tonight. I started four nights ago, in the dark, on a couch, with a candle between us and the power out across four city blocks.

I asked him why there had been nobody serious since Priya. The one he told me he could see himself marrying one day. I asked it like a game, because it was a game, but he did not answer it like one.

He said the job takes something out of you. He said Priya did not love him, she loved that he was a hero, like it was a conversation piece, and she did not like the reality of what being with him actually meant. And then he said a thing about being adopted that I have been carrying around in my chest ever since, about how you make yourself worth keeping by being indispensable, how you be the one who shows up and does not crack, and how a fire always goes out eventually and he genuinely does not know whether anyone would want the version of him underneath.