Page 78 of Faking the Heat

“Right,” he says. He puts his coat on. He takes his time about the collar. “For what it’s worth, the Bellamy Kwon thing stands. Call them or don’t. I won’t be involved.”

“Thank you.”

“And Mandy.” He’s already turning. “You never used to interrupt me.”

Which is, I think, the closest thing to an apology I am ever going to get from Derek Marx, and I decide, standing in a blanket on Michigan Avenue, that it is enough.

He goes off toward Delaware. I don’t watch him get there.

I stand for a while after that, and I wait to feel triumphant, and I don’t. What I feel is tired, and cold, and unreasonably hungry, and something underneath all of it that I eventually identify as quiet. It’s the first quiet I’ve had in my own head since the morning of the fire.

Sixty feet away a man in the wrong coat puts his hand out for somebody else coming down a stairwell.

“That was well done,” somebody says beside me.

There’s a woman there in a black cocktail dress, holding two paper cups, with dark curly hair pulled up onto the top of her head that I have absolutely seen before and cannot place.

“I’ve been standing behind you for the whole thing,” she says. “I want to be honest about that rather than have you work it out later. Also I made no attempt to leave.”

“Right.”

“Here.” She holds out one of the cups. “There’s a woman doing coffee out of a hotel urn on a trolley by the taxi rank. It’s terrible, but it’s hot.”

I take it because my hands are freezing. “Thank you. I’m sorry, do I,”

“No,” she says. “We’ve never met. I’ve seen about forty photographs of you, which is an unfair advantage and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” She puts her hand out. “Becca Hayes.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Yes.”

“You’re supposed to be in Providence.”

“I was in Providence.” She blows across her coffee. “Then my brother stopped answering his phone for four days, so I swapped a rotation with a creeper named Todd and got on a plane, and I have been sleeping on his guest bed for three nights waiting for him to say a true sentence out loud. Tonight I got dragged to a fire in a cocktail dress. This is a good week, actually. I’ve seen worse.”

I laugh. It comes out wrong, more like a cough.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s been.”

“I know what it’s been.” She looks across the street, at the doorway, at the shape of her brother’s shoulders in a borrowed coat. “He hasn’t looked over here once, has he.”

“No.”

“He knows exactly where you are, though.” She says it without any particular emphasis. “He’s known where you are since the second you came out of that stairwell. He’s just decided he isn’t allowed to do anything about it.”

The sip the coffee and it is genuinely terrible. I hold it anyway.

“Can I ask you something,” she says.

“Okay.”

“Has he told you about Priya?”

“A little. That she was a doctor. That it ended.”

“Right.” Becca nods slowly. “That’s the version he does at parties.”

I don’t say anything about his confession about their relationship during the black out game of truth or dare.