Page 40 of Faking the Heat

I cross the floor and stop just outside the radius of him, close enough to smell the fire.

“Sterling. You need to sit down.”

“I’m fine,” he says, and the word breaks in half on the way out.

He slides down the side of the island, back scraping the cabinet, until he is sitting on the concrete with his forearms on his knees, and then he puts his face in his hands and does not care that he is grinding soot into his own eyes.

I do not go get a blanket. I do not offer him water or suggest a shower or do any of the useful competent things I am extremely good at doing. I sit down on the cold floor beside him with my back against the same cabinet, close enough that our shoulders are almost touching, and I stay there.

“You don’t have to be fine,” I say.

I put my hand on his forearm. His skin is freezing. He flinches, a full-body startle, like I have set something off, and I do not take my hand away, and after a second he leans into it.

“In the Army it was different,” he says into his palms. “You expect the world to come apart. You’re geared for it. But here? Middle of the city, on a weekday. You’re supposed to go to work and come home. You’re not supposed to have to decide who gets air, because you can only reach one of them through the rebar.”

He pulls his hands down and stares at the far wall. There is a clean track through the soot under each eye and he has no idea it is there.

“I couldn’t get to him,” he says. “The kid. He was looking right at me. He was screaming for his mother and I was three feet away and the slab was too heavy. I’m a paramedic. That’s the deal. I do the work and they live. The math didn’t work today.”

I do not tell him it was not his fault. I have read enough forum posts to know that is the thing people say when they want the conversation to be over. I slide my hand down to his wrist and put my thumb on the pulse point, and I hold on, and I let the silence be as long as it needs to be.

The refrigerator cycles. Bowie pads over, sniffs one filthy boot, delivers a small skeptical noise, and settles against Sterling’s hip like a warm patchwork judgment.

“I read what was on your computer,” he says. He turns his head. He looks like hell, grit in his hair, soot mapped across his face, eyes red-rimmed. “You were looking for a way to fix me. Or checking whether I was going to come apart in the middle of your performance.”

It is a jab, but there is no weight behind it. It is just a man with nothing left for tact.

“No,” I say.

“Mandy, ”

“I wasn’t looking for a way to fix you.” My voice is not steady and I let it not be. “I was looking for a way to understand. You spend all of your time being the thing everyone else stands on. Becca. The crew. Me. Especially me. And I sat here and let you tell me you don’t know if anyone would want the version of you underneath all that.”

He does not say anything.

“So I’ve been thinking, and reading,” I say. “Since that night. Not to fix you. Because I wanted to know what it costs. And because, ”

I stop.

“Because what.”

There is a version of this where I do not say it. That version is safe and I am extremely practiced at it and it is available to me right now.

“Because I was trying to work out whether I’m Priya,” I say.

His head comes up.

“You told me she loved that you were a hero. That she didn’t want the reality of it.” My throat is doing something I cannot control. “And I’ve been lying awake going, what exactly do you think you’ve been doing, Mandy. He turned up at your worst hour with a spare room and smile and you have been living inside the best version of him for six weeks. You don’t know what it costs. You’ve never once had to hold the heavy end.”

“That’s not, ”

“And then at the gallery,” I say, because if I stop now I will not start again, “I went to find you.”

He goes very still.

“After. I went to find you, and you were at the bar with my father, and I stood behind a pillar like a coward and I listened to the whole thing.”

I watch him understand what I am saying.