Page 84 of Faking the Heat

Here is what I do not do.

I do not sprint out of that bay and drive across the city with my hazards on. I do not run six blocks through a rainstorm. I have spent my entire adult life arriving somewhere at speed with a bag in my hand, and every single time it has been because somebody was in trouble, and I am finally clear on the fact that Mandy Peterson is not in trouble and has not been for some time.

So I go home first.

The loft is exactly as I left it, which is to say it looks like a place where a man has been conducting an experiment on himself. I take a shower. I shave. I put on the grey Henley she said made me look like a man who owns a canoe, which she meant as an insult and which I have thought about approximately weekly ever since.

And then I go and get the notebook.

It’s on the counter by the sink where it’s been since the day she left, perfectly aligned with the edge of the granite, which is how I know I put it there deliberately and then lied to myself about it. Blue. Spiral bound. The wire binding still catching the light like a row of teeth.

I sit down on my own kitchen floor with it, which is where all of this started, and I go through it.

Rule One, in her handwriting, in her ridiculous careful lettering: Bathroom schedule is sacred.

Rule Four: Groceries split, no ledger, no martyrdom.

Rule Seven, in mine, in red pen, because she made me use the red pen: Don’t get weird.

And underneath all of it, at the bottom of the last page, in handwriting so small I have to angle it toward the window, something she must have written at some point when I wasn’t in the room and never mentioned:

Rule Twelve. He gets to have a bad day.

I sit on my kitchen floor for quite a long time.

Then I get up, and I take the notebook, and I go.

I rehearse it in the car, because of course I do.

The words tumble over each other like stones in a river. I’ve been in love with you for longer than this charade. Our friendship is the foundation of what I want, not the ceiling. I would rather risk everything by saying so than spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I’d just knocked on the door. I want the morning coffee and the drawings on my table and the cat on my laptop. I want the real thing. I want the arguments and the quiet mornings and the way you look in my oversized shirts. I want it all.

I think about all the times I could have said it. The night her car died on Damen and we walked twelve blocks in the cold, which is the true version of a night I have since told a table full of her relatives an invented story about. The night of the fire when I saw her on the curb, shivering and soot-streaked, and my heart stopped because I realized the world could just take her away in a puff of smoke. Every time, I chose silence because I thought silence was the price of keeping her. How could I have been so stupid to think that silence was anything but a slow death?

By the time I come off the Kennedy I have three complete versions of it and I am aware that every single one is a document. They are all beautifully organised. They all have an opening, a middle, and a place where I explain myself, and not one of them has a single thing in it that I could not have written down and left on a counter.

So somewhere around Fullerton I stop rehearsing.

The drive out to her place takes eighteen minutes. I do it in eighteen minutes, at the speed limit, stopping at the lights. There is a moment on Ashland where I nearly turn around, and I don’t, and it passes.

Her building is a plain brown three-storey with a buzzer panel and a scrubbed lobby, and there is a name card in the slot for 3C that says M. PETERSON in her lettering, and looking at that card does something to me that I am not going to attempt to describe.

I go up. The stairs smell like other people’s cooking.

I stand outside 3C at ten past eight in the morning with a blue spiral notebook in my hand, and I do not have a speech, and I have not rehearsed a single word, and my heart is going like I have taken four flights in gear.

I have crossed the street.

I knock.

Chapter thirty-six

No More Pretending

Mandy

There is a knock at my door at ten past eight in the morning, and I know it is him before I am out of the chair.

I don’t know how. There is no reason to. It is a knock. But it has a particular unhurried authority to it, three and then a pause and then one, and I have heard that exact rhythm through a bathroom door and a bedroom door and once through the window of a truck, and my whole body identifies it about a second and a half before my brain catches up.