Page 48 of Faking the Heat

“We are catastrophically failing it,” I say. “We failed it so hard that I would like it stricken from the document entirely. Rule seven is dead. We killed it. There’s a small service on Thursday.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

She is quiet for a second, and then: “Cereal.”

It is the word we use to reset, the one from the stupid list we wrote on the couch in week one, and hearing it now, in the dark, twenty feet from her sleeping father, hits me somewhere I am not braced for.

“Okay,” I say.

“No, I mean it, I’m calling it. Cereal. I need thirty seconds where nothing is a bit.”

“You’ve got it.”

She takes a breath. I hear it go all the way down this time, which is the first one that has.

“We haven’t talked about last night,” she says.

“No.”

“Not once. All day. We moved my entire life into your closet and we talked about hangers.”

“You had opinions about the hangers.”

“Sterling.”

“Sorry.”

“Are we going to?” she says. “Talk about it?”

And there it is, sitting in the fourteen inches of mattress between us with the cat asleep on top of it.

Here is the truth I am not going to say tonight, in this room, with her father snoring through the drywall: I have been in love with this woman since she put a double-shot latte down the front of my boots in a coffee shop six years ago, and I have spent every one of those years building a very good life immediately adjacent to that fact. I know how to be her anchor. I know how to fix her sink and move her boxes and show up at two in the morning. I have made an entire personality out of standing exactly close enough to be useful and exactly far enough to be safe.

And yesterday she put her hands under the water and washed a dead thirteen-year-old off my skin, and I have not been able to find the far edge of anything since.

“Yes,” I say. “But not with your dad forty feet away doing an impression of a chainsaw.”

“That’s fair.”

“He’s going to stop breathing at some point and I’m going to have to go in there, and I’d rather not have that conversation half-finished.”

“That is a horrifying thing to say.”

“I’m a paramedic. It’s a horrifying job.”

She laughs, and then it goes crooked halfway through, and I hear her breath catch, and I understand that we have arrived at the actual thing.

“He asked me about my intentions,” I say. “Your dad. While you were in the shower.”

“He did not.”

“He used the word intentions, Mandy. Out loud. Like a man in a period drama. And then he mentioned your grandmother’s ring, and I said something with the word ’serious’ in it, and I have no memory of the rest because I left my body.”

“Oh my God.”

“I want you to understand that I was fully prepared for questions about the pension. I had answers ready about the pension.”