Page 86 of Faking the Heat

“How long,” he says. Not accusing. Just asking.

“A while.”

“Mandy.”

“Years, Sterling.” My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect. “Years.”

He turns around and looks at me, and there is something happening in his face that I have only seen once before, in a shower, with the water running black off his shoulders.

And I know exactly what is about to happen. He is going to say it. He came here to say it, he has been carrying that notebook up three flights to say it, and if I let him say it right now then everything I do for the rest of my life is going to be the thing that came after.

“Wait,” I say.

He stops.

“There’s a thing I have to tell you first, and I need to say it before you say whatever you came here to say, and I need you to just let me do it in one go, because if you interrupt me I’ll lose my nerve and start apologising.”

“Okay.”

“Sit down. You’re too tall for this.”

He sits down on a box.

“I took the New York job,” I say.

His face does not change, which is how I know it has hit him somewhere, because Sterling’s face not changing is a load-bearing activity.

“Okay,” he says, very evenly.

“On Tuesday afternoon. At two o’clock. At my own kitchen table.” I make myself keep going. “I got on a call with their creative director and I told her I wasn’t going to relocate. I told her I’d come on as a consultant instead of staff, that I’d keep my own studio here and my own clients, and that I’d fly out four times a year for anything that genuinely needed a room.”

He is very still.

“And she said no?” he says carefully.

“She said yes.” And then, because I still can’t quite say it without my voice doing something ridiculous, “She said yes and then she went into a room at four o’clock and came back with a fit-out budget and a twelve-month underwrite on a storefront lease, and now I have to find somewhere with a window I can put my name on.”

Silence.

“So I’m staying,” I say. “In Chicago. In this city. I signed on Tuesday and it was done before you knocked on that door, and I need you to understand that part, Sterling, because it matters more than everything else I’m about to say. I didn’t stay for you. I want to be extremely clear about it. I did not turn down a job for a man. I went and got a version of my life that I actually want, and I did it on my own, at my own table, on a Tuesday, with a cat asleep on the other chair.”

He hasn’t moved.

“I did it before I came to you,” I say, “so that when I did come to you, you would never once in forty years be able to sit across a kitchen from me and do the arithmetic.”

And Sterling Hayes puts his face in his hands.

It takes me a second to understand what is happening, because he doesn’t make any noise. He is just sitting on a cardboard box in my half-unpacked living room with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face, and his shoulders are going.

“Oh,” I say. “Oh, no. Okay.”

“Give me a minute.”

“Take a minute.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re clearly not fine.”